Why I HATE Fallout 4's Story

I love fallout. But as soon as you put a 4 at the end... oh boy I'm mad. In this video, I talk about my complaints about the story of Fallout 4.

Thanks to Gamer's Little Playground for letting me use their footage.

My social medias:

[Matt]

I never got why they would set up the paranoia about synths, have the town of Salem in the setting and NOT have a Salem Witch Trial quest.

[marshallscot]

The Institute having teleport technology is the single dumbest decision they could they made for Fallout 4. I cannot believe that anyone who has cracked teleportation could have any meaningful struggle over energy, resources, or any rival faction.

[zangodeathbrand]

From a scientific perspective, kidnapping Shawn makes no sense. There were people born in the institute who never would have been exposed to radiation. Never mind that none of the vault dwellers were exposed not just Shawn.

[Notto-tndy]

I always thought it was strange that the Brotherhood wanted to totally destroy the institute, seeing as they hoard technology. It would make far more sense for them to destroy the Synth production facilities but take control of the rest of the institute's technology.

[serenitygaming]

I was surprised you didn't mention the most baffling part of Father's story, the fact that he gives you the synth Shaun and tells you to treat him like he's real, despite this whole time saying that synths aren't

[rolay]

For me, the biggest problem is that they call you the "leader" of multiple factions, but you can never make a decision. For god sakes, they make you the leader of the institute no matter what, but for some reason, you can't change them at all? I am the dictator. There should have been an option to stop all the random evil shit. For example, I was going for the institute ending on my first playthrough. Some random scientist keeps telling me to kill the Railroad. I had no option to ignore him. I told him, no, and he laughed it off. As the one in control, I should have been allowed to imprison him for trying to give me orders, If not outright execute him. I was forced to bomb the institute because they refused to listen to me.

Either make the player the leader or don't. The game can't do both. I honestly wouldn't even be mad if Father told the soul survivor to do it before he made the player head of the institute. It is evil but fits him perfectly. Plus, if he is in charge, it makes sense that it couldn't be changed. But they waited until the player was already "in charge" and acted like we are stupid for going against the orders of some random guy.

[ghostprxphet]

In true Bethesda fashion, Fallout 4 brings a lot of interesting ideas to the table but never even tries to discover them on a deeper level. The moral question of "should synths be treated like humans" could have been a great way to let the player make decisions based on their own values.
Nev Vegas used the player-decisions to encourage the player to explore the game world and the factions so they could view the conflict from multiple angles and decide, based on their moral compas, what is best for the Wasteland.

[themaddoctor]

I swear the only reason why they inverted the plot of 3 was to try to show off how much they improved with the face AI. Like in 3, ur character partially decides your father’s face. In 4, you can decide both the parents’ face, which then decides Shaun’s face

[loganr]

A better plot twist for Nate/Nora reaching the institute would be that Shaun and The spouse never existed and Nate/Nora was a test to implant fake memories in humans. It could be their next step

[madiqkandahertee]

My biggest problem is probably more obvious when compared to fallout 3.

Remember how you find your father relatively early in the story? And how the initial weight of finding a lost family member was relieved, letting you loose on the open world?

In fallout 4 it takes about 80% of a decent size story before you’re finally relieved of that pressure.

That’s another way I think fallout 3 does the ‘find the lost family member from the vault’ story.

[sylviahawthorne]

They could’ve had a ‘forgive’ option for Kellogg and if the story needed him dead so bad, they could’ve had the synths he’s with kill him mid sentence- could’ve been really dramatic and add a lot of intrigue over what the institute didn’t want you knowing about them.

[utahraptor]

I like how Bethesda wanted you to hate the Institute and love Preston Garvey even though it turned out that everyone hates Preston and nobody cares about the plot.

[matt]

I had more emotional attachment to a glitched radroach in sanctuary that wouldn't attack anyone then nora

[newdefsys]

Very good review of the Fallout 4 plot. Shaun meant absolutely zip to me after coming out of vault 111. After only spending a few minutes with him during the pre-war gameplay, I could not have cared less about him.
Maybe if Bethesda had expanded upon the pre-war world, having the player perform some tasks with spouse in hand, like taking expecting Nora to the hospital for delivery, or Nora sending Nate to pick up their Codsworth unit at the store. Anything more than just a mere 30 seconds in Shaun's bedroom.

[danethehero]

My ideas to improve FO4's story:

- Do away with Shaun, since he barely even appears in the plot. If not, give him at least more speaking lines and a personality so that we may at least care about him and be invested in the quest to find him. My idea is to have Shaun be the kid that accompanies Kellogg in the flashback, and when you find him, he doesn't know who you are and hates you for killing Kellogg, since by then he'd see him as a father figure more than you, as you were separated from him at an age when he was too little to remember.

- Speaking of Kellogg, instead of killing him outright, it could've made sense to capture him, maybe even talk him into helping you by appealing to his better nature. You could find something of his like a diary or an heirloom of his past, and show it to him to make him reconsider his choices and join up with you to atone for his past. Another idea I got from a user on another video (I don't remember the name, I am sorry) was of having Kellogg come up as a second personality in Nick when you install the brain chip inside him.

- Personal quests for all followers, like in New Vegas: One of the things that I remember more fondly about the game is Piper's backstory of how she exposed the corrupt mayor of her settlement. It would have been nice if this idea was expanded upon, like by having to remind her of why she became a journalist and help her investigate the Institute despite the town being against her (this could be easily merged into the quest where you find out that the Diamond City mayor is a synth). Another example is Preston, where you head to Quincy to avenge his Minuteman comrades who died there, so that he could have a personality beyond "Another settlement needs your help". My idea was that you could find the guy who sold out the Minuteman and either have Preston decide his fate, kill him or appeal to his better nature and stop him. Opportunities like these to flesh out FO4's world are all over, one just needs to find them and expand upon them.

- Expand upon all factions: Most factions don't go beyond the surface level, despite all the opportunities. My ideas to improve them are:
- - The Brotherhood of Steel could have its fanaticism exposed and questioned by the reveal that Danse, one of their most loyal and capable members, is a synth (aka the guys whose existence the Brotherhood abhors), plunging them into a miniature civil war between Maxson and Danse's factions that you have to solve.
- - The Institute is supposed to be this cabal of powerful and cunning scientists and researchers who want to restore the old world, and yet their actions contradict their goals almost directly (I am sure that scientists as smart as they are supposed to be should be aware that dumping Super Mutants into the Commonwealth isn't the way to go to achieve their goal), making them look more like a cheap imitation of the Think Tank from New Vegas. The problem is that the Think Tank scientists were at least funny to listen to and their antics were meant to mask their real nature, whereas the Institute's antics are played completely straight and end up being at complete odds with their nature. To fix this you would need to rewrite the whole Institute, by showing them actually doing smart decisions that pay off in the long run, with their main flaw being their complete detachment from the life of Wastelanders (maybe you could throw internal tensions in, between a group of people who still cares to maintain a semblance of ethical standards and another group who instead believes that ethics are no concern, as the Old World had already forgotten about it with the, shall we say, questionable practices of the ruling elites).
- - The Railroad are just generic good guys, and the internal divisions of the faction, which are hinted at to exist in the vanilla game, are never even touched upon. There is the split over whether Gen 1 and 2 Synths count as people and should be saved, and there could be another where some people want to stop lying around in their bunker out of the belief that doing so only enables the Institute to continue their deeds, and instead want to take the fight to them.
- - The Minuteman are the ones with the most potential, since their ideals boil down to essentially just "another settlement needs your help". The first improvement that I have in mind is to not make the quest where you rescue Preston mandatory, but if you wait on it too long, then you'll find him somewhere else alone, all the people following him having been murdered by Raiders. If you find him in this state, he decides to quit being a Minuteman, since the organization is lost anyway, and you can talk him out of it. If you do, you can convince him to become the new General, but if you fail, you will have to instead. You will need to reclaim the Castle and its artillery, but as the Minuteman grow stronger, Preston starts wondering on what helping people means and whether the Minuteman can continue helping them, since what the Wastelanders need the most is not just protection and resources, but to share what they have and form a structured government to protect themselves from threats like the Institute, which cannot be fought in wars or battles.

- Make the world more interactable: The big problem with the Bethesda Fallout games is that they were designed according to a paradigm that is fit for their own Elder Scrolls series, but not Fallout. Elder Scrolls is meant to be about the gameplay, doing sidequests, and specializing yourself in the various activities the game has to offer. The world of the Elder Scrolls is meant to be interacted with by being one of many characters in the world and following the breadcrumb trails that connect every character (the key example here is with the Ghost Ship of Anvil quest in Oblivion, where it's mentioned that the sailors were all murdered by someone and their ghosts were cursed to haunt the ship. Later on, during the Following A Lead quest, you find the killer's diary, where he tells that he killed them and why, and that it was he who cursed them to haunt the ship - hidden connections like these are all over the Elder Scrolls games). By contrast, Fallout's worlds are interactable with by making choices and seeing the consequences play out on screen (like sabotaging the Securitron army in New Vegas in Yes Man, the Legion and Mr. House's routes, or choosing whether to make Meyers or Hayes the sheriff in Primm), starting from your character build - to specialize yourself in something, you need to trade off something else (the most obvious example is Traits in New Vegas, where picking one gives you both a benefit and a penalty). FO4 sadly ended up being a hodgepodge of the two series, resulting in it feeling a bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing. Examples of how to fix it here include:
- - When boarding the Prydwen, taking a follower would result in you being scolded for allowing civilians to access a military facility containing a lot of classified data and rare technology that the BoS doesn't want getting out. If you have Nick or Strong, you will have to either turn them in, kill them or get kicked out of the BoS, unless Danse is the Elder (see above the civil war I thought of), in which case Nick can board, but not Strong. The same reasoning can be applied to Diamond City, where you can't enter if you have Hancock with you (as he's a Ghoul and a personal enemy of the mayor).
(More to come later, due to time constraints)

[caribou]

my absolute favorite part of fallout 4 is doing the vault section scraping sanctuary and then leaving the save 2% complete

[AttakusZakus]

The story could have had the most existential questions in the franchise, but they really opted to make Fallout 4 a weird test bed of ideas for the future of other franchises.

If Fallout 4 was instead a spin-off called Fallout: Commonwealth, Fallout: Synthetic Hearts, or whatever I think it would have been given a better wrap. There was so much potential to tackle questions like: “Are you truly…you?”, “Does the Wasteland deserve to be rebuilt?”, “Do the ends justify the means?”, “Can Humanity change?” Far Harbor tackled the main idea of Fallout 4 way better than the main game did.

So much missed potential and also the Fallout 4 Assault Rifle is ugly, that is all lol.

[avalon]

The whole concept of going out to find your kidnapped relative would've worked MUCH better if it was a brother or sister who were 10 years younger than you and whom you were the guardian of, and you got to play as the older sibling for a while before the bombs fell. Just normal everyday stuff and getting to know the characters and grow to care. Maybe they have a tragic backstory, and you get some heartfelt conversations with your kid sibling, and maybe those conversations would shape the outcome of the story.
And to shoehorn in the vault part, then maybe you got offered a spot in the vault by a suspicious rich guy, who totally didn't have suspicious plans, who offered you cash or maybe you were a new worker at vault tech, or what ever, to help you provide for your sibling, and by you agreeing to it, you indirectly cause the events of your sibling being kidnapped. THAT would be compelling and way more relatable.
Having that sibling being a kid and yourself being a young adult who has been taking care of your little sibling for years since your parents died in the army, or car crash, or stubbed a toe and died, also makes it realistic that the protagonist is desperate to find their lost relative.
As is, in Fallout 4, Shawn is a newborn. That thing doesn't even have a personality and we have zero investment in it. Basic storytelling 101: if you want people to care, then make them invested and they will care. Seeing a baby for 5 minutes does nothing.

[VioletAeonSnowfield]

When I played Fallout 4 for the first time I decided to roleplay as a woman that even before the bombs dropped had become disillusioned with her marriage and child. And for the most part? It worked.

My character put off looking for Sean for months of in-game time, because a small part of her was glad that her son was dead (which she was convinced had to be his fate); and a small part of her was glad that the overbearing husband she had come to hate had been killed, too. Even the fact that many of the characters you speak to try to force you to speak about your son worked great in terms of roleplaying as a disillusioned mother trying to deny the topic any amount of focus.

The only times it started to fall apart was when my character, after having largely come to flourish in the wasteland's freedom, finally decided to focus on the main quest to find some closure. Because it was only then that my character's dialogue choices and tone of voice didn't match up with the roleplay up till then. Suddenly, this kid that a significant part of my character had come to despise for 'robbing her of her freedom' prior to the bombs dropping was now her highest priority. She was suddenly acting like it was the focal point of her world.

Really makes one want to go back and play New Vegas again.

[aran]

There is actually a very good reason for the “Shaun is actually 60” twist……. at least there would be, it were done correctly. That’s the moment where you realize that you don’t have a child out somewhere in the wasteland, and you’re finally free to do as you please in the wasteland without that pressure hanging over you. The only problem it it happens 80% of the way into the game, not within the first 3 hours like it probably should.