Fixing fallout 4: The Institute Redefined (re-reupload)

[@tinaherr3856]

3:45 for your point on cyborg limitations, you could just go for the New Vegas Clinic explanation. Dr. Usanagi, the implant doctor, says that there is a limit to how many implants a person can have. The maximum limit being based on the individual person's endurance. So you can just have the explanation that most people can't have too many implants, and that Kellogg was just tough enough to have a lot installed. Edit: also, one of the cybernetic pieces (that you can obtain from Kellogg in the gameplay) that Kellogg has is pain inhibitors. So pain from cybernetics shouldn't be a thing

[@amicandapulse]

I think the issue here is that Endurance as a stat is more of a gameplay mechanic than an actual property of the characters, representing a mix of both the physical health to survive the dangers of the wasteland and the mental toughness to keep going on the face of those dangers and injuries. Physical Health the Institute should be able to handle, as they can just implement a strict fitness regimen for all youth and then implant them with cybernetics at 22, since I don't think Kellogg was superhumanly healthy before he was upgraded. Kellogg’s real advantage would be his mental toughness, but the ability to ignore and withstand pain would only matter if there was pain to ignore or withstand, hence my belief that the cybernetics should be painful enough that no one but Kellogg could really handle them. I will admit I had forgotten about the pain inhibitor, since only the hippocampal implant was actually relevant to the game, and that was a good catch. We could maybe double down on the idea and say that the cybernetics are so godawful that you need a pain inhibitor to even be able to begin to handle them?

[@catswag16]

i can't believe how much better you just wrote this game's ending. now to hope someone could mod this in lmao

[@RodBlanc]

that was fucking great ending and its now my head cannon. Thank you

[@sirvile]

I LOVE the Schlock Mercenary quote! Here I thought I was alone in their fandom.

[@amicandapulse]

I got into it either just before the pandemic or during it, and 7000 pages of webcomic was a good source of dopamine.

[@mahoganydoughnut6082]

When i first played fallout 4 i figured it would turn out the old institute directors were " make unit 731 look like charity workers" kinds of scientists. And shaun having been a test subject that gained not only the trust but respect and admiration of the whole institute to the point he is now its leader would have been a beacon of progress as little as that may be. But no just a bunch of people doing whatever just because is all we got. Fallout 4 has so much potential but it feels like all the writer did was have a few bullet points for a story and say that was good enough.

[@amicandapulse]

Well, Emil Pagliarulo, Bethesda's head writer, said that he tends to base factions around one core idea. For Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood, which many people liked, the idea was his experiences with the catholic church, while for the Institute, it was the idea of "the boogeyman", always in the shadows, potentially to blame when anything went wrong. The problems is that while the Catholic Church has beliefs, rituals, and motivations that could be twisted to form the Dark Brotherhood's beliefs, rituals, and motivations, the idea of a Boogeyman is inherently external, driven not by the Boogeyman's own nature, but by what people think of it, meaning the Institute wasn't designed around its own beliefs, it was designed to fit the beliefs that the people of the Commonwealth had about it, which created an organization that did Bad Science Things because it's what Bad Scientists are supposed to do, rather than because of what they themselves were trying to accomplish.

[@soldierinsane2689]

@@amicandapulseI think they’re just very dehumanizing to the people of the wasteland, using them as test subjects. From their perspective, the dregs of the wasteland aren’t useful to eachother or the world so being used in an institute experiment is easier to justify. Kinda like the enclave, they’re a secretive group that sees themselves as beyond others. Even the board is very deceptive, constantly trying to one up eachother and put the other down. Espionage l and subterfuge are the institutes forte, my opinion? They’re using the player as a pawn.

[@Nice-ish]

There are two key elements I feel could 'fix' the settlement system (besides gagging Preston). 1.) 10+ Settlements is just too many to custom build, even for those who enjoy base building. This could be resolved by holding "building competitions" each month, either before the actual release or immediately after. Release a cutout of the map area along with the build engine for people to construct a settle in a given location, then have the community vote on their favorite. The top 3-5 get put into the game, along with the builders' names in the credits. Then, if players don't want to build in a particular location, they can choose one of the prefab ones. There's even the added benefit of building and maintaining hype over the game during that time. One of the most popular mods on the nexus for fallout 4 did just this. 2.) Add more custom npc you can recruit for your settlements. As far as I know, there is exactly one in the entire game: the twin sister of the junkie in Curies recruitment mission. You could recruit her to a settlement after a successful speech check. Adding more would effectively serve as a form of collectable. Instead of your favorite settlement being filled with generics, each face and name would have it's own story. There are plenty of side missions with favorable npc players might like to 'keep' already. That's just my two cents anyway.

[@amicandapulse]

Ooh, I thought ot would be good to have more prefabs, but having an official fan competition to make them is clever. One other issue is that before Wasteland Workshop added those garden plots, you needed actual farmland to grow food, so the settlements leaned heavily towards just being farms instead of being in interesting areas. Also for some reason the settlements with skyway sections in them never gave you any access, you had to build an extremely rickety set of stairs on your own. Is the mod Sim Settlements, or is there another? Heavily agreed on the settler variety as well. There are a couple more unique settlers than you mentioned, something like 8, but they’re few and far between, and often have no use except for upgrading a tier 3 store to a tier 4 store, and most people don't invest in cap collector heavily enough for that.

[@romulusnuma116]

This is a really good rewrite using the Minutemen to get the best ending makes a lot of sense

[@SUPERBILLY3D]

Im currently working on my own rewrite of Fallout 4, and decided to see what other people had in mind. Inlove that you and I had the same idea of focusing on "Mankind Redefined" for our rewrite of The Institute, although you went a slightly different direction than I intend to.

[@amicandapulse]

What's the slant? More evil, more reasonable, more mad science, more rogue robots?

[@hugoheavens9863]

​@@amicandapulse I also don't like how "Mankind Redefined" means nothing in the real game so I thought of a solution that I think could help both the Institute and Brotherhood: The Institute wants to wipe out humanity and replace them with what they see as superior, the never aging, vats included and (perhaps) immune to radiation beings, the Synth. The Institute had been experimenting on FEV to eventually make it into a pathogen to spread across the surface world, making them into Super Mutants. Father would not only be seen as the father of the synths but as the father of this new humanity so he would probably be worshipped as a God within the Institute. Also everyone in the Institute except Shaun and Madison Li would be synths and thus wouldn't enslave each other. If the Railroad HAS to be in the game then they could go against mind wipes like you suggested. As for the Brotherhood, this change could help the players view of the Brotherhood as now we don't see Maxon as a crazy lunatic but a man trying to save humanity. His comparison of a Synth to an Atom Bomb would be completely accurate here. The destruction of the Institute in every ending would make more sense. In the final act of the game it is found out that Shaun has an incurable illness that will soon kill him. This same illness has thus doomed every single gen 3 synth to death, meaning the Institutes plan of redefining mankind would never work, Fallout 1 style. In the final quest you have the option to confront Shaun about this and by passing a red speech check (or high charisma check) you convince him to blow up the Institute and shutdown all the gen 1 and 2 synths that you and your faction were fighting. If you don't pass this check Shaun will continue to hate you until his dying breathe for, in his eyes dooming the world. You also have the option to infect Shaun with FEV that perhaps you could find in Virgils office, saving Shaun but turning him into what he had wanted everyone else to be. And of course there is the option to side with the Institute and kill all of humanity.

[@michaelcondron1304]

The synthesizer. I always wondered what that machine was called... 🤣

[@wardenai7650]

Very interesting, keep it up subscribed and followed :) looking forward to more fallout content!

[@OliRein12]

I have a pretty good suggestion actually, why not add a speech check earlier to calm the coursers down a bit something like “well if you truly feel that way humanity has a position for you that I feel you would enjoy” then make the Coursers sort of a unified police force among the commonwealth, they can work along side the Minutemen and ensure that Synths are getting their fair share and being treated with respect. Or even make it a barter check where you can be evil and convince the Coursers that Humanity enslaving the Synths would actually be a good thing and convince them that helping humanity would be the right thing to do. Make it so this check always fails as the Coursers are already paranoid so trying to convince them the thing they’re paranoid about is actually a good thing is almost impossible. This would solidify the Coursers thoughts and end with the Synthesizer along with The Courser race being destroyed.

[@amicandapulse]

Ooh, extra futility, I like it.

[@Jaysin412]

Awesome video, just found your channel, you deserve way more subscribers man! Love me some fallout content!

[@comraderho]

Are you posting a fixing the minutemen? Love this series.

[@amicandapulse]

I think fixing the Minutemen is just sort of scattered between this and the DLC video. And maybe some potential shorts about settlements.

[@comraderho]

@@amicandapulsefair. I had always hoped that the raiders attacking Garvey were instead the Gunners sent from Quincy that you could potentially side with, seeing that the Gunners are seemingly the MOST militaristic and technologically advanced group in the commonwealth (before the BoS show up) yet the LEAST developed. Probably too wishful of thinking though.

[@amicandapulse]

@rho6107 "Hey, I know you just woke up from a law-abiding pre-war existence, but could you break down this door and slaughter a roomful of civilians for us?, I promise it'll be super morally grey."

[@samphelps856]

Thank you

[@sirenia755]

the point is that the Institute does science for themselves, it would be productive if there help the commonwealth, but instead there release super mutants and gen 3 synths which kills of mankind, I question there goals, if there want to help man, start by adding them.

[@Shay-li1yf]

Great video!

[@privateuser3726]

Why discontinue Kellog's cybernetics, I think it would be more interesting to have synths be a continuation of their cybernetics experiment being created to help with their population issues. Synths would be trying to escape because they are still in the experimental phase, since the institute is trying to find out what the effects of being born an adult with cybernetic implants would do to a person's psyche, and some synths are tired of being treated like test subjects

[@amicandapulse]

Well, I think they are partially based on knowledge gained from Kellogg, are made to replace the Institute’s aging population, and do run away because they don't like being treated as potentially defective test subjects, so we're agreed on those points. Regarding them being entirely biological, it might be cheaper to mostly stick to biology than to have to wire all of their components together, make them lower maintenace since their cells can repair their own damage, as well as making them better infiltators, since you can't just catch them with a metal detector, so I think it is ultimately a good choice, though coursers being cyborgs for a little extra kick could make sense.

[@soldierinsane2689]

Father said that the institute was about redefining mankind, not a bizarre amalgamation of man and machine. I think he was afraid of another think tank situation, a bunch of mad scientists operating past their prime. He wants to preserve humanity rather than change it into something new I think

[@amicandapulse]

@soldierinsane2689 True, but that was the base game Institute, not the rewrite Institute. Also since Kellogg was augmented either before or soon after he kidnapped Shaun, the decision not to continue the research would've come decades before Shaun's tenure as director.

[@diarmo3082]

great little video!! 200th subscriber frfr 🎊

[@amicandapulse]

Yeah, I remember when my second video sat at 17 views for a month. It's a nice improvement.

[@EP_mc]

Need you to scrutinise over the new gameplay of starfield my bro

[@amicandapulse]

I got you bro: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qX_WmYqmZ555mpY

[@7th_CAV_Trooper]

Pro tip for building post nuke world - when radiation creates two headed cows and dear, giant bugs, and death claws you don't need an origin story for super mutants. Why did they ever waste time on this dead end lore?

[@amicandapulse]

Super Mutants being created by exposing humans to the Forced Evolutionary Virus was a major part of the first Fallout game, which came out in 1997.

[@Posty-vw9jc]

on the settlements thing, As someone else said there's too many settlements. there should only really be a few settlements. a couple big ones scattered around the map. each should have some uniqueness attached to them that we just dont get in the vanila game, just something to make them stand out from each other. I think it would've been awesome if you could've just taken an area and turned it into the next diamond city. the building mechanics are great but I dont think most players enjoy placing every single asset. instead people should've had the choice to do it hearthfire style and build their settlements bit by bit selecting different addons as they go.

[@amicandapulse]

@@Posty-vw9jc I mostly agree, though there is a bit of a trade-off there, as it is useful to have a large number of small settlements when you just need to drop off 150 pounds of scrap and pick up a few mutfruits for the road, but I do think they could cut out a good number of random farms in the northern half of the map, and maybe move The Slog so it isn't so close to Finch Farm. I still find the lack of a Quincy settlement weird as well.

[@darkamulet5768]

I had ideas on how to fix the Institute in a concept of a mod where I WAS Father instead. It was more so a thought experiment than to say I'm better than the writers at Bethesda. So here's my proposals: 1) Father isn't your son, he's instead your grandson to help establish a timeline of leaderships within the Institute and really, Shaun was thawed out earlier on and did sadly died of cancer back when the Institute was still a work-in-progress. However, because Father's your grandson and truly was a byproduct of the Institute, he's less inclined to set you free as he has no real emotional connection to you compared to Shaun. Maybe somewhere in the Institute are a set of portraits similar to WALL-E to help reveal who steered the figurative ship before you potentially could. 2) He's not replacing people with synths to monitor the Commonwealth or to upgrade humanity. Instead, he feels this can truly replace and control humanity itself as unlike regular people, synths in the eyes of the Institute are incapable of independent thought or have true feelings since it's all artificial and pre-programmed. Think about it, are humans truly capable of reproducing when many live in filth and irradiated squalor for so long? Many are also still racists, sexist, scumbags, liars, cheats, and synths could NEVER do such things, right? That's why they didn't even bother approaching Diamond City after the Broken Mask Incident, they just couldn't admit their mistake there. In the eyes of the Institute, they're the last form of humanity that should really exist as everywhere else has been tainted beyond usefulness in more ways than one. 3) Why did they kill the likes of the CPG, most of Vault 111, and even banish the ghouls of Diamond City? The CPG was corrupt, broken, and never going to go anywhere as it had no real political standing like say the NCR. It had no real philosophers, scientists, lawyers, nothing, just a bunch of settlers with hollow dreams for peace. As for most of Vault 111, that was Shaun's doing once he became the Director and mainly it's because none of them had any scientific standings, so they were deemed as useless even if it could've boosted the numbers of the Institute. Who knows, maybe they could've harvested some of the DNA similar to what happened in Vault 75 in order to avoid inbreeding while remaining mostly closed off for 2 centuries. As for the ghoul banishment, they knew these creatures would eventually go feral, so in the eyes of the Institute, they saved Diamond City, not purge it of any good people. OH, and it turns out the end of University Point wasn't their fault. They did want to go there to see if they could find revolutionary nuclear technology there, but by the time they arrived, Raiders had stormed the place so the Institiute forces had no choice but to shoot and quickly search before leaving in case anymore showed up. Of course, since digital phones don't exist in Fallout and rumors like to spread like wildfire, many chalked off this event as just the Institute being evil again. 4) Why does he appoint YOU as the next director of the Insitute? Two reasons. One, he's not dying like Shaun, Father is instead secretly bored of being cooked up in this facility for so long, he wants to go out there and see if it's truly as hopeless as this faction makes it out to be. He only spouts Institute propaganda to avoid getting impeached. And two, this only happens when you get good word in from the other superiors via the Institute missions similar to what happened in Fallout New Vegas Old World Blues DLC with the Think Tank's personal quests rather than mere nepotism. 5) What about the Super Mutants? That was Shaun's doing in his attempt to indeed make the perfect human as there had to be a way to make someone super strong and durable without sterilization or brain deformation, right? Sadly, the test subjects got loose and took samples of the FEV with them to infect the rest of the populace similar to what happened in Fallout 3 with Vault 87. Why didn't they try to stop them? The Institute had to spend time recovering and actually training their forces to be able to fight these monstrosities when out on the field, but their goals changed once synthetic humans were made possible after so long. They also came to learn they can't truly end the Super Mutant horde as more keep coming from other places such as Huntersville from Fallout 76 and Vault 87 from Fallout 3. 6) Father's not blind to the fact that you came here thanks to an enemy faction, so instead of willingly letting you inside right away after turning off Synth Shaun, he asks about your loyalty and if you don't respond well, you're automatically banished as again, he's got less of an emotional connection to you than Shaun would. Perhaps the other divisions only become truly accessible to you once you do each of their quests. What was the deal with Synth Shaun anyway? It was basically bait on a hook to compel you to stick around the Institute, possibly with the offer to get your dead lover also "revived" as a synth too in order to reunite the family. Maybe he planned on making a Gen 4 synth that was actually capable of growing up from infancy to adulthood but still retain some form of longevity immediately after. 7) Did he let you out as an experiment? Nope, he just knew keeping the power to the vault on for so long would not be worth draining the Insitute's emergency generator for, so he manually turned it off to get started on that Beryllium Agitator plan. Can any of these ideas also work for an Institute revision, Mic & Pulse? It was again just a big thought experiment than me wishing to officially indulge in coding and stuff to make it an official mod with voice-acting and stuff...

[@amicandapulse]

I'm not a modder either, and am also using this as a kind of thought experiment since I want to be a writer someday. I'm also definitely not better than William Shen, and think it's much easier to see the flaws in a finished product than to create something from scratch, even though you should probably take notice when everyone during development thought your dialogue system was terrible and then all of the players also hated it looking at you Emil. A lot of the story of the base game is about the tension between doing what's right for the Commonwealth and what's best for your son, and I think breaking the connection with your son wouldn't leave a lot of reasons not just to blow them up on the spot unless they got a whole lot nicer more quickly. Although, you could have your Grandson and Father both around, with Father freeing you out of nostalgia and wanting to really meet you before he passed, and you ending up becoming a rival to Father’s less sentimental son, though I think Father still works best as an emotionally stunted weirdo with one friend, no family, the willingness to create a robotic copy of his childhood self to emotionally manipulate his own father, and the desire for that robot to have the childhood he never had. He's such a freaking traumatized weirdo. I do agree that it was weird that you were made director so fast. I'm currently working on seeing if I can still squeeze a Railroad rewrite into the cracks between the other faction rewrites, and I think getting the division heads to support you would play a big role in any changes you were making. There's also the question of whether you were a good candidate or whether everyone else was a bad candidate. Ayo's a prick and not actually a division head, Alan Binet might be too sentimental, especially for your version, Dr. Li's not loyal enough, and nobody cares enough about Bioscience or facilities to let them be in charge. Or you could be a synth, and Father thought it was time for a synth to lead the Institute but knew that it wouldn't gain widespread support, and, by making a synth copy of the original Nate, who was dying due to the vault slowly failing, he could pass it off as based on nepotism/sentiment/wanting an outside rather than the first step in the Synths taking over the Institute.

[@darkamulet5768]

@@amicandapulse Oh my, I just thought up a really stupid idea for the Railroad involving the trains. Imagine instead of breaking in by blowing up a side of the Institute or using the teleporter, they actually locate the Institute underground and then smash a big armored subway vehicle straight into it like a charging bull, maybe then use it to help cart away the synths wanting to flee. Probably too cartoonish to pull off, eh?

[@amicandapulse]

@@darkamulet5768 I think that would be extremely resource intensive for a faction as broke as the Railroad. Breaking in through subway tunnels or maintenance tunnels in general also makes sense though. You could tie it into the part of underground undercover where you cause a collapse that lets a few synths lay low and make weapons. The Institute would want to fix the problem, so they'd have synth work crews clear the rubble, but when the rubble was finally cleared it would be revealed that the Railroad had tunneled into the cave the Institute was expanding into while the rubble kept the Institute from noticing, and got in that way.

[@darkamulet5768]

@@amicandapulse So what about a possible three-way ending? Rather than say using the Minutemen to help spare the Railroad and Brotherhood of Steel, you could bring back the cut content where you challenge Maxson thanks to defending Danse so you can become the next Elder and in turn, convince the Railroad to also come along for the ride (either with intimidation or compassion) and while the Institute is cleared of mostly everyone, it's not blown sky-high as there's plenty of tech to salvage from it, right? Maybe a new faction is born from this unification and combined assets called the Neo-Society or something, especially since you aka the Sole Survivor know perfectly well how the old world functioned and can therefore restart it here with the nice + spared scientists from the Institute rerunning the science division, the Brotherhood of Steel being the military protection, the Minutemen being the true civilian defenders, and the Railroad being the architectural experts of sorts? Maybe Vault 111's cryogenic pods are also fixed so if you start growing a bit too old, you can just pop back inside and see society return in perhaps a millennium?

[@amicandapulse]

@darkamulet5768 Honestly, I don't really want there to be a totally perfect ending. I do agree that it's dumb that everyone decides to nuke the Institute instead of trying to claim it, but at the same time my brain goes, "but what if the Institute scientists overloaded their own reactor instead of allowing the Brotherhood to take what they had spent centuries developing?" Instead of "and so the Brotherhood captures it and researches it in peace". And now I'm thinking that even a Brotherhood-Railroad team up might suck for the Railroad because the Brotherhood's attack wasn't exactly subtle, and the Institute might prepare to defend themselves by taking all of the Gen 3's with civilian programming and using their recall codes to override them into acting as soldiers, thus preventing the Railroad from saving any of them. So thank you, foolish mortal, for your dreams of peace have only become food for my cruelty.

[@dmitritelvanni4068]

Have ron pearlman voice who? Can't make it out.

[@amicandapulse]

Sole. The Sole Survivor/Nate/You.

[@Dawndreams174]

I feel like the proposed ending is slightly too much of a departure from the spirit of the current canon. I would rather have the main character being the counter balance to shaun, ofc being his father, thus conflict erupting from that relationship.

[@koffiewolf]

i never understood what they gain from the end products they get from putting generations of research in those fields. They are not going to replace themself with a Synth are they even planning on becoming cyborgs? I doubt they want themself give mutant powers so you only made more mutants to fuck with the surface? Also the leader dies of a rare form of cancer but they never had the idea of putting minds into a computer or someting like that. You could there is ingame logic to it like robobrains yes they are not perfect but its the uberly awesome underground science faction they should be able. What about putting the leader into a synth body? see there are scifi science options there. Lets take a final example so the farming research program that replaces farmers in the Commonwealth to study radiation on crops. You can do that underground its easier and less obvious then having a synth network just to study fucking plants.

[@sirenia755]

you are unable to alter the factions to do good, it would work that way.

[@evanharrison4054]

I've said it and I'll say it again: There's no earthly reason to try to rehabilitate Fallout 4. Play the first half of the story, play the DLCs and then stop because it doesn't get better than that and the rest is just a timesink. I'm interested in one thing and one thing about Fallout: letting dedicated, passionate devs like Obsidian take a whack at the property. It's an interesting setting, being dragged down by increasingly mediocre entries. The high point was clearly New Vegas, and that's the direction we should force Beth to take. Letting better people do it instead. ...of course, Fallout 4 made more money than all the previous Fallout games put together, so the only possible recourse we, as fans have, is to boycott the entire thing. I, for one, ain't buying Fallout 4 or 76. They say "vote with your wallet" and I certainly don't approve of Fallout taking this direction.

[@amicandapulse]

My Earthly Reason: It was my entry into the series, and playing it helped me get through an incredibly tough time in my life, which also caused it to be something of an Autistic Special Interest, but unfortunately after playing too much of it I came to see its flaws and my unconditional love for it turned more mixed, but my obsession with the series remains, and if I don't get my thoughts about it out then I will just keep replaying them in my head for the rest of my entire life. Also, if you're not buying fallout 4, does that mean you haven't played it and this is a secondhand opinion, or is it a Gamepass or piracy thing??? Also Also: I'm less than confident in Obsidian being able to make a worthy successor to New Vegas, given that the New Vegas team doesn't exist anymore and The Outer Worlds was mid. Also Also Also: I do have some hope given that Will Shen, who wrote Far Harbor, which I would definitely call the high point of Fallout 4, seems to be rising through the ranks.

[@evanharrison4054]

@@amicandapulse Hey, I didn't mean you should hate it. It's a decent shooter and it has a halfway serviceable story. Sorry to hear about your hardships. If it helps, I also played it when I went through a rough patch. It kinda cheered me up. Low effort, low stakes game, just turned my brain off and let the trigger finger do the talkin'. For your information, I played it because a friend had it. Finished all the DLC and half the main stuff. The rest I watched as youtube videos, but it really just feels like an open ender and I don't really go for those. When a game ends, I like it to end, not...prime me for some live service crap. ...again, sorry if I came off as standoffish. I really really love the Fallout series and I don't really like what it's turning into these days. If the world ends, Fallout 1-4 will be there on some disks, but 76 will literally be an abandoned piece of thing that nobody will remember 5 years after the servers get the bullet to the back of the head.

[@amicandapulse]

@@evanharrison4054 Well, if the world ends, then I think getting access to the world of Fallout isn't going to be that hard.

[@evanharrison4054]

@@amicandapulse Hey, since you took the time, let me tell you what my number one problem with Fallout 4 is. Maybe you find it interesting. I went in mostly blind. I made a character that I think best represents me(as I always do) and I went on to do as any RPG allows me to act as close to what I'd do as possible.(I like to roleplay as myself in other worlds, sue me) I walked outside of the vault, met Codsworth, the dog, built up Red Rocket into a nice little place for some people to hang about...you get the point. Typical goodie two shoes play, like I always do. I stick to the Minutemen because they are the epitome of what I want to see in the world. Neighborhood militias policing their small communities. I don't even mind Preston. He hooks me up with people who need help, I show up, blast the bad guys away. It's a sweet gig. The Minutemen seem like the group you wanna lead. Then I decide to check out this place, Nuka World. Seems like a laff to visit Disneyland post-armageddon, innit. I show up, I get put through a gauntlet, I am forced to fight the boss of the place, and then I'm apparently made the new boss of a bunch of criminals. I am a good guy, but...I mean...what do you do? Slaughter all of them? Because if you didn't, your job becomes clearing out Nuka World from dangers and having the gangs establish their turfs. ...again, I know you know what I'm talking about. I'm getting to the point. So you do all that, you win Nuka World, you decide to go home, and then they push you to start making raider settlements in the overworld. See, here is what really bugs me: Preston tells me I'm going to get kicked out of the Minutemen if I don't disassociate myself from being the gang boss. Me, the leader. I thought I take over the gangs, bring back the muscle, and use them as a battering ram against the bad guys. I own their asses. They do what I tell them to do. I feel like I did an amazing thing, assembling a giant fighting force of battle hardened men, in a world full of supermutants and deathclaws and shit, but I can't even use "hegelian dialectics" to "synthesize" a state where the gangs provide protective services to people who produce food and medicine and such? A good Fallout would give me the opportunity to pull pretty much all the groups together into a state of mutual understanding, provided I have a high enough speech skill and I go through some extra steps to achieve a nonviolent victory. Hey, if you ever wanna talk Fallout or something, I'm more than happy to. Contrary to appearances, I'm a nice person. ...you should hear the rant I do when the civil war in Skyrim comes up. The short version is I sympathize with Ulfric, but he's a damn moron for starting his(otherwise justified) rebellion in the middle of everything else going on. The Thalmor alone are reason enough to keep the empire together. I lock Elijah in the vault, I help the Think Tank, I make Joshua Graham see that peace is a possible path. ...pissed me off that I didn't get an ending to Nuka World. I loved every minute of that thing.

[@amicandapulse]

@evanharrison4054 Yeah, Nuka World was weird. It's the focus of the second half of my "Fixing Fallout 4's DLC" video, the first half of which is kind of a mess since I tried to put all of my miscellaneous thoughts in one video and could probably be skipped. I think I shared a lot of your ideas. My take was that since the park has a lot of slaves in it, you could simply say that if you start killing the raiders then they'll detonate the collars of the slaves to prevent an uprising, so if you want to save anyone, you need to play along long enough to disarm the collars. Also I suggested that the raiders should be Gunners instead, since they were underdeveloped in the base game.

[@duckterdoland3881]

I played it on my ps4 and despite people trashing the game I thought Survival Mode was really cool, until my game started crashing constantly. It's shit

[@amicandapulse]

Oh yeah, survival mode without mods is... not great. The whole of downtown Boston is so unstable that I honestly just find it easier to use the Cheat Terminal mod to teleport myself from location to location there.

[@duckterdoland3881]

@@amicandapulse I just wanted to look for trash and drink dirty watter, not teleport xD thank God for new vegas. And thank you for beeing you

[@gaulicwarlord]

“I don’t know how to make that work without a pane of bulletproof glass” I enjoyed the analysis, and agreed for the most part, but honestly the fact that you have to kill Kellogg is one of the worst parts of the game for me. Like fallout 3 you can’t really do a true pacifist run, and I think being forced to kill Kellogg to progress was a missed opportunity. I mean yeah obviously irl you would liquidate anyone who kidnapped your child, but this is supposed to be an rpg, at least in theory. Wish they would have made it to where you could join up with Kellogg if you’re doing an evil playthrough, or at least talk him down using speech checks. To me it’s one of many ways where the game railroads you into playing the way they want you to play. Doesn’t help that they provide a characterization of Kellogg right after with the memory den scene, which I thought was cool. Anyway like I said good analysis wish the writers would have used the same logic but Emil was the head writer so logic wasn’t on the table from the beginning.

[@amicandapulse]

It'd be tricky to balance having him on your side, as he could basically say, "two to beam down Mr. Shaun" and you'd skip the entirety of act 2, though I suppose he could be persuaded into a sort of truce, telling you about the scientist he was supposed to chase into the glowing sea, and offering to tell his bosses that he was already gone when you got to Fort Hagen and couldn't have stopped you, but not actually helping you get to the Institute. He's not a character with any particular goals beyond, "stay alive and keep smoking", but he does seem like the kind of guy to go a little rogue just to make things interesting. He could take the place of X6-88 in the Synth Retention quest once you got to the Institute, but I don't know what he'd do when reforms came up, as, again, his main motives are cigars and survival.

[@gaulicwarlord]

@@amicandapulse "and you'd skip the entirety of act 2," I agree, but that could be interesting too. Like okay, maybe you kill him, but you just screwed yourself out of a way to get to the institute faster. Could be a quandary of sorts, like I jumped the gun and killed Kellogg too quick and then now I have to do all this extra stuff to get to the institute. Maybe you need to do some jobs for Kellogg first before he could trust you, or as you said rather well, he just gives you the location of Virgil. That's three outcomes out of one decision they could have implemented, but that's kind of the point that I am making. By making you kill him, they remove a lot of player choice. Also Kellogg could be implemented as part of the theoretical raider questline, like if you sided with the raiders in Concord, and had a good rep with them, then you and Kellogg could team up to take over the commonwealth or institute or something. All of this is just spitballing, and as far as I know none of us here are video game writers, but the main theme of this video and a lot of criticism of fallout 4 is that it forces you to play how it wants, to feel how they want you to feel. Which is sad because there are some damn good characters in this game, it's a shame to see them go to waste in many respects due to the subpar writing or player options.

[@amicandapulse]

It is odd that not killing Kellogg could be both the Good option, as Killing Is Wrong (TM), or the Bad option, as he offers Villain Team-Up Potential. I could see an option to kill Virgil instead of working with him in exchange for passage to the Institute. Proving you can replace Kellogg one way or the other.

[@anthonymedynski9174]

They should work on making the institute laser weapons not garbage

[@amicandapulse]

I say switch to pulse guns, since there's no point having 2 laser types with almost no gameplay differences. Fo2's pulse guns and FNV's LAERs were too powerful for early game, but you could easily say the Institute traded some power for affordability and reliability.

[@DavidSavagebedalus]

It's a great ending, thanks for sharing this

[@brodieorr5393]

I think it's really funny that I've seen a dozen rewrites of this game by amateurs that are far better than the absolute hack of a writer Emil paguilaro's

[@brodieorr5393]

I think what really drives me crazy about the institute is that they tried to recreate project unity, but they didn't bother understanding the nuance that made the master, and fallout in general, so compelling

[@amicandapulse]

In fairness, I never really figured out what to do with the Railroad, so I'll grant that creating an entire internally consist story from scratch is much harder than poking holes in an existing one.

[@brodieorr5393]

@@amicandapulse don't get me wrong, I totally agree. I don't mean to imply that writing a story is easy, let along one that takes player choice into account.. However there was a noticeable, exponential drop off in quality after Emil got promoted to head writer

[@amicandapulse]

@brodieorr5393 I think a major cause of the problems with the Institute is that according to Emil, the basic concept behind them was that they were the Commonwealth’s Boogeyman, which the game itself is fairly explicit about, and while that sounds okay at first glance, it comes with the problem that a Boogeyman is defined by how other people feel about it, rather than what it is, so rather than working to fulfill their own goals they just kind of go around doing the evil science that the people of the wasteland assume they're doing.