Two questions about The Institute...(possible spoilers)

[CrashMasterJMM]

1. Has anyone discovered if there's a way to free the synths after you become director, or for that matter, take a different approach than Shawn?

 

2. Is there a way to defeat the Institute and NOT blow it up?

[Wunderbot]

1. Nope.

2. Nope.

 

It's a bit of a shame, but there's not a whole lot of freedom there. Siding with anyone but the Institute itself will eventually force you to blow it up. I suppose you could just shoot everyone inside, but the game wouldn't recognize it as an actual end to the main story. As Director you also don't have any more freedom. You can make a few decisions about how to respond to situations you get during quests, like when you get confronted with protests against you becoming Director, but you can't change the main course of the Institute. I suppose that's because most of them are already opposed to the idea of a newcomer/outsider becoming Director and they wouldn't really accept major changes from you.

[Raycheetah]

2. May be because Bethesda doesn't want to have to deal with a powerful MacGuffin like the Molecular Relay in future installments of the Fallout franchise. It would make perfect sense for the Brotherhood to seize that technology (along with everything else in the Institute), but then the next time the BoS appears in a Fallout game, Beth has to account for the possibility that you A) Sided with them and B) actually defeated the Institute. Even if you took the Institute with, say, the Minutemen, it makes little sense to blow the place up, but the problem remains. Beth could simply decide on a "canon" ending, say BOS wins, takes tech, or just the opposite, Railroad wins, does bupkis with the tech, but simply annihilating it at the end of the main questline simplifies things.

 

Shame, really. ='[.]'=