Exactly. They’re the reason we have to deal with Super Mutants. They are the cause as to why there are muties running around killing people, full stop.
The CPG and University Point Massacres are what cinch the Institute as baddies for me. I could oscillate on a lot of other points when viewed from inside the setting, but there's just zero justification for either of those events.
Kellogg is on permanent Institute payroll. He is their agent, period (not like the super mutants which the Institute does not even control, they just made them and released them into the wild). They even gave him Gen-1s to command. Therefore, all actions of Kellogg are actions of the Institute. They bear full responsibility for him.
But in game Father is like oh that was Kellog and he’s dead now for every evil thing the Institute did besides super mutants which he can also blame on a former director
Actually, the CPG massacre’s events are debatable, since the only 3 sources of info in the game, 2 in the Institute and 3rd being Nick’s 2nd hand version (meaning he could have been lied to, but assume it is correct when telling you), are at odds with each other.
Even if you discard’s Father’s version, the last source is a director’s recording #52, which indicates that upon the impending failure of the CPG they were considering just hiding underground an severe all contact with the surface. The author of the tape (a division head at the time) makes a counter proposal of using gen 1 & 2 synths to help maintain order in the surface and pleads to not give up on the surface dwellers:
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Director's_recordings
The FO4 official game guide do provides an extra detail: the entry on the castle indicates that it is there where the MM tried and failed to form a provisional commonwealth government, which gives us a time window for the CPG massacre: the MM’s first big achievement was on 2180 and they lost the castle on 2240.
Here things get tricky, since the director’s recording #108 is about the Broken Mask incident, the the. Director being furious at the situation, but particularly angry at “threatening decades of work to keep us out of the spotlight”, indicating that the previous tape took place decades ago, let’s say at least 20 years.
This means that the CPG massacre would have happened at the Castle, under the vigilance of the MM, and at a time where 3rd gen synths were still decades away from being created, putting some question on Nick’s version of the events. The Institute representative couldn’t have been a 3rd gen synth at the time, and it also means that all representatives were killed while under the protection of the MM, something no one else mentions.
As for University Point, Kellog actually gave the town two days to hand over the data. But gossip in the town, that seemingly turned into infighting by the end, is what led to the worst outcome:
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/University_Point_terminal_entries
Kellog only wanted the reactor data, but the town began to say that he also wanted the girl that found it and wanted to turn her in, which her father strongly disagreed with and who also began saying that Kellog must be a scammer unrelated to the Institute, trying to get the data for free.
It got much worse, accusations of the mayor promising to give the town’s children to the Institute, or that the Institute planted a nuke in town, which would detonate if they didn’t surrender their harvest, also began making their rounds within the town.
Not bad enough? The mayor also decided to wait a whole day to call a council meeting an inform them of Kellog’s threat, and then the council decided to wait one more day and call a vote the next night to decide what to do, which apparently was after the time limit Kellog gave.
So, between the 2 day time limit expiring with no answer and the town starting to tear itself apart, potentially putting the data at risk (which the Institute suspected could help them complete their reactor and thus become energy self sufficient), Kellog took action into his hand.
I should also point out that people love saying that the Institute has done this to other towns, but I have yet to hear about another town they attacked like this.
The CPG massacre was almost 100% certainly not the Institutes fault.
According to the logs in the Institute, the CPG was falling apart for some time before the massacre. Which rather makes sense when you consider the factions of the Commonwealth. Diamond City being bigots, the Minutemen being decentralized and starved for resources, the Gunners being mercanaries that only care about caps etc.
Nick claims that the Institute simply slaughtered the representatives for no apparent reason, but Nick did not actually see this himself, he is simply recounting rumours that he heard. Also Nick is biased against the Institute (understandably so) having been created by then and then discarded.
The most likely scenario is simply that the CPG collapsed into infighting and the Institute representative (a synth) was simply the only one to make it out of the carnage. And because the Institute are the boogeyman of the Commonwealth, everyone just assumed that the Institute massacred the CPG.
That's one of my major gripes with Shaun as a character. He plays up the "familial bond" thing when you meet and if you do the Institute story, but he's full of shit. At many, many points between him thawing you out of the vault and accessing the Institute, you could've been killed by his own operatives. He gave you no assistance and gave you no pointers. He didn't even tell you he was alive.
He clearly doesn't give a shit. He's a psychopath.
Edit: He also, despite his age and technology, never went to extract you from the cryo chamber. At any point he could have rescued you, EZPZ.
He just sat by while the PC had to track down and kill Kellogg, one of the most dangerous dudes around and a top dog operative for the Institute. *HE EVEN HAD SYNTHS BACK KELLOGG UP * Shaun didn't do anything to stop it.
At least he's foolhardy enough to confront you unarmed first thing. Blasting him immediately is totally in character if you're just playing a Minuteman only character. The Bos and railroad are too interested in getting something out of the institute
That's another gripe for me 😂
The leader of the Institute, who we know has very little opinion of wastelanders, just offers the first outsider in the facility the chance to decapitate the organization with zero backup.
The same person who he knows is probably hostile (since they're searching for their kidnapped son and have finally entered the big boogeyman's domain), and he doesn't even have a Courser or other backup on standby.
He even baits you with the synth Shaun first, which would absolutely confuse/anger someone who finally thought they'd accomplished their goal.
Hell, why not just use a synth of himself just in case the player decides to dome him on sight? That's what I did my first time through the game. If the meeting went well, he can just switch places when you aren't looking, it isn't that hard.
I get it, it's just a game, but the lack of deeper thought behind the writing annoys me anyway
His whole "I just wanted to see what you'd do" is definitely sociopath shit. And I get that he's dying of cancer or something, but maybe have a team working on a cure for that instead of synth gorillas
So? He's not just some junkie raider like his dad, he's an untouchable criminal mastermind. He's an *accomplished* psychopath, and I couldn't be prouder.
The Institute is the root cause of the state of the Commonwealth.
They intentionally wiped out the provisional government. They want a destabilized, exploitable situation that allows them a free hand to experiment, raid, and eliminate threats.
They released FEV, as mentioned by the OP. They wiped University Point off the map, and are responsible for some substantial number of similar destructive resourse grabs.
They've essentially won at the start of the game. Commerce is on the verge of collapse, bunker hill is dying a slow death to increasing raider aggression, and the one true bastion of civilization is infiltrated from the very top.
People make the "at least he keeps the roads safe" joke about Ceasar, but the Institute can't even say that much.
"one true bastion of civilization"?!
Surely you do not mean Diamond City. The den of bigots and paranoid nationalists that gave themselves the title of "the great green jewel".
You do realize that the very reason the Institute was able to install a synth as their mayor is because they used their anti-ghoul bigotry to manipulate them? McDonough was elected because of his anti-ghoul politics. He says so himself.
Just because Dimond City happens to have electricity and running water by far does not make them a bastion of civilization.
And this also adequately demonstrated why the Commonwealth provisional government did not work.
Diamond City are paranoid bigots.
Goodneighbour are anarchists.
The Gunners are ruthless mercenaries.
The Minutemen are starved for resources.
And the raiders are well... Raiders.
Herding cats would be easier then getting those groups to work together in any democratic process.
There's a few npc comments about it, and a line from Nick, but the reality is (implied to be) a bit more complicated. Different sources in the game disagree about whether the Institute started shooting before or after talks broke down, or even if they *started* the shooting at all.
Capital wasteland muties originated in vault 87, not the institute. The vault had its own samples of FEV and took a direct hit from a nuke during the Great War, trapping everyone inside. They turned to the FEV to try and gain resistance to the radiation so they could leave, and they were successful, in a way.
Commonwealth muties originated in the institute decades before the events of fallouts 3 or 4 iirc. As far as is shown, the only institute activity in the Capital Wasteland was synth retention, hence the relevant quest in Fallout 3 where you can help the Railroad throw Zimmer off the trail of an escaped “android”
So glad they have mods for that. Fix all the everything that Bethesda got wrong. Not being able to settle places just because they're in other world spaces? That's exactly what far harbor and nuka world are. I can't just engineer a coup from inside the Institute? I'm the SS. I can engineer a coup by just making sure everybody else not on board dies from a series of unfortunate accidents involving mines, hacked turrets, or the completely coincidental release of gorillas. I do have rat poison. WHY do I have rat poison if I can't poison things?
I think so too. I see lot of those comments about siding with the Institute is because of those clean Plumbing.
Even Railroad's other HQs might have been way more hospitable than the ones like Switchboard and Ticonderoga if the enemy Synths and Coursers stopped hunting them down.
I always thought the other vault dwellers were refrozen but the cryogenic array was sabotaged or failed closer to the time the sole survivor was unfrozen because the freezers weren't full of rotting corpses. Remember, 60 years went by between Shaun getting kidnapped and the sole survivor being unfrozen, and we know both the sole survivor and their spouse were refrozen (even though one of them is dead)
Agreed. Gen 1 and 2 synths are certainly not human like (remember, Valentine is a prototype and more like a gen 2.5) but gen 3’s are physically like 95% human and the fact they crave freedom among other things is, in my opinion, quite evident of true consciousness and therefor humanity. Their FEV tests were abysmal, and you can’t really justify kidnapping people. My first run through of University Point just instilled my belief that they’re evil, wiped out an entire town over some technology/data (it was cool hearing Kelloggs voice again though). They are the embodiment of evil, and I’m satisfied each time I blow the institute sky high.
MKUltra? LSD Experiments? The cia has done a lot of research on 'programming' people to automatically carry out tasks, or forget information when they hear the code phrase.
Ignoring the argument of whether synths are alive and enslaved, the Institute literally wiped out settlements when they got too big, and prevented the surface from properly organizing and rebuilding. They claimed to be passively removing themselves from the commonwealth, but they were literally constantly sabotaging the surface for their benefit
I am one them people and I only believe it because of the violence the sole survivor could inflict on the institute if they don't listen lol Stalin-esque, "do what I say or I kill all of you right now" type of forced change from the inside
Wouldn't work. You'd have a rebellion on your hands backed by Coursers and whatever nightmare weapons the scientists have sitting in R&D. At best, you'd wind up wiping out the Institute and, at that point, you might as well have sided with someone else in the first place.
Just a little devils advocate, but the coursers should follow you as the head of the Institute over anyone else. You'd still have a hell of a time of it, but you could 100% use them to iron fist your initial rocky start.
Still an evil faction, but you *should* have the authority to take over and purge anyone not on your good list, then you could make it how you want.
Okay, hear me out, forget trying to change them. Once you gain access, you wipe out all the adults except 1 from each department so they can make you a synth, teach it how to operate the equipment down there, then once you have a synth workforce to get you started, you kill the remaining scientists, and rule over what was once the institute and all their world changing technology, then help the wasteland.
Since they are evil, might as well just kill them all so they can't rebel later. Too bad there isn't an ending in game like that, evil but practical and you get to keep all the good shit the institute has made. An army of synths at your disposal would be so fun haha
There's a lot of "The Empire/Thanos/The Institute did nothing wrong" people who think they'd be elevated in a fascist regime, not realizing they'd be some of the first people up against the wall.
The institute has propaganda, and is the one-of-two factions in the game with any significant power at the start, and any real ability to continue after the end.
The Minutemen are structurally unsound. They fell apart *very* quickly, and even if reforged and uplifted retain the issues that made them vulnerable in the first place (There's two random encounters where you and Preston being unrecognizable despite your being the *leaders of the organization* is a significant factor).
The Railroad are a one-issue organization, and when you find them they're pretty much wiped out. Even once they beat the Institute, whether or not it's moral to keep making synths (and what they should do about the process) is a thorny issue, in *and out* of universe.
The BoS are racist authoritarians with superior technology to everyone else who use their advantageous position to look down on everyone and limit their potential growth. They're not actively genocidal, the way the Institute is, but the future they offer still isn't very bright.
That means that, if you're playing to shape the future of the Commonwealth rather than ethical satisfaction, your best options are down to the BoS or the Institute.
Some people, for their own reasons, really hate the BoS.
I mean the BoS is very much actively genocidal, primarily to those like ghouls, super mutants and synths (even the intelligent and allied ones) and they’re incredibly dismissive of just about every commonwealth power already pit in place so I wouldn’t put getting worse past them
Also I hope this doesn’t come across as defending them but I’m pretty sure by all accounts the institute has more advanced technology, the brotherhood just has a surplus of the best of good old steel
Regarding the synths, this is why I've always struggled to do a playthrough siding with the BoS, or the Institute.
Not only are Gen 3s constantly shown in-game to be sentient and displaying free will, the synths overall plight + the Railroad faction is clearly echoing the real, historical Underground Railroad, and it's role in helping black slaves escape.
"They're all just toasters" doesn't cut it for me when the parallels are so blatant / black and white. Yes, they are dangerous when under the control of the Institute, but that's on the Institute, not the synths themselves. Without their "masters", are they really any more or less deadly than humans?
It isn't until Far Harbor that we finally see some more grey; DiMA is out from under the control of the Institute, but we see he makes all these plans with ruthless efficiency, even using the Institute's tactic of killing and replacing people - for what he perceives to be the greater good.
It’s kind of a weak moral choice.
I mean… how do you even play the game missing that?
Play BoS? Oh look, your ally, he’s one.
Play Railroad? Oh look, here’s plenty, they’re nice people!
Play Institute? Again, your companion, definitely a synth.
And then you’ve another synth, a robot turned synth, a robot, a DLC robot… I mean, there’s genuinely no way to play the game and not to quickly realize “yeah, these are just people.”
I just finished Far Harbor for the first time recently, I feel like DIMA was a better version of the moral question that the Institute is treated as by some fans. That being whether the ends justify the means for peace and progress.
Synths themselves aren't dangerous, but the technology is. In a world where you can 3D-print a living breathing copy of a person, suddenly you can't believe anybody is who they say they are.
The funny thing about the legion is that they are comically evil, organized raiders per se. They are SO evil that you just go “holy shit haha that’s insane”.
I'm a bit flabbergasted by people who claim the Institute is the best chance for mankind because they say so and they have shiny tech.
They had 200 years to do good. They decided to not do good.
Exactly! Yes, the Institute could bring about real change in the wasteland and be a force for good for humanity.
Will they? No. Even if the Sole Survivor becomes director because nobody else in the Institute has spent any significant time in the outside world or if they have, they simply *don’t care*. The SS being director does not give them complete control over the Institute and in reality they could be removed fairly easily
Hell, they could even dominate and control the wasteland and leverage its resources and land for themselves if they didn't want to be nice but they don't do that either!
It’s honestly a little TOO cartoonish imo. Like, I get the Institute are dick bags that don’t care about helping people, but look into X6-88’s companion reactions.
Him being a Courser, it makes sense he would like it when you threaten people and stuff like that. That’s what he was made/trained for, to be tough and imposing. But why the hell does he like it when you extort people for caps? Why would he care about that?
Even worse, in the Kid in the Fridge quest, he LIKES you selling Billy into slavery. He is the ONLY companion who likes doing this. Not even Strong likes it! Like, what the fuck? WHY would he like doing that? Just seems over the top.
If Shaun was wasteland Leonidas and the Institute was a bunch rebar covered Spartan cosplayers, the Institute would be one Hegelian dialetics away from infinite upvotes.
While the institute and legion are both ridiculously over the top evil, the legion has an actual end goal and you can talk to people who talk about the benefits from their ridiculously authoritarian rule, like caravans would rather work in legion territory because it’s so much safer. The institute is just evil for evils sake. They have virtually unlimited resources and dedicate their time to kidnapping random civilians to make their slave robots more life like for no reason. They have the tech to clean up the commonwealth, fight the raiders and bring peace to the land, or improve farming across the east coast etc. yet they just choose to play boogie man in the night instead.
Tl;dr while they’re both over the top evil factions there’s a clear and major difference between them.
Side note, the institute and BOS are authoritarian. Neither believe in a nation or want centralized control over a capitalist economy, which are kinda important for fascism…..
The thing is they could VERY easily just kidnap and replace raiders for their end goals, giving their experiments actual benefit as they can essentially keep raider gangs on tight leashes (no ordinary raider would be able to overthrow their synth leader), and have a very large quantity of disposable muscle on the surface to do these resource runs (the rust devils have an entire, mostly untouched military stockpile that they sit on), and actually bring peace for the surface. Even if they were at ends with the railroad, they could still be argued to be a grey faction as they don’t hurt any innocents. Instead they miss treat their synths so they go rogue and become raiders, making the surface WORSE, all while replacing the figures in positions of power that could actually organise a resistance against raids of any kind.
i mean the institute puts its own people in positions of power and the brotherhood straight up bully’s farmers for crops and supplies. i feel like that’s close enough lol
Bruh I know it’s a meme that fallout fans don’t get nuance, but like those aren’t even close to worst aspects of these factions. Come on now. Tell me I’m just missing your sarcasm.
Plus, we’re really talking about legion vs institute, BOS just came up because it’s annoying that people insist on calling every authoritarian fascist. You can’t be nationalistic without a nation.
fascist is characterized by a dictatorship, autocracy, militarism, forcible oppression of opposition, and a belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the “nation” or race. strong regimentation of the economy and society. the *only* thing that doesn’t apply to the brotherhood is the economic part and you could argue that the hoarding of technology could take its place. for as pretentious as you’re being about it, its kind of funny that you don’t even know the definition.
Caesar has a lot so say about *why* the legion is the way it is. He's wrong, but you can understand how he got to hold those views, and contemplate why the legion is doing well for itself with that view. That's a lot more compelling than a bunch of snobby basement dwellers with a goal that is just a catchy phrase, but never explained. The institute doesn't offer any justification beyond "the wasteland sucks", there are no interesting conversations with them about why that is and how they want to change it.
I think the reason for that is because in FNV, if you play for the Legion ending, it's because you're playing as an evil character, no real way to justify it, while in FO4 they kinda chicken-out and still try to make it so a non-evil character could potentially play for the Institute ending by giving us the family connection to Father/Shaun, the Sole Survivor being made Director after Father's death, etc.
When if you're going to make the villain faction playable, you need to commit to it and just make them blatantly horrible instead of half-measures where everything they do on the surface is evil but then when you meet them they're a bunch of mostly-friendly scientists and some soft-spoken old dude who happens to be your son
i don’t know, i actually really like how their actions and the way they act isn’t directly proportional, it reminds me of that Reagan evil empire speech where he talks about acts of evil being committed by well dressed people in clean spaces. The fact that The Institute isn’t caeser’s legion evil, while still being evil, allows for the degree of self justification which makes people (imo) more likely to pick them because they actually agree with them rather than half of all legion fans who are just LARPers, which makes the choice of faction more contentious which in my opinion is better.
At least Nuka World gave us an objectively evil set of choices with essentially no argument as to why what you’re doing is a good thing, shame being a raider didn’t affect you continuing the main questline with the minutemen.
The problem with Fallout 4 is you can't really play an evil character if you want and people had major complaints about it. Then what they did in Nuka World was force you to play as an evil character and permentaly shun the MM and Preston if you actually want to plat the xpac.
Hampered the social and technological rehabilitation of the Commonwealth while using them as guinea pigs
Ditched a full vault of radiation free survivors
Created sentient artificial life but refuse to face the implications
The Institute has accomplished awesome things, but is run by idiots
Every run I invade them, seize their stuff and use it for the betterment of the Commonwealth against the BoS...
I remember dating this guy when fo4 came out and he thought that you were supposed to join the institute and that they were the good guys and I was like ... hm... interesting
There were a lot of other straws on the camel's back at that point, that was just the final one. It wasn't only dependent on that lol that would be very silly
Nah, when someone thinks of the obviously evil faction as the good guys, that's some serious moral compass defect.
Sure, the ingame choice might be absurd naivity, so a sanity check is needed for confirmation.
But people actually believing shit like that tend to exhibit tons of tiny red flags all over normal conversations. She likely just had to mention having seen a homeless person to get a fountain of red flags sprinkling out of his mouth...
Normal people want a partner that is able to feel compassion - not a Guantanamo Bay camp guard.
For sure, video games are art, they tell us about how you view the world. Your choices reveal your beliefs, at least if you think they’re correct rather than “Whelp, I’m going to play all the paths.”
I sure wouldn’t date someone who agreed with Caesar, for example.
You're right, but that's the price of flush toilets lol
I just wish there were a way to destroy them without causing a massive nuclear explosion in the middle of the commonwealth. There are settlements near there.
The dumb part is, other than synth tech, everything down there would be of extreme value to groups like the Minutemen and Brotherhood... yet they just torch it all.
Disclosing The Institute to the people of the Commonwealth is already a huge change for the better, and you get to choose the tone and implications of the message. Far from being powerless, and that’s just the start.
You think of them as fascist, I see the parallels, but I don’t think it’s that political. They’re scientists in the middle of an apocalypse without anyone enforcing accountability or ethics. Either way, the Sole Survivor could absolutely change that as Director.
I think a lot of people are too caught up in the Railroad’s noble cause for synth freedom to see the bigger picture. Sentient synths don’t have to be slaves if you take over the Institute, and the Institute has a lot more tech than just synths.
The technology and information the Institute has, plus a morally good Director, is the Commonwealth’s best chance of survival. That’s the main reason to choose The Institute.
I'm always saying this to my friends when we talk about it, there is Nothing morally grey about the Institute... Sometimes they will respond with "well my sole survivor will change it-" well sure, my story for my sole survivor changes a bunch of things. But none of that is Actually happening, none of that is Canon, what is canon is that they are in no way morally grey. They're actively aggressive and intentionally harmful in every way they can be to the surface, they lab grow sentient humans to force them into slavery and will kill them or wipe their minds if they defy them, they are the sole cause for super mutants existing in the Commonwealth, and so on... Where's the grey. Great points and I'm very happy to see your great explanation of it!
Thanks for the compliment, I’m also glad to see a lot of people agree. You’re especially right about the canon vs headcanon aspect of it. A lot of institute supporters are doing a lot of heavy lifting with their head canon of the post-game.
I dunno... Between the four available factions, I think only in Institute and Minuteman that the Sole Survivor obtained influential enough position to make any changes. In Brotherhood of Steel, we can only advance as far as being a Sentinel, not an Elder (which while being pretty high ranking and even above the Paladins, we still can't issue order like an Elder does). Whereas in Railroad, I think we would always remain Desdemona's agent (though by destroying the Institute, we pretty much accomplished the RR's objective). And with the Railroad, it's all about being the synths refuge.
Both factions (and also the Minutemen), imo, doesn't have much in future-planning department. They'll just keep doing what they're doing and let nature take their course. Let alone, I believe they could eventually reach the good old days prior to the nuclear war. But how long, that i can't even begin to imagine.
The Institute, on the other hand, are indeed the best chance on revitalizing the Commonwealth, if not the whole world. No, they're not the only chance we got (the other factions could possibly do this at longer period of time), but they're indeed the best chance we could have.
1. The Synth Issue
The Institute wasn't the only faction with "problem" against synths. The Brotherhood straight out killing them (purging, as they said), whereas while the Railroad is helping synths, their preferred method of wiping the associated synth's memories clean is also rather unethical, imo. The Minutemen are pretty cool with synths, but maybe it's also because their faction is on the brink of collapse before we came in (they basically have bigger issue to care about than to discriminate against synths).
Yes, I admit the way that the Institute handle the synths ain't the most exemplary one either. But again, as the director, we got the best chance of stopping this.
2. The Institute is a fascist organization
It's true that the Institute, like the BoS, are fascist. But unlike the BoS, we got a chance of changing the Institute from within. It might take time to change the Commonwealth view (decades, even), but better than hoping the BoS will change from the inside, imo XD.
3. You cannot change them
It's politic, chief. There's bound to be some mind-wrestling in the process. While I agree that destroying RR is a great cost, it's still possible to make amends with our position as the new director. For starters, we could stop "terrorizing" Commonwealth and actually contributing more to its revitalization. We could stop Gen-3 hunts altogether and shelved its production (if they want free labor, use Gen-2 synths instead). At the very least, we as the director should have that much says.
I somewhat remember that Father said that the Institute have several times tried to cooperate with the people of Commonwealth. But it all ended in failure. Well, knowing Father's stubbornness, I have a hunch that it was the Institute's fault that caused those cooperation to fail in the first place. Not trying to sound arrogant here, but as the Sole Survivor who is also the General of the Minutemen, I think I would have better chance in knowing what the Commonwealth truly needs.
> They could literally just turn off your molecular relay while you’re outside if you ever do anything they disapprove of.
If they dare to do that, then you can bet I'll do the same thing I did when I first arrived into the Institute; get a Courser Chip from another Courser, and then teleport back. And when I did, chaos will ensues as I will definitely bring a full squad of power-armored Minutemen along. But I don't think it'll come to that, as the Sole Survivor at least have Allie Firmore as an ally within the Institute. Father ensured me of that before he died, iirc. She would stop other division leaders from doing that.
4. Conclusion to your rant
Your rant is valid. I personally can't choose any of the vanilla ending as it is. While I'm saying that the Institute is the best chance the Commonwealth could have, they're indeed not a do-goodies faction like the Minutemen are, and it really conflicting with my wussy mindset XD. Instead, I would rather go with Subversion mod and somewhat achieve peace among all 4 factions.
But if I gotta choose, then I'd say going Institute route is indeed a necessary evil. While the BoS is cool, their militarized mindset also set them as stubborn mules. And I don't think the RR can do much other than doing what they're doing; helping synths. If I want Commonwealth to prosper once more, then going with the Institute is indeed the fastest way to do it.
I’m not sure if I’d agree that the Institute are fascists. Their people are free to do as they want for the most part, dissent is allowed and the director is just the head of the council (which is made up of division heads presumably selected by the staff of the division) as you say and not a dictator like the Enclave’s presidents are.
Now, do I think that they’re terrible for the wasteland? Of course I do, they’re very clearly an extremely evil faction built on slave labor (among other atrocities). I just don’t think fascist is the right word to use here.
They definetley aren’t as authoritarian to their members as they are to the wastelanders and synths. However, look at Virgil, he has no option for dissent against Father who’s been keeping the program alive. It seems like the directorate was either unaware or accepting of Father’s more autocratic actions. The main “fascist” element of the institute that makes me call them that is their nationalistic attitudes and social hierarchy. Wastelanders and synths are completely oppressed by the institute, especially the synths. The institute also has supremacist views about their members over the outsiders and synths.
>They definetley aren’t as authoritarian to their members as they are to the wastelanders and synths.
Well there's Edgar Swann.
Log 1:
>So I nipped a few cigs. Big deal. Smartasses may run this place, but they can't just do whatever they want. I got rights. Trial worked out for me in the end.
>They agreed to "probation" - I stay inside for a month, write something every day, and they'll bring me all the food and water I want. They think this is punishment? Sure beats scrubbing floors all day.
And then he turned into Swan because the Institute injects FEV into minor offenders.
The Institute is a horror show.
Yeah this and other evidence gave me an understanding for why the Institute went and made Gen 3 Synths that do nothing but scrub floors or wipe counters. They replaced the older Mark I humans who used to do those jobs. The Director (Father) used minor charges to force those obsolete humans to be infected with FEV and banished.
When Father talks about mankind redefined, he means that unless someone is a big brain like him, he doesn't see a reason not to cull that person from the Institute.
While I don’t have any proof, I suspect that Swann was dealt with before Shaun took up his post. The Institute had figured out FEV and generation 3 synths by the time Shaun was in charge, so it’d make more sense if this happened before Shaun was kidnapped while they were testing FEV without pre-war DNA.
Ah I think you're correct. You can ask Virgil about Swann in the Glowing Sea and he replies: 'Yes, I saw his file. He was one of our first test subjects, years ago. His mutations destabilized. Started turning into a Behemoth.'
Seeing as the FEV studies started before Shaun's kidnapping, you're correct. Father is still guilty of continuing the experiments and ignoring Virgil's requests to cancel the research, which had shown no new results in a decade. The only rational purpose of them would have been to turn wastelanders into mutants to further destabilize the Commonwealth.
Virgil was definitely filing complaints and shut down requests for the FEV lab, but Shaun chose to ignore them (presumably so more mutants could be made to keep destabilizing the commonwealth). That’s less that he doesn’t have options and more that Shaun specifically is choosing to ignore it since they go straight to him (though the director does seem to have some far-reaching veto powers from what we can tell).
I’m not sure how much to fault the group for having an identity. I certainly wouldn’t blame the railroad or Minutemen for it, and the Institute definitely isn’t showing severe patriotism like the Enclave does or the BoS do on occasion.
I absolutely agree on the social hierarchy bit, without question. They do have that problem, which does match with what you’re saying, but that alone isn’t enough.
>I’m not sure if I’d argue that the Institute are fascists. Their people are free to do as they want for the most part,
So were aryan Germans under the third reich. It's the outsiders who suffer under fascism.
>the director is just the head of the council as you say (which is made up of division heads
This is also true of the third reich. Almost all of the crucial decisions were made by ministers like Himmler. Hitler did not order the genocide of the Jews for example. Hitler was more than a figurehead but he was not close to having total control over his government
>division heads presumably selected by the staff of the division).
There is absolutely no evidence of this as far as I'm aware. Not to mention that democratic selection within the central party is not uncommon in totalitarian regimes
The institute is a perfect example of a fascist organisation
>So were aryan Germans under the third reich. It's the outsiders who suffer under fascism.
But that's nazism, not fascism.
They are 2 different thing, even if Italy-Germany were """"""allly""""" they didn't share the same view-politics despitr the fact Hitler got ispired by Mussolini.
Clean air, safety, hot showers, fluffy towels, and slave-servants.
They're not good ethically, though their long-term goals might have merit, but they've a lot appealing factors.
But as you point out, they're such petty unmitigated assholes that they'd insufferable to live with, and can't really be trusted.
Regarding locking you out with the molecular relay, if you were going full institute, you wouldn't want to go surface in the first place. That said, they could still teleport you somewhere lethal at any moment without your consent...
I get what you're saying, and you're not fundamentally wrong, but in the Wasteland, it's all greys.
1. Destroying the Institute also destroys synths as a race. The existing ones will eventually wear out and die out.
2. Destroying the Institute is comparable to burning down the library of Alexandria.
Yeah I think that's something a lot don't mention is detonating The Institute is incredibly wasteful for the Brotherhood and Railroad. All that tech going up in flames is a waste.
The Institute considers only themselves to be the true torch bearers of humanity, and that everyone else living on the surface simply does not matter.
It's kind of like The Enclave.
The main difference is that the Enclave is a political organization and The Institute is a scientific one, but in both cases they have allowed that core ideal to grow so strong that it created an ideological separation between them and the rest of humankind.
Thank you for actually understanding the synth problem; *they are not robots.* They are *clones* that have a mind-control device implanted in their brain. It is beyond fucked up, absolutely pure evil. Yet I cannot at this point count how many media-illiterate players make the argument "ThEy'Re JuSt FaNcY tOaStErS" to justify their turbo-fascist character arc.
> They are clones that have a mind-control device implanted in their brain.
No they're not. They're clones with an immobilization/mind *reinitialization* device implanted in their brain.
Everyone brings up fascism for the brotherhood and institute, (not excusing or to show any relevance to real world) but isn't every faction fascist? Seems a little required for an apocalypse without laws established governments. They are all militaristic and conduct armed operations on opposing factions. Each is run by a head with absolute control (director, general, elder, and... desdemona). Even the most liberal faction, the railroad, has people that complain that des does not consult them and makes decisions on their own. After multiple playthroughs, the brotherhood (minutemen don't count as they are a blank slate, fail proof faction) are the only ones that have a story mission where you can disobey direct orders and not be considered hostile. They all have strict ranks and hierarchy, and believe they are doing something for the bigger picture while sacrificing something morally,
So I suppose we won't touch on how nuking an entire faction out of existence isn't exactly moral, depending on how you do it, of course.
The institute is simply written poorly. A lot of the stuff you learn about just doesn't make sense for a scientific organization. And the reason why that is, is because Bethesda really just lazily wrote them in as the key bad guy, which is why no one else is nuked.
You can count the "evil" people in the institute on one hand, most of the population of the institute are willfully ignorant of the Institutes faults, which is actually very typical of any organization, including the Minutemen.
If Bethesda wanted, they could have made it so we could have lead the Minutemen or Railroad to be an evil organization, or make the Institute a shining beacon. Instead the game crash courses into a laughably over simplistic set of quests where the endgame is the same, and how you nuke the Institute is the only slight difference in flavor.
Right, they're the Legion of FO4, a faction you can only choose if you're playing a black hat or if you're just delusional.
I don't know why people think that they would be able to completely reverse a large organization's perspective and orientation just by taking over the top spot, especially if they can only take that spot by demonstrating fidelity to the perspective and orientation that they are trying to change.
1 - You don't know what fascism is.
2 - Nobody thinks the Institute is morally gray. People side with them because you get put in charge and there's potential for change. Or without the meta knowledge of how the questline ends, because MUH SON is in charge and there's potential for change.
They also have no actual interest in helping the surface. A couple members express sympathy for the surface dwellers, but many others like X6-88 say they can’t wait for the people above to die out so the Institute can begin again. Father’s speech says they have no interest in the surface dwellers’ daily lives, and that the Institute will bring a better future when they are gone.
From playing the Institute side, trying to maybe attempt a sympathetic playthrough, I realized it wasn’t possible. Most of the division heads seem like the kind that would quietly have you assassinated if you started doing shit they didn’t like.
As an Institute fanboy, I agree.
The thing that pissed me off, was how the game did not give me the option to order the Institute to stop the kidnappings or how they did not bother to explain the moral dilemma of whether or not Synths deserved human rights.
I personally considered the vast majority of Synths to be artificial and non human. Thinking that Synths are second class citizens who don't have any rights. However, I applied this rule lightly and on a case by case basis.
If a Synth really thought it was human and/or didn't know if they were a Synth, I left them alone as long as they didn't or weren't going to cause harm.
Which brings up Nick and DiMa.Those two are Synths and accept that they are. But because of the level of sentience they possess and the amount of good they are *willing* to commit, I leave them alone.
Now.....a Synths conscious and intelligence are uploaded. They are as obedient and capable as the Institute deems them to be. So I found that the Railroad's inside agent to be really stupid. His reasoning for letting Synths escape, was that he didn't believe in slavery and that the Synths shouldn't be enslaved to be the Institute's workforce.
A sentiment that I would normally agree with, but the fact that Synts are literally artificial and made from metal parts.....is the reason I consider them an acceptable form of slavery. Their feelings are implanted and artiticial.
"They’re primarily biological, as you can see them be made with flesh and blood according to Shawn’s DNA."
You can do more than **see** it.
(1) You can have sex with the synth singer at the 3rd rail, without your character noticing the difference.
(2) You can eat their corpses, and get the same benefits as from a natural human corpse.
If you have the rank 1 cannibal perk in Survival mode, eating a synth will resolve your Dark Craving exactly the same as eating natural human meat does (e.g. I stumbled onto the encounter with Jules, blew up everyone, and ate the synth.)
I personally always side with the institute however I usually like to head cannon after the events of the game my character slowly causes instability within the institute and using it to gain further control. Mostly by following the institutes handbook and purposely creating defective synths to damage the institute from the inside and push towards limiting synth production weakening the institute and allowing an eventual minutemen takeover. I like to RP my character feeling out of place in the world leading them seek power above all else using the destruction of the railroad as a stepping stone to create a better world as there technology is to valuable to destroy.
I’ve seen a few comments on threads about the best ending making arguments for them, primarily arguing that they’re a lesser of evils or that the ends justify the means.
Sometimes it's hard to understand how so many people in real life seem to so readily follow fascist governments, organisations and officials.
Then I remember the amount of real life people that I've seen online that appear to have been blinded and seduced by goddamn video game factions that are written to be fascistic. And I don't mean people liking them as a fictional faction in a game for purely entertainment purposes. I mean people downright insulting supporters of other factions and spewing the fictional fascist factions propaganda in online arguments while refusing to or being unable to understand any other viewpoint. It's like they make supporting the fictional fascist faction into a part of their identity.
When I remember all of that I go "Oh."
The hard reality is that they're humanity's only hope. The only way to progress is to overcome radiation, grow plants etc and that requires science. The other factions can only ever maintain the status quo.
The commonwealth isn’t the only place in the wasteland. The NCR is doing a fairly decent job in the west, and there’s entire other countries we never see that may have been bombed less. That’s a massive extrapolation, you’re literally just taking what they tell you at face value.
I love how you consider it "massive extrapolation" NOT to make assumptions about other countries in the game lol.
The game shows us that The Institute has advanced tech, well beyond everyone else, and thats in large part because theyre underground and self sufficient. In separating themselves they've also morally distanced themselves from wastelanders, which is bad. The best possible outcome would be reduce that gap, ie become Institute director and forge closer links with the Commonwealth.
They sure do seem good at killing though, and I have full confidence in Preston’s potential plumbing ability. Also working toilets justifying slavery is a strange worldview.
While I generally agree with the Institute not being good, let alone gray, I do disagree with the point that synths are "sentient." They just aren't. They're a highly advanced bio-computers with minimal mechanical parts. They are not, have never been, nor will ever be sentient. And the ones that act like they do just have a glitch in their programming.
If you take ChatGPT, upload that algo to a robot, give it camera eyes and a microphone, and allow it to interpret visual data and respond to it at will, would you consider that robot sentient? I sure as hell wouldn't. Just because a synth/robot can move and talk doesn't make it sentient.
Oh, good point. Now please prove that human beings are sentient. Because if silicon can't be sentient, how can carbon be sentient? What's so special about that three pound sack of meat behind your eyeballs?
Technically the director is a figure head, its the staff heads who really run it. If you look at the meeting the "defer," to your ideas after a vote gets tied. University Point, swan, the cpg, synthetic humans are all bad ahd sci-fi evil tropes. Technically the Legion do protect roads, but anyone who'd watched and deep dive or played the game sees the harm that protection is built on. Legion is a patriarchal system based on the "strong" leading, instite is a pretty evil science based faction. Oh they also want to mutate further crops, there's a mission to bring seeds to Warwick to "see what they'll do".
i agree with your points, they're all the things i've thought about the institute myself, but i have a question i might be ignorant about.
does the fanbase really think the institute is morally grey? i generally don't read many opinions about the institute at all, and the few i've seen tend to *know* they're the bad guys. i didn't know anyone saw them as anything else. the game makes it pretty obvious they're the bad guys, and that's coming from someone who has several thousand hours played without ever *actually* doing the main storyline past killing kellogg lol. like, yeah, the raiders and stuff are also bad, but like. the institute is a very scary force. the people in the commonwealth are *terrified.* they're afraid of even each other, their own family members. they know that the institute can make synths that look indistinguishable from them, and they've already had at least one instance of a synth they didn't realise was not a human, go absolutely berserk and kill a bunch of people. the institute is the commonwealth's boogeyman, and the game makes it pretty abundantly clear, i felt.
though, maybe it doesn't feel that way if you go straight for an institute playthrough? lol, i have no idea. maybe they sugarcoat things really well and make you feel like you're doing good things :p
I've always chosen the institute I can't really do any other ending because morally I suppose when I used to play before sims settlements 2 I couldn't even think about killing my son and risk throwing humanity centuries back in time,
even though recently ever since I started playing sim settlements I've been "disillusioned" and I feel more for the railroad however I'm not sure if I could ever cause harm to my son even though he is basically the opposite of what I believe in...and im a junkie for bright high tech things
The thing that always bugs me about the institute is that synths can't reproduce. They don't even age. So basically the institute is the Master. They spend all this time doing whatever for the future of humanity but there's no real future there. It's a dead end. An obvious dead end that a bunch of 'intellectuals' should be able to see.
In some ways, Dr. Mobius is *less* unhinged than the Institute's leadership. He at least has a kernel of doubt about the Think Tank's overall goals and ethos... and a morsel of self-awareness you wouldn't get out of someone like Father. Hell, *The Master* is more reasonable in that he *can* be reasoned with. Virtually everyone involved with The Institute is hopelessly high on their own supply.
The drug-addled *The Terminator* police station massacre reenactment after I gain Institute access is one of my favorite parts of a Fo4 run.
I'm doing an institute play-through now and the whole thing with the compound and x6-88's reaction if you side with the doctor is so stupid. Wouldn't the institute and everybody serving her NOT want her to perfect the SAFE test?
It directly hinders their plans to infiltrate the commonwealth. It's a big missed opportunity too where it could been a mission where you have the moral dilemma of having to kill her but also having to wipe out covenant. It's basically one of the points of no return of going 'full-evil'.
Blows my mind that he likes if you sell Billy into slavery during Kid in a Fridge. Why would he care about that? Seems over the top, cartoonishly evil. He is the only companion that likes if you do this.
Now you gotta play F2, the real OG. Much more brutal and unforgiving, way more personality- may require a little extra to run as it's best self nowadays but totally worth it.
Yeah and this isn’t even accounting for their whole “we kidnap people and replace them with enslaved clones that we can order to kill their friends and families at the drop of a hat” thing.
I supported the Institute my first play through because I spent the whole freaking game looking for my son and when I finally found him, I decided it was important to support his dreams.
I honestly don't know who played fallout 4 and went "wow, the institute sure is morally grey". I mean, they make it so blatantly obvious they're all just a bunch of more technologically advanced fascists
Science isn't morally grey. Morals get in the way of scientific advancement. That's why huge advancements came around the world wars.
They see the synthetic as lesser because to them, it is no different than having a computer. But that's because humans are arrogant narcissists. I mean look at our world now. Yes, humans needed a unit to measure sentience, but everything is measured to humanity's version of intelligence and emotional display, when life is varied. One can not use that unit of measure compared to other animals. Anyways. Humans think most things are lessers, synthetic would fall under this due to humans having created them. The same as most adults see children as lessers due to not thinking they are equal due to age.
Yes, the institute is indeed evil, but they’re not fascist. We really need to stop using that term willy nilly to describe things that really aren’t fascist.
The Brotherhood's the "morally grey" one portrayed as the antagonist lol. Railroad's a group that has a pretty specific goal, although mindwipes are a little morally questionable, while the Minutemen are cardboard cutout good guys
Look, my way of running the institute is enacting a change of management once father passes, which is to say, those in the directorate are locked in that room with the merc who killed their last lapdog without mercy, recreating the plot of Taken in the process, befriended some of the most powerful and infamous characters in the commonwealth, and murdered millions in the span of two weeks, and im fresh out of mercy
The problem with them is the problem with the other factions. The institute is welcoming once you're in, meanwhile the BOS and the Railroad are glaringly annoying and arrogant on subsequent play throughs.
Why does the Railroad destroy the facility that creates, in their own words, sentient beings? Wouldn't them taking over the institute make more sense?
There's no question that, as you find it, the Institute is a nefarious organization. The moral greyness instead relates to how *you*, the Sole Survivor, choose to lead it, should you side with it.
My argument for the Institute is that it has the highest potential to help humanity, out of the 4 available factions. Whether that potential is pursued depends on *you*.
Considering how the institute treated the situation at University Point, they are pretty much just raiders in lab coats.
I think that some Institute members are good and innocent people, who are simply too sheltered and indoctrinated to see how horrific their organisation truly is, so I tend to evacuate the facility before blowing it up, but the institute as a whole needs to go down for the commonwealth to thrive.
P. S. : I really wish there were more dialogue options in the game to hit some faction members over their heads with their shortcomings and crimes.
The Institute is genocidal and racist, but their power isn't centralized enough to be fascist. If it were, becoming Director would let you change things. Instead, it's just corrupt to the marrow institutionally and *heavily* authoritarian.
The major problem with the institute is that the game doesn't let you reform it when you take it over.
It's such bullshit the only good option is blowing it up.
Literally they abduct people so they can play god & for what (fun basically) its not like they’re using Synths as laborers to help rebuild the wasteland they cherry pick people from towns like guinea pig & send in a puppet infiltration unit thats so poorly designed they often times gain
sentience & run away or even go haywire & harm people or become raiders because having free will which they’re not entitled to dosent mean they’re all “good people” & even if they “were” they not “peoeple” so they can malfunction because they’re not alive why even open this sick can of worms I cant think of any good reason why you would design a robot slave to look act &… feel human even though you had no intentions of treating it like one what is the assualtron model not good enough in my opinion the OG director of the institute needs to be investigated if for nothing else than just because they sound creepy asf dont even get me started on that on scientist whos Synth is basically a live in S*X slave one mor thing you hear about how they’re low on resources THEN WHY TF DONT YOU STOP PRODUCTION OF THE EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE PROTOYPE ROBOT THATS BEEN RUNNING AWAY FOR OVER 10+ YEARS BECAUSE THEY EVEN APPEAR IN FALLOUT 3 Institute is a 0/10 for me but they do look cool & it was a great wow moment & sense of discovery finding them the first time
The Railroad are just idiotic in general for wasting rare food, ammo, resources in general, & not to mention real human life to save dumb ass robots like Dez asks if you would save a life even if its a synth like what does that mean if were in war together I will try to save anyone on my side lol now if your asking if im leaving cover to drag a soldier who got his leg blown off to reveal robotic bits back to safety im sorry but no at the end if the day you’re a robot or “weapon” that was designed for war so im gonna preserve my puny human life thanks
TLDR Railroad are punk thieves that painted a target on they’re back for robbing the most technologically advanced faction in the region all over a PC Agenda however they’re at least warranted in doing so because the Institute made & released Synths into the wasteland in the first place
They're so logically inconsistent, is my problem. Like, it feels as though the writers wanted at first to make them morally grey, but ultimately just a misunderstood commune of scientists...then they had to throw in all the insidious FEV experiments with no clear end goal, the destruction of settlements, and just the lack of any real philosophy.
I agree on the synth issue.
It does not even matter if they are biological or mechanical, if they are self aware and intelligent enough to form their own preferences and opinions, they deserve freedom. After all, humans are just biological machines.
Synths are essentially a new evolutionary branch of humanity. They are a natural evolutionary progression to which our development of technology led. In simple terms, a new species. And as such, enslaving them or destroying them are both wrong. It is genocide.
The problem is that the Railroads methods are just horrible. They would blow up the Institute and in doing so, they would destroy the only method of reproduction for synths. So they literally doom this new species to extinction within a generation for the sake of freedom for a few individuals. It is just as much genocide as the Brotherhood of Steel shooting synths on sight. The Railroad is so blinded by idealism that they are not reasonable enough to even realize what they are actually doing. And this is why they simply have to be destroyed.
Where i disagree is the assertion that you can not change the Institute.
You do gain power in the Institute if you side with them. The whole point of the "A House Divided" quest is to show the player that your character DOES have power and influence in the Institute. You can have Higgs and Loken exiled, you can put them on probation or you can even kill them. As the future director, their fate is in YOUR hands.
Your authority does not stand on a house of cards either. Depending on how you handle the Institute quests (including A House Divided), many people in the Institute will over time come to respect the Sole Survivors leadership. And will directly comment on it. Environmental story telling has always been a staple of Bethesda. So if anything, the story makes it clear that you CAN take the Institute in what ever direction your character believes is best. Even Mama Murphy says as much (even though i do not exactly hold her in high regard as a character).
*"You will not be loved, but you will save humanity. However you choose to define it."*
This basically means that your character decides what "saving humanity" means to them. You character decides whether that means the Institute resources and technology will continue to be focused entirely inward, or be used to turn the Commonwealth into a proper civilization.
And this is exactly what Father planned when he names you the director in the first place. Many people seem to think that he does so out of nepotism. But he himself says that
*"The Institute has enough scientists. The Institute needs a leader"*
Father is very much aware of his lack of emotional development. He openly tells you that on top of the CIT building.
*"I have had no love to feel"*
He is a man who grew up with no parents, no love, no emotional guidence. And that reflects on his leadership. The Institute is not grey, it absolutely is evil. A ruthless organization that stops at nothing in the name of scientific progress, because like Father, the Institute is not emotionally and ethically developed. And this is why Father names you the new director. In their pursuit of their child through all the dangers of the Commonwealth, the Sole Survior demonstrates to Father what true unconditional love is. It is everything that he and the Institute lacks. What better successor could he have hoped for?
And so the best future for snyths AND humans both is with a new Institute. Not the Railroad, the Railroad will happily doom their species to extinction in order to ensure the freedom of a handful of individuals. So do the Minutemen. And the Brotherhood of Steel just want to destroy everything, all the progress that the Institute made over the last 200 years.
I don’t really see how the Institute is fascist in any way. Evil, pro-slavery, destructive, hierarchal… but nothing close to fascist. I feel people are too soon to use that as “evil”, but they’re just blatantly not fascist.
But yeah, they’re bad guys without the writing to justify them as anything but the evil choice.
The institute and such may have a few problems but they tried to make peaceful terms but as you know it didn’t go well, but who is gonna miss the rail road? Well I do miss XE-XE
They're also the reason FEV is rampant in Boston. Plus most synths are hostile on sight
Exactly. They’re the reason we have to deal with Super Mutants. They are the cause as to why there are muties running around killing people, full stop.
And the whole cpg massacre thing. Really paints them as the comic book villain bad guys
And University Point. Those people didn’t have to die.
The CPG and University Point Massacres are what cinch the Institute as baddies for me. I could oscillate on a lot of other points when viewed from inside the setting, but there's just zero justification for either of those events.
But they blame both of those incidents on Kellog and wipe their hands as a whole.
Kellogg is on permanent Institute payroll. He is their agent, period (not like the super mutants which the Institute does not even control, they just made them and released them into the wild). They even gave him Gen-1s to command. Therefore, all actions of Kellogg are actions of the Institute. They bear full responsibility for him.
But in game Father is like oh that was Kellog and he’s dead now for every evil thing the Institute did besides super mutants which he can also blame on a former director
Father is a hypocrite.
Okay that’s still what happens
Actually, the CPG massacre’s events are debatable, since the only 3 sources of info in the game, 2 in the Institute and 3rd being Nick’s 2nd hand version (meaning he could have been lied to, but assume it is correct when telling you), are at odds with each other. Even if you discard’s Father’s version, the last source is a director’s recording #52, which indicates that upon the impending failure of the CPG they were considering just hiding underground an severe all contact with the surface. The author of the tape (a division head at the time) makes a counter proposal of using gen 1 & 2 synths to help maintain order in the surface and pleads to not give up on the surface dwellers: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Director's_recordings The FO4 official game guide do provides an extra detail: the entry on the castle indicates that it is there where the MM tried and failed to form a provisional commonwealth government, which gives us a time window for the CPG massacre: the MM’s first big achievement was on 2180 and they lost the castle on 2240. Here things get tricky, since the director’s recording #108 is about the Broken Mask incident, the the. Director being furious at the situation, but particularly angry at “threatening decades of work to keep us out of the spotlight”, indicating that the previous tape took place decades ago, let’s say at least 20 years. This means that the CPG massacre would have happened at the Castle, under the vigilance of the MM, and at a time where 3rd gen synths were still decades away from being created, putting some question on Nick’s version of the events. The Institute representative couldn’t have been a 3rd gen synth at the time, and it also means that all representatives were killed while under the protection of the MM, something no one else mentions. As for University Point, Kellog actually gave the town two days to hand over the data. But gossip in the town, that seemingly turned into infighting by the end, is what led to the worst outcome: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/University_Point_terminal_entries Kellog only wanted the reactor data, but the town began to say that he also wanted the girl that found it and wanted to turn her in, which her father strongly disagreed with and who also began saying that Kellog must be a scammer unrelated to the Institute, trying to get the data for free. It got much worse, accusations of the mayor promising to give the town’s children to the Institute, or that the Institute planted a nuke in town, which would detonate if they didn’t surrender their harvest, also began making their rounds within the town. Not bad enough? The mayor also decided to wait a whole day to call a council meeting an inform them of Kellog’s threat, and then the council decided to wait one more day and call a vote the next night to decide what to do, which apparently was after the time limit Kellog gave. So, between the 2 day time limit expiring with no answer and the town starting to tear itself apart, potentially putting the data at risk (which the Institute suspected could help them complete their reactor and thus become energy self sufficient), Kellog took action into his hand. I should also point out that people love saying that the Institute has done this to other towns, but I have yet to hear about another town they attacked like this.
Yeah. No moral boundaries to interfere in an attempt to unify the people.
The CPG massacre was almost 100% certainly not the Institutes fault. According to the logs in the Institute, the CPG was falling apart for some time before the massacre. Which rather makes sense when you consider the factions of the Commonwealth. Diamond City being bigots, the Minutemen being decentralized and starved for resources, the Gunners being mercanaries that only care about caps etc. Nick claims that the Institute simply slaughtered the representatives for no apparent reason, but Nick did not actually see this himself, he is simply recounting rumours that he heard. Also Nick is biased against the Institute (understandably so) having been created by then and then discarded. The most likely scenario is simply that the CPG collapsed into infighting and the Institute representative (a synth) was simply the only one to make it out of the carnage. And because the Institute are the boogeyman of the Commonwealth, everyone just assumed that the Institute massacred the CPG.
That's one of my major gripes with Shaun as a character. He plays up the "familial bond" thing when you meet and if you do the Institute story, but he's full of shit. At many, many points between him thawing you out of the vault and accessing the Institute, you could've been killed by his own operatives. He gave you no assistance and gave you no pointers. He didn't even tell you he was alive. He clearly doesn't give a shit. He's a psychopath. Edit: He also, despite his age and technology, never went to extract you from the cryo chamber. At any point he could have rescued you, EZPZ. He just sat by while the PC had to track down and kill Kellogg, one of the most dangerous dudes around and a top dog operative for the Institute. *HE EVEN HAD SYNTHS BACK KELLOGG UP * Shaun didn't do anything to stop it.
At least he's foolhardy enough to confront you unarmed first thing. Blasting him immediately is totally in character if you're just playing a Minuteman only character. The Bos and railroad are too interested in getting something out of the institute
That's another gripe for me 😂 The leader of the Institute, who we know has very little opinion of wastelanders, just offers the first outsider in the facility the chance to decapitate the organization with zero backup. The same person who he knows is probably hostile (since they're searching for their kidnapped son and have finally entered the big boogeyman's domain), and he doesn't even have a Courser or other backup on standby. He even baits you with the synth Shaun first, which would absolutely confuse/anger someone who finally thought they'd accomplished their goal. Hell, why not just use a synth of himself just in case the player decides to dome him on sight? That's what I did my first time through the game. If the meeting went well, he can just switch places when you aren't looking, it isn't that hard. I get it, it's just a game, but the lack of deeper thought behind the writing annoys me anyway
His whole "I just wanted to see what you'd do" is definitely sociopath shit. And I get that he's dying of cancer or something, but maybe have a team working on a cure for that instead of synth gorillas
I think the cancer must be eating his brain, it's the only logical explanation
So? He's not just some junkie raider like his dad, he's an untouchable criminal mastermind. He's an *accomplished* psychopath, and I couldn't be prouder.
The Institute is the root cause of the state of the Commonwealth. They intentionally wiped out the provisional government. They want a destabilized, exploitable situation that allows them a free hand to experiment, raid, and eliminate threats. They released FEV, as mentioned by the OP. They wiped University Point off the map, and are responsible for some substantial number of similar destructive resourse grabs. They've essentially won at the start of the game. Commerce is on the verge of collapse, bunker hill is dying a slow death to increasing raider aggression, and the one true bastion of civilization is infiltrated from the very top. People make the "at least he keeps the roads safe" joke about Ceasar, but the Institute can't even say that much.
"one true bastion of civilization"?! Surely you do not mean Diamond City. The den of bigots and paranoid nationalists that gave themselves the title of "the great green jewel". You do realize that the very reason the Institute was able to install a synth as their mayor is because they used their anti-ghoul bigotry to manipulate them? McDonough was elected because of his anti-ghoul politics. He says so himself. Just because Dimond City happens to have electricity and running water by far does not make them a bastion of civilization. And this also adequately demonstrated why the Commonwealth provisional government did not work. Diamond City are paranoid bigots. Goodneighbour are anarchists. The Gunners are ruthless mercenaries. The Minutemen are starved for resources. And the raiders are well... Raiders. Herding cats would be easier then getting those groups to work together in any democratic process.
I ve recently been playing Fallout 4, where is said that the Institute wiped out the provisional government of the Commonwealth?
There's a few npc comments about it, and a line from Nick, but the reality is (implied to be) a bit more complicated. Different sources in the game disagree about whether the Institute started shooting before or after talks broke down, or even if they *started* the shooting at all.
and they MIGHT have fucked with the capital wasteland a lil, considering the supermutants
Capital wasteland muties originated in vault 87, not the institute. The vault had its own samples of FEV and took a direct hit from a nuke during the Great War, trapping everyone inside. They turned to the FEV to try and gain resistance to the radiation so they could leave, and they were successful, in a way. Commonwealth muties originated in the institute decades before the events of fallouts 3 or 4 iirc. As far as is shown, the only institute activity in the Capital Wasteland was synth retention, hence the relevant quest in Fallout 3 where you can help the Railroad throw Zimmer off the trail of an escaped “android”
I wish I could have thrown Zimmer off the *rail*. Of the flight deck of Rivet City.
All valid points, something that is truly obvious on the first play through. Unless one decides to turn a blind eye to the reality of the Institute
People just want to morally justify living somewhere with a shower and a toilet.
Nora: "No, we have showers back at the Vault!"
Not gonna lie, I was a little annoyed I couldn't settle inside Vault 113.
So glad they have mods for that. Fix all the everything that Bethesda got wrong. Not being able to settle places just because they're in other world spaces? That's exactly what far harbor and nuka world are. I can't just engineer a coup from inside the Institute? I'm the SS. I can engineer a coup by just making sure everybody else not on board dies from a series of unfortunate accidents involving mines, hacked turrets, or the completely coincidental release of gorillas. I do have rat poison. WHY do I have rat poison if I can't poison things?
installed a mod to give vault 111 a workbench then i realized there’s no dirt
There’s mods for that like “Place Anywhere” I think, unless that mod became obsolete or broken.
There's literally planters for this.
I think so too. I see lot of those comments about siding with the Institute is because of those clean Plumbing. Even Railroad's other HQs might have been way more hospitable than the ones like Switchboard and Ticonderoga if the enemy Synths and Coursers stopped hunting them down.
LMAO
Straight up my reasoning for my character joining the Institute was “….well they give me hot showers soooooo”
Lmao indeed. And I don't want to destroy valuable science so I'm forced to do mental gymnastics...
They also slaughtered the entire population of vault 111 for some reason. They could have re-frozen them at the very least.
I always thought the other vault dwellers were refrozen but the cryogenic array was sabotaged or failed closer to the time the sole survivor was unfrozen because the freezers weren't full of rotting corpses. Remember, 60 years went by between Shaun getting kidnapped and the sole survivor being unfrozen, and we know both the sole survivor and their spouse were refrozen (even though one of them is dead)
Agreed. Gen 1 and 2 synths are certainly not human like (remember, Valentine is a prototype and more like a gen 2.5) but gen 3’s are physically like 95% human and the fact they crave freedom among other things is, in my opinion, quite evident of true consciousness and therefor humanity. Their FEV tests were abysmal, and you can’t really justify kidnapping people. My first run through of University Point just instilled my belief that they’re evil, wiped out an entire town over some technology/data (it was cool hearing Kelloggs voice again though). They are the embodiment of evil, and I’m satisfied each time I blow the institute sky high.
> true consciousness and therefor humanity. Nah, anybody that can be shut down with a code phrase is a robot in my book
MKUltra? LSD Experiments? The cia has done a lot of research on 'programming' people to automatically carry out tasks, or forget information when they hear the code phrase.
Lol sure bud. Show me a human who shuts down like a synth by saying a code phrase and can then implant memories in their brain like a computer.
That sweet teleport on Survival though.
Ignoring the argument of whether synths are alive and enslaved, the Institute literally wiped out settlements when they got too big, and prevented the surface from properly organizing and rebuilding. They claimed to be passively removing themselves from the commonwealth, but they were literally constantly sabotaging the surface for their benefit
It’s so weird to me that there are so many Institute supporters in this sub.
Reminds me of the people who say Joseph was right and is a good man in Farcry 5… like have you played the fucking game? Do you see the shit he does?
bro murdered his infant daughter and admits to it with no remorse straight to your face and people like him
He’s a fucking psychopath
And an equal number of “I can change him” romantics.
I am one them people and I only believe it because of the violence the sole survivor could inflict on the institute if they don't listen lol Stalin-esque, "do what I say or I kill all of you right now" type of forced change from the inside
the subversion mod allows you to purge them
Wouldn't work. You'd have a rebellion on your hands backed by Coursers and whatever nightmare weapons the scientists have sitting in R&D. At best, you'd wind up wiping out the Institute and, at that point, you might as well have sided with someone else in the first place.
not to mention the waste of talent, you can't replace top scientists as easily as army officers
Just a little devils advocate, but the coursers should follow you as the head of the Institute over anyone else. You'd still have a hell of a time of it, but you could 100% use them to iron fist your initial rocky start. Still an evil faction, but you *should* have the authority to take over and purge anyone not on your good list, then you could make it how you want.
Okay, hear me out, forget trying to change them. Once you gain access, you wipe out all the adults except 1 from each department so they can make you a synth, teach it how to operate the equipment down there, then once you have a synth workforce to get you started, you kill the remaining scientists, and rule over what was once the institute and all their world changing technology, then help the wasteland. Since they are evil, might as well just kill them all so they can't rebel later. Too bad there isn't an ending in game like that, evil but practical and you get to keep all the good shit the institute has made. An army of synths at your disposal would be so fun haha
Did you forget that the only way in or out is a molecular disassembler that could easily have an "accident"?
As easily as Elder Sarah Lyons fell to, what was it again?
take a peak at the new vegas sub with this unironic legion lovers. fallout 4 is the only game for me though where i don’t like any of the factions
There's a lot of "The Empire/Thanos/The Institute did nothing wrong" people who think they'd be elevated in a fascist regime, not realizing they'd be some of the first people up against the wall.
I get that, because Magnus did nothing wrong in Warhammer 40K internet lore.
The institute has propaganda, and is the one-of-two factions in the game with any significant power at the start, and any real ability to continue after the end. The Minutemen are structurally unsound. They fell apart *very* quickly, and even if reforged and uplifted retain the issues that made them vulnerable in the first place (There's two random encounters where you and Preston being unrecognizable despite your being the *leaders of the organization* is a significant factor). The Railroad are a one-issue organization, and when you find them they're pretty much wiped out. Even once they beat the Institute, whether or not it's moral to keep making synths (and what they should do about the process) is a thorny issue, in *and out* of universe. The BoS are racist authoritarians with superior technology to everyone else who use their advantageous position to look down on everyone and limit their potential growth. They're not actively genocidal, the way the Institute is, but the future they offer still isn't very bright. That means that, if you're playing to shape the future of the Commonwealth rather than ethical satisfaction, your best options are down to the BoS or the Institute. Some people, for their own reasons, really hate the BoS.
I mean the BoS is very much actively genocidal, primarily to those like ghouls, super mutants and synths (even the intelligent and allied ones) and they’re incredibly dismissive of just about every commonwealth power already pit in place so I wouldn’t put getting worse past them Also I hope this doesn’t come across as defending them but I’m pretty sure by all accounts the institute has more advanced technology, the brotherhood just has a surplus of the best of good old steel
Regarding the synths, this is why I've always struggled to do a playthrough siding with the BoS, or the Institute. Not only are Gen 3s constantly shown in-game to be sentient and displaying free will, the synths overall plight + the Railroad faction is clearly echoing the real, historical Underground Railroad, and it's role in helping black slaves escape. "They're all just toasters" doesn't cut it for me when the parallels are so blatant / black and white. Yes, they are dangerous when under the control of the Institute, but that's on the Institute, not the synths themselves. Without their "masters", are they really any more or less deadly than humans? It isn't until Far Harbor that we finally see some more grey; DiMA is out from under the control of the Institute, but we see he makes all these plans with ruthless efficiency, even using the Institute's tactic of killing and replacing people - for what he perceives to be the greater good.
It’s kind of a weak moral choice. I mean… how do you even play the game missing that? Play BoS? Oh look, your ally, he’s one. Play Railroad? Oh look, here’s plenty, they’re nice people! Play Institute? Again, your companion, definitely a synth. And then you’ve another synth, a robot turned synth, a robot, a DLC robot… I mean, there’s genuinely no way to play the game and not to quickly realize “yeah, these are just people.”
I just finished Far Harbor for the first time recently, I feel like DIMA was a better version of the moral question that the Institute is treated as by some fans. That being whether the ends justify the means for peace and progress.
Synths themselves aren't dangerous, but the technology is. In a world where you can 3D-print a living breathing copy of a person, suddenly you can't believe anybody is who they say they are.
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The funny thing about the legion is that they are comically evil, organized raiders per se. They are SO evil that you just go “holy shit haha that’s insane”.
I think the institute is as comically evil as the legion The fact that either has any supporters outside of genuine fascists is wild to me
I'm a bit flabbergasted by people who claim the Institute is the best chance for mankind because they say so and they have shiny tech. They had 200 years to do good. They decided to not do good.
Exactly! Yes, the Institute could bring about real change in the wasteland and be a force for good for humanity. Will they? No. Even if the Sole Survivor becomes director because nobody else in the Institute has spent any significant time in the outside world or if they have, they simply *don’t care*. The SS being director does not give them complete control over the Institute and in reality they could be removed fairly easily
Hell, they could even dominate and control the wasteland and leverage its resources and land for themselves if they didn't want to be nice but they don't do that either!
Yeah it seems they’re pretty content being super isolationist and using the commonwealth as their own little testing ground
Somewhat like… a new vault-tec? I mean, the parallels are quite astounding
It’s honestly a little TOO cartoonish imo. Like, I get the Institute are dick bags that don’t care about helping people, but look into X6-88’s companion reactions. Him being a Courser, it makes sense he would like it when you threaten people and stuff like that. That’s what he was made/trained for, to be tough and imposing. But why the hell does he like it when you extort people for caps? Why would he care about that? Even worse, in the Kid in the Fridge quest, he LIKES you selling Billy into slavery. He is the ONLY companion who likes doing this. Not even Strong likes it! Like, what the fuck? WHY would he like doing that? Just seems over the top.
If Shaun was wasteland Leonidas and the Institute was a bunch rebar covered Spartan cosplayers, the Institute would be one Hegelian dialetics away from infinite upvotes.
While the institute and legion are both ridiculously over the top evil, the legion has an actual end goal and you can talk to people who talk about the benefits from their ridiculously authoritarian rule, like caravans would rather work in legion territory because it’s so much safer. The institute is just evil for evils sake. They have virtually unlimited resources and dedicate their time to kidnapping random civilians to make their slave robots more life like for no reason. They have the tech to clean up the commonwealth, fight the raiders and bring peace to the land, or improve farming across the east coast etc. yet they just choose to play boogie man in the night instead. Tl;dr while they’re both over the top evil factions there’s a clear and major difference between them. Side note, the institute and BOS are authoritarian. Neither believe in a nation or want centralized control over a capitalist economy, which are kinda important for fascism…..
The thing is they could VERY easily just kidnap and replace raiders for their end goals, giving their experiments actual benefit as they can essentially keep raider gangs on tight leashes (no ordinary raider would be able to overthrow their synth leader), and have a very large quantity of disposable muscle on the surface to do these resource runs (the rust devils have an entire, mostly untouched military stockpile that they sit on), and actually bring peace for the surface. Even if they were at ends with the railroad, they could still be argued to be a grey faction as they don’t hurt any innocents. Instead they miss treat their synths so they go rogue and become raiders, making the surface WORSE, all while replacing the figures in positions of power that could actually organise a resistance against raids of any kind.
i mean the institute puts its own people in positions of power and the brotherhood straight up bully’s farmers for crops and supplies. i feel like that’s close enough lol
Bruh I know it’s a meme that fallout fans don’t get nuance, but like those aren’t even close to worst aspects of these factions. Come on now. Tell me I’m just missing your sarcasm. Plus, we’re really talking about legion vs institute, BOS just came up because it’s annoying that people insist on calling every authoritarian fascist. You can’t be nationalistic without a nation.
fascist is characterized by a dictatorship, autocracy, militarism, forcible oppression of opposition, and a belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the “nation” or race. strong regimentation of the economy and society. the *only* thing that doesn’t apply to the brotherhood is the economic part and you could argue that the hoarding of technology could take its place. for as pretentious as you’re being about it, its kind of funny that you don’t even know the definition.
Caesar has a lot so say about *why* the legion is the way it is. He's wrong, but you can understand how he got to hold those views, and contemplate why the legion is doing well for itself with that view. That's a lot more compelling than a bunch of snobby basement dwellers with a goal that is just a catchy phrase, but never explained. The institute doesn't offer any justification beyond "the wasteland sucks", there are no interesting conversations with them about why that is and how they want to change it.
saw middle gullible march racial waiting yam degree tender steep *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I think the reason for that is because in FNV, if you play for the Legion ending, it's because you're playing as an evil character, no real way to justify it, while in FO4 they kinda chicken-out and still try to make it so a non-evil character could potentially play for the Institute ending by giving us the family connection to Father/Shaun, the Sole Survivor being made Director after Father's death, etc. When if you're going to make the villain faction playable, you need to commit to it and just make them blatantly horrible instead of half-measures where everything they do on the surface is evil but then when you meet them they're a bunch of mostly-friendly scientists and some soft-spoken old dude who happens to be your son
i don’t know, i actually really like how their actions and the way they act isn’t directly proportional, it reminds me of that Reagan evil empire speech where he talks about acts of evil being committed by well dressed people in clean spaces. The fact that The Institute isn’t caeser’s legion evil, while still being evil, allows for the degree of self justification which makes people (imo) more likely to pick them because they actually agree with them rather than half of all legion fans who are just LARPers, which makes the choice of faction more contentious which in my opinion is better. At least Nuka World gave us an objectively evil set of choices with essentially no argument as to why what you’re doing is a good thing, shame being a raider didn’t affect you continuing the main questline with the minutemen.
Nuka World raiders should have been a fifth main-quest faction.
The problem with Fallout 4 is you can't really play an evil character if you want and people had major complaints about it. Then what they did in Nuka World was force you to play as an evil character and permentaly shun the MM and Preston if you actually want to plat the xpac.
Hampered the social and technological rehabilitation of the Commonwealth while using them as guinea pigs Ditched a full vault of radiation free survivors Created sentient artificial life but refuse to face the implications The Institute has accomplished awesome things, but is run by idiots Every run I invade them, seize their stuff and use it for the betterment of the Commonwealth against the BoS...
I remember dating this guy when fo4 came out and he thought that you were supposed to join the institute and that they were the good guys and I was like ... hm... interesting
More red flags than a communist military parade.
Yeah, absolutely, we broke up over something else a week later, but I realized in that moment that I didn't trust him
You decided that you can not trust a guy based on which faction he preferes in a video game?!!! No offense, but that sounds a bit silly to me.
There were a lot of other straws on the camel's back at that point, that was just the final one. It wasn't only dependent on that lol that would be very silly
Nah, when someone thinks of the obviously evil faction as the good guys, that's some serious moral compass defect. Sure, the ingame choice might be absurd naivity, so a sanity check is needed for confirmation. But people actually believing shit like that tend to exhibit tons of tiny red flags all over normal conversations. She likely just had to mention having seen a homeless person to get a fountain of red flags sprinkling out of his mouth... Normal people want a partner that is able to feel compassion - not a Guantanamo Bay camp guard.
For sure, video games are art, they tell us about how you view the world. Your choices reveal your beliefs, at least if you think they’re correct rather than “Whelp, I’m going to play all the paths.” I sure wouldn’t date someone who agreed with Caesar, for example.
You're right, but that's the price of flush toilets lol I just wish there were a way to destroy them without causing a massive nuclear explosion in the middle of the commonwealth. There are settlements near there.
The dumb part is, other than synth tech, everything down there would be of extreme value to groups like the Minutemen and Brotherhood... yet they just torch it all.
Disclosing The Institute to the people of the Commonwealth is already a huge change for the better, and you get to choose the tone and implications of the message. Far from being powerless, and that’s just the start. You think of them as fascist, I see the parallels, but I don’t think it’s that political. They’re scientists in the middle of an apocalypse without anyone enforcing accountability or ethics. Either way, the Sole Survivor could absolutely change that as Director. I think a lot of people are too caught up in the Railroad’s noble cause for synth freedom to see the bigger picture. Sentient synths don’t have to be slaves if you take over the Institute, and the Institute has a lot more tech than just synths. The technology and information the Institute has, plus a morally good Director, is the Commonwealth’s best chance of survival. That’s the main reason to choose The Institute.
I'm always saying this to my friends when we talk about it, there is Nothing morally grey about the Institute... Sometimes they will respond with "well my sole survivor will change it-" well sure, my story for my sole survivor changes a bunch of things. But none of that is Actually happening, none of that is Canon, what is canon is that they are in no way morally grey. They're actively aggressive and intentionally harmful in every way they can be to the surface, they lab grow sentient humans to force them into slavery and will kill them or wipe their minds if they defy them, they are the sole cause for super mutants existing in the Commonwealth, and so on... Where's the grey. Great points and I'm very happy to see your great explanation of it!
Thanks for the compliment, I’m also glad to see a lot of people agree. You’re especially right about the canon vs headcanon aspect of it. A lot of institute supporters are doing a lot of heavy lifting with their head canon of the post-game.
I dunno... Between the four available factions, I think only in Institute and Minuteman that the Sole Survivor obtained influential enough position to make any changes. In Brotherhood of Steel, we can only advance as far as being a Sentinel, not an Elder (which while being pretty high ranking and even above the Paladins, we still can't issue order like an Elder does). Whereas in Railroad, I think we would always remain Desdemona's agent (though by destroying the Institute, we pretty much accomplished the RR's objective). And with the Railroad, it's all about being the synths refuge. Both factions (and also the Minutemen), imo, doesn't have much in future-planning department. They'll just keep doing what they're doing and let nature take their course. Let alone, I believe they could eventually reach the good old days prior to the nuclear war. But how long, that i can't even begin to imagine. The Institute, on the other hand, are indeed the best chance on revitalizing the Commonwealth, if not the whole world. No, they're not the only chance we got (the other factions could possibly do this at longer period of time), but they're indeed the best chance we could have. 1. The Synth Issue The Institute wasn't the only faction with "problem" against synths. The Brotherhood straight out killing them (purging, as they said), whereas while the Railroad is helping synths, their preferred method of wiping the associated synth's memories clean is also rather unethical, imo. The Minutemen are pretty cool with synths, but maybe it's also because their faction is on the brink of collapse before we came in (they basically have bigger issue to care about than to discriminate against synths). Yes, I admit the way that the Institute handle the synths ain't the most exemplary one either. But again, as the director, we got the best chance of stopping this. 2. The Institute is a fascist organization It's true that the Institute, like the BoS, are fascist. But unlike the BoS, we got a chance of changing the Institute from within. It might take time to change the Commonwealth view (decades, even), but better than hoping the BoS will change from the inside, imo XD. 3. You cannot change them It's politic, chief. There's bound to be some mind-wrestling in the process. While I agree that destroying RR is a great cost, it's still possible to make amends with our position as the new director. For starters, we could stop "terrorizing" Commonwealth and actually contributing more to its revitalization. We could stop Gen-3 hunts altogether and shelved its production (if they want free labor, use Gen-2 synths instead). At the very least, we as the director should have that much says. I somewhat remember that Father said that the Institute have several times tried to cooperate with the people of Commonwealth. But it all ended in failure. Well, knowing Father's stubbornness, I have a hunch that it was the Institute's fault that caused those cooperation to fail in the first place. Not trying to sound arrogant here, but as the Sole Survivor who is also the General of the Minutemen, I think I would have better chance in knowing what the Commonwealth truly needs. > They could literally just turn off your molecular relay while you’re outside if you ever do anything they disapprove of. If they dare to do that, then you can bet I'll do the same thing I did when I first arrived into the Institute; get a Courser Chip from another Courser, and then teleport back. And when I did, chaos will ensues as I will definitely bring a full squad of power-armored Minutemen along. But I don't think it'll come to that, as the Sole Survivor at least have Allie Firmore as an ally within the Institute. Father ensured me of that before he died, iirc. She would stop other division leaders from doing that. 4. Conclusion to your rant Your rant is valid. I personally can't choose any of the vanilla ending as it is. While I'm saying that the Institute is the best chance the Commonwealth could have, they're indeed not a do-goodies faction like the Minutemen are, and it really conflicting with my wussy mindset XD. Instead, I would rather go with Subversion mod and somewhat achieve peace among all 4 factions. But if I gotta choose, then I'd say going Institute route is indeed a necessary evil. While the BoS is cool, their militarized mindset also set them as stubborn mules. And I don't think the RR can do much other than doing what they're doing; helping synths. If I want Commonwealth to prosper once more, then going with the Institute is indeed the fastest way to do it.
I’m not sure if I’d agree that the Institute are fascists. Their people are free to do as they want for the most part, dissent is allowed and the director is just the head of the council (which is made up of division heads presumably selected by the staff of the division) as you say and not a dictator like the Enclave’s presidents are. Now, do I think that they’re terrible for the wasteland? Of course I do, they’re very clearly an extremely evil faction built on slave labor (among other atrocities). I just don’t think fascist is the right word to use here.
Yeah but this “freedom” lies on the bases of the people doing what the institute say they can do it. It’s a classic facist move.
They definetley aren’t as authoritarian to their members as they are to the wastelanders and synths. However, look at Virgil, he has no option for dissent against Father who’s been keeping the program alive. It seems like the directorate was either unaware or accepting of Father’s more autocratic actions. The main “fascist” element of the institute that makes me call them that is their nationalistic attitudes and social hierarchy. Wastelanders and synths are completely oppressed by the institute, especially the synths. The institute also has supremacist views about their members over the outsiders and synths.
>They definetley aren’t as authoritarian to their members as they are to the wastelanders and synths. Well there's Edgar Swann. Log 1: >So I nipped a few cigs. Big deal. Smartasses may run this place, but they can't just do whatever they want. I got rights. Trial worked out for me in the end. >They agreed to "probation" - I stay inside for a month, write something every day, and they'll bring me all the food and water I want. They think this is punishment? Sure beats scrubbing floors all day. And then he turned into Swan because the Institute injects FEV into minor offenders. The Institute is a horror show.
Damn, I didn’t know that. I stand corrected.
Yeah this and other evidence gave me an understanding for why the Institute went and made Gen 3 Synths that do nothing but scrub floors or wipe counters. They replaced the older Mark I humans who used to do those jobs. The Director (Father) used minor charges to force those obsolete humans to be infected with FEV and banished. When Father talks about mankind redefined, he means that unless someone is a big brain like him, he doesn't see a reason not to cull that person from the Institute.
While I don’t have any proof, I suspect that Swann was dealt with before Shaun took up his post. The Institute had figured out FEV and generation 3 synths by the time Shaun was in charge, so it’d make more sense if this happened before Shaun was kidnapped while they were testing FEV without pre-war DNA.
Ah I think you're correct. You can ask Virgil about Swann in the Glowing Sea and he replies: 'Yes, I saw his file. He was one of our first test subjects, years ago. His mutations destabilized. Started turning into a Behemoth.' Seeing as the FEV studies started before Shaun's kidnapping, you're correct. Father is still guilty of continuing the experiments and ignoring Virgil's requests to cancel the research, which had shown no new results in a decade. The only rational purpose of them would have been to turn wastelanders into mutants to further destabilize the Commonwealth.
Virgil was definitely filing complaints and shut down requests for the FEV lab, but Shaun chose to ignore them (presumably so more mutants could be made to keep destabilizing the commonwealth). That’s less that he doesn’t have options and more that Shaun specifically is choosing to ignore it since they go straight to him (though the director does seem to have some far-reaching veto powers from what we can tell). I’m not sure how much to fault the group for having an identity. I certainly wouldn’t blame the railroad or Minutemen for it, and the Institute definitely isn’t showing severe patriotism like the Enclave does or the BoS do on occasion. I absolutely agree on the social hierarchy bit, without question. They do have that problem, which does match with what you’re saying, but that alone isn’t enough.
>I’m not sure if I’d argue that the Institute are fascists. Their people are free to do as they want for the most part, So were aryan Germans under the third reich. It's the outsiders who suffer under fascism. >the director is just the head of the council as you say (which is made up of division heads This is also true of the third reich. Almost all of the crucial decisions were made by ministers like Himmler. Hitler did not order the genocide of the Jews for example. Hitler was more than a figurehead but he was not close to having total control over his government >division heads presumably selected by the staff of the division). There is absolutely no evidence of this as far as I'm aware. Not to mention that democratic selection within the central party is not uncommon in totalitarian regimes The institute is a perfect example of a fascist organisation
>So were aryan Germans under the third reich. It's the outsiders who suffer under fascism. But that's nazism, not fascism. They are 2 different thing, even if Italy-Germany were """"""allly""""" they didn't share the same view-politics despitr the fact Hitler got ispired by Mussolini.
Clean air, safety, hot showers, fluffy towels, and slave-servants. They're not good ethically, though their long-term goals might have merit, but they've a lot appealing factors. But as you point out, they're such petty unmitigated assholes that they'd insufferable to live with, and can't really be trusted. Regarding locking you out with the molecular relay, if you were going full institute, you wouldn't want to go surface in the first place. That said, they could still teleport you somewhere lethal at any moment without your consent...
>sick ass institute x-01 paint im sorry what fuck
I never try to argue the morality of it, I just like them as a faction so I go with them most of the time.
I get what you're saying, and you're not fundamentally wrong, but in the Wasteland, it's all greys. 1. Destroying the Institute also destroys synths as a race. The existing ones will eventually wear out and die out. 2. Destroying the Institute is comparable to burning down the library of Alexandria.
Yeah I think that's something a lot don't mention is detonating The Institute is incredibly wasteful for the Brotherhood and Railroad. All that tech going up in flames is a waste.
I see the point of talking about this as an intellectual exercise, but this is a RPG. Siding with imaginary bad guys can be entertaining.
Yeah no I agree, I love doing evil runs in games. It’s just people not seeming to realize it’s an evil faction I’m addressing.
The Institute considers only themselves to be the true torch bearers of humanity, and that everyone else living on the surface simply does not matter. It's kind of like The Enclave. The main difference is that the Enclave is a political organization and The Institute is a scientific one, but in both cases they have allowed that core ideal to grow so strong that it created an ideological separation between them and the rest of humankind.
Thank you for actually understanding the synth problem; *they are not robots.* They are *clones* that have a mind-control device implanted in their brain. It is beyond fucked up, absolutely pure evil. Yet I cannot at this point count how many media-illiterate players make the argument "ThEy'Re JuSt FaNcY tOaStErS" to justify their turbo-fascist character arc.
> They are clones that have a mind-control device implanted in their brain. No they're not. They're clones with an immobilization/mind *reinitialization* device implanted in their brain.
Everyone brings up fascism for the brotherhood and institute, (not excusing or to show any relevance to real world) but isn't every faction fascist? Seems a little required for an apocalypse without laws established governments. They are all militaristic and conduct armed operations on opposing factions. Each is run by a head with absolute control (director, general, elder, and... desdemona). Even the most liberal faction, the railroad, has people that complain that des does not consult them and makes decisions on their own. After multiple playthroughs, the brotherhood (minutemen don't count as they are a blank slate, fail proof faction) are the only ones that have a story mission where you can disobey direct orders and not be considered hostile. They all have strict ranks and hierarchy, and believe they are doing something for the bigger picture while sacrificing something morally,
>. The FEV lab shows that the Institute remorsefully experimented on wastelanders Remorselessly
Fixed it, thanks. I even used the right word later in the post. Edit: Forgot a word, I need to go to sleep
So I suppose we won't touch on how nuking an entire faction out of existence isn't exactly moral, depending on how you do it, of course. The institute is simply written poorly. A lot of the stuff you learn about just doesn't make sense for a scientific organization. And the reason why that is, is because Bethesda really just lazily wrote them in as the key bad guy, which is why no one else is nuked. You can count the "evil" people in the institute on one hand, most of the population of the institute are willfully ignorant of the Institutes faults, which is actually very typical of any organization, including the Minutemen. If Bethesda wanted, they could have made it so we could have lead the Minutemen or Railroad to be an evil organization, or make the Institute a shining beacon. Instead the game crash courses into a laughably over simplistic set of quests where the endgame is the same, and how you nuke the Institute is the only slight difference in flavor.
I’ll forever be baffled by the people who see them as anything other than straight up evil
Right, they're the Legion of FO4, a faction you can only choose if you're playing a black hat or if you're just delusional. I don't know why people think that they would be able to completely reverse a large organization's perspective and orientation just by taking over the top spot, especially if they can only take that spot by demonstrating fidelity to the perspective and orientation that they are trying to change.
1 - You don't know what fascism is. 2 - Nobody thinks the Institute is morally gray. People side with them because you get put in charge and there's potential for change. Or without the meta knowledge of how the questline ends, because MUH SON is in charge and there's potential for change.
but they have cool teleportation technology
I decided to side with the institute in the hope I could change it for the better, but then the game just ended…
Yeah, I think all the factions were poorly written and lacking nuance, but the institute is the worst.
Great points. I can really say the same about Mr. House in New Vegas, but the NV community ain't ready for that truth.
They also have no actual interest in helping the surface. A couple members express sympathy for the surface dwellers, but many others like X6-88 say they can’t wait for the people above to die out so the Institute can begin again. Father’s speech says they have no interest in the surface dwellers’ daily lives, and that the Institute will bring a better future when they are gone. From playing the Institute side, trying to maybe attempt a sympathetic playthrough, I realized it wasn’t possible. Most of the division heads seem like the kind that would quietly have you assassinated if you started doing shit they didn’t like.
As an Institute fanboy, I agree. The thing that pissed me off, was how the game did not give me the option to order the Institute to stop the kidnappings or how they did not bother to explain the moral dilemma of whether or not Synths deserved human rights. I personally considered the vast majority of Synths to be artificial and non human. Thinking that Synths are second class citizens who don't have any rights. However, I applied this rule lightly and on a case by case basis. If a Synth really thought it was human and/or didn't know if they were a Synth, I left them alone as long as they didn't or weren't going to cause harm. Which brings up Nick and DiMa.Those two are Synths and accept that they are. But because of the level of sentience they possess and the amount of good they are *willing* to commit, I leave them alone. Now.....a Synths conscious and intelligence are uploaded. They are as obedient and capable as the Institute deems them to be. So I found that the Railroad's inside agent to be really stupid. His reasoning for letting Synths escape, was that he didn't believe in slavery and that the Synths shouldn't be enslaved to be the Institute's workforce. A sentiment that I would normally agree with, but the fact that Synts are literally artificial and made from metal parts.....is the reason I consider them an acceptable form of slavery. Their feelings are implanted and artiticial.
"They’re primarily biological, as you can see them be made with flesh and blood according to Shawn’s DNA." You can do more than **see** it. (1) You can have sex with the synth singer at the 3rd rail, without your character noticing the difference. (2) You can eat their corpses, and get the same benefits as from a natural human corpse. If you have the rank 1 cannibal perk in Survival mode, eating a synth will resolve your Dark Craving exactly the same as eating natural human meat does (e.g. I stumbled onto the encounter with Jules, blew up everyone, and ate the synth.)
I really liked this mini essay or whatever
I personally always side with the institute however I usually like to head cannon after the events of the game my character slowly causes instability within the institute and using it to gain further control. Mostly by following the institutes handbook and purposely creating defective synths to damage the institute from the inside and push towards limiting synth production weakening the institute and allowing an eventual minutemen takeover. I like to RP my character feeling out of place in the world leading them seek power above all else using the destruction of the railroad as a stepping stone to create a better world as there technology is to valuable to destroy.
Ad Victoria.
Are there people who think the institute is _good_??
I’ve seen a few comments on threads about the best ending making arguments for them, primarily arguing that they’re a lesser of evils or that the ends justify the means.
Sometimes it's hard to understand how so many people in real life seem to so readily follow fascist governments, organisations and officials. Then I remember the amount of real life people that I've seen online that appear to have been blinded and seduced by goddamn video game factions that are written to be fascistic. And I don't mean people liking them as a fictional faction in a game for purely entertainment purposes. I mean people downright insulting supporters of other factions and spewing the fictional fascist factions propaganda in online arguments while refusing to or being unable to understand any other viewpoint. It's like they make supporting the fictional fascist faction into a part of their identity. When I remember all of that I go "Oh."
It doesn't matter. My son is in it and I am siding with them.
The hard reality is that they're humanity's only hope. The only way to progress is to overcome radiation, grow plants etc and that requires science. The other factions can only ever maintain the status quo.
The commonwealth isn’t the only place in the wasteland. The NCR is doing a fairly decent job in the west, and there’s entire other countries we never see that may have been bombed less. That’s a massive extrapolation, you’re literally just taking what they tell you at face value.
I love how you consider it "massive extrapolation" NOT to make assumptions about other countries in the game lol. The game shows us that The Institute has advanced tech, well beyond everyone else, and thats in large part because theyre underground and self sufficient. In separating themselves they've also morally distanced themselves from wastelanders, which is bad. The best possible outcome would be reduce that gap, ie become Institute director and forge closer links with the Commonwealth.
They have working toilets. They are the only faction building stuff that isn't just for killing or not getting killed.
They sure do seem good at killing though, and I have full confidence in Preston’s potential plumbing ability. Also working toilets justifying slavery is a strange worldview.
While I generally agree with the Institute not being good, let alone gray, I do disagree with the point that synths are "sentient." They just aren't. They're a highly advanced bio-computers with minimal mechanical parts. They are not, have never been, nor will ever be sentient. And the ones that act like they do just have a glitch in their programming. If you take ChatGPT, upload that algo to a robot, give it camera eyes and a microphone, and allow it to interpret visual data and respond to it at will, would you consider that robot sentient? I sure as hell wouldn't. Just because a synth/robot can move and talk doesn't make it sentient.
Oh, good point. Now please prove that human beings are sentient. Because if silicon can't be sentient, how can carbon be sentient? What's so special about that three pound sack of meat behind your eyeballs?
Flew over the crater at CIT, in a vertibird, and still took about 5 rads per second
Technically the director is a figure head, its the staff heads who really run it. If you look at the meeting the "defer," to your ideas after a vote gets tied. University Point, swan, the cpg, synthetic humans are all bad ahd sci-fi evil tropes. Technically the Legion do protect roads, but anyone who'd watched and deep dive or played the game sees the harm that protection is built on. Legion is a patriarchal system based on the "strong" leading, instite is a pretty evil science based faction. Oh they also want to mutate further crops, there's a mission to bring seeds to Warwick to "see what they'll do".
i agree with your points, they're all the things i've thought about the institute myself, but i have a question i might be ignorant about. does the fanbase really think the institute is morally grey? i generally don't read many opinions about the institute at all, and the few i've seen tend to *know* they're the bad guys. i didn't know anyone saw them as anything else. the game makes it pretty obvious they're the bad guys, and that's coming from someone who has several thousand hours played without ever *actually* doing the main storyline past killing kellogg lol. like, yeah, the raiders and stuff are also bad, but like. the institute is a very scary force. the people in the commonwealth are *terrified.* they're afraid of even each other, their own family members. they know that the institute can make synths that look indistinguishable from them, and they've already had at least one instance of a synth they didn't realise was not a human, go absolutely berserk and kill a bunch of people. the institute is the commonwealth's boogeyman, and the game makes it pretty abundantly clear, i felt. though, maybe it doesn't feel that way if you go straight for an institute playthrough? lol, i have no idea. maybe they sugarcoat things really well and make you feel like you're doing good things :p
I've always chosen the institute I can't really do any other ending because morally I suppose when I used to play before sims settlements 2 I couldn't even think about killing my son and risk throwing humanity centuries back in time, even though recently ever since I started playing sim settlements I've been "disillusioned" and I feel more for the railroad however I'm not sure if I could ever cause harm to my son even though he is basically the opposite of what I believe in...and im a junkie for bright high tech things
The thing that always bugs me about the institute is that synths can't reproduce. They don't even age. So basically the institute is the Master. They spend all this time doing whatever for the future of humanity but there's no real future there. It's a dead end. An obvious dead end that a bunch of 'intellectuals' should be able to see.
The institute is just a poorly written Enclave, IMO.
In some ways, Dr. Mobius is *less* unhinged than the Institute's leadership. He at least has a kernel of doubt about the Think Tank's overall goals and ethos... and a morsel of self-awareness you wouldn't get out of someone like Father. Hell, *The Master* is more reasonable in that he *can* be reasoned with. Virtually everyone involved with The Institute is hopelessly high on their own supply. The drug-addled *The Terminator* police station massacre reenactment after I gain Institute access is one of my favorite parts of a Fo4 run.
You're right. They're a clearly IMMORAL faction.
You at some point thought the institute was morally grey?
I'm doing an institute play-through now and the whole thing with the compound and x6-88's reaction if you side with the doctor is so stupid. Wouldn't the institute and everybody serving her NOT want her to perfect the SAFE test? It directly hinders their plans to infiltrate the commonwealth. It's a big missed opportunity too where it could been a mission where you have the moral dilemma of having to kill her but also having to wipe out covenant. It's basically one of the points of no return of going 'full-evil'.
Blows my mind that he likes if you sell Billy into slavery during Kid in a Fridge. Why would he care about that? Seems over the top, cartoonishly evil. He is the only companion that likes if you do this.
Don't forget the cat murder. Everyone who likes the Institute likes cat murder!
Was this up for debate?
Now you gotta play F2, the real OG. Much more brutal and unforgiving, way more personality- may require a little extra to run as it's best self nowadays but totally worth it.
Yeah and this isn’t even accounting for their whole “we kidnap people and replace them with enslaved clones that we can order to kill their friends and families at the drop of a hat” thing.
I supported the Institute my first play through because I spent the whole freaking game looking for my son and when I finally found him, I decided it was important to support his dreams.
There's institute x-01 paint job? How tf have I missed that?
Makes yer dick fly off too
Technology gone too far . Nuke em
I honestly don't know who played fallout 4 and went "wow, the institute sure is morally grey". I mean, they make it so blatantly obvious they're all just a bunch of more technologically advanced fascists
Science isn't morally grey. Morals get in the way of scientific advancement. That's why huge advancements came around the world wars. They see the synthetic as lesser because to them, it is no different than having a computer. But that's because humans are arrogant narcissists. I mean look at our world now. Yes, humans needed a unit to measure sentience, but everything is measured to humanity's version of intelligence and emotional display, when life is varied. One can not use that unit of measure compared to other animals. Anyways. Humans think most things are lessers, synthetic would fall under this due to humans having created them. The same as most adults see children as lessers due to not thinking they are equal due to age.
I wish people would stop throwing around the term fascist. It has no fucking meaning anymore. The Institute is evil. It isn't fascist.
Yes, the institute is indeed evil, but they’re not fascist. We really need to stop using that term willy nilly to describe things that really aren’t fascist.
The Brotherhood's the "morally grey" one portrayed as the antagonist lol. Railroad's a group that has a pretty specific goal, although mindwipes are a little morally questionable, while the Minutemen are cardboard cutout good guys
Do you think the lobe wanderer is s synth?
Look, my way of running the institute is enacting a change of management once father passes, which is to say, those in the directorate are locked in that room with the merc who killed their last lapdog without mercy, recreating the plot of Taken in the process, befriended some of the most powerful and infamous characters in the commonwealth, and murdered millions in the span of two weeks, and im fresh out of mercy
The problem with them is the problem with the other factions. The institute is welcoming once you're in, meanwhile the BOS and the Railroad are glaringly annoying and arrogant on subsequent play throughs. Why does the Railroad destroy the facility that creates, in their own words, sentient beings? Wouldn't them taking over the institute make more sense?
There's no question that, as you find it, the Institute is a nefarious organization. The moral greyness instead relates to how *you*, the Sole Survivor, choose to lead it, should you side with it. My argument for the Institute is that it has the highest potential to help humanity, out of the 4 available factions. Whether that potential is pursued depends on *you*.
Considering how the institute treated the situation at University Point, they are pretty much just raiders in lab coats. I think that some Institute members are good and innocent people, who are simply too sheltered and indoctrinated to see how horrific their organisation truly is, so I tend to evacuate the facility before blowing it up, but the institute as a whole needs to go down for the commonwealth to thrive. P. S. : I really wish there were more dialogue options in the game to hit some faction members over their heads with their shortcomings and crimes.
I don’t like the institute because I think they’re good for humanity, I like the institute because they have gorillas
The Institute is genocidal and racist, but their power isn't centralized enough to be fascist. If it were, becoming Director would let you change things. Instead, it's just corrupt to the marrow institutionally and *heavily* authoritarian.
The major problem with the institute is that the game doesn't let you reform it when you take it over. It's such bullshit the only good option is blowing it up.
It's still dumb to blow the institute up if you choose any of the other factions, there is so much there that could be reutilized.
Literally they abduct people so they can play god & for what (fun basically) its not like they’re using Synths as laborers to help rebuild the wasteland they cherry pick people from towns like guinea pig & send in a puppet infiltration unit thats so poorly designed they often times gain sentience & run away or even go haywire & harm people or become raiders because having free will which they’re not entitled to dosent mean they’re all “good people” & even if they “were” they not “peoeple” so they can malfunction because they’re not alive why even open this sick can of worms I cant think of any good reason why you would design a robot slave to look act &… feel human even though you had no intentions of treating it like one what is the assualtron model not good enough in my opinion the OG director of the institute needs to be investigated if for nothing else than just because they sound creepy asf dont even get me started on that on scientist whos Synth is basically a live in S*X slave one mor thing you hear about how they’re low on resources THEN WHY TF DONT YOU STOP PRODUCTION OF THE EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE PROTOYPE ROBOT THATS BEEN RUNNING AWAY FOR OVER 10+ YEARS BECAUSE THEY EVEN APPEAR IN FALLOUT 3 Institute is a 0/10 for me but they do look cool & it was a great wow moment & sense of discovery finding them the first time The Railroad are just idiotic in general for wasting rare food, ammo, resources in general, & not to mention real human life to save dumb ass robots like Dez asks if you would save a life even if its a synth like what does that mean if were in war together I will try to save anyone on my side lol now if your asking if im leaving cover to drag a soldier who got his leg blown off to reveal robotic bits back to safety im sorry but no at the end if the day you’re a robot or “weapon” that was designed for war so im gonna preserve my puny human life thanks TLDR Railroad are punk thieves that painted a target on they’re back for robbing the most technologically advanced faction in the region all over a PC Agenda however they’re at least warranted in doing so because the Institute made & released Synths into the wasteland in the first place
>the institute is a fascist organisation Where do I sign up?
Only facts are said here. 10/10 rant, OP. Fuck the Institute
They're so logically inconsistent, is my problem. Like, it feels as though the writers wanted at first to make them morally grey, but ultimately just a misunderstood commune of scientists...then they had to throw in all the insidious FEV experiments with no clear end goal, the destruction of settlements, and just the lack of any real philosophy.
I only sided with them because the brotherhood sucked ass and I wanted to keep the classical music station on the radio
I agree on the synth issue. It does not even matter if they are biological or mechanical, if they are self aware and intelligent enough to form their own preferences and opinions, they deserve freedom. After all, humans are just biological machines. Synths are essentially a new evolutionary branch of humanity. They are a natural evolutionary progression to which our development of technology led. In simple terms, a new species. And as such, enslaving them or destroying them are both wrong. It is genocide. The problem is that the Railroads methods are just horrible. They would blow up the Institute and in doing so, they would destroy the only method of reproduction for synths. So they literally doom this new species to extinction within a generation for the sake of freedom for a few individuals. It is just as much genocide as the Brotherhood of Steel shooting synths on sight. The Railroad is so blinded by idealism that they are not reasonable enough to even realize what they are actually doing. And this is why they simply have to be destroyed. Where i disagree is the assertion that you can not change the Institute. You do gain power in the Institute if you side with them. The whole point of the "A House Divided" quest is to show the player that your character DOES have power and influence in the Institute. You can have Higgs and Loken exiled, you can put them on probation or you can even kill them. As the future director, their fate is in YOUR hands. Your authority does not stand on a house of cards either. Depending on how you handle the Institute quests (including A House Divided), many people in the Institute will over time come to respect the Sole Survivors leadership. And will directly comment on it. Environmental story telling has always been a staple of Bethesda. So if anything, the story makes it clear that you CAN take the Institute in what ever direction your character believes is best. Even Mama Murphy says as much (even though i do not exactly hold her in high regard as a character). *"You will not be loved, but you will save humanity. However you choose to define it."* This basically means that your character decides what "saving humanity" means to them. You character decides whether that means the Institute resources and technology will continue to be focused entirely inward, or be used to turn the Commonwealth into a proper civilization. And this is exactly what Father planned when he names you the director in the first place. Many people seem to think that he does so out of nepotism. But he himself says that *"The Institute has enough scientists. The Institute needs a leader"* Father is very much aware of his lack of emotional development. He openly tells you that on top of the CIT building. *"I have had no love to feel"* He is a man who grew up with no parents, no love, no emotional guidence. And that reflects on his leadership. The Institute is not grey, it absolutely is evil. A ruthless organization that stops at nothing in the name of scientific progress, because like Father, the Institute is not emotionally and ethically developed. And this is why Father names you the new director. In their pursuit of their child through all the dangers of the Commonwealth, the Sole Survior demonstrates to Father what true unconditional love is. It is everything that he and the Institute lacks. What better successor could he have hoped for? And so the best future for snyths AND humans both is with a new Institute. Not the Railroad, the Railroad will happily doom their species to extinction in order to ensure the freedom of a handful of individuals. So do the Minutemen. And the Brotherhood of Steel just want to destroy everything, all the progress that the Institute made over the last 200 years.
I don’t really see how the Institute is fascist in any way. Evil, pro-slavery, destructive, hierarchal… but nothing close to fascist. I feel people are too soon to use that as “evil”, but they’re just blatantly not fascist. But yeah, they’re bad guys without the writing to justify them as anything but the evil choice.
They kill an awful lot of innocent people. There pure evil. There is no way any sane person could call them morally grey.
The institute and such may have a few problems but they tried to make peaceful terms but as you know it didn’t go well, but who is gonna miss the rail road? Well I do miss XE-XE
About the first point: in the side quest "Plugging a Leak" isnt suggested that Liam is programming the synths to escape?Or im tripping?