The game doesn’t explain why the Institute has been creating Super Mutants with Fallout’s Forced Evolutionary Virus, why the Institute believes that communities of humans who survived a nuclear war are going to roll over and die at some point in the near future. It’s loosely implied that the Institute believes human beings can’t be fixed and that the solution is to “redefine” mankind - one of your companions, X6-88, openly states that things will be better once all the humans living above ground (the Institute is below the ruins of the alternate-universe MIT, dubbed the Commonwealth Institute of Technology) are dead and gone. The game never explains why they believe synths are just robots, nor why the Institute is replacing human beings with synthetics in the first place. Once you find him, you discover he’s the leader of the evil Institute, a secretive organization whose artificial humans (called synths) have been replacing humans in key positions of power for years, if not several decades.įallout 4 presents you with plenty of evidence that the Institute is wrong, and virtually no data to suggest they might be right. Throughout the first part of the game, the overarching goal is to find the son stolen from you while you were trapped in cryogenic stasis.

I bring this up to make it clear that I’m comparing FO4 to its immediate predecessors, not kickstarting an ancient debate over the direction Bethesda took the series.įallout 4 has two problems that mutually reinforce each other. My first exposure to the series was with Fallout 3 and while I’ve tried to dive back into the earlier games, I’ve had trouble switching back to turn-of-the-century gameplay and UI designs. I’m one of the latter type - while I’ve been playing PC games since the mid-1980s, Fallout and Fallout 2 didn’t make it on to my radar for whatever reason back when they were new. There’s infamous bad blood between fans of the first two Fallout games, which were isometric turn-based titles, and gamers who discovered the series with Fallout 3 / Fallout: New Vegas.

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