Fallout 4 rewritten

IamDaEmper0r

IamDaEmper0r

First time out of the vault
Okay, so at this point pretty much everyone agrees that the story/world of Fo4 is shit. So as an exercise in futility I decided to think of some ways to improve the main plot, disregarding other stuff. I will also add other stuff if people give suggestions.

Vault 111:
1) You dont witness your spouse's death, that plot is blown up.

2) a) The researchers are all frozen as well, the maintenance is controlled by Mister Handy's
2) b) These robots are controlled by a Zax Unit
2) c) Said unit is programmed to not want to let people out until given a all clear command by Vault-Tec

3) This unit wants you to find a new regulator for the coolant control machine, if this fails everyone dies.

The Minutemen:
1) a) Remade into a coalition of different of militias
1) b) they are held together by treaty

2) a) Preston is the militia leader/mayor of Concord - still quest giver
2) b) Preston's primary motivation is to be free of Brotherhood meddling ergo to get advanced weaponry and power armour.
2) c) the logic here is that then he will be able to enforce greater control over the rest of the settlements, so to defeat raiding groups and form a bigger government.

3) They can help the player because the BoS has the stuff needed but is not just going to give it to you - ergo your payment is that.

The Institute:
1) a) Now public and open for the world to see, and join.
1) b) However they are still quite secretive and wont tell the player the exact reason for their doing things

2) a) There are now very few powerful synths and the majority are essentially slightly more intelligent bipedal mister handys - and they have a radio broadcast kill switch.
2) b) Those that you will fight are equivalent to coursers - this is because good synths are expensive to make.
2) c) Said coursers now act as acquisition units, the purpose being to get prewar tech to get the Zax 3 running.

3) a) Primary Motivation is to develop a Zax 3 unit, this was their prewar mission.
3) b) This is a computer that is a true super computer.
3) c) The reason they have taken so long to make it is due to data corruption, and lack of repairs, and the need to develop a Zax 2 unit, this is a computer using transistors.

4) a) In relation to the main motivation of the character they can make the required parts however the machines used need an update only the Zax 3 can give.
4) b) They use the main character because it is cheaper to a outsider than a Synth.

The Brotherhood of Steel:
1) a) Now act more as a feudal force essentially demanding resources from the settlements below them.
1) b) In exchange they do fend of a settlements immediate issues, that prevent it from being bled dry.

2) Also the new rank system is blown up

3) a) Primary motivation is to complete the Prydwen
3) b) This is because it is based a pre-war design documents - these documents believed that the machine would be run by a ZAX 2 unit, because atm it is run manually, which is a huge drain of manpower.
3) c) Why they want the Prydwen complete is because Maxson wants to return east, to find out what happened to the Lost Hills, and if necessary take revenge on the NCR.
3) d) Furthermore having a complete unit would make it easier to construct more.

4) a) They have the tech to make the required parts for the player.
4) b) However they will only give it to you if you help them complete the Prydwen they will make the parts

The Railroad:
1) No longer exists, they make little sense in base game and changes to Institute makes them pointless.

I will add more to this later.
 
Cool. But Tbh I'd rather just scrap everything from fo4 and begin again. @Radiosity did that with fo3. He's got a cool reconstructing fo3 series you should check out. See his signature for the link. No I am not radiosity's sock.
 
That's the way to go I guess. But the writing in FO4 is so special that if more people start reconstructing this beast, more versions will come out, probably contradicting to each other aswell. You see, FO3 was straight up rip-off of FO1/FO2 plotlines and there's not much to talk about. FO4 tends to pretend to be subtle, realistic, opening so much questions and not giving straight answers (or any answers or even pathways for 'connecting the dotz' (c) R.Graves knows who) so you could mistake it to be deep which can give birth to several theories and points of view which none of them will be correct because there are correct answers implied in the first place. Like a typical piece of work in the modern art.
 
If we had to keep the existing setting and overall plot, I'd change these things:

HERO:
Not a pre war guy anymore. The pre war sequence, we can have it in the Memory Den, so there's no need to use that as an intro.
You're a vault ranger. Part of the team who actually gets out of the vault (located in the glowing sea), in full blue hazmat suits, and make business with the outside world, collect samples etc.
Game begins with the birth sequence, again. But to surprise everyone and make a stark contrast with Fallout 3, while hinting the thematics of the title, you don't get born in the hands of a loving father. It's a cold, soulless machine that gets you out of the womb, pierce your skin with a needle, and actually tells you your future (for example, if you pick a low score of endurance, the machine will say "probability of heart failure : 78% before 45 years old.", like in Gattaca. The machine will decide that you will grow up to be violent and unstable, so it decides that you will become a Vault Ranger. Self determination, soul in machine, missing family : the thematics are established.
Oh, if you pick 1 in intelligence, the robot drops you on your head and states that you now suffer from brain damage.
Years pass. The introduction ends with a mugshot : you got into trouble and you are in the vault's custody. You can defend your case in front of your judges, in a series of questions/answers that will define some of your background.
Actual quests inside the vault, to familiarize yourself with your comfort zone, before you are sent to a mission outside, which will turn ugly. I'll get back to up, but basically, you'll end up in a mass grave because of an accident, and you will find a way to escape.

MINUTEMEN:
-Neither the PC nor Preston are the leaders of the Minutemen. The minutemen obey a Cerberus kind of figure who simply calls himself "the general" and gives orders by radio, or hell, through his own memories in the memory den, for his most trusted lieutenants. You can actually overthrow him/her at the end of the minutemen quest, or you can keep obeying him, etc. Finish the ego stroking, start with some mystery and unanswered questions. His memories hide clues about who he is. Investigate. Learn more about his past and trauma. Decide for yourself if he's a sane leader or not.

-The Minutemen actually attack settlements which are owned by Raiders. You can find pre built settlements this way, but twice, you will actually commit war crimes by accident, because the raiders (gunners, whatever) used the population as human shields, and people will hate the Minutemen for it. Some will even seek Raider's support instead of yours, basically like in Wasteland 2.

-Mama Murphy is no longer from the Minutemen. She is an hermit, appearing in random spots, where the raiders are pacified (some kind of religious respect towards her.) if you want to use this at your advantages, you have to give her drugs to prevent her from moving away. Gives you an advantage over the raiders.

-Mama Murphy no longer gives exact predictions. 50% of what she says is false. The rest may be true, but it's vague. Never give any proofs of her powers (in the vanilla game, she litteraly gives you the exact code to terminate a courser, which is utter bullshit)

RAIDERS AND THE COMMONWEALTH:
-Explain why they are here.
1 : The Commonwealth used to be a trading hub.
2 : A plague recently hit the commonwealth. People blame the Institute, the Brotherhood's experiments on ground waters and even the ghouls for the plague, which killed a lot of people. The population fled before the quarantine, imposed by the neighboor governments (Ronto and the Brotherhood). Boston and Concord were occupied before the plot, and raiders only appeared recdently. Some came from afar to scavenge the personal effects of the population, the others are the sick, plague infested people who didn't have the chance to evacuate.

The gunners are mercenaries working for the Ronto Conglomerate, and they seek to seize the industrial facilities of the commonwealth, maybe even the Institute's energy facilities. It hints that the commonwealth actually had facilities, production, and business running at some point. It hints that the outside world is there too, and everyone wants a piece of the cake, which is basically what happens when a country goes to hell.

DIAMOND CITY:
-As said, Diamond City is not the city where people used to live. This is a refugee's settlement. Which justifies its current state.
-It prints its own money though : baseball cards of whatever (traders must exchange currencies somehow. What if the commonwealth decided to make business with the midwest ?). Piper makes these with her press machine, which actually makes her an important, politically powerful figure in the city.

FERAL GHOULS :
There are no feral ghouls anymore. There are Institute's test subjects who escaped and roam the land, begging for help, slowly becoming more and more crazy. They can run, and hit hard. Bodies pierced with machinery and electric components. Good looting source, if you're a bad guy. They beg you to flee while they charge, a bit like Half Life 2's zombies.
Instead of glowing ones, we have plague survivors. If they hit you, they can actually infect you, and force you to take expensive pills to make sure you don't get sick too.

THE HERO:
The hero's main motivation isn't to find his/her family. It's to find a cure for his/her sickness. He/she is slowly becoming infected by the plague and needs to find a way.
Yeah, you may have to find a cure for your hometown too, but the most urgent element is to cure yourself. There's an urgency, but that's the kind of urgency that lets you do secondary quests, unlike finding a baby.
Oh, there's Curie somewhere, right ?
Right. You need to find this tribal legend about a machine that can heal everyone. Zero evidence that this legend is actually true ; local tribes blattered about this nonsense for an entire century, and nobody ever saw Curie anywhere. But she might hold the key.
And when you find her ? She won't follow and help you. YOU follow and help her. She is objectively more important than you. You have to protect her, to make sure her knowledge doesn't fall into the wrong hands (more than reason to actually progress in the boring minutemen's questline and find out who this general is, to decide if it's a good idea or not to give him Curie)

THE PLAGUE:
It infects people AND machines. Imagine the FEV for robots. Like a biological OS which turned to have side effects on the people around. Which would justify why people are scared of Synths : they carry a disease.
You can actually be born in a vault, and you were a vault ranger (Yeah, vault rangers. They are actually a faction in the game, and they are extremely agressive.). Got attacked by Kellogg. Got infected.
During the quarantine, the medical robots stuck you and got infected as well. Slowly, the whole machinery of the vault got infected. People have lost control of the situation, inside.
You got out, because the machine thought you were dead, and dumped your dead body into a mass grave. You got out, and you only can find a cure for your vault, now.
OH, did I mention that your vault is in the middle of the glowing sea ?
Yeah. To get back there, you will need to find a proper Hazmat suit. That will be your first, long quest. It will take the entire first chapter to get the suit and gain access to the glowing sea again.
Why ? Because you think that Curie may be roaming around in the glowing sea, looking for the mass grave to study the corpses.

THE BROTHERHOOD:
Of course, the brotherhood is interested in this. A mechanical virus ? That's actually dangerous for them, considering their technologies and cyborg units. They don't want to save the world, they only want to save their own asses by intervening.
There's Maxson, and they are dicks, alright. They have the Prydwen and everything. But they are not backed by the western BoS. They are backed by the Midwest Brotherhood, which supported Maxson's rise to power, and pushed him to take action, because they are very afraid that the mechanical plague could reach the calculator.
You never see them anywhere. But you know they still exist. It's enough to actually tease an outside, living world, respect the lore and even maybe hook the audience for a potential sequel or DLC.

PIPER :
Piper doesn't come with you. She has a business to run. She gives you missions, though, and she is always with her bodyguard, a super mutant (because she is in constant danger of murder attempts. And it also hints that Super Mutants are citizen like others, and are capable of finding jobs, make peace and sociabilize)

SUPER MUTANTS:
As said, most of them joined the humans. You can find them as bodyguards, door watchers, soldiers etc. Some joined the Minutemen, some others joined the Raiders. Yeah, there's a chance that any band of raiders will have an intelligent super mutant with them, instead of their power armors.
They're not made by the Institute. They are refugees from the war with the brotherhood, in the south. The brotherhood pushed them out of the capital Wasteland, and could actually come to end the job any day. You see the problem, here, when you see them in peace, only asking to be forgotten for the war.

SYNTHS:
Synths are not "made" from scratch. They are computers wearing the flesh and organs of dead people. We'll get to that later. They may carry a disease, too, so we've got two valid reasons why people are scared of them. The whole boogeyman, kidnapping stuff doesn't work.
Secondly, do they have a soul ? They could have one. But they also could not have one. True, Valentine helps you and shit, but he is extremely buggy. He sends you on resolved quests. He forgets who you are at random moments. He suddenly changes his identity (voice, personality) for no reason. He shuts down, sometimes. Yeah, he makes dreams, but it's always, ALWAYS the same dream, so it's hard to tell if this is a proof of consciousness.
Same for the other synths. Curie "likes" when you help others, until suddenly, she "hates" it. After you banged her, she will run to a guard and ask for help, saying that you're a stranger who kidnapped her, because she has forgotten who you are.
In other words : make us doubt, to make us care. No definitive answer about their soul, so that we can make up our own mind, based on what we see, and how we play.

THE RAILROAD:
More than just a network of escaped Synths, the railroad now proves useful by smuggling goods into the Commonwealth, to pass through the quarantine. It's dangerous. Could lead to further infections. But it also makes them the best equipped traders of the game, with the best equipment. A reason good as any to work for them, if you're not interested in escaping Synths.

THE INSTITUTE:
The Institute was at open war with the commonwealth government until it got defeated and was forced to retreat under the glowing sea (not under the CIT, for obvious reasons), where their enemies cannot reach them.
Yeah, the institute created this OS advancement, which is biological since their AI is biological too. Building sized organs ; a biomass inside the Institute's walls, seeing everything, monitoring everything.
But the Institute has lost control of it. The scientists are basically held hostage, and their bodies are processed into Synths if they fuck up : yeah, synths are not "made" from scratch. They are machines wearing the organs and the flesh of dead people. That explains too, why people are scared of them.

The IA is now more evolved than ever, but it is also sick. It has some sort of disease too, and it sends a shitload of synths outside, to find a cure. The brotherhood hates it, because yeah, NOW it's a technological abomination.

Kellogg plays his part. Maybe he works for the institute as a secret agent, trying to find a way to regain control over this rogue IA. Maybe he works for the IA, and tries to find a cure for it.
You will fight him thrice. The first time, he beats you, hard. The second time, he escapes and it ends with a draw. Only the third time, you can kill him. Let the tension rise. Let the antagonist rise too. Reflect the hero's progress this way.

Anyway, when you find the Institute, you have a choice:
-Will you help the IA, and defeat these evil scientists for good, even though, they atoned for their actions against the commonwealth ? This way, the commonwealth finally defeats its enemy. The genocidal maniacs are gone, but the IA is now completely free, and shit is about to go down.

-Will you free the scientists and help them regain control of the IA ? You basically help genocidal maniacs regaining their freedom, yeah... But this way, maybe they can finally use the Institute for the greater good. Maybe they can stop the production of military units. They promise you that they will.
Who you decide to trust is up to you. Depending on who you chose to help, Curie learns how to make a cure, and here ends the second chapter.

Third chapter is the confrontation between the existing factions, with the possibility of making an alliance.



And here you go. No need to change the existing assets, setting and even general idea.
But we've got moral dilemmas (refugees situation, atonement for war crimes, freedom vs security, interventionism for good/bad reasons, risking a quarantine for the good of the people inside, GOOD actual reasons why Ghouls and Synths provoke fear, soul in machines and your own right to self determination, denied by a machine etc)
 
I'll go a different route.
I'll make it so you wake up after being frozen, along with all the people in the Vault.
You talk to them for a bit and learn you're from the pre war era.
You go outside to find a Wasteland.
The Institute are waiting for you and kidnap the people in the Vault (much like in F2 I guess) and you escape.

So now the motivation is trying to find the rest of the people in your Vault.
As you go around, you meet people from the Railroad, they don't give you much information on who they are.
All you know is that there is a group helping "Cyborgs" on the underground.

The Minutemen are anti-Cyborgs. They are a group which want to destroy them.
The Railroad are much like they already are.
The BOS are a group who want to harvest the tech from the Cyborgs, they also want to learn where they are coming from.
The Institute want to create more and advanced cyborgs.

All of them have some kind of conflict with one another
(The Railroad don't like the idea of Cyborgs being used as slaves, or that they are being killed by the Minutemen, they also don't trust the BOS with the tech)
(The Minutemen don't like the Railroad or Institute for allowing such "abominations" to exist, they also don't trust the BOS with the tech)
(The BOS just don't trust anyone)
(The Institute wants to be left alone with its experiments).

Later, you find that your fellow Vault Dwellers were taken by the Institute. This is from an escapee from the Vault (you could say this is Virgil, the ONLY super mutant in the game).
That alone has its own story where the Institute were trying to recreate the FEV virus after hearing rumour about in in Washington. however, due to the experiment being a failure, they abandoned the idea.

So, you get into the Institute where the leader is a Cyborg who reveals he had been around since the Pre-War days.
It is revealed that he also helped in the creation of the Vaults for Vault tech, but decided to break away from them before the War.
It is also revealed that he wants to find the next step in human revolution, and the Cyborgs are part of his master plan (much like in F1).
He goes on about the immortality of man and how they could harness new power.
There was also plans for creating Cyborgs, but there was an issue with this (see Fallout 3).

Once you leave the Institute, the other factions want you to join them.
This opens it up to which Factions you want to join.

If you join any faction beside the Institute, you have the option of rescuing your Vault Dwellers from the Institute (or not).

And then you can destroy the Institute, kill the people in it for the BOS, or save the Cyborgs.
This also leads to a massive war between all the other Factions.
(Simply put, you can either take them out one by one, or there would be a fight while getting to the Institute).

And the ending reflects all these choices.

I know it's not perfect, but given the story and ideas, I think my idea would have fit around it nicely.
While it does take ideas from 1 and 2, I feel they expand rather than trend on the same territory.
 
mithrap said:
If we had to keep the existing setting and overall plot, I'd change these things:
Click to expand...
But that script has two flaws:
-no science behind the virus. Immersion broken 0/10 - IGN, so to speak.
-it retcons Fallout 3. Specifically the Harkness made out of synthetic materials, yep.
 
0wing said:
But that script has two flaws:
-no science behind the virus. Immersion broken 0/10 - IGN, so to speak.
-it retcons Fallout 3. Specifically the Harkness made out of synthetic materials, yep.
Click to expand...
Well, the virus would be made by the Bioscience department of the Institute. Just got out of hands, with the biological IA starting to send infected squads and failed test subjects to the surface.

As for the retcon with Harkness, true. But in my version, synths could have some parts of plastic/steel (arteries and skeleton, for example), only the flesh and organs would have to be harvested from bodies. And Fallout 4 already retconned Fallout 3 (which retconned F2 and F1) in so many, more blatant ways... Water purifiers, the railroad being religious people etc.
 
A virus that can affect both flesh and electronics by... Manipulating individual impulses?
 
0wing said:
A virus that can affect both flesh and electronics by... Manipulating individual impulses?
Click to expand...
Electromagnetic perturbations (makes your radio unusable near a Synth or an infected -an opportunity for introducing scary moments, like in Silent Hill 2. Imagine your radio going nuts in the middle of a "dungeon" with Institute's test subjects lurking around. Far more scary than just ghouls, in my mind), but is also what makes Synths able to function, far away from radio contact and recharging pods), which, in the long term, makes your own immune system weaker. For example.

Could be cold fusion technology, too (which would highlight that microfusion technologies could be dangerous in the long term, which would lead the brotherhood to seize such techs within the civilian areas). Could be nanotech (a new kind of globulas, that can carry electrical signals, but also interact with the regular globulas and provoke internal degenesis) Could be a lot of scientific advancements. This is sci fi, the panel is quite large when it comes to justify a biomechanical plague.
 
mithrap said:
PIPER :
Piper doesn't come with you. She has a business to run. She gives you missions, though, and she is always with her bodyguard, a super mutant (because she is in constant danger of murder attempts. And it also hints that Super Mutants are citizen like others, and are capable of finding jobs, make peace and sociabilize)
Click to expand...
Good thing I fixed the Muties in Fallout 3 so this can actually be a thing :)

Also, some nice ideas there.
 
mithrap said:
Electromagnetic perturbations (makes your radio unusable near a Synth or an infected -an opportunity for introducing scary moments, like in Silent Hill 2. Imagine your radio going nuts in the middle of a "dungeon" with Institute's test subjects lurking around. Far more scary than just ghouls, in my mind), but is also what makes Synths able to function, far away from radio contact and recharging pods), which, in the long term, makes your own immune system weaker. For example.

Could be cold fusion technology, too (which would highlight that microfusion technologies could be dangerous in the long term, which would lead the brotherhood to seize such techs within the civilian areas). Could be nanotech (a new kind of globulas, that can carry electrical signals, but also interact with the regular globulas and provoke internal degenesis) Could be a lot of scientific advancements. This is sci fi, the panel is quite large when it comes to justify a biomechanical plague.
Click to expand...
are we dealing with grey matter scale nano-synthetic virus? because well, as far i could tell the pre-war goverment are stuck in the resistor, and technological gaps just to manufacture a smart organism in nano scale is just absurd. Also if the plague is sophisticated as hell like that we need more smart background canon than just a mere "tech accident" :P
 
eissa said:
are we dealing with grey matter scale nano-synthetic virus? because well, as far i could tell the pre-war goverment are stuck in the resistor, and technological gaps just to manufacture a smart organism in nano scale is just absurd. also if the plague is sophisticated as hell like that we need more smart background canon than just a mere "tech accident" :P
Click to expand...
Pre war governments, true. And in the current Fallout 4, the Institute is actually far behind the pre war government technological abilities, which makes no sense. Two entire centuries have passed!

The Institute should have been the most serious competitor to the big MT, when it comes to technological advancements. But considering the established lore, it's difficult to make them the best at anything except nanotech. The Shis are better than them in bioscience (seaweed eating radiations) and nuclear technologies (able to build their own reactors), the brotherhood is better than them in terms of cybernetic implants, the Big MT is better than them in terms of life saving technology, teleportation and mind uploading, a 250 years old Mrs.Nanny is better than them in medecine... and Mister House, one of their own fellow students, is better than them in terms of long range control, robot production and life expectancy improvements. Hell, West tek and the Master were both better than the Institute when it comes to biological enhancements, and one of them was a blob with makeshift tech and zealots, the other was a public entity from 200 years ago. Hard to beat the military progress of the Enclave (which ALSO discovered how to build functional AIs) for no reason too.

In other words, the only skill in which the Institute can excel is the nanotechnology and/or electromagnetic fields (so, this biomechanical plague, that allows computers to function and actually evolve, but screw everyone else in the vicinity), and the engineering of a biological artificial intelligence, able to actually, physically evolve and process abstract concepts in its resolution of problems, which is impossible for a regular computer. Other than that, the Institute, which is supposed to be the best technological faction, is outsmarted by everyone, including 200 years old entities and domestic appliances.
 
On the whole Pre-War opening idea: what if the Sole Survivor wasn't a Vault Dweller, but was someone who's been arrested, sedition or terrorism being the official reason, and is taken to a government research facility. Whether or not they committed a crime would be up to the players.

EDIT: The Sole Survivor's frozen,(to research Post-Cryogenic Syndrome or something?) They awake after the bombs have fallen, not on the day of the Great War.

I feel that would allow players to role play any character they want, rather than being told "You are a mother/father and have a wife/husband.
 
Prone Squanderer said:
On the whole Pre-War opening idea: what if the player wasn't a Vault Dweller, but was someone who's been arrested, sedition or terrorism being the official reason, and is taken to a government research facility.
Click to expand...
That's the beginning to basically every Elder Scrolls game ever, so it'd fit Bethesda's MO. To be honest, I'm surprised they haven't tried it with Fallout yet. Especially when Van Buren was meant to start with you as a prisoner, really surprised Bethesda didn't steal that along with everything else when they made 3.
 
At the very least, having your character's initial freedom limited by imprisonment is liable to create some feeling for the PC and their plight and to help you get into their world and form a basic opinion of the factions in it based on how they were dealing with you (prisoners with you, who was holding you, why etc..)

Even with the basic black/white choice you were given in Skyrim at the beginning (follow one guy to side with imperials, another to hang with the stormcloaks) it at least gave some variety to the beginning and sent you off in a slightly different path in the game world. It didn't matter much after that because you could just side with either group on a whim, but on my first playthrough it made me at the very least appreciate the one Imperial guy who helped me get out of there and set me free during the dragon attack. He was my first skyrim npc buddy, and the minimal feeling I got there was noticeably more feeling than any Fallout 4 npc has generated in me other than rage and annoyance.

The prisoner thing might be used a lot as a plot device but it is far and away a better way to get into the world and your character and their motivations than this "I'm a soldier/daddy who really loves his plastic family" bollocks that they gave us in fo4.
 
Radiosity said:
That's the beginning to basically every Elder Scrolls game ever, so it'd fit Bethesda's MO. To be honest, I'm surprised they haven't tried it with Fallout yet. Especially when Van Buren was meant to start with you as a prisoner, really surprised Bethesda didn't steal that along with everything else when they made 3.
Click to expand...

Van Buren is what gave me that idea. I also like the concept design for the prisoner's jumpsuit.
latest
 
I like the idea of being frozen as part of a vault experiment, but I'd cut out the pre-war section. You could be defrosted by some explorers who ask you questions about how you ended up as an ice cube, and you'd have to chance to define both your character and the world you came from on your own terms. Maybe you really are a soldier who saw pre-war America as an idyllic utopia. Maybe you're a convict who volunteered to be put in a vault in lieu of jail time. Or maybe you're a Chinese spy who was caught and used in an experiment instead of being imprisoned or killed.
 
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