yeah the institute is very nice actually.. and you can help improve the lives of the synths in the institute with side missions and they thank you for it the institute is a very good choice.. and with you as the new leader things can change.. even for the synths.

Basically you learn that the head of the retrieval division was treating all the synths like [censored].. bullying them with the coursers.. you can get him kicked out and the synths seem much happier afterwords.

I disagree.

Even if they pass the Turing Test, even if they manage to fool all of Humanity,

they still aren't Human.

While they may be more compassionate then most of the other wastelanders,

thats just only because they're coded to do so.

In the end, they're nothing but a bunch of circuits and code.

In the end, what happens next is left to the imagination.

While humanity is nothing but blood and chemicals.

Is it possible they have a soul, Alfred?

A soul of silicon, but a soul nonetheless?

I get what you're saying and this is why I love this game.

Both sides are right. (in a certain point of view.)

While it isn't original, FO4 story is MILES better compared to FO3.

From what I gather, the only TRUE good guys are the Minutemen as they:

-> Seek to help the people, not force them to their will.

-> Are relatively neutral to the Synths not trying to hurt them. They aren't trying to use them as tools, or obliterate them.

-> Don't appear to have issues with Ghouls. As with the Synth, the Minutemen seem to operate on a code of: “We'll work together. As long as you don't hurt us, we won't hurt you.”

The Railroad are just a bunch of fanatics who value Synth lives over actual human lives, and they'll do whatever it takes to ensure that the poor, poor, widdle Synthies get the rights they deserve. Yes, even those Synthies trying to kill Sole Survivor and her friends.

I'm gonna go do some minutemen quests now that my main quest has ended with me siding the Institute.

I guess my journey in the Commonwealth has only just begun.

I think Fallout 4 is some kind of weird unholy combination of F3 and NV.

You're a father looking for his son while settling the conflict between a bunch of morally ambiguous factions.

As for the Minutemen, it's somewhat similar to the Independent Vegas ending in that their reputation and leanings depends on what sort of Sole Survivor you are. After all, the Minutemen were good intentioned but were destroyed by in-fighting as well as the fact they had a suicidal last stand versus good targets. I like that they created a "Regulators" faction, though.

I always felt they were criminally underdeveloped in Fallout 3.

Does Piper and Nick hates you if you get BoS ending?

I meant the BoS people in the Boston Wasteland.

They have good intentions, I'll agree there, but they are still forcing others against their will. Plus, from the sounds of it, they need living human beings in order to create Synths in the first place, which is why people has been kidnapped by them...

Their intentions are right, but they are going through it with the wrong way.

Honestly, the Minuteman are probably the best ones to side with.

i dont think anybody hates you dependant on the ending.. you just lose access to that factions companions.. like danse if you dont join BOS or the courser if you dont join institute or deacon if you dont join railroad.. everyone else might not like a faction as much but as long as your not a complete [censored] you can keep them around.. i made piper ok with the institute in the end by bringing her along for the institute missions and romancing her.. she seemed ok in the end and even made a comment on how they might actually do the commonwealth some good..

only shaun was taken against his will when he was a baby.. they never needed to kidnap anyone else.. the people who went missing were simply recruited by the institute.. and "replaced" by synths to attempt to avoid suspicion (which just made things worse really)

No one inside the institute is allowed to contact the outside world.. for safety reasons.. so in order to try to avoid problems they replaced the people they brought onboard with synths (which backfired)

Erm....if you side with the Institute, yea BoS AND Railroad will HATE your guts. Not so much of Railroad tho lol!!
Not once did the Institute ever mention the Minutemen tho, so they should still be your friend.

This is the part where I dun understand.
The institute obviously never conducted any sinister experiments on the kidnapped people,

so I still dun understand all the secrecy even to the point of replacing them with Synths.

Why didn't they just announce their true intentions?
Im guessing they're worried that no one is gonna believe them, or worse gonna exploit them i guess?
In the end, every faction is just wary of each other.....its kindda sad, but i guess that is what happens when the world is destroyed like that.

simple.. they dont trust the outside world.. or know much about it outside of what their synths report back.. in one of the tips of the game it states that the institute once tried to work together with the commonwealth and it didnt go well.. so now they just try to avoid dealing with them directly.

yes they did, they used the FEV on at least some of them.

there is a whole section entirely based around the FEV and using it, it is part of the reason Virgil left, you can find his notes at some point and it is him basically saying "Father has forced the FEV experiments to keep going, despite how horrible it is"

no, Piper, at least does not like you joining, but if you actively point out the stupidity in certain orders you are given and argue with some of their more extreme ideas, Piper LOVES it.

Virgil is a moron. His logs say "We've made no significant progress."

My ass. The FEV department found the [censored] cure for super-mutants. Are you kidding me? Does he have even the slightest inclination as to what that could mean?

The FEV tests were undoubtedly necessary to facilitate the cure. No doubt it was nasty work, but in the end they actually achieved something that is one of the most important if not THE most important scientific achievement in the past 200 years. And its also probably why Father instituted that it be continued. It has the potential to cure everyone ever affected by the FEV virus, and return them to normal. Thats absolutely huge.

At the end of the day, the Institute is basically something Bethesda has almost never done before and that's...yes...be SUBTLE in its evil. I made a point about the BoS being the same way. Also, they have reasons why a otherwise good person would join them.

It doesn't prevent the whole "kidnap and replace" thing from being much much more than they claim.

Or are we arguing ALL of the infiltrators at your settlements are just guys they recruited?

There's also their desire to wipe out all Pre-War knowledge so they can rebuild society they wish.

You can imagine my loathing of that as a historian.

Where's this stated (without getting too spoilery if you don't mind)? I'm curious, I haven't seen this aspect yet.

It's related to the Goodneighbor quests. They had them driven out because Pre-War knowledge and traditions threaten their goal.

It's why they hate the Minutemen and arranged for their destruction.

The Minutemen as heroic dogooders inspired by Pre-War Revolutionary idealism threaten their desire to wipe out the past.

This is something I'm struggling with as I haven't finished the game after 86 hours (I don't care about spoilers).

Let's take them one by one:

The Minute Men - A wasteland militia that's dead set on being the "peoples militia" and generally wants to ensure the cooperation of all settlers in the Commonwealth.

The way I see it, they're the scrappy underdogs who'll eventually end up like the NCR as soon as they establish a government.

There's a lot of information missing, because you're the general and governor rolled up in one. If you could recruit or promote people to mayor, then you'd get a better idea of what'd happen in the future.

The Brotherhood of Steel - A militant BOS chapter led by General Maxson, a young zealot guided by principle and adherence to the belief that advanced technology should only be used by them.

Since this is the same chapter as in Fo3 (ugggghhh), they're also interested in helping the average settler out there. However, they will only do so if it coincides with their goals (appropriating tech and killing dangerous beings like mutants).

Despite their arrogance, they stick to their principles. While they view the populace as common peasants (they're not wrong though), this chapter has a history of helping them.

The Railroad- Underground liberators that help synthetic humans/androids escape and stay hidden away from the institute.

Their objective is to help synths as if they were sentient and free-thinking individuals and seek to free them.

I've always hated the whole synth/railroad lore ever since I heard about it in Fo3, so I'm obviously biased on this...

So here are my issues with the railroad - they have so many resources that they can afford to help very specific individuals of which there are maybe a hundred of, at max. That's it, there's nothing more to it.

Why aren't these people helping other people alongside the synths? Why aren't they out there dealing with raiders, feral ghouls and super mutants?

They're effectively just helping synths into a horrible world, without doing more about it. I can't think of the railroad as anything else but a product of lazy, bad writing. Even b-movie productions have a reason for a faction or character to exist.

The Institute - Researchers and scientists who grew up below CIT who use robots/androids to further their goals above ground.

Basically they're know-it-all scientists who haven't experienced the world above and have goals that are beyond the mere survival of the people above.

The institute is another poorly written faction, if for no other reason than the fact that they somehow managed to build a super high tech city below Boston without going above ground to get materials or machines.

These basemant nerds are generally unsympathetic and while their work is extremely important in general for human kind, it's unrelatable to the world above.

It is stated by them that synths are just machines, effectively making the railroad a useless faction. Since we don't have any other information to relate this to, there's no reason to believe that they're lying or wrong.

It might be that synths are sentient enough to merit being "people", but then the Institute would've had to face this fact a long time ago.

There's little other to them than their self-preservation and due to the lack of dialogue options and any real lore to dig up, they don't really have anything going for them.

----------

So in the end you have two choices of "good" guys, the Minute Men or the Brotherhood of steel. The first is another NCR waiting to happen and the latter is militant civilization through superior firepower.

My assumption lies in the the fact that the Institute says synths aren't sentient. If they are (boo) then the railroad is likely the "real" good ending.

All in all you can chalk the storyline up to piss poor writing and not bother with it any further than seeing the different endings for your entertainment.

In Fallout 3, you basically ask if you can join the Railroad and the person responds, more or less, "That's not really how this works but if you help a Synth escape slavery, then yeah, then you're a member." They're an organization which lends its aid to Synths, not an army. If you're sympathetic to Synths enough to risk the Institute's wraith to free them then you're a member. There's some hardcoe members but this isn't really an organization so much as an idealogy.

And bluntly, until the BOS arrive, the Institute is the WORST and MOST POWERFUL faction in the Commonwealth.

So being anti-Institute is a HUGE deal even if all they can do is free Synths as best they can.

It's probably the best written Faction since Fallout 1 and 2. The Institute managed to build a super-high tech city below Boston because it was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and they can and do know RIDICULOUS amounts of stuff and engineering. Also, they have ROBOTS. If you have an unlimited number of robots then just about any engineering problem becomes soluable.

Especially a school of genius engineers.

...

HOW?

I mean, Nick Valentine is someone you know. It's kind of hard to look at him and say, "he's just a machine." I mean, does the game have to spell out that he's a sentient person with feelings, desires, and morality?

Given Maxson has begun a campaign of extermination against all non-humans, I'm not sure the BOS can be called Neutral let alone good.

They took Elder Lyons dream of reforming the Brotherhood and made it the Enclave.

Er. They do? They send out Synth scav teams all the time for materials/equipment needed from the surface.

Its primarily how renegade synths are able to escape the Institute.

People don't even know what the institute is, apart from the boogeyman of the Commonwealth that nefariously replaces people with robots. That's another thing I hate about the Institute, you have no clue whether why anyone is bothering with it.



That's your opinion, I respectfully disagree

No amount of engineers or other eggheads will ever make materials appear out of thin air, which is why their whole underground existence is beyond suspension of disbelief.
All of their computers, furniture, tools and so on are obviously fabricated, but there are no factories or workshops down there. It just doesn't make sense.
This is just a repeat of why I heavily disliked Fo3 - Nothing made sense and Bethesda is really bad at explaining how or why. If you've seen mrBtongue's videos on youtube, you'll know what I mean.
Otherwise look up "Shandification of fallout".

Anyway, it's just a matter of opinion, you're not going to convince me that it's good writing



I don't think the game does a good enough job of telling whether or not they're sentient/creative/feeling.
Nick can be explained by the fact that he's a copy of another person, but we don't know whether he's the only one or if all the g2 synths and above are copies as well, or if they're magically advanced enough to be real people.
So yeah, they actually do have to spell it out. I'm not buying the whole sentient AI story in a world where priorities should be literally anything else than making synths.
Also, after those 86 hours of gameplay I still don't know why they're making synths for anything else than work labor.


The reform in Fo3 was hated by a lot of old fans, for good reason. BOS was never supposed to be the "good guys" anyway, so I actually quite like the way beth wrote them this time around.
Yeah, the way they treat non-humans is pretty bad behaviour, but in the end it doesn't matter much.
Apart from beths ridiculously excessive use of ghouls and supermutants, there aren't supposed to be that many of them, so the BOS shouldn't actually care about the former.
As for super mutants, BOS has no knowledge of a cure and probably wouldn't be interested anyway. In the end a supermutant should be treated as a lost cause (yeah, yeah, I like Marcus too).
That leaves the synths, which I'm not convinced are sentient anyway, but I do sympathize with the BOS in their opinion that they are extremely dangerous and need to be destroyed. Don't play with AI, that's the moral of almost every single story out there, with good reason.

Even if you don't see BOS as good, they're undeniably a better choice than the Institute and Railroad because of resources and a pragmatic solution to end most of the dangers out there.

It's logic in reverse Think about it, did the institute build synths and a teleporter first or their underground city?
It'd all be much simpler if the institute had been above ground for the first x amount of years and then disappeared from the surface, literally.

It's all a bad excuse for their teleporter to be a plot device in the story, which by the way is completely unnecessary.