omphaloskepsis
First time out of the vault
Bethesda. They "streamline" story, plot and theme with the same gusto that they attack mechanics and gameplay. There's no ghost driving the games shell.The game has been said to be underwritten.
If you're being insanely generous, you could argue that there's a brushpainting aesthetic, where they apply simple strokes of story elements as a subtle framework for creating a bigger whole. But the truth is that they're shockingly sloppy, and either lack writing and game design talent, or have management who suppresses the realization of that talent. Am I ranting yet?
They take ideas from a variety of sources (either anime or cyberpunk or both, often can't tell due to the severely diluted implementation), but either don't understand the originals or can't be bothered to explore the ideas beyond simple references, as if to gain credibility by hinting at superior works, without doing the work to actually insert those themes into the greater story.
The Institute and everything related is, in my opinion, the worst of FO4 and Bethesda. Sociopathic scientists with apparently unlimited resources (to crank out thousands of synths) in a series about scarcity and survival. And then there's the super-super-super science far beyond the Enclave, the Zetans or anything else seen in the world. The tech to develop a conscious AI alone puts them far above all other factions. Of course, this is Bethesda, so they're somehow ridiculously advanced in terms of bio-engineering and AI, but the advances that made those techs possible have barely influenced the rest of their tech. So they're only Enclave level in general despite having access to godlike tech in a couple of select areas. Plus: teleportation, which again is a separate tech stream with no further implications.
They force you into the Railroad quests (as with the other factions), but never ask any questions or allow the player to do so, or to explore their shoddy intellectual playground. The synths came out of nowhere in the FO universe, and we're instantly supposed to accept that these fully conscious beings exist and are being cranked out in hordes. And, what's the point again? Because I've never seen anything that coherently explains the Institute's goals.
I could go on and on, but I think the simplest summary is: if Ed Wood and Michael Bay teamed up to make video games...