Avali Nexus Forum Thread 3: A crowd.

Main Questline
So FO4 actually makes a character for you, background and all, you're from a military family and a retired soldier yourself, you're presumably upper middle class, married, with one child. Because of this military background you are pre-accepted into Vault 111, so the news comes in that bombs are coming so you ditch your faithful robot and run down the street to vault 111, you are dropped down the elevator right as a bomb goes off and you narrowly avoid the shockwave, once inside the vault you are put in a cryogenics tube and frozen. Then you wake up an unkown amount of time later and watch two people open your wife's pod, one is clearly a scientist and the other appears to be a thug, so they try to convince her to let go of your son and ultimately just shoot her and kidnap the boy, then they freeze you again. Apparently the system wasn't meant to be reactivated after being interrupted like that, because when next you awake a life support failure has killed everyone else, oops, so you'll gather some essentials around the facility, a 10mm, some ammo, a security baton, a pip boy, and you'll kill some rad roaches. You will then return to the surface, walk a block down the street and find your robot STILL FUNCTIONING, anyways you'll have a slight reunion where he has an emotional breakdown over how long you were gone, and still being somewhat in denial about how literally everything has gone to shit he will lead you around the neighborhood to try and figure out where your wife and son are, after finding nothing he'll accept that they aren't there and direct you to the nearby town of Concord to seek more help in your search. At Concord you'll run into Preston Garvey in the middle of a firefight with some raiders, he will direct you to a laser musket dropped by his fallen comrade and after you help him beat off the raiders you will be introduced to the hacking and lockpicking mechanics when he asks you to retrieve a fusion cell from the basement, after which you will gain a complete suit of power armor and a minigun with something like, 800 rounds to fight off another wave of raiders and then, a deathclaw. You get to keep the armor, minigun, and any loot, and after this Garvey and the civilians in his care will proceed to the returns of your home neighborhood, sanctuary hill, after directing you to diamond city to the south, if you join them at sanctuary two additional quest lines will open up, the minuteman arc and the sanctuary mini-arc.

Now that opening scene where your wife dies is actually very compelling, it gives the player a very credible reason to hate whoever those unnamed antagonists are, the firefight in Concord is a nice little sequence that introduces some characters you will presumably see a lot of, or at least it could, it only really introduces Garvey, their resident mechanic Sturges, and a druggie fortune teller whose name eludes me. There are more than that of course, but it never really does anything with them, I actually talked with one of those forgotten characters at sanctuary and he is a very one trick pony, his son is dead and he does nothing but reference his dead son and his poor emotional state, there is no quest line that will help you improve that state. The fortune teller is portrayed as being very reliable despite being a drug addict and claiming to have prophetic visions, it is said that she lead the group to sanctuary and she talks about how the player is destined for greatness, maybe I'm just jaded but it seems a bit convenient that a character who should be disregarded as a quack is actually so credible. Sturges is a decent character but he doesn't seem to have any story to him, he's just a personality and a face that spits words at you. Garvey has a fairly barebones story to him and is stereotypical good samaritan defender of the weak style person, but honestly I think he's a pretty good character all the same.

Sanctuary
Just a little mini-arc where sturges will walk you through the essentials of running a settlement, nothing to comment on as there is no plot of any sort.

Minutemen
Garvey will talk to the player about how the minutemen used to be a force for good around the commonwealth but they fell apart recently now he's the only one left, but he wants to change that, so he enlists you to go help other settlements with their raider problems to drum up support for the minutemen again, you will go to the first settlement and be told that they didn't honestly expect an actual minuteman to show up, then directed to a raider hideout that's been extorting them for some time now. After clearing the raiders the settler will inform you that the others have agreed to support and/or join the minutemen thanks to you helping them out, even if you didn't ask them to, after this minutemen will be found in the surrounding area with laser muskets, they will help you fight monsters. After returning to sanctuary Garvey will explain that the minutemen fell apart because they tried to help a town, nobody helped them, and they were massacred, he then says that he doesn't have what it takes to fully restore the minutemen to glory, appoints you as the General of the minutemen, gives you a flare gun that will signal nearby settlements to aid you, and directs you to another settlement that needs help.

This whole questline feels kinda flat so far, some nice character development for Garvey but that development is also shooting him in the foot so to speak, it feels like it's structured so that he never has to actually change as a character, he can stay in the same spot and do the same thing regardless of your progress, there's little to document and comment on in basic interactions with literally nameless settlers asking you for help, and there's certainly no story to be found in killing the raiders except a bit of background lore explaining that this group of raiders are the same ones you fought in Concord.

Brotherhood of Steel
When you get into Cambridge you'll pick up a military frequency on your radio, if you listen to it somebody calling themselves Scribe Haylen will request help at the Cambridge Police Station. Upon arriving at the station you'll find Paladin Danse in full power armor and Scribe Haylen in just her uniform fighting off waves of ghouls with laser weaponry as well as Knight Rhys on the ground wounded, Danse will immediately acknowledge your presence during the firefight. After the ghouls are all dead Danse will demand to know why you're there, thank you for your assistance, and explain that his recon team has suffered heavy casualties on their mission and that they require assistance to contact the brotherhood's central command. He will give you free reign over any gear you find in the station to prep for a trip to a nearby R&D lab to retrieve the component they need, on the way there he will provide some background on the Brotherhood's operations in the commonwealth. At the R&D lab you will be introduced to the institute and their synths, Danse will explain that they are a group of scientists producing advanced technologies such as the synths that are considered abominations by the brotherhood, you will fight off many synths as you navigate the lower levels of the facility and ultimately retrieve the component in question before returning to the surface where Danse will present to you a legendary laser rifle and offer you a place in the brotherhood. If you accept you will return to the Cambridge police station, be given the rank of initiate, and instructed to complete a task for both Haylen and Rhys. After completing one of these tasks Danse will ask you to help find out what happened to the last Brotherhood recon team to pass through the commonwealth as they were never heard from again. This search will lead you to several suits of power armor intentionally fused shut and one corpse with a holotape indicated that the recon team was ambushed and had to scuttle their power armor and retreat towards the national guard base nearby. At the Guard base you will find a single corpse inside the recruiting office along with a number of ghouls and a holotape explaining that she lost contact with the rest of the team after they split up and she made her last stand there...despite all of her perimeter defenses such as MG turrets and landmines being untouched when you find the building.

I quite like this so far honestly, Danse is a nice character but as a career soldier he's kind of 2D by nature, Rhys is also a career soldier but very childish and hostile for no good reason, and Haylen seems to be pretty up beat despite half their team being dead and them being holed up in a boarded up police station, all around though except for Rhys they're a tolerable bunch. At one point Danse mentions how dangerous it is to travel "this far from the station" as you walk literally 3 or 4 blocks, just outside of the city, which was a bit silly, because he said that about halfway there. It really paints the institute as bad guys nicely and leaves the player with the impression that the Brotherhood has good intentions but may not be quite going about them in the right way, in a talk with Codsworth he also mentioned that the Brotherhood seems disinterested with the locals, which was an observation I had not yet made myself that does actually seem to ring true, while the Brotherhood talks a lot about the good of mankind there seems to be little actual work to improve the locals' lives, which was an interesting bit of depth but makes the Brotherhood seem like they're not all that good at all, which will really spoil things if the questline keeps trying to push that they're good guys. I also have still not yet received the power armor Danse promised me.
edit:just did the quest for Rhys, the entire stated purpose is to clean up the mess that is the wasteland by killing monsters, it may not be for the right reasons (cleaning up scientific mistakes as opposed to cleaning up hazards to the locals) but it's definitely a good-guy thing to do.