Exactly, this is kind of hard to see how the Sole Survivor's marriage partner and kid get out of the cyro freeze before the cryo freeze incident occurs without dying of old age...maybe the incident happens very recently and they were able to get out beforehand and walk away?....

Creators lie about their stories all the time. It's how they avoid spoilers.

My take on it too, the captors might use the vault as an source for slaves or guinea pigs later has the benefit of no radiation damage.

Something happens and you wake up, fighting happens who also serve as the tutorial, you are the only one who leaves. now if most of the vault is flooded / collapsed he will also belie his wife and kid is dead.

Having wife and kid die before the game start don't match with the typical Hollywood logic used in computer game main quests.

Little does anyone suspect that your own player character is the one that is actually dead. Everything that happens in F4 is just a fevered death dream as you pass from this life.

Similiar to the theories about TLoZ: Majora's Mask? People say Link is dead and the game is about the five stages of grief?

Err.......no.

Note that kids in modern Fallouts and TES games are immortal, so they probably used the baby to shield themselves from the nuclear blast.

Has to be true.. I just read the words I wrote on the internet. Everything on the internet is true.

Actually, now that I think of it.. You're probably your own baby. Body swap. (or would that be mind swap?.. I get those confused.)

Actually you are Codsworth and your still in your box.......it was all an electronic dream.

Probsbly thiss. But who knows?

I'll offer one possibility for why this was done in Fallout 4.

How do you get the player to care about Shawn?

We see him as a cute baby and spin his rocket ship mobile and that is about all that is possible with him being just a few months old new born.

Not much of a story if the player isn't invested in finding out what happened to his family.

But what if we are also shown Shawn's mom or dad, our other half in this baby.

We can see their love for Shawn, we can look at Shawn and see his resemblance to both of us, it makes him more real.

Even more so, if our spouse dies leaving Shawn alone.

It brings the war home if you know you have lost your spouse forever and you might never even find out what happened to Shawn, let alone actually see him again.

If yesterday you were in your happy pre war suburban home with your spouse and son and today you are all alone in a nuclear wasteland.

And you have been shown what your pre war life looked like and you can see it is nothing but ruins now.

Wouldn't you want to do right by your spouse and find and protect that last link to your pre war life?

I expect this to be a major quest, but personally think it won't be totally tied in to the main quest.

You will be able to ignore it if you so chose.

There is a lot Bethesda could do with a story line like this.

Even if it is just a reversal of the Fallout 3 child looking for his or her father.

If nothing else I figure developers look back at previous games and say you know we can really do this MUCH better this time if...

See, this is what I mean about lazy writing. Instead of doing the groundwork to develop the character and make you care, they rely on the fact that a real person would care about their real family and so they assume the player will automatically carry those feelings over to this in-game family. Well, the spouse and baby aren't real people and they certainly aren't MY real family. I care about them as much as I do the random merchants I see get killed by enemies in the wasteland. I do think the son at least will play a major part. As boring and cliche as that will be with the whole "I must journey to rescue my family" thing is to me it would at least be tolerable if it was just the son and not the husband. I'm still holding out hope that the spouse dies in the intro.

Maybe it will be the son seeking out his parent, and wanting to kill them, for abandoning him outside the vault, where his other parent died. So, your CHILD will be sending goons after you.

Its obvious that he/she is an synthetic android.

If you look at the gameplay video in the house before they go to the vault you can see he opens the fridge and it has 3 nuka colas and 2 crab dinners, who would fill their fridge with this when they have a toddler at home.

Its implanted memories with hidden commercials.

I get that this is not your cup of tea, but "lazy writing"?

Just what "groundwork" are they suppose to do in the opening act to make you or most people care?

A great rule of thumb is always show, don't tell.

You are showed pre war America which we have never seen (except in black and white) but people have been waiting 7 years for Fallout 4 so I don't expect them to drag their feet in the intro.

Given that, they are trying to show what the Lone Survivor has lost.

To have him or her know what the world looked like before the bombs fell.

To feel how empty a place the world is now and know just what has been torn away from the Lone Survivor including his family.

What I've seen give me hope that Bethesda is trying their best to make Fallout 4 compelling.

I'm certain not everyone will like it but just because you don't like the genre, doesn't make it lazy writing.

It may be boring and cliche to most or it might be very compelling.

I guess we will have to wait for 11/10/15 to see, but I think most people will find the opening scene compelling enough to at least want to find out what happened to the Lone Survivor's family.

i think he's most likely a clone.

I'm going to assume this is a joke. Because that would be a terrible storyline.

Yeah. In a scenario like that, it's much more likely that both parents forfeit their place in the vault and make sure their baby gets lowered in the vault.

Eh, with the Enclave's lunatic 'experiments' who can tell what might happen. It might have been an experiment to see how a vault full of people would deal with mass shock and bereavement. So only families were allowed in, and then one member of each family was grabbed and shackled while the others were forced out at gunpoint.

Because, science!

I already told you why I think it's lazy: they would be assuming the player would automatically care about the family because they care about their real family in real life. They're characters, not real people. A writer actually needs to do some work to get you to care about them. They need personalities, they need more screen time, they need to actually do something. What can you tell me about the wife in the intro's personality? What kind of person is she? If she'd had the same amount of interaction as in the intro but instead been a neighbor to the PC, would she be compelling enough to care about what happens to her? No. They rely on a label. Forcing the family into the story for 5 minutes, not bothering to develop them or make them interesting (especially the baby who is just a generic bundle) and then immediately killing them for the angst or whatever is sloppy and lazy. The tragic "my family/village/whatever has died onoes" way of starting a story is extremely overused and generic.

BTW, overused and generic is not a "genre," neither is tragic backstory or throwaway characters. A genre is action, fantasy, horror, etc...and "show, don't tell" doesn't mean quite what you think it means. It was coined for books and other non visual writing as a way to tell people something like "there was a puppy, he had a ball, the ball rolled away and he chased it" was bad writing and that you'd want to describe the scene and the emotions or motivations of the characters involved rather than just telling the reader "X happened." In a visual medium, obviously everything is shown in a literal sense, you see it on the screen. To me this intro is more toward telling than showing in a figurative sense. We're told that this couple love each other, and their kid but are shown very little interaction between the characters to back it up.

Maybe the sequence inside the vault is really long, will add personality and development to the spouse and kid and will change my mind, I hope it does. What we've been shown so far story-wise however is not promising at all in my opinion.

You'll end up finding the brains of your spouse and child, which you can implant into the dog and mr handy.

pro tip: Implant the brain of your spouse into whoever you're most likely going to have six with anyway, the dog or the robot.

The fact that we can customize the wife, and that the kid is going to blend the two features, is pretty much proof that the kid is going to show up as an advlt.

Indeed. He'll have been rescued from the Vault before you awoke. Hell I bet he's Arthur Maxson.

Well the robot does have attachments.

And with the crafting system....

Your mileage may vary.

They have five or ten minutes to set the scene which we have only seen parts of at this point.

I'll totally agree that having the spouse survive would be really hard to do right.

As I said before I expect the spouse is part of the set up to make the player care more about the son.

i mean the son will literally be a merging of the Lone Survivor and the spouses appearance both of which the player controls.

This points to the son showing up later and being old enough to be recognizable the son of the Lone Survivor and the spouse.

Dealing with loss and trying to find those you are separated from while surviving is a classic in a post apocalypse genre.

The son would be a direct tie to the Lone Survivor's pre war life.

I don't look at my wife's romance novels and go they are sloppy and lazy and filled with bad writing because the protagonists always fall in love and they end up together in the end.

Instead I figure that there is a reason they are so popular even if I prefer Sci Fi and Fantasy.

Time will tell how well Bethesda pulls of this part of the Lone Survivor's story.

From what I've seen so far it looks like they are bringing their A game.

If you don't like it please ignore it, mod it, or don't buy the game.

If you can come up with a better setup then please create a mod so that the rest of us can experience it.