Thoughts on Cyperpunk 2077

CD Projekt Red has been working on Cyberpunk 2077 since 2013, though most of the team had to be put onto the Witcher 3 to get that finished and out the door.  At the E3 conference a limited live demo of the alpha code and finished material was demonstrated, and a very few reports from that demo have come back.

First off is that Cyberpunk 2077 is a first-person only game (or with limited times as 3rd person available).  Those players who have come to love the 3rd person game genre are a bit riled up at this, but do remember this code is still in alpha phase, so this may not be set in stone.  I can play both types of game and have a preference for the 1st person perspective over the 3rd person perspective, but that was not always the case.  What I enjoy about 1st person is getting a limited but deep view of the world from personal perspective, which creates immersion for me as a player.  I have problems getting immersed into 3rd person games as there is just too much of the game world I can see and experience that way.  I'm more than willing to get into situations where I know I will be swarmed as the 6th sense of being in 3rd person allows me to maneuver my PC in ways to alleviate that and address it.  Getting absolutely blind-sided is difficult in 3rd person, save for the 'pop-up' mechanic of hidden creatures underground, which when used sparingly keeps one on their toes.

What I don't like about 3rd person games is the general lack of accuracy for aiming of ranged weapons, and if a game is going to actually block out the rest of the world while I use a scope, then what is the purpose of 3rd person perspective if I'm just going to be able to do 1st person precision aiming?  All or nothing, mixing modes can be interesting, yes, yet that sudden black screen around a scope picture is immersion breaking in the extreme.  Still better than the 'get your aim point on the target and hope you can hit it' sort of deal, I suppose.  If CDP can put forward detailed and compelling content in 1st person, then that becomes a selling point.  Everyone loved the certain amount of detail that 3rd person got in The Witcher 3 and I'm not about to complain for more and more compelling content from a 1st person perspective.  Besides, who knows what the implants will get you, instead?

Second off is that there is a basic system of faction and class, along with reputation that backs these things for the PC.  The stats involved revolve around those of the cyberpunk ethos, which is to say that some of the traditional RPG stats are in the game, like Strength and Endurance/Constitution, but others, like Cool, are put in to represent other factors (like how you keep your Cool during certain situations, which is not well represented by either a separate charisma or luck stat).  What you do in the world will determine how you are seen by others, thus reputation amongst certain groups of people will make you more affiliated with them and the factions inside of it (depending who you work with or piss off).  That said these are not assigned at the start but what you get by playing the way you want to play.

How you play is determined by your background, and while there were only a couple of choices available in the demo, these represent your actual reasons for being in Night City and what some of your personal objectives are.  Are you looking to make a name for yourself?  Trying to find a lost love who disappeared?  Just an odd-jobber who sees this as a good place to pick up some work?  I expect that these will become more varied as CDPR adds in more stories, back story and content.  This is a welcome change from traditional RPGs where you are either that starting novitiate or have some nebulous history that you have to try and role-play given the situations in the game.  A good RPG allows for multiple paths to an objective and for play style that is part of a back story.  While a trans-human, that is a human with multiple cybernetic implants that can be swapped, is seen in the demo, it may even be possible to be someone who uses just exterior equipment to achieve similar ends.  The concept of a 'techno' path that doesn't utilize cybernetics (as such) is part of the genre just as the fully wired in 'net' specialist who has fully embraced the idea even into their own consciousness is part of it.  Hopefully that is something the player will get to determine and choose as this makes a difference in role-playing style.  Implants gives abilities that cannot be easily removed if they can even be found, while having none and using technology to interfere with cybernetic implants means you are dependent upon such equipment but are not so easily foiled through such attacks.

From what was demonstrated there are multiple ways to handle situations and jobs, and you determine your own style of play based on your background, skills and attitude towards those groups in the game.  If you want to go in guns blazing, then go for it.  Want to be a sly social engineer?  Go for it.  The thief who was never there?  Go for it.  Reputation for any play style is rewarded, while factional fame or infamy are also garnered by what you do.  How you do things gets some level of respect on the street, amongst groups and factions, and becomes a very real part of the cyberpunk genre.  Quests, as such, can be done however you like...or even not doing them at all or double-crossing the quest giver.  Experience, as such, is garnered by play style not via simply 'go here, get that' of the fetch quest variety, although that can also be done if you are just someone picking up jobs from people.  I welcome this as a good game mechanic and good concept for gaming that rewards a player getting into their character and doing things their own way.

While you don't get a blank slate you do get a slate that allows for how you approach your past in a way that suits you for a player character.  You may or may not have a companion, friend or lover that you work with and I expect that will be up to the player.  Solo play has certain benefits in that you aren't worrying about a companion, but you also don't have their skills and abilities to work with, either.   Social engineering and networking is a very real part of the cyberpunk game concept and if CDPR has done their background work for this, then working through a network of contacts means being able to get through some missions or jobs via that slowly building affiliation network with varying degrees of trust involved.  That is one damned complex mechanic to make and I hope that CDPR puts a large amount of effort into it as it can pay dividends and even shape the entire way a player goes through the game.  The smooth talker able to get rivals to work for them in certain ways and even together for projects of mutual benefit can be a very real possibility if you have enough street cred, reputation, and such, plus good interpersonal skills to pull it off.  Making that a viable and credible way to play in a cyberpunk world takes skill and care in crafting, and these are hallmarks of CDPR games which have a high amount of polish to them.

What CDPR is also known for is cut-scenes, lots of cut-scenes, and this is something that should be reserved for important events.  If I, as a player, have any real criticism of The Witcher 3, it is the sheer number of cut-scenes and those which are pre-rendered that do not fit current character appearance.  Cut-scenes can add to immersion, yes, but they can also break it by putting a 3rd person camera in to get a cinematic view that, while impressive, becomes something of an immersion breaker in a 1st person perspective game.  Even in 3rd person games where the characters are better rendered than what the game engine can accomplish normally, such scenes remind the player that they are in a game and without any control during the length of the scene save for maybe a decision or two.  Not being able to have an attitude, a way to use body language to express the player's stance on meetings or activities, or even choosing appropriate wardrobe to better suit a situation and being stuck with whatever the game designers put in will break immersion.  This is especially so in a game where these things matter, and much of cyberpunk is about what you wear, how you hold yourself and how you approach situations on an inter-personal basis. 

Doing that with a live action setting with other NPCs walking around and getting in the way has been one of the most immersion breaking experiences in modern gaming: having a talk with an important NPC only to have an NPC uninvolved with the conversation walking through it or even not pathing around either of the participants and pushing them out of conversation distance is one of the great sins of immersion breaking.  There doesn't need to be a freeze effect on everyone else to accomplish this, just putting in a script that gives a maximum approach distance that other NPCs have when they are not in conversation with those that are in conversation.  Add to that a 'stop walking around for a few minutes' when it triggers will at least keep them out of the frame for those scenes that are not pre-rendered.  Basically a script that tells other NPCs to 'stay out of the way and don't do much of anything' script would be good for this.

And if we are on the topic of NPC scripting, how about having them recognize when they are walking in place due to an obstacle, like a low wall or house, that is in the way of their path?  Somehow this simple concept has been overlooked in gaming, and even in The Witcher 3 you can find people with a walking animation who are facing a wall, a building or even stuck against a small rock unable to path around it.  Live action cut-scenes can look really nice but can also be a comedy of errors, with companions wanting to talk with you in the heat of battle where one or both of you might get killed by standing up and having a heart-to-heart chat.  How about a danger sense for NPCs that isn't magical but simply makes them realize that, in the middle of combat with enemies approaching or nearby, might NOT be the time for a little chat?  Saving an NPC from a scripted monster only to have a random one show up while you are talking does break immersion.  Especially if you are doing it against a wall where their path finding has gotten them stuck for the past 5 minutes.  This should not be a high bar to clear in modern gaming, but it is.  The inability of NPCs to jump over small obstacles is another problem, part of the path finding problem, but one that should be available so that someone other than the PC has the magical ability to jump up and over small rock or low fence.  What gives with that, anyway?  Still this is just a wish list idea, not a real one I'm expecting to see.

Talking about wish lists, how about every NPC have a back story and life?  For all the grand immersion of The Witcher 3 in places like Novigrad, where you see so many people having a life and doing things (like lifting invisible crates to pretend to work) just how many of them can you actually interact with?  How many actual street vendors are there in The Witcher 3 there?  Well over 20 would be my estimate.  And how many that call you over to offer their wares are ACTUAL vendors?  Perhaps 5 or 6.  In a brothel with so many women to choose from you can actually choose from 3 of them, even when they call you over to their table, it is likely they aren't one willing to spread for a few gold coins.  In fact the only 3 that will have to be marked on your map.  That is not 'immersive'.  And while you do get a bit of backstory, it goes nowhere.  Want to help the woman wanting to set up her own establishment?  Nope, can't do that.  Why?  I mean by that point in time or any time later, Geralt can be pretty flush with coin so investing in a business and safe house for the long-term isn't such a bad idea.  To take that a step further, how many street hooks, prostitutes or courtesans can you approach for a good time?  Zero is my count, even after a number of them actually seem to want a Witcher or possibly would prefer one (given the mutations and such it is unlikely that any Witcher carries a communicable disease).  What goes for them goes for much of the rest of the NPCs as well, and there are only a few that you get to actually interact with and the rest are window dressing.  For all the immersion of Novigrad, it barely has more people to interact with than in Skyrim's Solitude where at least everyone running a business there is willing to at least trade with you.  That is an exaggeration, but not by much.

While those are 'wish list' items, they are ones that make sense in a densely populated city, which is Night City in Cyberpunk 2077.  Walking along the street you should be able to get into a quick chat or at least get told off with a 'not your type' or 'not here but somewhere else' or some equivalent and have that as a follow-up.  Even if there is a short list of random NPC interests that have some branching to them and things that can be done with or for them for profit or pleasure or to just find someone to kill time with, it should be possible.  Will most NPCs have boring lives?  Yup, its expected.  Should they actually have a backstory and be a part of the world and fit their reputation and job, plus have personal things they like, dislike, need and want?  Why yes, yes they should.  And every shop, street vendor or other person running a business should be an actual vendor of the goods they have on display and even be willing to sell the display model if they are out of stock.  What is it with vendors not willing to sell what is on the shelves, anyways?  I thought these places were shops willing to sell their goods.  I'm not looking for filler quests or 'radiant quests', but for actual content that has some meaning to the NPCs involved.  Getting to know people exercises social skills and can be a handy way to get an out of the way refuge that no one is expecting you to go to when you are on the run.  Just a place to stay for a few hours or over night and then you're off again.  Is that so hard to accomplish in the modern world of RPGs?  Ditto that for sex workers: if you damned well call out to me, it has to be for a reason and that reason had better be sex related with exchange of funds for sex involved.  I expect that flirting in that line of business doesn't get you a long life save in the 'better' establishments...and those establishments, if you are in good with the management and you get your pick of the house, that pick had damned well better have more than a quick roll in bed available.  Social skills understand social boundaries, use them and exploit them to help get an advantage and to even find someone you might want to be with for the long haul. 

That shouldn't be just a couple of pre-made NPC companions, but something that is the equivalent of a 'getting to know you' period with some pre-made templates and scripting, and then finding out if it is possible to go beyond that which should then have some set templates and scripting by individual.  For the long haul a final set of templates and scripts should be available to move that NPC into a longer-term affair with reciprocity and all the advantages and disadvantages of their jobs, skills and abilities.  Possibly even have a training set-up so that the player can work with them or with trusted associates to train that NPC into a full partner beyond just friend to lover to affair to long-term relationship to companion.  Full partner with all of that rolled into it will be damned rare, true, but that is due to lack of player time.  Still allowing players the agency to pick and choose, find someone who fits their bill and not just have the individual thrust upon them, that would truly be 'immersive'.  At the end you get an NPC that starts out with a set of stock templates with adjustments, but who then becomes suitable to the relationship and begins to fit the player's play style either to boost it or give secondary venues that would not normally be available.  There were a few NPCs I felt that Geralt could definitely do that with in The Witcher 3 and not a single one of them were available for such an experience.  And there are a few that might even benefit by being with Geralt and find a much, much better life for themselves in the doing...and possibly even offer a way out of the Yennefer and Triss triangle.  A fresh perspective would have been nice, although I'm sure it would conflict heavily with all the lore. 

That is what player agency is all about, isn't it?  That's why I'm glad that there is a thumbnail backstory to the PC available in Cyberpunk 2077 as it can be fleshed in to the extent that the player wants to flesh it in.  Or not.  Player agency is required in RPGs, and if that means deciding to throw away your past life mid-way through the game, piss off everyone you know and go for broke in a different direction...then that should be available, too.  While that sort of story change does have to be considered and it makes for a horrifically complex game, that is what CDPR got into in trying to make a cyberpunk style of game.  You can play things simply or you can move laterally and obliquely to all expectations to play the way you want to play.  These are not neat and clean worlds, but messy ones with interpersonal stories, contacts, conflicts, loves, hates, status and all of that rolled into it, so that a pacifist play style can actually be accomplished.  Being a manipulative social climber is just as viable in a cyberpunk world as is the brawler, weapons specialist, net runner or technologist play style.  And if you want to try and play a stealthy character who gets things done but was never seen by any means, then that, too, should be something a player can do.  No one can ever pin the things you do down on you, but everyone knows you are the one who did it sort of deal.  There needs to be good and working stealth mechanics beyond just combat mechanics.  And if you feel that your social skills will be helped by a bit of eavesdropping on an associate, well, why not?

When I say that CDPR has a lot on its table with a cyberpunk world, I mean it.  The genre, itself, raises high expectations for at least some modicum of variability in play styles.  Whatever the main story or stories are, it should be possible to accomplish them without firing a shot or having one individual killed...as well as turning into a psychopathic slaughtering machine that people fear...and everything in-between.  You won't be able to please everyone in a cyberpunk setting, but having a good RPG experience means that the world is open for replay for entirely different play styles or just to investigate the world and see what it has to offer.  Going from the highly structured Witcher series to a far more open cyberpunk world means CDPR has to craft something good that isn't necessarily driven by any one thing, but that has a lot of people and organizations with conflicting agendas that may have no real 'end' to it, although it may have a finishing mark.  The story your create in the way you play the game should and indeed must be the paramount thing, and the objectives you set for yourself as a player take precedent over the larger world story lines.  While the game may have a finishing mark, you may decide to never reach it because the world is just that good.

Fallout 76 - Post E3

With the official announcement of Fallout 76, Bethesda Game Studios has put forward an online only, multiplayer (max. 24 - 32 people) game with multiple servers hosting different maps.  In addition they are saying that they are in this for the immediate future (out to, possibly 5 years) and will use microtransactions to fund the sustainment of the game, update it and keep the servers running.  The stuff being sold will be 'cosmetic only' in nature, which means nothing that will change game balance.  With that said there may be some paint jobs or other cosmetics that will add camouflage or other means to help individuals blend in with the background which, while totally cosmetic, does effect game balance. While 'cosmetic only' skins are the least worst way of handling microtransactions, they still aren't all that good due to human nature and the wish of some people to 'collect them all'.  Even when they are available for purchase with in-game funds or time spent, or as quest rewards, a tiny fraction of any player base will opt for purchasing such items.

Do note that if this concept had been rolled out with Skyrim Special Edition or Fallout 4, in that microtransactions would keep a bug-fix team on those games for as long as people purchased stuff, this would not have been a bad thing as those are single-player only games.  Yes some people will automatically purchase what's new in the 'ooo shiny!' or 'collect them all' mentality, it would not be that bad.  As it is there are unofficial patches made by modders who collect all the problems in game play, consistency and details that were just missed at the end of the bug-fix cycle for BGS in those games.  This concept is, overall, not a bad one and if it was expanded to older but still played and popular games it would show a corporate dedication to those games and the player base for them.  Letting the players purchase to invest in updates, bug fixes and general smoother game play with fewer crashes would go a long way to keeping a dedicated fan base for those games.

After that the movement to an online, all the time system of a multiplayer game goes against everything that the Fallout franchise was founded on.  Thus by making Fallout 76 BGS has decided to step away from a popular, award winning formula and into the brand new territory of online work.  Note this is BGS, the Studio, not Bethesda Softworks which oversees Zenimax Online Studio which hosts the Elder Scrolls Online.  What has been shown and talked about in interviews and a recently published documentary all demonstrate that BGS has decided that shooter-based action without RPG elements is the direction they are going for in Fallout 76.  As Todd Howard put it a few of the members of the design team for FO4 read some reviews by individuals who thought FO4 might have been a bit better with a multiplayer mode.  That is a mode between individuals with one hosting the game either over the internet or on a LAN.  From what code has been left in Skyrim and FO4 there are indications that BGS tested a multiplayer mode for each of those, but shelved it so as to concentrate on making the game playable and stable.

Todd Howard did joke about the stability, or lack thereof, in BGS titles and it is a point to consider in that Fallout 76 is using a blending of the FO4 game engine along with net code from Doom.  The entire structure of the game engine had to be changed away from a single player game to one that is multiplayer, persistent and the entire map available at all times.  Additionally a dynamic weather system and mode for predators and localized phenomena are also involved which means the days of loading a new cell or interior have to go away in order to make the entire game seamless.  This is not a bad thing, per se, yet the track record of BGS has not been stellar in the game engine arena.  A main reason to use the Creation Engine was that all the assets were already available from FO4 which meant cutting down on making their meshes, skins and even not having to redo their scripts all that much.  What has been shown is that the things that are in-world are destructible, which means they suffer damage and can be destroyed by taking damage.  Many of the structural mechanics from the FO4 Creation Engine had to be modified or scrapped entirely to allow this to happen, so this is also a brand new feature of the game engine.  No software ships without bugs and that will apply to Fallout 76.

In 'the future' there will be: private servers, 3rd party mod support and invite-only systems for friends to play together.  This is not at launch but 'in the future', with BGS hosting these games on their servers as opposed to individuals running the game on a truly private server owned outside of BGS for their friends.  From this information it can be gathered that Fallout 76 will be under the tight control of BGS.  Absolute control and power does not bestow skill or competence, however, and how long they will be custodians of this game will be determined by the number of long-term players who find this appealing in an already full multiplayer shooter game market.  The hassles that all multiplayer games face with overhead, sustainability, and then having a player base that must be kept interested through new content is something that BGS has not done before.  Indeed it has no demonstrated skill of understanding long-term play balance  so that a year or two down the line a newcomer to the game (if it survives that long) will still have a meaningful experience.

There are 'quests' in Fallout 76, with the Overseer giving the first one out and then others arising through 'the environment'.  The major part of the game play is exploration, finding crafting materials, making bases, taking over workshops, and then wash, rinse and repeat.  As given there are no NPCs in the game, period.  No human vendors.  No human survivalist groups.  While this may change at the governmental shelter (to a degree) as given the idea is an absolute 'everyone you see is a player'.  Yet the reason for choosing West Virginia was that it would be untouched by the Great War, which would mean areas where humans can and would survive the Great War.  The idea that all of the people will only come from Vault 76 flies in the face of all prior Fallout games that had families, religions and other groups that not only survived the Great War but were able to then repopulate areas separately from the Vaults.  In a rural region with cave systems, small towns and many off-grid individuals and families, to say that none of them survived is absolutely insane.  This is Appalachia and the number of small communities and families that prepare for problems are numerous throughout the region.  A nuclear winter might have been enough to kill of the vast majority of survivors, true, and yet there are also the cave systems to consider as natural shelters and place to grow minimal survival necessities and get clean water filtered by the soil and rock structures.  And as has been seen in prior Fallout games not all ghouls go feral (indeed many are transitioning to that state in Fallout 76 and retain the ability to use firearms and other weapons), and while these individuals are ghouls they are also NPCs.

Yet game mechanics and the wiping out of NPCs requires none of these people to have survived, because this is not an RPG but a multiplayer shooter game.  Without living individuals to carry lore onwards, it is lost, and that includes the lore of families and even the way of life of entire communities that didn't get into Vaults.  Yes there will be notes, journals and terminal entries by those that did survive for a time, but that is far different than getting the story first-hand from a survivor.  Fallout 76 breaks so hard in 'a new direction' that it has broken itself off from the franchise and has become merely a new multiplayer shooter game with a Fallout skin and equipment.  Such games depend on their players to find reasons to play and continue playing, and when they find content, creativity or even basic game mechanics lacking, they quickly move on to the next latest and greatest game.  A few game companies interact deeply with their communities, listen to feedback, hold livestreams that are interactive, bring developers out looking for feedback...all things that are not part of the way BGS has ever worked in the past.

The setting of Fallout 76 is fascinating if it was kept in the lore of the Fallout franchise with a Control Vault and perhaps even a Garden of Eden Creation Kit in it to start retaking the wasteland.  Seeing a GECK in action would be a truly new way to go for the franchise, as it has never been witnessed first-hand (you pass out in Fallout 3 when it is turned on as a part of Project Purity), and would have been a grand opportunity to go in a fresh direction for a game in the franchise.  Lore-wise there are problems with the outcome of Vault 76 as there was no presence of the descendents of the vault encountered by the Brotherhood of Steel on its eastward trek to the Capital Wasteland.  A thriving or even surviving community in the West Virginia region would have been noted by others and remembered by them as a background consideration.  As it is we don't know exactly where the post Great War survivors who populated the Capital Wasteland came from as the Vaults in the region never yielded a proper survivor contingent to begin rebuilding.  If those people came from Vault 76 the records would be heavy with references to them as the pioneers rebuilding after the Great War.  Those Vaults that did survive to do this were  remembered in other games and as those founding communities would leave some record of who founded it and where they came from, a successful Vault would have had some records, somewhere in the Capital Wasteland communities.

Fallout 4 in the Commonwealth has the exact, same problem, in that none of the Vaults in the region started the rebuilding process there nor even contributed a community to the wasteland to rebuild.  Vault 75 might have yielded enough for a family or two, once the children overcame those conducting the experiments on them, but they were not prepared to deal with the post-nuclear wasteland mentally or with basic survival equipment.  As the local accent and dialect of the Boston region is retained in FO4 that means there were surviving communities or families able to continue on after the war to retain those cultural artifacts.  If they had all died you wouldn't get that dialect and accent as it is part and parcel of a living human culture.

With that being the case the only result that can be gathered is that the Vault 76 members did not succeed in their efforts to establish a new community or set of communities in the wasteland.  Given a prime location for doing just that, the only conclusion is that something went wrong there.  Perhaps that is the real upshot of the multiplayer game: a bunch of individuals with access to nuclear devices will use them with abandon and destroy their own homes and homeland just for the fun of it.  Some people do just want to see the world burn, after all.  Trying to make the use of such devices as the ONLY way to remove environmental threats goes against a great tradition in gaming of allowing players the agency to figure out other ways to remove the threat via ingenuity, skill, planning or just getting lots of ammo together to get rid of a nest of creatures. 

If there is no better way to do these jobs and players are, in fact, rewarded for destroying the landscape, then BGS has decided to thoroughly walk away from the distaste for nuclear weapons seen in the early part of the franchise.  They did walk away from that, in part, when they put out Fallout 3, then allowed for the destruction of The Institute in Fallout 4 as the ONLY means to stop that faction and cause a nuclear detonation underground to do that deed.  Why bother trying to make a complex method of dealing with a problem when you can just nuke it?  Fallout 76 makes this a FEATURE and one that the studio PUSHES since it will be FUN.  Say, if it is seen as so much fun by those who survived the Great War, then why were Vaults made in the first place?  Would a good old nuclear war be welcomed by the people and voters?  Given the mentality pushing this out in Fallout 76, it would seem that people are more than ready to nuke any threat or hazard without giving a care about what they are actually doing to the entire region.  Of course to make it 'interesting' the entire area that was nuked will abate very quickly as that makes it even more fun, and only those prepared to go in early get the rewards.  Isn't that nice of them to downplay the use of nuclear weapons in a world ravaged by nuclear war?

This may be a variety of 'fun' to have a great social get-together shooter with nukes available and encouraging players to take on the 'roles' of Raiders, bandits and such...and even put in a 'bounty' system.  Are 'bounties' permanent or are they the quickly declining sort to allow for player 'fun' of griefing other players?  And if players are encouraged to take up the Raider lifestyle, then the disdain for Raiders as seen in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 is lost entirely, even if the PC goes with the Raiders in Nuka-World in the Fallout 4 DLC, there is much scorn heaped upon them by the locals.  Ye  ah, I guess it is fun to intimidate NPCs and get their reactions...now imagine those as actual players that are being griefed by other players acting like 'Raiders'.  If this is the direction that BGS really wants to go in, then why wasn't it allowed in Fallout 4 before Nuka-World or Fallout 3?  It isn't like there aren't some upsides to being a Raider or wasteland warlord, save for every other Raider gang hating your guts and every caravan and civilian taking a 'shoot on sight' mentality towards you.  Raiders live via instilling fear and using intimidation, threats, destruction and murder to get their way: this is something BGS WANTS PLAYERS TO DO.  Remember that.  This is all part of the fun, social shooter concept, right?  The thing every player wants to face is intimidation and griefing from other players.  I'm sure that BGS hopes that the bounty system and a few other bits and pieces of twiddling behind the scenes will keep this to a minimum.  Even though they encourage it.  Great way to mix signals there, Bethesda!

As I've said before this game will not be a Day 1 purchase or pre-order for me.  As an individual I am not a fan of online shooters nor do I seek the 'social' aspect of gaming outside of face-to-face types of games.  Having run RPGs in multiple genres and mixed genres, then becoming a player in single-player RPGs, I enjoy exploring the stories that unfold in those games as they represent a high level of game design.  No matter how good the 'story' is in multiplayer games, it must be scaled down and factored down to suit a target number of players to keep a variety of them interested in it.  Great and personal stories with depth and emotional involvement are suited to the single player game environment.  Trying to keep a compelling story to keep the interest of a few players requires a different sort of game world crafting that can be enjoyable:  I know, I've had to do that as an individual.  My concept for those worlds I ran was to figure out the background, lore, environment and social setting and then take part not as a 'game master' but the person who ran the world for players to experience.  Quests, as such, weren't the sole object of the game.  Jobs, working, and having sub-groups of players go off when they felt ready to break off from a story thread because they wanted to investigate another story thread - that was my job as the person running the game.  And as I knew the players as individuals, I could craft those stories on the fly by utilizing the materials present in the game given the history, lore and people of it.  Remove the people and much of the history goes along with much of the lore.  Players learned to keep notes, voluminous notes, as they started out as just everyday people who had decided to become adventurers: they had some background knowledge but it was suited to their situation as a PC.

Removing NPCs and relying on static terminals, books and such for a game, as in Fallout 76, is a challenge, yes, but one that is made stale by the game mechanic involved.  Audio logs will, by necessity, need to take the place of NPCs, and they can be very compelling as a story telling device when it is used sparingly.  The same with terminal entries, books and such: used sparingly and infrequently they can make a rich game world to flesh in a world that has untold stories or things hidden from everyday individuals.  Without NPCs these mechanics for doing quests are expected to pull the entire load to flesh in environmental storytelling.  I guess this is a variety of 'fun' and even a type of challenge to making a game.  If people are truly tired of NPC vendors who also have stories to tell, well, Fallout 76 may be just up your alley!  Heck, YOU can take the place of that NPC!  Isn't that grand?  And expect all the problems of theft, intimidation, destruction and such that such vendors always have to face...don't worry, people are encouraged to do this, you see.  Are there vendors in other game worlds you would dearly love to get rid of but couldn't because they were necessary to the game?  You won't face that problem now!

Now imagine the scenario where, a few weeks into the game, a group of relatively new players are exploring an area for the first time and discovering it, then get into a fight with other players who are Raider role-playing, or just being jerks, only to have a much higher level group of players get their hands on a silo who want to destroy the region to get high level goodies give all of you the warning that this is about to happen.  Fun, huh?  Guess you gotta find another server that hasn't nuked the place yet.  Luckily BGS will slowly 'rebuild' the region when no one is around because that is so 'friendly' and 'smart'...instead of forcing players to live with the long-term ramifications of their decisions, why not just quietly reset it when no one is looking?  Because that is so friendly to the Fallout franchise, right?  Just look at the rest of the wasteland, after all, it reset so quickly, didn't it?  Oh, wait, it is still called 'the wasteland'.  Don't worry, this will all be done with new lore to explain why the region around Vault 76 is set in its own area that can be nuked over and over again without long-term consequences.  Perhaps it will be the actual experiment of Vault 76 and those playing in it will be in a virtual reality like in Vault 12.  Or a GECK gone wrong that created an isolation field and rebuilding system that was impenetrable to the outside world or even put the residents into an alt-alt history timeline away from the rest of the franchise.  All the lovely possibilities of trying to explain this to keep a multiplayer game 'fun' that involves the use of nuclear weapons.  Perhaps the Great War wasn't something feared at all, but welcomed as the great fun war by those who received it.  Really, if using nukes has no long-term consequences, then what is the point of Fallout franchise?

Fallout 76

Just a couple of days after announcement and a few days before E3 when I write this about Bethesda Game Studio's newest effort in the Fallout franchise: Fallout 76

From the leaks we hear it will be a mixed single player and online multiplayer game which is a deviation from the franchise being single player only.  This is the 'new direction' of the franchise for BGS and it is significant, just as the broken dialogue system of Fallout 4 is, but perhaps for different reasons.  I do not play multiplayer games, save in a way that has me as a single player.  Call me a misanthrope, but my early experiences with multiplayer games back in the '90s have left an impression and not a good one, thus I veered away from gaming for a good 15 years and only rejoined a few years ago.  That is my bias, of course, and millions of people enjoy multiplayer games, and I recognize this as a fact, and as such there is a lot of money in the multiplayer community, if you can entice players to a new game.  With the current scandals of monetization, microtransactions and loot boxes, there may be a greater scrutiny placed on new entrants to the field than has happened in the past where large AAA game companies felt they could hold back features, put in low payout randomization for paid goods, and generally restrict experience for characters to force players to purchase better weapons and equipment to 'stay competitive'.  There is a lot of money to be taken in siphoning money from players for low rewards, high pay-in services in game worlds, and that is now starting to get backlash.

This is worrying as Fallout 76 comes on the heels of Bethesda's drive for Creation Club, which are essentially paid mods for new equipment, weapons, armor, skins, animals and the such like to 'enhance' single player games.  Developers get paid for the content and then Bethesda reaps the profits.  There has been backlash on this as single-player games from BGS already have a modding community working for free on their beloved games, and they do so for free (or ask for donations via other channels).  It must be remembered that it is this community that works to fix BGS games so that they run smoothly, have bugs removed from them, and then sanitize the overall game experience with large scale unofficial patches as seen in the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4.  To date no BGS game from its flagship franchises of the Elder Scrolls or Fallout has shipped relatively bug free, though it has worked very hard to make the Creation Engine more stable than its predecessors.

What this does do is bring up a question about Creation Club.  If such content is offered for Fallout 76, then how does multiplayer mode handle it?  It is to be remembered that these are assets purchased by an individual and not all individuals may have purchased the same assets.  So are they frozen out of multiplayer mode, making it a more generic game mode for multiple players?  Or are the allowed but only if all players have the purchased items?  The former would be a good way to go so that everyone gets a level playing field in multiplayer mode (whatever form it takes).  The latter, however, could be seen as a monetization scheme to try and get early adoption of useful (or even cut content) 'free' downloads for the first few weeks and then jack up the price of them once the game gets established.  But beyond monetization, such a system (in either case) will not deal with an unofficial patch to the game well, if at all.  Thus to have multiplayer mode may require freezing out 3rd party mods, entirely, and praying that BGS actually fixes the inevitable bugs that will crop up and continue to crop up over time.  This is not a realm that BGS has ever been in, and after an initial large player base and play base dies down over a couple of years, most other game studios stop fixing problems in the games they shipped.

This is worrying due to the amount of intellectual work that has gone into past BGS games and the creation of new ideas, features, weapons and equipment by the modding community that later see those ideas woven into later games.  Mods to put down settlements and take back the wasteland for Fallout: New Vegas can be seen as the beginning of the settlement system of Fallout 4.  The integration of supply caches have precursors in the storage systems including cloud storage for both Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim.  While Fallout: New Vegas did feature a form of survival mode it in no way compares to the multiple types of survival modes seen in Skyrim that were developed by modders.  Unfortunately BGS didn't decide to extend the dialogue system, add in new modes of dialogue based on additional character features or abilities or even extend the types of weapons that would be canon in the Fallout universe to those that modders have created.  Eliminating skills entirely and turning them into mere perks removes a level of customization and player agency where character builds were centered on skills to obtain perks, which also included ones that could allow base stats to be improved but all in the end to aiding the skills involved.  Thus the opportunity for new skills with their own perks was eliminated in favor of the genericized perk tree.  The concept of 'immersion' is broken at the start of Fallout 4 where the pre-war Sole Survivor has NO skills from the pre-war world that translate into the post-war world.  Yet these are clearly individuals with experience and pre-war lives that must have such skills, or even just have some skills and abilities that are not available in the post-war world.  By shelving skill trees the ability to make that pre-war experience a part of game play is also shelved.

Onto the minimal lore around Vault 76.

The game map for Fallout 3 was, by all accounts, something that started out as a much larger design space than what was shipped.  The game play area was supposed to be nearly four times the size as what was shipped, which would lead to doubling the base size of the generally rectangular area on each side of it.  Thus something like the Point Lookout DLC might have been just on the edge of the eastern game map if it extended that far into Maryland.  Similarly Vault 76 might have been included if the game play area remained centered on the downtown DC area, meaning that the northwestern corner of the map would start to clip into West Virginia.  When playing Fallout 3 there is a feeling that along the eastern, northern and western sides that a lot of places, marked and unmarked, are clustered together, while the northwestern corner feels somewhat desolate for all of it being pretty far away from major target zones for the great war.

This is part of Vault 76 being listed as under the purview of the DC regional zone for Vault-Tec at its national headquarters.  It is possible to find all the other Vaults listed for the region except for Vault 76.  If placed into a corner of the originally conceived Fallout 3 in the northwest, the lack of content there might be due to scrapping plans for exploring Vault 76.  The listing indicates that it would be something that wasn't impossible to get to from the pre-war DC region during working hours, which would place it on a drive no longer than 4 hours long.  That would easily include the eastern counties of West Virginia and even some small towns in the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge regions, as well as bordering both Maryland and Virginia.  Those are not even a long drive from downtown DC, and further eastern counties along the WV and VA border could easily be included into the DC range of Vault-Tec.

While the location is interesting it is also problematical for Fallout 3, in that the Brotherhood of Steel had to come overland from the west to get to the DC region and their zone of marching, patrolling and scouting would easily cover this region, as well.  Having relatively sophisticated technology for the post-war world, the BoS would have been liable, in fact likely, to run across any community started by Vault 76.  That was the purpose of the Control Vaults, that is Vaults that have no experiments going on inside and are run normally with a scheduled opening time of 20 years after any major war.

Vault 3 kept its door closed due to the wishes of the Vault Dwellers and when they did open them it was to trade with the outside world for parts that were getting in short supply.  The Vault Dwellers were killed by drug addicted raiders who then moved into the Vault which was suffering from flooding problems.  It does not appear that a Garden of Eden Creation Kit was in Vault 3, although as a Control Vault it should have had some resources to help rebuild after the war.  Yet those are not seen or talked about in Fallout: New Vegas.  In fact no Vault in the Las Vegas region had a GECK, though that may be due more to the wishes of Mr. House than anything else.

Vault 8 opened its door after 10 years, used its GECK  to remove the radiation from the surface and groundwater, and then formed the successful community of Vault City.

This brings up the question of the GECK and if Vault 76 had one.  With a GECK as seen with Vault 8 and expanded upon in Fallout 3, the GECK has the ability to remove radioactive materials from a rather large area, purify water even down to deep ground water sources, and generally remove it from the environment.  How, exactly, it operates is not known and chalked up to the super-science of the Fallout universe.  Having one gives a massive leg up to Vault Dwellers looking to repopulate the nearby wasteland.    Thus two game play situations for creating a game arise from this: one with a GECK and another without one.  Yet the relative isolation from major target zones for WV may mean that the wasteland of Fallout 76 is not as heavily irradiated as in other regions of the Fallout franchise.

What can be said is that the BoS have no records in the Capital Wasteland of running across Vault 76 nor interacting with any major communities in that area in Fallout 3.  Thus it is likely that Vault 76 did not succeed in its mission of rebuilding as it has no major or even minor influences on the BoS or even communities in Fallout 3.  It is mentioned by no trading caravans although a successful community would surely be included on the routes of a few of them.  Even relatively small and isolated communities that have a couple of families doing more than homesteading tends to get traders as such communities have demonstrated an ability to survive in the wasteland.

Super Mutants from Vault 87 make no mention of places outside the immediate Capital Wasteland and while they are very hardy for surviving in the post-nuclear world the geographic trek overland on foot to the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah regions might be just a bit too far for raiding parties to go.  It must be remembered that these Super Mutants have no controlling factor behind them like The Master, and the concentration ability of eastern Super Mutants is quite limited.  By the time Fallout 3 starts they have run out of FEV and are no longer able to make more of their kind out of humans or even abominations out of multiple creatures.  With their numbers being limited early on in Vault 87 and the absolute need of new people to be put into FEV to make more of their kind, the Vault 87 Super Mutants would have remembered if there was a large and relatively healthy human population nearby, yet there is nothing like that in Fallout 3.  This does not mean that can't show up in Fallout 76, but if they do their numbers will be small and limited, not vast and constantly repopulating.

Could Vault 76 be set so far into WV that it would be out of the range of the BoS patrols as they came across the country?  Geographically that is problematical due to the DC Vault-Tec oversight of the Vault as part of its territory.  Go too far away and it would fall into another district, possibly one in the Mid-West, so that eliminates the far western side of WV and much of the northwestern arm of the state.

The other organization that makes no mention of it in the records is The Enclave.  The pre-war shadow government that featured the best, brightest, most wealthy and most well connected individuals who would go to designated points of safety to ride out the Great War, they must have had someplace other than Raven Rock in the DC region.  In fact the US government had created a its own shelter for the US government in WV at the Greenbrier Hotel near Greenbrier, WV.  This was made as a refuge for Congress, family and staff during the Cold War and was constructed in secret.  In the Fallout universe it can be assumed that a similar facility may have been made and that it could be a refuge for The Enclave.  What is to be remembered is The Enclave of Fallout 3 is the one that was defeated in Fallout 2 with its oil refinery platform destroyed by the Chosen One.  The Enclave fled across the country and established themselves at Andrews AFB and Raven Rock.  It is unknown how much in the way of pre-war records they took with them, considering that this organization is just a remnant of that former group, but having records of the area around their destination would be important.  Yet none are found in Fallout 3 about other installations in the region.

Could The Enclave return in Fallout 76?  Yes and they would be based out of either the Greenbrier complex or similar installation made by the government for safeguarding personnel.  Without them being present in Fallout 3, it can be said they have no reach left and may not even exist at that point in time.  It is to be remembered that only Enclave members who could reach the west coast and get to the oil platform did so, and that airlift capability was limited to Vertibird range.  Anyone outside of the Greater Los Angeles or San Francisco region would have been stuck and it is unlikely The Enclave intended to have a single rally point on a distant oil platform.  What can be said is that by the time of Fallout 3 there is no Enclave organization that rode out the Great War near the Capital Wasteland and it is unlikely that the western remnant would not have known about a DC region rallying point.  Also due to geography, if the Greenbrier was still active as an Enclave base, the BoS would have certainly run across on their eastern trek as it is nearly west of the Capital Wasteland.

After that groups and sources run out.  No ghouls reference Vault 76, Mr. House does not make any mention of it, nor does The Institute or the people in control of The Pitt.  No major community that rebuilt based on Vault 76 is mentioned elsewhere in the Fallout franchise.  Proximity would have made it more important than The Pitt if it was even a minor trading hub as it would be easier to get to.  From all that we, as players, have seen, there is nothing really done by Vault 76 that others take note of in the franchise.

Is Vault 76 a failure, then?  That is the most likely scenario.  Even Control Vaults can screw up.  A GECK would have helped greatly in rebuilding, but even without that and no major targets near Vault 76 (and remember that actual fallout would tend to go west to east due to wind direction) their region may have even escaped the major amounts of radiation from other targets like Chicago, Indianapolis and St. Louis.  A bomb or cluster of them may have been further south to cover places like Ft. Knox, and if the Chinese knew about Greenbrier then it would have received at least a bomb or two.  While there would still be fallout on the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains, it would not be the kind with large particles falling to the ground but with much finer material carrying a lower radiation load with it.  The larger particles would have been deposited on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains due to wind current changes on the western approaches.  In the lee side of that would be a shadow zone with little to no fallout present and then only the slow drift of light particles descending after that.  Thus the environment of West Virginia, in general, might actually be in good condition and not the hellish landscape of the Mojave, Capital Wasteland or the The Commonwealth of Fallout 4.  Geography seems to have placed Vault 76 in a relatively light fallout zone that would be a prime place to reconstruct communities.

Why it didn't happen may be the central story to Fallout 76.

I wouldn't count on it as BGS rarely has a strong central storyline, preferring a weak one that allows players to explore the game world and not feel compelled to do great things if they don't want to.  The main story doesn't even have to make a lick of sense and they will go with it, hoping that the open world will draw in players.  Even the factions don't have to make sense.  Sadly, without a good narrative and rich set of side material that changes outcomes, players feel they lack agency and then get busy work, instead.

We shall see what Fallout 76 will bring.

I am not going to be a day 1 purchaser, however.

BGS has lost my trust with Fallout 4 and their moves since then have done nothing to bolster it.  They didn't create Fallout: New Vegas and don't even seem capable of creating a rich and somewhat immersive game world any more.  The early DNA of BGS of the 1990's has too much AAA gaming in it to take a risk to try and craft a rich, evocative and compelling game world that makes sense and offers wide player agency and massive consequences for the choices made during the game.  I'll pass for now and wait to see if BGS can actually make a good RPG.  Not a shooter, base-building game with a bit of dialogue and meaningless quests handed out frequently as busy work.  Building bases is busy work, and can be enjoyable as a past-time, but it is not to be mistaken for actual role playing.

Fallout 4 - A bad dream

The problems with Fallout 4 as part of the Fallout franchise are great and deep.  Internally the problems that are presented to the Player Character (PC) and thus to the player is in a setting that makes little to no actual sense.  Internal logic within the setting of the game is so highly skewed away from the basis for the franchise that it cannot be ignored.  By turning the franchise away from Role Playing Game (RPG) roots and going for a shallow action arcade shooter the basis for the game suffers to the point of breaking with the franchise.  The established concept of 'War never changes' makes it part and parcel of the human condition, and the long term ramifications are ones that require thought on the part of the player and a decent summation of outcomes based on the PC's actions.  Playing after such a game end can be highly fun and enjoyable and vary greatly from the ending summation, but that means it is just a variant out of that ending.  Fallout 4 has an ending movie that does not address such consequences.  Is the Institute destroyed or not and what happens with other factions will influence both of those endings.  The same is true of each of the other factions, as well, and their presences or destruction in the Commonwealth will have deep and abiding changes what follows, but none of that is featured in the ending movie.  Yet there is no way to eliminate all the factions and turn the Commonwealth into a true wasteland where it is kill or be killed and war is continuous.

Internally the logic for an arcade shooter of any sort is that it requires targets, and to that end targets must be in endless supply.  Yet this is a wasteland and the birth rate as seen throughout the series is relatively low save in the more civilized New California Republic.  Factions may hold sway or direct power in various places, but their internal numbers are relatively low compared to those they wish to control and do not feature the elements for creation of families, supplying people with safe haven nor in attempting to convert others to their faction.

Religious orders as in the case of the Hubologists or Children of Atom have extremely limited appeal due to their limited scope of beliefs, and while welcoming outsiders the internal codes of belief are so strict as to limit views on what happens outside their organizations.  A more traditional religion like Mormonism was seen as a threat to Caesar and wiped out as these were a people with more liberal views and yet adhered to the basics of humanity having free will and the freedom to decide their lives for themselves.  The mayhem and chaos of the Commonwealth means that there is no basis for an arcade shooter style game, and yet that was what the community got.

Now lets move on to factions or things that should have been factions in no particular order.

Super Mutants and FEV

Victims of FEV be they at the hands of The Master, the experiments leading to Super Mutants creating more of their kind at Vault 87, or The Institute all have one thing in common: limited numbers.  The Master created the largest and most diverse Super Mutant army as he was both a victim of FEV and cybernetically enhanced through a direct connection to a computer system.  While immobile he forced hundreds of people and creatures to be melded together by FEV and was a true threat to the world.  His demise and defeat of the Super Mutant army means that those numbers have dwindled as there is no way to create more Super Mutants: with the ending of the Mariposa Base came the end of the threat of Super Mutants in the west.  In the east, if the post-Fallout 3 canon of the success of Project Purity is correct, then all of those sites in the watershed for the Capitol region will be cleared of radiation.  As the Super Mutants had already run out of the eastern strain of FEV, the basis for creating more Super Mutants was at an end and their numbers would be on the constant decline in the Capitol region.

That leaves The Institute, and it had a time limited program of creating Super Mutants to examine the properties of the bodies and intellect to try and augment the Gen 3 Synth program.  Yet that research was a failure and the discards that were still alive were dumped above ground.  Like in the West and Capitol region this puts an upper end cap on the number of Super Mutants in the Commonwealth.  This breaks the paradigm of an arcade shooter getting new targets to knock down on a regular basis and the actual appearance of Super Mutants should dwindle the more they are knocked down.
 There are many, many opportunities for role-playing in such a condition as a few of these Super Mutants demonstrate some concept of cause and effect.  Added to that the wish to protect each other as they are considered 'brothers' and the decline in absolute numbers means that those better able to figure out what is going on will have a higher chance of survival.  This would break the concept of a Super Mutant Suicider as none of their 'brothers' would ever wish to see a life thrown away in explosive rage.  Even the dumbest of their kind place that kinship over rage, and that is one deep and abiding aspect of the Commonwealth Super Mutants that demonstrates some understanding of 'family'.

A final piece of the FEV is stored in the Nuka-World DLC at the Cloning Facility as seen in the Safari Adventure quest.  Here the presence of Super Mutants was noted by a surviving researcher who obtained tissue samples and isolated a form of the FEV and utilized it in gene splicing to create Gatorclaws.  It can be taken that the original research is still present and that the basis for FEV and its use are housed within that facility.  While no Super Mutants were created there, it serves as a repository of knowledge that is actually very advanced as the ghoulified researcher studied the material for years with advanced genetic tools and equipment.  Here the lack of ability to integrate DLC content into the base game comes to the forefront as this is research that a couple of factions would want to obtain:  The Institute and Brotherhood of Steel (Bos).  To accomplish the isolation of FEV, understand its workings and then use it for gene splicing in an exacting way is much further than The Institute had ever gotten with FEV and would be seen as highly dangerous technology and knowledge by the BoS.  Yet neither of these factions can even be informed of this which is part of why the conceptual basis for these factions is broken.  Nor can the PC enlist Virgil to go to Nuka-World to utilize the technology there to better understand the FEV and perhaps find a way to reverse it, though that might be a horrific process for those creatures that were melded together from multiple sources.

The basis for a real story is present: Super Mutants realize that their numbers are dwindling and that no new Super Mutants are appearing and to survive they must learn how to work together.  They are past the point of trying to storm Diamond City, and as settlements start to self-organize and protect themselves, they slowly go off the 'easy target' list and go into the 'high casualty' list.  Super Mutants would stop enraged 'brothers' from suiciding, as that makes things worse, not better.  An entire quest involving Strong and Fist as opposing leaders within the Super Mutant faction should arise naturally from this:  Strong wanting to understand some aspects of human nature and Fist wanting to basically shun humanity for the wrongs it has done to create Super Mutants.  A long quest involving negotiating with the larger Super Mutant encampments on behalf of one or even both of the leaders, trying to present their cases and even offering support and aid if they agree to stop raiding settlements could and should have been possible.  This would make the Super Mutants into a viable faction that, albeit violent, understands that such violence has its limits especially if a site or two is cleared of their 'brothers' by other events and there are none to storm back in and take it. Instead of a short sidequest and firefight, that entire quest could have been a multipart major quest with long-term ramifications.  And so long as the player doesn't side with The Institute, there are benefits to having a group of well armed and armored Super Mutants willing to storm important sites even if they don't agree with you all the time.

The Minutemen

Factions must have some basis for their coherence and have a set of objectives, goals, following and leadership that serve as its conceptual basis.  A free-form general protection faction, like the Minuteman, only needs the concept of communities helping each other to survive as its basis and some minimal command structure to help manage it.  It is a weak factional concept and yet can be very powerful given time to civilize and tame parts of the wasteland so that humanity is not in an active part of the food chain (while Raiders, et. al. would continue to be part of it).  What makes the concept of the Minutemen powerful is that it has an easy to understand basis and only requires some dedication and risk-taking on the part of just a few people at each settlement.  With work it becomes strong and without it everyone is left to fend for themselves.  Yet the concept of banding together will arise separately no matter what happens to the Minutemen: it is an age old concept of creating a Nation and will appear when no better basis for cooperative protection is around.

What isn't clearly understood is that the Minuteman concept is one that is of a militia, that being a lower level and self-organizing form of cooperative self-protection in towns, villages, counties and even small cities.  These organizations are loosely joined together with representatives from individual communities or even just households forming the strength of the organization.  Leadership isn't imposed but elected at that level, and the rank of Colonel is the highest one that has been historically available to such militia at a State-wide level in the US.  Such a militia can be strong, in theory, when local leaders and the highest level of leadership have general agreement on the basis for operation within the State and put themselves as available for emergencies or invasions to the top Executive elected position in a State, typically a governor.

As seen in FO4, there is no top level political leadership for the Commonwealth.  And as the northeastern States were amalgamated into the Commonwealth in 1969 in the Fallout universe, that means a top position that would have oversight on activities over the region.  Without that the lower level militias don't have a system of accountability save to each other, and that can fall apart rather quickly if there is no large-scale and pressing threat to the communities involved.  That is why the Minutemen fell in the Fallout universe in FO4: no higher level accountability structure from the political side.  In part that was due to the event of the massacre of the Commonwealth Provisional Government by The Institute.  Typically no amount of political infighting leads to an immediate massacre, and this meeting ended atypically with The Institute getting fingered as the culprit.  The reason why they are fingered is that such a massacre, when they are done on the political side, are done as part of a power grab and orchestrated beforehand, leaving a clear 'winner'.  That didn't happen and yet it was in the common interest of all communities to come to a working political arrangement.  Who won?  The Institute by keeping that from happening so they could continue to experiment on individuals taken from the wasteland.

Thus the job of the PC should not end at the ending of FO4 if the Minutemen are a surviving faction with multiple settlements agreeing to join it.  In fact that should be the start of the meat of the game, itself: helping to form a stable government for cooperative self-protection.  Standing up a provisional constitution, finding a way to get a legislative, judicial and executive branch hammered out and then holding elections would have been the real point of the game after dealing with The Institute.  When that happens then the role of 'General' actually can and should be reduced to that of the historical leader of militias in the US: Colonel.  A General is needed for a hard military that is rigidly organized and has the job of being a soldier as its profession.  A militia has that as a secondary concern and leading every day life as the primary one.  Militias aren't amateurs, as such, but they are not soldiers, either.  Seeing Minutemen going about their daily business of farming, crafting, running stores...that is the reward for being successful as a PC and a player:  Stability or at least meta-stability has been achieved and that is all anyone could ask for.


The Railroad


There is a dependent part of the Railroad that requires The Institute: the creation of new Gen 3 Synths.  If taking part in this factional ending then The Institute is destroyed and the source of new Gen 3 Synths go with it.  The ideological basis of freeing Gen 3 Synths from slavery ends on the day The Institute can't create any more and the Synth Retention Bureau is gone.  Without the ability to teleport the survivors of The Institute able to escape are left at the mercies of the wasteland, just like they did with Super Mutants but are not as well equipped to survive.  Gen 1 and 2 Synths can continue based on their power supplies, but without a command structure and active orders from above, their threat is limited.  Gen 3 Synths and Coursers are left and those wishing to seek their freedom need to find someplace that will take them in, and that is now a short-term mission of the RR.  That should take a few months at its worst, and without the need to 'protect' Gen 3 Synths via a mind-wipe and new background, processing of them should go at a rapid rate.  After that wave is dealt with there will be no RR: Desdemona has decided on the course that puts them out of a job.  The RR has a definite end goal and this is true if the PC takes the Minuteman path and is able to have a general evacuation of The Institute proceed.  As a faction the Railroad conceptually ends after that and their post main game content shows a bit of extracting revenge on a few Raider gangs, but otherwise doesn't offer much interesting content.

As a counter-espionage organization, the RR is nearly unable to survive against The Institute and failed at is prime mission of survival.  All of the spy trappings, however, didn't lead to espionage based protocols, or at least ones that were followed continuously.  That led to the Switchboard massacre and the current situation they are dealing with.  Here, instead of going for centralized espionage, the RR would have been much better served with a cell based system used by insurgents and serious revolutionary movements not just in our history but in that of the Fallout universe, as well.  Some of this is witnessed, but not in any truly organized fashion, instead using a few key people to serve as intermediaries between the RR and the Safehouses.  Perhaps with so few people  a good cell system couldn't be developed as the best of systems requires 3 people to a cell with very few contacts up or down the structure.  To get to the state they are in requires that they haven't taken the Switchboard attack to heart in full and even expose high value personnel on a first meeting.  There is no methodology to have an extended trust system, with reports moving upwards about new people and then having such new people put on missions or jobs to earn a spot in the organization.

Deacon, for all of his lies and manner, has some basic understanding of what needs to be done, but then goes against that interior logic to argue for the PC to be brought on-board the RR immediately.  Desdemona is actually correct in not wanting to expose their current HQ to an outsider, and yet Deacon will argue for just that.  As a player I would have been more than happy to cool my heels waiting for the data to be delivered from the Courser Chip (if you take that as your first exposure to the RR).  Secrecy is paramount to such organizations and no matter what your gut instinct tells you, if it is wrong just once it could be curtains for the entire organization.  Not only does this make sense, but is a missed opportunity for some serious role-playing which would have made the RR much more substantial as it would show that they mean business.  And if I wanted to become a player in the organization then that must start at the periphery, perhaps as a courier or errand boy for a safehouse.  Going that route means that when the Courser is taken down there is a pre-existing contact that can move your request for decryption up to HQ and then get a reply via other channels.  If done properly the entire RR part of FO4 would have been a major change from other organizations currently seen in the franchise and actually be quite refreshing to experience.  A whole stealth or espionage part of the game would be available on far more than simple hunt/kill/find data business and turn into a role-playing experience.

Lore wise the RR is a part of the lore after FO3.  It doesn't exactly live up to the expectations from that game, but neither does The Institute or the Commonwealth as a whole.  Before the attack the RR was in much better shape, and that attack at the Switchboard took place between FO3 and FO4, approximately 6 years before FO4, so the organization has had time to recover.  From what has been seen not all their operatives or safehouses were penetrated in 2281 and The Institute has been relatively slow going against the organization.  Bad leadership can be blamed on the downfall, though such bad leadership to let the organization be so deeply penetrated typically means the non-survival of the organization.  With enough good people, contacts and safehouses, the RR recovered and a good 5 years later it has...well...not many more people than it started with after the Switchboard attack.  Still Desdemona is right to enforce protocols and secrecy.  No matter how talented an outsider is, breaking those protocols is the sort of thing that led to the downfall of the RR at the Switchboard.  Yet the RR as conceptualized in FO3 has a greatly extended set of contacts outside the Commonwealth for smuggling runaway Synths out of the reach of The Institute.  That network was not lost as the absence of the Head of SRB demonstrates.

It is that network that should be the source of new agents and infrastructure building inwards and utilizing a safer cell based system for communications and even becoming somewhat decentralized.  While much of the interior expertise at the heart of the RR was lost at the Switchboard, those on the ground at the periphery in the smuggling groups and safehouses, the true purpose of the RR is to move Synths out from the Commonwealth, were left pretty much unmolested.  Operating out of the reach of The Institute, that system should have been drawn upon to create a better system of smaller safehouses that were widely distributed and harder to identify.  Talented individuals in that periphery should have been brought in to help restructure the organization under those who escaped the Switchboard.  There are other facilities that are isolated and beyond easy reach of The Institute that could serve much of the same purpose of the Switchboard but be more defensible and better camouflaged.  When attacked at the center of the organization it is incumbent for the periphery to change places, spaces and even rotate people laterally so as to confuse those seeking to find them.  Perhaps that did happen to some degree, but the major indicators is that safehouses were struck after the Switchboard and only a couple survived that under older protocols.  By becoming dependent on the center, the periphery was left vulnerable and unready to respond.

An actual endgame of having the last Synths being moved out of the system and closing down the safehouses is the actual goal for the RR.  It doesn't gain in strength even when it 'wins'.  There is no rationale for manning checkpoints as the RR is about movement of people undercover to save them from persecution and death.  Doing so openly will cause resentment amongst the population as a whole, plus makes agents a target for anyone wanting to take potshots at them.  Just as the underground railroad dissolved with the ending of slavery so too does the RR of FO4 end with the fall of The Institute:  in less than a year it should be gone as an organization and remembered for its ideals and good works done in the face of a superior opponent that it was able to survive if not defeat itself.  Without new Gen 3 Synths being made, the RR is on a clock ticking down until the last Synth that wants to be rescued is rescued, and you don't need to man checkpoints for that but use the informer network that the RR already has on the ground.  Plus a few more people may be willing to point surviving Synths to the right destination in recognition of the noble goal that the organization has now achieved.  And as the PC organized settlements, it should be easy to get the word out that these refugees need to be safely handled and moved to the RR.  Who needs checkpoints when there are far more friendly settlements that are easier to find by just following provisioners?


Brotherhood of Steel

The Brotherhood of Steel has morphed from its West Coast roots and has changed its basis in the East twice: once under the Lyons family and again under Arthur Maxson.  Their problems have been covered previously and require just a quick recap.  First is that the structure of the Brotherhood has seen the elimination of the Knights as a separate logistics operation with those roles having been transferred to the Scribes and the Knights now put under the Paladins.  The Lancers have been started up to cover aerial operations and form their own internal order.  Secondly Elder Maxson has taken on an expedition that is light on command infrastructure and that break with the Chains that Bind: the conceptual system of chain of command so that the leader does not directly command low-level subordinates but delegates that authority to a command structure.  Both of these conditions were seen in The Outcasts leaving the BoS in Fallout 3, and while changes to recruitment may be something that The Outcasts adjust to, the basic liquidation of an order and removal of intermediate command structures are both reasons for why The Outcasts left under Lyons.  They may only be a minority in what is seen when the Prydwen arrives, but a variant of their insignia is seen on every suit of Power Armor inside the BoS.

While Elder Maxson has shown himself capable in combat and had to negotiate with The Outcasts, there is a fundamental bridge that if it was rebuilt to get The Outcasts back into the BoS Eastern Division would have then drove them right out again with this expedition.  Indeed we can find no member on the Prydwen who was from The Outcasts.  While they may be getting on in years, The Outcasts are also hardened combat veterans and would serve as the core of the fighting prowess of the Eastern Division having been made self-reliant for years and understanding the rough necessity of survival.  Elder Maxson breaking the Chains that Bind, taking Liberty Prime along for the ride, when seen through the vision of The Outcasts is yet another leader going rogue and breaking with the past, tradition and basic command structure of the military.  Perhaps Elder Maxson left the highest echelons behind to govern the Eastern Division in the Capitol wasteland for a reason: he left behind the start of a civil break-up with The Outcasts and in his journey to the Commonwealth would be breaking up the organization he forged together.

Logistically the expedition as seen makes no damned sense and adheres entirely to the action arcade shooter concept.  Yet each Vertibird lost in combat is not one that can be magically replenished as there are no operational factories in the Commonwealth producing those parts or vehicles as a whole.  In fact the Prydwen and the contingent within it must be relatively small, compact and ready to adapt to local problems while dealing with a trickle of supplies coming all the way from over the Glowing Sea through a series of supply depots.  Recruits, Power Armor, ammunition, food, Vertibirds, spare parts...the list for keeping such an organization going is long and an expeditionary force being supplied by air must be small.  The numbers seen in the game in and around the Boston Airport are about it, but that means no patrols, no extended areas of control and very little presence outside of the facilities they occupy.  That would mean no crashing Vertibirds seen multiple times per day, no extended patrols even going up to the northwestern part of the map, no grand firefights against Super Mutants, period.

Why is that?  Every member lost would be a loss to combat skills for the organization and require a trained replacement that can't be physically trained in the Commonwealth. Why not?  Trainers require space and that would mean each of the Orders would require their own training environment and there just isn't the space for it nor the time until a reliable system of heavy transport on a regular basis can be instituted or created in the Commonwealth.  Logistically speaking, the BoS in the Commonwealth operates on a long thread and to get what we see in game would require daily overflights of Vertibirds not by one or two at a time, but entire squadrons.  Damn that would be impressive!  It wouldn't make any sense as it would require the Eastern Division to be in complete control over all of the Capitol wasteland, The Pitt and anything else they can get their armored mitts on.  It would also require a basic setting up of not just caravans for water but outright control and patrolling of the wasteland so that all communities within that zone are under BoS control and available for conscription.  And that is just to get that huge logistics supply chain in place!  And that would be something that would drive those hardened combat veterans known as The Outcasts right back out again.

What conclusion can be drawn from this?  That the BoS we are shown has not embraced its roots and while many detested the things that the Lyons family did, many of those things cannot be undone.  Recruits from the outside who pass Brotherhood fitness and ability tests can become members of the BoS.  The power structure we are given lacks all the standard pieces that makes a good military system work with subordinates delegated powers and responsibility and the leader overseeing the overall health of the entire organization.  Shorn of the internal checks on abuse of power, Elder Maxson now in his early 20's, has become a virtual warlord.  The trappings of the BoS are still there with the titles and ranks, and a vestige of the power structure is in place but can be over-ruled at any point by Elder Maxson who expects absolute obedience to his commands.  That is not the way of the BoS and without the Chains that Bind, Elder Maxson has corrupted the Eastern Division, perhaps using the easy excuse of 'necessity'.  Whatever the case, as presented, the BoS as given in FO4 are not plausible given the past of the BoS.


The Gunners

The Gunners are high-end mercenaries for hire...for everyone except the PC.  As shown they are immediately hostile to the PC and will just try to gun you down whenever they notice you.  What a sweet bunch, huh?  I mean it isn't like you actually want to contract their services...wouldn't it be cheaper to just  pay The Gunners a set amount every week or month to protect a settlement or three?  Maybe even offer them housing, good beds, food and the like for those on such duty?  It isn't as if the PC has a magical ability to create new stuff at a settlement, right?

Wait, you do?

Why isn't this something you can do with Gunners?  Well it would involve some sort of game mechanic for contracting, making sure that amounts were set aside to be paid out on a regular basis, say to a purser or quartermaster of The Gunners, and actually involve negotiating with The Gunners and interacting with its command structure.  As it is, who actually knows how to contact them?  Well a robot in Diamond City that wanted Deathclaw eggs was able to do that.  The Cabot family seems to have a contract with them.  After that?  Hmmmm....say who is paying these guys, anyways?  There aren't enough jobs around to support them and they have taken a couple of sites with high casualty rates, so where are their training facilities?  Gunner's Plaza doesn't have a decent shooting range or place to work out, and it seems to be mostly R&R and admin.

As presented The Gunners don't act like mercenaries, just better armed Raiders who like robots a bit less than the Rust Devils, but respect them more.  It is a faction that has technical background, at least enough to do reprogramming of robots and produce some higher end equipment.  The problem with The Gunners, like the BoS, is logistics.  Who pays them the high amounts necessary to keep all that running?  Even more to the point, how can they afford all that equipment?  This makes no sense at all.  The Institute may use them, here and there, but for that they have Kellogg, Coursers and lots of throw away Synths, so the actual need for using The Gunners is so small for The Institute that it isn't worth thinking about.  The Gunners cannot survive on scraps from The Institute.  And if there is an outside funding source it must be relatively large and well financed.  The only prior faction in the game for that is The Enclave, and they are in disarray on the east coast and not present in the Commonwealth.  The Enclave also prefers to operate on its own and NOT hire mercenaries, by and large, and scraps from distant survivors won't keep The Gunners going.

Anyone who has run FO4 with the Contraptions DLC content knows that it is possible to make new weapons, armor, ammo and gear given the right equipment.  That all requires resources, scavenging and purchase of said raw materials whenever its cheap to do so.  A place like Gunner's Plaza is chock-a-block with so much resource intensive goods that it would require a lot of time, effort and money to make it and keep it running.  Yet is it possible to even find a shop run by The Gunners who have a purchase list of things they will pay extra for?  How about representatives looking to trade on behalf of them?  Or putting up that they will accept certain goods as payment for contracts?  The answer to all of this is: NO.

Sad, really, as they would have made a fascinating faction.  Over the course of game play the opportunity to start interacting with The Gunners, perhaps on a sidequest, should have been introduced and that would then give a first Point of Contact with them.  Perhaps a store for trade or even finding low-level contract work they would be willing to pay a freelancer to do.  From there the 'getting to know you' game can proceed, with The Gunners being NEUTRAL at the start of the game and, if you start to work with them for protection of settlements, they might even become FRIENDLY though not 'allied' as such.

The Gunners are a military organization that needs something, and what it needs is the same thing the Minutemen need, in the end: a legitimizing organization.  As it stands The Gunners are a contract or two away from becoming Raiders: no amount of training and loyalty oaths will feed an empty stomach nor keep soldiers in line when there is no work to do.  Perhaps an unnamed third party with lots of cash to blow for very little is willing to keep The Gunners going, but with no hints of that anywhere in the game, that cannot be supported by something other than conjecture.  Sans the cash they are at risk of not being mercenaries but simply Raiders with a fancy name and still not being able to keep themselves fed.  The answer to this is a political system that has checks that can be put on The Gunners in exchange for becoming the actual military organization of the Commonwealth.  Leadership protocols would still be in place, save the Brigadier of The Gunners answerable to the Executive position of the Commonwealth.  This then offers a constant stream of funds for logistics and the removal of contracts as those now need to be processed by the government.

The Gunners wouldn't accept this immediately, which is why it should be part of a larger end-game scenario especially with a Minuteman or RR victory over The Institute.  Without any indication of exterior support for The Gunners in FO4 and with all indications being that they are an isolated phenomena of the Commonwealth, the only conclusion that can be drawn is they they service contracts inside the Commonwealth.  Their threats against MacCready demonstrate this, and The Gunners feel they are the sole taker of military style contracts in the Commonwealth and are willing to make sure any potential competition knows this.  They don't appear to go down to the level of harassing bodyguards, which is the sort of work MacCready is ready to accept, so there know their limits.  In addition while they may be for hire by some criminal organizations, they don't go after those.  The Triggermen have little to fear about The Gunners coming to harass them as they operate in different venues, though both use violence it is to different ends.


The Institute

When playing Fallout 3 I got the idea that The Institute was a bit more present in the affairs of the Commonwealth and didn't exactly operate in a very low profile mode.  At most they might be into a form of enforced experimentation via slavery on members of the population and at the lowest point they had visible individuals who operated directly like a power behind the throne sort of arrangement.  They were, perhaps, operating openly in what was old Central Boston and outside of that area they saw settlements and communities as too dispersed to bother with.

It made sense to see it that way as it takes quite a bit for an organization to send a few people at the highest levels out over the long distance from the Commonwealth to the Capitol Wasteland.  There is no hint that they simply traveled with a caravan or two, but that they came on their own through that harsh territory or that they might have come by sea travel.  Trying to make sense of the few times the Commonwealth, Boston, The Institute and Androids were mentioned left a sort of jigsaw puzzle to FO3 players.  Perhaps these Androids were being used as slave labor (with high starting cost, to be sure) to augment production of goods or perhaps even provide services that were not available from wastelanders.  What we didn't get was the feeling that The Institute was isolated not just from other parts of the wasteland, but unwilling to deal with the surface world much if at all.  That didn't fit with what we knew from The Pitt DLC of FO3, and some amount of active trade and even recognition of the quality of goods from The Pitt showed more than a passing interest in outside trade.

That sort of Institute, one operating behind the scenes but not underground, and even openly in some areas, plus understanding why trade was important to them for new equipment and ideas was missing in FO4.  An expectation of being able to have a role-playing environment that involved technology, slavery of Androids (Synths), and learning about the ways that The Institute exploited others outside of their immediate grasp were built up to a small degree by what was shown in FO3.    Taking up with another faction, the Railroad, would mean utilizing a different set of skills, contacts and interaction with individuals.  Playing both sides of the field would put the player in deadly danger of being called out or spotted as a double-agent.

Getting the Commonwealth that was delivered, while visually interesting, didn't live up to the sort of high technology to wastelander dichotomy that had been hinted at in FO3.  With the actual ability to play a role that one wanted to play in FO4 and handed something that was more warmed over wasteland with this tiny group with high technology living underground felt like a lost opportunity.  In over 2 centuries The Institute can barely manage what it has, and that is a problem as what it does have demonstrates some major problems with the faction in concept and execution.  The end result of such a tiny group of individuals, and the population size is smaller than that of Diamond City, points to major problems of genetic isolation, in-breeding and enforced population control as seen in Vault 81.  Yet in both Diamond City and Vault 81 there are enough children to support another generation of both places, with at least a representative group of individuals in their late teens or early 20s to serve as the next generation moving into the population to replace older individuals when they die.  The Institute is on its last generation of people, and has no echelon of individuals in their late teens to early 20s for immediate replacement of older members and only 2 children in the entire facility.  The population of The Institute is in for a severe decline over the next two decades and without facilities to educate children even on such a low level as seen in either Diamond City or Vault 81, there will be no Institute in 30 years.

Perhaps this was the goal of the Gen 3 Synth project?  Actually ANY goal of that project would be nice to hear as 'Mankind, Redefined' is a slogan that has no clear end-point objectives added to it.  To put it bluntly that redefinition must, itself, be defined, stated and have goals that can be achieved or the overall project is set to be on a Death March to absolute failure.  While having the ability to create individuals on the fly with pre-made routines and interaction capability is interesting, it must be pointed out that all Gen 3 Synths are sterile, consume food, and are based on the genome of one individual, Father.  The rationale for snatching him from Vault 111 was that as an infant he had an 'uncorrupted' genome, not tainted by radiation of the wasteland.  Yet this is true of each and every individual in Vault 111 and they were all intentionally taken off life support by The Institute, save for the sole survivor.  That was an insane move by the Director of that era as each of those people could, in theory, serve as the basis for an uncontaminated genome AND offer genetic diversity to the Gen 3 Synth project.  In point of fact, with The Institute as we are shown being a self-contained and isolated facility safe from exterior radiation, these individuals could be revived and brought into the population of The Institute to serve as a replacement group over a period of years with children being brought up to the ways of The Institute but leavened by pre-war knowledge of the survivors of Vault 111.  Psychologically The Institute has undergone drift away from the actual foundations of science and program execution: isolation has brought The Institute a sharp focus on one topic, Human Synthetics, yet prevent them from saying just what it is those Human Synthetics are supposed to be as an end goal.  As it is the Synth program has a relatively high maintenance overhead to it and in the Gen 3 line puts out individuals that must consume food to keep their biological bodies running.

They do need food as they consume it to survive when they show up in settlements run by the sole survivor.  Undercover or runaway Synths have the exact same overhead as normal humans in food and water, with only the actual need to sleep being a tell-tale sign that they aren't human.  Over time the humans in a settlement will eventually identify a Synth and eradicate them which is something that the Covenant group has been unable to formulate to counter Synth infiltration by The Institute.  With this in mind, what is the actual purpose of a Gen 3 Synth?  To serve as a workforce for the dwindling population of The Insitute?  If that is the case and the members inside The Institute refuse to recognize that many if not all Gen 3 Synths have the capacity for original thought and self-awareness, then the end of the Gen 3 Synth program would be to have a population tidying up a dead Institute.  Without a clear goal for the Gen 3 Synth program and seeing such Synths as property, then the very use of humans as a clear demonstration of the 'best' nature can create is being overlooked.  A perfect machine modeled on a human being would have the ability to be self-aware, original thinking and be creative as these are tell-tale signs of success in adapting to the natural environment.  Synths can be given immunity to the effects of radiation, yes, but that only makes sense if it is a genetic trait that can be passed on from generation to generation.

Here The Institute falls into the very same problem as The Master from Fallout who wanted to have Unity by converting everyone into Super Mutants via the FEV.  Super Mutants are sterile, and would be the LAST generation of thinking living beings on the planet.  Synths have this same problem, so that no matter how well made and designed they are, they are liable to the problems of nature and will die out.  Well die out after The Institute closes up shop due to lack of population that is, and that is less than a generation away.

Gen 3 Synths also have another problem and that is shown when Father tells the division heads that he is dying of cancer.  Fallout lore establishes that cancer was treatable in the pre-war world and was no longer a great killer but something easily cured.  Thus either The Institute lacks this medical knowledge and can't cure cancer, or they have it and this is a type that is different from any other form of cancer ever seen on the planet.  Father, therefore, has a genetic predisposition to this form of cancer.  So does every single Gen 3 Synth based on his genome.  If The Institute knew about this before making Gen 3 Synths, then it would have been caught and Father wouldn't be where he is in FO4.  Since it wasn't caught and Father has kept it a secret from everyone for years, that means he has allowed the production of Gen 3 Synths based on his genome to continue with the knowledge they have a genetic flaw in their basis.

For a year that might be an act of self-denial.  Longer than that, and it becomes a willful act of malice on the part of the acting Director of The Institute to withhold knowledge of a problem that is the very basis of the Gen 3 Synth program which is seen as a success.  Failure is an option when running scientific experiments, and by not informing the scientists of this problem and stopping the production of Gen 3 Synths, Father is showing a base human flaw driven either by fear, cowardice or just figuring that this will be dealt with AFTER his passing.  Without negative input into scientific knowledge, that is the knowledge of what doesn't work, there is no opportunity to figure out why it didn't work.  Without knowledge of this form of cancer The Institute is now years behind in finding out its basis and perhaps creating a cure for it.  Or at least delving into pre-war records on how cancer was cured so they can utilize that, though a bit late on the uptake on that score.  If Father truly loves science and scientific advancement, he would have informed everyone about this years ago, instead of keeping it secret with his doctor who was not given the means to do expansive research as it was to be kept confidential.

The worst part is that the sole survivor as 'the backup' has a 50/50 chance of having those SAME genetic traits.  And as that cancer took decades to show up, the sole survivor would not be showing it as they did go through medical exams in the pre-war world before going into Vault 111.  That means the act of the previous Director and Kellogg may have killed off the individual who might be free of this genetic problem.  What does need to be pointed out that dying and going into a deep freeze, presumably with the chemicals to preserve tissue already in the body, everyone in Vault 111 might still be revived.  That is part and parcel of cryogenic suspension, after all, where people will that their body be put into a deep freeze state with proper chemicals to prevent ice crystal formation and preserved until they can be treated and revivified.  Thus the entire population of Vault 111 might still be brought back to a living, waking state despite the intentional act of mass murder directed at them.

On the logistics side, The Institute seems to be pretty much a showcase of technology that, while impressive, doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  Starting with Synths, particularly the Gen 3 variety, we can see that one can be constructed from empty holding matrix to fully fleshed individual in about 10 minutes.  These are then processed...somewhere.   Perhaps it is a fully roboticized downloading of a basic personality matrix with directives and some physiological tests to see if all the random factors have made a Synth that can be upgraded to a Courser.  Call that about a half-hour, with time on a firing range...somewhere...included.  From start to finish all of this can be wrapped up in an hour or so, possibly, with a very few units going on to advanced programming and responses to become Coursers and the rest able to serve as individuals able to clean, do basic maintenance, and so on.  That is roughly 24 a day, buts lets put that down to 20 a day for calculation purposes, as some number don't pass muster.  In a week that is 140 Gen 3 Synths.  In a year, that is 7,280 Gen 3 Synths.  At that point there are more Gen 3 Synths than there are individuals in the Commonwealth.  There is a problem with Gen 3 Synths: they have a biological system that requires certain nutrients to remain stable, and quite a few Gen 3 Synths become fond of Fancy Lad Snack Cakes.  One box of Fancy Lad Snack Cakes per week might do for a Gen 3 Synth food addict, and since not every Gen 3 Synth likes the stuff, we can put a number down to, say, 5,000 boxes per year, roughly speaking.

At that point The Institute isn't about 'redefining' mankind, but maintaining a Gen 3 Synth population that is larger than everyone we see inside The Institute by a few orders of magnitude.  Hey, where are all these Gen 3 Synths, anyways?  Or do so few of them pass muster that the lovely construction system is constantly remaking Synths in the hope of a pass rate of something like 0.001% or less?  Because if that is the case, then the Gen 3 Synth program is a failure as it is a waste of time, resources, energy and manpower that would be better spent doing something else.  Like expanding The Institute's living space because it is woefully short on genetic variation and needs to expand to so as to not develop problems with in-breeding.  If they had gene therapy or something like it, then Father wouldn't have a cancer that couldn't be treated, and would indicate that The Institute does know how to utilize genetic treatments suitable for countering cancer.  Vault 81 has a problem of its tiny lab not being able to grow food quickly enough to keep its population stable, so there must be some protein synthesis going on somewhere to support its low population.  The Institute has this problem in spades.

If you side with The Institute actually knowing what they are doing, then where is all the necessary space to hold all the excess Gen 1, 2 and 3 Synths?  And if it is so competent that it doesn't need that space, then where are those Synths?  You can't find rank upon rank of Gen 1 and 2 Synths in broom closets, after all.  They do take up physical space and that space must be somewhere.  Gen 3's need more space due to their biological components, and its probably not a good idea to put a Gen 3 into a shutdown state for hours, not to speak of days, weeks, months or years.  Assuming that you can, then there is the same problem with Gen 1 and 2's: where are they.  Over 7,000 per year if The Institute is competent is what backing them on that requires.  Storage space, preferably climate controlled, which would help in preserving the state of most of those units because packing them in cosmoline would require a tedious cleaning job when you wanted to re-activate them.  There are more high tech and lower overhead ways to do this, of course, but all of those still require space.  If we got to see Mr. House's robot army, then where is the Synth army of The Institute?  You know the army of floor sweepers, garbage cleaners and the ones who clean the toilets?  If you packed a year's worth of Gen 3 Synths into one space it might fill up all of Dunwich Borer's quarry from lowest to highest point, with overflow out on to the landscape.

The only thing that would fit what is seen is that The Institute we get to see isn't the actual thing, itself.  It is more of a demo model with some selected members working in it to try and figure out just how humans and Gen 3 Synths can work together, or at least have the Gen 3's subservient to humans at all times with none of those nasty concepts coming from free will.  By deciding that the very factors of independent decision making that necessarily has a creative portion to it doesn't constitute free will, The Institute is making a case for predestinationism or even for humans not having free will.  Yet inventiveness requires this, which is why Curie feels so limited as a robot: she lacks that spark of being human, of freeing herself of mechanical and programming restraints and getting another set of input into her base personality to be processed biologically.  She understands the basis for such capability is rooted in nature, and a Synth brain in a more or less natural body is a suitable basis for this to happen.  Curie was an oddity, to be sure, but for there to be emergent behavior that leads to self-recognition at a base level, she concludes what is necessary to break free of those constraints.  You can't even tell The Institute about this since they don't allow Companions in with you.  Besides they would just see her as their property, shut her down and strip her of her personality that would be judged aberrant, faulty and damaging to The Institute's reputation.  Not as a success.

So where does that leave The Institute?  It is unable to do basic program management or handle large scale programs properly.  It wants to have a subservient mankind with all of the features but none of the drawbacks of human, and yet make such beings as subservient to flawed humans.  When given a base genetic flaw on the grandest program The Institute has been working at for over a century, the information is hidden away and then kept under wraps, and never acted upon when it is revealed.  The truly awe-inspiring ability to create Synths on a continual basis isn't supported logistically, save that there are so many failures that the success rate is low enough to deem any program with such a success rate to be an utter failure in any other context.  The population inside The Institute is not sustainable for another full generation and may have undergone catastrophic genetic drift to the point where the need for sterilization or birth control is necessary and the children heavily screened before birth to prevent genetic defects from running rampant.  None of this adds up to what we see in the game.  It does serve as an arcade shooter foil, but it is made of foil that doesn't survive a light scratching at the surface and tears easily.  Plus for all the worries about property and wanting to 'recover' it, much in the way of other property is lost on hare-brained expeditions with little to no obvious purpose.  While they can replace a few individuals competently, they also do so for no reason that can ever be found out.  The Institute in the way of Father promises much, but delivers nothing save to use the PC as a replacement for Kellogg that he hopes will be the right person to guide The Institute into the future.  A person with a body count in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands by that point.

A bad, bad dream

Fallout 4 had actual and real promise to it as a game in the Fallout franchise as we would start with a pre-war individual and then need to make an abrupt change to the wasteland of the post-war world.  You would have had a job, pre-war, and possibly go through a few days leading up to the fateful Saturday when the bombs dropped.  You could have been anything: a returning veteran, a lawyer, someone who worked at a Red Rocket servicing trucks, an employee of Rob Co., General Atomics, Dunwich or Slocum Joe's.  You might have been an undercover agent for the Enclave, working in trying to rub out criminals that the regular police were too corrupt to tackle, or handling threats that were outside normal experiences of any police, thus some of your work might have been fictionalized to cover it up.  You could have been a Chinese infiltrator, a bookie, a junkie, or that cranky old guy trying to fix his lawnmower.

A good and solid 2 or 3 hours of game play in a 70 hour or more game is not unreasonable for staging a prelude to what is to come.  Some careers might have some warning of what was coming and stashed a cache of equipment for you knowing that you were placed in the Vault 111 neighborhood for a reason.  Or you just might have been an everyday person with no preparations at all.  Maybe you had a Mr. Handy robot, but most people couldn't afford one, so you would ask the neighbor to lend their Mr. Handy to you once in awhile.  You would get to drive a car or take a bus, chat with co-workers, joke with customers or just huddle in a cubicle trying to parse out programming code for a new robot line.  Then the bombs dropped.  You had seen the world as it worked and didn't work pre-war.  You might have been married, single, cohabiting, with any variation of that you could think about.  And once you were thawed out you wouldn't have a 'save your son' story thrown at you and your very first concern might be in finding out if any of the other people inside their cryopods could be saved.  Just because their life support readings are off-line doesn't mean that they weren't properly put into suspension...this IS Vault-Tec we are talking about, after all.

Based on just what you saw coming out of cryogenic suspension, you might figure out that someone let you out or that it was just a random thing, or that something had gone wrong and the system chose to defrost you to solve the problem.  As a player you would be given facts, evidence, choices and not be steered towards finding your son and giving up everyone else for dead.  These were your neighbors.  Some of them might be friends or even lovers, all coming from a cul de sac sort of drama arrangement that would have fit perfectly with the Fallout franchise.  Would your pre-war skills stand to the test of the post-war world?  You might not know how to use a gun, or you may have been all too proficient at it.  You might not be a mechanical genius or you might see the complex diagrams used to create new items and declare them to not be efficient enough and improve them.  You would be translating pre-war skills into a post-war world, and while secretarial or clerical skills might not seem like good survival skills, they sure do come in handy in making lists of things you need and even figuring out where some good resources might be based on pre-war experience and that means more resources found more often.

How you started would then determine just what sort of attitude you took towards everything in the wasteland.  A pre-war drug pusher might not see strung out Raiders as hostile, but as a customer base.  That kind of turns the entire pre-scripted nature of Concord on its head, twists it around and turns it into something totally other.  Are you up to the task of dealing with a large Raider gang, not with violence but with price negotiation and factoring in the lives of innocents into the bargain?  Or if you were that pre-war Enclave agent, mowing these drug addled violent junkies might just be a clean-up operation and a Deathclaw something you were trained to handle.  Coming out of the past is not a de novo start: this is not a blank slate but one that has been written on and must be taken into consideration to make the rest of the game make sense.  Aiming to become a drug kingpin in the post-apocalypse is just as valid a response as wanting to establish a new government to bring order to all the chaos, with everything in-between also on the table.  This would require a deep world, one with established post-war themes that the Fallout franchise is famous for including and each faction would demonstrate that they not only adapted to this world but did their best to survive and expand in it.  That would bring conflict and war, war never changes.

People can and indeed must change when confronting life, in general, and a shattered world of a post-war era that has gone to hell. To be able to describe that trajectory is the primary job of a role-playing game and when coupled with player agency leads to diverse endings.  Tacking on a 'find your child' quest and thinking this can be a 'good' narrative that will press players onwards is not just lazy writing but an active insult to the Fallout player base.  A player has no investment in the pre-war world, the marriage that is presented or the infant that is the product of a romantic time after going to the park.  Player agency in the pre-war era and then ending it would expand role-playing choices and even allow for differing ways to approach the post-war era with different drivers and motives.  Removing choice and player agency in what is purported to be a role-playing game does not reflect a rich world, but a poor one that is poorly designed from the start.

While many new people were brought into the Fallout franchise by FO4, they got a rude awakening when playing either Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas as both of those featured role-playing where the decisions you made changed what you could say, who you could approach and what you could and could not accomplish.  In particular with FONV players could do damned near anything from being a saint that wouldn't harm any living thing all the way to a psychopathic murderer that left a pile of corpses behind them and made the Mojave into an empty wasteland (at least in the base game).  With prior parts of the franchise still on sale (and inexpensive) quite a few gamers got to experience what was and still is the Fallout phenomenon and then get a basis to compare the latest part of the franchise with its prior installments.  This is part of the reason that the post-launch FO4 critical reviews and scoring have not gone up after the first 3 months: players learned about what this franchise was and find more to be disappointed with in the current installment compared to the prior ones.  A player willing to invest a bit more time to play prior parts of the franchise then begins a serious process of analysis and comparison of those entries with FO4 and the result is the slow decline of FO4 away from the top of the franchise and down towards the bottom of it.

The only bright spot of FO4 is that the updated Creation Engine has allowed for modders to have the ability to start taking apart game mechanics, like the horrifically abused Perk system and start the process of restoring a skill and perk system, so that players get meaningful choices on how they want to approach the game.  Sadly this cannot fix the broken speech system nor the awful plot that theoretically should be driving the PC forward but is totally unimmersive to the player.  In a game that entices immersion via exploration and crafting, it also breaks that immersion by continually bringing the main story plot line up again and again.  If you want to be a PC that has actually rapidly adjusted their outlook, then having the 'you're over 200 years old!?!' bit thrown at you gets a bit tedious, to the point where you would like to throttle that person and say: yes, get over it since I DID A FEW WEEKS AGO.  Sadly the ability to actually do that or even have sensible replies to NPCs is lacking.  No one is so insular or so driven as to not listen to other approaches to a common problem or even problems for life in general (once you get to know them) save a religious fanatic and those are pretty easy to spot.  Yet the player can spend a long time thinking about what they actually WANT to say to an NPC, especially a faction leader, and get stuck with the same 4 choices which boil down to 3 positive and 1 negative.  For a franchise used to making the moral and ethical areas grey, the speech choices go totally to black and white.  And if you really don't want to slaughter your way across the wasteland?  Sorry, that is something you need to seek in a prior installment of the franchise.  Action combat game mechanics rule the roost in FO4.

One of the major problems that Bethesda Game Studios has had in its franchises is actually coming up with a game that demonstrates that it understands how a faction operates on the ground.  This isn't that necessary with free-form factions, like the Minutemen, but is a damned necessity with any faction that is driven by something other than basic self-defense.  The Brotherhood of Steel should act like it is just the spear point sent into the wasteland to assess and try and deal with The Institute, and have a regular organization that is sane, sensible, defensible and can be sustained by incoming supplies.  That leaves a wide range of role-playing opportunities both for and against the BoS in and of itself.  Those supply lines are vital to the success of the mission, and yet they are shoved aside as even a concept so the player can get an endless supply of exploding vertibirds and a coterie of dead BoS members larger than ANY chapter witnessed in the franchise...or more than all of them combined if you have a long enough time at the game.

A clandestine RR that has suffered a severe setback doesn't break its internal security rules because it has seen what can happen when it does that and it isn't pretty.  Gaining the trust of that organization is a long, slow getting to know you dance that requires patience on the part of the player to actually understand the organization.  The 'getting to know you' period is mandatory under all circumstances, and placing trust in the actions of the RR if you haven't won them over so as to get vital information from them creates an air of realism that no amount of poor random vocalizations by NPCs can ever do.  Deacon, for all of being a companion and such, needs to know his place in the organization and actually go through that 'getting to know you' period BEYOND just one operation.  Yet the flimsy plot demands otherwise, thus operational security goes out the window.

The Institute needs to be scaled to what it is purported to be and the grand showcase that we get needs to have all the underlying parts of what allows it to be as it is clearly shown, and that might not be a pretty sight.  As shown it is far too small to do very much, and without any real physical space to actually have the equipment necessary to process or store anything from food to Synths it comes off as just a showpiece not an actual working organization. What is given is a shallow and a rather vapid 'we are the future' faction that doesn't have either a well defined past or present and doesn't act like the things it says that matter actually matter.  As an organization they are unable to run even simple projects in a rational way or even bother to define what their end goals are for the organization.  When made the head of the organization it is not possible to actually change policies, reassign personnel...well if you had more than the handful available you might get a talent pool and that isn't allowed...or even start to execute based on those changes.  If you can't point out the major flaw in their Gen 3 Synth program in that having the genetic basis for all Gen 3 Synths have an underlying genetic factor leading to an unknown and uncurable form of cancer, well, for all the supposed intelligence there these people just aren't that smart.

As in other games BGS has put out, becoming a faction leader or at least the 'most important operative' in the faction is pretty much a quick and easy thing to do.  The rewards are slim and titles never hold any authority behind them because the PC is never given the tools to actually utilize their position and deal with its responsibilities.  The trade-off in rising in a faction is that you do get more leeway, more authority and are held responsible for what you do at ever increasing scrutiny to see if you are abiding by the tenets of the organization.  At the very highest level a player would have to deal with schedules, personnel assignments, and an actual budget to figure out how to keep the organization running.  Making that transition from troubleshooter to administrative overseer or CEO is a difficult transition to make, while still giving entertaining content and a real rationale for the player to take a more active role in events...if they want to do that.  Part of the fun of being at that high level is that you no longer get the cats and dogs missions, the 'could you do this vitally important thing that needs to be done RSN but you can do at your leisure?' sorts of missions.  The damned Radiant Quests that only serve as grind for the player to get levels but advance no story, no plot and are just Filler Quests for lack of better made content. All of those can, should and indeed must disappear at the Faction Leader level of things.  A leader with an active bent to them will lead by example and be willing to show how missions can and should be done, and this should change opinions inside and outside the organization both pro and con.  A less active leader for the organization delegates authority and responsibility for missions and then keeps track of them, asses outcomes, and lets the lower level individuals know what they did right, what they did wrong and all of that taken in context of just how hard the mission was in total.  Very few games ever offer that depth of activity level, however, yet if becoming a faction leader in a role-playing environment then that level of detail becomes necessary.  It takes skilled writing and coding to handle these affairs, and are actually more difficult than working on combat in the game engine as it requires an in-depth assessment of each faction and what they are about and how they go about activities.

A title without authority is hollow, and that hollow area is where the nuts and bolts of factions comes into play.  You can't turn the Minutemen into a true military without a government, but you can't start the process of MAKING a government for the Commonwealth so you can never get a true military.  The BoS has its core and foundation credo trampled upon, and yet you cannot bring up this lack of fidelity to them and impeach their current leader as a man setting himself up not as an Elder like Elder Lyons but something much closer to Father Elijah in FONV: a man with his own, personal agenda and the Brotherhood is just a tool to achieve it, in this case it is fame and glory for himself by doing this difficult task.  And the RR doesn't offer the opportunity for the PC to become a talent scout or trainer for new operatives so that the organization can become a bit more secure and active at the same time.  And for all the glitzy bits of The Institute, the PC never gets to enact policy changes, change personnel, and decide what the future of The Institute actually is.  And with the Vault-Tec DLC the ability of the PC to actually make something that functions far better than The Institute is put in their hands: older technology that works, is adaptable and doesn't suffer the power problems The Institute has.  Plus it has lots of living space available.

BGS can be credited with putting out a game with far fewer crashes than their previous outings, though it is based on an old game engine that is long in the tooth.  If you didn't like the strange physics of prior games put out by the studio, then you won't like those same ones showing up in FO4.  That could be readily forgiven along with the lack of a good melee system if the main story was compelling, interesting and immersive.  BGS tends to rely on relatively dull main stories and then shines in the small stories, the interesting side quests and some demonstration that what the player does actually matters in smaller affairs.  FO4 has some good and fun side quests and even interesting story based DLC content, yet all of that is in service to a game that has not taken past lessons to heart on how to broaden the role-playing aspects of their game without sacrificing  player agency.  Moving to shooter and action mechanics, and doing a much better job at them to be granted, has come at the sacrifice of an interesting plot, story and characters with some feeling that these decisions actually matter.  The conflict that is pushed out to try and make this work is driven by the supposedly most intelligent group around, yet they have not learned lessons from history about what happens when overbearing authority is utilized against a population of people: it isn't liked all that much.

The reason The Institute destroyed the beginnings of the Provisional Commonwealth Government was that the assembly was raucous, there were many different opinions and The Institute didn't hold any more sway than any other settlement.  It was, in other words, representative of the people involved who had a common goal of trying to secure a better future but having differing opinions on the best way forward.  This was wiped out by The Institute since such a body would not adhere to what The Institute 'knew' was the best path forward, which was to kow-tow to them.  Apparently the concept of earning trust was a bit too complex and involved for The Institute, and thus the wasteland's first hope for recovery on the east coast was destroyed by them.  Yet here was something that might have actually been an interesting role-playing experience and might have served to show just how The Institute actually works on the inside.  From a holotape found inside The Institute it is possible to discern a difference of opinion during the era of the CPG: at one point The Institute, itself, was somewhat more diverse in opinions on what the best path forward actually was.  Given the nature of the way those in charge of The Institute view negative internal feedback in the time of Father, it is possible that such opinions were over-ridden and squelched from simple authority of 'you shall obey the leadership'.  Yet The Institute, itself, is so small that it does not suffer from the one thing any organization just slightly larger than itself will get: office politics.  Such rigid obedience and rapid squelching of dissent is only possible in such a small organization, and yet it isn't large enough to sustain itself over time.  These things just do not work together or even make any basic sense.  A conflict from a diversity of opinions, with smaller groups seeking their own slice of the pie is something perfectly suited to an RPG and The Institute would have been the prime place to show it.

Finally there are the side quests and DLC content that should have long-term ramifications if a certain set of paths are followed.  With all the tongue-in-cheek humor of Automotron, especially when the comic book path is followed, the idea of having robot minions doing your bidding could play out in very interesting ways once the player gets their hands on that power.  By having a factory available to be refurbished and brought into full production, the PC should have been granted that ability that The Mechanist had and to utilize it with better skill.  For all of the fun of that DLC, there is no carry-through, no long-term ramifications and no major changes in NPC dialogue beyond companions of robots being a true threat to life and limb.

The Cabot House quest line offers the concept of a dark and foreboding power manifesting in the world and that if it isn't stopped than a true monster will be released that will transform the wasteland for the worst.  Given the nature of the franchise it would be very possible that creatures from the sea that weren't Mirelurks, Fog Crawlers, etc. but something far less amenable to physical or energy weapons might start showing up.  Perhaps Lorenzo Cabot was in contact with Yog-Sothoth or some other Cthulhoid entity seeking its own ends in the post-nuclear world, and releasing him and siding with him would have started a threat that would engulf everyone, even The Institute as it so unwisely thinks itself isolated when the realms of the earth and thought are very amenable to eldritch powers.  Instead Lorenzo will sit on his butt and give you a new Mysterious Serum every week or so.  So much for having him lead an army of creatures or R'lyeh rising up off the coast.

Given the Raider ending of the Nuka-World DLC, wouldn't it have been interesting to use the equipment in Nuka-World to find out where The Institute was and to find a way in?  The worst ending to The Institute is NOT blowing it up, but putting it in the hands of Raiders...Raiders led by the PC.  Putting the technology of The Institute into their hands and enslaving any survivors would mean a fate far worse for the Commonwealth than any of the base game endings.  Sadly this is not available as a possibility.  And all that fancy equipment, knowledge and so forth at Nuka World isn't of any interest to the BoS or The Institute.  Here you can find a gene splicing machine that not only separated out FEV from a dead Super Mutant, but then had the FEV adapted to suit other organisms without such horrific effects.  This equipment could lead to better Synth muscles, skin and tissue plus use a variety of sources for its creation.  And this same equipment would want to be sequestered by the BoS who would see it as a deadly weapon.  Weaponizing soft drinks would be of interest to ALL of the factions, period.  Being able to change a bottle of Nuka-Cola into a nuclear assisted explosive would catch the eyes of every faction leader.  Sadly, you can't get story lines like that in FO4.

Talking about Nuka-World I had thought there would have been an unlock for those with both Automotron and Far Harbor for Bradburton.  Having one's head preserved is a pretty bad decision after all, but there is a solution available based on prior content.  First off the actual equipment to create a Robobrain robot is available in the Commonwealth.  Secondly one of the people who led the Robobrain project is still alive in Far Harbor after becoming a Robobrain, himself.  Thus the PC has the means, available background and skill to offer John Caleb Bradburton a new way to get around: turn him into a Robobrain.  All of the pieces are there and yet the one other way out, and a good way to establish order in Nuka-World and rid it of Raiders should be available: get Bradburton up and running as a Robobrain as HE knows all the ins and outs of the park, all of the defenses available for it and he is the only one who has a snowball's chance in hell of utilizing all of it to get the place up and running again.  Given weaponized soft drinks, robots and the skill to utilize them, a team-up of the PC and Bradburton would pretty much spell the end for the Raiders and might even put a new force on the ground in the Commonwealth.

I thought the end of FO4 and all of its DLCs would be yet another ending to the game: the return of Bradburton with the help of the Sole Survivor to start up a new era of mankind with trade routes secured by Nuka-Cola powered and weaponized robots, favored groups getting their hands on weapons and armor that were augmented with Nuka-Cola, with the goal of restarting secure trade to create a functioning economy in the Commonwealth.  Some factions would reject this or even oppose it, while others would embrace it as it would mark the end of the era of Raiders and the terror of Super Mutants.  By combining all the DLC story pieces the beginning of the post-post-apocalypse would start in the Commonwealth.  And imagine a fusion reactor that isn't started with a fusion core but with a bottle of Nuka-Cola.  That would have been a fun and worthy role-playing opportunity that would reward good and expansive game play.  Instead there is the bad dream that is Fallout 4 - the missed opportunities.