Good read duder, and also. Yup.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

I would trade more open world jank and literal blue screens of death to get a better writing team on Fallout. You know like last time. IT WAS WORTH IT DAMMIT.

Your character isn't the idiot at all, Bethesda's story writers are the idiots.

This games main story is just pure horrible. It lacks any significant options outside of "which faction do you not want to get blown up", there is little to no areas where high charisma or intelligence can sway the outcome of major story plots, and like you've illustrated, switches gears in a fucking instance. I went with the BoS, and while they aren't the peaceful types for sure, it was still fucking jarring when, from their view, once they learned about the Railroad, the next thing was just "kill them all".

It actually made me not enjoy Fallout 4 the farther into the main story quests I went. So many opportunities for classic Fallout choices and interesting narrative deviations, but instead it's literally "kill these guys or you are our enemy, and they will just tell you to kill us". I know a lot of people don't like Fallout 3's story, but even that had a bunch of significant story moments that you could sway peacefully with some cunning and walking the tight-rope. And of course New Vegas was the most open in it's ending and outcomes based on how you played.

As weird as it is, and with how much time they probably were working on this game, it still seems like parts of it were super rushed. I really wonder if the "this November" announcement at E3 shot them in their own foot, because this games needs a lot of polish, and not just in the technical aspect. The story is a hot mess.

I'm on my second play through now, and I'm just going max Str, max Agi, melee weapons only build, completely ignoring the main quest from the get go. I plan to touch base with no factions, and just explore and live in the Commonwealth doing odd jobs. And so far it has been magnitudes more fun then my first run focusing on the main story.

Agreed on all counts. Fantastic thread title.

You've managed to encapsulate exactly why Fallout 4's main story is so bad. I mean, the main questlines have never been the creme-de-la-creme of Bethesda's RPGs, but the worst you could say about Oblivion and Skyrim's main questlines it's that they were sort of dull for being about a hell invasion and a dragon invasion respectively. It's hardly the only problem I have with F4, but it was underwhelming enough that I put the game down and haven't picked it up again since.

I played the game in parallel with reading this certain novels where the protagonist is enveloped in a warring state period in ancient China. So at first I felt the same way as you, but when I get into the mindset that my character in Fallout and this novel is a reflection of each other. Powerful but yet powerless in their desperate times.

The characters and factions in FO4 and their conflicts existed before you come out of the vault. To think that you, an individual, can make every okay without some sort of a clean slate is kinda...naive when I look back at it.

The writers had only 3-4 quest lines to explain the past conflict while the novel had thousands of pages to set up so...I can't blame them that much.

@tonyblue87 You want to know what I think is the absolute worst part of it all? If you flip the script and try to be a mass murdering psycho, instead of a messiah-like peace giver, the game will just totally shut you down as well. It only makes murder viable in an incredibly narrow set of circumstances; outside of the main quest, if you try and just bop people on the head, they either bounce back to life or their deaths have zero impact outside of whatever settlement you are in. No word of your misdeeds seems to get around, no alternate content (Dark Brotherhood or Caesar's Legion style) is provided. The game just halts.

So, you're left with a game that, if you're playing to try and bring some harmony to this fucked up world (as I did in my first playthrough), it literally will not allow you to do so, but if you try and become a terror right off the bat (as I did in my second), you will make absolutely zero progress. You can't win! There's no victory to be had here, unless you blindly subscribe to whatever your chosen faction is feeding you.

I mean, you can't even tell any of the other factions that you are going to be the new Director! I'm the fucking leader of the Minutemen, and I cannot tell them to work with me to push the Brotherhood out, or work with the Institute to help power the Commonwealth. I'm the number one gun in the Railroad, and I can't say "Hey, let's work together to change the Institute! No more slavery, sounds good?" I can't even tell the Brotherhood to convert the Institute into a base or at least steal all the fucking tech before we blow it sky high.

At least New Vegas allowed you to work for yourself, and gave you Caesar's Legion if you were way into murder. This game? Nothing. You cannot solve anything peacefully, and you can only get your murder on when the game feels like it. Try to force either solution at the wrong time and it all just falls apart.

I walked through The Gunners main HQ and killed everyone inside just to see if they were hiding anything cool and no-one in the world seems to give a shit. It could very well be part of a side-quest I haven't yet found, but it is a bit disorienting that no one seems to care. Even Gunners will talk about the HQ as though it's still standing.

@adequatelyprepared: If you're talking about Vault 91, it's just a place where Gunners spawn.

I don't think there's quest associated with it. The Gunners are just better armed bandits in this game. They're not important at all.

I played through the Brotherhood side and just rolled with it. Killed who they asked me to kill. Even when I knew they were questgivers. So I didn't do any quests at all for the railroad. Didn't see inside the Institute to take any of their quests either. First time seeing it was me rolling in and killing everything. The game accommodated my non-sophisticated path.

It should really give you good options if you are able to gain the trust of each faction like OP did.

I was also kinda hoping I would get some kind of second chapter of some conflict between the minutemen and the brotherhood. Because I don't imagine either side will take the other's military presence too kindly.

I've added an update to the original post chronicling an alternative choice, thinking it might have made the story better.

SPOILER: It didn't.

It's actually shocking how poorly this game's conclusion is executed. Why is there no individual quest-line wrap-up?! Every single game has had that! There's not even any niche or subtle distinctions in how each major faction ends up, it's just "They're completely fucked I guess" or "They won!" I did the Railroad ending and it was just this tedious chore of shooting through a few standard laser turrets, confronting my son (I just bust a gut when all of a sudden he was on his fucking death-bed right next to the evacuation terminal, when like 10 minutes ago he was saying "I'm sick and at some point I'll need a successor"), then making the Institute go boom and getting the most sterile, devoid-of-personality, generic ending I could have ever conceived. It's not even catered to your ending! All it says is "I've been through a lot but.... war never changes!!!!!"

I enjoyed the game but jesus, what a sour note. Like a hot fudge sundae with a something that resembles but is not hot fudge at the bottom.

I just don't get it. I beat the game today, just a few hours ago, and I can't believe it. "Hey, you're the new director of the Institute. You're in charge now, you have the final say, everyone will listen to you. BUT, you WILL kill the Railroad and I don't give a fuck what you think about it". OH BOY THANKS. It's so not disconnecting to be told you're in charge but then are immediately told to follow orders or you're the enemy. Like Preston making you the leader of the Minutemen and then commanding you at every opportunity.

The writing in this game reminds me of The Walking Dead, where drama has to happen in places where it makes no sense, character motivations change on a dime even when it makes no sense, and things just happen for no reason.

It started out with "FIND YOUR CHILD" and I was like oooh, this is kinda cool. I can't wait to see what twists and turns come my way! And then some time around you meet the Institute I just lost track of the game. I really, honestly, don't know what the story was about. Was it about making a nuclear reactor and providing power to all of the commonwealth? Was it about kicking the shit out of the BoS or Railroad? Because none of it felt satisfying. It felt very much in the vein of "Just do shit whatever I don't care".

I did what you did. I tried, very carefully, over the course of the game to work for peace. I thought we'd all be buddies by the end of the game and I'd be able to convince some of these ol' hardheads that their initial judgements were wrong and unite the commonwealth. Instead, I was hired by varying degrees of psychopath and told to murder everyone else.

The thing that surprised me was actually something at the end of the game, where Father tells you to merc the Railroad. You actually have a dialog option that explains to him that they aren't enemies, they just want freedom for synths. I can't remember what Father says word for word, but it's something like "Fuck you I'm the quest giver you have no power over me kill the railroad". And then once all of his enemies were killed, he dies and the game ends and I'm looking at my TV in complete disbelief that this shit just fell apart like tender chicken on the bone.

I was hoping to god there would be some kind of last minute twist and he'd be like "LOL Kellog was really your son and I'm just some guy you fucking scrub lol GG noob" before dying and I'd be like "OH SHIT THIS GAME IS GREAT WHOAAAA" and all would be forgiven. But no.

Oh well, at least I've got a sick fucking fortress at the Red Rocket Truck Stop.

When I hit the incredibly short end-game recap, which I think is the exact same regardless of what you do, I had 100 hours on the dot. I specifically avoided doing the main story most of the time, because I had no faith the game would wrap up well. I was definitely accurate in my blind assumption, and I'm glad I got my fill of Fallout 4 through the side quests, companion quests and just roaming around. If I had finished the main story in the first 50 or so hours, I don't know if I would have put in that other 50 that I did.

It really is about the journey with Fallout 4, because the destination is incredibly unfulfilling. There is still a ton of shit I haven't done, because doing absolutely everything would probably take another 70+ hours. I definitely plan on coming back in a year, after I've upgraded my PC and all the DLC has been released (I assume it will have, by then). I really, really enjoyed Fallout 3's DLC, so here's to that.

You know, I uninstalled Fallout 4 after about seven or eight hours of play. Then I reinstalled it because I wanted to give it another chance. I made it a total of fifteen hours in, thought about uninstalling it again, and didn't because maybe I'll want to try it again. I tried it earlier today and just felt like there were better things I could be doing with my time.

Thank you for confirming that.

I love Bethesda RPG's but the world in this game isn't particularly interesting, there aren't many awesome and identifiable places at all, and this is perhaps the worst writing that Bethesda has ever put out. Keep in mind, this is the company that forced your character to die in Fallout 3 even though there was a guy right fucking there who could walk in, do the thing, and walk out unscathed. They fixed this later, sure, but that's vanilla Fallout 3 for you. So what we're left with is a Bethesda game lacking in traditional Bethesda strengths but we still have all the bugs and shit. I don't hate this game, I honestly don't, but it's a hell of a disappointment.

On the one hand, I'm inclined to say that it's unreasonable for you to think that Bethesda should write for every permutation of you choosing to play middle of the road. That's just TOO complicated of a scenario . Deus Ex and pretty much every other faction oriented game that I can think of has the same problem.

On the other hand, I COMPLETLELY AGREE WITH YOU. While I played about 70-100 hours of the game and had a blast, I quit when I was only a few hours into the main game. The SETUP is fantastic, and when you don't do the main quest, the atmosphere and paranoia are fantastic. ... right up until you do the main quest and see how terrible it is. You can't side with the Institute because they are straight up kidnapping people and murdering them for no truly good reason. I wanted to be like, "Hey, Father, I'm cool with siding with you but can we just stop MURDERING? I feel like that's not too much to ask?" But on the flipped, rescuing Synths who have no idea that the topworld is a horror show seems similarly ridiculous. I wanted to be like, "Look. Kids. You have NO IDEA what you're asking. The world down here is pretty great. The world upstairs is like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. you don't want to go up there. At all. Ever."

Thanks for saving me hours of disappointment.

Thank goodness others agree. Holy shit. I beat the game in like 20 some hours, got my ending that had nothing specific to my choices and wrapped up nothing. I shut it down, watched the other endings on Youtube to see that they were all almost exactly the same and I haven't played it since. Even Fallout 3 had better wrap up. I'm fine with the little vignette and voice over ending, but I went with the institute and there was no "Some day in the future maybe the Institute can fix this shit because of the things I've done" It was just "My kid! He's dead now. War never changes am I right?"

All the other endings are like that too, except "I never got to see much of my son, oh well, war never changes am I right?"

Just one sentence giving some insight into how the future might be changed because of your actions. That's only 4 sentences total! One for each faction and their stupid plans.

I was riding such a fun-wave playing this game, then the story ended and it just blasted a poo-monsoon into my face.

Gee the way you put it with people being able to solve differences so easily, I guess wars never happen in real life.

Doesn't matter who you went with, all end games basically lead to the same place, you killing off the other factions. There's a lot of illusion of choice shit going on in Fallout 4.

War. war never changes...

look, if the game wanted you to have a peaceful ending everyone would be sitting around a campfire singing kumbaya.

The more I play this game, the more I appreciate New Vegas's main and side quest lines. The game can be drastically different from the beginning depending on the choices you've made. Also there are hardly any invincible NPCs.

I should play New Vegas again,

Fallout 4: War never changes because we're idiots.

What the fuck is the point of the minutemen in all this? Why did I spend so much time doing anything for those morons if they don't have a choice in anything. Or are we all missing something? Is there some super secret thing you have to do to use them for a peaceful ending or something? Because they are useless. You seem to only be able to murder two of the others out of a three choice setup. Either you work for the institute and kill the railroad and BoS. Or you work for the Railroad and kill the institute and BoS. Or, surprise, you work for the BoS and you KILL the institute and the railroad. What the fuck is the point of the minutemen here?

@sterling: They are the neutral faction that just wants a free Boston. That's why they dress up as colonials and call themselves the Minutemen.

You can side with them and they result in the demise of the institute and BoS

Don't know why anyone would expect peace from these factions since everything they do is antagonistic to the other.

I wish I could just not compare FO4 to NV

but i keep doing it and its bad

This is exactly how I felt, everyone around you is an idiot and you're just forced to play along. Worst part is the Institute, you become the leader but have absolutely no power over anything. Then you have the Railroad, bunch of ideological idiots who love playing the good samaritan while ignoring the mess they leave behind. Minutemen just are incapable of doing anything. Surprisingly, Brotherhood is the most functional faction but they are also direct threat to the development of the Commonwealth. Basically, if none of the factions are interested in improving the lives in Commonwealth, then why should I care for them.

So, I decided that I just want to set the world on fire. Next up is Desmonda's face and handful on mininukes.

I just finished it about an hour ago, and I'm so disappointed. All of the factions are either jerks (Brotherhood and Institute), boring (Minutemen), or completely hopeless (Railroad). I was most sympathetic to The Railroad, but I ended up going with the Institute because they seemed like the best hope for humanity. That was based on the thought that I'd have some control over the Institute since I was supposed to be the Director. The game makes it seem like you'll be able to decide how the Institute is run, but then doesn't actually let you choose anything. The council has absolutely no say when Father decides to put your character in charge, but then they decide to attack the Brotherhood without even consulting you, even though you are supposed to be in charge at that point.

When Father demanded that I kill Desdemona and I couldn't find a way to advance the plot without doing so (or completely betraying the Institute) I almost just stopped playing the game. It's just so frustrating how poorly they handle the illusion of choice in this game. Giving you dialogue options to resist the quest giver, but having them shoot you down until you have no choice but to give in is worse than just taking the illusion of choice away entirely. It doesn't help that there's no payoff at all after you do what Father tells you. The world doesn't feel any different (other than a few smoking craters).

I sure hope Obsidian gets another crack at this series. New Vegas had it's problems, but it is head and shoulders above Fallout 4.

Fallout 4's ending is such a disappointment especially since I found playing the game so fun. I could forgive the poor writing in Skyrim's main questline because there was so much other better stuff to do in the world. Fallout 4 feels so limiting by comparison After just under 100 hours I feel like I've seen most of the non repeating side quests and I have very little motivation to make another character and side with a different faction. Maybe I'll just play new vegas again I can make it look pretty good with mods. I sure hope obsidian gets a chance at another fallout like a lot of the rest of you are saying. I would love to see what they could do considering how fun the gameplay in fallout 4 is.

I found it interesting that the most direct (and only real) nod to New Vegas ended up being the weakest part of the game. I'm not entirely sure Bethesda knows how to write a 4-way faction struggle where you can decide the outcome of the region. They've pretty much been writing linear narratives with a cackling villain to slay in all their games (Didn't play Morrowind, maybe that's different).

When I realized that it was going to be a faction war, and exactly 4 factions, I couldn't believe how directly they had decided to use New Vegas' formula. It worked for that game because every faction had a very hard stance, and you knew that it was going to result in war no matter what you did, so you just tried to tip the scales to the faction you enjoyed the most. And you could just say "screw all you guys, I'm working with this robot voiced by a Kids in the Hall cast member, and we're going to kick all you idiots out of here!".

You kind of glossed over this because the whole thing was a mess, but why in the world does the Brotherhood want to kill everyone in the Railroad? Like, really badly? Without even trying to talk to them first? I didn't spend much time with them on their cool blimp, but are they basically just a bunch of frothing berserkers in this game? Why in the world would they want to kill a few scrappy freedom fighters in a broken down church basement? My only guess is the Brotherhood's arcane philosophy on securing and keeping tech away from people really had an awkward time defining what to do with synthetic life, and they concluded that anyone trying to aid it must be purged. Never in all 5 of the major fallout titles have I seen the Brotherhood devolve into such idiocy.

P.S: Has anyone stopped and thought about what the Brotherhood *should* be spending their time doing? I mean, the east coast chapter seems to be doing VERY well for itself. The west coast chapters however, are being obliterated by democracy. It's basically night and day between the two. That's the story i'd like to see but would probably never happen, as their paths have diverged so much. It just seems like the logical arc for the faction, to have the two meet, and well, have something happen. Unfortunately, Bethesda seems to be burying New Vegas as the little spin off they funded.

I had alot of fun playing this game and its new mechanics to weapon customization and such. However as an RPG I fully agree with your essay and yes sometimes the choices we're not executed properly by the game's writers and dammit I just wish that they leave the story and lore writing duties to Obisidian or any of the original writing from the 1st two Fallout games and just have the Bethsoft in-house dev team concentrate on the gameplay instead. I seriously believe that it would have been really something should they have agrred to that kind of development deal. I ended up joining the Institute but what was disappointing about it all was the choices even as the director you cannot make peace with other surface friends.

@ragingflower said:

They're not burying New Vegas, it's on the West Coast. Bethesda wants to make Fallout games on the East Coast. I think it was either Sawyer or Avellone who said something to the effect of there being a gentlemen's agreement that the two devs would essentially stay out of each other's sandbox.

They are all dicks except for Minutemen.. Well some of the npcs are dicks but the faction is tops legit

So my main takeaway from this thread is that what Bethesda have done, instead of building on the legacy of fallout or in any way trying to capture what made it great, is taken an iconic phrase from the series, and run it into the ground for the sake of some hack proselytizing?

I wanted to ask Father why the hell he's using human subjects in FEV experiments and ordering hits on the scientist that had a moral issue with that, destroying the government on the surface, and doing literal body snatcher shit but the option never came up. I may have missed that but it seems like the game considers "the surfacers just don't understand why what we're doing is good" a good enough explanation.

Fallout 4 is basically Shin Megami Tensei where everyone is an asshole and you have to side with neutrality and kill them all. I agree with you that the main story is pretty bad.

@radish: Railroad isn't any better, their solution to the problem is detonating a nuclear explosion to wipe off Institute. Good job guys, destroying all that research is surely going to make rebuilding effords easier but I'm glad those synths got saved, even if you killed off anyone who understood how they work and could fix them. Oh and folks are really going to appreciate that nuclear fallout, it was almost getting too comfortable to live in the city.

Yep every faction is stupid and needlessly destructive, it's really very SMT and I wish I could wash my hands of all of them.

At least to be fair to the Railroad they blew up the Institute in response to the Institute trying to murder them all but yeah it's a huge waste.

By the end of it I realized how restricted you were in actual choice, and was happy with my decision to stay with the Brotherhood and murder everything, because that's all I felt like I could do. At least their actions were consistent. Mostly, anyway.

Great post, totally agree.

I don't understand why these games can't be written better.

It's like everyone forgot the train wreck that was fallout 3s story where in every faction is working towards the same thing and has no reason to oppose each other or even do anything they do in the game. You had the enclave trying to force your father to complete his work on making free water for everyone which was a horrible change from his original goal of giving free water to everyone. So they kill the only person who knows how the purifier works for some reason only to turn the purifier on anyway which is a horrible nightmare because the world is doomed if you aren't the one to push the free water for everyone button. So you fight your way through an army of enclave to stop them from giving everyone free water so you can give everyone free water. Its not like Eden told anyone else about his plan to sabotage the purifier either so all anyone was ever planning was exactly what happened in the end. It was such a mess that made zero sense.

Ever since oblivion they have been getting stupider and stupider with their stories. At least in 4 people actually have a reason to not get along even if it's a bit flimsy for stuff like the railroad.

@oldirtybearon: That's an interesting relationship, one I suppose was born from how the IP was split in the first place. Business interfering with any narrative cohesiveness, as usual. I won't buy the "they can't communicate with each other, too far away" line iv'e heard elsewhere though. We have teleportation, functional aircraft of all shapes, and characters who were confirmed to travel coast to coast. To be fair, after posting I thought on how many references to 3 there were in New Vegas, and there might have only been one idle line about "An east coast chapter going rogue". I'm also not sure how the years match up in-game.

I really wouldn't mind Obsidian getting another shot at Fallout. I don't expect them to "fix" anything or ascend the franchise to a new level of storytelling, but I vastly preferred their approach with NV.

I just went along with what your son tells you to do. Took out both the BoS and the railroad.

The funny thing is, Piper will get mad at you. But then she's immediately back to "oh you're the love of my life", without leaving or anything.

Wait, why did you think any of these groups were ever going to work together peacefully?

Just finished the main quest line (sided with the Institute) and yeah that was rough. The Institute truly feels like the best option because all it needs is a leadership change to reverse its isolationist policies. Open its doors, start treating Synths like humans, use the nuclear reactor to power the Commonwealth. There's no reason why any of this can't happen except for the fact that the game doesn't give you these options. So now I'm left as the leader of an organization I have no control over and it seems like my companions hate me now because of it.

I don't really see how the writing is bad simply because there isn't a magic speech check that fixes everything. The Institute murders people in the night, well, just because. I think Father literally says it's "for the good of the Commonwealth." The BoS want to kill all mutants and all machines. They don't seem like factions you can just reason with

@bernard_bernoulli said:

I don't think people are asking for a magic speech check. They're just asking for (a) a little bit more compelling an argument than "it's for the good of the Commonwealth" and (b) some player agency to point out the obvious weaknesses in that argument. It's totally OK if you can't "win" an argument with one of the factions so long as the writers at least engage beyond a superficial Bond Villain level with a faction.

I'm gonna go off on a tangent here, but I think it'll illustrate what I'm talking about - In the movie "The Adjustment Bureau," there's essentially a celestial bureaucracy of angels going about making sure like happens according to the Way God Intended. Humanity isn't allowed free will because otherwise they'd throw a wrench in the whole works.

The protagonists don't just accept that at face value, they challenge the morality of such a position on the basis that everyone should have a right to self-determinate. Now, does the movie just stop there, and have the Head Angel keep on repeating that free will is bad in a general sense with no further explanation? No! He responds with specific examples - that Heaven tried giving people free will before humanity immediately sent itself into the Dark Ages. They tried again a few centuries later and immediately got two World Wars. Hence the idea that humanity cannot be trusted with free will because they are too self-destructive to use it responsibly. Now, no one says you need to find that explanation satisfying. You can totally think the lack of free will is bullshit even after all the disasters it caused. But the point is that there was at least an argument in response to being called out about it.

The same thing applies to Fallout 4. The Institute goes around murdering and slaving and generally acting like a bunch of jerks. Those aren't good actions that you would just accept without comment, you would expect some justification for why they believe they can do those things and still claim they are acting "for the good of the Commonwealth." But you don't get either one. You aren't really allowed much of an opportunity to question their actions and when you are you never get a detailed, satisfying explanation of why they think murdering or slaving is OK. It would have been a hell of a lot more compelling if they'd said (for example): "You might think us enslaving Synths is bad, but 30% of those that escape eventually go insane and start killing people. Therefore, we need to control the whole lot of them."

Can't disagree with you, yet I also don't care. I love this game and have no idea when I'm going to stop playing it. Since Morrowind, which, in my opinion, had a great story, the main story line is not the reason I play games from Todd Howard's studio.

Well if there is no payoff in the story I may as well uninstall the game. The world itself isn't that fun to be in and every character is awkward and mechanical. The crafting isn't close to satisfying enough to save the game either.