Repairing Fallout's story from Bethesda

[Aurelianus]

BTW all the Vault 0 lore and briefing (from BOS side) is tons of times better than any ending from FO4 or the shitty ending of FO3.

Well, that doesn't really say much about its quality though... Better than F3/4 isn't an achievement in any sense of the word.

 

[Chaito]

Well, that doesn't really say much about its quality though... Better than F3/4 isn't an achievement in any sense of the word.

Well, indeed. But the idea of the Midwest BOS came up comparing to the FO3/4 BOS. I know is not an achivement, but I was not disappointed by how FO:T moved the BOS acting, besides it is a spinoff game, it is "reliable" how they've handled that.

In FO3/4 BOS, it doesn't make any sense at all.

 

[SarcasticGoodGuy]

Well, indeed. But the idea of the Midwest BOS came up comparing to the FO3/4 BOS. I know is not an achivement, but I was not disappointed by how FO:T moved the BOS acting, besides it is a spinoff game, it is "reliable" how they've handled that.

In FO3/4 BOS, it doesn't make any sense at all.

In defense of Fallout 3 I'd say the BoS entered one of the harshest environments in Fallout, and chose to help its citizens. The Outcasts were Bethesda acknowledging the BoS change in ideals and were (imo) a good way of showing that whilst the bulk of the Brotherhood changed, there were still purists trying to return to form.

Fallout 4 makes no sense whatsoever. Instead of secrecy they stroll into the Commonwealth with a blimp. Instead of xenophobia they just accept anyone that manages to kill ghouls. In the span of 10 years they build a warship and have an army big enough to expand from DC straight to Boston.

 

[Aurelianus]

In defense of Fallout 3 I'd say the BoS entered one of the harshest environments in Fallout, and chose to help its citizens. The Outcasts were Bethesda acknowledging the BoS change in ideals and were (imo) a good way of showing that whilst the bulk of the Brotherhood changed, there were still purists trying to return to form.

Fallout 4 makes no sense whatsoever. Instead of secrecy they stroll into the Commonwealth with a blimp. Instead of xenophobia they just accept anyone that manages to kill ghouls. In the span of 10 years they build a warship and have an army big enough to expand from DC straight to Boston.

My problem isn't actually so much that the East Coast BoS switched up their philosophy & thus broke away, my issue with them is that they are the most black-&-white, comic book style goodies with no ulterior motives. There's no nuance to them whatsoever. Like I mentioned earlier, an ideal revamp of them would be to put the East Coast BoS as a form of militaristic powerhouse that extorts the settlements under the premise that they drove off raider tribes & whatever plagued them prior to the Brotherhood's arrival. Essentially they force settlements to become vassals under their "protection" - supplying the BoS with food, electricity, whatever. Give each settlement at least two factions, one opposing the BoS' stranglehold on the Capital Wastes (which of course should not be all lovey dovey themselves) & one supporting them.

Just throwing out basic concepts in their most primitive form here but something like that, if we don't just scrap everything Bethesda put on the table that is.

 

[SarcasticGoodGuy]

My problem isn't actually so much that the East Coast BoS switched up their philosophy & thus broke away, my issue with them is that they are the most black-&-white, comic book style goodies with no ulterior motives. There's no nuance to them whatsoever. Like I mentioned earlier, an ideal revamp of them would be to put the East Coast BoS as a form of militaristic powerhouse that extorts the settlements under the premise that they drove off raider tribes & whatever plagued them prior to the Brotherhood's arrival. Essentially they force settlements to become vassals under their "protection" - supplying the BoS with food, electricity, whatever. Give each settlement at least two factions, one opposing the BoS' stranglehold on the Capital Wastes (which of course should not be all lovey dovey themselves) & one supporting them.

Just throwing out basic concepts in their most primitive form here but something like that, if we don't just scrap everything Bethesda put on the table that is.

All I'm saying was they tried a bit with Fallout 3. Fallout 4 was just fuck it, lets have cool power armour, and that cool robot everyone liked.

Wow Toddy, you've made a deep, interesting faction with lots of radiant quests. Good job.

 

[R.Graves]

Wow Toddy, you've made a deep, interesting faction with lots of radiant quests. Good job.

Does anyone else think Todd Howard is cute?

On topic: fallout 1's story is near flawless IMO.
Not much fixing if any is needed.

Fallout 2 could use some work.

Fallout 3 should probably be rewritten to be a little less nonsensical but and childless withe less plot holes. Or considered semi-canon. Is the brotherhood are over there and they had a small civil war.

Fallout 4 makes no sense from any angle and should probably just be completely scrapped from canon.

That's how I'd fix it. By ignoring it.

 

[Walpknut]

One day Harold just comes down from a massive high and says "Hah! Capital Wasteland and Commonwealth? Man I got really fucked up" then the story resumes from where New Vegas left off.

 

[CT Phipps]

I'm happy to tackle quite a bit of these.

You'd have to scrap the whole thing and start over.

I'm serious. You can't salvage that mess of a story that they have. You simply can't.

You'd be surprised.

Let's do something simple. Right? In Fallout 3, where does Stimpaks come from? There is a scientific branch on Rivet City so a logical conclusion would be that those doctors over there produce and sell stimpaks so that they can buy other resources to further study and explore scientific methods. But... Where do all the stimpaks in Fallout 4 come from exactly?

I'm pretty sure stimpacks are just morphine renamed. Which means they come from poppies.

Bethesda solved the "what do they eat" question from Fallout 3 but they just left a whole lot of other questions unanswered. Where does the ammunition come from? Where does the energy to power a lot of buildings come from? How do raiders support themselves when there isn't enough to even raid in the first place?

The United States has more ammunition than its population many times over in real-life, let alone American Naziland. There's also the fact the Pitt was producing ammunition for Raiders and trading it for slaves. The power for all this stuff comes from underground nuclear facilities and was detailed in the cutscenes as such. The Raiders support themselves by cannibalism and have destroyed most of the settlements in the Capital Wasteland. The Capital Wasteland is dying and the Lone Wanderer is it's only hope as extinction is a very real possibility.

One thing I do note is I tend to take the view the settlements are abstractions. Megaton has farms, we just can't see them because the game world has limitations. The deck of Rivet City is probably full of hydroponics gardens and other materials. You just have to use your imagination for some of this.

How about Super Mutants? It doesn't make a damn lick of sense for them to be there or for The Institute to have access to FEV so they have to be removed. That means that anything that touches upon super mutants has to be rewritten.

The Pre-War govermment having CIT experiment with FEV makes perfect sense as they have been obsessed with this stuff for a very long time. It also escaped into the atmosphere so it should entirely be possible for the Institute to cultivate pure samples of the stuff.

And feral ghouls need to be removed completely. Ferals are not canon. Ghouls don't turn animalistic like that, they can go crazy like regular human beings but they do not turn into 28 Days Later rip-offs.

Feral Ghouls are something which makes perfect sense given GHOULS ARE PEOPLE SUFFERING RADIATION POISONING. The idea their brains might decay as a result of old age or radiation iis fine by me.

And would you look at that? All of the sudden the wasteland is an awful lot safer. Less raiders because the amount of raiders need to be in ratio fitting to the amount of civilians simply trying to live and let live. No super mutants or ferals running about.

Which is a pretty boring ass place for a shooter.

So... That makes Diamon City's famous walls pretty damn useless at this point doesn't it? I mean not 'completely' useless but useless enough to not be such a bit thing anymore.

Yes, because walls are useless in a Medieval-style anarchy.

But whatever. Settlement crafting! Removed. Completely remove that piece of shit feature from Fallout like the cancer it is. Why? Cause it doesn't make any damn sense for you to just fart out fairy dust and magically poof together an entire community. Shit like this takes time, it takes time for it to grow and the people that come and settle down need to have personality and their own agency. If anything the only compromise I can see is to reduce the number of places you can craft down to one and only one.

So, when one of the complaints is the world never rebuilds in 200 years, you have the complaint someone organizes people to rebuild?

So without settlement crafting all of the sudden there isn't a whole lot of places left that are populated. We have a greenhouse that magically survived for 210 years because.... It's cool? Is this what Bethesda thinks is cool? Or is it supposed to be humorous... Fuck if I know but it's god damn stupid. It would need to be rewritten completely. I'm thinking of a pre-war agricultural facility where they tested robots to maintain plants and shit so that in the case of nuclear war then vaults could be outfitted with robots to handle these sort of tasks to ease the burden on the people living in the vaults. But bombs dropped before it got out of its testing phase and now the robots' protocols have changed to defence mode and that any communist that is not registered in their data-base is to be shot on sight. Since you're pre-war it means you can get in there and potentially change their protocols or add others into those protocols and establish a community.

Farms have survived unbroken from the middle ages and you have a problem with a green house being run by immortal robots.

But a fucking greenhouse in the middle of nowhere who's windows largely survived the blast of a nuclear bomb? A couple of robots with valuable parts that hasn't been shut down and stripped for parts? It's ridiculous.

The Glowing Sea is the Blast Radius of the nuclear bomb. Everything else fell to crap naturally.

My point with all of this is that you'd need to rewrite so much stuff that it wouldn't even be Fallout 4 anymore. And if that much work is required you might as well just create a new game as it doesn't come with a bunch of baggage.

I disagree.

We're forced to have a certain kind of background, fine. If that has to be in the game then fine, it can work. But the vault representative that knocks on your door 'just' got your signature. How the hell are you allowed into the vault? Like, I sincerely doubt that they have had time to run a background check on you or anything so a name on a list is pretty much meaningless. If anything the vault representative is more of a valid candidate for the vault (as they can just look at his vault tec ID badge and go "ayeah, you're in") but they don't allow him inside.

The Vaults are experiments by the government run by a private military contractor. You were chosen to be in the Vault, your actual involvement was unnecessary. If you didn't want to be in a Vault, I'm fairly sure you wouldn't have a choice and would still be signed up as the government is crazy that way.

So then we have the blast, right? How come not a single soldier was like "fuck this shit, I ain't dying!" and jumped on the platform going down? Why were all those soldiers so willing to just die when they knew what was coming. It feels robotic. Like they aren't even people. None of them act like a human being would in this panic inducing situation. Even the people who aren't allowed in are acting far too subdued. Maybe if there was a couple of corpses that had been torn apart by minigun fire then it would have made sense but they're just standing outside of the gates pouting. So that blast happens and the representative survives. Remember the blast that you can see above you when going down? How the hell did the representative survive the blast? Have ya'll seen videos of nuclear blasts and how much force they pack? Yet he survives.

The soldiers are wearing Power Armor and assigned to the Vault-Tech project. I imagine they're very much aware they have a reserved place in Space or on the Poseidon Oil Rig. as for the Representative survive, he becomes a ghoul. I remind you, also, the nuclear blast hit the Glowing Sea on the other side of the map. You just got to see the mushroom cloud.

Only one Nuke hit Boston in this setting, why everything is intact.

Why are they shot? Why not just bring all three of them? Is The Institute really that crowded at that point in time that they can't support 3 people? And why are the rest of the people dead? The vault hasn't been breached and everyone else would've been frozen too. So if everyone else got unfrozen but you then why didn't they unfreeze you? Cause I distintcly remember there being vault-suit clad skeletons littered around the vault, so they didn't all die in their cryo chambers. None of this is making any damn sense.

This is explained in Kellog's memories that he was ordered to murder them all except for the spare. Even if they hadn't shot the mother then he would have suffocated her. As for why the Institute did it, it's because they're a bunch of racists who consider anyone not part of them to be subhuman.

So you survive and get out of the vault and move your way down to Sanctuary and find your old robot butler. Who's survived. On his own. For 200 years. With no one taking him down and stripping him for parts. Uhm... It's a Mr Handy. Not a Mr Gutsy. He should be dead.

Yes, because Sanctuary Hills has clearly seen so many visitors. Codsworth also says he runs away whenever someone starts shooting.

Anyway, you move on down to Concord and find The Minutemen who's story is that of a horror-story, they came for their people and started picking them off until there's now only a handful of them left! Raiders. Low level raiders are apparently bogeymen.

The Gunners are Vault-Dwellers trained in actual military tactics and equipment. They're the Talon Company equivalent.

 

[Jogre]

I'm pretty sure stimpacks are just morphine renamed. Which means they come from poppies.

A healing chem. When injected, the chem provides immediate healing of minor wounds.
-Description of Stimpaks in Fallout 1.

Plus there is an entire piece of cut FO2 dialogue explaining that Stimpaks can actually cause skin to regrow around wounds.

It is essentially supposed to be a super-drug designed for rapid regeneration.

Morphine does also exist in the Fallout Universe, but because some countries like Australia have strong censorship laws it's refered to as Med-X(It gives a bonus to damage resistance, is highly addictive, and is used by the Followers to numb pain, making it functionally similar to Morphine.

Megaton has farms, we just can't see them because the game world has limitations

Not good enough.

Almost every single settlement in Fallout 1 and 2 had either Brahmin or Crops despite engine limitations.

Almost every single New Vegas settlement had Crops and some kind of Livestock despite engine limitations.

The Pre-War govermment having CIT experiment with FEV makes perfect sense as they have been obsessed with this stuff for a very long time.

Files in West-Tek state that all FEV research was sent to Mariposa. The project was top secret, so it's unlikely CIT would even know about it, and even if they did, it wouldn't have been shipped to them without West-Tek knowing first.

Feral Ghouls are something which makes perfect sense given GHOULS ARE PEOPLE SUFFERING RADIATION POISONING. The idea their brains might decay as a result of old age or radiation iis fine by me.

If there brains are rotting, they should be going delusional, perhaps lashing out at people coming too close, not turning in to literal cliched zombies.

And Ghouls might not have been suffering from radiation poisoning before Bethesda came along. The most commonly accepted explanation was Airborne FEV virus.

So, when one of the complaints is the world never rebuilds in 200 years, you have the complaint someone organizes people to rebuild?

The world should be rebuilding by itself within time, and each individual settlement should have there own identity. It shouldn't be a matter of "Everything remains stagnant for a couple hundred years, then one guy from 200 years ago wakes up, suddenly becomes the king of everything and unites the entire world under one banner", that just seems like a stupid way of feeding the power fantasy players might have, rather than actually being bothered to create a world that could plausibly exist without the player.

I imagine they're very much aware they have a reserved place in Space or on the Poseidon Oil Rig

A. Sure, because the Enclave is just going to let two generic mooks, whose sole contribution to there cause is guarding a vault right on to the Oil Rig. That's definitely how a top-secret elitist society would work.
B. They are on the other side of the country. It's going to be a long trip to the Oil Rig, and I'm guessing planes wouldn't work too well from all the Electro-Magnetic Pulses. By the time they reach the Oil Rig, they'd already have seen most of the dangers of the wasteland anyway, and would also be too mutated to be let in.

This is explained in Kellog's memories that he was ordered to murder them all except for the spare

The Institute needs pre-war DNA for an experiment. There is a Vault filled with a dozen residents of pre-war DNA.

The Institute is choosing here between having 11 backup test subjects, or killing a bunch of people for no valid reason. I wonder what any rational group of people would choose to do in that scenario?

The Gunners are Vault-Dwellers trained in actual military tactics and equipment

Since the game isn't courteous enough to actually allow you to talk to Gunners and ask there backstory(Like pretty much any other Fallout game would have), there is no possible way of confirming this.

There is no evidence for this and it is 100% speculation.

 

[CT Phipps]

Morphine does also exist in the Fallout Universe, but because some countries like Australia have strong censorship laws it's refered to as Med-X(It gives a bonus to damage resistance, is highly addictive, and is used by the Followers to numb pain, making it functionally similar to Morphine.

You have me there.

Not good enough.

Almost every single settlement in Fallout 1 and 2 had either Brahmin or Crops despite engine limitations.

Almost every single New Vegas settlement had Crops and some kind of Livestock despite engine limitations.

The question of how to manage resources is one which the developers had to make with the change to 3D. One of the biggest disasters of the Ultima series was the switch to voiced 3d Gameplay because the games became so much smaller. I'm not saying the crops and Brahmin weren't welcome when they showed up in the game but they did show up in Rivet City's hydroponics garden, just not Megaton.

Files in West-Tek state that all FEV research was sent to Mariposa. The project was top secret, so it's unlikely CIT would even know about it, and even if they did, it wouldn't have been shipped to them without West-Tek knowing first.

That just means CIT could have had its own research sent there, not that they never did any. In real life, top secret projects often have dozens of locations and layers of research as well as trails of compartmentalization. Even so, it's still possible CIT cultivated FEV on their own since it escaped into the atmosphere and is everywhere now.

If there brains are rotting, they should be going delusional, perhaps lashing out at people coming too close, not turning in to literal cliched zombies.

FEV is part of the reason why animals are so aggressive and territorial. Radiation and FEV combinations used to be canonical as the source of the ghouls and might still be in the Bethesda verse since they don't rely totally on the Bible.

And Ghouls might not have been suffering from radiation poisoning before Bethesda came along. The most commonly accepted explanation was Airborne FEV virus.

Radiation was always meant to be the start before it got retconned into FEV and radiation before being retconned back. It led to the confusion whether Harold was a mutant or a ghoul or both.

The world should be rebuilding by itself within time, and each individual settlement should have there own identity. It shouldn't be a matter of "Everything remains stagnant for a couple hundred years, then one guy from 200 years ago wakes up, suddenly becomes the king of everything and unites the entire world under one banner", that just seems like a stupid way of feeding the power fantasy players might have, rather than actually being bothered to create a world that could plausibly exist without the player.

Well, the whole point of the games is very often the world is not getting better but getting worse. Given I hate the progressive view of history, I appreciate it. You can work to turn around things but I don't see a problem with efforts to rebuild failing in the much more hostile and shitty East Coast.

A. Sure, because the Enclave is just going to let two generic mooks, whose sole contribution to there cause is guarding a vault right on to the Oil Rig. That's definitely how a top-secret elitist society would work.
B. They are on the other side of the country. It's going to be a long trip to the Oil Rig, and I'm guessing planes wouldn't work too well from all the Electro-Magnetic Pulses. By the time they reach the Oil Rig, they'd already have seen most of the dangers of the wasteland anyway, and would also be too mutated to be let in.

Those were probably the Enclave's mooks is what I'm saying. The Vaults are directly under the supervision of the Enclave and one of their two major projects (the other being FEV). As for the Enclave betraying their own like that, I don't see that as a remote problem since they're awful awful people.

The Institute needs pre-war DNA for an experiment. There is a Vault filled with a dozen residents of pre-war DNA.

Honestly, I'm surprised they didn't chop up Shaun. CIT is a university run by scientists who are collaborating with a fascist state just like so much of the Pre-War corporate and academic community. The fact they're awful people doesn't surprise me.

As someone who works in academia, having them be wasteful and destroy priceless material for their experiment is just true to life.

The Institute is choosing here between having 11 backup test subjects, or killing a bunch of people for no valid reason. I wonder what any rational group of people would choose to do in that scenario?

I confess, I was surprised to find the Institute didn't kill them so they could siphon power from the cryogenics facility. It's a nuclear reactor powered Vault and they need energy for their teleporter. I thought they were setting that up but, no, it seems they just did it because Institute people loathe outsiders.

Whoever raised Shaun and the Institute's former director seems to have been a real dickbag.

Since the game isn't courteous enough to actually allow you to talk to Gunners and ask there backstory(Like pretty much any other Fallout game would have), there is no possible way of confirming this.

It's all at the Vault you can visit, which is the Gunner home base.[/quote]

 

[Walpknut]

Oh boy a new FO3 apologist. So glad you joined just to defend a shitty 7 year old game dude.

Stimpaks are morphine? The fuck?

 

[CT Phipps]

Yep, I mentally burped and confused Med-X and stimpacks.

That I have no apology for.

As for being an apologist, I take the game as a Fallout-spinoff from the main games.

I enjoy it on its own without apology.

 

[CT Phipps]

I'd like to see the Armor thing dealt with.

Also, some more explanations on what the hell is going on with the BoS.

 

[Jogre]

Oh boy a new FO3 apologist. So glad you joined just to defend a shitty 7 year old game dude.

Stimpaks are morphine? The fuck?

Nothing wrong with someone with an opposing viewpoint coming on the forum. He seems polite enough, why so confrontational about it?

Even so, it's still possible CIT cultivated FEV on their own since it escaped into the atmosphere and is everywhere now.

I guess you have a point. I'll give you that one.

Radiation was always meant to be the start before it got retconned into FEV and radiation before being retconned back

Fallout 1 was incredibly ambigous about it, and later it was established to be Airborne FEV. I don't think before Bethesda there ever was a point when it outright stated it was radiation.

Well, the whole point of the games is very often the world is not getting better but getting worse

The whole point of the games is that the world isn't getting better but worse?

Lets look a moment at Fallout 1: a game with various cities and towns. The wasteland seems to be slowly becoming civilized. New models of laser weaponry are being developed by the Brotherhood. Based on your endings, you can hear vaguely about a Republic being formed, or of the Followers becoming a major force, or of the Brotherhood spreading out across the land

Fastforward to Fallout 2: Southern California is now a fully-functioning republic, up in Northern Nevada is a city state that has made huge leaps in medicine, and wants to begin expanding. There is also a dynasty within New Reno that wants to use a newly invented drug to take over northern California. While there are a few isolated bands of bandits and mercenaries here and there, the big, bad raider gangs that could actively threaten towns like we got in Fallout 1 seem practically non-existent. It's implied from Redding that the power struggle between Vault City, NCR and New Reno means that few towns will be able to retain there independence.

The games aren't supposed to exist in a constantly stagnating universe.

but I don't see a problem with efforts to rebuild failing in the much more hostile and shitty East Coast.

200 years ago Americans were still using wagon trains to travel from one side of the country to another.

Lets look at the world of Fallout 4: People living in shacks, scattered and disorganised, still being threatened by a group of gangs who kill people and steal shit. That could very easily be straight after the bombs dropped. It seems as though almost no changes have happened to the world in the whole 200 years.

Those were probably the Enclave's mooks is what I'm saying.

The Enclave were a top-secret society made of the wealthy and elite. There is no way that they would reveal there existence to a bunch of random soldiers.

I thought they were setting that up but, no, it seems they just did it because Institute people loathe outsiders.

Exactly my point. If the Institute were in any way rational scientists(Which the game sets them up to be), killing a bunch of people just because they dislike outsiders is a stupid course of action. They gain absolutely no benefit from it, and they lose out on 11 or so test subjects.

It's all at the Vault you can visit, which is the Gunner home base.

If your talking about that training Vault, the Gunners are simply there. There is no indication that its where they originated from.

 

[CT Phipps]

If your talking about that training Vault, the Gunners are simply there. There is no indication that its where they originated from.

I could be incorrect on this but I thought someone made a reference to tattoos on their foreheads in the consoles in said Vault while the Gunner models often have tattoos on their foreheads of their Blood Type.

 

[SarcasticGoodGuy]

I thought gamma rays travel faster than the speed of light- correct me if I'm wrong I honestly don't know but- are you and Jason Shaun really radiation free? What about Vault 81? When did they open their doors? Why couldn't the Institute go after them?
And you saw the bomb go off and you didn't go blind.
And why was there a vertibird?

@CT Phipps there's a lot wrong with Fallout 4's story. You can't deny it at this point that to make it a legitimate Fallout game (not a spin-off, one that exists within the same Universe as 1,2 and NV) a lot would have to be redone from the get go.

 

[CT Phipps]

Fallout 4 has a few genuine just, "this is just lazy" stuff unlike Fallout 3 which I'm willing to bend my suspension of disbelief in the name of fun.

* Jet being in the rehabilitation Vault is just laziness since nothing prevents it from being Buffout. If you're going to retcon Jet into a pre-War drug then at least mention it in universe.

* The armor retcons are too numerous to make any real sense.

Oddly enough, I'm okay with almost everything else.

I don't think there's that many things which require more lore. The Institute making Super Mutants is a valid reason for their existence, for example.

 

[SarcasticGoodGuy]

Fallout 4 has a few genuine just, "this is just lazy" stuff unlike Fallout 3 which I'm willing to bend my suspension of disbelief in the name of fun.

* Jet being in the rehabilitation Vault is just laziness since nothing prevents it from being Buffout. If you're going to retcon Jet into a pre-War drug then at least mention it in universe.

* The armor retcons are too numerous to make any real sense.

Oddly enough, I'm okay with almost everything else.

Alien cities under the Mojave? Please I have to know if you're OK with that. You've brought up good points in the name of Fallout 4, but can you defend that?

 

[CT Phipps]

I thought gamma rays travel faster than the speed of light- correct me if I'm wrong I honestly don't know but- are you and Jason Shaun really radiation free? What about Vault 81? When did they open their doors? Why couldn't the Institute go after them?
And you saw the bomb go off and you didn't go blind.
And why was there a vertibird?

1. Intriguingly, DIMAH speculates that the Sole Survivor is a Synth and given Shaun has recreated himself as a boy, it's entirely possible that a lot of that could be explained as the Sole Survivor having implanted false memories and this was all Shaun trying to give himself a father figure in a weird mad science project. Frankly, it would have been a better ending.

2. I do think it would have been an interesting to have the reason the Institute shut down the cryopods as because they were diverting power to the Institute. Which would fit with their statement they have been stealing power from the Commonwealth all along.

3. Vault 81 may have simply not opened their doors to the Institute.

4. Well, it's an Osprey Helicopter style which exists in the RL so I imagine it's not the same kind the Enclave uses.

Alien cities under the Mojave? Please I have to know if you're OK with that. You've brought up good points in the name of Fallout 4, but can you defend that?

It's an homage to Lovecraft's The Nameless City. Jack Cabot could be wrong about their existence even if you accept the story their father had an alien artifact he discovered in the 19th century. I generally am alright with all of the Cthulhu Mythos and Zetan references in the world as it just adds to a sense of the strange and mysterious to the world.

I admit, for a long time, I did want it revealed the Zetans were actually Vault-Tech humans mutated and operating from a Moonbase constructed for the Enclave to journey to.

 

[Jogre]

4. Well, it's an Osprey Helicopter style which exists in the RL so I imagine it's not the same kind the Enclave uses.

Why not just give it a new name like "Helicrapter" or "Fucker Jet" or something. Vertibirds before this means the style of vehicle the Enclave uses.

as it just adds to a sense of the strange and mysterious to the world.

The thing is, a crashed UFO, or a Speaking Altar, or spooky flash backs would add a sense of mysterious to the world, a full-out questline where someone finds an alien artifact and becomes immortal adds no sense of mysterious, and instead outright forces these things to exist in the game-universe.