Huge Missed Opportunities in Fallout 4 (mild spoilers)

Ragemage

Wept for Zion
The whole game! *badum tshhhh*

But seriously, all jokes aside, there are quite a few things that get brought up in the game, and, had they been fleshed out more, would have made the game a lot better in my opinion. Here's some of the biggest ones I noticed:

1. Mama Murphy and Tower Tom

Now I KNOW this one has been brought up before, but I figured I'd mention it again. Mama Murphy's a psychic somehow, we all know that. Here's the thing though, in the Beantown Brewery, you can read a terminal from the raider leader there named Tower Tom. You find out he actually had Mama Murphy kidnapped for a while and was using her to tell him the future. The terminal entries goes on to mention they tracked Mama Murphy all the way to wherever Preston and his guys were held up in, which set into motion the events that led you to meeting the Minutemen and getting the Power Armor. What if instead of helping Preston, you had been able to help Tower Tom get Mama Murphy back? You meet up with a raider captain or whatever, he recruits you, you go in there and kill Preston and his posse and force Mama Murphy to come with you. Once Mama Murphy is in the hands of Tower Tom, he thanks you, pays you, and asks you to help lead his Raider band. From then on you can make settlements like normal, but instead of them being filled with settlers, they're filled with Raiders, with the Beantown Brewery being your main base of operations instead of Sanctuary or The Castle. Think of it like the Powder Gangers in New Vegas.

2. The Super Mutant Cure

Okay, maybe I'm missing something here, but one part of the game that pissed me off was Virgil and his goddamn magical mystery cure. See, he's a Super Mutant that still retains his brain power so to speak. He tasks you with going into the Institute and finding a cure he was working on. Turns out, it's a cure that stops him from being a Super Mutant! So, once you get him this cure, what does he do? Start using this cure to try and make more copies so that you can eventually cure all the super mutants in Boston? Create some kind of device that lets you contaminate the water so when Super Mutants drink from it it sets the cure loose in their body and slowly turns them back to normal ala President Eden? No, none of that! Instead, he just uses the cure on himself and then says he's planning to make more even though he doesn't even know how to recreate the original! Imagine instead of him being an idiot and using it right away, he started making copies? Imagine being able to turn Strong into a human again! I'm sure he'd object to it but that would make for some good character development with Strong rather than what we got in-game.

3. Curie and the Machine

Alright, so everyone knows how you can turn Curie into a Synth right? After that she becomes bangable to put it in layman's terms. Here's my problem with this: Why the fuck would you only turn Curie into a Synth? What about Codsworth? You know, your 200 year old stalwart butler, the only person besides a few of the nonferal ghouls you know from before the war? The companion in the game Bethesda wants you to feel the most attachment to considering he's the only one that'll say your character's name? And yet, there's no option for that! He isn't romanceable, you can't turn him into a synth, you can't even clean the fucking rust off of him! It makes no sense as to why he can't become a synth as well, none at all, especially when you're supposed to feel like he's part of your family!

While we're at it, if all the Institute needs is a brain to basically extract memories from in order to make a synth, then why the Hell can't we make our wife/husband into a synth? Her brain is perfectly preserved, frozen solid along with the rest of her inside Vault 111! Yet even if we become leader of the Institute, we can't go back into Vault 111, retrieve our lover's body, extract the brain, and make her a synth! Wouldn't that be a wonderful reason to join the Institute? They could hold the leverage over you that "Oh, we could bring your wife back from the dead with all her memories and everything!" Considering a lot of us designed both our husband and our wife characters, I felt like there should have been a way to get them back. I mean, we made them ourselves, there's a perfectly plausible way to "resurrect" them, and yet we can't fucking do it!

4. Slavery

This one should speak for itself. We had it in Fallout 2, 3, and New Vegas, yet for some reason it's absent in Fallout 4. Considering how many random NPCs there are scattered throughout Fallout 4, being able to mezz them and sell them for caps would have been great! It would have actually given us a chance to be evil, something the game has very little of! I mean, slavery's already implied all throughout the game! For example, when you rescue this Ghoul Kid from a fridge, you have the option to sell him into Slavery rather than getting him back to his parents. Which, I just realized, is a huge ripoff of the Greyditch quest from Fallout 3. I think the most offensive part though is the fact that there's this terminal in the Hallucinogen HQ which mentions the fucking Mesmetron! It says it was supposed to be shipped there but got lost along the way.

Anyway, those are 4 plot devices that I think, if they'd been improved on, would've made the game a lot better, or at the very least added some roleplay elements. What do you guys think? Do you have any of your own you'd like to add?
 
Last edited:
I suppose this is a good thread topic considering the entire game is a giant missed opportunity. There is so much that I would like about Fallout 4 if they simply chose not to utterly DESTROY THE F***ING DIALOGUE with a dumbass wheel.

So huge missed opportunity in Fallout 4? How about the elephant in the room: That stupid dialogue wheel that someone important apparently thought was a great idea to force into a Fallout game. If it wasn't for that, the game might still resemble an RPG even with its awful characters and writing.

As for Mama Murphy...I'm glad there wasn't more to that because Mama Murphy is the worst character in the game - another cliche, stereotypical Oracle on drugs. It's been done a hundred times in a hundred different stories. The whole game is filled with missed opportunities for story expansion though - every time you think you meet someone interesting it turns out you cannot under any circumstances talk to them and your interaction with them is confined to a computer terminal log at most.

Fallout 4 is Fallout with the dialogue removed. Therefore every single character and setting in the game is a missed opportunity for great immersive interaction with other characters.
 
Honestly yeah, the dialogue wheel was a massive mistake on their part. However I find it a little laughable you think that would make the game still resemble an RPG. If they had taken out both the voiced protagonist AND the dialogue wheel, then maybe.
That too.

It would resemble an RPG which is about the most you can expect from these writers. You certainly can't expect them to do a real RPG. I would gladly take Fallout 4 with the old dialogue system and no voiced protagonist. But they apparently wanted to go all the way with the dumbing down.
 
As for Mama Murphy...I'm glad there wasn't more to that because Mama Murphy is the worst character in the game - another cliche, stereotypical Oracle on drugs. It's been done a hundred times in a hundred different stories.

True, but at least with this she would have been given a purpose. Using her to unlock the evil questline would've been nice. I mean, it's either that or have her as she is now, useless, immortal, and annoying. Every single time I TP to Sanctuary, all I hear is "Mama Murphy's as good as her word kid. No more chems. No more Sight either." I have it memorized, that's how many times I've heard it.

Plus this way you're leaving her in the hands of town destroying, pillaging, looting, cursing rapists rather than the goody goody Minutemen. I doubt they'd treat her kindly.
 
I could write a doctoral dissertation on the missed opportunities in Fallout 4, but for the sake of time and the lack of shits I give about FO4 anymore I'll stick to one. The Minutemen; a historically awesome group of civilians who banded together to not only secure the local homesteads, but to fight tyranny itself were relegated to a douchebag turned internet meme and radiant shit questing. Along the way you are forced to accept allies from local shacks..um I mean settlements, the same people who couldn't protect themselves from two-bit raiders or ghouls. Then instead of letting the player take a town like Concord, Quincy, or Lexington after you have secured enough allies you are forced to defend rundown shit craters on the corner of why would anyone live here and please kill me drive.
 
I could write a doctoral dissertation on the missed opportunities in Fallout 4, but for the sake of time and the lack of shits I give about FO4 anymore I'll stick to one. The Minutemen; a historically awesome group of civilians who banded together to not only secure the local homesteads, but to fight tyranny itself were relegated to a douchebag turned internet meme and radiant shit questing. Along the way you are forced to accept allies from local shacks..um I mean settlements, the same people who couldn't protect themselves from two-bit raiders or ghouls. Then instead of letting the player take a town like Concord, Quincy, or Lexington after you have secured enough allies you are forced to defend rundown shit craters on the corner of why would anyone live here and please kill me drive.

Yeah, I understand that completely. The only actual town you can recruit to the Minutemen is Covenant, and that only has 15 people or less living in it. I would've liked to have taken over already functioning towns rather than having to build my own from scratch because that just ruins what little immersion there is for me. It's like "Well hey, if I can build an entire fucking city in 10 minutes, why have you assholes been sitting on your hands the last TWO HUNDRED YEARS?"
 
That'd just be a rip-off of that quest from Fallout 2, oh I'm sorry 'homage'.

Wait, which part of the 4 I listed would be a rip-off of a quest from Fallout 2? I haven't actually finished Fallout 2 so I don't know a lot of the quests from it.
 
I was replying to MutatedPanda, I should really start quoting posts I reply to.
Anyway there's a minor quest in FO2 where you attempt to cure a Super Mutant but instead it turns to goo upon administering the cure.
 
I was replying to MutatedPanda, I should really start quoting posts I reply to.
Anyway there's a minor quest in FO2 where you attempt to cure a Super Mutant but instead it turns to goo upon administering the cure.

Ahhh, I see. That poor Super Mutant. Kinda want to see this quest in action now. I really need to get back into FO2, but I'm currently absorbed in Wasteland 2.
 
Then instead of letting the player take a town like Concord, Quincy, or Lexington after you have secured enough allies you are forced to defend rundown shit craters on the corner of why would anyone live here and please kill me drive.
Concord, Quincy, and Lexington will be in the next set of DLCs for the expanded settlements Addon. $15.00 USD There will also be another settlement pack included with it that allows you to make wiffle bats. This time they will have Operation: Anchorage accessed through the Memory Den for $25.00 USD as well as Build-able computer terminals that you can read your stored pipboy messages on for $2.00 USD.
 
Every single time I TP to Sanctuary, all I hear is "Mama Murphy's as good as her word kid. No more chems. No more Sight either." I have it memorized, that's how many times I've heard it.
You missed a valuable opportunity my friend, as did I. If you feed her addiction she will OD
 
You missed a valuable opportunity my friend, as did I. If you feed her addiction she will OD

Really? Well then, I know what my next character is doing. If I decide to play through it a 2nd time. I might whenever the DLC comes out so I can have a fresh start, see the game with a new pair of eyes.
 
I think I mentioned it several times before, but I think the raiders could have been a real faction this time.
Especially with the settlement system it's really disappointing that the raiders are faceless mooks again.
It would have been so awesome if the player could actually join a raider gang and raid settlements as well as other gangs, and then unite all the raider tribes as a warlord, bringing down the Minutemen, BoS and Institute in the end, ruling the land. It would make for a completely new way to tackle the main quest. First you join a tribe, become its leader (preferably not after one quest like with the Minutemen), raid settlements and so on. Then you start allying yourself with other raider gangs, maybe building a central raider settlement somewhere (like in Sanctuary). Send out raiding parties, slavers, reach critical mass until you can take over Diamond City. The Minutemen are long dead by this point, so you need to take down the BoS and the Institute. Find out how to beat the BoS with their technological superiority, sabotage their airship and base and find a stash of power armours for your elite raiding party, wipe them out. Then it's to gain access to the Institute, taking over its facilities.
It's finally a viable option to finish your personal quest, too, as you're just searching for your son. You have no attachment to any of the other factions and don't give a shit about synths or whatever.
I guess I'll need to learn how to mod when the Creation Kit drops...
 
Concord, Quincy, and Lexington will be in the next set of DLCs for the expanded settlements Addon. $15.00 USD There will also be another settlement pack included with it that allows you to make wiffle bats. This time they will have Operation: Anchorage accessed through the Memory Den for $25.00 USD as well as Build-able computer terminals that you can read your stored pipboy messages on for $2.00 USD.
That's like $400 worth of DLC so that's a steal.
 
I could write a doctoral dissertation on the missed opportunities in Fallout 4, but for the sake of time and the lack of shits I give about FO4 anymore I'll stick to one. The Minutemen; a historically awesome group of civilians who banded together to not only secure the local homesteads, but to fight tyranny itself were relegated to a douchebag turned internet meme and radiant shit questing. Along the way you are forced to accept allies from local shacks..um I mean settlements, the same people who couldn't protect themselves from two-bit raiders or ghouls. Then instead of letting the player take a town like Concord, Quincy, or Lexington after you have secured enough allies you are forced to defend rundown shit craters on the corner of why would anyone live here and please kill me drive.
They are actually a ripoff of the Desert Rangers from new vegas... and maybe the NCR rangers (those at their begginings)
 
I disagree with the mama murphy part. She´s a waste. Her job could have been replaced by anyone telling the player the location of the main settlements.
 

The thing is though, everything's already in place for this to happen in the base game if they would simply make a patch/DLC for it. The whole reason those raiders have Preston and his gang pinned down in the first place is because they work for Tower Tom and want Mama Murphy. So instead of helping Preston, you help the Raiders get her. Badabing badaboom you're on the gang's good side. Although, in order to make it less easy, maybe Tower Tom could have you run some quests for him before he makes you his co-leader. Raiding a few settlements maybe, or wiping out a rival raider gang, idk. Instead of Sanctuary, your home base would be Beantown Brewery, Tower Tom's HQ. Once you get in good with Tower Tom's gang, he sends you out to help other raiding parties. You know, all those raiding camps scattered all over the place? Maybe he'd send you to some of those camps and you'd get quests from them or something. I'm thinking it'd be like the Powder Gangers in New Vegas, except a lot more fleshed out. Probably one of their main questlines would be helping them take over a major city, like Diamond City, and filling it with raiders.
 
Back
Top