So, a question that came to me as I start my Minutemen Play-Thru of Fo4 after finally finishing the Railroad (three attempts before the last one all met with game-breaking bugs. We're looking at you, Castle radio-tower!) and it occurred to me that there is a lot of options and story/conflict that could open up if the Sole Survivor was drastically changed during their first few adventures in the Commonwealth Wasteland.

Getting nabbed by Super Mutants who found a stash of F.E.V. and dipped you, creating a Super Mutant who isn't completely stupid or insane due to the Sole Survivor not being irradiated. Immediately crosses off all but the most open-minded of the Brotherhood from talking to you and possibly causes other factions to hold you at arm's length, at least until you prove yourself.

Getting exposed to radiation at high doses at a particular sight which causes the Sole Survivor to turn into a Ghoul. This might be mostly cosmetic, but will affect how people react to your Sole Survivor and his or her role in the Commonwealth.

Players may have the option to 'accidentally' end up going toe-to-toe with a Courser before the quest where we (nominally) first encounter one and get knocked out and wakes up later, worse for wear but otherwise okay ... until later on in the game where a test or accident exposes that the Sole Survivor is a Gen-3 Synth, created by Father EDIT for various reasons EDIT and creates a duplicate body, and uses the Memory Lounger technology to transplant the memories from the dying Sole Survivor into a new body, but political hiccups in the Institute force him to hide the Synth on the surface to escape questions from the Directors of the various divisions, where the Sole Survivor's drive to find their son overrides the normal protocols in the Synth's memory and thus the 'Sole Survivor' rides again. Also opens up a lot of potential for story-driven conflict within the factions as suddenly, you're either a potential threat, something to be protected or a possible enemy of the faction outright.

Supermutants are ugly, so no I wouldn't play one.

Ghouls are ugly, so no I wouldn't play one.

Synths are basically same as human already and will look okay, except as a bonus I could also mod parts into myself that would make me more awesome, so yes I would play one.

I'd play as an Assaultron, imagine alll the fun runnng around like that head blasting [censored] out of everything

thought about that myself...would kinda like the idea of playing as a ghoul - survivor of the bombs that has to get adjusted to his new life and all the racism OR a synth that doesnt know hes a synth and finds out during the playhtrough and is confronted with questions of what makes a human etc...great story potential there...

I assume tough that if you can not choose your "race" that ghoul has not enough mass apeal....

I prefer to play as a healthy humanoid organism.



Someone's thinking they're all pretty, eh?


...


Nothing wrong with that, I guess.

These are examples of features I whole heartedly support, no matter if I would or would not entertain the idea. It adds a principle of diversity into gameplay that is purely player choice.

Becoming a Synth, dont forget the Memory Den. So yeah its possible

FEV Programm was made after War. Supermutant, here i come.

And become a Ghoul, should be the easiest Way. Just visit the glowing Sea, without Clothes.

Synth? Sure. Ghoul? Sure why not if it's optional and characters react to me. Super Mutant? Hell no, not unless it's a mariposa super mutant.

I'd rather not be locked out of most of the map and the already limited locations.

If my Super Mutant can be as cool as TMNT, then sure I would.

As I understand the workings of the F.E.V., or Forced Evolutionary Virus, if the human that is dosed/dipped/subjected to the stuff is not irradiated, ie Vault Dwellers, then they retain much of their mental capacity even if they do get 'dumbed down'. A Super Mutant made from a Wastelander or somebody who has been exposed to large amounts of radiation will become a Super Mutant with severe mental retardation. I just love the idea that, even twisted into a monster, even dropped into an alien world where everybody will react with fear and loathing, the Sole Survivor pushes on to find their child, no matter the odds or the cost.

It's been awhile since the original Fallout games, so apologies if my grasp of the history doesn't include nerfs or retcons, I'm working on it.

Ghouls tend to be farm more random, just pockets of the population that had a gene that allowed them to survive otherwise lethal doses of Radiation, but at a cost. It destroyed their reproductive abilities even as it extended their lifespans and caused most of their external soft-tissue mass to slide right off. That the Sole Survivor might be one of these rare few could be a twist, the reason why people 'selected' for Vault 111 were picked was because the gene was tagged as a possible point of interest in a study about cryogenic suspension, and that's why the Sole Survivor and their family were picked to enter the Vault.

The Synth alternative would work very well in this ... chapter? ... of the Fallout story, and might also allow the Sole Survivor to affect the world for hundreds of years after the end of Fallout, meaning that in Fallout 5 we could hear about some sort of 'Immortal' leading the Minutemen or the Railroad or the Institute if Bethesda decides to once again 'prune' the branching story-lines of the previous game. It would also be a somewhat tragic story of being a parent 'forever', given how the game 'ends' for the Railroad/Minutemen and who you end up taking home with you.

Having all three of these options would, I feel, add a lot of life to the game for additional play-throughs, especially if certain events change due to the Sole Survivor's new 'race' and new Factions rise and open up dependant upon that Race, while other factions might become permanently hostile or need a great deal of work done or some heavy persuading to let you at least talk to them.

That's not always true and we have proof of that, even with Mariposa super mutants it's not true. Take for instance Lily, she was from a vault and dipped into FEV and look how she came out. Most of the Capital Wasteland super mutants come from a vault, where do you think they came from? we don't know what the effect for making a intelligent super mutant is, only that there are lucky ones who don't lose much of their intelligence and end up with a mental retardation.

No, I don't want to play as a Super Mutant.

Yes, I might play as a ghoul if it could be reversed.

Yes, I would play as a synth.

If properly supported I'd play all of them. Done properly it would add a lot of replay value and would a good deal of depth. You'd be increasingly limited in the amount of interaction with human NPCs as you pick a character that's less and less human. In turn it would add a variety of benefits in combat and alter the way you interact with the world.

This.

(Also, in general, I'm not a fan of things that change the appearance of my character post-creation & without consent. So the whole "whoops, you walked into Radiation Zone, you've now melted into a Ghoul!" idea would just make me throw things at the screen. )

Would we be able to shout cool supermutant lines on demand like "DIE HUMAN" "I'LL WEAR YOUR BONES AROUND MY NECK" etc?

If yes, sign me up.

I wouldn't mind being a synth but I have no interest in ghouls and super mutants

These three are specifically unrealted to vault dwelling and the past. The whole premise of the game. It's one thing to side with one of them or otherwise obliterate them as it is now. It's an entirely different leap of faith to say that you are one of them. You'd have to start a new game for sure and much that occurs now, specifically early on would be invalidated. You can become a vampire (SKYRIM). It's a bit of a stretch to go all robocop and become a Synth. I would encourage anyone with a good plot for one of these being realistic to share it here, keep me entertained today and let the creative juices flow. Below I broke out what I was thinking when cast my vote at the polls. I'm doing so very well in the polls. Tremendous. Jeb.. not so good, terrible polls.

Ghouls you'd what... miss the path to the vault because you had the map upside down?

Supermutants you wouldn't have even been alive in 2077. You'd be a mutated nerd, raging in an abandoned building long after a major part of the Fallout plot. So I say good luck fleshing that out as additional content. It'd be more like a 'mode', like arcade mode, randomly spawning into a or your world as such with no reason for it.

Synths. Same as ghouls... a major portion of the fallout story would be irrelevant and it'd require a new and heavily abreviated game as such a character.

Polls.

I would not play as a ghoul or super mutant but I would play as a synth.

It's the only one that is plausible without changing the story too much. Just like Nick Valentine. The bad guys grab the baby, shoot the spouse and swap you out with a synth who has your memories. Voila, you are now a synth who thinks she (or he) is still human.

Meh, half of the people here are boring. Why play with boring humans? Expand your freaking mind a bit more. Super mutants are essentially Orks of Fallout, which makes them super cool.

My concept for the three races is that it's the player's 'choice' to go towards Quests that will result in the transformation, but there will always be an out before you take the final 'plunge' and become a Super Mutant/Ghoul/Synth.

Super Mutant, you might get a quest shortly after leaving the Vault on your pipboy to investigate some weird shouting just to the north of Sanctuary, go up and there's some Super Mutants being led by a Primus, digging in the ground. The Sole Survivor gets jumped by a Super Mutant with a board and wakes up in a cage with several other prisoners, one of whom warns the Sole Survivor that the Super Mutants intend to 'dip' them all and turn the prisoners into more Super Mutants.

There's an option to either try to save yourself, thereby damning the other Prisoners as you use them as distractions, or damn yourself, distracting the Super Mutants so they can escape ... or if you're a high enough level, fight and kill the Super Mutants while the other Prisoners escape. If you sacrifice the Prisoners, nothing is ever mentioned except for people weeping about kidnapped family members and your own guilt, if you manage to fight off the Super Mutants, you're hailed as a friggin' hero by random NPCs who may have been fellow Prisoners or family/friends of those Prisoners.

And if you fail to kill the Super Mutants and get dipped, and stagger into the nearest town looking for aid, before the locals can shoot, or if you manage to make it to Diamond City and the Diamond City Security gets out their guns, one of the Prisoners you sacrificed yourself for runs up, shouting they know who and what you are, and explain to the trigger-happy locals what you did for them.

So you're tentatively allowed into the cities, but can now prove you're still a human being on the inside, however green and ugly you are on the outside.

Again, a totally optional quest you don't need for anything other than curiosity or a desire to play as a man (or woman!) trapped in a nightmarish body with unnatural strength and next to no fine motor skills, if a certain scientist is to be understood.

For the Ghoul, there's a abandoned military vehicle just near Sanctuary with radioactive barrels nearby. An easy fix would be to have 'experimental Rad-X prototype' as a pickup there that offers slightly better rad-immunity, but comes with a big warning that the producer takes no responsibility for side-effects, and the truck was dumped there by the soldiers after they were told they had to shoot up with the stuff in the presence of the radioactive barrels to test the effects and they decided to go AWOL.

Everything seems fine ... until you go to sleep and wake up in a pool of blood and jelly-like flesh. Step out from the bedroom and hear the people around you cry out in horror at what you have become!

At least the Rads won't be a problem anymore ...

For the Synth, maybe your Pipboy picks up an 'odd radio signal' from one of the abandoned shacks in the region just south-south-west of Sanctuary, a garbled distress call, and being the hero/mercenary/scavver you are, you rush over to either save somebody or pick over the corpses. Upon finding the shack, you instead encounter a Courser in a fire-fight with three individuals, and upon noticing you, the Courser immediately opens fire.

If you kill the Courser, well and good and you find out the trio knows one of them is a Synth, but nobody knows who, and they've been together for years and are determined to remain together until the day they all die, tell you they're making a run for the Commonwealth border and wish you good luck, leaving you with a Courser to loot.

If you fail to kill the Courser, and he's/she's very high level, well armored and equipped with the best laser-weaponry the Institute can create so for a low-level character right outta the Vault, it's going to be challenging at best, you get gut-shot and fall to the ground, your vision fading to black as you see the Courser come stomping over, looking down at you and going "Oh ... This is Courser X-26. Requesting emergency contact with ..." and your vision finally fades away ...

No, it can't end like this ... Shaun .... Nate/Nora .....

Suddenly, you're awake, lying in a dirty bed with the 'Legendary' Doctor NPC leaning over you, telling you how lucky you are to be here. When you ask what happened, the Doctor hems and haws but finally says that somebody dropped you off on her doorstep, and that you should thank your lucky stars to still be alive.

A close call, it seems, and displays how deadly the Institute is ... until you enter the Institute, and have a meeting with a certain NPC who smiles at you sadly and explains why it is you never seem to get tired anymore, and what really happened that day ...

I would love to play any of them.

Ghoul - to have an option to become ghoul, if the radiation will reach 100% of my health bar , or to die.

Supermutant - I'm not sure how you can become that. I know there are some spoilers in some factions, but I'm not sure if that was in the past or if that can happen lately too.

Synth - it seems similar to human, but it would be interesting to have different UI - like in terminator/predator - different sensors, calculations etc. - like that tracking synth g2, who keeps repeating: I have the best sensors, I can detect your presence.

Yup, agreed.

All of them would've different pros and cons but anyway, would be as fine for a change. +vouche.

Ah, the smell of vanity in the morning

I would welcome the opportunity to play any of those rolls from the start, but I feel in order to do it right each needs a separate main story . . . which Beth wouldn't do.

I wouldn't use tattoos or scars on my characters either.