This is the Fallout Universe - there are rarely any unalloyed good guys. FNV has the obviously evil (the ultimate tough love) Legion, the dangerously amoral “I’ve got and will KEEP MINE” Mr. House, and the very corrupt though largely benign NCR. You have an (IMHO) obviously worst option, and then ones that are flawed but maaaaybe acceptable.
In FO4 though, all the factions have failed the morality test to a greater or lesser extent. In Fallout in general, it’s a lot of “bad things happening to good people” and “choosing the lesser of evils”.
Oh, and IMHO the Institute ending is a lie - the moment Father is dead, you are soooo gonna be replaced (poisoned, killed in your sleep) and be replaced with a Synth puppet unless you end up massacring most of the Institute anyway.
Back to story mods though, mods that lean into the Fallout Lore and setting, complete with no/few good guys are the best. Fourville works if you finish it, as does my highly recommended The Machine and Her.
Or really, any mod that remembers that it’s not only War that Never Changes, but that People never change.
FO4 was not only my first Fallout game, it was one of the first modern video games I ever played when I bought a gaming-level computer a few years ago. So not really knowing RPGs, it was RPG-like enough for my taste. And yeah, when I tried FO3 and FNV later, I did find some of the combat systems or gaming mechanics in general to be a bit clunky in comparison, but I didn’t mind the ‘crappy dialog’. I do like the story / RPG aspects.
Well, I did say it’s the part I enjoyed about FO4 these days, since I’m highly leveled up now. If I get frustrated at my lack of progress in another game, or if I just had a bad day, I’m tempted, at times, to spit on my hands, don the power armor, and begin blastin’ stuff.
But again, I do like a good mix of story aspect and puzzles to figure out, as well as shootin’, and I did get into the whole FO lore to an extent. I always read all the terminal entries! I like the whole alt retro-futuristic, ‘Tomorrowland gone bad’ vibe. As well as the general biting parody of corporate hegemony.
Now excuse me, I’m going to play some more Fourville! What’s in the vault? What’s in the vault?!?
The thing is, I strongly believe (maybe it’s canon even?) that the Sole Survivor (SS) is a synth to begin with. Was popped into the world and given the job of, basically, passing judgement on the Institute. A little bit like Siegfried’s role in the Ring Cycle. And also, similar to Blade Runner, in that the protagonist is a replicant (“synth”). The idea is hinted at, pretty strongly, in the SS’s conversation with Dima at Far Harbor.
Either way, though, I agree, the institute ending is bad for you. If you’re actually a synth, then when they’re done tolerating you and your autonomy, they’ll just turn you off.
FWIW, any of these endings are not great. You eventually die in combat, because the Commonwealth never seems to get more peaceful, no matter what you do.
It’s a very common fan theory, arguable both ways. It’s a big point in Far Harbor, where if you say you are a synth, and the quite morally gray DIMA plays on your suspicions you could be. Bethesda brings up the argument but has never confirmed either way. I lean toward the SS being human, because he is recognizes the Vault-tec Rep, which would be at best a poorly documented interaction since it happens just MOMENTS before the bombs drop, and unlikely to be included in any records Father could find to create memories about. Counter argument could be that the institute could have the tech to extract memories from long-dead corpses if only in bits.
Anyway, no canon confirmation one way or other. Maybe it’ll be brought up in the new season of the show, though I doubt it.
OTOH: War… War never changes.
More importantly, what will you choose once you know?!
IF we were a synth, couldn’t the whole pre-war sequence be a false memory? It could be built as accurately as possible, to match the ruins we find as closely as possible as well as whatever pre-War research the Institute had access to. But the Vault-Tec sales rep could have been entirely made up, because there’d be no way for the synth to find evidence that contradicts whatever they invent, so it doesn’t matter - it just needs to be plausible.
@ParallelLines is saying that the sole survivor recognizes the Vault-Tec rep at the Goodneighbor hotel, who is now a ghoul in the present day, over 200 years after the rep sold him vault timeshares just before the bombs dropped-- so it would have been difficult for the Institute to have known that and planted the memory. But I think there are ways to handwave that, and I agree that Bethesda means for the question to be ambiguous.
BTW, I’ve heard that some unexpected NPCs turn out to have synth components if you kill them, though you might have to use a mod to kill otherwise unkillable NPCs-- like Sturges. Even some random settlers can be synths and unexpectedly turn against the settlement sometimes. I remember one encounter fairly early on in my FO4 gameplay-- I had Preston as a companion at the Starlight Drive-In, and he suddenly got into a fight with one of the settlers-- he’s shooting her with his laser cannon, and she’s whacking him with a board. I was like, WTF?!? I now realize she must have been a sleeper synth.
Oh! I forgot that we see him again. Yeah, that would mean he’s a real person in the flashback, then. It would be much harder for the Institute to have figured that out.
And, more tellingly, he recognizes and remembers you. So he’d have to be an Institute plant as well.
I mean, every conspiracy theory finds a response to each reasonable counterargument, but that’s getting pretty deep. It’s Synths all the way down at that point.
The idea of the Institute even making synth ghouls seems kinda funny, for some reason. I don’t think I ever found a synth component on any ghouls I killed-- but all of them, I think, were feral ghouls. I don’t think I ever killed any ghoul that had its mental facilities intact.
The reach of the Institute was far and wide. One fun fact or fan theory I heard is that all the birds are synths spying on the Commonwealth. Apparently, the monitors in the Institute are from the same vantage points as where the birds sit and roost at the various locations being monitored.
Conceivably, he could remember the “real” you who presumably died in the Vault before they found you and made a duplicate of you. But they would need to know about the vault tec visit to plant it in your memory, yeah.
Right, but the point they’re making is that it would have been very difficult for the Institute to find out about this guy in particular knocking on your door the day the bombs fell in order to plant in your synth mind the false memory of having met him.
If they can pull memories out of dead brains, that could explain it. Or if they had such widespread access to pre-war records that they found a list of houses each VaultTec agent visited. But in the Fallout universe, AFAIK there were no wireless phones, and pip boys couldn’t communicate remotely, other than by voice over radio. So how would the VaultTec agent have recorded that he did in fact visit you and get that information to a location The Institute could find in the time between his visit to your door and the bombs dropping?
One possible flaw in the ‘Sole Survivor is a synth’ theory that just occurred to me…
Despite the fact that the Institute cranked out synths like McDonald’s makes hamburgers, they considered synths to be inferior to humans, right? So it doesn’t seem likely that Sean / Father would have wanted the Sole Survivor to succeed him as head of the Institute, knowing he was a synth. Also, not to mention, pretty cold (heh) to kill your frozen father and turn him into a synth clone with his father’s memories.
But of course, that could be explained away somehow. I don’t remember for sure, but I think there were factions within the Institute that argued that synths were equal to humans. Maybe the ‘synths are people too’ faction replaced the Sole Survivor without Father’s knowledge, as kind of a proof of concept, knowing Sean / Father would take the Sole Survivor under his wing.
Just wanted to thank @solost for clearing up the confusion on my post while I was about doing other things. And yeah, as I said, there’s many ways to defend either POV given the apparent tech involved, as well as the very limited information the SS provides the player about how much he does / does not remember. It’s always a fun discussion, but…
I’ll defer to our OP (the same solost!) if they have secured enough possible quest mods to try, they don’t seem to feel we’re hijacking their thread due to their enthusiastic participation, but I’d be ashamed of myself to be one of the sources of a hijack and all!
I mentioned this because I was reminded of a fun Mod (stability with a semi-complete game, probable, but you takes your chances, and the author hasn’t updated it in nearly 4 years) I’ve advertised before:
(just in case it doesn’t load/preview, it’s The Secret of Huntress Manor, and it ties into pre-existing Dunwich sub-stories and dark occult themes we’ve seen in several Fallout games by now)
I remember making this argument back when people started calling Diablo an RPG. I gave it up as futile around the turn of the millennium.
Functionally, a CRPG is one that:
Has NPCs that you can talk to
Has a system where your character learns or improves skills as they advance
Which feels overbroad, but consider how many IRL tabletop RPG sessions consist of, “Go into that mine and kill everything in it. Conversation is optional, and slightly discouraged.”
FO4 has a lot less story-depth than its predecessors, except maybe for 3, and that’s a valid thing to criticize it for, but it’s still inarguably an RPG - or, if not, we’d have to concede that a significant portion of D&D modules written by Gary Gygax himself aren’t RPGs, either.
