Can't Get No Satis-Faction

Dec. 12, 2015

Can’t Get No Satis-Faction

The main storyline ofFallout 4revolves around the interplay between the 4 main factions of the game. How they all have oriented and organized around the conditions of the Commonwealth is a study in shades of grey and understanding their motives and tactics are key to making a decision that is in line with how you would prefer to play the game. Players are able to take on missions from every one of the factions during a playthrough, which gives everyone an opportunity to hear their ideologies before making a committed choice. Eventually, you will have to make a choice to swear allegiance but it’s a tough choice to make and one that I really struggled with when trying to decide what kind of story I wanted to see unfold.

What follows is my experiences and impressions of the factions and how I felt the overall faction struggle for power story was handled. For an in-depth breakdown of each faction, their quests and crucial elements, click on the headings to visit their robust wiki pages.

I ran into this faction before any others as did most players at theMuseum of Freedomin Concord. I was impressed by their resolve and thought Bethesda did a great job with the character ofPreston Garvey. He was idealistic but tortured, loyal but opinionated. I opted for him as my primary companion through the game (except for when I needed the hacking expertise ofNick Valentine). The Minutemen as a whole held a mission of peacekeeping force, a citizen’s militia of sorts where the people of the Commonwealth would exercise a form of democracy. I found the Minutemen initially indifferent and to be frank, boring at the start. It isn’t until their story opens up and they start taking some harder stances against the Brotherhood of Steel and the Institute that you begin to see their conviction for their vision of the future. They are sympathetic to the Synth freeing aims of the Railroad minus the fanaticism which I appreciated and their mission of empowering the settlers of the Commonwealth to work, unite and rebuild the devastation felt very grassroots and very communal. But their squeaky clean aw shucks nature had me feeling just a little too much like a boy scout at times. I mean, we were killing people by the thousands here.

I could not get into this faction, and I really did try especially for all the weapon and armor advantages that casting your lot with them offers. Perhaps it’s my bend but the gun-ho zealotry of the Brotherhood put me off. It seemed very shoot first ask questions later. However I will say thatPaladin Danseoffers a refreshing departure from that guns blazing ideology and I recommend playing through the Brotherhood quest lines to get a deeper perspective. As a whole, the Brotherhood is a very reactionary faction, taking an extreme stance against a potential danger in the form of technology. Their zealotry seems to delude them here, making them a bit oblivious to their hypocritical reliance on technology. However, I am sympathetic to their aims because they are born of good intentions and their contradictory nature is how many of us would honestly react to a crisis that was bigger than us.

This faction was the most interesting to me in terms of what they stood for, and although they were framed as the villains, I couldn’t find much in the way of stark evil to pin on them. Besides the megalomania, god complex, and kidnapping of Shaun and murder of Fiona of course. Which is pretty bad admittedly. The creation/slavery of synths is the game’s biggest moral grey and you could make a compelling argument for or against the motives of the Institute here. Machine or man? Autonomous or subservient? The issue with this faction for me is probably related to this greyness. I couldn’t really find a compelling reason to side with them and perhaps that sterility was the point. Their ambiguity made them the most boring faction of all, and I ultimately sided against them for their involvement in kidnap and human trafficking. It would have felt hamfisted to have sided with the faction that kidnapped my son and murdered my wife. If I’m being further honest, the interactions with this faction were the most awkward of the entire game, one in which it showed its major warts related to plot, pacing, and the recorded dialogue.

I rode with this fun lot for quite a bit, and actually chose them for the ending. They were kooky, paranoid, and ramshackle but they had an exuberance and sense of fun that the other factions just did not. From the fashionably patchwork attire and cigarette smoking leaderDesdemona, the delightfully eccentricTinker Tomand comical man of disguise and one linersDeacon, I had way too much fun performing their missions and fighting for a cause that felt real, if altogether a bit narrow or limited which is why i vacillated before choosing to see their story through. I mildly cared for the plight of the synths who wanted freedom, but had seen enough gunfights with the others that I more ore less viewed them as Mr. Handys on two legs. I was happy to find that the Railroads aims didn’t alienate the Minutemen and further found that combining the missions of both side by side really made me feel like I had arrived at comfortable playthrough orientation. Their,  fanaticism was generally ok with me, outside of their willingness to kill whoever necessary to free synths. Fortunately having Preston and the Minutemen code at my side helped inject a bit of general compassion into the game, and when the time came I was sure to issue an evac alert to spare as many lives as I could.

I feel Bethesda hit the character homerun with this faction, consolidating the game’s most colorful characters into one crowded catacomb.  Outside of Sturges with the Minutemen, none of the other factions featured much in the way of interesting supporting actors. But with the Railroad, I felt like I was hanging with old friends when piloting the Vertibird with Tinker Tom and Deacon, hamming it up the whole way up the flight to bring pain to the uptight Brotherhood. 10/10 would ride with these cats any time.

At endgame, stopping to look back at the journey Bethesda crafted for use through the interplay of the factions, I can say that the experience has been mixed but mostly positive . Strong characterization is always one of the more difficult things for a writer to do even when there is a strong conceptual frame and for all but one of the factions, Bethesda did a good to outstanding job. The biggest pitfall with the factions may have been their contradictory natures which is usually a good thing in storytelling until being forced to choose one at the expense of others comes into play. A fifth lone wanderer option could have been an interesting play for those players who unlike myself could not find a faction they really identified with or perhaps an opportunity to have obtained meaningful leadership in one of the factions that allowed you to reshape the aims of the group. That kind of dynamic storytelling is what can lift a game into another kind of experience, and one more immersive than any movie or book and I think it’s ultimately what Fallout, Elder Scrolls and the Mass Effect universes are aiming for. When that time truly comes, we’re all in for a treat.

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Emergence

Editor at Fextralife. I look for the substantial in gaming and I try to connect video games to the emotions and stories they elicit. I love all things culture and history and have an odd fondness for the planet Jupiter. I think my dogs are pretty awesome too.

Meanwhile, in 3, you had the waters of life, at least, and some different things. Wasn’t perfect, but I think it was more fitting than 4 did.

I agree with a lot of the sentiments in the comments here. I really don’t think they did an overall terrible job with the factions (questing aside which is a different critique), it’s just that they did the most crucial one in the Institute poorly. The entire story unfolds via choices you make around that faction, and yet they are a dull group with nothing really polarizing. There was little pulse there to love or hate and when I was standing on top of Mass Fusion flipping the detonator I didn’t for a moment feel like I was making any kind of real change for the better in the Commonwealth.

This is exacerbated further when walking around during endgame; the world around me hasn’t changed at all. Mutants gon mutant and raiders gon raid, so what exactly were the stakes again?

I’m hoping a few months after the G.E.C.K is released ambitious modders will make the minutemen not suck. It might involve a suddeny-silent protagonist, but I think the voiced protagonist was a bad idea to begin with (did a whole article about it about a year ago, and every problem I mentioned and then some is present in full force is FO4) so I’ll live.

@OdwallaBaroqueDragonPS you’re definitely not alone. Close-minded action game fans dismiss it as nostalgia, but a common sentiment among people who actually enjoyed Morrowind is that it’s the best of them, the last of their consistently good writing and worldbuilding. (It’s way better now than it was last gen, Oblivion and FO3 were especially bad at it, but it’s still not great.)

At this point I think Morrowind was an accident. Ken Rolston (Morrowind, Oblivion), Emil Pagliarulo (Morrowind: Bloodmoon, FO3, FO4, Oblivion, Skyrim) and Todd Howard have no idea what made Morrowind so good. Either that or Todds a sellout, take your pick.

You know what’s ironic, and some people might disagree with me here, is that I found that some of the best writing they ever did was in a game that had very little spoken dialogue and much of whose story was told in text, like a freakin’ text-based RPG: Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Maybe I’m a little old school there, but…

Ever since that “era” things have seem to go further downhill, as far as writing is concerned, in terms of Betheseda. I can’t get into the endings of this game. I can’t “feel” it. I can’t get immersed in the experience. I’m trying to get engaged in the gameplay, but the endings are what really ties me up with this game. None of them are really… good at all, overall, and by good, I don’t mean morally; I just mean… good.

While almost anything can be criticized and has room for improvement, I think there’s a point where that ceases to be the main factor of relevance, and it just gets to where something wasn’t so great. For me, that’s the endings of FO4. As usual, there was so much squandered potential, and Bethesda fell short. That said, I’m still playing, of course, but I can’t help think it disappointing. If anything, I think the Minutemen and the Institute had the most potential, and as Director, through the ending, I see no reason why some reform in the Institute could not occur, and as for the Minutemen, as stated prior, it fell flat entirely.

This would have been a much better way of doing things- as well as a way of really improving the feel of settlements and making them come to life more with named characters. I can see why they didn’t do this as it would increase the amount of content they had to put in… But then that’s only an issue for the developer.

The minutemen could have been a very interesting faction indeed if you did become half a diplomatic negotiator and half a commander. However it just pans out as the “General” really becomes the whipping boy and doing all the work. Missed opportunity, though I guess the method of speech implementation makes diplomacy more difficult too… Oops.

I think the tl:dr is bad bethesda writing is bad. While I wish they could put together a ‘complete’ story, as usual only parts are excellent, and much of the rest is mediocre or poor. I think they shackled how evil they could make the institute as Bethesda probably didn’t want Shaun to have become supremely evil (though lets be honest it would be much better with that aspect in it), but the institute choice did seem silly to me. I only chose it in a reload file after I’d initially chosen the railroad just so that I could see how it ended.. and the answer to that is just disappointing and with little closure on the institutes future goal.

I like the idea of the Minutemen, but almost all their quests are radiant garbage leading into settlements that give even more radiant garbage. What you should have been doing 1/2 the time is securing trade routes and negotiating political favors with actual characters (not nameless NPCs) in actual towns, making hard choices trying to appease self interested groups to unite the commonwealth in trade and defense, not running “clear area X” quests” with no larger story or context on repeat for 90% of it.

My problem with the Institute is that I don’t know why you’d side with them. What are their goals? Just hide away and advance whatever area of research seems good at the time to preserve their own little world? 140 hours and I still don’t know why you’d side with them. They feel like they’re just there because that’s the only way they could think of to tie their “personal” stories villain into the faction story, but they couldn’t be completely evil or do anything interesting to make the faction story believable (ie siding with them doesn’t make you a cartoon villain like siding with the Enclave in FO3 does) while still needing them to be the villain for the first half. I think better writers could have pulled it off, but it doesn’t really work as is.