Anyone else think this whole 'Synth' thing has gone too far?

Greentoast11

Greentoast11

First time out of the vault
I mean they haven't been in any of the original fallout games,
Not that new things are bad but it was kind of fun in Fallout 3 with Harkness.
But it's very ufallouty or something, Synths don't feel retrofuturistic in the way that Robobrains do , It's almost too high tech.


Inside in the Institute is all metal and doesn't resemble anything from the same genre of retrofuturism in any other fallout game.

This is very poorly written as I am having trouble putting what I mean in to words, But just wondering what everyone else thinks.
 
The Synths are terrible, yes.

First of all, there's no way these things should exist. I don't care how long the Institute has been underground supposedly forwarding science, they couldn't even figure out how to cure cancer. If they can't cure cancer of all things, they shouldn't be able to basically turn a ZAX computer (one of these massive things: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/ZAX ) into something small enough to function inside a human head.

Second of all, there's a huge plothole involved with the Synths. Synths are escaping constantly, the Institute knows about it, so they build an entirely new brand of Synth called Synth Coursers to track them down. Top of the line tech. But.. instead of doing that, why don't they just implant teleportation signals into all the synths they make? They put them in the Coursers so it's clearly possible. Hell, if you join the Institute you literally get teleportation grenades that summons a small army of Gen 1 Synths to use via teleportation. So there's no reason they can't just slap these teleportation devices into regular Gen 3 Synths. Then, if a Synth escapes, badabing badaboom you teleport the little bastard right back into the Institute, reprogram him, and call it a day.

It makes no sense for them not to be able to do this. It's a huge plothole. The only reason they don't do this is just so the Railroad can have some purpose in the game. That's it. Without Synths escaping the Institute the Railroad would have 0 reason to exist. To justify an entire faction they had to make another faction riddled with plotholes. Good job Bethesda.

That's not all, I could keep going, but those are the 2 most glaring problems with Synths as they're presented in the game.
 
Greentoast11 said:
This is very poorly written as I am having trouble putting what I mean in to words, But just wondering what everyone else thinks.
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I personally think it is how they were done that is the problem. Anything can become canon or lore, but how well does it fit in? How was it implemented? This like many things narrows down to leaving design up to Emil. I actually started watching a Minecraft Fallout 4 youtube series. I'm not a fan of Minecraft or Fallout 4, but I actually got into it. Why? Because I like the characters, they have substance and purpose. They fit the world they are in.
What does this have to do with Synths? Well, they actually deal with a conceptualized version of Synths, not Emil's, but their own take, and it is kind of cool, and it fits into the world that they created.

I am intrigued to why I enjoy something that has 2 things in it that I don't particularly enjoy. But I guess it is because it was done well in the medium used. Time, effort, and love was put in it. I also find it terribly sad that a group of random internet guys came come up with a more attractive version of Fallout 4 then a AAA company.

If you read the comments on any Fallout 4 video there is a good chance people will be bitching about something. I couldn't find any complaints in their series.
Also Uni is 1000000 times better then FO4's Dogmeat
 
I'm fine with them, tech wise. I've never really minded the whole "Too high tech thing," But yeah, they have no reason to exist. Synths are supposed to be slaves, right? So why the fuck would they give them free will if they had the choice? That's retarded, you'd think top teir scientists would realize that. Unless that's just a fetish of theirs, then it would make sense.
 
Gen 3 synths make zero sense. As slave labor the institute would have stopped at Gen 2 as a mass produced workforce as soon as Gen 3's were found to be sentient. If I had written it, I would have made the entire institute Gen 3's after a revolt 30 years earlier had them wipeout the human inhabitants, would have made more sense as to why they were replacing random wastelanders. They even could have made escaped synths a ruse to get the RR to help get their Gen 3's integrated into society.
 
GlowHound said:
I thought it was already too far with Replicated Man in 3.
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At least in FO3 they make Harkness seem like a huge deal. Zimmer says it himself that if he can't find Harkness, then that will set the Institute back literally decades of research and planning. So there are stakes to the whole thing.

Of course, Fallout 4 proceeds to take these stakes and shove them into our cold, vampiric hearts. It seems like the whole Replicated Man quest was pointless. If Harkness was the ONLY Gen 3 Synth as stated by Zimmer, then how the fuck did they get so many by the time of Fallout 4? Unless Bethesda's simply retconning player choice again by saying we gave Harkness back to Zimmer.

But even THAT doesn't make sense because in FO4, you find this one guy in the Institute who says he took over for Zimmer, and that Zimmer hasn't been seen in years! So this most likely means that the "good" ending to the Replicated Man quest is canon, whereupon you kill Zimmer after revealing to Harkness that he's a synth. But if that's the case, then the Institute should only have Gen 1 and Gen 2 synths, since Harkness was their only Gen 3 and without him, as Zimmer says, they wouldn't know how to make another without decades of research.

In other words, the Replicated Man quest just points out more plotholes in Fallout 4. Fucking amazing.
 
I thought it went too far with the introduction of the "replicated man" quest. I don't think that "plausibly human androids and AI" really fit with the aesthetic or level of technology of the rest of the setting. That's full on "distant future science fiction" stuff, not "post apocalyptic" stuff.

I mean, if "plausibly human androids" were within reach, then pre-war robots shouldn't have looked like Robobrains and Mr. Handys. That's a technological jump greater than that of a vacuum tube radio to the iPhone.
 
PossibleCabbage said:
I thought it went too far with the introduction of the "replicated man" quest. I don't think that "plausibly human androids and AI" really fit with the aesthetic or level of technology of the rest of the setting. That's full on "distant future science fiction" stuff, not "post apocalyptic" stuff.

I mean, if "plausibly human androids" were within reach, then pre-war robots shouldn't have looked like Robobrains and Mr. Handys. That's a technological jump greater than that of a vacuum tube radio to the iPhone.
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It's sort of plausible if the Institute have been working at peak efficiency for 200 years, the original vacuum tube never mind radio took little over a hundred years to get to the Iphone so bad analogy.
 
Well the analogy isn't that bad, if you take into account that the innovation required to get from vacuum tube to iphone did not occur in a.. well.. vacuum.

Innovation in the way that the institute is doing it, while they are concealed from the rest of the world and hidden from the economy of that world would not tend to have the same pace as innovation driven by the demand of customers in a thriving economy, or innovation accomplished in small steps by a variety of people/minds over a period of time all of which benefited those people in their lifetimes.

I would expect the innovative tendencies of the people of the institute to atrophy over time, with each generation being at best a poor copy of the previous one, due to their intentional isolation and the lack of factors that drive innovation, along with a lack of good teachers who truly understand the material and who aren't just repeating things they were told.

Without a demand for products and an economy in which creating them has direct profit to the innovator and where he/she has access to funding, new awesome tech products don't tend to get researched and developed at anywhere near the same pace as they would without these factors to drive them.

this is ignoring the fact that Synths as the plan apparently goes in Fallout 4, were intended to replace people and thus kill off the very people who create them in the long term.

It was a very stupid plan to spend 200 years working on it, and have none of these geniuses realize how innately stupid it was in all that time.
 
Synths were ok for a little Blade Runner homage quest but basing the whole game around them is almost impossible to do interestingly. Honestly what story about robotic humans hasn't been done to death already? I'm just shocked Bethesda didn't pull the "YOU WERE A ROBOT THE ENTIRE TIME OMG #PLOTTWIST". Although that would certainly explain the main character's dull and lifeless delivery of almost all his lines.
 
First of all the major technological difference between the Fallout universe and our own is that in Fallout the integrated circuit was never invented. How you build plausibly humanoid androids without the microchip, I have no idea, but maybe they managed to invent one in the intervening 200 years. That's plausible.

But while MIT assuredly has a machine shop, MIT does not have a chip foundry and would be hard-pressed to build one after a nuclear war.

But the partial faculty of even the best institution of higher learning isn't going to be able to, without support from the outside world, go from "we invented the integrated circuit" to "we have invented the ARM processor without considerable outside support in terms of materials, facilities, and money. I mean, these things require semiconductors that use a lot of rare earth metals, and where exactly are the folks at the institute getting them (there really aren't that many available in Massachusetts).

As a rule, technological advancement should not speed up *after* global thermonuclear war.
 
Let's just say that Synths are the highest technological invention in Fallout as of yet, and strangely it's not exactly that important or relevant.
 
They can do literally anything.

From what lore there is, it's pretty clear that the Institute is beyond powerful. The only logical reason for them having not cured cancer is that their leadership are composed of idiots, and cannot prioritise. They can teleport anyone anywhere at any time, they're untouchable, they possess an unlimited supply of replaceable killing machines and cyborg commandos, they can create cybernetic life, they have limitless food and water, and presumably Bethesda means to imply that there are hundreds of other, locked-off rooms in the Institute, which means they could be as big as Boston's urban areas itself, but underground.

If the five leaders had any sense at all, the Institute would've conquered the entire Commonwealth a long time ago. They have infinite infiltrators, infinite armies, infinite robots, infinite special agents, and infinite resources and equipment. They could sustain themselves forever, but they could also conquer the entire East Coast. Nothing at all, in any terminal or any dialogue, implies that the Institute possess anything finite. It's never even stated why they even needed the nuclear tech they take from Mass Fusion. They need more power? For what? Nothing suggested they had any limits throughout the whole game.

The Institute is essentially that kid in the play-fight that keeps making up new rules to keep themselves invincible and annoy the whole group.

"nuh-uh the insisood is under the ground and you have to warp to get there! woosh!"
"nuh-uh you can't kill me I teleport a whole army to your base and they destroy everything! boom!"
"nuh-uh I make super mutants and put them all over the city! RAWR!"

They are beyond magic. At least magic is normally a way to explain plot holes, the Institute is made up of nothing but plot holes. Name one thing about the Institute that doesn't have a plot hole, I challenge you to name just one thing.
 
ZigzagPX4 said:
the Institute is made up of nothing but plot holes. Name one thing about the Institute that doesn't have a plot hole, I challenge you to name just one thing.
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You know I was thinking really hard about this and I did come up with one thing. Mr. House was taught at MIT, he makes sense; good work Obsidian, you made (presumably) the only sensible character (loosely) affiliated with the
Institute.
 
From what i gather, Synths are very much artificial humans. Existence of Gen-1 and Gen-2 androids causes some confusion because naturally player thinks there is a linear evolution. Actually Institute hit a wall with traditional robotics so with Gen-3 they decided on an utterly different approach: Making humans completely from artificial tissues. So now Gen-3 synths have no relation with older Synths, except maybe for software.

Since Synths are unlike anything in Fallout series they very much belong to our future. In Fallout 4 we see technology returning to it's natural course.

Maybe what we see in The Institute is this; "diverge caused by unending warmongering, developments on nuclear energy and lack of integrated circuits, is gone and now technology returned to it's natural evolution."

However it can also be another diverge between real world and Fallout Universe due to absence of integrated circuits. Since it's impossible to make anymore progress with hardware; utterly different approach is needed to make a break through. So the approach they come up with is more akin to medical technology than robotics. They're making humans bodies so lack of integrated circuits not a certain obstacle. They simply using wetware.
 
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Gen-3 is okay if there are very few of them. It's going too far that everyone could be a synth. Wetwares are not cheap. You can't just pull it out from raiders.
 
I wouldn't say lore breaking, just nonsensical; it makes no sense that after the nuclear apocalypse a bunch of professors lock themselves underground and make more progress than legitimate scientific communities such as the Shi or the Enclave, smart people can't singularly produce a "perfect" community, they need a working class in order to produce materials to experiment and create with, the Institute clearly doesn't have a working class so how the fuck do they find materials to make legions of synths?
 
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