Maybe the trailer Bethesda released yesterday for Fallout 4 teased more than people realise — or at least, this is what some hardcore fans are speculating right now.
Reader Stefan Andersson sent us note of a popular theory making the rounds on Reddit and other websites right now, all revolving around Fallout 4′s protagonist. You know, this guy; the person we see at the end of the trailer:
Looking closely at his face, folks have noticed that he actually looks pretty similar to the man at the start of the trailer, who is shown with a family:
And both of these men look a lot like the guy from the casting documents which we reported on back in 2013:
As we noted yesterday, it seemed likely that the guy in the jump suit and the guy in the casting documents are the same person judging from the similarities in appearances. But how can the man at the start of the trailer be the same one in the jumpsuit? Wouldn’t that be impossible?
Well, maybe. The theory making the rounds right now is that the guy at the start of the trailer might have gotten into a vault with cryogenic freezing, making it possible for people inside of it to stay alive for long periods of time. Ergo, it could be possible for someone from before the war to still be alive way afterward, during the post-apocalypse.
When we originally reported on the casting documents, we noted that the character is said to start the game in a in a cryogenic sleep chamber. So, that aligns — but people are taking this nugget of information one step further. Some people are speculating that this might be the entire premise of Vault 111, which is shown during the trailer. As fans know, each vault has a specific scientific shtick — there was one vault where someone got cloned 50 times, and a different vault that only had one single man it it. The purpose of these experiments was to test out how the people act in trying, ridiculous conditions, and to get a better sense of how humanity would go about repopulating after a potential war. In short, vaults were never meant to keep people safe — they just had one specific theme. Folks are assuming that if the protagonist is supposed to wake up from cryo at the start of Fallout 4, then it’s likely the vault he came from had cryo as its experiment.
How would humanity even pull that off, though? It’s not like we have the ability to revive people once they’re frozen in real life. According to a theory on Reddit by MateoElFidel, the technology was likely stolen from aliens. In the past, Fallout tech such as Skynet is said to have been built from alien tech, and it’s possible that we stole something as advanced as cryo from them too.
The question would then be what the circumstances around your waking up from cryo are: is there a set date? Does someone from the outside have to give an “all clear”? Did the tech malfunction? It’s worth remembering that the HTML to the teaser website before the reveal yesterday said there was some sort of system failure, so maybe it’s an unplanned tech malfunction. Whatever it is, fans aren’t sure, but what is clear is that something is wrong. In the casting documents we shared in 2013, the protagonist gives a narration where he mentions that he is actually afraid for his family. The start of the trailer shows Dogmeat looking through the ruins of the protagonist’s old home. Specifically, he sniffs the stuff in the infant son’s room.
The tipster who sent us one of these Fallout theories can’t help but wonder: “Is the story also a nod to FO3 with the father now searching for the son?”
That would be a cool twist! Other theories floating around right now posit the game will let you explore your pre-war hometown, and that if the game does let you play stuff from before the war, it’s possible that your actions then affect what you will find once you revisit those older locations.
The most out-there theory I’ve seen floating around has to do with androids, however — some folks are hoping that maybe you’ll get to play as one. This one seems less likely to me given what we’ve seen in the trailer, but hey, it’s still one of the many theories floating around right now.
Of course, these are just theories. Very good theories, which pick up on details from the trailer and marry it to the already existing lore of Fallout, but theories nonetheless. We’ll know more about what is going on with Fallout 4 once E3 starts, when Bethesda has its own press conference.
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