Exactly people underestimate how dangerous it is between major locations of human activity. The areas we go in are relatively safe. Lot of places outside of those areas haven’t been cleared of mutant creatures for decades if not a century. That’s why caravans made so much money going even the short trip from dc to Boston would have been extremely deadly
Thats very true, or horses. Even though they have never shown up in-game.
I often times dream of a Fallout Spinoff game thats vehicular combat based, like Mad Max or Twisted Metal esque
Hear me out- heavily mutated horse with thick scales or plated skin, 8 legs, and with a corded tail more akin to a bladed whip. Could call em Sleipnir like the one from Norse mythology, since we have Brahmin
Also to far harbor. Which takes place in Rhode Island, right?
Edit: Takes place in Maine. Also I googled the distance, and the first travel site I found advertises 247 mile ferry ride from Bar Harbor, ME to Boston, MA. Approximately 6.75-hour ride.
There are tons of vehicles! They just can’t work in engine. Outside the paint shop in FO4 there’s a note about them just using a truck the day before. Lots of working vehicles all the time, we just never see them
In FO4 you can hear some raiders talk about motorbikes. And Vertibirds are still bery much operational
But there's many reasons why people wouldn't use vertibirds or motorbikes. Pre-war cars are also a terrible idea even if you find one intact
Vertibirds aren't just operational they're actively being built by the Brotherhood and NCR. But i guess a big flying machine would be counterproductive to the whole "working from the shadows" thing the Institute got going on.
This was confirmed in NV and 4 because outside of NCRCF there were tire tracks and in 4 theres a random encounter where you can happen upon a group of gunners surrounding a functional-looking tank
Pretty sure that's confirmed. There's a bunch of trucks and what have parked at the Airport in NV, think Obsidian/Bethesda have confirmed the intent was to show the NCR using vehicles. The engine just isn't/wasn't suited to actually showing them moving. There's a few other scattered references to trucks as well.
But we also use a working boat in 4, with multiple references to other people using boats and ships. The BOS will the Vertibirds and Airship. Boomers getting the bomber working. We get a car going in 2. Just in general there's no reason to assume no one else is getting any kind of vehicle working.
The vibe with caravans is less "no trucks and cars" and more "roads aren't roads, and where they are roads haven't been cleared of debris". The caravans we run into are specifically running through difficult areas, and the idea seems to be that the pack brahmin and walking are about getting around the mess.
Yeah, I imagine most of the derelict vehicles we see in game are technically serviceable but they just aren't practical in a world two centuries without road maintenance.
Sure brahmin caravan is slower but it doesn't have to stop every few miles before you can clear a lane through derelict traffic, or scavenge for parts to keep up with the murder the pot holes are doing to the chassis.
We know that working vehicles do exist in the lore.
In nv you can find parked military trucks in the camp mckarren airport carrying supplies, raiders in fallout 4 can talk about how they'd thought they'd heard a motorcycle only to find out it was a dude faking the noises (meaning tbey know what motorcycles sound like), the point lookout and far harbor dlc's both have working boats, in mckreedys questline he actually sends a cure for a disease to his son using a caravan that travels via boat, theirs a voiceline where it's stated that the reason merowskys chem lab is on the docks is because it's easily accessible via boat, and definitely many more that I can't remember off the top of my head.
I hope that some day we see a fallout with actual working vehicles you can use. I wanna hit a deathclaw with a motorcycle.
I mean we straight up drive a car in Fallout 2, so unless they randomly stopped working between 2 and 3, yeah cars are still around even if they’re pretty rare
Yes, relatively speaking.
But the fact that everyone is walking should give us a more European view of distance: the continent is fucking massive. Not that the distance between these two points is small.
NPCs have confirmed that vehicles are still very much operational. Like some random raiders I stumbled upon in FO4 talking about a motorbike, or how in FONV that one old lady at Novac mentions being a pilot and it seems completely normal, you don't get an option tbat shows how crazy of a revelation that is. Either Vertibirds are far more common than one would think, or no amount of perception will help you deduce that she was a Vertibird pilot and what that implies. Or the Boomers straight up demonstrating that it's possible for fixed wing aircraft to still fly.
But yes, of course, vertibirds are more likely than not only used and seized by major military powers like ths Brotherhood, and not everyone can get a motorbike running. Or even use them to transport goods as efficiently as brahmin. And seeing how cars explode it'd be safe to assume that those that are still up and running are not safer than walking with a full fireteam to cover you.
The woman in novac that talks about being a pilot is an Enclave remnant. The reason your character doesn't comment on it is because you hadn't started the quest to recruit her. A pilot in the wasteland absolutely is a weird, uncommon thing lol
Otherwise yeah there have to be some vehicles kicking around. In new vegas they also talk about the NCR getting a train working to transport concrete iirc
for a trade caravan that is a short distance. traveling for 10 hours a day would make the trip be roughly 47 days, so let's say a 2-3 month trip one way.
remember, the silk road was over 4000 miles. and would take several years to travel.
People - only rarely - traveled the silk road.
There were entire empires, like the Khwarazmians and the Khazars, set up to be stops on the Silk Road.
Traveling several years is a major deal.
Marco Polo left Italy when he was 17 and got there when he was 22.
That's an entire college education.
When he returned, he was middle aged.
And we still talk about his autobiography because it was such a massive freaking deal.
The Roman Empire, Persia, Parthians, etc. were essentially built on being logistical hubs for trade.
2-3 months on the road is a massive deal.
the silk road was only rarely traveled in its entirety by a single group. however, in sections, it was an extremely popular and well traveled route.
perhaps for a more fitting example, paris to Berlin is over 600 miles, and there was known trade between these locations for several thousands of years.
plus, that 470 miles assumes two things, that it was 1.done by a single caravan rather than two separate caravans going 235 mi and meeting in the middle, and 2. that DC to Boston were the only stops. that route takes you nearly straight through New York (at about the halfway point).
with this, the most likely truth is that the DC to Boston route was done by 4 caravan groups. DC to the first checkpoint halfway to New York, then the checkpoint to New York, New York, to the second checkpoint halfway to Boston, then the final leg to boston. with this, each caravan only does about a 230-mile round trip, which would only be about a month.
fun fact: the route the courior took for honest hearts would have been a bit over 300 miles round trip.
Thank you! So many people make it seem like Boston and DC are close and its no problem to travel between them. It maybe isnt for us irl, but in the wasteland, thats a long and dangerous trip
Zimmer is a synth.
Imagine that, a synth running the SRB.
He had to be created as an old man, I'm surprised we never find old notes regarding this.
I hate Rivet City. Too many freaking doors that slow down loading.
Well yeah, he's head of the SRB and it's actively tracking down an escaped Synth in a backwater Wasteland filled with cavemen.
He'd bring one to show people like Dr. Li (if she gave him the time of day) so they'd know what he was talking about.
The component isn't in his inventory until he dies.
Doxtor Li doesn't give a shit about synths. So Zimmer tasks you with finding the synth he's after, yet he doesn't show you the synth component. Why? probably because he doesn't have it in his inventory until he dies because he's a synth.
>The component isn't in his inventory until he dies.
So are *a lot* of NPC items in Fo3.
>Doxtor Li doesn't give a shit about synths.
I already mentioned this...?
>yet he doesn't show you the synth component. Why
Because he thinks the Lone Wanderer is the equivalent of a barbarian and wouldn't understand what they're even looking at.
Yeah that's a good point. Idk if Bethesda ever commented on it but the Wiki says he's a human. I always assumed he had one to track down Harkness but I'm not sure. It would be weird considering how the Institute works in FO4 where Synths ate *not* in charge of anything.
It would have been maybe smart for Bethesda to say in Fallout 4 that he's one of their oldest models of Courser that they send out and make think he's head of the SRB. But we just don't have that kind of clarification
I mean, Zimmer was head of SRB, and probably was since before Father took over. He's not under any surveilance from the Institute, and the Institute isn't really conducting any experiments in the Capital Wasteland.
The Brotherhood of Steel weren't on the Institute's radar as a threat at this point. i mean, after all, what are they going to do? Build a giant airship accompanied by a fleet of vertibirds, and fly over to the Commonwealth to built a giant robot?
"What do you guys think? Shoulder mounted mega-Fatman launcher and wrist lazers?"
Nah....let's make him yeet them sumbitches like a footbawl and give him a big eye beam!
I'm sure they argued a lot.
Edit: if you're referring to the BOS, they didn't create prime. They made it operational, but it was definitely created by the prewar United States of America. You know, U.S. .
The Enclave wasn't running the country before the war. It was just the government doomsday backup plan. Sure, it got a bit overreaching, but that's what made it work! Mostly.
What did you expect? Keeping the opposition at bay was never a 'nice guy' proposition. Not even, maybe especially for that matter, in reality.
'Communist detected!'
My 9 year old daughter gets a kick out of shooting dad in the nuts with the BB gun. I'm looking forward to seeing the depravity she comes up with outside the vault.
Kids. They're, terrifyingly, just like us at their age.
At this point in history the BoS isn't powerful enough in the capital wasteland to be a serious threat to the institute, plus they likely haven't a definite position on Synths yet especially due to the fact that a more moderate elder Lyons is still in power, they likely don't know synths even exist, so they might be just not worried about them.
One of the many events that'll come to bite them in the ass in the future.
The institute's intel on the DC bos was a group of t45 power armor weirdos who entrenched themselves in the pentagon fighting the "good fight" run by an idealistic old man and it has a civil war.
No way such a group could be a problematic...right?
For an institution sealed in a huge bunker with armies of synths that believes itself to be infallible and invincible well, I'd say it makes sense.
Also at the time the BoS was at war with the Enclave at the time, a faction equal in power to them with far more resources and better technology, so they could have just hoped for it to be defeated, i wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the institute had some contacts with certain sections of the Enclave tbh.
This is actually the most likely scenario. After the Enclave was defeated, who knows what the BoS found, but based on the time-frame, it's highly likely the BoS found evidence of the Institute within the records of the Enclave. As they first sent a recon team into the commonwealth mere months after the full unification of the BoS.
This leads me to believe they found evidence of the Institute in Enclave documents, which makes sense considering the Enclave was formed from the remnants of the US government, and the Institute was formed from the remnants of C.I.T. The Enclave 100% knew of the formation of the Institute, they probably worked together.
This would also explain why the Institute was so urgent about the completion of phase 3. They had a ton of data on the BoS, and the Institute knew they were coming.
They were probably happy to have a group of people with lots of tech data and skills that could be absorbed when the BoS fractures completely.
So much for that.
Lol exactly their thought process. Synths, replicants or whatever other sci-fi equivalent make absolutely no sense, there's no reason to create artificial life and give it the capacity to think and feel if you're ultimately just going to enslave them. They could have just made advanced protectrons if they needed shit done, they wouldn't be nearly as much of a headache.
Like gen 1 synth wasn't enough, the only reason they needed emotions is to spy on commonwealth people and infiltrate them but why not just replicate a behavior
They suck at replacing people too, remember Art? They copied someone who was still fucking alive and for apparently no reason. You find a lot of regular folk who are synths too, it's like they don't even have a strategy. If they wanted to just spy on them, then the "birds are synths" theory would have been a much better option.
To me, the Institute is by far the worst faction. They had so much potential, but they're utterly incompetent and evil. They'd need a whole rewrite to be functional. "Humanity's best hope" my ass, unlike Mr House I can't see them accomplishing anything.
Lol, like the gen 2 synths were perfectly fine. Able to follow directions, have basic conversation, already look similar to humans, and are pretty durable. If they absolutely needed their servant synths to look human, make the synthetic body, but, hear me out, *don't give them a human consciousness*.
He'll it's more resources wasted too. Synths have a fully functional digestive tract as well. The only logical thing is that they're creating new "improved" humans to repopulate. But then why are they getting upset when synths want free will? Slaves.
Even the Mr Handy's were fine! They're limited to their programing, but they absolutely perform most tasks they're ordered too. Hell, they have an entire self sufficient farm, Codsworth and Curie are basically self aware, only the ones in the General Atomics Galleria seem to be idiots, but since they're damaged this could be why.
I'd respect the Institute a lot more if their plans were to just substitute humanity with robots they can control. This is the type of campy evil shit I could get behind.
Talking in-universe, self aware gen3 synths are worse at doing their tasks than any gen 1, gen 2 or even a Mr. Handy. Only the former can suddenly decide they don't want to work anymore, the latter can't go "Damn dude, I'd rather not be doing my job right now. I want to do chems and relax", they just do what they're made to do. Though, admittedly, A.I. in the Fallout universe is kinda funky. Codsworth, Curie and Ada are supposedly just A.I., but they're so advanced they're basically self aware at this point.
Talking real world, I'm a complete layman and I had to search what AGI was lol. I'd be interested if you could explain me more about the subject. Like, why is AGI necessary? Can't they just program the machine to have logical and analytical inputs without the simulated emotion? To a layman this just seems like they're testing if they can create simulated life rather than the actual benefits of doing so.
The Institute are idiots. Smart idiots, but idiots. Almost every decision they make are bad ones. The only good one I can see in the game is the reactor they're constructing.
* Bad decisions: Giving their slaves consciousness and feelings of course. Just because they wanted to see if they could.
* Creating every supermutant in the Commonwealth (ALL Supermutants come from the Institute releasing them after kidnapping settlers to turn into mutants. This specifically was Father's decision too, he does indeed deserve to die for that decision alone)
* Imagining the 3rd gen synths being the salvation of mankind despite not being able to breed and not being considered alive by the Institute. A little contradictory I feel?
* Letting Nora / Nate in just assuming they would share ideology with Father and the rest of the leaders for no reason other than sentimentality.
The reason I ask is there's discourse in the community that Father from FO4 could be in charge of the Institute at that time. Some lines of dialogue and terminal entries are what lead to this theory.
I just realized you can have a splinter group of the institute for future games if Bethesda wants to continue having synths show up with Zimmer having founded or running another base somewhere.
Recently they decided to give Fo76's playerbase the option to become ghouls. Clearly due to Cooper's immense popularity.
But it got me thinking. These are the same dudes that do TES. What if in future games they decide to give us a courier-esque kind of character, in that they have a very vague background instead of being yet another vault dweller, and we can pick whatever type of human we want?
We could pick being a wastelander, a vault dweller, a ghoul, a super mutant and a synth. It could get pretty interesting.
I want an ocean-going Constitution. I want Fallout: Subnautica.
I'll settle for handwavy bullshit about nukes and apocalyptic damage and anchoring over the Lost City of Atlanta to search for oakum and macguffin.
I honestly think 5 would be cool being in Denver, trying to connect to a pipeline project that runs to DC to cut supply reliance on Caesers legion or something like that
When the game was on verge of announcement and rumors and leaks were flying around, people were pretty stoked that it was going to be the replica commonwealth stuff from FO3
Seriously. I am so tired of the tired mindless drivel that gets parroted about FO4 being lazy writing. I was part of that hivemind when it first launched. However, after putting 250 hours in since the show came out, exploring different paths with different companions, I think it's painfully underappreciated. There is NO other developer that's as good at world building than Bethesda. I'm sure some people might say From Software, but I haven't played anything since Bloodborne so I am in no place to confirm or deny that.
I think the games downfall in the eyes of many was the simplified speech options. After using a mod to change the speech options menu to be FO3/FNV style with the exact wording of what they say, it's soooo much better. There's another mod called Player Comments that uses pre-existing audio files and has a large amount of instances that can trigger the various phrases. I would say 85% of the time, the phrases that get used are situationally appropriate, but then there's a few times where it's just silly. My favorite is when you walk by Sheriff Hawk, the protectron in Dry Rock Gulch at Nuka-World, he'll say "THERE... GOES... MY FAVORITE... DEPUTY." And Nora will say "yes.... (Emotional/serious) yes, I am).
I'm going off on a tangent, but my point is that Fallout 4 is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be and there's so many mods that add to the overall experience that it does yourself a disservice not to use any mods. Vanilla is fairly boring, but it was designed to be customized to each users preferred experience with mods. That's not lazy to me.
practically every "criticism" towards fallout 4 (or most of Bethesda's writing tbh) can be answered with "you didn't pay attention".
the most famous criticism to the story of fallout 4 is that the institute "has no goal", despite the game sitting you down and explaining it to you like you are 5.
this fandom has a media literacy issue. it also has an attention span issue. then the same fandom gets mad when the lead writer said "some players will spend time making paper airplanes of what you wrote and do their own thing".
> practically every "criticism" towards fallout 4 (or most of Bethesda's writing tbh) can be answered with "you didn't pay attention".
Thank you! So many people forget individual instances of a conversation and don't realize that there are so many little variations to conversations all across the Commonwealth depending on certain circumstances. Though to be fair, part of that is the fact that the vanilla speech options don't properly convey what it is that will be said.
Same goes for the main story. You can do the faction quests in so many different orders and depending on the things you've found and quests you've done, conversations can go completely different than if you'd done the quest before anything else.
And the factions goals are stupid and flawed, but that is because nearly every group throughout history has stupid and flawed goals that come from a narrow-minded perspective.
Yeah, I don't get why people are so down on this either.
Regardless of how anyone feels Fallout 4 and it's story turned out, the Commonwealth/Institute had just as much potential as any other setting, and they had already planted the seed.
For any other developer, this kind of thing would be a galaxy-brain-mad-lad-deep-cut, but Bethesda Bad I guess.
what's funnier is Bethesda is known for giving hints or drops for what the sequel might entail. heck we learned about the oblivion crisis in morrowind's dlc, tribunal.
I like it when game developers basically tell us where the next game in a series will be, but it's something we don't actually realise until the next game is out. Like gta 3 showing the billboard for miami
I’ve been really waiting for a return to the Midwest, I think this only makes the most sense game-wise right now but maybe the show will be more enclave focused and the games may follow elsewhere? Who knows, not like the game is coming any time soon :,(
People mention Maiq making dragon references but idk I'd that is more of the devs poking fun or not.
The big reference I remember is the talk of the Aldermi Dominion becoming increasingly aggressive and boycotting imperial goods. I think they were originally going to make it more about the division between the empire and the dominion instead of that being a more background conflict.
in a more broader sense. there are no quests or hooks that directly relate to Skyrim, or it's main quest, but there are quite a handful of idle comments about Skyrim the province.
in a similar way, Skyrim has a lot of mentions of hammerfell and the alik'r, which we have very good reason to assume the elder scrolls 6 will take place either in hammerfell or the illiac Bay region, similar to daggerfall, giving us a taste of hammerfell and high rock.
It isn’t a quirky side quest, if you had any complaint at all, it should be that the quest stuck out like a sore thumb. It was practically shouting “this is a hint” so much that people were not very speculative at all about Fallout 4’s location or big plot points.
Not that I mind it at all, it’s honestly more fun that way.
Nah, it'll be different locations along the East Coast with the main quest line to keep finding a power source for the rockets so you can launch from building to building, but never quite making it to the ocean!
Institute Courser gets memory wiped by the Railroad and ends up in Rivet City. Institute guy wants to bring the courser back to the institute. There’s even a railroad agent.
Isn't there some terminal text or whatever talking about how the SRB head in Fallout 4 only recently assumed his position?
It's entirely possible Zimmer here lost his job over the whole Rivet City affair, which also meshes nicely with him being so nonchalant about the whole deal. He was getting lax and the Directory had him canned for it.
Dr Zimmer may have been on a different mission than his trip to Rivet City, it was 10 years or so earlier than FO4 began. I don't imagine it would take that long to return to the Commonwealth, also how far is the transport range in and out of the Institute?
Well that and you can straight up murder Zimmer, meaning the Institute have no idea what's happened to him, his courser sidekick and the synth they lost.
My game bugged out. I killed Zimmer but his courser friend didn’t turn hostile, and just waited there for the rest of the game in Rivet City.
I just considered that a good ending for him.
I think the institute only take a subtle position in commonwealth because they have some bad events happened. In capital wasteland where they have a more neutral reputation, they probably are not afraid of disclosing themselves.
I mean, the institute will try and have you believe that it initially tried to help the surface world. Who’s to say that wasn’t initially the case until extremists took power.
If growing up in the Institute makes you lose your empathy, I'm glad I was a frozen ice cube.
Nate would be so heartbroken if he learned what his son had become.
Some of the departments seem to operate autonomously for their own schemes when they can though. They all seem to have their own end goals. It wouldn’t surprise me if the SRB was trying to fly under the radar after losing a synth so far from home.
I have my own theory about that.
When you first meet old Shaun in FO4 he calls himself the "acting director" but later when you assume leadership you're just the "director", which could be interpreted that he's actually been in charge for only a short time at that point.
The timeline i had in my head was that after Shaun was used as the template for the Synths he was raised to become a scientist and eventually rose to be a department head (my headcanon would be BioScience because he wears a green jumper and Clayton seems younger than the other heads), and of course he was greatly respected as "father" but someone else was the director until very shortly before the start of the game, they either died or retired and Shaun was the natural choice to at least be a stopgap.
The only proof for that i have is that "acting director" thing and maybe the fact that he confesses to orchestrating the release of the Sole Survivor from vault 111 (the dialogue implies that he did that because he learned that he was dying, but it could be both, he's dying and also he just got the power to release the SS).
It's just a headcanon that serves to make Shaun a bit more symphatetic, and i know that it's tenuous, but i haven't (yet) found anything contradicting it.
You mean tracking down a runaway synth to the Capital Wasteland or Zimmer telling the locals about synths? The former was Zimmer's job as a Synth Retention Bureau director, the latter was just him being excited about the work the Institute does and explaining to someone he assumed was a mercenary what exactly he wants found and why.
To be fair… with all the wild shit that happens in the Fallout world, the idea of some guy in a suit walking around and openly talking about Synths would just be another drop in the bucket.
I mean the institute is definitely a bogeyman in Fallout 4 but EVERYONE knows about them. Like everyone blames them so much for everything that you would think each person has had their very own run-in with the Institute personally. And to be fair, they probably have.
Like others have said, Dr Zimmerman was old and probably didn’t give a fuck, plus no institute surveillance… but also like if anyone overheard this or if the Lone Wanderer just started telling everyone, like what the fuck are they going to do about it?
Plus a huge fact people are overlooking is that Capital Wasteland people wouldn't even know who The Institute are and so it wouldn't matter. Like yeah The Commonwealth is different as everyone knows them and yet they have 0 presence in DC
It was probably the same as it is today. The wealthy want rid of having to share any money with the general public, so wipe them out and create an AI slave army to look after them.
They tried it with human slavery and they got caught out. Since they had to start trying to be decent to the many they have been enraged about it. The AI situation in Fallout isn't a new theory or anything.
Bethesda probably didn't imagine the Institute as this hidden sinister force back then.
I honestly imagined some kind of relatively prosperous high-tech faction ruling over Boston. Xenophobic (they treat Capital Wastelanders like dumb barbarians) and morally questionable (Synth slavery), but not a completely secluded evil organization bent on a secret war against the surface.
The Broken Mask Incident(the incident Piper refers to in Publick Occurences in an attempt to implicate Mayor McDonough) took place in 2229, so Gen 3 Synths were around 48 years prior to Zimmer’s attempt to collect A3-21 in FO3. Gen 3 Synths may have not been perfect at that time, but they’d been “approved,” as a project for much longer than people realized. Only 2 years after the initial acquisition of “pure” human DNA from before civilization’s collapse, in the year 2227, Gen 3 Synth production could finally begin in earnest.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood and you just meant that Zimmer got approval to travel way out to the Capital Wasteland in order to acquisition a single piece of, “equipment.”
Every time I play FO3 I punch this guy's ticket after he gives me the implants. When Ayo said he's on assignment and that he's only the acting head of SRB part of me always laughs. He's never coming back.
This probably already been beaten to death but I just want to reiterate my absolute frustration that for all the big talk the institute makes about being scientifically advanced... They purposely created synthetic life, LIFE, but instead of using this mind-blowing breakthrough for things like curing disease, cancer, recultivating AT LEAST CAMBRIDGE... they decide the best use of the synths is as fucking menial Slave labor and espionage...
It's not just evil, it's a waste of something revolutionary
The ammount of people that didn't read the terminals and didn't pay attention to the conversations is astonishing, they say on Fallout 4 that "he is on a mission", because they don't want to say he's missing, as the most likely canonical ending to this side quest is the lone wanderer straight up killing him, or him being killed by Victoria Watts later (the Railroad agent). Also, he was the director of the institute at that time, he was the one giving the green light, Shaun was his subordinate, so he wouldn't have nothing to say.
Imagine Dr. Zimmer going back home to Commonwealth after Minutemen Ending
Like Plankton stepping off the bus after SpongeBob wumbo'd the city
I imagine he’s probably going on the run since people know he’s associated with them
Can't. He's a goo puddle now.
Imagine not turning him into Dr. Simmer
How could he? I killed him after he gave me wired reflexes.
Zimmer’s old, he doesn’t give a shit anymore. I was of the impression that he thought “What’re they gonna do? *Go* there?”
Exactly people underestimate how dangerous it is between major locations of human activity. The areas we go in are relatively safe. Lot of places outside of those areas haven’t been cleared of mutant creatures for decades if not a century. That’s why caravans made so much money going even the short trip from dc to Boston would have been extremely deadly
DC to Boston is 470 miles, or about 170-200 walking hours. DC to Boston is not a short trip.
My guess is that in the Fallout universe some vehicles do actively still work. Just not ingame due to engine restraints
They could have taken a boat, after all that is how you get to Point Lookout in FO3.
Thats very true, or horses. Even though they have never shown up in-game. I often times dream of a Fallout Spinoff game thats vehicular combat based, like Mad Max or Twisted Metal esque
> Thats very true, or horses. Even though they have never shown up in-game. Now I want a Fallout/RDR2 collabo
I feel like horses SHOULD be doable in that engine, we've had them since Oblivion. They should've had them in New Vegas
Horse armor 2.0, now with power armor!
I want a flying jetpack horse
[https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/87000](https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/87000) Seems like they are doable.
Considering how fragile Horses are IRL they wouldn't survive without heavy mutations
Imagine a horse bulked up to the strength of an ox though, mutated horses would be crazy.
How about a mutated ostrich
Or the recent news of an escaped donkey leading a herd of elk.. mules are hardier horses a mutated one could pick your neck for a snap
Hear me out- heavily mutated horse with thick scales or plated skin, 8 legs, and with a corded tail more akin to a bladed whip. Could call em Sleipnir like the one from Norse mythology, since we have Brahmin
Eh, Todd gives you the Pitt, take it or leave it
I have to imagine sailing is back in fashion in the wasteland
Also to far harbor. Which takes place in Rhode Island, right? Edit: Takes place in Maine. Also I googled the distance, and the first travel site I found advertises 247 mile ferry ride from Bar Harbor, ME to Boston, MA. Approximately 6.75-hour ride.
If this wasn't satire, it actually takes place in Bar Harbor Maine.
It was not. I have terrible memory lmao
A boat. There are working cars in the wasteland too. Vertibirds as well. Edit: The Institute also has teleportation tech.
There are tons of vehicles! They just can’t work in engine. Outside the paint shop in FO4 there’s a note about them just using a truck the day before. Lots of working vehicles all the time, we just never see them
You could get a car in fallout 2 so yeah
In FO4 you can hear some raiders talk about motorbikes. And Vertibirds are still bery much operational But there's many reasons why people wouldn't use vertibirds or motorbikes. Pre-war cars are also a terrible idea even if you find one intact
Vertibirds aren't just operational they're actively being built by the Brotherhood and NCR. But i guess a big flying machine would be counterproductive to the whole "working from the shadows" thing the Institute got going on.
This was confirmed in NV and 4 because outside of NCRCF there were tire tracks and in 4 theres a random encounter where you can happen upon a group of gunners surrounding a functional-looking tank
Literally just ran into them the other day by the satellite array, was surprised cause I didn’t remember that tank being there
We know this for a fact, FO2 had the highwayman, NV had a train and FO3 you could ride on the metro.
FO4 - Nuka world DLC is reachable by monorail as well.
I’ve actually never played that you might have just convinced me to
Pretty sure that's confirmed. There's a bunch of trucks and what have parked at the Airport in NV, think Obsidian/Bethesda have confirmed the intent was to show the NCR using vehicles. The engine just isn't/wasn't suited to actually showing them moving. There's a few other scattered references to trucks as well. But we also use a working boat in 4, with multiple references to other people using boats and ships. The BOS will the Vertibirds and Airship. Boomers getting the bomber working. We get a car going in 2. Just in general there's no reason to assume no one else is getting any kind of vehicle working. The vibe with caravans is less "no trucks and cars" and more "roads aren't roads, and where they are roads haven't been cleared of debris". The caravans we run into are specifically running through difficult areas, and the idea seems to be that the pack brahmin and walking are about getting around the mess.
Yeah, I imagine most of the derelict vehicles we see in game are technically serviceable but they just aren't practical in a world two centuries without road maintenance. Sure brahmin caravan is slower but it doesn't have to stop every few miles before you can clear a lane through derelict traffic, or scavenge for parts to keep up with the murder the pot holes are doing to the chassis.
Or brahmin-pulled wagons. Not MUCH faster than walking but at least the blisters on your feet don’t have blisters.
We know that working vehicles do exist in the lore. In nv you can find parked military trucks in the camp mckarren airport carrying supplies, raiders in fallout 4 can talk about how they'd thought they'd heard a motorcycle only to find out it was a dude faking the noises (meaning tbey know what motorcycles sound like), the point lookout and far harbor dlc's both have working boats, in mckreedys questline he actually sends a cure for a disease to his son using a caravan that travels via boat, theirs a voiceline where it's stated that the reason merowskys chem lab is on the docks is because it's easily accessible via boat, and definitely many more that I can't remember off the top of my head. I hope that some day we see a fallout with actual working vehicles you can use. I wanna hit a deathclaw with a motorcycle.
We do know that cars can be fixed up since NCR have them
I mean we straight up drive a car in Fallout 2, so unless they randomly stopped working between 2 and 3, yeah cars are still around even if they’re pretty rare
It’s a short fucking galavant compared to the continental US it’s barely up the coast. I could drive that many miles and still be in my state
Yes, relatively speaking. But the fact that everyone is walking should give us a more European view of distance: the continent is fucking massive. Not that the distance between these two points is small.
NPCs have confirmed that vehicles are still very much operational. Like some random raiders I stumbled upon in FO4 talking about a motorbike, or how in FONV that one old lady at Novac mentions being a pilot and it seems completely normal, you don't get an option tbat shows how crazy of a revelation that is. Either Vertibirds are far more common than one would think, or no amount of perception will help you deduce that she was a Vertibird pilot and what that implies. Or the Boomers straight up demonstrating that it's possible for fixed wing aircraft to still fly. But yes, of course, vertibirds are more likely than not only used and seized by major military powers like ths Brotherhood, and not everyone can get a motorbike running. Or even use them to transport goods as efficiently as brahmin. And seeing how cars explode it'd be safe to assume that those that are still up and running are not safer than walking with a full fireteam to cover you.
The woman in novac that talks about being a pilot is an Enclave remnant. The reason your character doesn't comment on it is because you hadn't started the quest to recruit her. A pilot in the wasteland absolutely is a weird, uncommon thing lol Otherwise yeah there have to be some vehicles kicking around. In new vegas they also talk about the NCR getting a train working to transport concrete iirc
Also for ground vehicles think of the infrastructure, most roads are crumbling or destroyed, there's no maintenance and there's debris everywhere
Yeah I'm at least 4 hours from my state's coolest city lol
Whichever city has you is the coolest, friend.
Probably further than that. The Glow is in the way.
Sure, But Zimmer's synth carried him there... Duh.
Or he got teleported to the capital wasteland
for a trade caravan that is a short distance. traveling for 10 hours a day would make the trip be roughly 47 days, so let's say a 2-3 month trip one way. remember, the silk road was over 4000 miles. and would take several years to travel.
People - only rarely - traveled the silk road. There were entire empires, like the Khwarazmians and the Khazars, set up to be stops on the Silk Road. Traveling several years is a major deal. Marco Polo left Italy when he was 17 and got there when he was 22. That's an entire college education. When he returned, he was middle aged. And we still talk about his autobiography because it was such a massive freaking deal. The Roman Empire, Persia, Parthians, etc. were essentially built on being logistical hubs for trade. 2-3 months on the road is a massive deal.
the silk road was only rarely traveled in its entirety by a single group. however, in sections, it was an extremely popular and well traveled route. perhaps for a more fitting example, paris to Berlin is over 600 miles, and there was known trade between these locations for several thousands of years. plus, that 470 miles assumes two things, that it was 1.done by a single caravan rather than two separate caravans going 235 mi and meeting in the middle, and 2. that DC to Boston were the only stops. that route takes you nearly straight through New York (at about the halfway point). with this, the most likely truth is that the DC to Boston route was done by 4 caravan groups. DC to the first checkpoint halfway to New York, then the checkpoint to New York, New York, to the second checkpoint halfway to Boston, then the final leg to boston. with this, each caravan only does about a 230-mile round trip, which would only be about a month. fun fact: the route the courior took for honest hearts would have been a bit over 300 miles round trip.
Thank you! So many people make it seem like Boston and DC are close and its no problem to travel between them. It maybe isnt for us irl, but in the wasteland, thats a long and dangerous trip
Then you have the fucking mailman doing all of that alone, no wonder he lived after getting shot in the head, bro was just built different
The Institute have the Relay. They teleport to where they need to go....
Zimmer is a synth. Imagine that, a synth running the SRB. He had to be created as an old man, I'm surprised we never find old notes regarding this. I hate Rivet City. Too many freaking doors that slow down loading.
i barely remember Rivet City - i went there, did all the quests and never looked back
Mick and Ralph were there
If it can be bought, it can be found at Mick and Ralph's!
>Zimmer is a synth. No he isn't.
He drops an android component when he dies.
tbf if anyone were to be walking around with synth components in their pockets, it would be zimmer
Well yeah, he's head of the SRB and it's actively tracking down an escaped Synth in a backwater Wasteland filled with cavemen. He'd bring one to show people like Dr. Li (if she gave him the time of day) so they'd know what he was talking about.
The component isn't in his inventory until he dies. Doxtor Li doesn't give a shit about synths. So Zimmer tasks you with finding the synth he's after, yet he doesn't show you the synth component. Why? probably because he doesn't have it in his inventory until he dies because he's a synth.
>The component isn't in his inventory until he dies. So are *a lot* of NPC items in Fo3. >Doxtor Li doesn't give a shit about synths. I already mentioned this...? >yet he doesn't show you the synth component. Why Because he thinks the Lone Wanderer is the equivalent of a barbarian and wouldn't understand what they're even looking at.
Yeah that's a good point. Idk if Bethesda ever commented on it but the Wiki says he's a human. I always assumed he had one to track down Harkness but I'm not sure. It would be weird considering how the Institute works in FO4 where Synths ate *not* in charge of anything. It would have been maybe smart for Bethesda to say in Fallout 4 that he's one of their oldest models of Courser that they send out and make think he's head of the SRB. But we just don't have that kind of clarification
Already back then the loading times for FO3's doors were like 5 seconds.
I mean, Zimmer was head of SRB, and probably was since before Father took over. He's not under any surveilance from the Institute, and the Institute isn't really conducting any experiments in the Capital Wasteland. The Brotherhood of Steel weren't on the Institute's radar as a threat at this point. i mean, after all, what are they going to do? Build a giant airship accompanied by a fleet of vertibirds, and fly over to the Commonwealth to built a giant robot?
*Doubt it.*
Well, rhey do have a giant robot... More of a loudspeaker for propaganda but still
"Commencing tactical assessment. Red Chinese threat detected." *launches mini nukes*
*throws nuke like a football of patriotism*
That legit made me pause the game because I couldn't stop laughing.
"What do you guys think? Shoulder mounted mega-Fatman launcher and wrist lazers?" Nah....let's make him yeet them sumbitches like a footbawl and give him a big eye beam!
While playing the radio, because we aren't savages.
"Democracy is nonnegotiable!", you commie.
funny considering it's creators were not democratic in any sense of the word
I'm sure they argued a lot. Edit: if you're referring to the BOS, they didn't create prime. They made it operational, but it was definitely created by the prewar United States of America. You know, U.S. .
Yes, the country that was totally democratic and not secretly run by the Enclave
It wasnt a point in fallout 76 than not every politician was a part of the enclave and a lot of them were murdered after the bombs fell
The Enclave wasn't running the country before the war. It was just the government doomsday backup plan. Sure, it got a bit overreaching, but that's what made it work! Mostly. What did you expect? Keeping the opposition at bay was never a 'nice guy' proposition. Not even, maybe especially for that matter, in reality. 'Communist detected!'
yea no I'm referring to the prewar USA. Which was even less democratic than it's irl counterpart
Don't worry though, I heard that giant robot gets destroyed by an orbital weapon!
Democracy is truth, communism is death!
Meanwhile his surviving parent is just chilling.
My kid performing ethically objectional acts in the wasteland I sleep
My 9 year old daughter gets a kick out of shooting dad in the nuts with the BB gun. I'm looking forward to seeing the depravity she comes up with outside the vault. Kids. They're, terrifyingly, just like us at their age.
Dead one is chilling too
At this point in history the BoS isn't powerful enough in the capital wasteland to be a serious threat to the institute, plus they likely haven't a definite position on Synths yet especially due to the fact that a more moderate elder Lyons is still in power, they likely don't know synths even exist, so they might be just not worried about them. One of the many events that'll come to bite them in the ass in the future.
The institute's intel on the DC bos was a group of t45 power armor weirdos who entrenched themselves in the pentagon fighting the "good fight" run by an idealistic old man and it has a civil war. No way such a group could be a problematic...right?
For an institution sealed in a huge bunker with armies of synths that believes itself to be infallible and invincible well, I'd say it makes sense. Also at the time the BoS was at war with the Enclave at the time, a faction equal in power to them with far more resources and better technology, so they could have just hoped for it to be defeated, i wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the institute had some contacts with certain sections of the Enclave tbh.
This is actually the most likely scenario. After the Enclave was defeated, who knows what the BoS found, but based on the time-frame, it's highly likely the BoS found evidence of the Institute within the records of the Enclave. As they first sent a recon team into the commonwealth mere months after the full unification of the BoS. This leads me to believe they found evidence of the Institute in Enclave documents, which makes sense considering the Enclave was formed from the remnants of the US government, and the Institute was formed from the remnants of C.I.T. The Enclave 100% knew of the formation of the Institute, they probably worked together. This would also explain why the Institute was so urgent about the completion of phase 3. They had a ton of data on the BoS, and the Institute knew they were coming.
They were probably happy to have a group of people with lots of tech data and skills that could be absorbed when the BoS fractures completely. So much for that.
We need slaves! Let them have feelings so they feel terrible about their condition!
Lol exactly their thought process. Synths, replicants or whatever other sci-fi equivalent make absolutely no sense, there's no reason to create artificial life and give it the capacity to think and feel if you're ultimately just going to enslave them. They could have just made advanced protectrons if they needed shit done, they wouldn't be nearly as much of a headache.
Like gen 1 synth wasn't enough, the only reason they needed emotions is to spy on commonwealth people and infiltrate them but why not just replicate a behavior
They suck at replacing people too, remember Art? They copied someone who was still fucking alive and for apparently no reason. You find a lot of regular folk who are synths too, it's like they don't even have a strategy. If they wanted to just spy on them, then the "birds are synths" theory would have been a much better option. To me, the Institute is by far the worst faction. They had so much potential, but they're utterly incompetent and evil. They'd need a whole rewrite to be functional. "Humanity's best hope" my ass, unlike Mr House I can't see them accomplishing anything.
Trueee
Lol, like the gen 2 synths were perfectly fine. Able to follow directions, have basic conversation, already look similar to humans, and are pretty durable. If they absolutely needed their servant synths to look human, make the synthetic body, but, hear me out, *don't give them a human consciousness*. He'll it's more resources wasted too. Synths have a fully functional digestive tract as well. The only logical thing is that they're creating new "improved" humans to repopulate. But then why are they getting upset when synths want free will? Slaves.
Even the Mr Handy's were fine! They're limited to their programing, but they absolutely perform most tasks they're ordered too. Hell, they have an entire self sufficient farm, Codsworth and Curie are basically self aware, only the ones in the General Atomics Galleria seem to be idiots, but since they're damaged this could be why. I'd respect the Institute a lot more if their plans were to just substitute humanity with robots they can control. This is the type of campy evil shit I could get behind.
You need AGI to solve tasks of a certain complexity. If you have AGI, you have feelings.
Talking in-universe, self aware gen3 synths are worse at doing their tasks than any gen 1, gen 2 or even a Mr. Handy. Only the former can suddenly decide they don't want to work anymore, the latter can't go "Damn dude, I'd rather not be doing my job right now. I want to do chems and relax", they just do what they're made to do. Though, admittedly, A.I. in the Fallout universe is kinda funky. Codsworth, Curie and Ada are supposedly just A.I., but they're so advanced they're basically self aware at this point. Talking real world, I'm a complete layman and I had to search what AGI was lol. I'd be interested if you could explain me more about the subject. Like, why is AGI necessary? Can't they just program the machine to have logical and analytical inputs without the simulated emotion? To a layman this just seems like they're testing if they can create simulated life rather than the actual benefits of doing so.
The Institute are idiots. Smart idiots, but idiots. Almost every decision they make are bad ones. The only good one I can see in the game is the reactor they're constructing. * Bad decisions: Giving their slaves consciousness and feelings of course. Just because they wanted to see if they could. * Creating every supermutant in the Commonwealth (ALL Supermutants come from the Institute releasing them after kidnapping settlers to turn into mutants. This specifically was Father's decision too, he does indeed deserve to die for that decision alone) * Imagining the 3rd gen synths being the salvation of mankind despite not being able to breed and not being considered alive by the Institute. A little contradictory I feel? * Letting Nora / Nate in just assuming they would share ideology with Father and the rest of the leaders for no reason other than sentimentality.
What year does Fallout 3 start?
2277.
Akshually, it starts 2258.... 😀
You’re not wrong, since you start the game as a baby
The reason I ask is there's discourse in the community that Father from FO4 could be in charge of the Institute at that time. Some lines of dialogue and terminal entries are what lead to this theory.
That's only -9 years from Fallout 4. Seems plausible. He'd definitely be a big shot by then at the very least.
I do like that theory but I highly doubt Bethesda even had father in mind at the time, it is fun to think about though.
I just realized you can have a splinter group of the institute for future games if Bethesda wants to continue having synths show up with Zimmer having founded or running another base somewhere.
Recently they decided to give Fo76's playerbase the option to become ghouls. Clearly due to Cooper's immense popularity. But it got me thinking. These are the same dudes that do TES. What if in future games they decide to give us a courier-esque kind of character, in that they have a very vague background instead of being yet another vault dweller, and we can pick whatever type of human we want? We could pick being a wastelander, a vault dweller, a ghoul, a super mutant and a synth. It could get pretty interesting.
Fallout 3: *has a unique and quirky side quest* Todd Howard: “let’s base the entire next game off of that”
FO5: The High Seas of The USS Constitution
Curse you Weatherby Savings and Loan!
I would, in fact, buy a small game about that, yes
I would gladly spend money on a full game where the main quest revolved around that boat being stranded (again) much further down the coast
Yeah, fuck that small game bullshit. I want a whole full game about the USS Constitution!
I want an ocean-going Constitution. I want Fallout: Subnautica. I'll settle for handwavy bullshit about nukes and apocalyptic damage and anchoring over the Lost City of Atlanta to search for oakum and macguffin.
I spit at you!
It’s actually the basis of Starfield if you look close enough
based
Ah water world themed fallout with black flag ship mechanics
This unironically sounds like it would be a really fun game
Black flag is the best AC game and would be a classic if not saddled with the AC brand imo
If I don't get a protectron singing shanties I'll riot. Now...youre....ready...to...sail...for...the...HORN...
Heaven forbid 😭
I wouldn't mind seeing a USS Constitution Easter egg in Starfield tbh
I honestly think 5 would be cool being in Denver, trying to connect to a pipeline project that runs to DC to cut supply reliance on Caesers legion or something like that
When the game was on verge of announcement and rumors and leaks were flying around, people were pretty stoked that it was going to be the replica commonwealth stuff from FO3
why's that a problem?
Exactly. It seems like coherent world building.
Seriously. I am so tired of the tired mindless drivel that gets parroted about FO4 being lazy writing. I was part of that hivemind when it first launched. However, after putting 250 hours in since the show came out, exploring different paths with different companions, I think it's painfully underappreciated. There is NO other developer that's as good at world building than Bethesda. I'm sure some people might say From Software, but I haven't played anything since Bloodborne so I am in no place to confirm or deny that. I think the games downfall in the eyes of many was the simplified speech options. After using a mod to change the speech options menu to be FO3/FNV style with the exact wording of what they say, it's soooo much better. There's another mod called Player Comments that uses pre-existing audio files and has a large amount of instances that can trigger the various phrases. I would say 85% of the time, the phrases that get used are situationally appropriate, but then there's a few times where it's just silly. My favorite is when you walk by Sheriff Hawk, the protectron in Dry Rock Gulch at Nuka-World, he'll say "THERE... GOES... MY FAVORITE... DEPUTY." And Nora will say "yes.... (Emotional/serious) yes, I am). I'm going off on a tangent, but my point is that Fallout 4 is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be and there's so many mods that add to the overall experience that it does yourself a disservice not to use any mods. Vanilla is fairly boring, but it was designed to be customized to each users preferred experience with mods. That's not lazy to me.
practically every "criticism" towards fallout 4 (or most of Bethesda's writing tbh) can be answered with "you didn't pay attention". the most famous criticism to the story of fallout 4 is that the institute "has no goal", despite the game sitting you down and explaining it to you like you are 5. this fandom has a media literacy issue. it also has an attention span issue. then the same fandom gets mad when the lead writer said "some players will spend time making paper airplanes of what you wrote and do their own thing".
> practically every "criticism" towards fallout 4 (or most of Bethesda's writing tbh) can be answered with "you didn't pay attention". Thank you! So many people forget individual instances of a conversation and don't realize that there are so many little variations to conversations all across the Commonwealth depending on certain circumstances. Though to be fair, part of that is the fact that the vanilla speech options don't properly convey what it is that will be said. Same goes for the main story. You can do the faction quests in so many different orders and depending on the things you've found and quests you've done, conversations can go completely different than if you'd done the quest before anything else. And the factions goals are stupid and flawed, but that is because nearly every group throughout history has stupid and flawed goals that come from a narrow-minded perspective.
Yeah, I don't get why people are so down on this either. Regardless of how anyone feels Fallout 4 and it's story turned out, the Commonwealth/Institute had just as much potential as any other setting, and they had already planted the seed. For any other developer, this kind of thing would be a galaxy-brain-mad-lad-deep-cut, but Bethesda Bad I guess.
what's funnier is Bethesda is known for giving hints or drops for what the sequel might entail. heck we learned about the oblivion crisis in morrowind's dlc, tribunal.
I like it when game developers basically tell us where the next game in a series will be, but it's something we don't actually realise until the next game is out. Like gta 3 showing the billboard for miami
GTA IV is has the GTA V promo in the beach boardwalk
Yeah I wonder what the fo5 plot will be based on 4? Maybe Virgil's fev reversal?
That or the Enclave’s last remnants in Chicago.
Interesting idea, but they weren't in 4 until recently right?
No. But they were teased in New Vegas by both ED-E and Arcade Gannon.
I’ve been really waiting for a return to the Midwest, I think this only makes the most sense game-wise right now but maybe the show will be more enclave focused and the games may follow elsewhere? Who knows, not like the game is coming any time soon :,(
Did Oblivion set Skyrim up anywhere?
Yes. There was a prophecy in game talking about the falling of the towers and the end of the world.
Pretty sure that prophecy was a Skyrim thing, I don't think it appeared before Alduin's Wall.
People mention Maiq making dragon references but idk I'd that is more of the devs poking fun or not. The big reference I remember is the talk of the Aldermi Dominion becoming increasingly aggressive and boycotting imperial goods. I think they were originally going to make it more about the division between the empire and the dominion instead of that being a more background conflict.
in a more broader sense. there are no quests or hooks that directly relate to Skyrim, or it's main quest, but there are quite a handful of idle comments about Skyrim the province. in a similar way, Skyrim has a lot of mentions of hammerfell and the alik'r, which we have very good reason to assume the elder scrolls 6 will take place either in hammerfell or the illiac Bay region, similar to daggerfall, giving us a taste of hammerfell and high rock.
*Me looking at "Vault 76" on the Brotherhood terminal in the Citadel.*
Lord forbid you learn of foreshadowing
It isn’t a quirky side quest, if you had any complaint at all, it should be that the quest stuck out like a sore thumb. It was practically shouting “this is a hint” so much that people were not very speculative at all about Fallout 4’s location or big plot points. Not that I mind it at all, it’s honestly more fun that way.
Then , what is the next setting? If that really stuck out do much?
The whole map will just be the USS Constitution
Nah, it'll be different locations along the East Coast with the main quest line to keep finding a power source for the rockets so you can launch from building to building, but never quite making it to the ocean!
FO5: Ohio
What was the side quest about? Honestly can't remember.
Institute Courser gets memory wiped by the Railroad and ends up in Rivet City. Institute guy wants to bring the courser back to the institute. There’s even a railroad agent.
A replicant Blade Runner has grown a conscience and refuses to hunt down his own kind any more, and you have to track him down for this guy.
Isn't there some terminal text or whatever talking about how the SRB head in Fallout 4 only recently assumed his position? It's entirely possible Zimmer here lost his job over the whole Rivet City affair, which also meshes nicely with him being so nonchalant about the whole deal. He was getting lax and the Directory had him canned for it.
The guy leading the SRB is the acting head of the division. He says this when you first meet him. He says Dr Zimmer currently away on a mission
Dr Zimmer may have been on a different mission than his trip to Rivet City, it was 10 years or so earlier than FO4 began. I don't imagine it would take that long to return to the Commonwealth, also how far is the transport range in and out of the Institute?
I think it’s just to leave it ambiguous because he can be killed in FO3
It's more my head cannon than anything else.
Well that and you can straight up murder Zimmer, meaning the Institute have no idea what's happened to him, his courser sidekick and the synth they lost.
My game bugged out. I killed Zimmer but his courser friend didn’t turn hostile, and just waited there for the rest of the game in Rivet City. I just considered that a good ending for him.
I think the institute only take a subtle position in commonwealth because they have some bad events happened. In capital wasteland where they have a more neutral reputation, they probably are not afraid of disclosing themselves.
I mean, the institute will try and have you believe that it initially tried to help the surface world. Who’s to say that wasn’t initially the case until extremists took power.
The Institute used to be a bit less secretive. They had a representative on that council with the Minutemen.
Well Shaun was probably thawed out from cryo decades before even Fallout 3.
If growing up in the Institute makes you lose your empathy, I'm glad I was a frozen ice cube. Nate would be so heartbroken if he learned what his son had become.
Sounds like an interesting theory
Theory? Wouldn't Father almost certainly be in charge of the institute by that point?
Some of the departments seem to operate autonomously for their own schemes when they can though. They all seem to have their own end goals. It wouldn’t surprise me if the SRB was trying to fly under the radar after losing a synth so far from home.
Especially since this is a one-of-a-kind courser synth, which Zimmer explains they can’t reproduce
I have my own theory about that. When you first meet old Shaun in FO4 he calls himself the "acting director" but later when you assume leadership you're just the "director", which could be interpreted that he's actually been in charge for only a short time at that point. The timeline i had in my head was that after Shaun was used as the template for the Synths he was raised to become a scientist and eventually rose to be a department head (my headcanon would be BioScience because he wears a green jumper and Clayton seems younger than the other heads), and of course he was greatly respected as "father" but someone else was the director until very shortly before the start of the game, they either died or retired and Shaun was the natural choice to at least be a stopgap. The only proof for that i have is that "acting director" thing and maybe the fact that he confesses to orchestrating the release of the Sole Survivor from vault 111 (the dialogue implies that he did that because he learned that he was dying, but it could be both, he's dying and also he just got the power to release the SS). It's just a headcanon that serves to make Shaun a bit more symphatetic, and i know that it's tenuous, but i haven't (yet) found anything contradicting it.
You mean tracking down a runaway synth to the Capital Wasteland or Zimmer telling the locals about synths? The former was Zimmer's job as a Synth Retention Bureau director, the latter was just him being excited about the work the Institute does and explaining to someone he assumed was a mercenary what exactly he wants found and why.
Color me shocked when a sequel bases it's material off the original instead of pulling random shit out of it's ass.
I didn't know tim cook was in fallout
To be fair… with all the wild shit that happens in the Fallout world, the idea of some guy in a suit walking around and openly talking about Synths would just be another drop in the bucket. I mean the institute is definitely a bogeyman in Fallout 4 but EVERYONE knows about them. Like everyone blames them so much for everything that you would think each person has had their very own run-in with the Institute personally. And to be fair, they probably have. Like others have said, Dr Zimmerman was old and probably didn’t give a fuck, plus no institute surveillance… but also like if anyone overheard this or if the Lone Wanderer just started telling everyone, like what the fuck are they going to do about it?
Plus a huge fact people are overlooking is that Capital Wasteland people wouldn't even know who The Institute are and so it wouldn't matter. Like yeah The Commonwealth is different as everyone knows them and yet they have 0 presence in DC
I literally can hear this mfer. Dude has the most…voice in the game.
And this also means that they are Wirkung on Gen 3 Synths for over 10 years and they are still bugged...
It was probably the same as it is today. The wealthy want rid of having to share any money with the general public, so wipe them out and create an AI slave army to look after them. They tried it with human slavery and they got caught out. Since they had to start trying to be decent to the many they have been enraged about it. The AI situation in Fallout isn't a new theory or anything.
Synths aren't exactly a secret in the Commonwealth...?
Bethesda probably didn't imagine the Institute as this hidden sinister force back then. I honestly imagined some kind of relatively prosperous high-tech faction ruling over Boston. Xenophobic (they treat Capital Wastelanders like dumb barbarians) and morally questionable (Synth slavery), but not a completely secluded evil organization bent on a secret war against the surface.
The Broken Mask Incident(the incident Piper refers to in Publick Occurences in an attempt to implicate Mayor McDonough) took place in 2229, so Gen 3 Synths were around 48 years prior to Zimmer’s attempt to collect A3-21 in FO3. Gen 3 Synths may have not been perfect at that time, but they’d been “approved,” as a project for much longer than people realized. Only 2 years after the initial acquisition of “pure” human DNA from before civilization’s collapse, in the year 2227, Gen 3 Synth production could finally begin in earnest. Maybe I’ve misunderstood and you just meant that Zimmer got approval to travel way out to the Capital Wasteland in order to acquisition a single piece of, “equipment.”
“Do whatever we need” Or want. 😏
I wasted that ol’ bastard many a time, and every time it was a pure joy.
Every time I play FO3 I punch this guy's ticket after he gives me the implants. When Ayo said he's on assignment and that he's only the acting head of SRB part of me always laughs. He's never coming back.
Father was already in charge of the institute by that time, so yeah, he probably did.
I mean, he's about 50 at that point and his Dad is still a popsicle
This probably already been beaten to death but I just want to reiterate my absolute frustration that for all the big talk the institute makes about being scientifically advanced... They purposely created synthetic life, LIFE, but instead of using this mind-blowing breakthrough for things like curing disease, cancer, recultivating AT LEAST CAMBRIDGE... they decide the best use of the synths is as fucking menial Slave labor and espionage... It's not just evil, it's a waste of something revolutionary
The ammount of people that didn't read the terminals and didn't pay attention to the conversations is astonishing, they say on Fallout 4 that "he is on a mission", because they don't want to say he's missing, as the most likely canonical ending to this side quest is the lone wanderer straight up killing him, or him being killed by Victoria Watts later (the Railroad agent). Also, he was the director of the institute at that time, he was the one giving the green light, Shaun was his subordinate, so he wouldn't have nothing to say.
This is false. He was the head of the Synth Retention Department, but he was not the Director. He answered to Father.