I'd like to bounce off your idea.

Idk how you guys feel about COD: Ghosts, but i loooove the intro.

[Fallout 5] The game starts off with you being a secret agent. You're in a submarine.

You wake up, mirror in your bedroom is the customizer. Activating your "CIA file" on a desk is the SPECIAL. Either two things:

1) you board a bigger submarine

Or

2) you stop under an oil rig

Or other

Whatever it is, it is under Chinese communist control. It harbors nuclear missiles. Your goal is to infiltrate, disarm, and leave.

However, things go bad because you have no sneak+ no skills+ no pre-War money+ weenie hut, jr.

The alarm rings, you are getting shot at. You cant take your time to fire back because you hear a second alarm followed by (Mandarin) Missile will launch in 10 seconds.

Youre sprinting to the office ig? you kill the group of enemies in there, but before the captain dies he says a codeword which activates a trap. The controls explode. Theres nothing you can do except go to the extraction zone. You swim to the sub, bullets flying over your head, hitting the water. The nuke launches. You leave the area. The sub reaches America. An underwater vault in a cave. You open up the hatch.

Stuff happens.

Eventually, you leave the vault and meet the brightness of nuclear winter.

I like the idea your are born in the aftermath of the nuclear bombs dropping, and your are living about 300 after the bombs.

Location-Your luve in a naturally walled off place where it is almsot shaped like a crater. But it is not a nuclear crater so. Because of the shape of the location your start in it acts like a natural barriar from wildlife. But it is feetile enough where the nukes didn't effect the region majorly. So there is a decent amount of fauna and flora. Over time a geoup of former Vault dweller find this place and settle in it, making it there home. Safe, and isolated.

The community is about 40 years old by the time your 9 years old, and you wonder around the small community seeing the adults, and other kids. Yoy begin to wander around and get dared into going beyond the fances community in the area. But as a result you and the other kid get attacked by a small radscorpion and your parents step in to protect you. As a result they scold you, but also tell you the dangers of the outside world. Beyond the crater and there fances off town.

Reasoning for leaving the communiy-20 years later you are 29 years old male/female who has been taught to be mindful of the wilderness and stay in the crater community. Only for a strange group of outsiders to come in and at first seem friendly. Wearing relatively good armor, and seem nice to the locals. Only for the dead of night, the outsiders begin to raid the town to the ground, killing everyone in the town, but you and a handful of people(6 people) and you have to leave the crater because the outsiders begin to burn the forest and town down. Thus beginning your journey out of the crater. Later on you can visit your old home and see it is homed to different raider group. But killing them off allows your to remake the town again. With new people and the 6 people from before.

I would like to see a game shortly after the Great War as well, but instead of a Vault dweller you are a Vault-Tec security guard who discovers a horrible experiment going on in their vault and plans a coup to overthrow the overseer and break out of the Vault. After that you lead the dwellers into the wasteland, build settlements for them, and one of them becomes a companion and potential love interest. You try to rescue people from other vaults and expose Vault-Tec's crimes, but this attracts the attention of the Enclave, who need those people for their own goals. You can destroy them too, or join them and convince them to take down Vault-Tec together. This would explain why there is no trace left of any Vault-Tec personnel in the games set a few centuries later.

I don't know about you guys but I'd love the option to become other things than a basic human. like choosing being a ghoul. picture this-- if you pick ghoul then you get to see a quest in which your pre-war self undergoes ghoulifiction and you survive though the nuclear war following the great war. then you go though a series of choices that shapes who you are, not unlike the introduction quest in fallout 3 where you grew up in the vault in one quest-line.

And if you pick human, then you still have the opition to become a ghoul or supermutant later on if you want to.... but the difference is that you're now a post-war citizen and have no memories of what the pre-war world was like.

I just think playing as a super-mutant could be interesting from a storytelling POV, especially if you're one of those rare super-mutants who remember what it was to be human. that could go down different rotues where you hate the other supermutants for doing this to you, or you fully embrace being supermutant. maybe a storyline where you try to get humans and supermutants to cooperate.

How about starting the game in an enclave bunker, right after the bombs fall. You’re in there with powerful politicians and celebrities. You’re job is a janitor/repair/ gofer who answers to all these lay abouts. You choose the missions for these people and it progresses to more and more complicated tasks. And then you get sent out and the real game starts.