Fallout 4

"Of course, since synths don't reproduce and the only facility for creating them got blown up, that problem will eventually go away all on its own."

Is this part of any sort of Good Ending? 'cuz I think that counts as genocide, assuming you view Synths as people anyway.

The synths that you talk to and aid in their revolt during the Railroad path seem to view that as a preferable outcome to eons of slavery, so I'm afraid that I have to defer to them. It is a bit morally incongruous, though, especially as the game itself never brings the issue up that I recall.

• Institute ending: Synths keep existing and being made, but are enslaved.
• Brotherhood ending: Synths get hunted down and murdered.
• Railroad ending: Synths are freed, but eventually die out.
• Minutemen ending: Synths are kind of ignored.

edited 25th Sep '17 6:47:14 AM by Fighteer

The Minutemen also destroy the Synth factory but they can sound the evacuation protocol so maybe someone from that department made it out to rebuild the machine.

Ultimately calling the destruction of the synth factory a genocide seems like a false equivalence considering that synths don't have reproductive capabilities on their own so they aren't denied anything. They just kinda stick around like sentient ghouls do.

edited 25th Sep '17 6:52:11 AM by Kiefen

Indeed: synths are not "natural" life forms, so they would die off as a group anyway if not manufactured in sufficient quantities to replace them. Same with ghouls and, one presumes, super mutants. As the world slowly gets cleaned up after the nuclear apocalypse, the sources of radiation and mutagenic toxins that create them will go away, leaving them to eventually go extinct through natural attrition.

Even if their bodies don't naturally die, synths are still victims to entropy along with everything else, and they'll dwindle through accident, malice, or mechanical breakdown until none remain.

It reminds me a bit of the situation with the Forsaken in World of Warcraft. Being The Undead, they don't naturally reproduce; they're only created by raising the corpses of the previously living. Sylvanas seems to believe that they have a "right" to exist, which in turn has led her to create more by any means necessary, including not waiting for living folks to die on their own. Naturally, the other races seem to have problems with that.

edited 25th Sep '17 7:07:39 AM by Fighteer

Do we know that Synths don't age? They apparently so indistinguishable from humans you could eat one and not notice, as the Trappers of Far Harbor seem to have noticed

Hmm, maybe they do, but we haven't seen any "old" synths that I recall. The in-game details of their biology are a little obscure.

Yeah, that's true. Apart from the one old Synth you, kinda, sorta do a whole DLC alongside. Ya know, Nick Valentine. He's one of the oldest Synths, being one of the two prototype Gen 2's, and he looks like it too.

Like you said, he's a Gen 2. Mechanical instead of biological. Gen 3 synths are weird in that they're assembled, but they're still biological. There's some conflicting information on whether or not they age.

If we look at human biology, aging is not an inevitable process, but is rather a case of our basic cellular structure being programmed to self-destruct after a certain length of time. If you turn off those mechanisms, there's no reason why a person would ever have to die of "age-related disease", although there could be other complications, such as cancers and dementia, that are inevitable given enough time. We just don't know, and it's considered grossly unethical to perform such experiments.

The point is that there's no reason why the Institute would design synths with the same programmed cellular degeneration as humans. They have other mechanisms they could build in if they wanted to retain various forms of control. But as we've discussed, synth biology is weird and doesn't make a lot of sense if you look at it in depth.

"Ultimately calling the destruction of the synth factory a genocide seems like a false equivalence considering that synths don't have reproductive capabilities on their own so they aren't denied anything. They just kinda stick around like sentient ghouls do."

If they have a method of reproduction, even if it's "artificial" like a factory, and you take that away, you're still killing ending their race/kind/whatever.

Most robots in fiction can't reproduce like organic lifeforms but they are still sapient living creatures and thus wiping them out counts as genocide.

edited 25th Sep '17 9:03:47 AM by Nikkolas

That's grossly simplistic. Even the simplest organism will reproduce given favorable environmental conditions if it isn't out-competed, but synths (and ghouls and super-mutants) don't fall into this natural order. They cannot reproduce, so they are literally a dead-end. If there were not artificial mechanisms making more of them, they'd die off inevitably due to simple natural forces that bear no malice and make no judgment.

A synth can bear no children, so there is no imperative for them to carry on a genetic legacy. Any new synth is related to them only in the sense that a toy is related to another toy made by the same factory. Do we "genocide" a toy by discontinuing its production?

In other words, synths are not a "species". They may have rights as individual sapient beings, and that's what the Railroad ending gives them, but they have no inherent right to reproduce, since they cannot.

It would be nice if the synth manufacturing equipment could have been preserved through the Institute's destruction, but if it were, who'd operate it? I doubt that a hypothetical Minuteman government would vote in favor of that. Maybe the dude in Far Harbor? He's a bit... off.

edited 25th Sep '17 9:19:38 AM by Fighteer

@Synths age: The game's kind of awkward here, because you can actually see synths being made and they are abundantly made from flesh and muscle and etc. Should they age? Well, you can't say "no" without raising a bunch of questions about what exactly the Institute has done or what other implications this could allow for. (Kellogg is old-aged, so has the Institute discovered virtual-immortality? But then, he is far more obviously mechanical.)

I know that synths can't gain weight. There's a message on an Institute computer: "Good thing it's physically impossible for a Gen 3 to actually gain weight and succumb to obesity. Wouldn't that be quite the Achilles' Heel? Humanity's most impressive technological achievement - laid low by junk food."

And that suggests that, to some degree, a synth's appearance is deliberately chosen, customisable by the Institute, and is not necessarily akin to a normal human body. At the same time, we have to assume, somehow, that despite not having a digestive system akin to a normal human, that they lack one is still essentially undetectable. This ends up raising some more questions: do synths lose weight, then? Can you solve whether you're a synth by dieting? It might be a better avenue to explore than the "ask random questions about baseball" thing.

Synth biology is confusing.

For what it's worth, Hancock would probably end up a Good companion. I know he kind of gets that cool murder-y intro, but his approval is all completely tied to helping people, espousing the joys of freedom and ending slavery, etc. He just likes drugs and is okay with getting his hands dirty to do it. So tolerating an obvious goody two-shoes makes some degree of sense, but an Evil character wouldn't have Hancock follow him because, and this ruins many a budding friendship, Hancock might try to gun them down.

edited 25th Sep '17 9:24:29 AM by Lavaeolus

Yeah, I never got the idea of Hancock as evil. Certainly he's not if you pursue his companion quest line, and you can help him become a better person by the end of it.

edited 25th Sep '17 9:24:06 AM by Fighteer

Admittedly i stopped playing FO 4 right around the time I recruited Hancock but my memories of Goodneighbor are it being a pretty crazy place. Not Paradise Falls evil or anything but still a refuge for criminals and other neerdowells. I helped Bobbi break into Hancock's place and stole some stuff and killed Hancock's bodyguard lady. Then Hancock confronted me, I killed Bobbi, and Hancock was like "we're cool."

I just got the impression he was largely amoral, not evil but he'd still object to being a saint. But I freely defer to people who actually beat the game and spent more time with him.

I think it's fair to say that Hancock is shady. The way he's introduced is pretty contrasting to Preston or Piper. I could understand a Good character being unnerved by him. And that's not really a problem, because you don't really want everyone to fit into this complete binary. But I think overall Fallout 4 does lean to the more "Good" side of things with companions; I imagine the final output would've been much different had a karma system remained. All the companions—

Who approve of doing helpful things for people: Codsworth, Curie, Danse (not synths though), Deacon, Hancock, Nick, Piper, Garvey

Who are fairly self-centred with morality: MacCready, Cait, X6-88

Who approve of random murder: Strong

So if you're going for a more violent character, you don't have that many people to choose from.

edited 25th Sep '17 9:33:20 AM by Lavaeolus

Strong is about your only option for a violently evil playthrough.

FYI, I haven't completed Danse's story, but as I understand, he flips on his attitude towards synths by the end of it.

edited 25th Sep '17 9:33:51 AM by Fighteer

Is there any companion in FO 3 or NV that would approve of "random murder"? Some don't really care like Clover or maybe Lily but are they pro-murder advocates? I dunno.

But yeah, on the whole, it just seems like all of FO 4 leans heavily towards the "Good" side and that reflects on the Companions. In New Vegas nobody gave a fuck about anything except Boone and the Legion. I was told Cass would leave if you have low enough Karma but I don't even know how that's possible in New Vegas, the Karma system is such a joke. And for all the talk of "Veronica will hate you if you fuck with the BOS" I literally brought her along for the mission where I massacred the BOS for Caesar. She helped me shoot my way out and then didn't even leave once I blew the bunker.

edited 25th Sep '17 9:50:18 AM by Nikkolas

Strong's a weird one, really. He's still got a lot of times where he'll like if you are "nice" and help people, but it's hard to tell when those are and when he wants to be aggressive. There's a Blue-and-Orange Morality to this, which could be more fun but the game never gives Strong that much chance to explain or explore his viewpoints. He feels kind of throwaway compared to the other companions, and I wonder if there were any conflicting ideas about him.

To maintain Evil karma, you must commit the greatest possible sin in the Wasteland: pointlessly and consistently nick everyone's pencils and other assorted junk.

edited 25th Sep '17 9:52:57 AM by Lavaeolus

It's not so much a flip as it is him going from "kill them all!" to "I don't even want to talk about them." Like, regardless of whether you choose to support or oppose them, he'll dislike just being around for the conversation.

So how about this. I mentioned earlier reading a lot of complaints you can't do evil shit in FO 4. I'm also re-watching a guy who did a Fallout 3 Kill Everything run.

What are the most evil things you can do in FO 4 and how do they compare to stuff in 3 and NV?

For instance, I shuddered when the guy I'm watching sold Bumble into slavery. That's....that's something alright. Really would pick that as the most evil thing in the game.

But I'm not sure about New Vegas or 4, or how their evil choices might stack up to this.

I do want to say, I would have HATED it if Companions were tied to 'morality' of some kind. My favorite companion is Mac Cready and, while I haven't spent much time with her, I think Cait has the best written character arc.

Since I end up playing a 99% good character, I'd be frustrated as hell if I ended up being left with only Preston and Piper who... are just simply boring. Probably I'd only consider Strong more boring than Preston.

As for the Synth age thing, I'm inclined to believe that they don't age. We obviously get the impression that the Institute doesn't give a shit about their synths 'is the field' and probably leave them to their own devices for getting information and, if they get caught because they don't age or someone catches wise, then the Institute would probably just send someone new.

If I remember correctly, this is discussed in relation to the synth Shaun specifically. The Institute is against it because a child synth is useless to them: He won't age and will easily be discovered pretty quickly. This is discussed in a terminal.

Well, depending on your definitions of evil, you can shoot your own son in the face, support a harsh military dictatorship that wants to slaughter all ghouls and artificially created sapient beings, support a technocratic dictatorship that randomly subjects the common people to SCIENCE and enslaves sapient machines and clones. Also, for some reason, Nuka World lets you take a vacation and play raider at a theme park if I have the premise right. Or if you see the BOS or Institute as the only ways to bring stability to the wastes, you could see destroying them as the evil action.

But in general, you can't engage in such petty dickery as an evil karma Fallout 3 run or a Legion New Vegas run. The Sole Survivor is much more of a goody-goody two shoes than the Lone Wanderer or Courier.

edited 25th Sep '17 2:38:27 PM by Balmung

After finishing Nuka world you can enslave the Commonwealth with your raider gang.

That seems incredibly out of character given the base game.

I want to buy Nuka World now.

(though that does sounds incredibly out of character)