Hatred of the Railroad and the BOS.

The Minutemen are a Positive Faction for the Commonwealth in the Game.

The Institute will be under a Tolerant and Progressive Leadership (on most of My characters) that wishes to prevent Morloks from using Eloi as a food supply in a distant future.

The Brotherhood would prefer to keep Humanity that is not part of the BOS on the Planet huddled around campfires and using sticks. Hand chipped spearheads are signs of EVIL TECH and must be eliminated!

The Railroad are misguided and do too little to improve the Lives of the Mortal Survivors of the Great War.

Bethesda should have brought the Followers from New Vegas, or allowed the Minutemen to become a stepping Stone to building a Standing Militia to deal with the Mutant, Raider, and Gunner problems within the Commonwealth, and to keep the Pitt from expanding East and Swamp Folk at Home.

I'm not certain that's true. There are terminals all over the common wealth. Turrets. Guns.

I think it's specifically high tech. Laser, plasma, fatmen, power armor, bombs.

my SS was a pre-war housewife, used to nice, clean, living rooms and robots doing all the work for her. The Institute was perfect! I mean... why live in a rubble-filled house with a leaky roof fighting off Raiders when you have a nice laundered bed, a shower, room-service, air-conditioning.

(As for what they do/stand-for, well, I didn't find out most of that until AFTER Father made me Director. As Director I believe it's my duty not only to make things better for the scientists of the Institute, but the people above ground too. Father was brought up to believe in science first, everything was an experiment, to damned with the consequences. I wasn't. I was brought up pre-war, I've seen suffering both before and after the bombs, I know that science can make things better if it's only focused in that direction. Now that I have the power, that's what I intend to do)

Honestly looking at it from the POV of someone who time-jumped 200+ years, it looks exactly like what my PC would have imagined the future would look like. Beautiful, white and clean. Machines doing all the grunt work. Mankind just enjoying researching and finding new discoveries. Etc. Even as a die-hard BoS supporter my PC had a hard time not swapping my combat armor for a lab coat.

What have they actually done wrong? They make some really good human-like machines. Good. Some of them go AWOL and they have to hunt it down and bring it back to repair or dismantle it, or just destroy it if it resist too much. Makes sense to me. They are blamed for some killings and kidnappings in the Common Wealth, but the outside world is pretty messed up with ghouls and mutants running around anyway. If you want to make a perfect world there are sacrifices and such. It's not like the Institutes main goal is to take over all mankind and rule the world with an iron fist. They just want to remake it as a much better place for everyone to live (assuming of course you're human). Again, makes sense to me.

To be honest I'm hard pressed to think of a reason NOT to join them.

I just want to point out that you, yourself, compared the Institute's kidnappings to ghouls and Super Mutants. You did that, which suggests you know how screwed up it is. From Roger Warwick's replacement, whose job is to watch the new plants the Institute made grow until he's told to kill his family and burn the farm to the ground, to dismantling the Common Wealth government by replacing important officials and botching it.

Someone on the forums said there was a terminal that said they won't touch the surface until the humans above ground die off, which lines up pretty well with what Shaun tells you if you won't join him (the current world is doomed and dying. He doesn't say he'll save it. He doesn't say he can save it.)

boo-hoo the institute kidnapped a few people, boo-hoo the institute experimented with virus on people, omg they have robots

what's your current murder count as SS? Hundreds? Thousands? The Institute are small time petty-dabblers compared to the genocidal Sole-Survivor (whichever faction you choose)

Doesn't Nick tell you that the gen 1 synths are known for massacring whole towns and then scrapping them for parts?

The difference is, the Sole Survivor kills people and takes their stuff.

The Institute kidnaps people, tortures them for personal information, kills them and replaces them with a robotic duplicate who in turn will most likely be ordered to eliminate any and all of the family and friends of the person he replaced.

When the Sole Survivor kills, that's the end of it.

When the Institute kills, they eliminate entire family bloodlines.

My SS just never found a whole lot of evidence of the kidnappings and mass murders happening. People talked about it and blamed the Institute, but the Institute in their eyes is the boogey man who is blamed on anything they can't explain otherwise. What I needed to see is documentation in the Institute's computers mentioning these kidnappings and murders and then explaining 'why' they were done. If it's something like "Well I got bored today so I sent some Synths to wipe out a town", well that would be bad. I just never found that.

There is some if you look around. I remember one of the entries detailed replacing a farmer so that they could use the farmer to experiment with some genetically modified 'better' crops in the Commonwealth. The goal was to help out the Commonwealth in the end, and that meant murdering a farmer and replacing him with a synth. The Institute claims to be on the track of 'the ends justify any means'. They do evil to achieve good.

The problem in my eyes is that there is no evidence of the good ever panning out. When I talk to the institute leaders, I get the distinct impression they only want to do good for the institute and that the Commonwealth is basically a test bed and resource for achieving that. Somewhere along the way, the drive to actually bring the 'good' to the Commonwealth was lost... or perhaps never existed at all and the few terminal entries are just paying lip-service to get one project or another approved.

Of course, like every faction, they are composed of both good, bad, and everything in between. I felt bad about destroying them in my first playthrough... but not so bad. You'd think as their leader, I'd have the option to turn their actions towards good, but NOPE. The game gives approximately no power at all to control them.

If you want evidence of kidnapping, take a look at the Super Mutant population. There's a goodly number of Institute kidnapping victims right there. There's also a scene in Goodneighbor where the Watch guns down a suspected Synth infiltrator...and sure enough looting his corpse nets you a Synth Component.

University Point was a pointless evil massacre.

And it was done by Shaun.

Wth son.

Shaun's a diabolical little turd.

He literally thaws you out so you can kill Kellogg for him.

That doesn't make a lot of sense though. Granted he paints it as poetic justice, but honestly Shaun had no idea that you wouldn't get killed by the Rad Roaches before leaving the vault, let alone become powerful enough to take out their most dangerous agent (what would the odds of that be?). No if Shaun really wanted Kellogg dead he would have sent a dozen Synth assassins after him, not thaw you out and hope for the best. He thinks it's just 'ironic' that it went the way it did.

The Institute is very tempting. It's clean, relatively safe, and thrives on intellectual curiosity and technological development. After traveling through the muck and dirt and fighting off hordes of drug-addled raiders and violent super mutants, I can easily see how a character could find it easier to align with the Institute and settle down into a safe space. Add to it the fact that your entire motivating end-goal is located there: Shaun.

Now, all of that being said, I find them to be super sketchy and have no interest in aligning with them or settling down there. My PC has quickly realized that, while he loves Shaun, he doesn't like the man who Shaun's become and, because of that, he can't support the Institute. Instead, he's a double agent working for the Railroad with full intentions of bringing down the Institute. While he'd prefer for it to happen non-violently, he's prepared to get the job down however he needs to do it, for the greater good.

yeah, cos replacing someone with a synth is WAY worse than SS firing a fatman into a farmhouse. Hell, half the time I don't even look to see who's in there in the first place. Just.. someone taking pot-shots at me? WHOLE SETTLEMENT GETS FATMAN'D

I'd personally like to know who the [censored] giving all the needlessly psychotic orders is, personally.

I've identified:

Shaun
Virgil
The head of SRD

Anyone else we need to eliminate to get rid of the worst of the Institute?

Agreed! I got the impression that Shaun thawed you out mostly just to see what would happen. He admitted that he didn't expect you to survive the wasteland, much less reach him. So pretty much, he thaws out his surviving parent, expecting them to die some terrible death, just on a curious whim. There was absolutely nothing to indicate that you'd be able to find or kill Kellog. If he wanted Kellog dead, all he'd have to do would be setup a deathtrap room for their next meeting...or even more simply, just kill him the next time he's put under the knife for more enhancements/maintenance, since it's well established that the Institute has been 'improving' Kellog for some time now.

If Shaun wanted to meet his parent, he would have shown up at the vault and thawed you out himself... or at least sent a team to retrieve you. I think it's pretty clear he was just playing a sociopathic game of some sort.

On the flip-side, I wish I had an option not to kill Kellog. It's clear he's a pawn...and yeah, a rough guy and hard to forgive, but an option to turn him to your side and use him against the institute would have been grand. Kellog as a companion! I loved the chance to get inside his head though... I'd hope a 'don't kill Kellog' line would still take him to the Memory Den for a bit of head diving.

On the other hand, it's one of the few really good moments of a voiced protagonist you aren't going to forgive this guy but SEETHE WITH HATE.

Which I liked.

I was actually looking for a way to not kill him myself. But I exhausted all the dialog I could and then it was 'game on'.

My real fear, was that my sidekick turned him to red ash with her laser gun and I was thinking, "Oh crap. How am I going to get a piece of brain from that?" Thankfully Fallout logic kicked in.

Hey, at least its a quick death.

The Sole Survivor isn't torturing every last personal detail out of your history before you're killed.

Regarding Shaun and his... plan, did anyone link https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/3twp5c/major_spoilers_so_er_shaun/ yet?

I did enjoy the voice-work. I have mixed feelings on the voice-work overall. I really do enjoy a lot of it and the protagonist voices are very well done for the most part. I think it adds a lot to the game. BUT, I can also see where there are tons of conversation options we should have had, but don't get, and I feel like the voice work requirement is a big reason why a lot of that is missing. Either way, the story feels the strongest around that point. It all goes downhill for the end, but that search and exploration portion was great.

That's hilarious.

On my end, I think the game is strongest as a choice between the BOS and Institute.

The Minutemen and Railroad aren't as compelling, choice wise.

Brilliant. Bethesda story logic at it's finest.

I actually liked the BoS ending as they seemed the most capable to actually do what they intended on doing once they got rid of the competition and ultimate end goal seemed noble to a man from a 200 year old past who thought that ghouls and mutants were, if nothing else, unnatural.