So in my prior posts about Fallout 4’s shortcomings and changes I would have done for it, I covered the lack of important locations and weak world building that deprived characters motivation for the story. I feel like Bethesda tried to emulate New Vegas’ structure with the action centred around a single point of interest and having a bunch of interests squabble over it. Yet, Diamond City was never designed to be an important or strategic piece in any faction’s goals. Likewise, it ended up being rather sparse in interests or details nor did it qualify for its in world importance.

My fix was to develop five important political bodies each with an invested interest in the ruins of Boston and a brief description of how they are integrated with each other. However, while I liked New Vegas’ direction, I don’t think Fallout 4 has to follow so closely in its predecessor’s shoes. So, the Boston ruin settlements help to flesh out the stage for the conflict but not the conflict itself. 

Furthermore, I don’t think it’s constructive to look at a flawed result and say that to fix it you have to pitch everything about it out and start over. I’ve already expressed that those situations don’t really interest me. So, in my efforts to provide an alternative to what we had, I tried to preserve what I could of Bethesda’s efforts – in spirit if not in design.

As such, the crux of the conflict should center around the Synthetics that sucked up so much oxygen from the actual release.

It also means fixing the massive mess that is the convoluted and contradictory entities that are the Synthetics. And that means we’ll have to put their creators, The Institute, squarely in centre stage. 

But first here is a quick rundown of the Synthetics. They are robots designed with cutting edge artificial intelligence and advanced engineering so as to be wholly indistinguishable from actual human beings. 

Seems reasonable enough except whenever Fallout 4 tried to get into the nitty gritty details.

For one, the earliest you’ll stumble across talk of the Synthetics is at the small village of Covenant. There, following their quest, you’re informed that a person is impossible to identify whether they’re a robot or not until the individual is dead and you’re able to dissect the body to find robot parts. As such, the doctors of Covenant were attempting to create a psychological test that would reveal the nature of Synthetics without having to resort to death.

However, this brings up way more questions than it provides answers.

First, how the hell can you not tell a robot until you’re dissecting it? I’m not sure if Bethesda has taken literally any biology classes but if you cut a person, they’ll bleed. And they’ll bleed because our circulatory system is incredibly complex and important for providing oxygen, nutrients, hormones and nourishment to our entire body. It seems trivial to tell the difference. Prick a person’s thumb. If they bleed then they’re human. If they don’t. They’re a robot.

Unless, of course, the Institute created the Synthetics to have a fake circulatory system. For argument’s sake, let’s assume they did this. The marvel of the Synths could be that they Institute was able to fabricate a fake cardiovascular system that provided veins and blood to each of their robots. This would mean, despite what the characters argue in game, the only purpose for Synthetics is literally as infiltration units for the rest of the Commonwealth. There is no other logical reason to develop and build such an insanely complex and ultimately pointless system other than to try and obfuscate the robot’s identity. In Far Harbour, we learn the fate of one unlucky Synth is that they were grabbed by cannibals and eaten before they could reach safe shores. And they didn’t even notice something wrong with their victim. This suggests that not only did they develop this circulatory system but they also created synthetic flesh, muscle and bone so realistic in its properties that literally people used to eating it couldn’t tell the difference. 

And also makes you wonder where their meetings debating how human flesh would taste went down. 

So if the Institute was creating highly advanced infiltration units, what was the purpose of this unfathomably difficult project? We don’t know because Bethesda never provided an explanation. Literally. As I’ve complained before, it wasn’t for manual labour because labour robots are littered throughout the entirety of the Fallout universe like discarded PPE from a pandemic ravaged world. And not only that, but these infiltration units are incredibly more fragile than an actual armed robot army as they now must bleed and be crippled from wounds, seek to preserve themselves and be susceptible to radiation and other biological maladies that other robots would naturally carry immunities. The only logical explanation is, then, that these were meant to be spies and sleeper units with the next logical step being that the Institute was planning some sort of tyrannical invasion of the Commonwealth that would be accomplished so quickly as the people in power were either replaced by complicit Synthetics or easily neutralized by infiltrated Synthetics. 

However, why would the Institute want this? We learn that the Institute is nothing more than a bunch of scientists from MIT who survived the apocalypse in their secret underground laboratories and, quite literally, want nothing to do with the pathetic squabbling outside world for being so barbaric and primitive. You literally have a conversation with your son on the roof of the old Cambridge Square building where he laments how disgusting the rest of the world is and how he doesn’t regret never leaving his hole except for this moment. 

As I’ve said, the plot of Fallout 4 is insanely, incomprehensibly stupid. 

I simply can’t accept that a secret scientific society would ever approve the amount of attention, resources and time required to develop this incredibly useless technology. To add insult to injury, the Institute literally developed teleportation technology rendering the argument for an infiltration unit moot since they could appear unexpectedly exactly on their target and then vanish before anyone could respond. And yet the news of this world shattering technology kind of hits like a warm fart. Your faction of choice is like “That’s neat” when you inform them and then they blithely move on with whatever inane issue Bethesda cooked up to occupy your time. 

So, first order of business, kill the teleportation technology. This was literally a deus ex machina designed to fix obvious plot holes in their story when they were writing it. Furthermore, the ability to teleport would have such unfathomably far reaching effects for the world going forward that you do not want to open that can of worms on a franchise that you have any intention of continuing with. It’s the sort of thing that’s either pre-baked in or it will eat up the entire narrative whether you want it or not. And since Bethesda is so gungho on making Fallout a post-apocalyptic survival sim even though its been multiple generations since the apocalypse, this is clearly the dumbest decision I’ve seen on the top of a heap of idiotic choices. 

And since I’m committed to making Synths work and the crux of the story, we now need to do the work Bethesda wouldn’t. 

We need to come up with an explanation for these dumb robots which exist in a resource strapped world that already has robots. As a reminder, the apocalypse in Fallout occurred because the world had exceeded the natural limit of its resources to support an insanely energy wasteful society. Fallout happened specifically because there wasn’t enough resources to go around. So if we want to create a new kind of robot that is immeasurably more wasteful and difficult to develop than the rustbuckets in our garbage cans, we need a damn good reason for doing so.