What in particular did Witcher 1 do gameplay wise that the others did not? I've never played it, only the sequels.

You can even as homosixual person be married to the other six...

And the Witcher is a RPG too... so the RPG = blank character is not true.

Is it because it somehow restricts creativity, or you're simply uncomfortable with your avatar being in a successful, stable relationship?

I'd point out the situation we find ourselves in at the beginning of the game is effectively the tutorial, and we'll lose that successful, stable relationship upon beginning the game proper. It's not something we can carry over - nor outside character creation is it something we have zero control over, given the dialogue options present in this situation that can define our character's personality.

You are taking umbrage with the stage decoration at the beginning of a narrative. Much like in Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas (Each of which involved protagonists with established lives prior to the start of the game), who our characters were before we take our first steps into the Wasteland and who they become are fundamentally different individuals. Heck, I'd argue New Vegas was a more restrictive backstory, since it forced Ulysses and the events of the Divide into our characters' histories.

And before you bring it up, being a veteran doesn't mean our character necessarily was in a combat role. Plenty of non-combatant military functions to be had.

Depending on your gaming past & preference, you might not like it ~gameplay-wise. Witcher had three cameras, and [?] at least two modes of player controls. Witcher 2 only kept one of each... the behind the shoulder cam; and its combat controls. In Witcher Geralt was an expert swordsman with multiple styles to deal with groups, light, and heavy armored opponents. In Witcher 2, Geralt just flailed his weapon wherever the player happened to face him; (even facing away from hostile attackers)..

In Witcher, Geralt wore a bandolier of potions, and would quaff a few as the fight progressed, when he needed an edge... In Witcher 2, Geralt suddenly never did that again, and had to kneel somewhere [even in water in swamps] to brew & pre-buff before the coming fight; before he even knew what might be beneficial. In Witcher [1] Geralt could do either; in Witcher 2, the option to drink potions was gone, once combat commenced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZcsNE6wCHI

I actually see these as down sides. It was a peeve for me that no one knew the character I played in TES. My PC had no past, no aptitudes, no past aspirations or trade skills...No way to have survived to advlthood. It was like they just https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYOWIdPHXts one night.

I have no idea why the whole heterosixual thing is a problem right now... and I have a feeling this line is a trigger.

But you -can- play as all of that.

For anything about insanity. Dude... the likely hood of a character being mentally bonkers in a stable society is very slim. But the likelyhood of him going insane in an apocalyptic world is high. You can still be a psychotic person who runs around wearing a banana suit and stabbing the living mess out of mailboxes because USPS never delivered your pacakge.

For anything sixuality related. Around the time the game is based on, homosixuality wasn't very well accepted. It was very common for them to stay in the closet, lie to themselves, and enter a heterosixual marriage.

You can play as an uncharismatic character and still be in a marriage, or relationship. Look at the Kardashians.

And lastly... just stop complaining already. Most of the arguments made are just repeated. It's not going to change the final outcome of the game. They're probably bug smashing at this point for the November release. But what I really don't understand with a lot of people and this argument is just one curious thing.

This game series is not a pen and paper dungeon and dragons. The character is not completely yours. And the character has to have a start somewhere for the story to work. Elder Scrolls was able to get by this with the "Your adventure starts in a bar" trope. But that doesn't work very well in all cases.

..for the nth time, I've already talked about the difference 'tween circumstance and choice & personality.

And Ulysses is a liar who can be ignored.

You can't have your cake and eat it to, simply put. If you want better story telling and writing you have to sacrifice a small part of the game simple as that. I'm willing to accept this so we can really see if Beth has stepped up their writing or not.

That's really what killed that franchise for me. Witcher 1 was more of a rhythm game in terms of combat that I could never be comfortable with, which drove me away from the game. Witcher 2, the inability to affect a fight once it had begun by not being able to drink potions (and the inability to adapt to situations as they arose, while being mindful of the toxicity meter) really staled the gameplay to the point I again, just dropped the game in disinterest.

Witcher is a franchise with an amazing setting (I've got the English translations of the novels incoming) and story...but the gameplay mechanics just hinder my ability to play it.

Yeah, but again...it's not as though this relationship matters beyond a background context. Unless somehow in the story we discover our wife/husband and child are alive in some fashion...they exist simply to ground our character into the narrative world. Which, since Fallout has always been a bit of a cheeky homage/dig to 1950s Nuclear hysteria, involves the concept of the model family.

They can't go with you into the Wasteland, and you can control your character's responses to the Mister Handy (Who is the only remnant that does carry over). In the end, what matter is the family to your character's identity and personality? Ultimately, you the player decide what emotional attachment your character had to them, if any at all.

How often will I need to repeat myself regarding circumstance etc.? Jesus flipping christ.

And I complained because the more complaints Bethesda sees about this, the more likely they are to patch a solution, and/or a modder is to fix this.

Clearly, it must be n+2. Unless you're telling me that getting married etc. just happened to the character, and that s/he had no say in it.

You know what? Sod it. I've made my statement. Arguing with you people is beyond a waste of time, since either most of you are unwilling/incapable of reading/comprehending, or I fail horrendously at explaining my point of view. I say this not because you disagree with me, but because you people are not arguing against my actual statements, but to something you imagine me to have said.

I will now return to playing TTW, where my slightly amoral, heterosixual, young woman character who does not really care about why her dad left (hey, he was smarter than her, and she's sure he had a good reason) has raiders to shoot and a home to make.

We got alternate start mods for Skyrim, I'm sure we'll get one for FO4 as well.

Then your best bet would be modders, right?

It's already too late for Bethesda to change gears and reverse what they have done Hey, they may even have written a quest that is related to the character's backstory.

There was an Oblivion mod that allowed the PC to arrive in the port, surely (unless technically infeasible), there may be mods that allow for a PC not from Vault 111.

*My guess is that there is a barber shop somewhere, for appearance changes, and the [existing UI] possibility for modders to replace the bathroom scene in character generation.

I don't doubt that someone will attempt a mod that disables all cinematic conversations, and/or MQ dialogs.

(To convert the game into a sandbox for a custom PC; one not from the vault.)

Except he's not, and like it or not, the Courier does have a backstory that defines certain characteristics. Hell, forget Ulysdes. Our own BRAIN tells us about certain stressful events in our past, such as charging a super mutant with a pen knife and punching a deathclaw. I think that says a lot more about the Courier than being married with a kid does about Mr./Mrs. 111. Hell, people are acting like they now have no choice but to be one specific type person. Have you seem the many millions of sorts of people who can be married? There is still a lot to work with. No less than there was when we were forced to play as a teenager or an obviously brave or brazen mailman.

People need to stop bringing up Witcher as an alternative example of an RPG. It is not a major title compared to long-standing successes such as the Tales franchise, Star Ocean, Phantasy Star, Ys, and many others.

Todd Howard explained why they adopted a voiced protagonist with a certain background. Think of any other RPG from the past decade or more, and you'll realize that they all have voiced protagonists (or a party of characters) with backgrounds. He also pointed out that BGS still wants you to have as much freedom as possible so this isn't really a big deal.

If I want to offer a complaint, it's that he is still claiming "be any character you want and do anything you want" in the E3 2015 presentation but I do not see BGS adopting an artstyle that matches my preference. This means that I certainly cannot "be any character I want and do anything I want". Visual aesthetic is a far more limiting factor in telling my own story that having a general background at the beginning of the story.

Interesting view to take, considering your dad leaving resulted in a direct threat to your own life. All my characters made it their mission to track their fathers down, if only to knock Dad flat on his rear.

Now the Vault 101 emergency broadcast...that one generally gets ignored. "Yeah, not really interested in going back into a place that was actively trying to shoot me dead."

I don't consider it an alternative. I consider it a template; and a yardstick to judge by.

(Alongside, and second fiddle to Planescape.)

I'm not trying to troll or anything... but perhaps because we genuinely don't understand what the problem is?

The only real complaining and moaning we see is that "It limits our creativity". Realistically, that's not even the full case. It's ONE portion of your characters life. The pre-apocalypse world of Fallout was already insane enough that you can pretty much come up with just about any reason to the marriage. Just about any reason to why that kid exists. Then just about any background before that marriage. All that I am seeing when I see these complaints is that you asked for atoms to make lemonade, and you were given a bundle of lemons instead. So instead of making lemonade with what you got, you just throw a fit and demand for something already set in stone to be ripped apart to it's molecular level.

How is this opening any different from the previous games? You were given a key milestone of the character's life, and you just build around it.

If you were LGBT then I could understand the complaint a bit personally if that was the case... but again. The times that Fallout was based on is completely different for our time.

The Witcher series is a good template to bring up, the only major problem with that series is, your Geralt and not your own character. Fallout 4 you are your own character however Voiced Dialoge and a preset background hurt that choice of character and corridor us into a certain mindset. I still think we will have the wiggle room that Fallout 3 did, nobody told you to go search for Dad and you could easily stick your middle finger in the air and say screw him and go your own way. I did that most of the time in Fallout 3, just said screw you Dad for leaving the vault and having myself hold the bag afterwards. Went off and did my own thing in the world. Fallout 4 should be no different, I hope we still will have freedom and wiggle room to do that, voiced Protagonist will hurt that a lot.

The whole blank slate/prisoner trope for TES is actually logical given the metaphysical lore on the Rebel, The King, and the Observer, and the concept of Towers in TES.

Red Dead Redemption was the most engaging, memorable, and provoking story I've ever played. I can only wish any other game is as wonderful. I'd rather have a great story with an already written preface, than a blank slate as dry as a witch's...

...Red Dead Redemption DID do pretty good at that...

Even if a character you play has a pre-set background and backstory, that doesn't stop you from getting attatched to them on some level.

Some games do this better than others.

Mike from Alpha Protocol, for example, was a d--- no matter how you played.

Marston from Red Dead was likeable in that tragic, anti-hero with family-man sensibility (separated from his wife and child for HOW long, but wouldn't give a hoker the time of day? Come on, respect that)

Well said, OP.

There is loads of message by the time i am writting, so i mostly answer first page.

For one thing, for the X th time, stop bashing someone because he has a different opinion than yours. Someone can be skeptic or hatefull of a product without any kind of hard feeling (or any kind of feeling at all) for those who love it. Please, do the same toward them. Otherwise, it is just mean, arbitrary, gratuitous and useless.

To clarify toward Gizmo >

About the characters backstory, there is an amount of things that is under its control and an amount of things that were set upon him by life itself, just in real life. You don't choose your skin color or were you were born, those things happened before any involvement from yourself. Let's call those things background. But the background isn't really who you are. Then, there is an amount of thing that aren't your decisions, but aren't the decisions of others either. Having a low HQ, a weak constitution, some mental disorders etc... Those things are your nature, which is different than your background. Then, you have your personnality, which is who you are deep inside. Then you make choices and you have motives that lead to those choices. Then, you have your evolution, that is your life between your birth and the present, which is a mix of all of those things, including your nature, your choices, and your motives. At last, there are outside events that happened to you, without any control from yourself, that don't depend on who you are, but isn't either related to your background.

In Fo1-Fo2-FoNV, to generalize a bit, the only things that are already defined are parts of your background (you were born in Vault 13/Arroyo), and an outside event that force you to leave. You didn't decide to go for the water chip, or the GECK, but were chosen by your people for doing that task, not because you are worthy, but expendable, or randomly chosen, or because Hakunin plants say so. Hell, you can be a complete moron with a weak constitution, unable to fight a rat, and still be chosen. The other members of your settlements might even lampshade this by considering the wrong person was picked. The choice of sending you doesn't depend on who you are at all. Then, you have indeed made a choice, but the only choice was to accept the task and leave your hometown. But if you didn't leave the hometown, you wouldn't explore the gameworld. So it isn't hard to accept that your character would you the same thing as the guy who bothered to buy the game. Explore the gameworld is mandatory for both of you or there would be no game. Other than that, there is one other forced choice in Fo2, destroying the Enclave, but there is several possible motives. Destroying the Enclave because you hate them, saving your village, or just self-survival, as they want to kill everyone, including you. The courrier also chose to become a courrier, but we don't know anything past that. He might enjoy the job, or just doing that occasionnally amongs thousand of other jobs, he might owe ton of money etc...

Other than that, everything is up to you. You can decide the rest of your background, you can decide your nature, you can decide your personality, you decide your choices and motives, you can decide your evolution, you can decide who to side with in main/side quests, (and if you want to meet/kill Benny, find the chip, learn about them, or ignore them) you can decide your behavior, if you want to kill everyone, kill no one, be diplomat, be violent, be stealthy, have great intelligence, be a complete moron, be strong, be weak etc... Only things decided for you are a bit of background and one outside event that kick you in the gameworld.

In Fo3, they are already in a middle ground. You have more background elements forced upon you (lost your mother, were born outside, raised by a doctor father in a vault, expelled at 19, be loved by your father), but those are background elements. You can theorically choose your nature, personnality, some of your evolution, some motives, choices etc... You might say that somehow, you are forced to love your father, but you can choose to semi-antagonize him or at least disrespect him. You are free to antagonize or love Butch and Amata. The problem is that no matter if you keep mistreating your father and Amata, they will keep loving and helping you (imagine that the first person that comes to help you agains't her own father is the one you bullied for 19 years). Which gives the impression that the game refuse to aknowledge your agency. Not matter your choice, what happens next is what the develloppers chosen instead of what you chose. You can be a very kind and forgetfull Fo3 apologist and consider that those Vault people love for people they spent all their life with can never be broken. If that so, why so many of them try to kill you ? Let's be kind and consider that you have an input in your vault life. Then you are kicked from the vault, but not because who you are, but because what another character (your dad) did, and the overseer mistrust of him and his relatives.

After you leave it, it only goes downhill. No matter the nature, personality, motives, evolution and choices you try to provide to your character, the devellopper will always force him to make some choice (which, being forced, annihiliate the concept of choice) that can and probably will contradict all the character building you made. No matter what you decided for your character, he will escape your control and follow the develloppers orders, by looking for dad, helping him, joining the brotherhood, looking for the geck, and helping activate project purity. Not only your characters will have to do those things to finish the game (if you add Broken Steel, he wouldn't even be able to actually finish the game), but the others characters will also lose their agency by having a predetermined behavior instead the one they should have after your own action. If you killed thousands of BOS members, Lyons should never consider you as an hero, for instance.

So, IMO, Fo3 mostly managed to give you some input in the beginning (but still removing a lot of your agency compared with Fo1-Fo2-FoNV), pretend to leave you some agency afterward, but completly blow up the illusion when you are following the main quest. Which is, at best, a mixed bag. At worst, a complete denial of your agency.

About the blank state, it mostly fits to FoT. You can define some part of your nature (stats), and tiny part of your personnality (choosing to do optionnal objectives and how), and one (very committing) to join the BOS and follow its order. Everything else is a blank state, IMO, not because you don't have forced personnality/motive/nature/background/etc, but contrary to Fo1-Fo2-FoNV, there is not enough options in the game to allow you to choose how you will fill the blank and how the NPC will respond to it. With Fo1-Fo2-FoNV almost everything in the gameworld, allow you to make choices, define who you really are (despite the partial background and the single forced event) and the gameworld is reactive enough to react to it, providing the much needed consequences.

Which makes us pretty much worried, is not only the controversial way of handling those choices (of lack of) in Fallout 3, but also all the things that seem to be forced upon us, that go well beyond background and one single forced event. The tone of your voice, your heterosixuality, your marriage, your child, how you decorated your house, how you talk to your wife, buying the robot butler and choosing its programming. All of those things involve some develloppers decisions overriding your own, about your character's nature, personnality, behavior, evolution, motives and choices, with cover all the factors mentioned above. Of course, we cannot know to what extend the regression will occur, as it is only the beginning of the game, but so many devellopers choices overriding our own in just a few minutes is indeed extremely worrying.

Also, considering that the dev stated a few times that they wanted to give the player freedom, they seem about to fail that promise, by removing from the player several aspects of a freedom he already had in almost every other titles of the series, a freedom that was amongs the very things that made that series worth of praises in the first place. No matter if we love or hate that trend, a part of the player freedom to control its characters was removed. The remaining question is how much of this freedom we will still have at the end.

Once again, i am explaining an evolution and why some of us are worried. You don't have to be worried if you think that this freedom is unecessary.

Whether I not I can deal with the pre-determined background will depend on whether or not the family is mentioned / brought back. If the PC is constantly referring to their spouse and how much they love / miss them and / or it turns out they're not really dead, it's going to a little annoying. It's bad enough that you can't have a same six couple, but if they stay dead, that at least gives some leeway with role playing.