[QUOTE=AntorkaDelta;49829932]I'm not defending the institute or anything but I recall thinking early in the game that gen 1 synths were used by the institute as mechanised locusts, stripping areas of resources to dump into the institute's workbench.
I can't remember if the game backs this up or if the gen 1s are just on the surface for no apparent reason.[/QUOTE]
There are mentions of Gen 1 and 2 synths stripping towns for parts.
As for the replacements, it's obviously spies and political agents. Considering the railroad is right there and they can't seem to find them reliably, it makes sense that they would want to get any railroad sympathizers out of the picture by having eyes and ears on site to spot them out, and a synth is more discrete than an eyebot for that matter.
It's part of the reason why Piper wasn't already taken away by the Institute. She's not with the railroad, and doesn't try to liberate synths. Also if they removed her people would actually realize she was right about everything [sp]and the mayor would get plucked out of his office by angry men with pitchforks and torches.[/sp]
[QUOTE=TheRealRudy;49829952]why does the institute replace people on the surface with synths anyway, it seems pretty pointless to me? i can get people like the major of diamond city for example, but even then what do they gain from it when they don't want to be involved with business on the surface anyway? especially when your average wastelanders also get replaced, what's even the point apart from wasting resources on making said synths for those kind of things?[/QUOTE]
I think the safe assumption is that it possibly gives them eyes in different locations. Maybe they also do it in preparation for experiments that require surface work, like farming. It all boils down to either intel, or something that is of a benefit to the Institute.
That being said, [sp]it's not unusual for their replacements to run their course, as can be observed by reading the SRB terminal with a page on McDonough[/sp]
Seems to me like they're just doing it to keep the railroad at bay by constantly removing potential agents and sympathizers.
[QUOTE=Ganerumo;49829990]Seems to me like they're just doing it to keep the railroad at bay by constantly removing potential agents and sympathizers.[/QUOTE]
That's a good reason but I'd say Bethesda had to scrap or wasn't even able to start on a good chunk of lore about the Institute. Shit could have been tied in heavily with the cut water content seeing as the cut Institute Power Armor looked like a badass diving suit and the new DLC is revolving around (unfortunately) synths infesting a seaside town.
Which is odd since they've had since Fallout 3 to get everything in order for The Institute.
If it wasn't for Father having a sweet spot for you in the game and openly letting you get to him, you would have never even seen an inch of the Institute, and by extension neither would have any of the other factions.
The plot functions because of Father's nepotism, which backfires horribly if you join any other faction than the Institute at the end of the day.
Same deal with how New Vegas' story functions. Every faction knows that there's some shit brewing with the platinum chip, but as the carrier of the chip you get to see a lot more than any of the factions individually get to see. Everyone knows the Lucky 38 is here and that House is inside, but [I]you[/I] get to see because you have something of value to House, and you can abuse this trust to murder the shit out of him.
[editline]28th February 2016[/editline]
Also the BOS is unreasonably pissed at the Institute because Maxson is eager to prove himself as leader and also because they're likely still particularly fucking livid at this whole "Madison Li leaving for the Institute" business they had to go through ten years ago.
[QUOTE=TheRealRudy;49830019]seems pretty weird to me that this very advanced faction that has invented these advanced synths and teleportation are having such a hard time to find some small faction the railroad?? at this rate they're more likely to invent time travel or something before finding the railroad.
as for the other "spies and political agents", there doesn't seem that much "political plot" going on further in the commonwealth other than people sitting around doing nothing until "the sole survivor" comes around (if you could view that as political plot), and this name calling between the railroad and institute and the nazi bos, oh and preston and his crew who kinda sit on the fence and in the end suddenly also decide to go to war, for some reason, in the name of liberation and all that bullshit.
also, if they're dispatched to have "eyes and ears" on what's going on in the commonwealth, then they're doing a pretty shit job of things like not being able to have seen coming and defend themselves from the sudden dumb blind rage of the nazi bos going all "WE NEED TO LIBERATE THE COMMONWEALTH FROM THESE ABOMINATIONS OF NATURE, LETS CHARGE INTO THEIR HQ BLINDLY WITHOUT EVER HAVING MADE DIRECT CONTACT WITH THEM, AAAAAAAA" and being completely crushed when they decide to do so, with the bos finale turning into an anticlimactic overkill of killing defenseless scientists and stomping the occasional synth that walks in the way, and then nuking the complete shit out of the place without thinking "hmmm, perhaps some of this tech here cloud have been completely useful for general progression".
especially when you consider preston and his cool dudes and dudettes of minutemen, and even the railroad itself were able to do the exact same thing with far less resources and general power than the bos, yeah seems like that synth replacing completely paid off![/QUOTE]
Well, the sole survivor is basically the catalyst that really makes the downfall of most factions in the game possible. That's an important thing to remember, who knows how things would have turned out without that factor involved. The biggest mystery about the Institute was uncovered by the sole survivor.
And it's important to remember the Institute's main goal isn't weapons, or military technology. They're not Big Mountain, all their advanced technology goes into supporting life within their super structure and the synth production. Synths just happen to be multi-purpose and capable of being useful weapons because of how easily they can be mass-produced.
They might be aware of what is happening in the wasteland, but conquest isn't something they really ever intended to do, and probably have little experience with. They don't have an interest in waging war across the Commonwealth, but in the right circumstances, they can seriously drop the fucking hammer as evidenced by their end-game quest. In all the other endings where you go against them, you most certainly put them in a situation where they're at a huge disadvantage.
How is it shitty and close minded ? How is the Institute having shitty plans or being shortsighted somehow directly correlated to the game being poorly written, rather than the Institute being written from the start to have shitty shortsighted plans ?
The NCR in NV is written to be shortsighted as fuck. They can't keep spies at bay, they can't keep shit in check, and they're so tunnel visioned that without the player's intervention, Caesar's Legion would absolutely win in the long run because they'd crush resistance at the dam. Does that make the writing shitty and close minded, since the NCR isn't perfect and didn't think their shit through ?
Is Skyrim's civil war writing shitty and close minded because the Stormcloaks are written from the start to be retarded manchildren who don't actually have plans for the future ?
[editline]28th February 2016[/editline]
Practically speaking your point is that you don't like the writing because the factions didn't behave exactly how you wanted them to, which is childish as shit.
I think it's easy to explain how the institute gets all its resources. If they can completely master the art of creating humans how do we know they didn't also master the art of equivalent exchange as well. Just turn a bunch of dirt into microchips that easy.
[QUOTE=TheRealRudy;49830127]that's not it though. for example, the only reason the bos was turned from this pretty progressive (albeit pretty black and white) faction in fo3 (with nv playing further on that too by showing that the west bos wasn't progressing much by being stuck in their old ways) is because bethesda wanted/needed a "powerful" opposing faction for the institute, and thus they threw in maxson to turn them into sudden closeminded nazis.
seriously, i went with the bos on my first and only playthrough of the game (only really because they were the faction with liberty prime, the only awesome (forced) returning character from fo3 imo, i couldn't give a shit about their ideals since all factions were bad anyway) and i asked the living shit out of them why we would destroy the institute anyway, and they gave me the constant vague "because they're abominations of nature, they need to be destroyed hurr durr" while maxson's face almost spazzed out from gamebyro's attempt of trying make him look serious and edgy while saying.[/QUOTE]
I think they had the BoS change back to their original ideals because an ENORMOUS amount of people complained about Bethesda not understanding the source material and making them goody two shoes.
Woah, my dad is actually playing FONV now.
He bought it on release, said the intro was boring as fuck and he couldn't get into it, and hasn't touched it since.
He's played like 8 hours in the past day, seems hes liking it now.
[QUOTE=fulgrim;49829918]Now that you mention it, That was another thing I liked about house- he actually has a tangible plan for the future, he lays out what he hopes to achieve and expects you to be on board with his glorious vision. [sp] shaun [/sp] Says something incredibly vauge about re-defining humanity with the synths that he insists totally [i]aren't[/i] human and expects you to be on board with his glorious vision.
[B]Also I was going to point out that they clearly have factory's under CIT because you [sp] blast into one during the brotherhood ending [/sp] so i suppose that answers the dude who asked where microchips would be made.[/B][/QUOTE]
is there a screenshot or something of this?
i was pretty sure that area [sp]you laser your way into in the Brotherhood invasion was part of the abandoned ruins of CIT, it looked like nobody had touched it in decades.[/sp]
[editline]Edited:[/editline]
I looked it up, [sp]it's called Old Robotics and it's where Protectrons used to be manufactured (?). so i guess either CIT had a hand in producing Boston's Protectrons, possibly contracted by RobCo, or the Institute figured out how to make them and used them in their early days for labor. that might explain their ability to manufacture early generation Synths, although i would expect then that the place would be full of leftover Synth parts and components, not Protectron materials.[/sp]
Decided to use the wasteland spawns mod.
That was a mistake.
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/tEi4E7T.jpg[/IMG]
(Yes, there are THREE deathclaws after me. At level 12. With no explosives.)
Edit- It did it again. Thankfully grabbed my missile launcher.
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/UdTK839.jpg[/IMG]
Ok, look.
To paraphrase someone's very smart comment in, er, probably Forbes that I wish I kept, the world of Fallout doesn't need to make sense to work. It just needs to be internally consistent with its 50s pulp science fiction logic.
Fallout is a world where radiation really does turn people and animals into mutants, snacks can last 200 years without spoiling, atomic batteries can power robots and ray guns forever, aliens are real and SCIENCE! can put people's brains inside robot bodies and build devices that turn a radioactive wasteland into a flowering paradise.
So, spoilers aside (because I haven't reached the Institute yet- too busy building settlements), it makes perfect sense that there are crazy underground scientists building an army of robots and sending them out to randomly replace people, not because it's plausible, possible or worth doing but because it would make for a good pulp magazine story or a comic book plot.
This is the difference between Fallout and, say, the latest Witcher.
When you walk around the outskirts of Novigrad you see farmer huts, fishermen and even tanneries because that's the sort of stuff you'd see around a realistic middle ages city.
When you walk around Diamond City and see a little vegetable garden it's not there because of the gritty realism. It's there for the same reason there are perfectly positioned skeletons lying around diners, coffee cup and newspaper in hand, frozen perfectly in the moment of their death 200 fucking years ago. It's to sell the Fallout post apocalyptic look. Outside the city the world is frozen in the last moment of the great war forever. Inside the city people eke out a living in the remnants of the old world. That's it. Realism has nothing to do with it.
I mean, it's a game where a person that's days after defrosting into the world manages to gather enough crap to build and then populate new towns all over the region, farmland and automated gun turrets included, but everyone else over the last 200 years couldn't be arsed to clear the old skeletons out of their demolished hideout, let alone build something new?
And you're worried about how the institute has enough resources to build an army of robots?
I see 1 deathclaw and the background is riddled with film grain.
[QUOTE=Mattchewy;49830428]Decided to use the wasteland spawns mod.
That was a mistake.
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/tEi4E7T.jpg[/IMG]
(Yes, there are THREE deathclaws after me. At level 12. With no explosives.)[/QUOTE]
what's that outfit you got on? it looks decently hobo-ish.
[QUOTE=Pops;49830539]what's that outfit you got on? it looks decently hobo-ish.[/QUOTE]
It just got released. The Rebel armor.
[url]http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/10382/?[/url]
[QUOTE=ScumBunny;49830483]Ok, look.
To paraphrase someone's very smart comment in, er, probably Forbes that I wish I kept, the world of Fallout doesn't need to make sense to work. It just needs to be internally consistent with its 50s pulp science fiction logic.
Fallout is a world where radiation really does turn people and animals into mutants, snacks can last 200 years without spoiling, atomic batteries can power robots and ray guns forever, aliens are real and SCIENCE! can put people's brains inside robot bodies and build devices that turn a radioactive wasteland into a flowering paradise.
So, spoilers aside (because I haven't reached the Institute yet- too busy building settlements), it makes perfect sense that there are crazy underground scientists building an army of robots and sending them out to randomly replace people, not because it's plausible, possible or worth doing but because it would make for a good pulp magazine story or a comic book plot.
This is the difference between Fallout and, say, the latest Witcher.
When you walk around the outskirts of Novigrad you see farmer huts, fishermen and even tanneries because that's the sort of stuff you'd see around a realistic middle ages city.
When you walk around Diamond City and see a little vegetable garden it's not there because of the gritty realism. It's there for the same reason there are perfectly positioned skeletons lying around diners, coffee cup and newspaper in hand, frozen perfectly in the moment of their death 200 fucking years ago. It's to sell the Fallout post apocalyptic look. Outside the city the world is frozen in the last moment of the great war forever. Inside the city people eke out a living in the remnants of the old world. That's it. Realism has nothing to do with it.
I mean, it's a game where a person that's days after defrosting into the world manages to gather enough crap to build and then populate new towns all over the region, farmland and automated gun turrets included, but everyone else over the last 200 years couldn't be arsed to clear the old skeletons out of their demolished hideout, let alone build something new?
And you're worried about how the institute has enough resources to build an army of robots?[/QUOTE]
you're making two arguments here: one, that style takes priority over realism, which i don't disagree with, and two: that the fantastic elements of the Fallout world suggest that the rules of our real world no longer apply. this is a bad argument because it asserts that the existence of ray guns and super science excuses all other breaks from real world logic.
The Fallout setting, like those of nearly all other works of terrestrial fiction, gets its operating parameters from our real world. It then builds onto that set of established guidelines with creative thematic additions like super science, the fantastic effects of extreme radiation, the near-total shortage of fossil fuels, and the cynical nature of a society brought about by American exceptionalism that exacerbates international tensions.
Things like plasma weaponry don't exist in our real world, therefore, the writers of Fallout are allowed to use whatever rules they feel like to establish the way they work. Because we have no reference point in our knowledge to compare to Fallout's plasma rifles and casters, we have no complaints about the way they work in the games.
But complicated story elements that require real world rules to make sense, like the ability of a small and isolated group living in the basement of a university to manufacture thousands of advanced robots, are not excused by the existence of things like plasma guns. Now, if there had been a kind of technology that was based in the fictional realm of super science added by the writers, like say, an experimental matter recycler in the CIT basement, then we would be able to believe it. Since there isn't, however, it's not internally consistent, because it doesn't make sense within the rules of the world, which are borrowed from the real world.
Suspension of disbelief exists so that you can ignore small issues with consistencies rather than nitpick them all day long.
[QUOTE=TheRealRudy;49830657]
[media]https://twitter.com/DCDeacon/status/668802348140109824[/media]
[/QUOTE]
this is totally unrelated to the discussion at hand, but man this still pisses me off
like [I]why you gotta say shit like this pete[/I]
[QUOTE=DChapsfield;49830621]
But complicated story elements that require real world rules to make sense, like the ability of a small and isolated group living in the basement of a university to manufacture thousands of advanced robots, are not excused by the existence of things like plasma guns. Now, if there had been a kind of technology that was based in the fictional realm of super science added by the writers, like say, an experimental matter recycler in the CIT basement, then we would be able to believe it. Since there isn't, however, it's not internally consistent, because it doesn't make sense within the rules of the world, which are borrowed from the real world.[/QUOTE]
This is totally true, I won't excuse Bethesda's bad writing, but they did add some shortcuts so it isn't such a seriously glaring flaw. The Institute is said and shown to be much bigger than what you see, it's not a huge leap to think that somewhere behind the closed doors there's strip mines or more facilities. I mean the whole protection factory thing kind of supports this. Who knows what else is there, abandoned, that they don't even need anymore because they're so far ahead?
If anything I'm scratching my head at how they kind of just procure genetic material to paint over the synth skeleton to make gen 3's. That's the kind of super over the top sci-fi stuff that I don't think we will ever achieve in real life ever, and I'm an optimist about future scientific advancements.
[QUOTE=TheRealRudy;49830657]you're giving a same-ish answer as when people asked uncle pete why a terminal states jet is a pre-war chem or that a ghoul kid survived 200 years in a fridge without food;
it's not about how realistic things are and writing it off as weird 50s science, we know fallout is full of that, but it's about consistency.[/QUOTE]
This is totally Pete just being a shitter though.
[QUOTE=WillerinV1.02;49830667]this is totally unrelated to the discussion at hand but this still pisses me off
like [I]why you gotta say shit like this pete[/I][/QUOTE]
I doubt the guy was even aware of the discussion and probably didn't realize he'd be scrutinized so much for it to be honest.
[QUOTE=Ganerumo;49830678]I doubt the guy was even aware of the discussion and probably didn't realize he'd be scrutinized so much for it to be honest.[/QUOTE]
It doesn't really matter if he was worried whether or not he'd be scrutinized for it, it's just a shitty comment to make. When a fan cares so much about the game you're representing that they can nitpick something like that and bring it to your attention, don't respond with such a dismissive, underhanded comment.
[QUOTE=Notanything;49829977]I think the safe assumption is that it possibly gives them eyes in different locations. Maybe they also do it in preparation for experiments that require surface work, like farming. It all boils down to either intel, or something that is of a benefit to the Institute.
That being said, [sp]it's not unusual for their replacements to run their course, as can be observed by reading the SRB terminal with a page on McDonough[/sp][/QUOTE]
If they didn't have a bunch of synths replacing people for no reason nobody would know or care about them. If they wanted eyes on the surface all they really had to do was send a few synths to live there and report back every once in a while, there's no point in replacing a bunch of people by the shitload if it's only going to cause commotion and draw attention to yourself.
I don't see how the institute is anything but dumb and cartoonishly evil when they do shit like replacing people with synths to test GMOs, it's not "shortsighted" or anything like that, it's bewildering. They try to set up this "mystery" as to how the institute works and weather or not they're actually a boogeyman or is there a truth behind it that makes sense. But nope, you get there and they're just zany like that, there's some bullshit about being humanity's best hope when you're producing a bunch of sexbots but who the hell is gonna buy that. The only reason anyone would consider them as an ending is because the other factions are equally dumb or just straight-up boring.
The enclave were just nazis who loved the good ole genocide, no bullshit. The institute is someone's poor attempt at making a morally ambiguous faction, with the brotherhood being more or less the same. They come off as either stupid or stupid and straight-up terrible.
[QUOTE=TheRealRudy;49830685]i wouldn't call things like the entire foundation of where the institute gets all their resources for their stuff or where the super mutants in boston came from small issues and nitpicking when being frustrated the game doesn't give a damn and provides vague to zero answers about it.[/QUOTE]
Complaining about how the Institute gets their iron and silicon to manufacture their robots is as nitpicky as it gets.
Their foundation is already clear enough. We know who and where and why and how. What exactly do you need to be satisfied ? A fifty page long document about the foundation of the Institute, an exact ledger of the production input and output, a detailed 4K map of every piece of rock ever mined and dug into a room by the Institute, detailed schematics of their teleporter explaining the exact mechanics behind it and the coordinates to each source of raw material for every single component ?
Why does it even matter. Does it matter to know where Caesar gets all his sports gear, or why he even uses shitty sports gear to begin with ?
[QUOTE=honestfam;49830694]If they didn't have a bunch of synths replacing people for no reason nobody would know or care about them. If they wanted eyes on the surface all they really had to do was send a few synths to live there and report back every once in a while, there's no point in replacing a bunch of people by the shitload if it's only going to cause commotion and draw attention to yourself.
I don't see how the institute is anything but dumb and cartoonishly evil when they do shit like replacing people with synths to test GMOs, it's not "shortsighted" or anything like that, it's bewildering. They try to set up this "mystery" as to how the institute works and weather or not they're actually a boogeyman or is there a truth behind it that makes sense. But nope, you get there and they're just zany like that, there's some bullshit about being humanity's best hope when you're producing a bunch of sexbots but who the hell is gonna buy that. The only reason anyone would consider them as an ending is because the other factions are equally dumb or just straight-up boring.
The enclave were just nazis who loved the good ole genocide, no bullshit. The institute is someone's poor attempt at making a morally ambiguous faction, with the brotherhood being more or less the same. They come off as either stupid or stupid and straight-up terrible.[/QUOTE]
Replacing people is pointless if it's not the right person. There is really only so much a simple walk-in observer can do, but if say a leader, or important figure gets replaced without any issue, then that has a lot more options for intelligence than just simply being some guy that wanders in one day and settles into the corner of the room.
By the time synths were already replacing people and mingling with the general population, I'm pretty sure the Institute's reputation amongst the surface population had sunk from just being mysterious to being considered outright hostile, and should be met equally.
The accident at Diamond City, and the interpretation of the fall of the Provisional Government solidified them being just boogeymen. With mutual mistrust, the Institute didn't really have any objections performing their surface operations, seeing as how the whole of the Commonwealth saw them as boogeymen, and knew they existed.
They're also probably replacing people because the locals became too wary of outsiders. After all the first gen 3 incident was some random bloke walking in and going berserk, not someone undercover.
Where is the "morally ambiguous" thing coming from about the Institute anyway ? They're entitled self righteous cunts who are willing to exploit the surface and who went as far as to engineer their own slaves to work faster. Their final goal is to essentially wipe out everything topside to replace it with their own creations. They're evil fuckers. The closest there is to them in New Vegas is House and at least House doesn't want to nuke the wasteland again, he just wants to get the fuck out and allow an elite to get to some other planet and restart humanity there, away from the pile of garbage that Earth has become.
[QUOTE=WillerinV1.02;49830667]this is totally unrelated to the discussion at hand, but man this still pisses me off
like [I]why you gotta say shit like this pete[/I][/QUOTE]
Because it's not his problem. He's a the president of Marketing for god's sake, if they really wanted to hound someone about the writing, why not one of the actual writers? Or Todd who oversees everything for the most part?
That's what frustrates me every time I see those tweets.
[QUOTE=Ganerumo;49830729]
Why does it even matter. Does it matter to know where Caesar gets all his sports gear, or why he even uses shitty sports gear to begin with ?[/QUOTE]
Sports gear is a much less valuable resource than veritable mountains of iron and silicon, though. Why he uses shitty sports gear is explained, too. Partly by it's low-value as armor. This isn't delivered to the player with a 'fifty page long document', either. It's all inferred by its logic within the universe.
I think this whole discussion, at this point, is silly, tbh, but you have to admit that in a universe where star-trek level 3D printers that can create something out of [del]nothing[/del] poker chips exists, it's a little odd that there isn't any details hinting at stuff like this.
[QUOTE=The_J_Hat;49830765]Because it's not his problem. He's a the president of Marketing for god's sake, if they really wanted to hound someone about the writing, why not one of the actual writers? Or Todd who oversees everything for the most part?
That's what frustrates me every time I see those tweets.[/QUOTE]
People are so eager to hate everything Bethesda does that they get angry at the wrong people :v:
I'm hardly a fanboy, all I do half the time is criticize Bethesda's choices but even I think people need to tone it down a little
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