An idea of how I would rewrite Fallout 4 has been rattling in my head. Characters will be shuffled around and their motives will be different. I’ll expand on the characters and factions changes in other post because this post will end up being way too long. For this post I just want make changes to the main story. This will mainly apply to our main character, Shaun and the Institute.
The game will begin with your character being woken up from cyro sleep. Codsworth the Mr Handy robot is the one who welcomes into the world. Codsworth will belong to vault tech and is not yours like in the original. Codsworth will explain your player character seems to be suffering from a bit of amnesia from being frozen for so long. Codsworth will try to get you to remember who you are. This will lead into the customization screen and you’ll also choose your special stats. Afterwards Codsworth will explain he doesn’t know why everyone is dead. You can pass a speech check where he explains that someone activated him and told him to release you. He doesn’t know who or why. You can of course look around the vault and if you pay close attention you will notice one of the vault dwellers has a gun shot wound. If you search them you can find a wedding ring. After you finish exploring the vault you and Codsworth will leave the vault and head to Sanctuary Hill.
I feel placing the opening sequence later in the story makes for an interesting mystery. Who are you? Who were those people with you in the vault with you and why are the all dead? Why did someone release you? This way you can get to know your character and decided who they are by the way you play. You did not need some holotape that over explains your backstory and will always be there no matter what. Did we need to know that Nate and Nora were a solider and lawyer? No. And I understand that some people don’t like Codsworth being a household Mr Handy because they were generally used in military bases or as guards. Making Codsworth a vault tech Mr. Handy that was activated by Shaun to wake up your character a bit more believable. I will expand on Codsworth in this new role in another post.
The game can pretty much proceed as normal as you meet the Synth Detective Nick Valentine and he takes you Dr. Amari in The Memory Den in Good Neighbor. Remember your character is suffering from slight amnesia and the pods in The Memory Den will help you unlock the mystery of what happened in the vault. When you are hooked up to the memory pod the original the opening sequence set during pre-war will play out. This is where you’re revealed to have a spouse and baby, then the bombs fell, you were rushed to the vault and frozen. So the random vault dweller with the gunshot wound whose ring you probably sold for caps was your spouse. But how did they die? The memory den will glitch. You’ll see a man in front of cryo pod and before you can get anymore answers the memory starts glitching and you are pulled from the memory. Dr. Amari will explain that your character seems to repressing the memory and there was a danger of hurting you if she tried to force you to remember. Nick will comment that he knows the man who is Kellogg and you will track him down like in the original story. When you retrieve the chip from Kellogg’s brain you watch from his perspective that he murdered your spouse all while you helpless banged against your cryo pod and took your baby to the Institute. The same Institute that your character has learned from the locals is a terror of the Common Wealth. There will be a memory where you can see old Shaun but the player doesn’t know that this is our son yet. It will be very obvious who those persons that gave your character extreme proportions. But for now you will only know this person as Kellogg's boss and the leader of the Institute. Shaun will tell Kellogg to track down and kill Virgil and Kellogg will state in the memory that Vigil is in the glowing sea so he couldn’t get to him. Your next objective is to find Vigil and find a way to save your son from the Institute.
Because I moved the orginal pre-war back story I didn’t want to show the killing of your spouse again from Kellogg’s perspective. It just keeps the pace flowing. In the orginal story showing your spouse’s death once was tragic. Showing it again from a different angle is just “Alright cool, I can see my character banging their hands against the glass.” As you tried to find Kellogg you should have learned with your interactions with the NPCs of the world you should be able to draw your conclusions of the Institute. How much of what people say is true? If they really are that bad what does that mean for your son? You now can put a face to who is in charge of all the abductions and fear mongering. When you find Virgil he can confirm all the horrible things the Institute has done but also the good as well. Vigil can put that doubt in your mind that maybe they aren’t all that bad. Any good or bad sad against the Institute the player will always have their leader’s face in their minds.
Honestly speaking the biggest failing in the main story of Fallout 4 story is that I do not care for Shaun and the Institute. They are a terrible faction because they are never given a good reason for anything they do. Which is a darn shame because they have a lot of plot threads that lead no where. Why did they kick ghouls out of Diamond City? Why are they making Synths and still turn around and treat them like slaves when they have robots? What is the point of replacing people when you are capable of just paying off the traders for information? They have a lot of protentional that could make a player ask a lot of moral questions but writing just drops the plot as quickly as it is picked up.
The Institute could have been well intentioned but misguided scientist faction truly trying to help mankind. The moral dilemma is the ways they go about in trying to solve problems of mankind. Firstly start by giving Shaun a personality. We should interact with him as much as possible. You could like him like you would Nick, or Piper or any other companion. First he would give you little innocent tasks. With each task you complete the more he encourages you, he tells you how happy he is to have you there. He even starts to call you mum or dad. But then he’ll start asking you to do things where someone had to pay the price for in cruel inhumane ways. Sometimes there may or may not be a positive effect. For example they are working on plants that resist radiation and don’t have radioactive effects when consumed. A lot of the food that is grown in the Common Wealth that settlers are surviving on came from the Institute. You can have NPCs say once upon a time food was hard to grow but now suddenly growing crops has gotten easier over the years. This new crop growth is the only possible after kidnapping people and testing their new foods on these poor people to confirm it was safe for human consumption. Will you bring them new test subjects? Another example is instead of the Synths being slaves they are meant to be the next step in human evolution. But the Institute is obsessed with creating the perfect human and not robot slaves. Unfortunately if you do not reach the standards of the Institute you are considered a dud and cruelly experimented on. The Institute thinks these synths suffering are necessary because to them they are helping humanity. Some synths will understand that they aren’t to the Institute standards and believe their sacrifice is for the greater good. Others will not and will try to escape with the help of the Rail Road. Will you help the synths or is their suffering justified because good will come from it? Maybe Shaun will request for you to kill Piper or Nick. Diamond City is under their control and they don’t need Piper or Nick around because they are a liability. Your actions should have consequences and impact you personally. I want the player to question at the end of the day when working with the Institute if the ends justify the means.
