[Day One] Fallout 4: Character Creation

Last night, I had work, then a grad class until 7:30 at night. I barely managed to run home in between to save my Fallout 4 package from the downpour that had chosen November 10th, of all days, to let itself loose on the Connecticut shoreline, where I currently make my lair.

After I finally got home, I put food in my mouth (a hastily slapped together bagel and Italian sausage, thank you very much-- no wasted time in the kitchen on Fallout 4 day for me!) while flipping through the game guide and loading the game, which was a fun deluge of of S.P.E.C.I.A.L informational trailers put together by Vault-Tec for the purposes of educating me before the game started-- all hail Vault-Tec.

I decided to make an agile and perceptive character, with also a fair number of points invested in intelligence. The ideal is to have a character who can basically ninja her way through any situation. I'm going to want to put enough points into intelligence that I will be able to hack terminals when necessary, and I'm also going to want to lockpick and get the awesome guns when possible. (Note: There is a killer-looking gun in Vault 111 that is master-level. If this is normal Bethesda lockpicking, I can probably get it as soon as I find some bobby pins.)

Armed with her wits and a 10mm, Edie leaves the surburbia she has grown up in to walk the wasteland. You are forced as a player with a specific backstory and what that entails-- husband, child-- which I'm not sure I like, even though I did manage to form some affection for the two the short time we spent together. The monologue in the beginning-- male only, because game creators apparently didn't want to give you a gender option in enough time to save you from feeling like the female option was tacked on-- says that your character was in the war as a soldier before the detonation that caused apocalyptica. I think that applies to the female character as well as the male, anyway. I'm gonna go with it, so it explains my suburban housewife's ability to survive in the Commonwealth at all-- she was a soldier with PTSD who never thought she'd be happy and isn't surprised that this has happened. Trusting no one, she badasses her way through the Wasteland.

I'm trying to conserve bullets where I can, since I remember always running out Fallout 3, and I only had a couple minutes of actual combat, so I haven't been able to figure out the button-mapping for VATS since I'm playing on Xbox One.

As a whole, my major complaint about the intro was that I was basically forced into the male character's shoes and had to force-change to the female, shoving him aside in the bathroom mirror in character creation to get my own space. Maybe that's okay-- maybe I met him in the army and he thinks I should take a backseat role to him now that we're civilians again-- but I shouldn't have to make up a story to justify it to myself.

This is obviously a tiny, tiny part of the game, but it was so obviously geared toward the male character that it bothers me. A tiny part of the game should be able to be handled better than this.

Looking forward to more gaming this afternoon-- I have five glorious days off from work as my Fallout Vacation!