Who to gank: Brotherhood or Institute?

[Aintiarna]

Or you could just shoot them in the head and let the world heal right now. We kinda took that as the best option after WW2, you know?

 

The problem is that what we're dealing with is a situation that makes the dark ages look like a picnic. You underestimate the scale of the problem. Mutated killer creatures everywhere. Raiders. Radiation. All that on top of a collapsed civilisation. When the Roman Empire collapsed it took hundreds of years to recover. Fallout dwarfs that situation by many orders of magnitude. If the human race can ever recover, it will take a millennium I'm quite sure. Remember what Einstein said about World War 3:

 

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

[Moraelin]

And that all would have been over DECADES ago, if the MA could have just formed a provisional government instead of having every single delegate murderized by an Institute courser. If a loose militia under your leadership (and, hell, with really just you doing most of the work) can stop raids on settlements, imagine what a united government could have done. Actually, you don't even have to take a guess, because a unified government already did exactly that decades ago in other places. E.g., the NCR or, hell, even Caesar's Legion. Hell, even the BOS ended up more powerful than they'd ever been before after controlling all of 69 square miles of DC for just 9-10 years. Imagine a unified MA government for half a century. Just. Effing. Imagine.

 

So yeah, the Institute could help alleviate... the problem they created in the first place. It's like saying that Lenin's bolsheviks did end the anarchy and civil war they created in the first place. No thanks.

 

Seriously.

 

No. Effing. Thanks.

[Aintiarna]

I think you're getting gameworld and real world mixed up a little here. What you can achieve in a game world and what would happen if the world we're presented with in FO4 actually existed are very different things. As the player you're the special snowflake who can bring order to the chaos of the commonwealth. If it were real, I don't think so. Anyway, it's still interesting to think about it all.

[Moraelin]

Well, obviously, but I still like things to not trip suspension of disbelief too much. I.e., they still have to be a little bit realistic.

[charwo]

 

So, by a unique set of random flukes of the universe, and totally unlikely to ever happen like that again, you're in a position to basically stop the Third Reich. or Stalin's great genocide, or Pol Pot's genocide, or whatever. Do you use that chance to save countless innoncents, or do you think that your own living a luxury life is totally worth their suffering, pain, fear and death? Do you need any extra conditions and experiences to think that killing innocents is NOT worth a bit of luxury for yourself? Do you even feel anything for those innocent victims? Do you actually need to live among them to feel the most basic human compassion? Well, that's the questions you're going to have to answer for yourself. And discover a bit about the role you're playing and the priorities behind it in the process.

 

 

I think you're way over drmatizing the Institute. Godwin's Law is kind of inappropriate for the Fallout universe, and the Enclave are basically Nazis. That said, the Institute are two-bit slavers. They lack any totalitarianism that's comparible to 20th century ideologies. Totalitarianism is basically targeting innocent people so as to freeze them in place, so that the Laws Of Nature, can run it's course in the ideology's favor. Guilt and innocence, threat or not, these things are irrelevant to totalitarianism because the ideal is to destroy the inner life of all possible opposition.

 

As"Fazil Isksander put it "Under the totalitarian regime, it was as if you were forced to live in the same room with an insanely violent man."

 

The Institute are not interested in destroying the inner lives of their own nor the Commonwealth. They aren't even interested really, in ruling over the wastelanders. They are "only" interested in liquidating opposition to their goals. They are thugs in lab coats, but they're thugs. They are basically Ashur from The Pitt, but more than a bit worse. I'd actually say they're less evil than Caesar's Legion or W. Brotherhood. The rub here is that while there is a consensus vision of "mankind redefined" there's actually a lot of variation on that theme. One of the two dissident scientists, Lawrence, I specifically spared because he's very uncomfortable with dependence on the sythns. But there's enough pliability and room for dissent in the Institute for new ideas and paradigm shifts to occur in a way that doctrinaire totalitarianism does not allow..

 

This is not to say the Institute aren't bad. They are murderous, thuggish, slaving authoritarian society, but these are tendencies in any society, one that with work, a society can be coaxed away from. Plus, and this is what I consider the most crucial: what other faction could reverse engineer GECKs? Because massive deployments of GECKs is what is necessary to banish the wasteland. And yes, those are so important I'd support Caesar's Legion if they could provide that payoff, and I REALLY hate the Legion.

[Scribblesix]

 

A lot of people on these forums have said the same thing but most of what the Institute do and say seems fairly coherent to me. Their goal is the advancement and furtherance of the human race. As far as that goes, the commonwealth is already lost. As such they have no real qualms about using it as a test bed for their experiments. All that matters is the Institute. I don't get what is so hard to understand about that. The commonwealth is overrun by mutants, ghouls, raiders and mutated humans that have been exposed to radiation for generations. If the player character cares about the Commonwealth, it's likely only because the game has forced them to spend some time in it. Which brings me on to..

 

Eh? Hmm, No. The whole replacing people with synths things in no way whatsoever corresponds with the institutes stated goals. (Thematically the whole replace people with look alikes is used to describe subversion and ideological conversion-things the institute are not interested in). Sending out synth murder patrols to gather resources is FAR FAR less efficient than just trading for them (they dont have to do it directly). They place a farmer to conduct a seed experiment: THIS MAKES THE EXPERIMENT WORSE; they spend vast resources with the sole effect of making their science shittier.

 

 

This is not to say the Institute aren't bad. They are murderous, thuggish, slaving authoritarian society, but these are tendencies in any society, one that with work, a society can be coaxed away from. Plus, and this is what I consider the most crucial: what other faction could reverse engineer GECKs? Because massive deployments of GECKs is what is necessary to banish the wasteland. And yes, those are so important I'd support Caesar's Legion if they could provide that payoff, and I REALLY hate the Legion.

 

eh,

• murderous: sure ill give you that, but which commonwealth society isnt? Diamond city?
• Thuggish: erm... No. One could happily say good neighbor is thuggish though.
• Slaving. Hmm... No, though I understand why you'd say so. But the insitiute emphatically do not take humans as slaves. Nor do they see the synths as slaves and there is a good arguement to say they are correct.
• Authoritarian: er again... no. They dont even have a central authority figure.

[Aintiarna]

Eh? Hmm, No. The whole replacing people with synths things in no way whatsoever corresponds with the institutes stated goals. (Thematically the whole replace people with look alikes is used to describe subversion and ideological conversion-things the institute are not interested in). Sending out synth murder patrols to gather resources is FAR FAR less efficient than just trading for them (they dont have to do it directly). They place a farmer to conduct a seed experiment: THIS MAKES THE EXPERIMENT WORSE; they spend vast resources with the sole effect of making their science shittier.

I honestly don't think I can explain it any better without writing reams and reams of text which I really don't want to get in to. If you think about the way the Institute scientists think, and about the way in which they look upon the commonwealth, and about the way in which they've been isolated from it for 200 years, and about their previous history of interacting with the commonwealth... then I think their whole approach of replacing people with synths and using murder patrols as you put it does make sense to them. Not to us obviously with our 21st century western cushy life mindset.

 

But at this point I think we should just agree to disagree. :smile:

[Moraelin]

@Scribblesix

The institute is indeed not interested in ideological conversion, but seems rather busy at subverting the society above them.

 

I think that what you skip over in assessing their goals vs means is the paranoia aspect. Which may not be obvious if you take the path of initially joining the institute, but is plenty obvious if you don't want to sign up immediately.

 

Any half-way normal person, never mind your son, would go basically, "well, it must be a lot to take in. Just sleep on it, we can talk about it later." But Father immediately goes on that they've learned that whoever isn't with them is against them, brands you an enemy of the institute, and calmly announces that his synths will basically shoot on sight now. (Well, no change there;))

 

We're really talking about some twits who've been isolated and isolationist for 200 years, and as paranoid about the rest of the world as, well, any die-hard isolationists. I mean, Father's idea of having a look at the Commonwealth to decide if it deserves another chance or not, is looking at it for 5 minutes from the highest roof of the CIT. I think it's quite telling that that's as close as he's willing to get to them.

[TheOriginalEvilD]

And that all would have been over DECADES ago, if the MA could have just formed a provisional government instead of having every single delegate murderized by an Institute courser. If a loose militia under your leadership (and, hell, with really just you doing most of the work) can stop raids on settlements, imagine what a united government could have done. Actually, you don't even have to take a guess, because a unified government already did exactly that decades ago in other places. E.g., the NCR or, hell, even Caesar's Legion. Hell, even the BOS ended up more powerful than they'd ever been before after controlling all of 69 square miles of DC for just 9-10 years. Imagine a unified MA government for half a century. Just. Effing. Imagine.

 

So yeah, the Institute could help alleviate... the problem they created in the first place. It's like saying that Lenin's bolsheviks did end the anarchy and civil war they created in the first place. No thanks.

 

Seriously.

 

No. Effing. Thanks.

 

It's the Darth Vader scenario. Anakin was the chosen one, he was destined to bring balance to the Force. Most people miss the fact that he did in fact do just that, but it took him going to the dark side and wrecking most of the galaxy before he finally did it....by killing the Emperor. So yeah, just because the Institute caused a lot of problems doesn't mean they can't fix them. The reality is, whether or not they WOULD doesn't change the fact that they're really the only ones who CAN since they're the only ones with the technology.

 

I guess if we work this out hypothetically, maybe the BOS could defeat the Institute and then use that tech to do the same thing, but again that's relying on the BOS using the tech and not storing it away for safe keeping. The problem here is that they seem just as content to kill every super mutant they come across rather than heal them.

[Moraelin]

But here's something I've been wondering: do they actually have much technology to show for it? The only domain where they're ahead is synths, which doesn't help much if you don't want an army of cyborg slaves.

 

In 210 years they made one breed of genetically engineered melons. Well, Dr Penske did that with mutfruit, without killing anyone, and with far less resources. Virgil managed to make a FEV antidote... which only works on the FEV strain that he himself created. Curie did more as just one robot in less time, in a half-collapsed bunker with rats.

 

Other than that, their terminals and computers run the same pre-war RobCo OS. The lasers they made are actually weaker than the pre-war lasers. Their reactor relies needs a pre-war component to run at all, although that component was just a booster, and other reactors up there can run without it.Etc.

 

They really DON'T have any technology to fix the Commonwealth. They're a one trick pony: synths, gorilla synths, and more synths. That's it. Th-th-th-that's all, folks.