Recently played F4, and the beginning is really underwhelming. Where as F3, took the time to teach you the game in a clever way and also fill in your story from childhood to advlthood, F4 really takes a weird direction.

Instead of having you play the character through a war mission, to teach you how to Shoot and do V.A.T.S, etc. Have your characters Charisma based dialogue be during the War Council.

They just throw you into a situation and scream at you "Care Now" Me, errr....yeah no.

Also that is one fugly baby.

Yeah, that baby looks like...erm...it doesn't look like a baby.

It feels too much forced, I admit. Like we barely know the spouse and our child and yet we're supposed to care deeply about them. :/

Pretty much....

There's ZERO imo story progression from parents to anything else....Won't spoil anything lol....

Agreed here. Really hate that we go from buying space in the vault to nuclear war in a span of a few minutes. There's a number of different ways they could have done it but I feel like it was a missed opportunity

The prologue and protagonist's background are so naive and cliché I don't really feel encouraged to do the main quest. Can't really identify with that character in the beginning.

And I either missed something or there is actually no clue whatsoever that would tell what's the time interval between getting frozen, the kidnapping and leaving the vault. Shaun can be an infant (as the protagonists keeps telling during the first quests), a teenager, an advlt or he can be dead already.

To be honest, maybe I gave Bethseda too much credit, I almost had half expected my character to wake from the wonderful life of a family, and it was all the Matrix kind of moment, where they were made up and we were locked in those machines like Fallout 3 had introduced, that makes you believe whatever wasn't real.

Why did I give Bethseda that much credit, why?

I did not see the story yet. But I agree introduction was not good enough.

There's the same issue as with daddy in Fallout 3. The narrative build up is so minuscule that it's very hard to give a [censored], and that eats most of the intended effect. Underwhelming is an understatement.

They try to force us to care but we have no reason to care other then she is our wife and kid. But I know nothing about her other then we are married.

When Nora gets shot I was like "Well that [censored] up" but I didn't really care nor do I care about Shaun. [censored] Shaun.

To be honest I was a cruel cruel human being when this scene came up, I laughed. And said, that's awesome.

When that scene played i actually got abit emotional, but i am a very fragile person. I do think the intro was to short, but i like the premise. I did enjoy the main story and finding out what happened to Shaun though.

I was heavily motivated the entire way by trying to find my son and emotionally devastated by the story.

Very good, Bethesda.

Awesome job.

That's the point. You're not supposed to know the time frame

I hate the internet sometimes. I can't tell if this is sarcasm lol

I was right then, I'm not supposed to know. The protagonist keeps asking about the baby, though, which means they are oblivious to a possible time frame.

I think what erks me the most is that even though you don't really have time to build an emotional connection at the beginning of the game with your family (because of how rushed it is) you will may have an opportunity to build one later in the game. But that never happens because the moment is never taken advantage of! It falls exactly into the same trap as Fallout 3 when you find your father and he doesn't really care because he's got important work to do.

Fallout 4 is an amazing game, and there were some amazing points in it's plot. But the emotional pursuit and urgency of reuniting yourself with your loved ones, and the validation/closure once you found them were completely wasted.

EDIT: I tried to make my post as ambiguous as possible.

Don't get me wrong, I DID feel bad for the spouse and the baby; wanted to make the SOB suffer for what he did, but I didn't care in the level of “That was MY wife that just got shot, and that was MY SON that just got kidnapped.” I felt like I was a random dude who woke up, saw an injustice happen and was all, “You sick, demented [censored]. I'm gonna make you pay for that when I find you. No one shoots women and steals her babies when I'm around!”

I don't know, I found the intro pretty decent.

But then again I spent like 20 minutes on the character I wasn't playing too. I didn't want them to have an ugly baby

So part of me was like "NOOOO All my work is gone!"

Honestly I didn't care either way. Call me morally indifferent.

i care as much as i care to take the chip to Mr.house or find my dad.

Non of the Fallout MQ quest have been something that make me care. Like it happen on others games,(i really dont remember what was the last one that truly make me care lol)

Delivering the chip quest does not pretend to create an emotional link using a cliché prologue.

Yeah, Shaun isn't exactly Clementine from The Walking Dead Game, is he? And neither's the spouse. Your character sees him/her get gunned down and skips merrily right out of the vault two minutes later. Not a choked up voice, not even a tear!

tbh I think the whole angle of seeing the world pre-war was a total missed opportunity. If you want us to feel connected to our family, you have to give us more, you have to build up the relationship, you can't just show us a baby and then say "Here, care about this" especially when you don't even make a passing attempt at writing realistic, emotional, or even good dialogue. The pre-war bits feel more like a tacked on novelty. Like they were sitting around the conference room and decided, "Hey, y'know, this would be cool," but then they remembered they were making a Fallout game and everyone would just want to get to the open world post-apocalyptic bits straight away, so ehhhhh to hell with it.

From the approach they took it looks like they wanted to get you in and out of the intro as quickly as possible.

That being said, the MSQ is just poorly done (at least from what I've seen of it). I have no motivation for it. The sidequests make up for it and are usually interesting and engaging.

True. But it still did a better job than Fallout 4 did. There was a little more lead up, and you got to interact with James for way longer than either your SS spouse or Shaun, in addition to making character choices for LW along the way. They could have done so much more with Fallout 4's intro, like giving us a full day with our character's family. Maybe going to the park like was suggested, with the option to turn it down, giving some choice/insight into who your character is. If you go to the park, maybe something goes wrong, like an attempted mugging. You are then given a choice on how to deal with it. (Violence, persuasion, give in, yell for help) Again, more interaction with family, and opportunity to define who you are.

So much wasted potential.

I always think to that moment right after you get to the vault

3 actually hooked me initially with it's intro since it made me care about finding my dad and finding out why he left, but this game has no setup whats so ever so I don't know how they expect me to give a crap about my poorly textured baby and it gets especially annoying when sometimes the dialogue options are literally just 4 ways of asking about Shaun who I couldn't care any less about.

Exactly. What's harder is to realistic create, Family Father Figure into Genocidial Psychopathic Maniac who goes around making all the brutal, immoral decisions. My character starts off too nice and turning him into some evil son of a bad word jerk face, just doesn't fit the way he was introduced.

Much like the other game, everything about your characters moral, and who they are, should have been something to explore and define Pregame.

I like a little anonymity to my name and was going to for making the starting line to my character Atomic Survivor. But yeah that doesn't quite work so well.