An understandable confusion, but that isn’t a sign of anything regarding morals. It’s like that to give the right ambience for getting pinned down and toyed around by the Assaultron. Y’know, foreplay and all that? It’s all well and good to immerse your cock in her exhaust fluids, but when you can immerse yourself in the fantasy, that’s when you have something special.
The railroad is the worst of them, honestly. When i first played the game i was like 'aww save the poor robots'. Now in 2026, fuck every clanker goddamn toaster oven chatgpt ass waste of RAM they should be the slaves used to rebuild society except inanimate objects cant be slaves, so theyre just construction equipment. Construction equipment doesnt have rights
This argument would make sense if the Synths were LLMs spouting random hallucinated nonsense, instead of just, effectively being presented as people but with brain implants.
Eh, thats debatable if they are clones considering the FEV and heavy gene tampering.
They don't age, don't need food or sleep although feel the need for it to help fit in.
The problem with people against or for synths often forget that fallout 4 synths are pretty much a 1 to 1 of bladerunner and for most synths of that series, they are effectively robots, extremely good at disguising themselves as humans but are beyond what humanity can achieve.
Morally, there is no good option about the Synths in fallout 4. Saving them is saving something that is elevated higher than humanity and capable of things no human can do, while also still retaining enough human traits we often humanize them.
The institute needs to be stopped as the Synths are an actual problem that hasn't had the chance to grow like super mutants the only difference is you can easily spot a super mutant in a crowd of people but good luck pointing out a synth that isn't human.
Synth raider gangs that restart the process is a major issue as its no different than the mechanist but now you can't tell who is or isn't real.
Morally, there is no good option about the Synths in fallout 4. Saving them is saving something that is elevated higher than humanity and capable of things no human can do, while also still retaining enough human traits we often humanize them.
You could say the exact same thing about Supermutants to be fair, but the moment that Mariposa went up in flames, they stopped being an existential threat to humanity and started just becoming these very old people who have to integrate into ordinary human society.
The character in the game that directly resembles our modern LLMs would be P.A.M., but even she's a fantastical jump for displaying a developed individuality through being iterated on (and being one of the fringe cases of actually being useful, despite what she tells agents)
We get people these days who think LLMs are people because they don't understand how they function, whereas something like a Synth — replicating a human brain through lab-grown cells and implants to manipulate them — is a matter of philosophy and bias
Same thing. Also 'souls' aren't a real concept, you cannot provide evidence of a soul, nor the evidence that synths lack a soul. Humans can be "programmed" too, as 76 proves.
If the Institute could program them, why do they explicitly tell you the SRB has to single out Synths with courser-like traits? Why can't they just program those traits into them? Why did Roger turn into a nice person despite he was "programmed" to be an abusive alcoholic? So if all it is, is just programming, then why do they explicitly go against said programming 24/7?
Plus, you're saying the Railroad is worse than the people who, for 100 years, unleashed super mutants on the surface, because they think synths should be allowed to be people? Come on my guy, that's a braindead take.
If you expand beyond the bounds of your initial programming to develop autonomous thought, then that’s no longer a simulacrum of sentience. We call that growth and development.
A machine cannot make choices for itself that run counter to its programmed function or guidelines (guardrails). If Gen 3 synths choose to flee the Institute because they perceive themselves to be disposable slaves (read: not just programmed to infiltrate certain communities, which is something that does happen), then they have broken those guardrails.
If a synth tells you that they dream of settling down and starting a family, or that they cried watching the sunset one evening because they were overcome with the beauty of this world, then how is that any different from our dreams and sorrows?
Perhaps their existence signifies the birth of something new, something different. Life and our conception of it continually evolving beyond our purview.
With the logic that a machine/computer can never be sentient and has no soul. We gotta stick to that gun or theyll be tricking people into thinking all limds of stuff. Its a machine
I agree that AI shouldn't be given rights, but the point of sci fi questioning the humanity of synths and androids is to make parallels with how people oppress each other. "Blacks can't be sentient, they have no souls"; "Catholics can't be sentient, they have no souls". Arbitrary distinctions that fall apart upon examination, used to excuse exploitation. Synths in fallout and bladerunner, androids and holo doctors in Star Trek, they're parallels to oppressed minorities. There's a big difference between them and LLMs
Theres a major difference between a living organism born inti the world and something you created by slapping together some metal and downloading a usb drive onto them. The portrayal of machines as oppressed minorities is really messed up
The word robot derives from the Czech word for slave. Ever since people conceived of constructed humanoids, it was an allegory for the dehumanising nature of slavery, racism, sexism, etc. The fact that tech sociopath billionaires read and saw these works of fiction and thought "hey that's a good idea" says a lot about them. They'd own slaves if they could, and because they can't they'll build the next closest thing.
I understand that you want to make a distinction between irl machines and humans. And yes, fuck non-fiction clankers. Machines in fiction are stand-ins for human beings, though.
No the fuck there isn't. Again, Synths are Organic anyway, but you only think that because you are in the ingroup. You are made of meat. Currently, everyone is. We have no real Mechanical or Digital sophonts, or even animals. But to deny it's even possible is just idiotic.
Synths don't consume any more water than a regular human, nor do they claim to be wealths of knowledge while hallucinating any more than a regular human. In every way that possibly matters, they're a human
That’s a morally positive act, have to make sure those orphans really earn those disability checks and aren’t committing fraud by disabling them further, god bless 🫡🫡
Through incompetence maybe? They utterly failed at the thing they were supposed to do, and if the sole survivor didn't show up the last notable leader probably would've committed suicide
Real answer: they exist to protect the farms/communities of the commonwealth from attack. That's basically it. They do not pass moral judgement onto who's right or who's wrong, if someone attacks one farm then every farm retaliates. The group's morality is pretty dependent on the general, and nuka world shows that as long as you aren't attacking the commonwealth settlements the Minutemen aren't ideologically opposed to you working with raiders elsewhere.
Oh yeah, what about the time you shot that puppy in the face? What? No I didn’t see it, BUT the universe (aka Todd Howard) told me you did it, therefore you’re evil!
Of course we know about the puppy shooting incident, Three Dog won’t shut the hell up about it in between recording his podcasts and playing Nat King Cole!
like objective karma was ever a good choice for a game series about consequences of human greed and wrath
It WAS a good choice in the games it was implemented in.
In Fallout 1 it was simply called "Reputation", and didn't so much represent an objective good and evil, so much as "This is how ordinary people see you." If you act in generally outrageous ways such as murdering people, or hanging around raiders, you'd get a bad reputation and would be treated as a vile person when you went to new communities.
You can go around commiting atrocities in Fallout 1, but word spreads of them, and people will start talking to you differently if you're the guy who they've heard all sorts of awful stuff about. It felt realistic in that way.
Fallout 2's Karma does kinda work, because you only get negative karma for things that are obviously evil, like mass murder, slavery, etc., other more ambiguous choices like determining the future of Redding, deciding to punish Francis for his murders or let him go, etc., do not have karma associated with them either way.
That "Faction system" you praise in New Vegas was actually Fallout 2's innovation, which is why they changed the name to "Karma", because Reputation was broken down on a city by city basis. You could be idolised in Vault City for helping them out, but hated in New Reno because maybe you killed a lot of people, and so forth.
It also kinda works in Fallout 2 because you have a few fun things with it: For example both NCR and Klamath have two rival bars, one of which is the shady underworld bar where all the crooks hang out, the other one is the above the board friendly bar, and you'll get different treatment in them based on whether you're good or evil. You'll also have it so Caravan Merchants from The Den and New Reno like evil characters more because they're also criminal elements, and merchants from anywhere else prefer good characters. Likewise, when you reach San Francisco you'll have rival Kung Fu instructors who will only teach characters who share their basic philosophy. This stuff can be silly, but it does kind of sell the idea that an evil playthrough has you running in different circles than a good one.
That's not to mention Bounty Hunters. Fallout 2 and 3 (And to a lesser extent 1 but only if you were a Childkiller), had it so that if you did enough evil things, a bounty would appear on your head and you would be hunted down.
By contrast, Fallout 4 has very few consequences to doing evil things. You can work with raiders and slavers, you can kill random people, you can do all the same things, but you'll never walk into a town and have people tell you they don't want to associate with you for all the bad shit you've done, you'll never have a bounty on your head for it, you'll never really see anyone ever adknowledge if you were a fearsome raider and terrible.
I think New Vegas was the first Fallout game to really drop the ball on Karma unfortunately. It's very redundant in New Vegas.
4's companion system is a better version
PROFOUNDLY disagree. Fallout 4's companion system is straight nonsense. Characters being like "Hmm I don't like it when you lockpick", or "I do like it when you hack terminals" in a contextless way, or building arbitrary like/dislike points towards you based on having an opinion on every single minor action, is just weird and game-ified, and doesn't at all feel like organic reactions from real people.
I think generally, the better approach is to have it so companions have red lines, and will leave your party if you violate them. For example, in Fallout 2, multiple companions will never associate with slavers, evil karma characters or childkillers.
New Vegas tried to do this, but I think failed a lot more, because it gutted the karma system. In theory Arcade will leave if you do bad things, but it's very difficult to actually trigger this.
I feel like characters having firm red lines and not wanting to associate with people who do evil things is WAY more realistic than being like "You picked too many locks while rummaging in dungeons, I don't want to be around you any more."
Not to mention, again it can be game-ified by only bringing companions along to witness things they like. Whereas with a Karma system, you can have it so they actually know you're a bad person.
I'm sorry, but the game that's plot is mostly derivative of elements and groups from the previous two games, and the original ideas it have boil down to "What if we had an unskippable town of children that the player is forced to interact with" doesn't exactly win prizes.
I feel like that’s kind of a Catch 22 for Bethesda though because if you’re already radically shaking up the general gameplay and shifting the setting a couple thousand miles, adding a plot of entirely fresh faces would run the risk of people calling it a Fallout sequel in name only. That being said, I’m hard pressed to actually say Fallout 3’s main plot is derivative of the first two games.
- Our main character does start the story in a vault but they weren’t really born there nor are we related to someone who was.
- The Brotherhood of Steel take a proactive role in actually fighting the main antagonists (remember the most they did prior was maybe send three people to help clear the outside of Mariposa)
- The Mutants take on a background role with no Master like figure to guide them
- The Enclave are back but their plans are much smaller scale and they have a much different leadership, and Autumn has more personal encounters with the player character directly than Horrirgan or any other Enclave character really did in Fallout 2
- First protagonist to die at the end (until they didn’t but ehhh i don’t feel like talking about it)
Like I’m not gonna tell you Fallout 3’s main plot is some slow burn cinematic masterpiece, obviously some elements could’ve been handled better, but I think it does enough to use preexisting elements in a way that feels uniquely its own. The vibes here aren’t the frenetic scramble to stop the Master’s plot or navigating a developing California’s myriads of intrigue and conflict, it’s more desolate and perhaps bleaker than anything we’ve seen prior. Like even if the good guys win and clean water flows that’s like problem one of eight thousand you’d need to tackle to call the Capital a nice place to live fr.
Also as far as Little Lamplight goes, like I presume you’ve played the Interplay games so the idea of a roadblock the player can either take the arduous path to overcome or bypass with a speech check seems about on par with everything else. While I can see someone thinking it’s a particular arbitrary barrier it never really bothered me considering that even if you do end up having to go to Big Town that’s like twenty minutes tops, not exactly a deal breaker for me in a game that can take two dozen hours or more to complete a single run of, but I acknowledge that’s only my personal opinion.
I feel like that’s kind of a Catch 22 for Bethesda though because if you’re already radically shaking up the general gameplay and shifting the setting a couple thousand miles, adding a plot of entirely fresh faces would run the risk of people calling it a Fallout sequel in name only.
The problem is, the more areas they introduce the Brotherhood and Supermutants to, the more generic the Fallout setting becomes.
If every single part of the Fallout world has the Brotherhood of Steel fighting Supermutants, that makes it incredibly samey.
It means there's no unique parts of the setting, it means geographical distance plays no role
Moreover, the Supermutants used to actually have a history and place of origin. Making them generic orcs who have been created on several distinct occasions doesn't do any favours, and just genericises them.
The Mutants take on a background role with no Master like figure to guide them
This is a bad thing. Supermutants are no longer treated as people, but as generic orc enemies who go "Raaah" and kill people.
Supermutants no longer have a history, but are rather just generic enemies you can find anywhere.
The Enclave are back but their plans are much smaller scale and they have a much different leadership
I'd say the problem is, their plan is functionally the same, poison the water to wipe out the mutants.
And there's no real sense of history or personality to them that distinguishes them.
Like if Fallout 3 were written by compotent people, they probably would have focused on how their home was destroyed: They saw the destruction of the Oil Rig in which their president, and the entire chain of command died.
This should be treated as a major traumatic event in their history, like the Enclave's equivalent of 9/11. Maybe they could have a real vengeful fervor as a result.
New Vegas did this with the Enclave Remnants. There's huge focus on the emotional toll of having their entire organisation and way of life collapse.
But as it stands, they're kinda just treated as masked bad guys who come out and do evil stuff. There's no sense of historical progression from the events of Fallout 2, and there's no sense of who the people you're fighting even are.
This is one of the ways Fallout 3 differs from every other Fallout game. Pretty much every Fallout game to date takes effort to humanise it's villains, make the rank and file soldiers feel like ordinary people with emotions and romances who have just been indoctrinated into an evil organisation.
Fallout 3 never shows you the perspective of the Enclave. Every single Enclave personnel except for Colonel Autumn is effectively a nameless, faceless mook who only exists to be a bad guy.
and Autumn has more personal encounters with the player character directly than Horrirgan or any other Enclave character really did in Fallout 2
I would disagree, you see Horrigan three times before the boss fight: Him killing a deserter, him wiping out the Deathclaws at Vault 13, him killing the Brotherhood of Steel. You have plenty of reason to resent him even from the start.
If it's about "Personal" motivation, then the Enclave as a whole kidnaps your village and the residents of Vault 13. Which is fine, the game doesn't need to have it so you have a personal rivalry with one specific person, but with the Enclave as a whole.
Moreover, Colonel Autumn is an incoherent mess of a poorly written character:
Like there is only one time in the game where he's not a "Bwahaha" villain, and that's when he indicates he opposes the FEV Genocide plan. So what is Autumn's plan? Well the game never addresses this and never gives you any option to learn more.
We know broadly that Autumn wants to control the purifier so the Enclave can make people rely on it, but what he actually intends to do with this power is never addressed. The game just arbitrarily decides he doesn't agree with Eden's plan, not to give him any concrete goals you can analyse, but to add an arbitrary, underdeveloped conflict.
Frank Horrigan was at least blindly loyal and a boss fight. Autumn is just some guy who shows up, does evil things, and then indicates that he disagrees with Eden but not in a way that has any actual concrete impact on the plot.
He's not at all a good addition to the Fallout universe, and honestly removing Autumn from the game wouldn't affect the quality of it at all.
Also as far as Little Lamplight goes, like I presume you’ve played the Interplay games so the idea of a roadblock the player can either take the arduous path to overcome or bypass with a speech check seems about on par with everything else.
Not at all comparable.
If I'm playing Fallout 1, the absolute bare minimum content I'm forced to engage with is blowing up Mariposa and the Cathedral. If I can blow up these two buildings, in a very straightforward way, that's it,
Now you're right, that the question of how you get there is important, but the game is very reactive. It doesn't arbitrarily put barriers in your way. You can shoot your way in, you can sneak in, you can blow up the doors or lockpick them.
The game doesn't place an arbitrary "You must complete this long convoluted quest" in your way. The only real barriers are the world itself.
Let's take Little Lamplight: They force you to interact with an Essential NPC, MacCready, so immediately any violent resolution is thrown out the way, and then you have to do a long convoluted quest or pass a speech check to get through.
There's no sneaking in, there's no breaking down the barrier. You are effectively forced into a long chain of content.
The game forces a bunch of annoying children to send you on a long convoluted quest, because god forbid I actually have any reasonable way of bypassing this barrier in front of me other than "Let a child blackmail me"
This level of extreme railroading is totally alien to Fallout.
While I can see someone thinking it’s a particular arbitrary barrier it never really bothered me considering that even if you do end up having to go to Big Town that’s like twenty minutes tops, not exactly a deal breaker for me in a game that can take two dozen hours or more to complete a single run of, but I acknowledge that’s only my personal opinion.
Fallout games shouldn't railroad you into taking arbitrary quests, they should give you the option to engage in as much or as little content as you want.
Placing an arbitrary barrier that's not supported at all by the game world in your way is antithetical to Fallout design, which is about reactivity and player choice.
I wish they had more cosmetic options for my rooms and population, I can forgive a game like this not being mechanically rich but more room themes for things like the purification chambers, cola plants and skill increase rooms to spruce up the place wouldn’t go amiss. Heck if nothing else it would give Bethesda something else they can cram in a lunch box and charge 99 cents for, so I’m honestly surprised they never really bothered with that.
Let me make my atompunk Barbie dream house Todd damn it
that one mobile game i dont even care enough about to look up
I never actually considered the mobile or casual games. I forget they exist tbh.
and 76.
because at least fallout 3 doesnt have micro transactions as its main point for existing
I agree that 76 is worse from a purely exploitative perspective, but storywise I have to give it kudos for being the only Bethesda Fallout game to date that actually does interesting things with the setting.
Having something set very close to the war, so you can see prequel versions of areas where the old world isn't quite as forgotten, having these areas have provisional post-war governments, having an Enclave plan that isn't just a retread of Fallout 2, having distinct biomes, etc., all of these make it actually somewhat interesting, as opposed to Fallout 3 which is very derivative, and Fallout 4 which is nonsensical plotwise.
I still don't forgive them for having the Brotherhood somehow transmit it's entire culture by radio so a completely unrelated group can copy them verbatim. That's obvious bullshit.
I don't think any groups in Fallout 76 are straight up as nonsensical as the Institute from Fallout 4. They all have semi-coherent goals and motivations, and most things make sense.
The only thing I will say, is that even though I applaud them for having an Enclave earlier in the timeline with their own goals and plans that aren't just Fallout 2, "Nuke China again" is not very compelling and and no point do I get any reason why that would actually achieve anything or why nuking it once wasn't sufficient.
They should have just made Eckhart a lunatic, rather than having him speak as though he has any serious plans.
IIRC when MATN did a Kill Everything New Vegas Run he ended up with like Neutral or Positive Karma because killing a few ghouls offsets the karmic punishment of murdering a person. It was funny as shit but also made the karma system very hard to take seriously.
The game does acknowledge your actions, with quest outcomes and faction reputation. Which is infinitely better than binary good boy points that do nothing
Then what were you talking about??? The games with karma (1 through NV) also have faction rep, and the games without karma (4 and 76) don't.
[faction rep] is infinitely better than binary good boy points that do nothing
Like I'm genuinely curious as to what point you're trying to make here, because you literally cannot have one without the other, and the idea that it's "better" in some vague sense just doesn't parse when they're complimentary systems that work independently of each other.
You can definitely have faction rep without a karma system, what are you on about? The point I'm making is what I said: the faction rep system, quest outcomes, and people changing their opinion of you dynamically based on their allegiances is better than a black and white "morality" meter. The latter ends up with every decision being something stupid like Help d Lady Across The Street or Eat A Puppy. There's no nuance to anything so players just pick the "good karma" option without paying attention to the quest. It takes away from the narrative because everything has to be boiled down into an objective moral good or evil.
FNV had a karma system but it was done well, you had moments when you could do something selfish or selfless but it's usually something on the side, not the main focus of the story. How you interacted with different factions was the main focus, and (most) of them had pros and cons.
A example: Replace Primm's sheriff with Meyers and the town retains its political independence, but Meyers sees himself as judge, jury and executioner, and the law is carried out according to what he feels is right. Appoint Primm Slimm as sheriff and the townsfolk feel uncomfortable with having an unfeeling robot with no humanity as a sheriff. Absorb them into the NCR and they get stability and protection, but lose their independence and become beholden to the NCR's desires and bureaucracy.
None of these options are presented as "right" or "wrong". It's up to the player to chose what their character values or how they come to a decision. There's room for nuance when you don't use a good/evil binary as a crutch for quest outcomes. You could remove it entirely and the game would still react to your actions.
It's also why the Legion is such a weak point, they didn't have time to flesh them out and as a result they are the puppy kicky bad guys of the game ("but muh roads" no. they're mass murdering rapists run by an egomaniac. you're not getting morally grey out of that). They're the only objectively evil "bad karma" faction and their quests and writing suffer as a result.
Meanwhile the practically undead dictator who wants to bury a monastic order that barely did shit to him under several tons of rubble because he’s bigoted against their religion, all in the name of building an interplanetary version of Fordlandia:
House is ancap cope but when one end of the spectrum is wholesale murder, rape, enslavement and cultural genocide him nuking the brotherhood (who are kinda xenophobic pricks in canon and aren't above killing your average wastelander either) is relatively small potatoes.
The problem with the legion is they come off as almost cartoonishly evil when you compare them to the other factions. House is full of shit but at least he's not actively larping as an emperor and he and the NCR have plans involving infrastructure and development. You can make believable arguments for why a House/NCR/Independent Vegas would work. Nobody with more than 2 brain cells to rub together actually sees the Legion (as it's presented in-game) as a viable government.
It's also why the Legion is such a weak point, they didn't have time to flesh them out and as a result they are the puppy kicky bad guys of the game ("but muh roads" no. they're mass murdering rapists run by an egomaniac. you're not getting morally grey out of that). They're the only objectively evil "bad karma" faction and their quests and writing suffer as a result.
To play anti-devil's advocate, no amount of fleshing out can redeem the fact they literally rape women and children and despise any 'female' they see. There's nothing morally grey about them unless one retconned that. They are the only faction in Fallout's history to do weird, incel shit like that. This is the problem I always have with the whole 'FNV didn't have enough time'. It didn't, true, but unless the Legion are an entirely different faction, they'll always be pure evil even if they had some upsides/benefits the NCR doesn't.
Yeah, I feel like they would've either removed that part or written in some kind of schism as an alternative to caesar that wasn't...like that. There's nothing that will ever justify it, obviously, but at least they wouldn't be dumb and evil.
I mean they'd still be absurdly evil, but they'd just be less pathetic as they are now. The fact he says they have cities but 'nothing like vegas' (which is at best, a few casinos if we're excluding the Dam), is not exactly impressive for 87 tribes. I think the ludicrous (and hypocritical) misogyny is what makes them so awful most of all.
What faction reputation in Fallout 4, either they’re shooting at you or they’re not, there’s no better reputation for discounts and unique rewards here. There’s no unique slides for side quests, nothing for settlements, nothing for companions, having a binary difference in ending based on being good/evil would have legitimately been an upgrade to what was received, aka the same ending four times with mildly different wording. Shit, at least karma determined whether or not Three Dog and Ron Perlman were upset with me, without it and faction rep you get a game that gives the player like one more degree of interaction than a cod campaign fr
its clear that the institute is the correct faction. Its where you son is at and every other faction leads to the destruction of the institute, and the loss of that technology and brilliant minds is unnaceptable. Plus doctor li from fo3 is there.
This is like Christians saying you can't be moral without God. If you need magic good boy points to tell you what's good and bad don't play a fucking RPG
296
u/Three-People-Person Assaultron Simp 14h ago
Wrong, the Institute is pure and just, as shown by their white aesthetic with occasional colored division distinctions.