Best ending question

[Moraelin]

Now I'm not trying to dissuade you from pursuing any ending you wish, but I still don't see how the institute can count as anything but evil when it:

- kidnaps and murders people, but also

- is into slavery

- murderized every single delegate when the Commonwealth tried to form a provisional government, plunging it back into chaos

- and have been actively destabilizing the Commonwealth ever since

- killed family members of the Railroad as retaliation

- beta-tested an early Gen 3 (and presumably a prototype courser, by the results) by sending him fully armed into a major settlement, causing the Broken Mask massacre

- experimented on people with FEV, and killed them afterwards (and no, they didn't develop a cure. Virgil's serum only counteracts the one FEV strain HE created.)

- exterminated whole communities just for something they wanted from them (e.g., all the rest of Vault 111),

- or even for something the Institute wanted and THOUGHT they had, but the poor barstards didn't actually have (e.g., University Point),

- are still letting their Gen 1 and 2 exterminate whole communities for nothing more than the scrap,

- sent a hitman to murderize a top Institute scientist for trying to run away from the Institute. Mind you, he didn't sell any secrets, nor join any enemies. Just for running away.

- freed you and led you to chase their top hitman just to see how long you'd survive in an unfamiliar hostile world

- proclaim you an enemy on account that, literally, "whoever isn't with us is against us", and start actively sending synths to kill you or murder your settlers, if you don't agree to join IMMEDIATELY

Etc.

 

Now I can deal with the idea of individual people not being as evil as the whole of the Institute, though even then there are instances where you kinda see their true nature. Such as someone talking about taking a few coursers along to intimidate another department into giving them what they wanted. Or the fact that they just murderized and replaced a human doesn't even register when talking about Warwick farm. Etc.

[tomomi1922]

I am not discrediting anything you said. In fact, I tried not to read TOO MUCH into google but rather trying to explore myself. I am trying to be normal and trying to let the plot surprise me :) If you know me, I am the kind of person who doesn't mind spoilers and will go to a movie fully knowing how it ends and it will not diminish my entertainment value one bit. Thus, for once I tried to be different. I said things about Institute without knowing the full story. And if I did go with the Institute, I would probably get the same reaction and emotion you have now.

I have had the game for a while and didn't even complete 1 playthrough. It's just all the mods that took up all my time :(

Anyway, I just sealed my fate with them by shooting up one of their named scientist. No more Institute for me. This is according to this list.

[Gilibran]

Well i got the best ending when i broke my game somehow while skipping large parts of the MQ after exiting vault 111 lol

 

First visit to the institute i killed father and practically everyone inside. Not related to that, but i could not complete old guns and i only get more minutemen radiant quests. So basically what i ended with was, the railroad helping any synths that escaped already or hid very well when i wiped the institute.

 

BoS is happily killing raiders, supermutants and ghouls

 

Minutemen are still rebuilding by gaining new settlements

 

The institute, well dead, all that tech sitting there and waiting to be used when the time is right.

 

All in all my commonwealth is a pretty safe peacefull place in that broken game. No faction wars or aggro, i'm in good standing with all remaining factions. No missions to do from any faction that could jeapordize the peace. Just rebuilding and making it a better place eventually.

[tomomi1922]

I guess it can't be helped that this thread is going to discussion about choices and morality. And I don't care now since I successfully finished my intended goal.

With my limited personal observation, and trying not to get all the opinions influencing me, I start to feel the writing quality of Bethesda is not as good as I first thought.

 

- The way most factions decide to go to war with others are very .... weak. "We feel that XYZ faction is, will be, against us, so please go wipe them out". The only legit one is Institute vs Railroad because we can clearly feel the tension rubbing from the start.

 

- Even Railroad's back story is weak. Institute creates 1 synth per minute, how many can the Railroad "saves"? Wiping their memories and making them feel like complete human (like clones in Arnold's The 6h day), adding to the dying population. These are not robots, but biological living being. So in a way this helps out mankind by repopulating. And the only thing to worry about is the design is somehow not as perfect as real human, which Institute is trying their darnest to correct.

 

- I was surprised at the given choices of response toward Elder Maxon. Most of the responses either to openly disagree or mock him. There is no strong support response option. It seems like Bethesda is positioning us to dislike him to begin with. What if players really buy his ideology and choose to support him fully? I see that with Minuteman, with Railroad, with Instittute, but quite openly bias against BOS.

 

- And what's with the "Defend the castle" quest that ... Institute just went all out assaulting the castle when it's not even their style? Sure the player shot up a scientist or even Father himself, but Institute has been the cloak and dagger type and they have been so effective at that. I can see BOS doing it, but it's funny watching some helpless synth standing below castle wall and to be used as target practice for me from the top wall. I know FO4 doesn't have the game mechanic to scale the wall, but even in such universe, I can see hoard of BOS commando roping up the wall, while Verttibirds drop power armored knights with minigun or gattling lasers down the castle. That would be hard to defend. But not Institute.

 

 

This is a game, and we players are open to choose to side with any faction we see fit. There is no right or wrong answer. So I find the bias against BOS quite disturbing. And even if you are facing up Hitler in there, you don't openly mock him right inside his HQ. It is just bad writing. If I am a general or president, and some kid you invited to your office run his mouth like he is on Youtube, swear to god I will put him down. Maybe not killing him, but he will learn his place when I put him in military prison for a good 3 months with limited rations.

Edited February 12, 2016 by tomomi1922

[Jasemyne]

Still don't get why most folks are longing to blow up the Institute's nuclear reactor in the center of what was once Boston City and this with a char being in sight. Ever heard of Chernobyl? Guess not.

Edited February 12, 2016 by Jasemyne

[Moraelin]

Chernobyl was a fission reactor. A FUSION reactor like the institute has, would just release a huge amount of neutrons when it blows up, which get braked very well by the soil on top of it, and it would just stop once the containment fails, i.e., after it's blown itself up.

 

Pretty much all the nuclear contamination would be from neutron activation of the ground and concrete above it, but the explosion doesn't last nearly long enough for that to be a significant problem. In fact, not even for it to be a measurable problem.

 

It would also cause a significant amount of energy to be stored in the ground around it, in the form of atoms basically knocked out of their lowest energy position by fast neutrons. But again, for any significant DENSITY of that to be stored you'd need something like months worth of reaction. You're nowhere near enough energy to cause a cascade reaction. Which if it happened, it would just mean some melted sand when released. It's a problem when that happens in your reactor shielding or moderator bars, because it damages the reactor and can cause problems, but if months after the nuke some grain of sand spontaneously melt, meh, it's not like it reactivates the reactor to cause a meltdown.

 

Long story short, I'm an a**hole and I fully endorse nuking the institute :tongue:

 

Edit: just to clarify something: most of the fallout from a fusion bomb, a.k.a., hydrogen bomb, actually comes from the fission explosion that is basically the detonator. The bomb is basically built like a praline, with an outer shell made of plutonium, and a gooey centre that is the actual fusion payload. Sometimes with a crunchy layer of beryllium in between, because it's a neutron reflector and lets you get critical with a smaller bomb. When it gets imploded, first the plutonium goes off in a big fission explosion (think: like the Nagasaki bomb), which in turn compresses and superheats that gooey centre, causing it too to go kablooey. A much bigger kablooey, in fact. Well, most of the fallout comes from that yummy plutonium shell. Which wouldn't be present in a fusion reactor.

[Jasemyne]

Disagree. Such a reactor is a deuterium-tritium breeder which is extremely vulnerable already to minor accidents and, strange enough, allegedly not so much to a major accident according to the work hypotheses that like in the days of yore speak of an even safer safety until proven wrong. But already a minor accident which would be of just little importance in a nuclear reactor like the modern fast breeder type releases masses of radioactive tritium into the ground water and thus the bio-cycle and here the crops the settlers are busy with immediately, all scientists agree to that. An immediate repair, however, is thought to be impossible for man (but of course not for specialized robots that probably get blown up together with the reactor). Man just dies with some delay compared to a nuclear bomb. In any case the he who blows up such a fusion reactor in a habited area, let alone a big city, would be no longer welcome on this planet, you better believe that. He'd be shot dead by everybody with a gun once within range. And that's already the reason why the protagonist and his dog have to hit the road at the end of the game for having made the Commonwealth a deal worse place to live than it was when he was still a frozen-stiff hamster.

Would be far more human to use certain crazy terrorists for a hindenburging of the Prydwen and the mad fuhrer of the tin cans. Ad victoriam / Sieg heil as they cry, huh. :wink:

Edited February 12, 2016 by Jasemyne

[Boombro]

But isn't the reacter the faction uses deep in the ground? That should weaken it no?

Edited February 12, 2016 by Boombro

[Moraelin]

Not sure exactly what they use for fission. It could be Deuterium + Lithium 6, for all we know, and neither of those is particularly radioactive or dangerous. And lithium deuteride HAS actually been used in fusion bombs way back when, so it kinda fits the 50's-60's setting of the game.

 

But be that as it may, the tempting part about fusion is that it produces vastly more energy per mass of fuel than anything else, hence the quantities of fuel needed would be actually very small. Even going with deuterium and tritium one GIGA-Watt fusion power plant would need about 125 kg of deuterium and 125 kg of tritium per year, and to get a sense of how much energy that is, it's equivalent to burning 2.7 millions of tons of coal per year.

 

Now only a couple of grams at a time would actually be in the fusion chamber at any time, so that's not much contamination there. Realistically even if you blow up the fuel tanks nearby, a month's reserve of fuel would be about ten kilos of tritium.

 

But, remember, that's for a hypothetical humongous 1 GW reactor, not something you'd have in the basement of the institute.

 

Tritium is a weak beta emitter, i.e., it emits electrons. It can only harm you if you inhale or ingest it. Otherwise, you could bathe in tritium water and it wouldn't harm you too much. And even ingested, most of it gets out of your system in about two weeks, which limits the damage.

 

It also tends to sink in normal water, because tritiated water is heavier than normal water. So it doesn't contaminate the ocean or underground water for too long.

 

EDIT:

 

But if we're talking a BREEDER reactor, which is a fair guess, then you DON'T actually have tons of tritium stored at any time. You only have grams of it at any given time, to release in an accident. The rest is just lithium, which isn't radioactive.

 

So, whop-de-do, you'd enricht the atmosphere with a few grams of tritium, on top of the about 200g produced by cosmic rays each year and coming down in the rain. I'm SO no impressed by the danger of that :tongue:

[robhartman9]

I never put that much thought into it. I just figured one more smoking crater wouldn't make much of a difference. To me an obvious DLC would be to track down a GECK and make it all better.