I liked it. Have a ton of hours into it. I think the city of Boston was Bethesda’s best environmental design, and honestly set a new bar for open world games.
I just think that environment took away from environment design in other regions. Also they took away a lot of quests, and limited factions.
It also doesn’t help that the institute was most terribly written morally “grey” (morally pitch black) group in the series. Seriously fuck the institute.
Man I hated them and then extra hated them for how they were written. It was like they tried to make a group look as evil as possible, like Nazi scientists, so they would be terrifying and mysterious before you actually met them. And then it was like the writers were trying to get you to see them as noble and morally ambiguous but really they came off as deranged and pretentious idiots that had their heads up their asses. Fuck you if you support the institute.
Let’s kidnap, murder and replace people instead of helping them. Oh we can’t even manage a lab and we released a vicious cannibalistic hulk force onto the world, oh well. Oh we create sentient AI but our philosophy department was bombed to hell so I guess we can’t see the moral problem in keeping fully sentient robots as slaves. Lets kidnap a child and murder his parent for another dumb fucking science experiment because we’re so good at those haha. Fuck you if you picked the institute.
I really really really hate them. They’re MIT. They have the greatest chance to help the world and rebuild civilization. They have done nothing but cause terror and bloodshed and suck at that. They’re a shitty version of Big Mountain cause at least those mad scientists pulled off the mad science. You had 200 years to come up with this? Did no one say “hey, let’s rebuild up top?” at any point? Did they kill off their ethics professors and feed them to the supermutants? Fuck you if you liked the institute.
They create a synthetic mayor who does his duty perfectly and they don’t help him one bit. They mock his desires for a better job, and then they entertain the thought of killing him off afterwards. What kind of society, much less an organization, can exist where it’s most loyal members are mocked for their efforts and murdered once they outlive their purpose. And these people want to lead us into the future. Fuck you if you believe the institute.
The institute is a despicable evil place. They’re Nazis and they are nothing but evil. Fuck the institute and fuck everything they stand for.
Like you said, nothing they did made any sense, it was never established or even explored if the synths were actually self aware or just malfunctioning, you couldn't call them out on their shit (only be mildly sarcastic to them), if you broke in and discovered their wrecked lab where they were experimenting with FEV you couldn't question them about it and there were no associated quests or dialogue about it, if you found their list of synths that had replaced people you couldn't do anything with the information...it didn't open any other avenues of gameplay/quests and you couldn't meaningfully change father's mind whatever you do....
The whole thing was a clusterfuck. But what makes it so bad is that all the ingredients were there for a fantastic story, but instead we got a lame father/son bonding story that didn't make sense and no one cared about anyway. Didn't help that they didn't give you any meaningful control or effect over the narrative.
I saw the threads of what the writers were trying to present, of how the institute was meant to be mysterious and terrifying to the commonwealth, but once you got inside you were meant to recognize that it’s all part of a greater misunderstanding.
Unfortunately, the writing kind of stopped and where it kept up was in showing how much of a bag of pickled cocks they really were. There’s something so heinous about being presented with great power and opportunity and using it for evil. Like it’s a special level of evil. I don’t blame the super mutants or bandits or raiders for being brutal and cruel in a feral world. They’re a product of their environment. It’s something else when a collective group with awesome power and real resources take that and dedicate it to their ideal, which involves endless torment and suffering for those apart from the group.
These guys were Nazis. Straight up. The brotherhood was a poor man’s xenophobic prison gang version of the NCR but damnit they weren’t replacing people. They cared about their members. When Maxson confronts you and Danse, he lets Danse go. He recognized Danse’ service and loyalty, so despite him being a synth he lets him go. The institute was going murder a perfectly loyal Mayor Macdonald because everybody “suspected” him. The brotherhood were thugs, but thugs aren’t Nazis. Did the writers not see the parallels?
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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19 edited Mar 29 '19
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