SportBrotha
First time out of the vault
So I recently finished the Fallout 4 main quest line by siding with the Minutemen, and aside from being utterly underwhelmed by nearly every aspect of this game I've been thinking about all the various plot holes I've discovered.
Here's my personal favourite. If you play the game siding with the BoS, Minutemen or Railroad you are forced to destroy the Institute by planting a 'fusion pulse charge' on the Institute's nuclear reactor. You fight your way deep into the Institute through a conveniently forgotten and poorly hidden secret tunnel (if you side with the Railroad or Minutemen, I believe the BoS just make a giant hole in the ground with Liberty Prime). Once you reach the reactor, in an exemplification of lazy and linear level design that plagues this game, an ally from either the BoS, Minutemen, or Railroad teleports you and your party to the tallest building in the Commonwealth to detonate your nuclear bomb (shameless plot point ripped straight out of FO3 to be used once again, just like many other tropes in this game).
But what I really want to talk about is this teleportation issue. The Institute is built up as being so technologically advanced that they can teleport their synth coursers anywhere in the Commonwealth and in the last 5 minutes of the game we learn that people can be teleported by any individual that controls the Institutes teleportation system. So seeing as how the Institute is capable of teleporting people against their will, they are able to plant teleportation devices within synths and they can use this anywhere in the Commonwealth, why don't they simply install teleportation devices on every 3rd Gen synth. If the synth runs away, just teleport them back to a holding cell to be reformatted. You don't need coursers anymore, and synths don't need to know they are implanted with teleportation devices.
Furthermore, the player, no matter what, has one of these devices implanted in their Pip-Boy. Why isn't it the case that as soon as you turn against the Institute they don't just teleport you to a room filled with lazer turrets, immediately disintegrating to upon arrival, or if Shaun has grown too emotionally attached to you to let this happen, why not transport you to a prison cell where he can attempt to reason with you. Indeed, if you antagonize the Institute you receive a quest which asks you to teleport back to the Institute. If you do so, you find yourself locked in a small room with Shaun accosting you through an intercom. At this moment I thought I would be treated with maybe a brief cutscene, such as the one we receive in Fallout 1 if we succumb to the Master's plan and join his army. We get dipped in an FEV vat, and our Vault is found and its residents are forced to join as well. Even Fallout 3 had an option similar to this. When Colonel Autumn is interrogating you in order to obtain the Project Purity passcode, giving him the correct passcode results in him using the passcode to unlock Purity and then killing you (ignore Autumn's horrible writing for the moment, at least we see that we as a player are not protected from death just because we are the protagonist. Fallout 1 and to some extent even 3 understood that there are sometimes wrong choices, particularly in dialogue that can get the player killed). But enough with that digression. Instead of trying to reason with you, to see his point of view, or simply eliminating the biggest threat to the realization of his dream, Shaun simply teleports you back to the Commonwealth.
So that's the most glaring plot hole to me. The player has a teleportation device implanted in their Pip-Boy which could be used to instantly kill or capture them should they ever wrong the Institute and this is completely ignored. At least give me a moment where I remove this device, dooming myself to never return to the Institute, but ensuring some safety should I betray them. And then why is there a Railroad at all? There should be no escaped synths, there should be no coursers. The Institute, instead of sensibly saving resources by installing teleporters on potential runaways, invents a whole new synth with the same teleporter to chase and runaways AND THEN teleport them back anyway?
There are so many other plot holes as well, I've left some others out that I found. What do you guys think? What's the worst plot hole in FO4?
Here's my personal favourite. If you play the game siding with the BoS, Minutemen or Railroad you are forced to destroy the Institute by planting a 'fusion pulse charge' on the Institute's nuclear reactor. You fight your way deep into the Institute through a conveniently forgotten and poorly hidden secret tunnel (if you side with the Railroad or Minutemen, I believe the BoS just make a giant hole in the ground with Liberty Prime). Once you reach the reactor, in an exemplification of lazy and linear level design that plagues this game, an ally from either the BoS, Minutemen, or Railroad teleports you and your party to the tallest building in the Commonwealth to detonate your nuclear bomb (shameless plot point ripped straight out of FO3 to be used once again, just like many other tropes in this game).
But what I really want to talk about is this teleportation issue. The Institute is built up as being so technologically advanced that they can teleport their synth coursers anywhere in the Commonwealth and in the last 5 minutes of the game we learn that people can be teleported by any individual that controls the Institutes teleportation system. So seeing as how the Institute is capable of teleporting people against their will, they are able to plant teleportation devices within synths and they can use this anywhere in the Commonwealth, why don't they simply install teleportation devices on every 3rd Gen synth. If the synth runs away, just teleport them back to a holding cell to be reformatted. You don't need coursers anymore, and synths don't need to know they are implanted with teleportation devices.
Furthermore, the player, no matter what, has one of these devices implanted in their Pip-Boy. Why isn't it the case that as soon as you turn against the Institute they don't just teleport you to a room filled with lazer turrets, immediately disintegrating to upon arrival, or if Shaun has grown too emotionally attached to you to let this happen, why not transport you to a prison cell where he can attempt to reason with you. Indeed, if you antagonize the Institute you receive a quest which asks you to teleport back to the Institute. If you do so, you find yourself locked in a small room with Shaun accosting you through an intercom. At this moment I thought I would be treated with maybe a brief cutscene, such as the one we receive in Fallout 1 if we succumb to the Master's plan and join his army. We get dipped in an FEV vat, and our Vault is found and its residents are forced to join as well. Even Fallout 3 had an option similar to this. When Colonel Autumn is interrogating you in order to obtain the Project Purity passcode, giving him the correct passcode results in him using the passcode to unlock Purity and then killing you (ignore Autumn's horrible writing for the moment, at least we see that we as a player are not protected from death just because we are the protagonist. Fallout 1 and to some extent even 3 understood that there are sometimes wrong choices, particularly in dialogue that can get the player killed). But enough with that digression. Instead of trying to reason with you, to see his point of view, or simply eliminating the biggest threat to the realization of his dream, Shaun simply teleports you back to the Commonwealth.
So that's the most glaring plot hole to me. The player has a teleportation device implanted in their Pip-Boy which could be used to instantly kill or capture them should they ever wrong the Institute and this is completely ignored. At least give me a moment where I remove this device, dooming myself to never return to the Institute, but ensuring some safety should I betray them. And then why is there a Railroad at all? There should be no escaped synths, there should be no coursers. The Institute, instead of sensibly saving resources by installing teleporters on potential runaways, invents a whole new synth with the same teleporter to chase and runaways AND THEN teleport them back anyway?
There are so many other plot holes as well, I've left some others out that I found. What do you guys think? What's the worst plot hole in FO4?
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