While players can control who their character ends up becoming in the story and the choices they make, the Fallout games rely on a far more prescriptive storytelling style than the Elder Scrolls series, even if there is still much more freedom than other series like Mass Effect. In Fallout 4, the player is either a veteran or a lawyer who survives being cryogenically frozen within Vault 111 in 2077 and leaves their Vault centuries later in search of their missing son, Shaun. In Fallout 3, the character is explicitly a 19 year-old who leaves Vault 101 in search of their father, James. In Fallout 1 the player character grew up in Vault 13, while in Fallout 2 the player is the first protagonist's direct descendant. In most Fallout games, the player's backstory is established. The Fallout games may resemble The Elder Scrolls in a lot of ways, but there is a key difference. While this also means that the Elder Scrolls games tend to have stories which aren't particularly character-driven, it also allows for the kind of roleplaying freedom exemplified by the ten different playable races. It is entirely up to players to determine their character's age, motivations, and any details of their life before the start of the game. Skyrim even avoids saying which way across the Skyrim-Cyrodiil border the player was attempting to travel when they were captured by the Imperials and sent to Helgen for execution.

Players always start imprisoned in some way, but their reason for being there is rarely elaborated upon. The Elder Scrolls games prioritize roleplaying freedom above all else. One of the reasons for this lies in a subtle difference between the storytelling styles of the two series. While Elder Scrolls fans can choose from many of the races of Tamriel, however, Fallout players can only ever play as a human. They use the same engine, both series are first-person open-world roleplaying games, and both worlds have a variety of races.

Ever since Fallout 3 the Fallout games have had the same basic formula as Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series.

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