Top 5 Missed opportunities of the Commonwealth

[Fatalmasterpiece]

So in my nearly 400 hours playing FO4, good, bad and otherwise I couldn't help but find many missed opportunities which I couldn't help but feel Bethesda could have done so much more with the narrative of Fallout 4. While the story is provoking, to falls flat because their are no true repercussions for our actions beyond the final faction choices of the game. Considering the game boils down to supporting one faction and killing nearly everyone else, the other characters and narratives on the way don't actually matter. Nothing truly changes the Sole Survivor or shapes who they are. Here are the top 5 ways that Fallout 4 could have added more depth to the Commonwealth but didn't.

 

#5 - Atom Cats

Probably the best coolest faction in FO4, they don't give you a bunch of angst and degrading comments like the other groups. There's no beef about race or synths, just cool cats chilling out with good music. The Atom Cats are the best example of the game's flavorful retro 50s vibe, what sets Fallout apart from other post apocalyptic settings and provides much needed air in an otherwise bleak setting. They could have been a full blown faction but instead we get one short fetch quest and a combat encounter. Further more, their leader Zeke is one of the highest level characters in the game and judging by his terminal entries has a hidden history all of his own. This is never expanded upon in the vague background material and all we are left with is a cool jacket and some power armor mods.

 

#4 - Lily Tourette

If you have had encounters in the Federal ration stockpile or Beantown Brewery and read the terminals you may have realized that the raiders here have a feud which Red Tourette's sister is caught up in. This gives a brief hint of depth into the Raiders who otherwise are just mindless punks providing body sponges for your bullets by the dozen. Unfortunately, instead of giving the player the opportunity to find Lily and save her, she just disappeared, evidently killed at some point with no further depth from the writers. The player could have had the struggle of helping raiders to free this woman and possibly redeem a companion but instead it's just another mindless killfest against more mindless wretches. What is with raiders that just auto attack anyways? How do they know that you're the hero come to cleanse them and not another raider yourself who could be a powerful ally? It would be nice if one group of raiders would talk to you or at least take the time to shout "Give up the gasoline!".

 

#3 - Jared's Corvega Assembly plant

Jared leads the gang who terrorizes the player early on at the Museum of Freedom in Concord although the player never realizes this until after Jared is killed. His plan was to try to use chems to unlock the secret to Mama Murphy's second sight and has a cult following willing to stop at nothing to gain power in the area. However, his raiders are indistinguishable from from any other bullet sponges in the game and Jared makes no appearances to add intrigue to this plot. By the time you unravel any of this story line which is arguably one of the most interesting in the game, Jared is already dead and the plot has ended. To make matters worse, because of all the explosives in Jared's area of the assembly plant, it's easy to kill Jared without ever even "meeting" him. Even if you could, he would just auto attack like every other raider in the game. It's too little too late for this narrative.

 

#2 - Synths

What makes a monster and what makes a man? From Quasimodo and Frankenstein's monster to the Phantom of the Opera, this is the question many famous character have made us ask. In the end, it is the human element we find in these characters by seeing through their eyes, their experiences which gives us the answer. Such inhuman beings define their existence and humanity through their actions, their will and their experiences, they strive to be people. The Synths, organic artificial people created by the Institute, pose such a question in Fallout 4 and leave the player with the option to be their savior or their destroyer. The problem is, we never see their experience, their suffering or their will to become their own people. While they speak of being unhappy in a life of servitude and plot their upheaval, our interaction with them is often limited to short, single dialogue of shallow discourse. There is no earth shaking moments where the synths crawl from the gutters and shake their fist in the air. In fact, they never really show emotion or will for much of anything other than being true plot devices. Besides brief encounters with reprogrammed synths, fooled to think they are human, the experience is left flaccid when not a single synth even so much as chooses a name for it's self or shows true signs of self determination.

 

#1 - Kellogg

Kellogg is, at first, the main antagonist of the FO4 plot line and one of the most interesting characters in the game. You see his face briefly as he kills your spouse and kidnaps your son. Instantly, you hate him and want to find this guy. His interaction with the player however is very short lived, in fact ending the first time the player meets him with his death. Rather than building a relationship with the player where they feel compelled to destroy Kellogg, teased by lost opportunities at catching him, he is simply a speed bump on their quest to save their son. Bethesda then returns to their favorite trope of revealing his background after he has already died, making nothing you learn about him have gravity on the decisions you make later. Instead of feeling a struggle or conflict about killing Kellogg it doesn't matter, he's dead and we are already heading off to the next quest objective. While he does taunt the player briefly over an intercom moments before being fatally confronted, the player isn't even given a choice about killing him or forging what could have been one of the best villains of the franchise. He's dead, like every other character that get's in the Sole Survivors way.

[Ethreon]

Meanwhile in the Beth writing department

 

*chirp chirp*

 

Very good points, maybe you should offer yourself for hire. They sure need some help in the writing department.

[PoliteRaider]

I think you missed an important one, but I don't know where you'd put it on the list.

 

Shaun.

 

We had no time pre-war to really establish any connection with him or even with Nora to give us that link by proxy. Our search for him once we emerge was constantly interrupted by a lot of distractions. I consider myself a pretty role-playing heavy sort of player and even then I just couldn't motivate myself to focus on Shaun for any reason other than I should care about my child. When you do find him it's a complete disappointment, although not really a surprise like the writers clearly (and strangely) imagined it would be. What I want to know is what he's been up to for the last 65 years and it's just never really addressed.

 

Of all the named NPCs I felt the least engagement with Shaun. I honestly cared more about McCready's son and Valentine's lost fiancee more and they never even appear in the game.

[archtrtd1]

Wow. Fantastic summary! Something tells me, once the Creation Kit is released, that we will find unfinished quests, dialogue options, missing npcs, etc. that were left out of the original game due to time constraints/laziness/whatever. Maybe someone can put together a "Cutting Room Floor" mod for Fallout 4. I really hope there are bits that would allow for even just one your "missed opportunities" to be fleshed out into a quest mod.

[bben46]

All of this comes back to Beth making the game NOT for the hardcore PC fallout players who want an immersive story, but for the console kiddies that will buy it for the mindless killing and care nothing about story or plot. None of the 'enemy' factions has any depth. They always shoot first without any attempt at dialog - even the pathetic excuse for dialog Beth uses in the game.

 

I would have liked to be able to pit one faction against another such as fomenting a feud between Raiders and Gunners, or getting a band of Raiders to form an alliance with Good Neighbor to protect them against the nearby Super Mutants. Or even negotiating with a group that would normally just mindlessly attack a settlement to trade instead. As for feral ghouls, they would still attack mindlessly because they are mindless. But Super Mutants in earlier games tried to kidnap humans and not just mindlessly kill.

 

On one forum I saw a console kiddie complaining that the game was boring and he finished it in 6 hours. After 6 hours I had barely gotten out of Sanctuary Hills and met the Minutemen in the museum. My guess is he thought the main quest was the entire game and you were supposed to win by completing that one quest line.

[robhartman9]

I liked the atom cats rule mod and would like to see that expanded with better tools. Maybe even an alternate ending where the cats storm the institute cause kidnapping people and replacing them with replicants just isn't cool baby

[Welcome2Stonia]

Couldn't agree more with the OP. Although there is so much more that could be added to the list...

 

All of this comes back to Beth making the game NOT for the hardcore PC fallout players who want an immersive story, but for the console kiddies that will buy it for the mindless killing and care nothing about story or plot. None of the 'enemy' factions has any depth. They always shoot first without any attempt at dialog - even the pathetic excuse for dialog Beth uses in the game.

 

I would have liked to be able to pit one faction against another such as fomenting a feud between Raiders and Gunners, or getting a band of Raiders to form an alliance with Good Neighbor to protect them against the nearby Super Mutants. Or even negotiating with a group that would normally just mindlessly attack a settlement to trade instead.

 

What's the deal with Gunners anyway? They were supposed to be a group of mercenaries... well then, why can't I hire them? Why do they shoot me on sight? I didn't know I had bounty on my head???

[Cornette]

How about the lack of towns. Salem, University Point, Quincy could of all easily been open towns instead of just another mob filled area. Also the Minuteman quest line could of been much longer where we help all the non existing towns out while building small farms and settlements. Doing so we'd encounter Kellogg and maybe some Coursers that we wouldn't be able to kill at places such as the fishery and University Point. Eventually after saving the townfolk of Quincy they would let us into Diamond City (rather then just letting us in 5 minutes into the game), find Nick then go on the true hunt for Kellogg.

 

So a proper Minuteman story line capping off where we've helped and built a decent amount of towns building the Minuteman's power. Then we get lead into the second half of the game of finding the Institute and the war between them and the Railroad/Brotherhood/potentially Minuteman. Also proper towns which would have their owns quests and such...

 

Take it even further and allow an evil route where we betray the Minuteman at Quincy for the Gunners. We then use the Gunners to take over all the land we claimed as the Minuteman. After the Institute attacks Green Tec we find our way into the Institute but Father is all 'you are to corrupted go away'.

 

Will stop now as the idea train has started but cannot go anywhere for now....

[JuJooGuppy]

Almost ALL of these issues (That I agree 10000% on!) boil down to one simple underlying issue: A severe lack of and lack of development of proper story and story-telling / RPG elements, as mentioned above, specifically for the newer generation of gamers that are instant-gratification players and unable to enjoy a game that requires more thinking.

I am dissapointed by the fact Bethesda went this route with FO4, because Skyrim showed that you can still have an indepth game that sells extremely well, and yet can still be a bit more streamlined to appeal to the players that get bored if they are not killing something every 5 seconds. Hell, Fallout 3 and New Vegas (I think NV sold less, though..) showed that as well. I love FO4 and play the hell out of it, but the story content is so severely lacking compared to any of their past titles.

Just think about factions storylines: FO4 we have the Minutemen, Railroad, BoS & Institute. The last of which you can only join in essentially the final act of the main story, and then get what, 3-5 at most quest for? All the quest are intertwined with the main story, too, which is fine in one way (I like that they relate to eachother, actually) but they made them so close to eachother story wise that it isn't much in the way of variety. And, there really arent faction quests outside of the main story arc. Lastly, the main story arc is simply a faction arc, whichever faction you roll with. In order to get a fair amount of quests, you're kinda forced to play all factions till the moment you HAVE to pick, where as in the past the main story was its own storyline.

In reality, the faction you chose should have a storyline that augmented the main storyline instead of just basically being it. I felt like the main story runs really short before being taken over by factions. (And shouldve been able to choose early on for ALL factions. That, and forced to pick a true faction fairly early. Say you joined BoS and institute, you would be forced to chose almost immediately, and use your status to do spying on the other, etc.


I mean look at Skyrim... you had what, Thieves guild story arc, Mages college, Dark Brotherhood (for life!), the.. champion guys that I am drawing a blank on, the main story... all the daedric quests for their goodies (Which gave you UNIQUE weapons / armor that looked different, rather than a named exact copy of a weapon that has a stat that you can get in the world anyway....). It had several MAJOR cities like Diamond city that provided lots of small quest and larger quests, where as FO4 really only has Diamond City and sorta Good Neighboor. Capital Hill to a small degree. But thats it, really. Only 1 true major city compared to.. 6? Not to mention Skyrim had a TON of minor cities the size of Good Neighbor all with yet more lore, quests, etc.

Its truly shocking how little quests content there is between FO4 and Skyrim, and its sad. It would be such a better game with more of that. And now they have announced Far Harbor stating that it is the largest DLC landmass ever, larger than Shivering Isles, which is great! Cept they mention that it has less content overall than Shivering Isles... which means it will be a huge land mass with little true incentive to explore aside from just exploring, not to find more quests. (Don't get me wrong, still excited, but it makes it seem like it will have a lot of empty space.)

Sorry this got a bit long and rant-like. But I think I lay out my point. The difference in quest options is staggering, and it greatly hinders replayability for FO4 unfortunately, because I love it otherwise.

[Boombro]

 

There is no earth shaking moments where the synths crawl from the gutters and shake their fist in the air. In fact, they never really show emotion or will for much of anything other than being true plot devices.

But you do find ones that want to escape and did. Like the whole RR plot line and the raider one and countless others in other quests.

 

 

Kellogg is, at first, the main protagonist of the FO4 plot line and one of the most interesting characters in the game. You see his face briefly as he kills your spouse and kidnaps your son. Instantly, you hate him and want to find this guy. His interaction with the player however is very short lived, in fact ending the first time the player meets him with his death. Rather than building a relationship with the player where they feel compelled to destroy Kellogg.

But that is out of character.

 

From his flash back, texts and pretty much everything about him, he has no buddies, kills everyone just because and has pretty much no allies.

Why would such a man be a buddy with the player for any reason? Because his loved ones died like him? He did the same for countless before the player.

Edited March 30, 2016 by Boombro