Fallout X: Back after those messages

[ShneekeyTheLost]

My idea for fixing FO4's plot is surprisingly simple: When he hits Concord and talks to Codsworth about how long it has been, instead of continuing to want to find his kid, he realizes that his kid is already long gone. Maybe a scene of mourning, maybe showing depression, maybe not. But at any rate, the player's character no longer feels that their kid is their absolute priority anymore because it's been a couple hundred years now and the kid is probably dead of old age if not from whatever violence erupted around him.

This completely changes the framing of the game because you no longer have this critically important thing driving you beyond all other things. Instead we start with more humble drives, namely survival. You're a pre-fall person used to technology in a post-apocalyptic world. This actually encourages you to explore the world rather than charge down the plot path because scavenging for supplies is a natural thing to do. This also changes your initial meeting with the Minutemen. They're offering food, water, shelter, and supplies... and you need all of these things. Also, get rid of the damn radiant quests, they're unnecessary. And overhaul the settlement raid system so if you have sufficient security score, you just don't get pestered about raids there. Not because raids don't happen, but because the settlement can handle it themselves without your intervention.

When you hit Diamond City, it isn't to find your kid, it is to try and get supplies. If you've hooked up with the Minutemen, you're going to be wanting a market for anything you produce and a source for supplies you can't make yourself. If you haven't, then you're probably still living hand to mouth and could use some extra supplies, and Diamond City has been signposted as a place to get that. Piper is still on her anti-institute kick, hears your kid is dead, and immediately blames the institute on the logic that it takes *resources* to get into a Vault, and no one other than the institute has that. This gives you a good ol' fashioned revenge plot. If your character doesn't bite on that, she instead offers that the institute has resources, which you are in need of, so if not for revenge then how does greed sound as a motivator to go after the institute?

Of course, unlike the actual game, you have options here. You can believe her as much or as little as you like. You can bite on the revenge plot, you can bite on the greed angle, or you can just shrug and respond with 'not my problem' or at least 'I'm going to need more evidence than crazy conspiracy theories before I buy in'.

This eliminates the hunt for Kellogg entirely, at least at first, because you have no drive to figure out who he is. Besides, his mere existence is a huge plot hole anyway, I don't care how cybernetic he is, you're not living that long and not appearing aging a day. Instead, you pick up hints that synths are actually real, and after a few run-ins you get someone (Shawn) contacting you via your Pip Boy, informing you that yes, synths are real, but not the boogymen that some people think they are. When asked how the person is able to contact you like this, Shawn deflects the question by stating that he's been watching you ever since you left the vault, and that observing a pre-fall survivor handle the post-apocalyptic wasteland has been 'informative'.

At this point, you get signposted, directed, or otherwise hinted at the Railroad. There's probably a dozen or so breadcrumbs you can scatter about so that the player will stumble across at least one. Plays out as you'd expect. The problem here is that all synths have a 'factory default reset' button, as demonstrated several times, which completely negates the Railroad's entire reason for existence. In fact, as it turns out, the Institute is secretly using them to spread Synths to key areas, basically taking it upon themselves to pay for the Institute's shipping and handling. For Synths to be truly free, you'll need to eliminate the Institute's control center.

Instead of hinging the Brotherhood's arrival on Fort Haagen, it instead is on a timer which starts the moment you leave the vault. Two in-game weeks after you leave the vault, the Brotherhood arrives, and the scene is triggered the moment you go outside after the timer runs out. If you've run into Danse before this, you have an opportunity to get recruited. If you haven't, you have a somewhat colder initial reaction and they will require you to 'prove yourself worthy' with side-questing killing super mutants, ghouls, and others. Of import, you're sent to go kill a pack of ghouls, only they aren't feral, they're just trying to live their lives scavenging from the area. They didn't attack the Paladins, they came under fire and ran. If you kill them, you get inducted. If you don't, you get flagged as hostile to the BoS. If you met Danse, you get to skip this because Danse vouches for you (assuming you've done the initial quest with him), but you're eventually going to hit a mission with a moral quandary.

Once the Brotherhood show up, you get an invitation to meet from the mysterious guy on your Pip Boy. You meet a Synth Courser, who talks to you about what the Institute 'really is', and depending on your dialogue options are offered an opportunity to go 'see for yourself'. This leads to being introduced to Shawn, who introduces himself as your son. No funny business with the synth of young Shawn either. He points out what a crapsack world the surface has become, and offers an opportunity to help make it better. They're not going to cleanse everything, but they are going to Big Brother it up. A major point of the Institute is subtle but pervasive monitoring, always watching, with freedom not at the forefront of their goals. A better life, but not a free life. After all, he reasons, look where freedom got us. People, he claims, needs order, needs discipline, needs control, to keep them from screwing things up. Humans, when permitted to sink to their lowest common denominator, are more monstrous than the deathclaws and super mutants they foolishly created.

The Institute is still evil, but it's a different brand of evil, and one that stems naturally from their observations. They offer a dystopian Big Brother despotism, but one which at least permits creature comforts so the commoners won't revolt and rebel, to 'save people from themselves'. With Synths acting as a Secret Police and enforcement branch.

As far as the Minutemen, remove the radiant quests and you have a well meaning but underfunded and undergunned faction honestly trying to do right by their fellow man, hopelessly outnumbered by all the factors that work against that goal. Working with them can help unlock new settlements, and you can set up trade routes between settlements (as well as between settlements and certain cities) but you're going to need to make sure they're properly protected or the trade caravans themselves are going to get hit by raiders et al. There's a limit to how big a caravan can be, based on the population of the settlement it is coming from. Some of the people need to be guards or the caravan is going to get wiped out. The more expensive and valuable the trade route is, the more guards need to be sent with them to avoid raider strikes. And guards don't move supplies or generate revenue, they just take up available space. Siding with the Minutemen opens up more options with settlement building, leading into an almost 4X style of play with interconnected settlements producing resources, each location having a given resource it is better at producing, and balancing those resources is a thing you'll need to do.

So then you have the jackboot stomping BoS, the dystopian Big Brother wannabe Institute, the well meaning but inherently flawed Railroad, or the honest but perpetually underfunded and undergunned Minutemen.

[factotum]

My idea for fixing FO4's plot is surprisingly simple: When he hits Concord and talks to Codsworth about how long it has been, instead of continuing to want to find his kid, he realizes that his kid is already long gone. Maybe a scene of mourning, maybe showing depression, maybe not. But at any rate, the player's character no longer feels that their kid is their absolute priority anymore because it's been a couple hundred years now and the kid is probably dead of old age if not from whatever violence erupted around him.

The problem is, the protagonist has absolutely no reason to make that judgement. They were frozen for 200 years, and they have no idea at what point during that 200 years Kellogg turned up to kidnap their son. If you wanted them not to have the overriding urge to find their son, then you have to simply not have their son be kidnapped in the first place--ideally, you wouldn't even give them a son to start with. Because you've got to remember that, for them, pretty much no time has passed since they were a happy family, and them finding out their son is dead is not only dark as heck, but their reaction to it isn't likely to be "Oh, welp, best go and survive now, who cares about children anyway?".

[GloatingSwine]

Actually, there's an even easier fix, and I bet this is actually what they intended all along and changed it because it would be obvious and the internet guessed it.

Just have the player be a Synth, and all their memories before the war and of Shaun are fake, Kellogg's trail is recent and he hasn't aged because it's a deliberate setup. The whole plot up to you finding the Institute is a test of the capabilities of the new model.

[Cikomyr2]

Actually, there's an even easier fix, and I bet this is actually what they intended all along and changed it because it would be obvious and the internet guessed it.

Just have the player be a Synth, and all their memories before the war and of Shaun are fake, Kellogg's trail is recent and he hasn't aged because it's a deliberate setup. The whole plot up to you finding the Institute is a test of the capabilities of the new model.

Now, i still wonder why they didnt do that.twist in the first place. Everything pre-war is strangely scripted, eeriely "perfect", and your conversation with Dima establish your memories dont got back any further than that.

I was 100% ready to believe you've been a synth all along.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

The problem is, the protagonist has absolutely no reason to make that judgement. They were frozen for 200 years, and they have no idea at what point during that 200 years Kellogg turned up to kidnap their son. If you wanted them not to have the overriding urge to find their son, then you have to simply not have their son be kidnapped in the first place--ideally, you wouldn't even give them a son to start with. Because you've got to remember that, for them, pretty much no time has passed since they were a happy family, and them finding out their son is dead is not only dark as heck, but their reaction to it isn't likely to be "Oh, welp, best go and survive now, who cares about children anyway?".

The protagonist has no reason to make the decision that their son is alive either. Odds are stacked heavily against their son being alive.

But you have a point, get rid of the kid entirely. Not necessary to the plot.

[factotum]

Main issue with "Player was a synth all along!" is that you have to jump through hoops to justify why, when you reach the Institute, they don't just say "OK, experiment over, gonna shut you down now.". It's been established in previous games (particularly, FO3) that synths have command words they can't gainsay, so suddenly changing that in FO4 would be just as annoying.

[Cikomyr2]

Main issue with "Player was a synth all along!" is that you have to jump through hoops to justify why, when you reach the Institute, they don't just say "OK, experiment over, gonna shut you down now.". It's been established in previous games (particularly, FO3) that synths have command words they can't gainsay, so suddenly changing that in FO4 would be just as annoying.

Special project by Shaun? He autogenerated a command word when you were created and wiped all traces of it.

Then you learned that the command word was "please help us" which explains why you are such a sappy samaritan to the Commonwealth.

[Vinyadan]

I think he just wants the Minutemen to die in a fire.

Kinda. I didn't actually finish the game, but I think I finished the Minutemen storyline, and Preston in the end was just always standing there by this creek. I don't exactly remember the geography, but it felt like he had this very precarious situation where he watched other people, but didn't actually merge in with others, and also didn't really have anything to do himself and had turned into a radiant quest automated vending machine.

So having a base and a glorious, if possibly stupid, death would have given a conclusion to his story.

By the way, in Red Faction 2 the main character first steals the bad guy's hat, then forces him into a missile silo at gunpoint, and finally kills him by launching the missile. There's no explanation of where the missile ends up, however.

[GloatingSwine]

Now, i still wonder why they didnt do that.twist in the first place. Everything pre-war is strangely scripted, eeriely "perfect", and your conversation with Dima establish your memories dont got back any further than that.

I was 100% ready to believe you've been a synth all along.

I'm absolutely sure the reason they didn't do it was because people were all talking about the possibility on the Internet before the game came out and they didn't want everyone to say "I guessed it!"

Some creators can't handle people having their plot twists guessed in advance, and it's always an absolute disaster when they change things to get away from it (Monarch in DC comics was a classic example. They made a big mystery about who it was, and left enough hints that most people guessed it was Captain Atom, but because everyone had guessed it they changed it to be Hawk (of Hawk and Dove) which made no sense).

Same with S8 of Game of Thrones, they were so obsessed with nobody being able to predict what would happen that what did happen was terminal stupidity.

Main issue with "Player was a synth all along!" is that you have to jump through hoops to justify why, when you reach the Institute, they don't just say "OK, experiment over, gonna shut you down now.". It's been established in previous games (particularly, FO3) that synths have command words they can't gainsay, so suddenly changing that in FO4 would be just as annoying.

Nah, just tie that into the story. You don't have those command overrides because the Institute is trying a new and more insidious way to make synths loyal with the implanted false memories that lead you to them.

It's not like the entire Commonwealth isn't full of runaway Synths that coursers should be able to bring back pretty easily if they were using those command words.

[MCerberus]

Nah, just tie that into the story. You don't have those command overrides because the Institute is trying a new and more insidious way to make synths loyal with the implanted false memories that lead you to them.

It's not like the entire Commonwealth isn't full of runaway Synths that coursers should be able to bring back pretty easily if they were using those command words.

I just think that they needed waaaaaaaaaaay more work done into the concept both for and against the conclusion and thought out what it would mean in the world. Have dogmeat not trust you at first. Rework the Danse quest lines because it makes no sense why you didn't get shot on the airship. Have someone say "hey that's not right" during the memory lounge. The wedding ring could act as a totem convincing you you're human.

Just anything other than shove it off to one discussion with an NPC people avoid for not liking then wait for the last DLC released to bring it up again in any form.

[GloatingSwine]

I just think that they needed waaaaaaaaaaay more work done into the concept both for and against the conclusion and thought out what it would mean in the world. Have dogmeat not trust you at first. Rework the Danse quest lines because it makes no sense why you didn't get shot on the airship. Have someone say "hey that's not right" during the memory lounge. The wedding ring could act as a totem convincing you you're human.

You didn't get shot on the airship because Danse vouches for you, have a tense scene about it maybe. He's a synth infiltrator already.

And that's not a change. Danse is a Synth already (has a Synth Component if killed).

[Cikomyr2]

You didn't get shot on the airship because Danse vouches for you, have a tense scene about it maybe. He's a synth infiltrator already.

And that's not a change. Danse is a Synth already (has a Synth Component if killed).

Actually.

I keep wondering why its not a bigger plot point.

The Brotherhood came to the Commonwealth because of a message received from Paladin Danse about a dangerous energy signal detected.

Paladin Danse is a Synth, therefore, this report was done by order of the Institute. Therefore the Institute baited the Brotherhood in getting in the Commonwealth. Why isnt this brought up more?

The Institute had the Railroad on the run. They literally ***JUST*** smashed them straight in their HQ and scattered them to the wind. The Railroad only recently settled in the Old North Church; which was merely a recruiting ground up until very recently.

The dynamic between the factions is artificially static in game because or gameplay reasons. In the stories, the Brotherhood is being drawn in and the Railroad is on the defensive.

[MCerberus]

You didn't get shot on the airship because Danse vouches for you, have a tense scene about it maybe. He's a synth infiltrator already.

And that's not a change. Danse is a Synth already (has a Synth Component if killed).

No, later when Danse gets found out as a synth. I am having a really hard time figuring out a situation where he is detected but main character synth isn't executed.

[Triaxx]

Since you're essentially Father's pet project, he makes sure there are no records of you as an active synth. They only found out Danse because he was on a list.

[Rater202]

And Danse had no idea he was a Synth until he was told.

[NeoVid]

There were so many places that story hook could have gone instead of nowhere. Imagine how differently the cut mission chain about overthrowing Maxson could play out depending on whether Danse is found out as a synth before or after the rebellion...

[Triaxx]

Or if they'd realized they had a ready made 'man' on the inside.

[factotum]

Paladin Danse is a Synth, therefore, this report was done by order of the Institute. Therefore the Institute baited the Brotherhood in getting in the Commonwealth. Why isnt this brought up more?

Because it's flat out wrong? A synth does not need to be ordered by the Institute in everything they do, they have free will (or else they wouldn't be able to run away from the Institute), and as far as Danse is concerned, he's a member of the Brotherhood. So, he does things that he believes are good for the Brotherhood regardless of what the Institute wants. The only way the Institute could force him to do something else would be to send out a Courser and use Danse's command words, which would be a bit obviously outing him as a Synth to his companions!

This is actually handled quite well when you're sent after Danse once they discover his true nature--he is quite happy for you to kill him, because he's Brotherhood through and through and the idea he's a synth is repugnant to him; you actually have to work pretty hard to persuade him otherwise.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Danse as a synth makes zero sense anyway. He literally grew up as BoS. Like there are people who remember him as a kid. Synths can't do that. They are, yanno, synthetic. And if some BS mumbo-jumbo For Science! tech even less believable than the stuff out in Big MT does permit it to grow like that, then you haven't created a 'synth', you've basically grown a living being in a bottle and attached a mind control chip to it. Either way, the entire 'twist' is complete and utter immersion-breaking nonsense. Furthermore, there's no way an implanted chip big enough to count as loot is going to go unseen by the kind of scans BoS regularly perform on their members. None. Zero. Nadda. Impossible.

Yes, I say this as I happily accept Super Mutants, all the things attributed to FEV and 'radiation', and all the other wacky Science Fiction Double Feature nonsense. Why? Dunno, but how FO4 handled Synths in general was complete garbage. They probably thought they were being clever, just like that drunk guy at the end of the bar probably thinks he's being clever, or how someone who is stoned suddenly thinks they've somehow tapped into the full potential of their brain when in reality they're just spouting complete and utter gibberish.

I don't know what the writers were on when they wrote practically anything about FO4, but it must've been some righteous stuff, man.

[Rynjin]

Danse as a synth makes zero sense anyway. He literally grew up as BoS. Like there are people who remember him as a kid. Synths can't do that.

The Institute regularly snatches real people and replaces them with Synth copies.

They are, yanno, synthetic. And if some BS mumbo-jumbo For Science! tech even less believable than the stuff out in Big MT does permit it to grow like that, then you haven't created a 'synth', you've basically grown a living being in a bottle and attached a mind control chip to it.

That said, this is essentially what 3rd generation Synths are anyway. They're entirely organic, except the chip.

Either way, the entire 'twist' is complete and utter immersion-breaking nonsense. Furthermore, there's no way an implanted chip big enough to count as loot is going to go unseen by the kind of scans BoS regularly perform on their members. None. Zero. Nadda. Impossible.

...What scans? No, seriously, what scans? The BoS has NEVER had medical scanning tech, in any of the games, to my knowledge. They primarily hoard military tech, not medical tech.

[Triaxx]

Yeah, Synth's don't really make any sense. Completely indistinguishable from humans, but not human? Yeah, that's probably dumbest idea Bethesda's had. But like... I hope they stop there.

[Grim Portent]

Yeah, Synth's don't really make any sense. Completely indistinguishable from humans, but not human? Yeah, that's probably dumbest idea Bethesda's had. But like... I hope they stop there.

Nothing particularly weird about the idea of Synths, they're artificially constructed beings who are ambiguously P-zombies. The basic idea of 'thing that looks human unless you look extremely closely but isn't actually human,' is hardly new.

[Rynjin]

Yeah, Synth's don't really make any sense. Completely indistinguishable from humans, but not human? Yeah, that's probably dumbest idea Bethesda's had. But like... I hope they stop there.

Yeah, it was pretty dumb. This little known B-movie named Blade Runner had the same idea and everybody hated it.

[Triaxx]

Even Blade Runner's were only hard to detect, not magically impossible.

[Rynjin]

Even Blade Runner's were only hard to detect, not magically impossible.

They had to literally sit every individual person suspected of being a replicant down and give them a 1 on 1 psychological examination. That's niche enough knowledge that I'd be calling bull**** if the BoS had a similar test or "magic scanner" that can detect synths but not get tripped up by the plethora of other cybernetic implants that are out there and people can get.

[Lord Raziere]

Nothing particularly weird about the idea of Synths, they're artificially constructed beings who are ambiguously P-zombies. The basic idea of 'thing that looks human unless you look extremely closely but isn't actually human,' is hardly new.

Yeah, it was pretty dumb. This little known B-movie named Blade Runner had the same idea and everybody hated it.

An idea being old is no excuse for it to not be challenged or thought critically about. just because it was in Bladerunner doesn't mean its evergreen or gets to stay around forever. if people being to find ridiculous or irrelevant an idea once thought fascinating.....too bad. people move on.

furthermore, Triaxx doesn't have to like an idea just because it done well once. and they are perfectly fine in criticizing its execution in FO4.

[Rynjin]

An idea being old is no excuse for it to not be challenged or thought critically about. just because it was in Bladerunner doesn't mean its evergreen or gets to stay around forever. if people being to find ridiculous or irrelevant an idea once thought fascinating.....too bad. people move on.

furthermore, Triaxx doesn't have to like an idea just because it done well once. and they are perfectly fine in criticizing its execution in FO4.

Nothing was challenged or thought critically about. The statement was just "the idea is dumb". Very obviously, the idea is not dumb, as an entire movie about said concept is still being taught in film courses as a masterpiece of visual storytelling.

You can criticize the execution...but I don't think there's much to criticize there either. It's the exact kind of B-movie idea that the franchise is built around, and fits in well with the setting. There is absolutely no evidence that the BoS could "just counter it 5head" as is being suggested, because frankly the Brotherhood is mostly made up of meatheads who are about a generation away from going full 40k Tech Priest and being like "yeah I have no idea how any of this works but it shoots good".

You know me. You know I've written multiple 1000+ word screeds about how bad Fallout 4's storytelling is. I'm not defending this blindly. Of all the things to complain about in FO4, "Synths are unrealistic" is one of the complaints I think is invalid.

[Cikomyr2]

Nothing was challenged or thought critically about. The statement was just "the idea is dumb". Very obviously, the idea is not dumb, as an entire movie about said concept is still being taught in film courses as a masterpiece of visual storytelling.

You can criticize the execution...but I don't think there's much to criticize there either. It's the exact kind of B-movie idea that the franchise is built around, and fits in well with the setting. There is absolutely no evidence that the BoS could "just counter it 5head" as is being suggested, because frankly the Brotherhood is mostly made up of meatheads who are about a generation away from going full 40k Tech Priest and being like "yeah I have no idea how any of this works but it shoots good".

You know me. You know I've written multiple 1000+ word screeds about how bad Fallout 4's storytelling is. I'm not defending this blindly. Of all the things to complain about in FO4, "Synths are unrealistic" is one of the complaints I think is invalid.

The sum of the details on the synths that we know kind make the whole comes appart at a the seams. But I agree with you that one of the core tenet of the genre Fallout occupies is "what if absurdly advanced but illogical science", so the Synths are just as silly as any other silly and unrealistic things that happened in the previous games.

[Rynjin]

Pretty much. The biggest issue with synths as a concept is how they make the Institute look like morons. You have the ability to make perfect human replicas and wonders beyond even Pre-War science...and your grand master plan for taking over the Commonwealth is to replace people in power with synths that are under your control?

Did you ever think that it might be more effective to just take over the Commonwealth using promises of bringing back Pre-War comfort and safety? Founding your own colony and making it open to anyone willing to swear fealty to you? Hell, if the issue is test subjects, I am 100% certain you could either get plenty of WILLING VOLUNTEERS in exchange for material reward for themselves and their family, or get by experimenting on the seemingly infinite numbers of Raiders out there.

The Synth idea is dumb because of how it's used, not because of how it works.

[Rater202]

They also used the Synths for slave Labor.

And apprently they reinvented the wheel when developing th eAI tech the synths run on. Gen 1 Synths were Dumb AI and Gen 2 synths ran the same gamut as previous bots. It was only when theyy were experimenting with Nick and DIMAS that they did something new... And incidentally, that tech was the only thing that carried over to the Gen 3 Synths. The robotic Synth projects were regulated to foot soldiers.

...And not manual labor.

Th entire institute is high intelligence, low wisdom. You notice that their laser weapons are worse than the ones you find in the common wealth in most regards?