HUGE SPOILERS!!

So you've been frozen for 200 years, and they take your son in the beginning of the cryo period..

When you meet your son, the head of the institute, he says that he's 60 years old??

The 3 of you were frozen, probably for ~140 years. You're unfrozen, they kill your spouse, take your kid, and refreeze you for another 60 years. How does that not make sense?

The conversation with the head of the Institute literally tells you what happened.

All he says was:

"you thought your son was 10 years old, is it so hard to believe hes 60 years old?"

not really much to go with that

Yeah, they really skipped down on the dialogue this time.

It's like a quarter of what it was before.

I just shot him in the head in my second play through before he said a word to me. Was one hell of a fire fight afterwords getting out of there.

The dialogue in this game is just plain awful for a franchise of this standard

and yet all these fallout "fans" (isn't it funny how many "fans" there are now?) praise the game to no end

That literally tells you that he was taken out of the cyro chamber 60 years ago X(

You got into the chamber, got frozen, got unfrozen, saw your spouse killed and your child taken, got re-frozen, got unfrozen. It was pretty clear that you got frozen and unfrozen twice.

FO4's dialogues are something that nobody praises and literally everyone criticizes.

"FO4's dialogues are something that nobody praises and literally everyone criticizes."

Well yeah... that's what happens when something isn't done right, why would anyone praise it?

And it was a very vague explanation of how my son is the leader of the institute

No, he said "When you left the vault, you thought 10 years had passed. Is it so hard to believe that 60 years had in fact passed?"

There's also specific mention that Kellog had life-extension tech installed in him (including info on the the Director's Terminal).

As for why he was leader, it is vague, but he does mention that he worked hard to get there.

Really people? He literally lays out exactly what happened.

The kidnapping occurred in the year 2227. The cryo facility re-activated, putting you back into stasis for 60 years. 2227+60= 2287, the year the FO4 starts.

You woke up thinking you were looking for an infant, then a ten-year-old boy. Shaun revealed that nope, nope it turns out he is now an old man, 60 years old and the leader of the Institute.

Wasn't all that vague to me.

You said that the fans praise it to no end. I commented that they don't praise this aspect.

Most people don't hate a game just because of one feature and FO4 is praised because the other aspects still overweight this (completely useless) change to dialogues.

It is vague, but it doesn't really matter how he became the Director. This is the Institute, you probably get on the top via something boring like a well written thesis XD

Funny how? You lost me there.

Indeed, I understand that he was taken for the purpose of untouched genetic material. And that they could raise him from the start (infant) with ibstitute ideals and make him perfect for a director.

But isn't that exactly what everyone else is in the institute? They should be "pure" genetic material too, right? What's the difference?

Also, your character was kept as a backup. But why was all the others killed? They would be just as perfect material as you. They could have had multiple genetic samples to go by. Perhaps i misses something in the dialogues, but what makes you family except for shaun (infant).

- no, they just took him to create Gen 3 Synths and one of holotapes from times he was a baby refers to him as "A Sample". It was he who seems to have decided to rise up from a genetic sample to Director... and if I had to guess why, it was to get revenge on those who killed his parent and this somehow evolved into actual love for the Institute... which was now under his absolute control

- at one point the Institute left the underground and formed a united Commonwealth state together with the Wastelanders (it was from better times when they still tried to work together with the rest of the Commonwealth). It failed, something nasty happened and the Institute moved back under the ground (and supposedly this created the hate for Wastelanders) but many of them were no doubt affected by radiation and FEV during that period during which they lived over the ground. Heck, I am unsure if they were even able to have a FEV-free environment until much later

- they needed only one and it was unlikely that misfortune would follow them to the point that their other two back-ups also failed so they did not need more. As for why they HAD to kill the others... well, I guess the Director at the time was a downright villain as even Kellogg disliked this course of actions

Nope. As Shaun explains, The Institute was originally founded by students and professors of CiT who hid in the CiT basemant.

Basemants are not air tight/radiation proof, everyone who would later go to found The Institute has corrupt DNA due to the early years spent in the CiT basemant before they actually made "The Institute" itself.

I don't see how they could have made it any clearer that you were frozen, unfrozen briefly when the institute and Kellog stole Shaun and killed your spouse and then re-frozen as a "backup." The game initially tricks you into thinking you had been refrozen for 10 years but you are told to your face that it was actually 60.

The whole "They stole my baby" issue always seemed misguided. If the Sole Survivor had half a brain, then they would have realized that their baby is only a few months old to he has been dead for decades with the few months old having a very low probability. Shaun has been waiting 60 years to meet his parent so he can wait another year while they explore every part of the Commonwealth.

The whole "pure DNA" thing was something that never made sense to me. The mutations and such that are present in all the "impure" humans are 100% beneficial and make it easier to survive in their current environment. The human body managed to adapt to the radiation and other things, why throw that away and why would Synths need those mutations or need to not have those mutations. Would anything extra in the "pure" human DNA even apply to Synths?

Not exactly on topic but the dialogue is a little bit rough this time around. I am sure if you didn't probe deeply enough in conversations you could have missed parts. I remember when I decided to pick the institute side, I did a bunch of their missions and it was all good but then suddenly there was talk of this Prime robot thing. I sat there, as the player, wondering why my character would walk up to Dr. Li and just start asking about this Liberty prime thing so matter of factly even though he had never heard anything about it before. It was ridiculous.

Because the world above is an aberration that isn't supposed to exist, a folly of minkind's idiocy. Likewise, all mutations resulting from that aberration are thus negative, and are not supposed to exist either.

Its the same genetic purity spiel that led The Enclave to believe they are the only true humans, and everyone else is a genetic freak that needed to be purged to make the world right again, despite the fact the mutations everyone has are, as you pointed out, beneficial.

Besides that, the way Shaun talks about it implies that the mutations have made the DNA unable to be re-sequenced, or whatever it is they did with Shaun's DNA, due to the "errors" caused in the DNA from the mutations. Even if they wanted the mutations, they couldn't copy the DNA due to its mutations making it unable to be copied correctly.

If he had half a brain, and he has more than half, he would realize that these people would not go all the way to a Vault and start killing people just to let the child die.

He does not know how much time has passed, but as a parent his instincts (mixed with his desparation to reclaim what is left of his life) make him consider the possibility of his child being alive.

The final step of assembling the Synth is pushing them into some kind of red liquid. So I guess they are using a different kind of FEV to force the human body to be born onto a machine. Just like how Mariposa FEV works best with clean humans (the ones not infected with FEV), this FEV probably also works best with non-infected human DNA. Seemingly, you can't properly force evolution with a virus if another instance of a Forced Evolutionary Virus already did its job.

We don't know that the mutations the surface population have are all, or even mostly, beneficial. It wouldn't surprise me if the incidence of various cancers and other genetically-based diseases is way up in the population compared to pre-war, or if natural lifespans have been shaved down quite significantly.

If the Institute start out with a baseline DNA, largely unaffected by random radiological mutations, then they can always pick-and-choose beneficial mutations from the general population and splice them in later. Removing non-beneficial ones is a trickier proposition.

Where did I ever say that they would kill the kid. The Sole Survivor doesn't know when their kid was kidnapped. So it could have been in 2120 for all they know. Their kid could have died of old age in 2220 and been dead for decades when the Sole Survivor left the vault.