I've really been enjoying Fallout 4, but I see the story ending in sight. What's like it that I may next enjoy?

The Game Room
61

Haha, I did visit Greygarden at one point, and those crazy robots freaked me out more than any alpha Deathclaw or Queen Mirelurk. I decided I didn’t want any part of that weirdness at the time and high-tailed it out of there :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

The robots do make for some good comic relief. “Hester’s Consumer Robotics” was a fun little discovery. And I know there’s another place full of robots that are batshit crazy as well (the Atomic Galleria or something?)- I walked by it on the way to another quest and heard a lot of crazy robot talk. I also decided then that I wanted none of that nonsense at the time.

62

They’re harmless enough but one will ask you to clear the muties and mirelurks out of their water supply. Do that and you get a free settlement with all that food, which will be shared with all other settlements when connected to a supply line.

You can take over the place by showing a General Atomics employee ID to the Mister Gutsy in charge. Won’t qualify as a settlement without mods but they’ll let you roam around freely. Successfully luring a mirelurk king from Dark Hollow Pond (directly south) back to the bots is rather fun.

63

Take Valentine along when you go to Far Harbor, he has quite a bit of special dialog there. Would have been nice if they included special dialog for Curie but c’est la vie.

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That was my main criticism of Far Harbor. Obvious Curie would have opinions or Piper would see a story, etc but Valentine is the only one actually integrated into it. Made it feel half-finished to me.

65

Strong should undoubtedly have remarks with and about Erickson.

66

Will keep it in mind, thanks! I had Valentine briefly as a companion during the “recover Kellogg memories” questline. Got Deacon as a companion now since I’ve been working with the railroad as they helped me to get into the institute. His sarcastic comments were fun at first but are getting annoying and repetitive. I might just go Lone Wanderer until I get to Far Harbor.

Father has dispatched me to “The Battle of Bunker Hill” but I’ve been taking my sweet time getting there since I know I’m drawing close to the end of the main story. I found the Pickman Gallery, the spooky art museum with the curator who hunts raiders. I keep stumbling across fun little finds like that.

67

Assuming you haven’t sent him anywhere else, you can pick up Valentine at his office when you talk to Ellie to start the Far Harbor quest.

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So, after putting it off many times for side quests or just roaming around on my own, I finally finished the main quest line last night. I enjoyed it a lot! (Endgame spoilers follow which I won’t bother blurring since it’s like a 6 year old game, so be warned if you’re new to FO4).

I ended up siding with the Railroad against the Institute. “Rocket’s Red Glare” where I infiltrated the BoS airship and destroy it was a blast (hehe). Although I’ve heard grumblings that none of the factions are particularly great to side with, I found the moral ambiguity inherent in the game interesting. I tried in this run to be the white knight ‘savior of the Commonwealth’, but no matter what you do there are innocents that are going to get killed, sometimes by me. Like when I went into the Institute relay room to help the rebel synth teleport my friends in, and a number of unarmed, helpless Institute scientists just happened to be in there along with several synth guards, necessitating killing them all. Shooting a scientist who’s running away in the back does not feel very heroic. Wish I had had a stun gun option there! And betraying my son Shaun didn’t feel great. He certainly gives you a major guilt trip speech at the deathbed scene.

I ended up threading the needle well enough that I blew up the Institute while keeping the Railroad, the Minutemen, and my sometime companion Piper all copacetic toward me. My son had told me that after he blew up the Institute he tried doing Minuteman quests afterward, and Preston would just keep saying “I can’t believe you killed all those people”. So I knew there was some way to issue an evac order to avoid that and I was concerned I might miss it like my son did, but I managed to figure ti out on my own.

At some point in future I want to replay as a BoS member-- I hear they have a bitchin’ giant mecha called ‘Liberty Prime’ to play with in one of their late questlines.

Yep, after the Institute smoke cleared I told Desdemona I was taking a little vacation, and set out on the Valentine / Fah Hahbah starting quest. I’m just a little ways in (just found the synth commune) and I’m really liking it so far! Far Harbor seems to have a very Stephen King / John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’ / Lovecraftian tone to it.

69

You might want to take the first rank of the Aquaboy/Aquagirl perk so you can go swimming with him and not take radiation damage.

He’s even more fun in Fallout 3.

If you do his personal quest, be sure to use evidence terminals in any police station you come across. They’ll tell you where to look for what he wants.

Oh, and if his personal quest triggers while you’re in Far Harbor, you should head back to Boston to take care of it before completing Far Harbor. He won’t want discuss anything else until he ties up that loose end.

70

I sided with the Institute my only full playthrough.

Was I insane to do so? Is that the “evil organization” of the game? I think I had to go back and kill a bunch of people I had been really nice to, which felt really crappy.

71

Sounds like a feature :wink:

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@solost - Glad you got to the end and were content with the ending you chose.

@Mahaloth - I’ve (in the thousands of hours I’ve played) done every ending, but was most frustrated with the institute ending, in that, if I’m the head of the institute, why can’t I put together a more peaceful solution? But as said earlier . . . there are mods for that. :slight_smile:

Lore and world wise though, my default is the BoS ending - because, and forgive me a minute if I sound like a BoS Zealot, this is absolutely one of the technologies that is too dangerous for humans. Not because synths are inhuman, or robots, or anything of the sort, but because humans cannot use this technology ethically.

MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW

The institute flat out replaces people that disagree with them with synth slaves, and there is a strong argument that they do it to their own people as well as their enemies. Eventually, you are going to end up with someone unethical enough to replace everyone at the top with synths and have a total dictatorship that will likely collapse when some mastermind dies.

The railroad has zero issues with wiping synths for their own good. Even with permission, the single example you meet in game has no where near the mental maturity to be making that decision. The railroad may have good intentions, but it is killing the person who gave consent, and creating new personas that may or may not be capable of making ethical decisions going forward. A situation that would likely get worse in a post-destruction of the Institute storyline, because otherwise, what purpose would they all serve. Not to mention, on related notes, the fan theories about PAM (fun, look them up!) and how Arcadia in Far Harbor is run (not saying more there, because, big spoilers).

Lastly, the minuteman? They were an utterly failed experiment long before the MC showed up. They depend upon a single person for guidance and to do all the work. The minute the MC retires or is gone, they are likely to break up into massive factionalism again. And considering their intense manpower shortages, I see no way they wouldn’t use the Synth technology ‘to protect the commonwealth’. Possibly for the greater good, as it were, but it would still be an abuse of what may be free-willed beings, and likely to end up with yet another gang of extortionist overlords (just like the BoS tends to be).

Okay, rant off.

Honestly, I always wished that there was a way, after saving Virgil, to bring him back to the Institute and put him in charge, along with a few others that still have the basic moral underpinnings to function as part of an open society. Most Fallout societies are scavenging or getting by on restored tech without looking forward, or looking to avoid the dangers of the past. Getting someone to think beyond returning to the past (the NCR is going forward to the past with all it’s corruption, expansionism and oligarchy at near lightspeed) or protectionism with exception for the chosen elite (BoS) is a worthy goal. For all its flaws, the Institute is one of the few that seeks to do so.

73

The second time I played it, I avoided recruiting Preston altogether. Problem solved!

74

Except for the Minutemen, they’re all evil in some way. Yes, even the Railroad.

75

There are PC mods (possibly other platforms too) that fix some of the heavy-handed faction story fails. Such as allowing the PC to reform the Institute into something other than the banality of evil personified, or making the BoS less racial purists and fanatical militants.

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From my more limited one-ending experience, I don’t know that I’d say it’s ‘insane’ to side with the Institute; it does seem like the slightly more evil of all the morally ambiguous outcomes; but I mean, walking around the institute after being up in the wastelands, I did think more than once, if I was a real person experiencing this place, I would think it’s insane to blow it up. This place is freakin’ awesome compared to the desolation above. Maybe Shaun does have a point that the Commonwealth is a lost cause…?

I think more to the point, from a player perspective the Institute ending is probably the most boring one, because all you have to do is follow what Father / Shaun tells you, and not get on the Institute’s bad side. As opposed to the double agent game I was playing-- siding with the Railroad, secretly killing coursers and freeing synths, all the while telling the Institute I thought they were just the bee’s knees and hoping I don’t get caught and banished and screw up the ending.

Ooh, I just reached Arcadia last night, so I’m glad you held off on the spoilers, but I definitely want to follow up with you on the fan theories once I learn more.

77

What bothered me about this part of the story is, I don’t think the game itself recognizes the philosophical issue here. All the other unethical stuff that the other factions do gets called out, usually by the PC, sometimes by NPCs within the unethical faction. The Institute’s treatment of the synths is called out by that one Institute guy who helps you plan an escape. The Brotherhood’s treatment of synths is called out by that scribe who sides with Danse after his identity is revealed. (Far Harbot spoiler:) Dima’s actions to protect the Synth colony in Far Harbor is called out by Dima himself. And of course, the player can call out all of these actions as immoral. But nobody ever questions the whole “erase their memories” thing. Everyone’s totally onboard, nobody ever says, “Isn’t this basically the same as murdering them?”

There was a similar thing in Fallout 3, IIRC, where your cyborg dog companion’s brain starts degrading, and you have a quest chain to replace it with a fresh brain, and this is universally viewed by all parties, including the dog, as solving the problem, and not as replacing your ailing dog companion with a different dog.

Also, small brag, but last week I got 100% of the achievements for Fallout 4 in Steam. Only the second game I’ve done that for!

78

Oddly, I missed or overlooked the plotline where synth memories were getting wiped out by the Railroad. Yeah, that would seem to be very much at odds with the Railroad’s ‘synths are people too’ creed.

Wow, quite the FO4 completist, nice! I just checked out of curiosity and my Steam FO4 Achievement stats are “You’ve unlocked 44 of 84 (52%)”. So looks like there’s still quite a bit of juice left to squeeze out of that turnip for me.

79

Screwing up the ending is not an option. :wink:

There is a Synth in Arcadia who does just that. To get this quest, you have to fetch Faraday’s storage drives first. You have the choice to tell the truth to the Synth’s friend or not.

Close. That’s in NV.

80

My first playthrough, we met, he asked for some help, and the moment I could ditch him, I did. Too annoying.

I hated the crafting/structure stuff in the game. Like, I hated it enough that I pray Fallout 5 skips it, if there ever is a FO5.

I’m excited for Starfield, I can tell you that. I hope it has no building and is just “skyrim/fallout in space”.