It has been explained a few times now. While the backstory has similar amounts of fixed elements, the difference is those elements aren't comparable. Having a scientist father doesn't say anything about the Lone Wanderer as a person, but having a spouse and a child says the character was in love, wanted to get married and to procreate. It also seems that they're the kind of person to find fulfillment in such a life. This is pretty big stuff to have preset. The LW didn't have any preset personality, you could like Amata as a friend or flip her off constantly, fight bullies or help them, be polite to advlts or insulting, find the BB gun neat, hate it or be gleeful about killing things with it, desperately search for your dad, search for him to get answers, be angry with him or not, or never look for him at all, etc

I find it 100% the opposite. I find it impossible [and un-fun] to roleplay an unknown role. The less details their are, the less role there is to play.

In the Witcher... On any given day would Geralt decide to brutally beat up Dandelion? How would I know, if I didn't know that they even knew each other? That they are long acquainted friends makes that even less likely. Details matter in Roleplaying.

I don't really care about the story. I play the story once when i first get the game, then spend the next few years and +/-2k hours doing any-/every-thing else.

The voiced PC does concern me though. I'm seriously worried that the voice i'm stuck with won't match the player i design. At all. But i'm sure if Beth doesn't give us an option to disable it, a modder will have it worked out in short order.

I play the story once, and then move on to another game. Some months later I might return and play a different kind of PC; and hope that the differences actually matter. I've got maybe 25 hours in Skyrim... and I've just not had the interest to return to it since the first month or two that I played it; and that was years ago.

I think you're confusing backstory details with character personality. Growing up in a vault or a tribe or working as a courier doesn't say anything about who you are as a person. Being a married man with a newborn son does. There's no way this won't factor into the story, and there's no way this won't heavily impact the sort of attitude that makes sense for Fallout 4's player character. We aren't talking about someone who was married and divorced a decade ago. These are very, very recent events. And flexibility in character personality is all about degrees of separation. It won't make any sense for your character to [censored] off and go be some [censored] of the wasteland.

So you're stuck with two possibilities: schizophrenic writing with a character who swings back and forth between being a badass raider and an attentive father, or the Mass Effect approach, where you play good guy or hardass good guy. The latter of which results in a mostly meaningless distinction.

It never really made sense to go mess off in Fo1 with all those meaningless side quests when you had the goal of saving your vault from dying either.

that's pretty much something EVERY RPG suffers from.

I think many ignore that backstory shapes that personality.

... And I think that this is quite wrong.

... And I think that this will be seen, and factored into the story in FO4.

I don't have a problem with the voiced protagonist. In fact I think that the voice will deliver tangible emotions and add a new level of attachment to the character. What I don't like, however, is the married with a child past. I think it's quite difficult to let the player feel the bond between the PC and the NPCs. Not many games do that right. I liked the way The Last of Us approached this, but didn't like how The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt did it. And since I think that the spouse and the child will play a crucial role in the story and the character development of the PC, I'm a bit worried that Bethesda will fail at this.

It objectively does not. You can say that statistically speaking, X percentage of people from this background with behave this way, like these foods, have gone to these schools, etc. But these are generalities. It's very easy to find any number of people who break the mold or don't adhere to classic stereotypes.

It's immediately different when you say, "This man is a good father." There's no wiggle room here, you've defined precisely who they are as a person. A good father is not a background detail. It doesn't matter whether you came from a vault or a tribe or from outerspace. You will always be the good father.
And that's bad, because it takes away player input and saddles them with a predefined character. What's the point in giving the player choice at all if you're going to set such a defining trait of their personality in stone?

The Witcher is a great example in that Geralt is effectively immutable. You can choose to support this guy or that guy and maybe kill or not kill somebody sometimes, but Geralt never actually changes as a character. This is fine, given the games are based on a book series and that's how it's been since the beginning. But that's never how Fallout has worked. Fallout has always taken the light touch approach and allowed for a variety of different character personalities.

It doesn't help that the narrative hook Bethesda have chosen is the most tired plot device in gaming right now. The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, etc. This current infatuation with the (surrogate) father/child relationship is so overdone and boring. And I'm not at all confident that Bethesda has the writing chops to pull this off in a satisfying or interesting way.

I know it was an oversight in my writing.

Consider what you are disagreeing with:
"Growing up in a vault or a tribe or working as a courier doesn't say anything about who you are as a person."

A person can grow up even in a gang of murderous cannibals; and not be inclined to murder and eat people; but... no one emerges from that unaffected. Backgound shapes one's personality; and in that case, it almost certainly means that they've eaten human flesh before, and know it... Think about that and its effect on one's personality.

In the case of the vault... It means that the PC was always fed; always under the Overseer's thumb [whether they liked that or not]. They always had someone older than them that knew what to do, and delegated instruction. Remember the FO3 GOAT? Remember the question about turning a fellow in? that's the culture there. No one emerges from that vault unaffected. They all exit into the outside world with a preconceived (and flawed) understanding of life.

Heh, I have yet to see anyone come up with a good argument *for* the protagonist's restricted background besides "I'm fine with it", "I don't mind the character being married" and "I prefer to play characters with a more defined background".

Ultimately this is all about personal taste.

I think it's interesting how almost all the the insults ("fanatics", "whining", "childish", "SJW" etc.) come from folks who are fine with the background as it is.

Really? Are all marriages like that?

I was considering having Shaun as the result of a drink and drug fueled fumble in the alley behind a sleazy bar. Pressured into a shotgun wedding by the parents, never really being happy with how my life turned out and kind of grateful for having the chance to start over. But probably without actually hating my other half, so it's generally a fairly neutral role.

If you want to play a really nasty character, I have suggestions for that as well, but find myself reluctant to spell it out.

Probably because you've yet to see the arguments of someone who's actually played the game and seen the background in the context of the story.

I don't know how a backstory stops someone from RPing anything they want. Past Bethesda games did have a set backstory to a degree. Besides a voiced protagonist I don't see any difference.

And if it does bother you that much I've seen people "RP" some crazy things. Many of the times using their imagination to fill the gaps in the game.

OK, how's this:

With a blank slate, you can make up whatever you like as your backstory. And the chances are that nothing in the game will happen that relates to it. You can try to force it to have more meaning in the game, but results will vary.

But with the marriage background we can create characters of all shades, both who we start as and who we turn into after wandering the wastes for a while. Yet at some point, the wife/husband and child will come into the story (either alive or dead). And that gives you scope to role play with something in the main quest, as well as when we are just wandering around doing stuff.

I see having a family as a huge deal and very character defining. For one, the character is straight no matter what, also the character obviously loves their spouse and since they don't live in a world with arranged or forced marriages, people who aren't fond of this can't mentally explain it away. Can't play a gay person, can't play a person who loves being single and playing the field, can't play a spinster or someone who doesn't believe in love, can't play someone who doesn't want kids, can't play someone too young to have kids or someone innocent, can't play an angry and bitter person who's been burned too many times by the opposite six, can't play someone who doesn't want to be tied down by a family, etc...we're a pleasant, middle class suburban family man/woman who loves their spouse and is a veteran no matter what. I'm definitely not happy about this.

One you never knew that you destroyed the divide, all you did was deliver a package and leave, and then all hell broke loose, oh and you got shot in the head. Nothing really to change your outlook on life and your past and story isn't bound to some family.

This story in fallout 4 is definately going to center around the loss and possible knowledge of what happened to your family. You can't just forget about them, because guess what, it's probably going to be important to the story.

In FONV, you got shot in the head and left for dead, that gave you a personal reason to find Bemny and meet this Mr. House fellow, without defining your PC's character.

People's complaints about the writing were not universal. More importantly, they tended to be focused on world building and quest design rather than the player character. So rather than fixing the things people didn't like, Bethesda has decided to go after one of the things people did like. Of course people aren't going to be pleased.

It's like people wishing they could lose weight easier and so you chop off their arms and legs. Sure, they lost a lot of weight, but that clearly isn't what they wanted, so don't try acting like you did them a favor.

And I don't see why you'd bring up Bioshock Infinite. Bioshock Infinite was also a very linear game that's narrative simultaneously emphasized the importance of choices while commenting on how meaningless the majority of the choices you make in video games are. The nature of the PC demanded a voice, not because people would like it more, but because it was necessary to tell the story. More importantly, you were always Booker Dewitt, who was a predefined character with a predefined backstory that the entire game's narrative was built around (contrast that to Bioshock, where the story is all about Rapture, so no need for a voiced protagonist). Also, Bioshock Infinite was one of the best written games I've seen in years, and I doubt that Bethesda is going to get anywhere near it.

I couldn't get into Mass Effect because I thought the voice actor for the man was atrocious. The woman was better, but I was renting the game and decided my time would be better spent elsewhere so I stopped playing.

Fallout 4's male voice actor is also horrible sounding from everything we've seen so far.

I would give them a break if they had shown me anything as an act of good faith that would make me feel like extending the benefit of the doubt to them. But, most everything I've seen story wise is a red flag, and if they're leading with their best foot forward, that's a bad sign.

Also, I'm not going to play ball when someone goes "We've put a lot of work in the story because the story is important and this game is about story. But we won't tell you anything about the story!"

I draw a line of difference between RPGs where you play as a character, and RPGs where you make the character you play as. Fallout and TES are the later, the Witcher, Final Fantasy, and Bioware's stuff is the former. In the latter you are playing the role of the character. In the former, you are guiding the character. Nothing wrong with that approach, but it's not the approach that Fallout has traditionally had, which was one of the things that appealed to me about it. All of the "We want to be Bioware" signs that Bethesda's riveted to the Soul Survivor's face are a turn off for me, because I don't buy Bethesda games to play Bioware games. I buy Bethesda games to play Bethesda games.

I draw no line of difference at all; a character is a character, is a character. Fallout 1 & 2 both shipped with 4 predefined PCs, and if one examines their preferred skills, one can get a handle on their personalities pretty quick. If you made your character, you have the same institutionalized background as any of the four in Fallout, or any of the four in Fallout 2.
In Witcher 1 & 2 you play Geralt of Rivia, in Planescape you play The Immortal; a man recognized by many, and with a long, long past to make up for. In Baldur's Gate, you are the ward of Gorian, and lived your life in Candle Keep; like living in a library.

But you also play everyone else that comes along. You play Viconia, an outcast, treated like dirt by her kin, and like dirt by everyone else for being of her kin. You play Taix, the mad evil cleric ego-maniac; and you play Minsc, practically the Tick as a medieval knight... And Xan the depressed mage, and Edwin the evil calculated mage.

In BG I'd split Imoen apart at the inns to skulk off on her own, to case and burgle ~alone if no one in the party shared her alignment and profession; and certainly not bring Jaheira and Khalid along to protect her... They would never agree to that, or accept the spoils; and so if she got into a fight, and got killed, then the others might never even know what happened, or have thought she'd run off, eventually leaving without her.

I'd play Kagain the evil mercantile Dwarf you meet in Beregost (in BG), and I've even played him where the others had traded him a cursed helmet that reversed his ethics (this is an item in the game), and it made him feel quite strange and doubting of his own motives; quite vehement once it came off too.

Nobody gets the perfect game they want. I'm not happy about the voiced protagonist or the simplified dialogue choices that don't tell the player exactly what his character will say. Some aren't happy about the apparent replacement of skills with perks. Yet others seem to think the graphics should be cutting edge.

The only real question you have to answer is whether or not the things you don't like are a deal breaker. For me, they are not. I know I will sink many hours into this game. Hell, the settlement building will probably keep me occupied for an unhealthy amount of time alone.

Can't play that? Isn't that the whole, and entire, end-all point of roleplaying? [Running a character who is something you are not, and seeing the world play out using their point of view and behavior.]

I disagree with that assertion.

... Unless this is something like Arachnophobia; and all the players who politely request spider replacers.

Even less so, when the developer actively tries to include a pinch of every preference, instead of a full helping of just one; (or even half helpings of just two for that matter).

They're not dealbreakers for me, at least not yet. I just don't want to end up losing everything I loved about Bethesda's games I don't think I would be as nervous and sensitive to the changes (voiced protagonist, no skills, fewer dialogue options, semi preset personality) if I hadn't just gone through this whole song and dance with BioWare. I used to love their games but with each one more elements that I loved were taken out or changed for the worse and replaced with things that I didn't like or that were poorly implemented. With their latest game Dragon Age: Inquisition I've finally come to the realization that their games don't offer me anything anymore and they're no longer the company I once loved. I don't want the same thing to happen again with Bethesda

I'm still excited for Fallout 4 and the weapon customization and settlement building in particular look awesome, I'm just...apprehensive.

You can't play those types of characters I listed without the game directly contradicting you and no, the "end-all point of roleplaying" isn't the inability to shape your character...I hate being limited into such a narrow framework. The more defined a protagonist is, the less I'm interested in the game and obviously the less replay value it has for me.

Me too!

And given that they have had the protagonist voice actors working on the voice acting for nearly 2 years, we may get pretty close.

Most games but the voice acting in during the last 6 months.

Certainly it backs up the "Fallout 4's narrative has a lot more branching paths and overlapping of "if that than this" than Fallout 3. They want the game to handle all the fail states of missions instead of forcing players to reload saves." quote.

Gives me a lot of hope that Fallout 4 will be more than a simple shooter.