I like the theory, even if I don't think it's true. I feel like if Bethesda wanted to throw that curve ball at us, they would have made a terminal or something that would clue us in to his real identity. I mean without that definitive proof, we can't "know" and it is all just speculation. Honestly, based upon the thread title, I thought you were going to make the argument that Shaun is not Father because Father was fully formed by the Institute, and whoever Shaun could have been died when he was taken from the vault. That I DO believe, to an extent. I am not wholly convinced that an individuals nature doesn't play some crucial aspect in defining themselves (I would argue that it plays the greatest factor) but Shaun is certainly very... pragmatic, when it comes to assessing his own past. I know that the revelation that he leads the Institute is supposed to make you second guess everything you've heard about them and join their cause, but when talking about what happened to your wife and Kellogg, although it makes sense, it is incredibly cold and alien, even when he brings up that he has had years to make peace with it. The way he describes her death as her fault basically... I guess it would be the only way I could justify working with the organization that killed my mother in cold blood, but still.

I do agree though that the PC is for all intents and purposes a functional moron, which I H-A-T-E with a passion. Granted, the dialogue system isn't really supposed to convey intellectual aptitude and serves more to just advance plot points, but the contrivances of the story (and overall game content) seem like blatant slaps to the face over the hours spent playing. I think the idea was to make him as relatable as possible, so that way his mannerisms would fit a broad range of people's preconceptions for "who" their sole survivor is, but it comes off as appealing too much to a common denominator. Which isn't to take anything away from the voice acting. I think the voice acting is great. And honestly, a lot of the problem comes from the tonal whiplash, like when you go from looking for Shaun, which is a tense and frantic thing, to doing [censored] favors for some random dude you just bumped into. The duality of video games trying to tell a story essentially, eh?

What they should have done from the start, since all dialogue options serve to advance the story in identical ways, is make four different personality types, such as: straight-laced and polite, foul mouthed and lovable rogue, sarcastic and joking, and then suspicious and mean. Or honestly, however you'd want to divvy that up. That way, we can at least dictate how we are going to act for when we meet certain people. For instance, if you are talking with someone you think is cool and you are trying to break the ice you can be straight laced, but if you run into a tense situation you can be the foul mouthed rogue, or just mean and direct. I think the dialogue was written so it tried to accomplish that, but it was hit and miss in my opinion and I would prefer to have more direct control when dictating how I want to respond to any given situation.

edit: Sorry to go so far off topic there at the end. I forgot to mention that I don't think it's true that Shaun isn't Father, because to get a DNA sample, they wouldn't have to puree baby Shaun into some organic goop. You could isolate DNA from any culture of cells and then amplify from there. Killing the infant Shaun would be evil for no discernible gain, which doesn't sound like the Institute's MO (and honestly sounds like some 1970's villain caricature). Twisting the kidnapped young boy into the essentially psychopathic leader of your organization? That fits them quite nicely.

Even though Father was raised by and in the Institute, I believe one of his justifications for appointing you his successor is because you are an outsider, which is probably how he views himself. I discount nepotism, because he pretty much states that he views your existence as a curiosity... like an experiment. However, you are his parent and he probably assumes that the traits he developed in himself are traits that you potentially share, and so appointing you the successor to the Institute is like appointing someone who he conceives as being similar to himself that it will keep the Institute on the right course. He wouldn't dream of giving his baby to anyone who he didn't have some clear cut reason to believe they would do right by it.

But that is only noticeable to people that play more than one character. Besides even if Father is a fraud, then it would be easy to change his features to resemble Shaun. After all, if the Plastic Surgeon in Diamond City can change a person's skin color, then the Institute can do a lot more. There is no way to have baby Shaun from African descent and have Father of Caucasian descent if Father is trying to impersonate as Shaun. I guess it would be possible, but the Sole Survivor would have to have an Intelligence of 1 or the Institute is comprised of only Idiot Savants.

Sure, I mean people can head-canon whatever they like, of course. I could RP for instance that I'm actually a Gen-3 Synth that's been tested for a leadership role in The Institute or something, and Father just implanted all these memories of Nora, Shaun etc. But of course, there's no proof of that.

But, objectively, I don't think there can be any doubt that Bethesda intended Father = Shaun. So anything aside from that is headcanon/creative RP.

Obviously Bethesda intended for Shaun to make the Sole Survivor's journey to save their son into a quixotic quest. Since there is no way to rescue Father from his kidnappers unless time travel is used. This reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j42eaiLdBTY.

mmm... the best explanation I've found that fully fits the facts as presented is that in addition to being a complete psychopath, Father is also colossally vain. As such, he is convinced that only someone of his bloodline could possibly lead the Institute in his stead, and so he thaws out his remaining parent.


Then of course, he has to test him or her to make sure they're competent to lead the Institute, and reasoning that violence is a good indicator of academic and organizational capacity he stages the fight with Kellogg. That works better than him being a completely random nutjob, but the fight vs. Kellogg is still problematic. We can also, maybe assume that his illness is perhaps causing him to act irrationally, because otherwise it's still hard to see how someone with such obvious behavioural quirks could ever have been accepted as Director of the Institute.


That works ... but there's a lot of unsupported assumptions needed to make it work, and it doesn't feel right somehow. It does have the considerable advantage of not being contradicted by anything in the game ... but I'm not sure that's enough to sell it when the initial scenario seems so poorly thought out.

Oh yes. I just mean that in this scenario he's an unrelated psychopath, a ruthless and unfeeling Director that has no genetic connection to the player character. I could probably have made that clearer

That's kind of how I feel about it to be honest

That's a separate objection: all they needed was a cell scraping - no need to shoot anyone. Or they could have thawed out Nora and said "come and live in luxury with us and get proper health care for the baby, or you can die in the radstorms outside". Occasional medical check-ups "to make sure there are no lingering effects from the cryofreez process" would give them any number of excuses to take blood and cell samples. No one needed to get shot in the head at all.


Of course, if everyone always did the sensible thing there'd be far fewer stories. All the same, that still seems contrived.

That would have made sense. That would probably have been fun. It's the College of Winterhold all over again, isn't it?

Not sure what you mean by the College of Winterhold. If it was unclear what I meant by quixotic quest, I meant it to be an impossible quest. There is no saving your son from his kidnappers since he became one of them decades ago.

If Time Travel was used IMO, then it would have been the last Fallout game. Why bother saving your son and spouse in 2227 or whenever Shaun was abducted when you can stop the Great War from happening and save everyone? However, the other Fallout games have a paradox with saving America from the Great War. If they save America, then they won't be born. If they aren't born, then they can't save America.

There's a story going around that the College of Winterhold quest was originally intended as a time travel quest. It turns out that by finding the Eye of Magnus events propagate backwards in time causing the great collapse and the focus of the quest is to travel back and prevent the collapse thus eventually preventing the Great Collapse and restoring Winterhold to its full glory.

According to a poster on the Reddit lore sub, one of the devs confirmed this, although I obviously don't have any direct confirmation. Still, it makes sense of some of the more gnomic utterances by the Augur and the Psijics, so I'm inclined to believe it.

It's possible they had a similar story in mind for the F4 MQ

The player character is a synth...and the game is only implanted memories.

Edit:

Think about it...this is the only way that DLC involving existing factions in the existing Commonwealth can be added, and the only way that 'canon' on the Commonwealth can be determined.

Or we never left Vault 111 at all. We died with the rest of the people, and the whole game is a dying dream.

I hate time travel in SiFi stories and games. I just can not wrap my head around the basic paradox that time travel creates. If you are affecting the "real" world and not some alternate reality then you setup an infinite loop that destroys time altogether. Many of the best SiFi writers have wrestled with trying to make the paradox work and they all fail at some level. Please leave time travel out of the Fallout World, the writing is already poor enough we don't need to compound it.

Well, you don't know how it might have been set up, assuming this was the plan which is still pure speculation, of course. It could have been a case that the mechanism only had a certain range into the past - so you could save Shawn, but not travel back to the start of the war, for instance. Or it could have been a deal where only certain points in history were accessible for reasons involving n-dimensional mumbo jumbo.



There's a few ways around it. You could have four quest-givers depending on which factions still existed; you could have outposts, lost patrols and deep cover agents who might or might not know the latest news out of Boston. It would be awkward though.

I'm betting they largely use a new worldspace and.or factions. It's what they've generally done in the past.



I'll promise not to make any time travel mods, but beyond that you'll need to talk to Bethesda

That's how I felt. Father is a psychopath, or at best a sociopath. That he's the head of The Institute which is busy playing God makes for another very compelling reason to nuke it from orbit (so to speak).

Actually, although this is somewhat off-topic'ish...it's all an elaborate Vault-Tec experiment.

Something like an extension of what Von Braun was doing back in FO3. The basis for that is that so far in the Fallout Universe, there are only 3 known builders of vaults or vault similar facilities - Vault-Tec, US military/government, and Mr House (yes, he had an underground facility). I find it difficult to think that something like the CIT would develop an underground research facility without Vault-Tec having it's finger in the pie somewhere, and using the implanted memory tech, there would be no necessity to have any evidence of Vault Tec involvement known to the test subject/s.