Nuka-World only lets you join/run the raiders out of Nuka-World. Near the end of that quest line, you do get to take raiding parties into the main map and take part in assaults on settlements. You don’t get to raid any of the main ones like Diamond City unfortunately.
It’s all a bit dumb. Especially if you previously helped a bunch of those settlements previously. Apparently, you lost your mind and decided to massacre your own people.
As for Nuka World
[spoiler]I picked the open season quest option for Nuka World which lets you just kill all the raiders.
It’s basically the good ending. There was no way I was going to raid my own settlements after investing so much time in them. The raiders are pure evil…especially the one with Dixie. I enjoyed shooting up all three with explosive bullets and psycho jet. Tough battles even with almost god like power.[/spoiler]
The design of the park is really great. The rides were really well crafted and I loved that most of them actually work. Like the whole rest of the game, there are chunks of hidden history layered everywhere that you go.
As far as the main quest goes, maybe the fact that all 4 factions were flawed and almost every choice was zero sum says something about the apocalypse. I chose the rail road because they seemed the least flawed.
I thought about that, but I think it is a bit naive/egotistic to think the PC can change an institution all by him/herself. There is sure to be institutional backlash against thinking that human synths are not property but human beings. The Institute quest line shows that a lot of decisions are made behind the director’s back anyway so it is highly doubtful the PC can be the agent of change The Institute needs.
And the really egregiously bad guys, like the Raiders, are depicted as such over the top sadists that it sort of becomes numbing in that regard too; even the really bad guys are caricatures of evil.
I always had the most contempt, though, for the Gunners. Rather than use their clearly superior organization and firepower, as well as tactical leadership and cohesion, to set up a real government, drive out the raiders, and restore order albeit a sort of autocratic order, they simply act like just another raider band. Such a missed opportunity for a cool DLC there too.
The main factions all suck, for sure. The Minutemen are ineffectual and don’t seem to actually have a plan beyond being a totally reactive self defense force. The Railroad has so many logical inconsistencies in their ethos, as well as a few moral blindspots, that they are hard to take seriously. The BOS, well, they’re stormtroopers with a decided lack of intelligence or foresight.
But yeah, the Institute. Nuking it always bugs the hell out of me. Look, the old leader is dead anyhow, a lot of the people in the Institute are more isolated and ignorant of the surface than actively hostile, and their tech base and resources are amazing. Really, even if they implemented their whole rather draconian plan to dominate the surface and control everything, it’d be better than the hell that is Commonwealth, probably. Yet siding with them means massacring everyone else pretty much, including your friends, with no way to save anyone. Still, though, nuking not just the Institute, the best hope anyone has for a better future, but also the entire center of Boston again, seems insane.
Yeah, that always bugged me as well. There’s the ending where you can get the Brotherhood, Railroad, and Minutemen to all get along (by being VERY careful with which quests you complete and the order in which you take them), but giving the Institute a chance to redeem themselves doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
My biggest complaint is that if you go the Minuteman route all the work clearing settlements seems wasted. I have no person interest in the building minigame stuff but having every settlement just be a couple turrets that I threw down didn’t make it feel like the Minutemen were actually doing anything.
This is apparently solved by some awesome mods that came out after I played where the settlers will actually rebuild on their own.
So blowing up an advanced technology center to save a bunch of unmotivated people was just silly.
Also, the actual mission that kicks off the Institute/Minutemen battle is nonsensical. They need some specific random wastelander to make their reactor better because somehow they know he has a high IQ??? And they can’t recruit him in by showing him their literal paradise? And so now they need to launch a full scale assault on the fortress? It makes no sense in general, let alone as the pivotal moment of that plot line.
It’s a bit “dumb” only if you so chose to be “dumb”. No one is forcing you :)
I agree the main quest is so flawed that I quit playing and haven’t finished any of the main lines. I got depressed because they all suck. I think it all came crashing down when I finally reached the institute. I played for a few hours after leaving there, but gave up soon afterwards, completely uninspired & with no desire to move on.
After 115 hours invested no less. And to be honest, I was enjoying the hell out of it for the first 110 hours.
OTOH, I have, um, 636 hours in this game. I too hate the main quest; in the run-throughs I did after the first, I pretty much waited until, oh, level 50 or so to do it. I just loved wandering around and killing stuff in an open-world shooter. A better central quest would have enhanced the experience, sure, but it wasn’t strictly necessary for me. I long ago stopped giving a damn about why I was roaming the world rhymin’ and stealin’.
How the BOS and Railroad could co-exist is beyond me, but given the dreadful plot construction overall it’s no surprise it’s possible.
I’m just going to revert back to an early save before nuking the Institute, do the DLCs and forget about the main quest. I’m friendly with 3 out of 4 factions, and I’m ok with that. After learning that the Institute stole your son and then turned him into an asshole, there is no living with the Institute. (Edit: If anyone has a right to turn my son into an asshole, that person should be ME!)
The point that really turned me against BoS is Blind Betrayal. So Danse is a synth, but by god he is revered around the Brotherhood for his deeds. Instead of challenging their assumption that all synths are abomination, they just stick their fingers in their ears and pretend this new evidence doesn’t exist.
The Railroad quest line eventually requires you to destroy the Prydwen, which is crazy. There is a whole bunch of BoS in DC, so destroying Prydwen won’t destroy BoS. Destroying the Prydwen is like poking a hornst’s nest. Unless you are ready for a fierce response (that may or may not come), then for self-preservation sake don’t do it.
And the Minutemen’s (or Preston’s) last request is just a bridge too far. I enjoy the settlement design/management/post-nuclear-war Sims part of the game very much, so I will contiune with that, without nuking the Institute.
The problem is that 2 other factions do the same thing. This another thing about the F4 world I hate.
I don’t know. You could be sneaky about the whole synth thing. Setup some tests that will allow the scientists to discover that synths are sentient on their own. For example, as the director, ask the to discover WHY the synths are running away. Not HOW, but WHY?
Another thing I would do as the director is to direct the biology department to invent a plant that eats radiation, can grow in water or land, and is non-toxic to eat. Then spread that shit all over the commonwealth, especially in the glowing sea.
I see your water purifier in DC, and I raise you with these awesome new plants.
I really liked the majority of this game. Have around 250 hours played and never finished the main quests for the reasons you all have mentioned above. I loved the combat at first, then I loved the hording, then just exploring. I think I have visited 95% of the locations in the base game and actively ignored the main quest until there was nothing else to do.
When I finally got the Institute and started messing around with the other faction quests I knew my days in the commonwealth were numbered. For me, the choices offered were so egregious and the writing so linear that the main lines literally sucked the enjoyment out of the game. I bought Far Harbor and tried to enjoy myself but it was just a slog… more synths? Really!?
And I think that was the problem for me. Synths. Fallout 4 took a “B-” side quest from Fallout 3 and built a whole game around it. In Fallout 3, I liked The Replicated Man quest because it fit with the general 1950’s pulp sci-fi theme. It was a good one-off. But a whole game about a technology that doesn’t really fit in Fallout (for me), it was too much. Especially when the game is too lazy to ever tell me why the Institute is so set on the synth path.
Ultimately I just grabbed Codsworth and Dog, left the Commonwealth without finishing the quests, went to Far Harbor and parked myself in Vault 118.
“Greetings Professor Falken. A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
I don’t think it is just a pure philosophical/scientific issue of considering whether synth is human, there is also the economic issue. If the synths are human beings, that means the Institute has to pay them far wages and treat them fairly. Where will the Institute get that kind of money???
It is kind of like the historical case of slavery, it is not just a moral question of whether skin colour determines the intrinsic value of a human, it is also about the economy that depended on slaves to make a profit. As soon as slavery is gone, the profit margin of the industries that depended on unpaid labour to make a profit will evaporate, therefore those with stakes in those industries would do everything to stop abolition.
I know I would find no joy fighting those exploitative doctors underground in boardroom meetings. I prefer helping settlements and creating a true commonwealth above ground.
Erm, sort of, if you’re going by the example of American chattel slavery. It gets complicated really fast. The economics of slavery in North America were only a part of the institution’s importance; it was also the foundation of a social, cultural, and political power structure that far transcended its economic function. Plantation owners arguably saved little in real economic terms by not paying wages, which in the 19th century were abysmally low for agricultural labor anyhow. The capital cost of buying slaves, upkeep (food, clothing, shelter) even when not productive, and of course security and loss prevention were also not insignificant, and slave owners could not adjust the workforce easily to adapt to changing markets. What made it viable was one, the absurdly and historically transient high prices of certain agricultural commodities, namely tobacco and then cotton, and two, the huge political power institutionalized racism and chattel slavery gave to an entrenched white ruling class, allowing them to deflect the political and economic ambitions of the majority poor white population by making it impossible to challenge the elites without making common cause with a class of people deemed grossly inferior and alien.
Slavery in the USA was never a purely economic institution, nor was it primarily about not paying wages–there was no cash in the agrarian economy anyhow, as we see after the Civil War with tenant farming and sharecropping for whites and blacks. It began as a way (after forcing the indigenous peoples to work didn’t succeed, and after indentured servitude failed utterly, c.f. Bacon’s Rebellion) to secure a labor force, certainly, but endured long after its economic utility was called into question because it was pretty much the only way to sustain a social and political order the uniquely benefited a particular class of landed elites, at a time when the rest of the North American elite was transitioning to a more urban, commercial dimension of activity.
Sorry about the lecture, but it’s a topic I’m quite interested in. I do think there are arguments about the Institute and synths that could fit this structure, though not quite so simply. The Institute needs the synths to sustain not its economy–what economy does it actually have, really?–but to sustain the leadership of the Institute as a powerful, supreme clique. Without synths to rule over, they are just raiders with better guns.
Oh yeah, they’re all scum, really. Which as noted elsewhere may be a comment on the nihilism of the post-apocalyptic world, but I think is more likely just less than stellar narrative design.
Yes I did some googling on the economy of slaves historically and came up with this Economist article, which gives me a lot of links which are interesting. The argument that slave owners have economic advantage because they have cost free labour is not quite right. But my point still stand: if the Institute is build on pleb doing all the nitty-gritty stuff, while the “real” humans do science for science sake, then there is institutional insertia to keep things just the way they are.
The Institute economy does not translate into caps or money easily, but there is an economy: there are costs for doing science, and they must be met somehow. Making synths cost raw material. They all come from scavenging trips to the surface, which cost (manpower, loss of synth due to hazard etc.). Synth Retention Bureau, to capture escaped synths, is a cost for maintaining its economic structure, but it is far less than, say, hiring a bunch of wastelanders doing all the cleaning (playing the settlement minigame, it is obviously a massive PITA). Of course, there will be a tipping point, when the Railroad or the Synths start organising rebellions so much so that would make the cost of maintaining slaves uneconomical, but the whole point of SRB is to stop that tipping point from ever happening.
The comparison between the American southern slave owners as social elite with the Institute as an elitist clique is right IMO. Science is by definition elitist (only the best theory wins), so if you surivive based on that elitist mentality, sooner or later it will sip into all aspects of one’s life and the scientists may think they are better than everyone else. (IMO The surface humans are not “inferior” because they were “damaged” by radiation. Rad damage human genes that somehow thrived is just another strand of human evolution. Different, but not necessarily inferior or superior.)
As a fun note, the Institute weaponary is absolute SHITE. I don’t know if it is by design as commentary, or it is just an accident, but if you have to stand up to late game deathclaws, raiders and super mutants, not to mention BoS power armour, you need more than Institute laser weapon. It works in so far as you are giving these toy guns to an army of plebs you care nothing about. Superior numbers overwhelm. The Institute doesn’t have better guns, just superior numbers!
Oh, absolutely. The Institute ain’t good folks.
