Fallout Fallout 4 Thread

[Jozoz]

Yeah only r/fallout seems to be youtube comments level of fanboyism.

It's correct what people say in the comments though. It doesn't matter. Bethesda already got paid.

 

[Carrion]

What makes you say that? Seems like a light joke about the base building gimmick.

I thought it was about the Bethesda NPCs, having a loose screw and all that, except worse.

 

[ArchAngel]

What makes you say that? Seems like a light joke about the base building gimmick.

I thought it was about the Bethesda NPCs, having a loose screw and all that, except worse.

No, he is just making fun of how their game world does not make any sense. And he is right, screws can normaly be found everywhere, in many things. It is funny that game only lets you get them from few types of objects. I didn't even really think about it before that tweet but yea, it is another stupid part of the game and Sawyer was making fun of it .

 

[Rhapsody'n Blue]

why do you even consider such bullshit even plausible?
fucking clickbaits. just paste the article here next time.

I didn't want to fuck with linking in the images, or to deal with their formatting. Clickbait? You realize your tax dollars are likely funding wars in over three regions, right? I hope you're just as judicious when it comes to that.

 

[Alexandrovitch]

Since I have no plans to play the game ever again, could someone spoil me why was our son taken in the first place, and what kind of abilities did he posses to become the head of Institute?

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

The Stalker games are all "Stalker 1". Stalker 2 was never made. There were even rumours that Bethesda wanted to buy the Stalker franchise, fortunately nothing happened.

is this you doing that thing that I do where I'm like "shame they never made a Fallout 3," or were all the STALKERs meant to take place simultaneously or something? I so badly want to love that series, but the terrible gunplay/lack-of-stealth just always turns me off, no matter what mods I go for. great mood, though.

Sort of.
There has never been a Stalker 2 released.
There are other stalker games, but neither of them have 2 on them, and they aren't really true sequels.
Clear Sky is more like the prequel / prologue to Shadow of Chernobyl, and Call of Pripyat is the epilogue, that explores the consequences of the ending of SoC.
They all center around / feature Strelok in a way, even though you don't play as him in CS or CoP.

Anyway, yeah, most of the followers in FO4 aren't great. They are either, bland, boring or annoying.
The only follower I could bear was Cait. I found her backstory to be adequate, and her mannerisms bearable.

What makes you say that? Seems like a light joke about the base building gimmick.

I thought it was about the Bethesda NPCs, having a loose screw and all that, except worse.

No, he is just making fun of how their game world does not make any sense. And he is right, screws can normaly be found everywhere, in many things. It is funny that game only lets you get them from few types of objects. I didn't even really think about it before that tweet but yea, it is another stupid part of the game and Sawyer was making fun of it .

Yeah, making screws that rare was an absurd attempt at balancing.
I mean, desk fans are only kept together with 2 screws? What?

 

[Rhapsody'n Blue]

Two questions before I buy into this (if I buy into this):

1) Do non-combat encounters happen outside of cities? I mean, do you find people in the wilds beyond psycho killers who instantly aggro?

2) In general, do missions have combat objectives (kill person X, clear zone Y) or is the combat more a secondary affair (e.g. your mission is to find object Y in base X, which just so happens to house raider group P). I prefer the latter as it allows more creativity in how the player achieves the goal.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Two questions before I buy into this (if I buy into this):

1) Do non-combat encounters happen outside of cities? I mean, do you find people in the wilds beyond psycho killers who instantly aggro?

2) In general, do missions have combat objectives (kill person X, clear zone Y) or is the combat more a secondary affair (e.g. your mission is to find object Y in base X, which just so happens to house raider group P). I prefer the latter as it allows more creativity in how the player achieves the goal.

1) Yes, you occasionally find wandering settlers and caravans

2) It's more like the former. However, I think you can get away with just assassinating the leader.
When the mission says "wipe out the raiders from X" it really means "kill this marked guy."
After killing the marked guy, the mission would complete, even if there are a few stragglers left.
At least for most radiant / procedural missions, anyway. There is one procedural quest where you just have to find a certain item.

 

[Rhapsody'n Blue]

Humm..

I really hope Bethesda lets another company take a crack at a spin off title. Obsidian would be cool, especially with Tim Cain on board, but Inxile or even Zenimax's Arkane Studios (Dishonored) would make me happy. Any one of these developers makes games more Fallout than Fallout 3 (can't judge 4 yet, but likely the same).

 

[Lemming42]

Two questions before I buy into this (if I buy into this):

1) Do non-combat encounters happen outside of cities? I mean, do you find people in the wilds beyond psycho killers who instantly aggro?

2) In general, do missions have combat objectives (kill person X, clear zone Y) or is the combat more a secondary affair (e.g. your mission is to find object Y in base X, which just so happens to house raider group P). I prefer the latter as it allows more creativity in how the player achieves the goal.

1) Unbelievably rarely. I haven't played it since I beat it on release week but I remember a grand total of one single non-combat encounter, and it potentially turns into a combat encounter if you fuck up the charisma check.

2) Yes, almost every quest actually mandates the killing of various people. Stealthing through dungeons is borderline impossible - perhaps actually impossible - and there are occasional doors that won't open until everyone in the room is dead, frequently pacifying people won't work and the game will just wait until you shoot them in the head, etc.

 

[Bradylama]

why do you even consider such bullshit even plausible?
fucking clickbaits. just paste the article here next time.

I didn't want to fuck with linking in the images, or to deal with their formatting. Clickbait? You realize your tax dollars are likely funding wars in over three regions, right? I hope you're just as judicious when it comes to that.

RK is Singaporean/Indonesian Chinese. The only wars his governments have ever waged are against Leftists.

 

[Rhapsody'n Blue]

RK is Singaporean/Indonesian Chinese. The only wars his governments have ever waged are against Leftists.

Tell that to the East Timorese.

1) Unbelievably rarely. I haven't played it since I beat it on release week but I remember a grand total of one single non-combat encounter, and it potentially turns into a combat encounter if you fuck up the charisma check.

2) Yes, almost every quest actually mandates the killing of various people. Stealthing through dungeons is borderline impossible - perhaps actually impossible - and there are occasional doors that won't open until everyone in the room is dead, frequently pacifying people won't work and the game will just wait until you shoot them in the head, etc.

Per #2, ehh.. This would kill it for me. Really? Didn't Bethesda brag that you could almost make it through the whole game without killing anybody, save one or two primary characters? Guess they had quite a few conditionals on that (main quest only, etc).

Funny how stealth these days doesn't mean ghosting anymore (but killing without being seen).

 

[Bradylama]

Tell that to the East Timorese.

Tell that to the who? Where? *awkwardly tugs collar*

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Since I have no plans to play the game ever again, could someone spoil me why was our son taken in the first place, and what kind of abilities did he posses to become the head of Institute?

The Institute was fucking around with FEV experiments for no apparently good reason before they decided it would be a better idea to make artificial humans that they could control. All of the Super Mutants in the Commonwealth are dumb as shit, so why the Institute couldn't keep them on a leash and to what purpose is a mystery. To make Synths that are exactly like people, they needed a genetic baseline but almost all of the available subjects have been damaged by radiation. Therefore they needed someone that had no exposure to the toxic environment of the wasteland.

BUT, why it had to be Shaun is never actually explained. They're manufacturing Synths as full grown adults, so it's not as if they needed to start with an infant to avoid the aging issue that's come up before in real life cloning. Really anybody in Vault 111 would have been a suitable genetic baseline. They could have easily coerced your spouse into coming with them and bringing the baby, so it was never explicitly necessary for Kellogg to kill him or her. It's also questionable why of all the test subjects recruited from the Sanctuary Hills suburb, not a single other family has a baby or child that was frozen in the vault. And for that matter, it's never explained why they needed someone from before the bombs fell that was perfectly intact. Vault 81 is a viable community, and the Institute Scientists should at least have been aware of the vault locations. They could have easily recruited any other vault dweller for the experiment. They also never clarified why any of the scientists weren't a suitable baseline, because supposedly they were all sealed off from the outside world underneath CIT to begin with. None of them should have ever been exposed to radiation or the FEV. Most of them have never even been above ground by the time you arrive, and when they do go above ground they're always wearing full-body HAZMAT suits.

The reason Shaun becomes the head of the Institute is NEVER EXPLAINED. We're just supposed to assume that he was so uniquely qualified that they had to make him their leader. My guess is that because he's genetically related to all the 3rd Gen Synths, they need him to be their figurehead to pose as an authoritarian father figure, which is why they literally call him Father. That is of course, never explicitly stated or even hinted at.

 

[pippin]

is this you doing that thing that I do where I'm like "shame they never made a Fallout 3," or were all the STALKERs meant to take place simultaneously or something? I so badly want to love that series, but the terrible gunplay/lack-of-stealth just always turns me off, no matter what mods I go for. great mood, though.

I think they all are standalone expansions to Shadow of Chernobyl.

 

[Bradylama]

It's certainly true that the writing is better than Fallout 3's, but that's a technical feat of composition. As soon as you scratch underneath the surface, nothing about the story holds up to scrutiny, only this time it's worse because you're practically railroaded into the narrative whereas in Fallout 3 you at least had a few options.

 

[potatojohn]

It's certainly true that the writing is better than Fallout 3's, but that's a technical feat of composition. As soon as you scratch underneath the surface, nothing about the story holds up to scrutiny, only this time it's worse because you're practically railroaded into the narrative whereas in Fallout 3 you at least had a few options.

We're talking about a game series where radiation turns people into immortal uglies and everyone's living in 200 year old ruins. Fallout is all about style and atmosphere and zero sense.

 

[Bradylama]

Pete Hines, everybody, give 'im a hand.

 

[Rhapsody'n Blue]

We're talking about a game series where radiation turns people into immortal uglies and everyone's living in 200 year old ruins. Fallout is all about style and atmosphere and zero sense.

Now that is where you're objectively wrong.

This explains it better than I: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27089

To quote a bit, so as to not be obtuse:

Last time we talked about how the writers completely misinterpreted and subsequently bungled the themes and tone of the Fallout universe. Now let’s get into the brokenness of the Fallout 3 setting. Last time they just made things really hard for themselves, but this is where the plot of the game melted into radioactive nonsense.

Let’s start with my favorite question…

But what do they EAT?

I know this question is really irritating to some people. They see it as some kind of unreasonable demand for a super-realistic simulation. But the question of “What do they eat?” isn’t some dumb pedantic complaint, like a gun enthusiast demanding to know where everyone gets gun oil or a computer technician asking why the computers haven’t all failed due to magnetic degradation[1].

The fact that human beings need food and that food takes work to accumulate is a completely universal truth that has shaped our entire history and culture. Human beings hate work, but we do it anyway because we need to eat. In a survivalist society, it shapes how we form families, where we build towns, what we do for a living, what resources we value, what animals we domesticate, how we dress, and countless other details about our outlook and day-to-day life.

If this was a story where the sides were fighting over some pre-war super-weapon, then we wouldn’t need to think too hard about where food comes from. But Fallout 3 makes the struggle for water central to the plot, and then completely fails to lay the groundwork for it.

Fallout, at its core, is an exploration of cold war hysteria and fear, and to make an exploration meaningful you need to ground the fantastical in something that has real world relevance. Much in the same way Lord of the Rings, for all its magic and monsters, has relevance in a post WWII european nation-state dynamic, or resonance through universal themes of brotherhood (good/evil dynamic, etc). My point is every story needs these foundations, these hooks into the familiar or relevant, to work.

 

[potatojohn]

Fallout 4 does have farming. There are lots of settlements everywhere, and they sell a part to diamond city presumably. There's even a BoS quest where you go intimidate farmers to get food.

It's watered down but surely F4 is more about the logistics of survival than any Fallout game so far.

 

[Jick Magger]

Per #2, ehh.. This would kill it for me. Really? Didn't Bethesda brag that you could almost make it through the whole game without killing anybody, save one or two primary characters? Guess they had quite a few conditionals on that (main quest only, etc).

Funny how stealth these days doesn't mean ghosting anymore (but killing without being seen).

There are maybe two or three quests I've done so far in which you can avoid combat via a speech check, but those only came at the end of the level, and required me to murder the shit out of around two dozen people to get to that point at the minimum. 90% of the speech checks in the game are for either requesting extra information about something or someone that basically just serves as an excuse to give you some extra XP, or for a negligible increase in the amount you can get paid for a mission, which is pointless since you'll be drowning in caps by mid game that you'll only ever want to spend on junk since surviving via subsistence looting is easier than ever now.

I'd say the most unique quest I've encountered so far is the Silver Shroud one, and that's still focused around murdering people with no alternative options (the most you can do is change the amount of people you kill in the final encounter), and that's just because I get to play as a cosplaying autist fedoralord going around murdering normies.

 

[typical user]

Humm..

I really hope Bethesda lets another company take a crack at a spin off title. Obsidian would be cool, especially with Tim Cain on board, but Inxile or even Zenimax's Arkane Studios (Dishonored) would make me happy. Any one of these developers makes games more Fallout than Fallout 3 (can't judge 4 yet, but likely the same).

Why not just hire all those guys + Chris Avellone? Inxile and Tim Cain responsible for world, quests dialogs and Arkane Studios focused on level design, stealth, cyber-punk things. It's lot of cash but how was GTA V made? Money rain, klapacious, throw as much as you can. Fallout 4 and 3 sold good because of adverts. Meanwhile I heard AoD sold horribly. I wouldn't even know game like this exists if it weren't for some dude praising it all over the place while bashing Fo4.

Tell that to the East Timorese.

Tell that to the who? Where? *awkwardly tugs collar*

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Since I have no plans to play the game ever again, could someone spoil me why was our son taken in the first place, and what kind of abilities did he posses to become the head of Institute?

The Institute was fucking around with FEV experiments for no apparently good reason before they decided it would be a better idea to make artificial humans that they could control. All of the Super Mutants in the Commonwealth are dumb as shit, so why the Institute couldn't keep them on a leash and to what purpose is a mystery. To make Synths that are exactly like people, they needed a genetic baseline but almost all of the available subjects have been damaged by radiation. Therefore they needed someone that had no exposure to the toxic environment of the wasteland.

BUT, why it had to be Shaun is never actually explained. They're manufacturing Synths as full grown adults, so it's not as if they needed to start with an infant to avoid the aging issue that's come up before in real life cloning. Really anybody in Vault 111 would have been a suitable genetic baseline. They could have easily coerced your spouse into coming with them and bringing the baby, so it was never explicitly necessary for Kellogg to kill him or her. It's also questionable why of all the test subjects recruited from the Sanctuary Hills suburb, not a single other family has a baby or child that was frozen in the vault. And for that matter, it's never explained why they needed someone from before the bombs fell that was perfectly intact. Vault 81 is a viable community, and the Institute Scientists should at least have been aware of the vault locations. They could have easily recruited any other vault dweller for the experiment. They also never clarified why any of the scientists weren't a suitable baseline, because supposedly they were all sealed off from the outside world underneath CIT to begin with. None of them should have ever been exposed to radiation or the FEV. Most of them have never even been above ground by the time you arrive, and when they do go above ground they're always wearing full-body HAZMAT suits.

The reason Shaun becomes the head of the Institute is NEVER EXPLAINED. We're just supposed to assume that he was so uniquely qualified that they had to make him their leader. My guess is that because he's genetically related to all the 3rd Gen Synths, they need him to be their figurehead to pose as an authoritarian father figure, which is why they literally call him Father. That is of course, never explicitly stated or even hinted at.

Vault 81 is bad place to start with as they can just go into lockdown and are very suspicious when dealing with outsiders never leaving their shelter. The Institute has razed some settlements but taking whole Vault? I know it's derpy location of 20 people but it is established in lore that typical Vault can hold 1000 people and assaulting place built to last nuke drops? Yeah good luck with that.

It is also explained that people in Institute got hit with small dozes of radiation and/or FEV because I believe they have A/C sucking air from outside. It isn't implied but since they hooked up to power generators outside their compound then they aren't technologically advanced as they appear to be.

As how Shaun got into Directors chair can be explained by the fact he was indoctrinated for his whole life and he is puppet to real leaders that don't reveal themselves. It isn't again implied anywhare AFAIK but could be logical explaination.

But why he in particular was kidnapped and how everything else happened is a fair point. I described in other thread how moronic Institute and PC son are.

 

[Bradylama]

Fallout 4 does have farming. There are lots of settlements everywhere, and they sell a part to diamond city presumably. There's even a BoS quest where you go intimidate farmers to get food.

It's watered down but surely F4 is more about the logistics of survival than any Fallout game so far.

You're still full of shit because saying that something is "style over substance" isn't an excuse for bad storytelling. There wasn't anything about the stories in Fallout, Fallout 2, or New Vegas that lacked their own internal logics or didn't make any sense. In Fallout you have to find a replacement water chip for the vault or else they'll be forced out into the wasteland, then you have to deal with the Master's Army because they'll eventually find and destroy the Vault. In Fallout 2 you have to find the Holy McGuffin or your village will die, and then they're captured by the Enclave and you need to save them. In New Vegas you're seeking revenge against Benny, but end up getting wrapped up in a geopolitical turf war over the Platinum Chip which effectively makes you Kingmaker. There are certainly individual elements that could be nitpicked in each game, but the central core of the story is logical and makes perfect sense.

The same can't be said for Fallout 3 where you're trying to keep the Enclave from turning on the Water Purifier, when your whole goal is to turn on the Water Purifier, or in Fallout 4 where the Institute has no practical reason for ever kidnapping your son, and therefore the entire premise completely goes tits up. Those are the centerpieces of the games' narrative, and hand waving it away because there are ghouls is just weaksauce bullshit.

Vault 81 is bad place to start with as they can just go into lockdown and are very suspicious when dealing with outsiders never leaving their shelter. The Institute has razed some settlements but taking whole Vault? I know it's derpy location of 20 people but it is established in lore that typical Vault can hold 1000 people and assaulting place built to last nuke drops? Yeah good luck with that.

By the time Kellogg first made contact with the Institute, which was some number of years before he kidnaps Shaun, they're already producing Gen 1 Synths. Those things are basically just T-800s which the Institute can produce indefinitely, so they certainly have the firepower to take down a vault with no real cost to themselves in manpower.

It is also explained that people in Institute got hit with small dozes of radiation and/or FEV because I believe they have A/C sucking air from outside. It isn't implied but since they hooked up to power generators outside their compound then they aren't technologically advanced as they appear to be.

That's also a contrived explanation, because it doesn't make sense that a facility which is so sealed off from the outside world that the only way to get in or out is through teleportation - wouldn't also have its own internal air recycling system. If they're drawing in air from the outside, then the BoS wouldn't have had to bore a nuclear hole into the yard of CIT, they could have just widened the path the air was coming in.

As how Shaun got into Directors chair can be explained by the fact he was indoctrinated for his whole life and he is puppet to real leaders that don't reveal themselves. It isn't again implied anywhare AFAIK but could be logical explaination.

The real leaders are the lead scientists, and they make it apparent after Shaun names you his successor. The Institute is lead by a council of scientists with Father being the Chief, but that doesn't mean he holds dictatorial authority.

 

[typical user]

Fallout 4 does have farming. There are lots of settlements everywhere, and they sell a part to diamond city presumably. There's even a BoS quest where you go intimidate farmers to get food.

It's watered down but surely F4 is more about the logistics of survival than any Fallout game so far.

You're still full of shit because saying that something is "style over substance" isn't an excuse for bad storytelling. There wasn't anything about the stories in Fallout, Fallout 2, or New Vegas that lacked their own internal logics or didn't make any sense. In Fallout you have to find a replacement water chip for the vault or else they'll be forced out into the wasteland, then you have to deal with the Master's Army because they'll eventually find and destroy the Vault. In Fallout 2 you have to find the Holy McGuffin or your village will die, and then they're captured by the Enclave and you need to save them. In New Vegas you're seeking revenge against Benny, but end up getting wrapped up in a geopolitical turf war over the Platinum Chip which effectively makes you Kingmaker. There are certainly individual elements that could be nitpicked in each game, but the central core of the story is logical and makes perfect sense.

The same can't be said for Fallout 3 where you're trying to keep the Enclave from turning on the Water Purifier, when your whole goal is to turn on the Water Purifier, or in Fallout 4 where the Institute has no practical reason for ever kidnapping your son, and therefore the entire premise completely goes tits up. Those are the centerpieces of the games' narrative, and hand waving it away because there are ghouls is just weaksauce bullshit.

Vault 81 is bad place to start with as they can just go into lockdown and are very suspicious when dealing with outsiders never leaving their shelter. The Institute has razed some settlements but taking whole Vault? I know it's derpy location of 20 people but it is established in lore that typical Vault can hold 1000 people and assaulting place built to last nuke drops? Yeah good luck with that.

By the time Kellogg first made contact with the Institute, which was some number of years before he kidnaps Shaun, they're already producing Gen 1 Synths. Those things are basically just T-800s which the Institute can produce indefinitely, so they certainly have the firepower to take down a vault with no real cost to themselves in manpower.

It is also explained that people in Institute got hit with small dozes of radiation and/or FEV because I believe they have A/C sucking air from outside. It isn't implied but since they hooked up to power generators outside their compound then they aren't technologically advanced as they appear to be.

That's also a contrived explanation, because it doesn't make sense that a facility which is so sealed off from the outside world that the only way to get in or out is through teleportation - wouldn't also have its own internal air recycling system. If they're drawing in air from the outside, then the BoS wouldn't have had to bore a nuclear hole into the yard of CIT, they could have just widened the path the air was coming in.

As how Shaun got into Directors chair can be explained by the fact he was indoctrinated for his whole life and he is puppet to real leaders that don't reveal themselves. It isn't again implied anywhare AFAIK but could be logical explaination.

The real leaders are the lead scientists, and they make it apparent after Shaun names you his successor. The Institute is lead by a council of scientists with Father being the Chief, but that doesn't mean he holds dictatorial authority.

Aren't those folks limited with power to create those androids until you go and happilly bring them uranium core from Mass Fusion building? Sure it makes sense if they were to order their synths to dig through mountains covering vault but it would be waste of resources to keep spamming them at front entrance. Their goal would be to capture people not kill them either in gunfight or by camping at front door until they run out of food and water (but it is implied that they grow food and they have water chip suppling them with fresh water - which could break as Vault 81 overseer is complaining how that place is falling apart after 200 years).

Yes the fact that they somehow got irradiated is nonsensical but hey it is established why they need vault dwellers and how their scientists don't qualify.

Shaun maybe got lucky or was skilled or because of the fact he made 3rd gen synths possible to make. It isn't explained why he exactly. But there are worse things in the game which aren't explained i.e. how those Atom fanatics in Glowing Sea are shrugging off radiation.

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

You bash Piper for speaking about synths but you forget that whole fucking city is in war zone filled with muties and raiders who don't mind each other. That hole with 12 shacks is the best humanity can do after 210 years and is called great green jewel. Even Klamath was bigger than that. It is even more moronic when you wonder how do they trade, how do they get pre-war unspoiled food, meds and other things. Who in that world would be stupid enough to send caravans to trade with some morons who decided to settle in middle of destroyed town filled with mutated crap that can easily raze it to the ground? Todd Howard probably.

Wondered about that, myself. On the way in I found three of Diamond City's wall patrol in a battle with Super Mutants, and I'm pretty sure they would have been slaughtered if I hadn't stepped in. They beckon me further down the path, 'follow the signs, can't miss it'. So I walk along and see the turrets and some barricades and, yeah, I could see this place doing alright. Then I decide to go down an alleyway and check if there's any interesting salvage I can trade with merchaHOLY FUCKING SHIT THAT'S A LOT OF SUPER MUTANTS! I duck into a building and hop over things to keep away from their stupid mutts, and exit...right into a pack of wild, normal hounds. Quick, into the sewer! Oh, a war between raiders and ghouls. Is this entire ruin infested?



Jewel my ass. You could house Diamond City's population in one of the Works of a Vivec Canton. Hardly anyone would notice.

 

[potatojohn]

You're still full of shit because saying that something is "style over substance" isn't an excuse for bad storytelling. There wasn't anything about the stories in Fallout, Fallout 2, or New Vegas that lacked their own internal logics or didn't make any sense. In Fallout you have to find a replacement water chip for the vault or else they'll be forced out into the wasteland, then you have to deal with the Master's Army because they'll eventually find and destroy the Vault. In Fallout 2 you have to find the Holy McGuffin or your village will die, and then they're captured by the Enclave and you need to save them. In New Vegas you're seeking revenge against Benny, but end up getting wrapped up in a geopolitical turf war over the Platinum Chip which effectively makes you Kingmaker. There are certainly individual elements that could be nitpicked in each game, but the central core of the story is logical and makes perfect sense.

The same can't be said for Fallout 3 where you're trying to keep the Enclave from turning on the Water Purifier, when your whole goal is to turn on the Water Purifier, or in Fallout 4 where the Institute has no practical reason for ever kidnapping your son, and therefore the entire premise completely goes tits up. Those are the centerpieces of the games' narrative, and hand waving it away because there are ghouls is just weaksauce bullshit.

Imagining there being some or another medical reason why the institute wanted Shaun is a trivial suspension of disbelief that is inherent in the consumption of any fictional media.

Meanwhile in New Vegas you're shot in head twice point blank and left for dead. A couple of days later after being "patched up" you go on to seek revenge and become the most powerful figure in the land. Now there's a premise that even the average child would find ridiculous.