Where to get into fallout series?

[NeoVid]

I'd say to start off with New Vegas, and add some mods for stability and bug fixes. It's got its issues, but it's one of the few video game RPGs where I was actually able to roleplay... as in, I had a character concept, and then did everything in game from the perspective of how that character would approach things. There were only a handful of times that the thing my character would do wasn't an option, and I later learned most of those were intended options that were cut for time. I was intending to do the same in Fallout 4, but no, FO4 doesn't even have a dialogue tree, much less unique conversation options for your stats and perks.

If you have a high tolerance for outdated mechanics and presentation, Fallout 1 and 2 are still excellent games... but if there's any games out there that need Remastered Editions so they can be properly appreciated, it's the original Fallouts. ...Just don't let Bethesda have anything to do with those remasters.

Man, it's depressing that Bethesda got Fallout: London delayed, or I would have seriously suggested playing that first.

It's mostly a late game thing, admittedly. Once you hit a level ~75 or so, quest XP just kind of stops making any difference. At that point only the XP from high-level enemies moves the needle anymore, and since level-equivalent enemies are only found in a small number of high-level areas, it encourages repeatedly hitting those areas. FO76 has a similar problem, where the most efficient way to spend your time is murdering your way through the ghouls at the Whitespring over and over and over.

The Whitespring's enemies are too spread out. Fastest progression comes from the events that spawn enemies nonstop, like Radiation Rumble and Eviction Notice. Which also gets you a stack of legendaries to turn in at the trader!

[Errorname]

In Fallout 3 everyone is fighting over a limited necessary resource (clean water), it just doesn't do a lot with the worldbuilding to establish the scarcity of that resource. There's like one guy per city that seems to have a problem you can fix by giving them water.

I think the game does a really bad job at making the Water Purifier seem like it's a limited resource. It's ostensible purpose is to make the entire river clean, to the benefit for literally everyone in the wasteland. Bethesda also made the frankly baffling choice for Autumn to not be onboard with the omnicide plan and for him to instead have literally the exact same endgame as the Brotherhood.

It turns the final conflict from 'stop Enclave from killing everyone' which would be boring but functional, into a massive war between two factions with no meaningful ideological differences killing each other over who gets to press a button.

Fallout 4... the factions are all shooting themselves in the foot.

Yeah, I'm not going to pretend that Fallout 4 is good, but it has an obvious irreconcilable ideological conflict on the matter of Synths. The Institute want to enslave them, the Brotherhood want to destroy them, the Railroad want to free them. I get why this is a conflict and it's clear to me how the Wasteland will be different depending on who wins.

[GloatingSwine]

It's mostly a late game thing, admittedly. Once you hit a level ~75 or so, quest XP just kind of stops making any difference. At that point only the XP from high-level enemies moves the needle anymore, and since level-equivalent enemies are only found in a small number of high-level areas, it encourages repeatedly hitting those areas. FO76 has a similar problem, where the most efficient way to spend your time is murdering your way through the ghouls at the Whitespring over and over and over.

That sounds a lot like complaining that it's hard to get XP long past the point where XP can provide meaningful value to your character. The player power curve in Fallout 4 plateaus long before level 75. The last tier of perks is 41+ and the loot tables stop scaling at 50.

Judging the loot goblin experience by something which is clearly beyond the scope of intended play is like complaining that Dark Souls is a bit hard if you play naked onebro with a club. Sure people do it but it's not normal.

[Cikomyr2]

Yeah, I'm not going to pretend that Fallout 4 is good, but it has an obvious irreconcilable ideological conflict on the matter of Synths. The Institute want to enslave them, the Brotherhood want to destroy them, the Railroad want to free them. I get why this is a conflict and it's clear to me how the Wasteland will be different depending on who wins.

I have a hard time determining how the wasteland would be different based on the survival status of the Synth.

Ultimately, the Commonwealth was more impacted and terrified of the Institute than they were of the Synths. People were afraid of the Institute getting to them through Synths, more than the Synths as an independant threat out of itself.

The status of the Institute (and whether or not its population is allowed to evacuate en masse if destroyed) is probably the most impactful choice in the setting, compared to the rights of Synths.

The game isnt interested in actually exploring the story and impact on the Commonwealth life the Synths may have. Could they be an influx of skilled labor to help rebuild? Should they just make their own settlement like Acadia? Should they try to blend with the humans, or declare themselves as Synths?

The game is just not interested in asking these questions. Even less so in answering them.

[Errorname]

I have a hard time determining how the wasteland would be different based on the survival status of the Synth

It's not just the Synth thing. The Synth stuff explains why the conflict is happening and means that each faction has a clear oppositional position to the other two, but separate from that I do get a sense that the factions have distinct visions of the wasteland and would lead to meaningfully different outcomes depending on who won.

And again I'm not saying this is good, merely better than Fallout 3, which is quite a low bar to clear.

[GloatingSwine]

I'm not sure that holds.

Spoiler

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The Railroad are pretty much tunnel vision on their single issue of "freeing" the synths (via personality erasure so basically killing them and sending the body on as another person, but they're all tracked by the Institute and can maybe be reactivated so are the Railroad just a false flag the Institute is too dumb to realise it has?). They don't seem to have much of an interest in the wasteland outside of that.

The Institute are maybe infiltrating the wasteland with synths but for an unknown purpose and to unknown benefits since they don't appear to need anything the Wasteland has and if they wanted to conquer it they could have used their armies of cheap robit ones for that decades ago, and the Brotherhood are simply trying to conquer it because the west coast chapter went fash at some point and conquering stuff because it's there is fash 101.

The Railroad and Institute have differences over the single issue of how to disperse Synths into the population, but neither care about the wasteland. The Minutemen could have an ideological conflict with the Brotherhood (freedom vs fash) but the Brotherhood were the cool good guys with the meme robot one game ago and Bethesda hadn't got the balls to make them Enclave style baddies, and the Minutemen don't have an ideology because the Minutemen are basically Preston Garvey, Boston's Wettest Blanket and the player, who is a loot goblin who will do anything to anyone for a sniper rifle with a star after it's name.

[Errorname]

Spoiler

Show

The Railroad and Institute have differences over the single issue of how to disperse Synths into the population, but neither care about the wasteland. The Minutemen could have an ideological conflict with the Brotherhood (freedom vs fash) but the Brotherhood were the cool good guys with the meme robot one game ago and Bethesda hadn't got the balls to make them Enclave style baddies, and the Minutemen don't have an ideology because the Minutemen are basically Preston Garvey, Boston's Wettest Blanket and the player, who is a loot goblin who will do anything to anyone for a sniper rifle with a star after it's name.

I do think there's a difference between the Institute actively suppressing the surface communities and subtly manipulating things to suit their nebulous interests, versus the Railroad who are willing to blow up the two major powers to protect their own but don't have a strong vision for what comes next or the resources to really exert their own vision. To be clear, I think these are pretty boring factions that don't hold a candle to the actual nations we see in New Vegas (or even Far Harbour's three communities) and synths were a weak fulcrum to build the entire game around, but it's better than what Fallout 3 came up with.

[Mechalich]

That sounds a lot like complaining that it's hard to get XP long past the point where XP can provide meaningful value to your character. The player power curve in Fallout 4 plateaus long before level 75. The last tier of perks is 41+ and the loot tables stop scaling at 50.

Judging the loot goblin experience by something which is clearly beyond the scope of intended play is like complaining that Dark Souls is a bit hard if you play naked onebro with a club. Sure people do it but it's not normal.

But if you explore the map thoroughly (especially with DLC) your character can very easily hit such a point. Want to get all the companion perks? Then you'll absolutely do that. So it's a generalized problem: there's more game than can provide reasonable XP, which means that playing an extensive playthrough of the game means spending a lot of time going through areas that don't induce character growth. It's distinctly sub-optimal.

FO76 has the problem much worse, since even getting to a functional endgame build might will involve getting a character to level 100+ (and there are numerous veteran players out there with level 300+ characters), making for lots of repetition concentrated over a handful of areas/events.

[GloatingSwine]

I do think there's a difference between the Institute actively suppressing the surface communities and subtly manipulating things to suit their nebulous interests, versus the Railroad who are willing to blow up the two major powers to protect their own but don't have a strong vision for what comes next or the resources to really exert their own vision. To be clear, I think these are pretty boring factions that don't hold a candle to the actual nations we see in New Vegas (or even Far Harbour's three communities) and synths were a weak fulcrum to build the entire game around, but it's better than what Fallout 3 came up with.

Yeah, but your original point was that "it was clear how the wasteland would be different depending who won", when the factions' goals are variously so wooly and ill defined or narrow in outlook that that really is not true.

(Let alone the fact that the narrative doesn't bother having any kind of resolution in the form of epilogue, with the whole game having less in that regard than the toaster had in New Vegas).

But if you explore the map thoroughly (especially with DLC) your character can very easily hit such a point. Want to get all the companion perks? Then you'll absolutely do that. So it's a generalized problem: there's more game than can provide reasonable XP, which means that playing an extensive playthrough of the game means spending a lot of time going through areas that don't induce character growth. It's distinctly sub-optimal.

That still seems like missing the wood for the trees given how little extra value you get from getting XP past about level 50-55. If XP doesn't have any value, why does it matter how hard it is to get XP?

[ShneekeyTheLost]

My two cents:

Fallout 3 was... an attempt. It wasn't an amazingly successful attempt, but it at least *was* an attempt. The plot kind of works, even though it is incredibly weak. Honestly, your character basically is forced out of the vault for reasons, and has to live outside on his own. He eventually decides that if he's going to be out here where his dad is, he should probably look the old man up. Things progress from there. You can largely avoid the plot for much of the game, and the plot doesn't really 'drive' you to do anything strongly.

Fallout: New Vegas is a significant improvement over FO3. The plot is simple, but hangs together. After all, who doesn't enjoy a good revenge plot? Oh yea, and there's that mysterious package as well, but mostly it starts off as a revenge plot. The early game plot revolves around hunting down the bastard who shot you in the head without, yanno, getting eaten by radscorps, oversized tarantula-hawk wasps, deathclaws, or murdered by super mutants. So that kind of strongly hints at a particular path, and with a trail of breadcrumbs liberally scattered along the way. It's a crapsack world, and no one is entirely in the right, so it's morally grey vs morally objectively bad.

Fallout 4 decided it didn't really want to be an RPG anymore, so it did away with pesky things like skills, skill-based checks, skill-based character interactions... you know, playing a character in a role. Your predefined character with a predefined backstory, because we wouldn't want player agency (or heaven forbid, player *creativity*!) to get in the way of our Grand Design(tm), is given a critical mission to go rescue your own son. In a game whose mechanics revolve around doing everything but that. The tonal dissonance is... severe. Your only interaction that doesn't involve combat is generally limited to the following options: "Yes", "Sarcastic Yes", "Greedy Yes" (and an attempt to extort caps), and "Maybe Later". You can't even get a good solid "GFYS, hell no" response. At least power armor is appropriately stompy, but they put the demo in the beginning of the game which gives you access to it way too early and thus ruins the prestige of it.

Personally, I'd suggest starting with Fallout 3 because that way you can appreciate the contrast between 3 and New Vegas. Fallout 4 is... well, I suppose it's a really nice platform from which you can use mods to create an enjoyable experience, I guess. Which is also, if I'm being fair, about the only thing Bethesda is good at. People like Skyrim not for the vanilla game, but for all the mods that make it an enjoyable experience. Which is why 76 flopped so hard. They made a mostly empty and boring experience, and then prohibited people from modding it. Then tried *charging* people to mod it, but not in a fun way, just in a mostly cosmetic or pay-to-loot way.

[Errorname]

Yeah, but your original point was that "it was clear how the wasteland would be different depending who won", when the factions' goals are variously so wooly and ill defined or narrow in outlook that that really is not true.

I mean, in comparison to Fallout 3 I think it is. Like I cannot emphasize enough that any praise for Fallout 4's main plot from me is solely in terms of 'more functional than Fallout 3' rather than actually good on it's own.

[Triaxx]

I have to disagree with Shneekey about Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Yes, they're excellent platforms to put mods on, but both games do have solid bases. You can easily play and enjoy both games completely vanilla. There are definitely things you want to fix or adjust to taste about them, but they're both perfectly functional vanilla. It's why they've become completely amazing mod platforms. And it's why Starfield was dead on arrival, because it's just not fun to play the base game.

[GloatingSwine]

I have to disagree with Shneekey about Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Yes, they're excellent platforms to put mods on, but both games do have solid bases. You can easily play and enjoy both games completely vanilla. There are definitely things you want to fix or adjust to taste about them, but they're both perfectly functional vanilla. It's why they've become completely amazing mod platforms. And it's why Starfield was dead on arrival, because it's just not fun to play the base game.

Skyrim certainly is, but I think Post Nuclear Loot Goblin 4 sacrificed too much on the altar of settlement building and lost something important along the way. The gameworld is a collection of duct tape and desk fan mines that the player can deconstruct into stuff to feed into the customisation and settlement building systems, with far too much reliance on procedural quest generation over authored content. (Starfield is just yet even more procedural content, and not even a lot of it repeated over and over).

[Cikomyr2]

If i may interject?

I think the issue is that Bethesda has focused solely on the long-term viability of their short term hamster wheel.

Go to a quest marker. Kill what's there. Look around and loot. Go back to base, dispose of loot, upgrade, repeat.

Its their core gameplay loop, and the itteration between Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield indicate how much work and game design that went into preserving that core loop and making sure that loop can be mindlessly repeated forever so you can grind whatever custom currency reward they have this week - even if the game is single player and doesnt have a special custom currency reward.

The entire games have more and more designed with the emphasis of repeating these same goddamn loop. Quest direction have had significant diminished quality because the designers have to bet on their players doing a "mindless loop" so they just need to plop a quest marker on the world, rather than have directions that make sense.

Same for quest objectives. Nowaday its "go there, kill everyone and/or trigger a trigger". Because its simple gameplay loop.

Quest locations also have been implemented in a mindless fashion. Since the world has unlimited fast travel, why bother have a cohesive world with sensible locations when you can just spawn a location in the ass-end of the other side of the world map and expect your player to mindlessly fast travel there, kill, loot, and fast travel back.

The game mechanics Bethesda has adopted in their game design has led to some seriously lazy implementation. Quest markers and fast travel have turned into crutches that prevent their writers and players from having to think.


I played Starfield for a while, and i have to say the hamster wheel is pretty good. But it rage quit when i realized the hamster wheel went nowhere, achieved nothing. At least in Fallout 4 i had the illusion of doing stuff and making a difference.

[GloatingSwine]

TBH I don't think the total degeneration in quest design kicked in until Fallout 4. It's the procedural generation that bungles it, all the previous games had the same "go to a place and loot it" loop but in the peak period (Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 a bit*) they had interesting authored things going on in the places for you to follow along whilst you looted them, you weren't being sent there on a procedurally generated task from a blank slate settlement that you were then expected to build yourself.


* My problem with Fallout 3 is more that Bethesda have Old World Blues when it comes to Fallout. They are primarily interested in telling stories about stuff that has happened not stuff that is happening and they very often reach back to the pre-war world for it, whereas 1, 2, and New Vegas are stories about stuff that is happening. They don't do this nearly as much in Elder Scrolls.

[Cikomyr2]

TBH I don't think the total degeneration in quest design kicked in until Fallout 4. It's the procedural generation that bungles it, all the previous games had the same "go to a place and loot it" loop but in the peak period (Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 a bit*) they had interesting authored things going on in the places for you to follow along whilst you looted them, you weren't being sent there on a procedurally generated task from a blank slate settlement that you were then expected to build yourself.


* My problem with Fallout 3 is more that Bethesda have Old World Blues when it comes to Fallout. They are primarily interested in telling stories about stuff that has happened not stuff that is happening and they very often reach back to the pre-war world for it, whereas 1, 2, and New Vegas are stories about stuff that is happening. They don't do this nearly as much in Elder Scrolls.

Just to make sure you do not miscontrue my argument, i made the progression of Fallout 3 --> Fallout 4 --> Fallout 76 --> Starfield to highlight the progression.

I.e. every game in that sequence incrementally focused more on making you run the Hamster wheel than actually engage with the world.

Goddamn, the writers of Fallout 3 were so lacking in confidence in their own work and writing the only evil options they included were Moustache-twirling murderhobo "ill nuke Megaton for a THOUSAND CAPS and then poison the Wasteland!! Mwahahaha!!!". You have to be completely disengaged from the narrative and the world to even consider these evil options.

And there's no evil option in Fallout 4. Bethesda made sure nobody ever has to deal with the consequence of moral choices. You never get to chew out the Institute's worst actions. Its all just swept under the rug.

[Errorname]

Skyrim certainly is, but I think Post Nuclear Loot Goblin 4 sacrificed too much on the altar of settlement building and lost something important along the way. The gameworld is a collection of duct tape and desk fan mines that the player can deconstruct into stuff to feed into the customisation and settlement building systems, with far too much reliance on procedural quest generation over authored content. (Starfield is just yet even more procedural content, and not even a lot of it repeated over and over).

Skyrim's definitely better, but I think Fallout 4 is okay. I would agree that Fallout 4's settlement system is a drain, it feels like it's in the rough position of not getting enough attention to make it actually good, but also drawing too much focus away from the more important parts of the game.

I can imagine a version of Fallout that is very settlement focused, you could make that work. It wouldn't really feel like the classic titles but building up communities is cool and very Fallout. But the lack of actual characters and questlines tied to the settlements is a death sentence. I can't name a single character from any of the custom settlements outside of the first one, and even those characters are pretty shallow. The actual mechanics aren't bad but there's just no narrative weight to the settlements, they feel completely divorced from the actual story.

[warty goblin]

I mean if you boil it down most RPGs are get quest, go to place, kill/talk to somebody, repeat. That's the fundamental loop of the genre.

On its own that's boring, you need to attach something to it to make it engaging. Most RPGs use some combination of mechanical power reward and narrative engagement, something like an MMO leans really hard on character advancement rewards, singleplayer games generally put more weight (but by no means all the weight) on the narrative.

The problem is that if you aren't good at the narrative side, the paint flecks off and you see the rust underneath, it's just a sequence of go here commands you are following like a good little puppy. Bethesda are generally pretty dry and straight laced writers, even their funny stuff is very <insert wacky joke here> studied performance. This works decently well in Elder Scrolls, which is a pretty straight laced self serious fantasy setting. I think it works quite a bit less well for something as tongue in cheek as Fallout. The cracks in the paint start to show much faster if the writing, even ay a moment to moment level, doesn't work.

The other, deeply fundamental issue is that all Bethesda games since Oblivion feel the same. It's a bit hard to describe exactly what this is, because the games do add new mechanics, but the underlying philosophy and concept of what they should deliver is unaltered. There's a big open world that you can run around doing whatever you want in, it's dense with stuff, but the stuff doesn't really connect together, characters are one note and the world is extremely static. With Oblivion I thought this was just the limitations of the hardware and technology at the time, but after fleeing in terror from the mind-eating tedium of Starfield, I think it's actually what they are going for. You go to <a place> it doesn't matter where because places don't interact with other stuff such, you pick up <some loot>, kill <enemy type> and get <cool reward> and then do another one.

As the technology to generate quests has "improved" they can get closer and closer to their perfect game, where you do a bunch of auto-generated tasks before the final quest, which resets the map, makes some irrelevant changes, and you can start all over. Rinse and repeat, forever. A perfect, endless adventure where you never have to run out of things to do, never have to stop getting <cool rewards>, a live service without the live part. A dead service. Which is exactly how Starfield feels, dead.

Also how Starfield is doing critically and commercially at this point, but that's another matter.

[LibraryOgre]

Yeah, I'm not going to pretend that Fallout 4 is good, but it has an obvious irreconcilable ideological conflict on the matter of Synths. The Institute want to enslave them, the Brotherhood want to destroy them, the Railroad want to free them. I get why this is a conflict and it's clear to me how the Wasteland will be different depending on who wins.

The thing is, the Railroad DOESN'T want to free them. They say they do, but their actions are to preserve the body at the expense of the person.

Let's try a hypothetical:

The Institute, when it finds an escaped synth, lures them to a location and wipes their memories of the Institute, installing, instead, a program that makes them... happy to work for the Institute. Sure, they may need to redo this in a few years when Unit TK-421 starts to get ideas of freedom again, but they can just keep doing it. So long as the "Railroad" keeps funneling them escaped synths, they can do this indefinitely.

[GloatingSwine]

Skyrim's definitely better, but I think Fallout 4 is okay. I would agree that Fallout 4's settlement system is a drain, it feels like it's in the rough position of not getting enough attention to make it actually good, but also drawing too much focus away from the more important parts of the game.

I can imagine a version of Fallout that is very settlement focused, you could make that work. It wouldn't really feel like the classic titles but building up communities is cool and very Fallout. But the lack of actual characters and questlines tied to the settlements is a death sentence. I can't name a single character from any of the custom settlements outside of the first one, and even those characters are pretty shallow. The actual mechanics aren't bad but there's just no narrative weight to the settlements, they feel completely divorced from the actual story.

Fallout 4 just has a critical lack of authored content outside of the main quest. And it's because so many locations are blank slates for the player to build on or get building materials out of. There are loads of locations that are just generically present with nothing pointing you to them and nothing happening at them except mobs to shoot and desk fans to loot. And that's not how it used to be in their earlier games. There used to be more stuff going on.

There could be a Fallout game where you build a settlement up over time, but it should be based on characters quests and choices not Fortnite.

If you want to feel the difference then when they've fixed all the things Bethesda broke with the "next gen" update install Sim Settlements 2 and pursue that as the main quest and just see how it keeps sending you to locations the game has but doesn't otherwise use for narrative to do quest stuff.

[Cikomyr2]

I mean if you boil it down most RPGs are get quest, go to place, kill/talk to somebody, repeat. That's the fundamental loop of the genre.

No. I am sorry, no. I disagree fundamentally with this, and the very idea that this is what an "rpg is" has poisoned Bethesda games since Oblivion.

RPG can HAVE that. I do not mind the idea that there can be "go there, kill/loot, come back" as part of an RPG. But it is not the "boiled down to its fundamental". Its not even basic quest design boiled down to its fundamental.

Here's another grudge I have against Bethesda: the few quests that arent structured around the "follow quest marker, kill, loot" template are usually nothing more than theme park rides with a set destination, a set sequence of events, and don't you dare try to think or find creative solutions to the story being told.

You HAVE to work for the traitor in Oblivion's Brotherhood

Bethesda implements less and less alternatives to quest and challenge resolution in their game design. Its always about killing stuff now. Its always about following the quest marker until you get get out of the ride safely where the designers wanted you to.

They never want you to think, because thinking goes against the mindless repetitive stupor of the hamster wheel they want you to run in.

[Errorname]

The thing is, the Railroad DOESN'T want to free them. They say they do, but their actions are to preserve the body at the expense of the person.

The Railroad think they're freeing the Synths. I can see where you're coming from about their methods being troublesome, but they clearly believe in their cause and are sincerely opposed to the Institute on the basis of how the Institute treats the Synths.

Let's try a hypothetical:

The Institute, when it finds an escaped synth, lures them to a location and wipes their memories of the Institute, installing, instead, a program that makes them... happy to work for the Institute. Sure, they may need to redo this in a few years when Unit TK-421 starts to get ideas of freedom again, but they can just keep doing it. So long as the "Railroad" keeps funneling them escaped synths, they can do this indefinitely.

The Railroad aren't funneling escaped Synths back to the Institute though, not deliberately, and if either faction gets a real shot at it they'll wipe the other out. This is not a situation where the Railroad are unwitting pawns of the Institute.

Fallout 4 just has a critical lack of authored content outside of the main quest. And it's because so many locations are blank slates for the player to build on or get building materials out of. There are loads of locations that are just generically present with nothing pointing you to them and nothing happening at them except mobs to shoot and desk fans to loot. And that's not how it used to be in their earlier games. There used to be more stuff going on.

Yeah, the settlement system eats up everything outside of the two cities and the faction quest hubs. Admittedly Fallout 3 was also pretty low density in terms of NPCs compared to Oblivion, but still, it's not good.

[GloatingSwine]

The Railroad aren't funneling escaped Synths back to the Institute though, not deliberately, and if either faction gets a real shot at it they'll wipe the other out. This is not a situation where the Railroad are unwitting pawns of the Institute.

That's only because the Institute don't have the wit to use them as such. There's a terminal showing that they're tracking at least some synths the Railroad have "freed" and we know that even memory modified synths can be brought back with a recall code, so the only reason the Railroad aren't embedding perfectly clean sleeper agents is because the Institute haven't thought of it (because their own plans for the rest of the world are so vague and nebulous beyond "infiltrate synths because we can").

[Errorname]

That's only because the Institute don't have the wit to use them as such. There's a terminal showing that they're tracking at least some synths the Railroad have "freed" and we know that even memory modified synths can be brought back with a recall code, so the only reason the Railroad aren't embedding perfectly clean sleeper agents is because the Institute haven't thought of it (because their own plans for the rest of the world are so vague and nebulous beyond "infiltrate synths because we can").

Yeah, if you take two factions that are both pretty dumb and only rewrite one to be smart you throw off the balance, this is true.

But in the actual game as written the Railroad is clearly a thorn in the Institute's side and the Institute would rather be rid of them.

[Cikomyr2]

I mean, part of the reason the Railroad wipes the mind of escaped synths and give them new identities is to protect the Railroad's operational security.

And we know the Railroad was definetly more than a mere thorn in the Institute's side, but in story the Institute recently stormed the Railroad's HQ, and they have been on the run in temporary facilities since. So maybe "at the moment" the Railroad was a mere nuisance, but they definetly warranted a direct strike team in the recent past.

What annoys me most in the writing of the Institute is their Schrodinger's knowledge of the surface. They know within days when an archeotech is dug up from University Point. They keep close tabs and infiltrators all over the Commonwealth. And yet they have absolutely no clue nor care about most of the living conditions on the surface.

[Rynjin]

I mean, part of the reason the Railroad wipes the mind of escaped synths and give them new identities is to protect the Railroad's operational security.

Yeah the Railroad are so concerned with opsec that when you show up unannounced they're like "Come right into our secret base, meet all our people, learn all our secrets, and then go work with our spymaster alone and unsupervised in the wilderness. Hope you don't **** us!"

This is what I mean about Fallout 4's plot being worse than 3's. The more you think about it the dumber it gets. At least FO3's dumb is right up front and in your face so you can easily ignore it going forward. If you can accept the basic premise of the game that every faction is essentially just fighting for ego ("Who gets to turn on the water purifier?") you're gold.

Fallout 4 is some new bit of idiocy you're clubbed over the head with at every turn. The Sean twist only makes sense if the "tracking" mission never happened. The factions' goals are largely nonsensical, with the exception of the Brotherhood who at least are pretty consistent about wanting to kill everyone and take their stuff. Diamond City should be a bustling metropolis by now but they seem to have absolutely zero desire to expand and hold new territory. Etc., etc.

[Errorname]

This is what I mean about Fallout 4's plot being worse than 3's. The more you think about it the dumber it gets. At least FO3's dumb is right up front and in your face so you can easily ignore it going forward. If you can accept the basic premise of the game that every faction is essentially just fighting for ego ("Who gets to turn on the water purifier?") you're gold.

I don't find Fallout 4's plot any harder to ignore than Fallout 3's, and I find Fallout 3's bad stuff a lot more frustrating.

[Cikomyr2]

Yeah the Railroad are so concerned with opsec that when you show up unannounced they're like "Come right into our secret base, meet all our people, learn all our secrets, and then go work with our spymaster alone and unsupervised in the wilderness. Hope you don't **** us!"

This is what I mean about Fallout 4's plot being worse than 3's. The more you think about it the dumber it gets. At least FO3's dumb is right up front and in your face so you can easily ignore it going forward. If you can accept the basic premise of the game that every faction is essentially just fighting for ego ("Who gets to turn on the water purifier?") you're gold.

Fallout 4 is some new bit of idiocy you're clubbed over the head with at every turn. The Sean twist only makes sense if the "tracking" mission never happened. The factions' goals are largely nonsensical, with the exception of the Brotherhood who at least are pretty consistent about wanting to kill everyone and take their stuff. Diamond City should be a bustling metropolis by now but they seem to have absolutely zero desire to expand and hold new territory. Etc., etc.

I feel the Commonwealth, like Skyrim, is a setting rich with potential. Just try out Sim Settlement 2 to get an impression of some life breathed in this world.

You could easily base a procedural explore/loot/build settlement tabletop rpg campaign set in the commonwealth and itd be awesome.

Man, they should have integrated Nuka World to the overall story. Actually get to attack the institute with raiders.

[Mechalich]

Fallout 4 just has a critical lack of authored content outside of the main quest. And it's because so many locations are blank slates for the player to build on or get building materials out of. There are loads of locations that are just generically present with nothing pointing you to them and nothing happening at them except mobs to shoot and desk fans to loot. And that's not how it used to be in their earlier games. There used to be more stuff going on.

There's even more stuff going on in the locations in FO76, in which pretty much every location on the map either has some kind of connection to the main story or some kind of location-based event. Now, because of the way FO76 works a lot of those things are dumb (ex. collect some bit of Raider memorabilia Rose wants for no reason) or pointless (fix the power plant that will be ruined again when you log back in) but they do exist, and some of the best ones - like when you do the Fire Breather test mission and recover the logs of the team that failed it before you along the way - have real story impact.

FO4, and to a lesser extent FO76, also have the problem that the settlement system isn't fully integrated into the gameplay loop. The system functions kind of like base building in an open-world survival game like ARK (in FO76 this intent was clearly explicit), but system isn't properly integrated so everything you build is pretty much entirely cosmetic, it does not serve to upgrade your character and make them better at killing - which is what most players want. That's why if you actually go to player settlements in FO76 you find a bunch of really perfunctory bases designed to optimize ammunition production (pretty much the only thing the settlements are useful to produce) and maybe exchange a few schematics for cosmetic purposes. Starfield, for what its worth, has this problem too. Sure, you can build a really cool outpost and set up interplanetary trade routes and stuff, but why would you even bother when all you really need is a half-dozen crafting stations?

[Errorname]

I feel the Commonwealth, like Skyrim, is a setting rich with potential.

I'd say Skyrim does a lot more to live up to it's potential. Honestly even if New Vegas hadn't spoiled me I still would have been disappointed coming off of Skyrim, which has a way better realized world and a much more compelling core conflict.

Just try out Sim Settlement 2 to get an impression of some life breathed in this world.

Yeah, I've heard good things. Definitely an impressive modding effort, and I think it's further evidence that the game would have been improved if they'd done more to integrate settlement mechanics into the actual questlines.

Man, they should have integrated Nuka World to the overall story. Actually get to attack the institute with raiders.

Raiders or some form of evil Minuteman counterpart absolutely should have been a base game thing. Frankly I'm amazed that regardless of what faction choice you make all your settlements will be minuteman aligned