Fallout has always been about one person, YOU!. Not this time. Its about all of us now so Im starting to wonder where we are all going to come from? We cant all be vault dwellers.... right?

But even if we get to choose our background (vault dweller, tribal, townsfolk, non-human) we are still going to need a place to pop out of. Will there be start towns/vaults, big citys, small camps? Will we just appear somewhere?

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Well the first thing is: I hope we actually don't get to start as vault dwellers, because it would look very weird if everyone was one... since.. leaving a functional vault is like extremely rare and I'm just generally against it on many points.

What I instead want is that you choose background and all that stuff, tribal (better stats in unarmed, melee, throwing, traps, outdoorsman) and they start in a small village, heading out for some quest...

another background could be that you are a militia from one of the bigger towns (NCR for example, if it would be present in the game), when starting as a militia you start in NCR with some other skills improvement.

Would just be fun if it where several different spawning points, depending on what you choose to be.

Well it wouldn't be too weird since a few vaults were meant to support hundreds of thousands of people for decades, it wouldn't be too weird... and also i hope that we can choose to be just about anything, from a BOS initiate, an waste-lander, a scavenger, a raider, or just about anything in between.... Give me an axe and point me towards the caribou, dinners on me.

Hundreds of thousands? No. in game vault populations that I saw never ranged above a couple hundred at maximum. That said, many vaults were not meant for long term habitation, thanks to the crazy schemeing of the pre-Great War Enclave. A large percentage of vaults would either be released early or have otherwise failed. Assuming that the environment for FOOL is not going to be the entire United States, but rather a certain area I'd say that we'd be lucky to have people of a vault background coming from one vault, but it would be very doubtful that all of the game's players would originate in a vault.

This could play into the race selection process in creating a character pretty easily, I would think. Imagine that you'd have several major race choices, followed by a background choice... Similar to the setup in Dragon Age.

Human - Vault dweller / Tribal / Brotherhood / Townperson / Raider / Slaver / Enclave
Ghoul - Scavenger / Townperson / Glowing One / Enlightened Feral
Super Mutant - Enlightened / Townperson / Master's Creation / Scavenger
Mechanical - Robobrain / Synth / Cyborg

So that's a lot of backgrounds to create stories for, but you get the idea. Each background would start someplace different from other versions of the same race, and have a backstory trait/perk based on where they come from.

Human Race - No SPECIAL bonuses, bonus to karma building,
Human Vault dweller - Bonus to science / medical / speech
Human Tribal - Bonus to melee / unarmed / barter
Human Brotherhood - Bonus to big guns / science / repair
Human Townsperson - Bonus to sneak / speech / small guns
Human Raider - Bonus to lock pick / small guns / sneak
Human Slaver - Bonus to melee / small guns / speech

Ghoul Race - +3 Endurance -3 Charisma, Rad Immunity
Ghoul Scavenger - Scrounger / Fortune Finder perk
Ghoul Townperson - Bonus to sneak / speech / small guns
Ghoul Glowing One - Special radiation attack
Ghoul Enlightened Feral - Bonus to Melee + Cannibalism perk

Super Mutant Race - +3 Strength +2 Endurance -3 Intelligence -2 Charisma, Rad Immunity, Toughness
Super Mutant Enlightened - Regains some of the intelligence penalty
Super Mutant Townperson - Bonus to sneak / speech / small guns
Super Mutant Master's Creation - Cannibalism + Bloody Mess perk?
Super Mutant Scavenger - Scrounger / Fortune Finder perk

Mechanical Race - Iron fist perk, Toughness perk, Adamantium Skeleton perk?
Mechanical Robobrain - +2 Intelligence, +2 Perception, +2 Charisma, -4 Luck
Mechanical Synth - +2 Perception +2 Charisma +2 Agility, -4 Luck
Mechanical Cyborg - +1 Perception, Cyborg Perk

Just an idea, anyway. I'm not sure they'd make the race system this deep, but if it's anything like normal Fallout then there's no class system, so this would be the only form of class definition.

but the vaults where not made so people would leave them randomly, vaults where not made for hundreds of thousands, more like a thousand. Also if the vault is fully functional there would be no reason to leave, vault 12 (necropolis) is a perfect example of a mal-functional vault gone very wrong. Vault 15 is also a good example, but the people inside split into 4 part, 3 of which turned into gangs (vipers, khans, etc), the last one built a village (shady sands). If they somehow produce a system so it doesn't look weird, then I guess I can't complain.

depending on what year it is we might aswell start from a vault since not all were revealed just to keep the options open In gaming terms... Life's a die, then you bich.

Great post BTW

I don't think they will go that deep either, at least not at first. First it's difficult to test and implement and also they have to leave room for expansion and not give everything at start.
Perhaps one thing they could do is make the players branch off the more they advance.
For example a ghoul at lvl 40 could become either a glowing one or a enlightened Feral. At lvl 40 a human could become either a cyborg or a raider. "War. War never changes."
- Ron Perlman

A single Vault origin for PCs would only work well under certain circumstances. The best idea that comes to mind, is having something terrible happen that requires the sudden evacuation of a Vault. An accident, radiation leak, attack by mutants or the like are all possibilities for such a scenario.

The evacuation could be handled as a tutorial event, with both NPCs and players involved. During the course of the evacuation, each player will need to make certain choices... which will determine their starting location post-evacuation. This would allow for a single-Vault initial origin, but also for different starting locales in the main part of the game. One player may end up falling in with a bunch of nomads, while another may join a gang of wasteland warriors.

The bland option in such a scenario would be for the former Vault dwellers to simply build a new life for themselves not far from the entrance (if possible) so they could attempt to salvage stuff from the Vault.

Multiple types of origin events may be interesting as well. If everyone was a Vault dweller come forth into the wasteland, it may be a little boring. Unless mutation can occur to players through the course of play, this would leave out the possibility of playing mutants and other weird options.

If you read "the vault" vault zero had the ability to sustain well over 100,000 residents... Give me an axe and point me towards the caribou, dinners on me.

I hadn't read that, my apologies, I sit corrected. In the case of such a mega-vault then everyone coming from such a location would make sense if it was being evacuated. The "escape the vault tutorial" seems like it's been done to death though, to me. I'd much rather have a deep race system with many options for character creation, and subsequently multiple starting story possibilities. Not to mention that in an MMO you kind of expect more than one newbie starting area unless it's a pretty small scale MMO. With a IP like Fallout you'll have to forgive me if I like to think grandly. Although, I agree, a deeper race system could be something that gets worked in at expansion time.

no problem ForkBeard... and yeah maybe the "Escape the Vault" tutorial is over-done, but since we only see a few vaults of the 119, (or something) their were, it could easily be that vault 60 could support 100,000 residents and (as an experiment) only had 100 in it, and was told to open a couple years after, and was to be a city... so you start as a "vault dweller" but as a city resident, maybe in the slums (lower lvls) or something...


P.S. Vault Starting <== (use it gamesas or i will ghetto stomp a squirrel ) Give me an axe and point me towards the caribou, dinners on me.

While I was driving around in circles today (farming ), I had a thought (and yes it did hurt a bit.)

What if you start in 1 of 2 situations/locations the first time you start the game (you get to choose before you play one of them)

#1 You start in a vault (as the basic tuturial) and learn your way around the game a bit. You start as a young kid, in classes sort of and you get to learn the Vault tech
OR
#2 You start in of the many survivor towns and you learn your way around the game a bit. You start as a young kid, in the school of hard knocks and you get to learn about the Wasteland.

Then After you finish the tuturial, you click OK, continue. At that point you get to create/modify your charcter until they are of legal age (or 21 or something older than a kid). Once you have completed this, you are kicked out of the world you know, and sent to find your own way.

Later (big assumption coming), when you start up a new character, you will get more choices based on your karma, and pervious ?experience? level.

On another note about Vaults and kids. Maybe some of the Vaults kicked out the babies that they did not like, or gave them to one of the nearby villages in trade (or to get rid of). So that you have the gene's of a Vault dewler(s ) but know nothing of it.

After many generations, and many different Vault controllers (leaders) they may have cut down the population levels due to space/food or might have gotten rid of the werid mutated baby, because they just couldn't bring themselves to let anyone kill it out right. (Yeah, just throw them out in the wasteland and let nature take its course.

Dave Chase

My suggestion is having a few starting towns. You always start out as some wanderer that the Wastes dragged you into. Where you start, could be up to you, or maybe up to the skills you tagged, or another factor that creeps into the minds of the developers.

One thing I'd like to think about is, Fallout 2 took place during a time when the world is slowly rebuilding itself. By now, in this game, it should be that way, still a lot of ruin, but life is growing. Multiple of cities, and small towns. The name's not important, what I do is. I'm a drifter, a drifter of the Wastes.

I was having similar problems when I was trying to build a post-apocalyptic table-top RPG campaign setting: where do people start? How many options? This part actually stumped me the most, and was part of why I stopped working on it >.>

Some ideas, building off of what Forkbeard posted..

Survivalist camps! Would priobably be similar to Villager, but more scavenging oriented and definatly with better survival skills.
Nomad! Born and raised by a wandering clan or extended family.. perhaps merchant-oriented?
Immigration? Always a possible origin, although it could also be set aside for just for appearance customization I suppose

I would want to put BoS off to the side as a joinable faction.. perhaps requiring numerous quests to join.

I hadnt thought much on the non-human/semi-human races yet, but I will do so =)

In the year 1987, at the John F. Kennedy Space Center, NASA launched the last of America's deep space probes. The payload, perched on the nose cone of the massive rocket, was a one-man exploration vessel - Ranger 3. Aboard this compact starship, a lone astronaut - Captain William "Buck" Rogers - was to experience cosmic forces beyond all comprehension. An awesome brush with death: in the blink of an eye, his life support systems were frozen by temperatures beyond imagination. Ranger 3 was blown out of its planned trajectory into an orbit a thousand times more vast, an orbit which was to return the ship full circle to his point of origin - its mother Earth - not in 5 months, but in 500 years.

I'm ticking the Fell From Space/ Alien Abduction origin.

Ex-Alien abductee could be interesting. Imagine a bunch of people waking up, falling out of tubes in the wreckage of a crashed alien vessel. Naturally one must ignore any Draenei comparisons as this would be much better of course.

OK, I'm focusing on the last bit. Here's a, uh, purely hypothetical question. Let's assume that, no one in particular, was going to start a player faction of robots (assuming we have player factions). And let's assume that this guy (again, not naming any names here) and his faction started a robot only settlement. How would this purely anonymous man, err... machine, be able to tell the difference between a Synth and a regular Human? It's kinda hard for me, I mean, the unknown mayor of this town, to enforce a shoot-on-sight policy for organics entering the settlement when I... he can't tell the difference between the two races

What I'm getting at is that there should be a way to look at them and tell the difference. Maybe oddly colored eyes, or his body is a different shape, or we all get infrared goggles to see if he's organic or not.

BTW: machines should be poison resistant

That is all I put the 'Skill' in 'Kill.'
Wait, what?

I like the idea that we all come from a massive city-like vauld that has a population of meany tens of thousands. Join my Fallout Online Facebook page.

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IMO, FOOL shouldn't have a 'race' system or even the possiblity of choosing your starting location. If it does, it should have a minimal effect on the actual game. A big part of the alure of FO1+2 was that it was what you did after the game started that made your character, and the only effect the choices you made at creation had was your "natural aptitudes".

You didn't start out as a raider in FO1+2, instead after starting the game you made the choice to attack merchants when you came across them. In FO2 you don't start as a slaver, but you can become one in The Den. The point i'm trying to make is that up until you leave Vault 13 (FO1) or complete the temple of trials (FO2) your character's life was meaningless. There was nothing s/he did that had any bearing on the path you decided to take with your character. All the background of your character did in regards to FO1+2 was set a pretense for the main quest.

In FOOL there shouldn't be a main quest (IMO). And if there is, I highly doubt it will be a "do or lose" situation like we saw in FO1+2.

Enough of my rambling though. The point i'm trying to get across is that you shouldn't be forced to choose a race/faction/ect at character creation, the start should be as generic as possible so that you can make the choices and work towards the type of character you want to be. There should be various quest chains and/or prerequisites you have to meet before becoming a SM, BoS, Raider, Slaver, ect and the difficulty of the quest(s) and/or gaining the prerequisites should be based on the benefits and penalties for joining a race/faction. Also, i don't feel that character level should be a strict requirement, as in you don't need to be level X to become Y. Instead the difficulty of the tasks you need to complete to become Y should force you to be roughly level X.

Some examples of how it could work:

1.Becoming a SM: You would have to become a member of the CoC and raise your rating with them significantly enough to show you are worthy of being dipped. Also, you could never have been radiated above a certain amount or taken any perks that are mutation based, otherwise the FEV wouldn't take properly when you are dipped.

2. Becoming a BoS: Being that there are several different roles you can fill in the BoS, there can also be a variety of ways to join the BoS, but you would be restricted to that role once you join. Want to be a Paladin? Then you would have to eliminate a den of SM (for example). But if you want to be a scribe, you would have to retrieve some schematics and/or items of technology at the bottom of a military base and be forced to "test" your science and repair skills throughout the base. Regardless of what type of BoS you wanted to be, you would have to have the required karma (neutral for your traditional BoS, good for something more akin to the BoS we see in tactics) and the appropriate rating with the BoS.

3. Becoming a raider: This would probably be the easiest one, being that all that could be required is that you have bad karma and successfully attack a caravan.

Of course, these are just some examples of what i think we should see, and it could vary greatly, but i strongly feel that you shouldn't have to choose a race at character creation.

This idea might not work for a 3rd gen MMO, simply due to the sheer magnitude of it all.

How....down right godly would it be to have gamesas use google earth as sort of a blueprint for a nation-wide urban/rural topography overlay. This way (much like your predecessor with down town DC) you can keep the real and raw feel of the entire United States. And sure, sure, the U.S. is huge but, scale it down, have detroit or the twin cities look bigger then they are! You know, work the Dev magic. The fun part about this is you get to keep a world map travel style, meaning you HAVE to drive around this mountain bend in CO and run the risk of a raider ambush because its in between A and B.
Furthermore,everyone who is starting out fresh it would feel close to home. especially if:

Once you slap in your area code for the final steps in registering FOOL- BAM! You wake up in a random/preselect vault or village just shy of (more often then not) the actual town or city your own ancestors inhabited many many years ago! Have a die-hard friend out of state? no matter... simply punch in his area code and be ported to his or her version of hell.

This would still follow if not pass the torch of how the BOS finally meet and unite across the nation.
With the enclave being the obvious superpower. They always did oust the brotherhood in tech, even if by a little. Plus they had organization, communication.

Because you are now working with historical landmarks, you can have huge raiding parties pillage actual military installations like resourceful airbases in Nebraska, or terrifying bio-weapon facilities near plum island.

Granted yes, this probably wouldn't work out so well due to instability with populations and what not but, wouldn't it be something? and really.... it still captures what fallout really was- being out alone in the frigid and twisted wasteland.

Get even more zesty!
Graciously ask the DOD or NSA for a one time nuclear wargame scenario and base that data to what the geography in the FO world would look like 200+ years later.

Ah but these are radiated ravings of a weather beaten waste lander, Godspeed everyone!