Right here:

http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/07/despite-fallout-4-making-it-a-villain-mit-tries-to-convince-us-it-isnt-evil/

Well at the very least they have the data and control from all the vaults in Boston....possibly more. The 3rd gen synths are precisely the kind of thing Vault Tec would consider to be the perfect result from all that research. I would not be surprised in the least if there was some tie between CIT and the Enclave......different secret branch or something. Eyebots and X01 armors are strongly associated with the Enclave and can be found all over Boston.

I think the Eyebots are actually working for the Brotherhood of Steel.

You might be right, of course, but I think the Institute is it's own thing.

Albeit, the Vaults in Boston are controlled by the Gunners who are Vault-Dwellers created by a Super-Soldier program.

Either way the main character is forced to become a child killer making you even worse than kellog and whatever twisted principles you believe in.

Physical control isn't exactly the kind of thing the Institute cares to have recognition for......I doubt they care about the dead ruins anyway. The data of what transpired there is another thing. And let us not forget the Coursers are super soldiers and all the genetic data from the school vault.

But yes, Elder Maxson is a great character. He's a nuanced multi-faceted character and probably the single best creation of the game aside from Nick Valentine. Piper, Cait, and Danse are all very interesting and enjoyable characters with arcs but Maxson has them all beat. He's also a much more interesting character than Shaun himself as while I'd like to believe he was sincere--the fact I can't call him on all the horrible evil [censored] which went down underneath his reign as director was disappointing.

Elder Maxson, by contrast, is a character who you completely understand the rationale of. He's a soldier, he's a visionary, and he's a young man out to impress his elders. Elder Maxson has seen Elder Lyons' path's downsides and how it got his Big Sister/Crush Sarah killed. He's seen how it tore the Brotherhood apart. He grew up in the Capital Wasteland and can you tell me is there a a WORSE environment for teaching someone tolerance of Super Mutants and Ghouls? OF COURSE he considers the Institute another Enclave in the making. OF COURSE he wants to cleanse the Commonwealth of all nonhumans.

He has to be strong and godlike because that's the image he's cultivated and he can't ever back down because he's made himself a god by always winning and always being perfect. It makes his death at the end so very tragic and SUCH A WASTE. Because he had the potential to be the greatest hero of the setting since the Vault Dweller or Lone Wanderer.

Maybe better than both.

I also think the realization he'd perverted not only Elder lyons dream but Roger Maxson's dream is appropriate. Just like NCR is a secular Pre-War capitalist society ruled by the rich and corrupt while Aradesh wanted a communist spiritual community devoted on small town-based lines.

It's very very thematic.

I think you're too obsessed with his untold psychology.....pointless. The bottom line is a: Is he wrong? and b: Is it worth destroying the BoS as a whole over?

To answer those questions:

a: No....everything about the Institute points very much to them being another Enclave. They even follow the Enclave/Vault-Tec directive of not waking anyone from vault 111 until over 80% fatal catastrophic failure. They sure walk the walk. Beyond that we see more than enough examples.....dozens....of the destruction and chaos the synths cause. Self loathing or not they are VERY dangerous to have around.....you have no idea when something will trigger them to do something horrible. Would you seriously risk actual innocent human lives and potential human extinction to embracing them among human population? That would be a far worse decision than a minor underground explosion taking out a horror organization.....far more dangerous and destructive long-term.

b: You claim to like the BoS just not Maxon.....leaders come and go, some better than others and none to everyone's liking so why destroy the entire organization? As I pointed above I really don't see what insane logic of your own you justify this with? He never does anything that is unjustified or not backed by enough facts.

Well, I'm a professional writer so I tend to get into the heads of fictional characters a bit too much.

As for the BOS, I don't think I'm destroying them.

Yeah, their force to invade the Commonwealth was destroyed but I hardly think it's the entire East Coast Brotherhood of Steel.

Bad damage and it'll halt their expansion but I think they'll recover.

At the very least, the Capital Wasteland branch is fine.

Likewise, we'll just have to disagree about Synths.

I'm like 80% sure Maxson is a synth but that still doesn't make him wrong, just a hypocrite.

Wrong....every synth you kill is either obviously a gen 1 or 2 obvious robot or has synth components when killed....neither is true of Maxon.

You can disagree all you want but the evidence is stacked against you.

Sure.

And I'm comfortable with my decision enough to nuke the Prydwen.

*puts on sunglasses as it goes down*

"What a senseless waste."

BUT MAYBE I'M A SYNTH.

I could have been replaced in the teleportation beam.

I have to say, taking all this into consideration I don't understand how you can hate Maxson. He is honetly one of the most genuine and upfront characters in the game. One may disagree with and even hate the ideology he represents, but I see nothing in him that would justify hating him as a person.

Because Maxson is going to kill one-third of my Sole Survivor's new family (Curie is a waif)
Close friends (Nick and Hancock--sorry Strong but you kind of creep me out)
And ruined his friendship with Danse (albeit, my destroying the organization he's worked for his entire life for gives him reason to hate him)

"Love to hate" is different from hate because he's a great character for getting an emotional response.

I engaged with the story as my character vs. Maxson in the end

And that my Sole Survivor was willing to side with the Institute to stop him even as he understood him.

y'know, I actually feel sorry for you, Charles. I believe the Brotherhood have ALWAYS been hypocritical. I mean, doesn't the Brotherhood of Steel elder in NV mention something about having a weapon against the NCR if you bring him a functioning orbiting laser trigger device (as in C-finder that is actually hooked up to the laser)?

Now it is the right thread.

Eh, Father Elijah is kind of an outier for the BoS.

After all, he's basically Evil Elder Lyons.

I was talking about

But even without that, the BoS (Lyons' group anyways) used a GIANT ROBOT, a weapon of mass destruction in and of itself that was only stopped when the Enclave destroyed it with an orbiting satellite (ant maybe nukes from that satellite), and they now want that robot back up and running.

True and it was ELDER LYONS who used nuclear weapons first.

Both Liberty Prime as well as the Mobile Command Carrier Nukes.

It makes the whole thing a slippery slope doesn't it?

Yeah I really don't get Darth's morality play here, it's very clear the point that is being made. The Brotherhood of Steel are willing to use the weapons that they want for what they see as "the Greater Good" and you can justify it with the Institute's obviously criminal behaviour all you want but it's the violation of principle that is being addressed here and the slippery-slope there-after.

Also about the kids on the Prydwen; equally blame the Brotherhood of Steel for using child-soldiers in the first-place.

Actually, can anyone give me the relevant quotes from the Codex that address that? Did we ever get to hear them, in fact? Is taking control of nuclear weapons and using them actually a violation of the BoS tenets?

It's not really a kind of thing you can loophole around. The BoS gather technology to prevent it from being used to destroy the world again. That's why they do it and their purpose as an organization. It's why they have their technological focus in the first place.

This isn't cherry picking quotes.

It's basically saying, "Jesus was all about the violence dude. Learn the ways of war and kick the ass of sinners."

Which, sadly, also happened in history.

Well, the BoS are are gathering and using technology to help the world - by destroying those who threaten it. While someone may disagree with their assessment of who is or isn't a threat, they're not violating any of their own principles by using nuclear weapons, are they?

You're deliberately ignoring context and consequences.....nothing in life is ever black and white there is always an exception to every rule. You cling to this bit of logic to an extreme and then use it to justify destroying the commonwealth's last line of defense and put it under the control of an extremist organization that will cause untold damage and just like Vault-Tec did with the vaults will probably leave the Commonwealth devoid of life.

There is a cat aboard the ship as well, does that mean the BoS is using cat soldiers?!

I'm joking of course and I agree on the child soldier angle. There should not be kids aboard the Prydwen. One of the repeating BoS missions is a 'train a squire' mission where you bring a kid with you into dangerous places... like a mall full of supermutants. That whole thing creeped me out and I never accepted a second of those missions. The kid doesn't fight, but you can be a soldier and not actually fire a gun. That was clearly putting some kid directly on the front lines.

Back to the cat though. In my first playthrough, I sided with the Minutemen at first, then switched to RR, which inevitably led to the BoS being destroyed. I looked for that cat afterwards around the wreckage... just hoping it survived somehow. I couldn't find it... perhaps it did survive though. Cats have a non-lethal terminal velocity. They have a decent chance of surviving any fall relatively intact. I thought that would have been a neat touch if the cat survived. Once the mod tools are released, perhaps I can make it so...

That would be I imagine Maxson's perspective on the subject.

It would also be, I think, entirely in line with why the Enclave and Chinese both justified their use of nuclear weapons.

"They're bad and need to be destroyed."