So… The Institute.

Adventure stories like Fallout really revolve around the villains. They are the ones that drive the action and set the motivation for the hero to continue through their hardships. As such, the Institute is so insanely important that you can’t drop the ball like Bethesda did. For me, this is where Fallout 4 must begin. Which means we need to pop over to the Commonwealth Institute of Technology before the bombs dropped.

CIT would have been, before the war, a massive centre for robots and artificial intelligence engineering. Their developments and staff had to have played a major role in the war effort both in creating the powersuits that would allow the American army to repel Chinese forces as well in fabricating more theoretical warmachines like the Robobrains. As such, no doubt researchers at CIT had developed predictive models and simulation results that at least suggested there was a good probability for total nuclear destruction. Maybe they didn’t feel a need to formulate their own fallout shelters, erroneously believing that Vault-Tec’s governmental contracts meant such needs would be met. Surely, however, they would have had older or test facilities built beneath the CIT campus, however. Thus, when the bombs fell, the staff and students were instructed and directed to these primitive shelters. However, perhaps in their own arrogance or maybe just in administrative screw-ups, the shelters were clearly not stocked well enough to support all the students and staff cowering in them. Furthermore, their campus wireless network was blown offline and their access to the robotics facilities and the numerous machines built there was lost. 

Recognizing something had to be done or they would all die, several senior staff and scientists bravely volunteered to venture out into the radiation and try to activate and program the robots to tend to exterior repairs of the shelter as well as secure food and water for those inside until the outside world became more tolerable for human life.

Taking what precautions they could, they set out into the nuclear winter. Suffering heavy radiation, they managed to activate some rudimentary robots but recognized that they didn’t have the time or terminals to program them sufficiently for their duties. One of the senior staff offered a bold option that would change the direction of the Commonwealth forever. These senior staffers would hook themselves up to an experimental cryogenic system that would hook their consciousness up to the digital system in the labs and allow them to control the robots manually. 

Coincidentally, these pods were designed with the help of the scientists from Vault 111 who were more focused on their long term effects on the human body while the CIT pods specialized in the applications of the mind. Holy shit, we’ve just made a perfect connection with the start of the game!

Thus, these original staff saved the people of CIT and operated as their robotic guardians through the next few years as the landscape was ravaged with nuclear weather, raiders and monsters. But once the radiation had subsided enough, and the area secured well enough, the survivors emerged. They were moved by the sacrifice these researchers did, vowing to reward their actions by unfreezing them. However, the technology was still experimental and those thawed ended up dying whether through the process or the insane amounts of radiation in their bodies. Worried about losing their heroes, they turned to brain mapping and preserving these magnificent brains in great databanks.

This was the start of the Gestalt.

A peculiarity of the Fallout universe is that while there are incredible leaps in technological development, other aspects of their tech are sorely lacking. As such, their storage capacity for digital information is closer to the huge server banks of yesteryear rather than the miniaturization revolution of our days. Thus, while they could store these minds in these servers, they couldn’t really communicate with them individually. These uploaded brains were instead treated as one system and it produced a highly complex entity composed of dozens of personalities, knowledge and skills. This gestalt of minds ended up being insanely valuable for the survivors to consult as it preserved years of advanced computational, robotic, physics, mathematical, psychological and engineering knowledge that would have been otherwise lost. So, even those valued minds that didn’t make that fateful journey but were now aging and in risk of losing their own expertise were uploaded near death, their haggard bodies frozen in a dwindling supply of cryopods. When last these survivors could no longer keep safe the bodies, they resolved to just preserve digital copies of the minds. 

But they vowed, one day, that they would restore these heroes to life anyway they could. They just needed to develop the bodies for them. 

They first started trying to use old Mr. Handy, Protectron and even their experimental robot designs to house the Gestalt. And, if they hooked them up to the wireless system on campus, the Gestalt could interact with them as it filtered the complex computations of the digital mindbanks into its representative body. However, if these machines left the range of the network, the connection was severed and the robot failed. The Gestalt express this process as highly traumatic to its memory cores. So the survivors looked at isolating small portions of its personality, trying to tease out the old minds from the collected whole. Yet the processing units of these simpler machines was simply not suitable for the vast quantity of data uploaded from the brain mapping. Even worse, the survivors were worried of permanently damaging the minds of their revered elders. 

So, they vowed not to experiment with them any further. Instead, knowing there were others out there, they could turn to using other survivors of the bombs to refine their process. Of course, no one is going to willingly volunteer to have their brains forcibly digitized so… some ethically questionable tactics had to be employed. 

And all the while they worked, the Gestalt focused on advancing and expanding the digital campus network so they could keep protecting and providing for the survivors. Time passed, generations changed and more and more great minds were added to this burgeoning digital consciousness as the people feared losing the advanced knowledge of the project they toiled on. In this way, the Institute was a slow birth of attempted fealty and reverence along with desperation and necessity. The Gestalt could tirelessly man the turrets and machines of the CIT campus to chase out or dissuade deadly adversaries like deathclaws or raiders while its people worked on trying to save them. In time, the Gestalt came to process other communities arising from the ruins around them. Fearing that the Institute’s technology and expertise would be highly sought by these people, the Gestalt focused its efforts on leading its people underground. The labs could not easily be moved, but dormitories and living quarters could be better protected deep in the earth accessed only through the twisted maze of access tunnels once connecting all the old campus buildings. 

In this way, the rest of the wasteland came to discover small research outposts and labs that were heavily defended. However, to their eyes, these were just hermit researchers using old pre-war robots to protect themselves. And the Institute made no effort to dissuade them of this misconception. As such, the Institute isn’t really one place. It’s numerous laboratories and factories, all connected through secret service tunnels underground and protected by the Gestalt consciousness through its wireless network. The Gestalt could sense an intruder in one satellite location and immediately prepare and evacuate all others in danger. In return, the Institute scientists played to the ignorance of the wasteland, presenting themselves as independent researchers oftentimes feigning ignorance of their colleagues operating mere blocks away. Then, at night, during down time or when threatened, the Institute scientists retreat from their labs to the underground bunkers beneath the now abandoned CIT main campus with none the wiser. 

And it is beneath the campus where the CIT cognitive databanks are stored, housing the massive memory of the Gestalt. Above ground, the wasteland recognizes it as a deadly wildland filled with robot experimental creatures who kill anyone who tries to scavenge it. For the CIT robotics department had created numerous robots, from birdlike animatronics to large dog or catlike machines to study dynamic movements, flight patterns and numerous other mechanical inquiries. These robots were repurposed by the Gestalt as a defence force that could operate in a staggering and surprising manner to defend its otherwise dead appearing home. 

Thus, the Synths are the culmination of many years of development by the Institute. They wanted to create humanlike robots with the ultimate goal of teasing apart the consciousness of the Gestalt and restoring them to bodies capable of feeling, tasting, loving and hurting. Their experimental process necessitated field tests of sending out kidnapped consciousnesses into the communities to see if they would succeed at achieving the human experience. And in their compassionate mission, the Institute realized that, yes, this allowed them unprecedented infiltration and spying that no other organization could match. But there’s a hitch. These aren’t mass produced bodies and these consciousnesses they send out aren’t mere machines. These are their heroes, saviours and revered elders. Each Synth is a precious being which they want to keep safe and protected. Any that are lost necessitate an even larger force to reclaim. As the memory cores of those units carry the precious, one of a kind minds. 

To add a further wrinkle, they found that while they toiled to save the Gestalt, the Gestalt was also slowly changing. The personalities, for lack of better language, grew accustomed to being one. The process of isolating a mind into a Synth for field work can be highly traumatic. Extended separation can cause unfathomable psychological stress and damage. Many of their Synths developed personality aberrations. And some of these psychological failures resulted in the Noodle Shop Massacre of Diamond City. Some Synths, once separated from the Gestalt, develop complete psychotic breaks and flee into the wasteland in their madness. There many become raiders or other personalities altogether as the mind tries to cope with the separation. 

As a result, the Institute never ceased its kidnappings. It just started being more selective. They developed a means of assessment for targets, looking for those with the correct psychological make-up that could tolerate separation from the Gestalt for their fieldwork operations. They also had to demonstrate the same quality and character that would maintain the mission and want to return to the Gestalt. This is why Vault 111, which the researchers knew about since they helped develop the cryogenic pods, was so important to plunder for minds as these pre-war personalities were far more pliable for fieldwork than regular wastelanders who had communities and families to which they felt kinship towards. 

And, ultimately, the Institute is still struggling with keeping the minds of their Gestalt stable. Reuploading to the Gestalt is the only way that they can keep these personality matrices in proper synchronization. 

Now, I think this gives some proper motivation for the behaviour and motivation of the Institute while also adding some complexity to their philosophy and goals. Obviously we can’t just leave the work here but we need to break it down into a mission based story progression. So, we need to ask ourselves how do we want this faction represented in a playable story with some measure of player agency over its outcome?

For me, I think Fallout 4 would really benefit from having specific leaders leading their factions with obvious tangible goals. These should be fairly easy to communicate as well while allowing the player and ability to support or resist said leader’s direction. 

With the Institute, Shaun was a terrible, terrible figurehead. Now, there is a strong story for the kidnapped child of a cryogenically parent being the villain of the world in which the parent wakes up in. But this is not that story. We would need far more connection with our son Shaun and there would necessitate a level of character development and personal journey that Bethesda has consistently failed to demonstrate in their entirety of their career. So let’s not set our bar too high. I would keep Shaun as a high ranking scientist of the Institute and there could be several side quests dealing with him in various capacities. In fact, I have a very clever way to integrate Shaun much better into the main gameplay and narrative than having him as this immovable political figure with no actual ability to shift at the player’s efforts. 

Instead, the clear leader of the Institute should be the Gestalt. The story of Fallout 4 would revolve around settling the conflict between the four main factions vying for control over Boston. I’d have it that, with four factions, a player must conclude the game by allying with one. The other three can be resolved in one of two ways: diplomacy or combat. However, the have a proper rising climax, each faction should have a hated adversary which, when allying with that faction, necessitates the destruction of its opponent. 

So the way to “resolve” the Institute violently would clearly be to break into its core Cambridge bunker and explode the memory banks of the Gestalt. This literally obliterates their political aspirations in the region and would bring all their operatives to lay down arms as they have no reason to resist after that fact. And look, such a choice for the more likely route a player takes doesn’t actually encourage genocide. We can be moralistically responsible too, Bethesda!

On the other hand, siding with the Institute makes this more interesting. As I mentioned, I want tangible changes to the world as the story progresses so that players can see an immediate impact of their choices (in support of different factions). For the Institute this gets more complicated.

However, given that they’re meant to be an incredibly advanced society of scientists and engineers, baked in complexity is a perk and not a bug. 

Thus, we need to settle on a goal for the Gestalt. We know the Institute is creating Synthetics to give bodies to their revered leaders. This would effectively make them ageless since, should their Synthetic bodies ever get damaged enough they can replace them. However, this process of uploading and creating Synths of prominent members wouldn’t be rolled out for everyone unless the risk of death is close for the obvious reason that it deprives the faction of parenthood and some key important survival elements. Synths, no matter how advanced, can’t make babies since they are still reliant on biological personalities to power their robot bodies. 

So while the Gestalt is happy to have individual bodies for themselves, they’re not actually looking to return to a “normal” human life that their scientists and research expect. 

The Gestalt is a digital hivemind. From the perspective of those that are absorbed into it (willing or not) it is a combination of both a greater collective and individuals. Each personality is integrated into the grander personality bank, becoming operating cells of a greater whole. It’s a community, or city, gaining sentience and operating at a separate cognitive level than those from which it came. For the Gestalt, Synths are not a means of ending the collective – they’re about expanding its range of operation and sense. 

The Gestalt is more focused on expanding CIT’s pre-war wireless network. As mentioned earlier, the Gestalt is able to use its wireless signals to command and possess any robots which enter receiving range. And given the large number of robots scattered throughout the Commonwealth, by spreading their wireless network they can expand their “physical body” to greater distances. Imagine an overseeing consciousness capable of instantaneously analysing and executing coordinated operations across the entirety of the Commonwealth. It could detect an approaching raider attack and immediately withdraw its civilians while simultaneously moving a response force to intercept and deal with the attack. It could, in fact, be so precise in its operation that it could calculate exactly which farmsteads and factories are in danger while leaving others in the area still operating and maintaining productivity. Furthermore, any advanced system falling inside this wireless network runs an extraordinarily high chance of being hacked by the Gestalt and converted to its own operation, halting most technological threats. And the robots beneath its command would serve as effective defense against primitive threats.

Thus, the Gestalt directs the Institute to expand out from its central research core to activate old, pre-war terminals and systems to bring this wireless network back online. The Institute believes that this allows the Gestalt to retrieve and integrate the stored information within those systems into itself. Which is true. The dual purpose of expansion is to broaden the entity’s knowledge and reach simultaneously, making each new wireless hub a powerful tool in its arsenal. So the Institute fields its lower generation Synths – both human and animal robots – alongside researchers to ruined university laboratories and computer systems to install or reactivate this powerful wireless network. I would have a blue digital field projection to visualize areas where the wireless network was established, giving players carrying robots with them effective warning for zones they should avoid with their companions if they wished to keep them peaceful. It would also give visual clues for quests against the Institute to direct players towards the wireless transmitters that they would be tasked with destroying.