How would (You) fix the story?

Step one: take it away from Bethesda

>>715802839 (OP)
Reveal the M.C. is a synth from the beginning and have him either escape the Institute or be sent out into the Wasteland as its willing agent in the tutorial. That way, you're immediately set up with a role playing choice to either embrace or reject your inhumanity propelling the narrative from the start into a far more interesting place than "find your missing son" (which is just the inversion of FO3's opening)

The BOS doesn't need to be in this story for starters, they don't add a lot. Maybe keep Paladin Danses detachement but beyond that get rid of them. The Minute Men are a cool concept, take the time to flesh them out more and give them a bit more depth. I want to be able to build them up in more ways than just "build le heckin settlement". If I'm a general then I want to shape what they become. Do they become an NCR tier nation state with a professional army or do they decay into a degenerate raider gang extorting settlements for protection money. Give me choices.

bump

Alright, I haven't given this too much thought, so let me just spitball off the top of my head.
>Remove Shaun
>Remove pre-war backstory or at least make it more ambiguous as to what your career/station in life was.
>Kellog still raids the vault but at the head of his own raider gang. He accidentally thaws the vault and, in a panic, begins killing the dwellers. You manage to escape.
>Once in the Wasteland, you can start trying to find out why Kellog raided the vault. The existence of the Institute is much less clear.
>You go through his memories before you confront him rather than after.
>Once you do confront him, you find out from him that the Institute is real, and he was supposed to gather intelligence from the vault. The killing of the dwellers was not sanctioned by the Institute.
>You can now choose to spare Kellog for an in with the Institute or to work with him.
>Make Institute less retarded. Give them real goals beyond, "we build da robot."
>Make the Railroad a side faction like the BoS and Boomers in NV. You can help them and convince them to join your main faction.
>Also make the major settlements into minor factions. You can convince them to join you or subjugate them.
>Make the Minutemen both a good and evil faction. You can go along with the current leadership for a more moral playthrough, or you can subvert them alongside Kellog and replace their leadership with raiders loyal to you, using their positive image as a guise to take over the wasteland.
>Synth infiltration actually plays a large part in the game. If you are one of the factions against the Institute, you need to find ways to root out the synths in your faction and your allies. If you are with the Institute, you need to get your operatives into positions of influence.
>Factions don't just want to nuke the Institute for some dumb ass reason, they actually want to take over their tech or destroy them with conventional means.

>>715802839 (OP)
remove the minute men

>>715806226
Either the minute men or the BOS need to go. Their goals are too similar. Having both is redundant.

Give the institute a reason that makes any fucking sense for making their toilet cleaning slavebots sentient and giving them feelings.
Delete the railroad entirely, it's retarded.

>>715806610
They're not similar at all? The BoS only shows up to destroy the institute and doesn't care about the commonwealth beyond that, the minutemen are a militia that wants to protect the people of the commonwealth from any threats like raiders and coincidentally the institute. They don't even care that much about the institute until you personally antagonize them.

>>715806648
I feel like the Institute was supposed to be a critcism of tech bros who put computerslop above the best interests of humanity. Bethesda didn't explain this well. I'd make the Institue more of an Apple or Meta allegory. Maybe even turn them into a an actual company thats flourishing in the wasteland. They're building some cool shit but they've completely lost sight of what actually matters in the process. Just a very anti human company. If House was Howard Hughes then Shaun should be Steve Jobs

>>715806882
Fair but the conflict with the institute is the only thing that actually matters in the story. Bethesda never bothered to explore the commonwealths interests beyond that.

>>715802839 (OP)
>Ditch the blade runner plot entirely or have it relegated to side quest stuff at most.
>generic raiders and super mutants are gone, there's now a significant focus on hostile wildlife and mutant creatures
>ditch the opening and family angle, you're just a random guy who made it to the icebox vault
>have the BoS relegated to a few stubborn holdouts who stayed behind after a failed pacification campaign
>the main plot is now about the weakened but still influential minutemen, the secretive but powerful institute, and a rising coalition of major settlements all arguing over how to continue managing the commonwealth while maintaining peace between eachother.
THERE ITS FUCKING FIXED

Here's a thought, why don't we just play as Nick Valentine. He's a rouge synth who has to choose between his alligence to his creaters and his desire for freedom. He's a far more interesting character then Nate. Maybe Nate should be the companion

>>715807569
The synth stuff is inherently flawed.

>>715807692
Sure, but all of that could be rewritten.

>>715806610
The Minutemen are basically extinct, their motivation is just being heckin good bois larping and they basically work as a force to create a NCR around Boston. They are the shittier faction by a wide margin between those two.

>>715802839 (OP)
have an option to say no.

>>715802839 (OP)
the BOS storyline needed the enclave to continue their skirmishes against each other even in boston
they expanded the enclave a little bit with the update but they have like 3 outposts plus one in the glowing sea

>>715805958
>Make the Minutemen both a good and evil faction. You can go along with the current leadership for a more moral playthrough, or you can subvert them alongside Kellog and replace their leadership with raiders loyal to you
Isn't there a mod that let's you do this? I vaguely recall you could kill Preston(or throw him in jail) and pick who you wanted to take his place.

>>715805958
>>715807380
I like both of these. I always wanted a fallout where the mutant wildlife is more than a minor inconvenience for factions.

>>715808247
No

>>715808320
Not sure, I never really bothered modding this shit-ass game. I just thought it would be a cool way to have a more independent option like Yes-Man, especially for evil or self-serving characters. If someone has done that in a mod, that's cool.

>>715802839 (OP)
You need to fix the design of the game before you can try to tell a story. You can:
>Focus on the silent RPG protag, the classic Fallout choice and the most logical, just follow the steps of F3 and NV and expand on them, creating a somewhat blank character with a solid world around them and plenty of options to roleplay as whatever you want.
>Focus on the voiced protag experience, go for something like the Witcher or Mass Effect, write a better written and more defined protagonist, with fewer options in general but focusing on decision with huge consequences, following a linear story.
>Focus on a full open world experience, ignore trying to tell the story of the widow looking for their kid and just create whatever in the universe of Fallout. This is not what Fallout is, but it's what Bethesda does best in TES. At best you get Morrowind, at worst you get Skyrim - still better than Bethesda's Fallout games.
As it happens, Fallout 4 tries to do all three and fails catastrophically at everything. The protagonist is a voiced protag but with 0 personality, running around an empty open world where there's nothing to do because of a lack of side quests and shitty worldbuilding, other than follow a story with a very flimsy narrative. Oh, and you can build settlements too.
Only after fixing the design of the game I would tackle fixing the story itself, which imho had some good ideas, but it was very poorly executed all around because of the game it was locked in.

>Have the option so some factions can work together to shit on just one AND the predilectes rival faction, one whose negotioation its simply not an option.
>The the minutemen a nonessential choice
>Have a raider ending, and have the option to dominate the other wasteland gangs so they join you, dlc gangs and even the atom cats included.
>Make it so the Railroad gets staffed with free synths militiamen with scavenged Institute armor and weapons, and even join you in some missions (because toasters can be fucking grateful enough to even go against the whole reason as to why they got mindwiped, since they can want actual freedom without pretending to be someone else).
>Have the option to join the Operators.
>Rework all radiant quests (especially if they are time sensitive)
>Have the option to save your wife/husband (i know, there is a mod for that already, i feel like it should be on the base game).
>Have a system to increase levels for settlers and other minutemen militiamen.
>Have an endgame options when joining the institute where you can change some policies on how does the institute behaves so institute fags can finally shut the fuck up with their headcanon.
>Buff vertibirds armor, and make a second vertibird variant designated for assault purposes thats just hovering around and shooting at hostiles thats stupidly hard to take down and yet hits like a truck.
There is a lot of other shit, but basically is making it so that gameplay feels aligned with the story. No shit like one of the best equiped factions in the game having some toilet paper armored choppers with aluminum plating, as well as more faction interaction.

>>715812853
>Operators
My bad, i meant the Gunners

>>715803162
>Reveal the M.C. is a synth from the beginning and have him either escape the Institute or be sent out into the Wasteland as its willing agent in the tutorial.
The entire backstory were fake memories implanted to create an agent hellbent on finding Shaun who was just normal scientist born after the war. Your character didn't even came out of a real vault. None of the pre-war stuff in the intro is canon. All of the synth are actually made by a rogue Brotherhood of Steel Scribe who wanted to keep the wasteland from technologically progressing by planting a bunch of sleeper agents to make people think that the Institute is a mad scientist organization.

>completely rework institute.
>completely rework minuetmen.
>completely rework railroad.
>completely remove brotherhood.
>completely rework opening game sequence.
>start of game is similar with the character creation bit and the bombs falling. Once in the shelter your character is separated from your spouse and Shaun as everyone is checked for contamination. You'll answer your special questions here. After that a red warning light sounds and you are informed you are contaminated and led directly to decontamination pod where you are cryo-frozen.
>you wake up, your pod successfully worked, every other pod is empty. You find data entries on computers about brainscans of everyone in cryo-stasis. You find Shauns pod empty with a data entry from your spouse about them leaving to look for them.
>leaving the vault you run into cogsworth who has a corrupted memory but he has a recording from your spouse that leads you to going to diamond city.
I can't be assed to fix it all. Suffice it to say your spouse should play a larger role. They are the one leaving info for you to follow with them chasing Kellog. The reveal your about 60 years late should be more impactful and less of a wet fart. Something like when you finally "catch up" to your spouse you find their skeleton.
The institute is about trying to create the next level of human evolution, true synthetic life at any cost, since the earth is no longer conducive to unmutated human life. All the synths they've created so far just imitate life, extremely well but they still lack free will.
Minutemen shouldn't be a bunch of losers who are about to die. They should be the middle of the road group between the extreme of the railroad and the institute.
The railroad should be Anti-synth people who have survived the institute. Lots of Mutant representation in this faction.

>>715802839 (OP)
Boston would be great as a fresh ruins/scavenger centric plotline
>the glowing sea only recently receded
>there is a gold rush into the town by scav gangs and others
>only diamond city managed to establish a stable foothold
>institute is a pre war establishment for building synths for the space program
>they managed to survive in their high tech bunker for decades in the shroud of the glowing sea
>now there is hrowing tension between the gold rushes and the alarmed synths
>they replace organics with copies as a form of infiltration
>minor subplots like player can trace that regulators had their start as national guard units that went rogue. Thus the militarism larp
>also explains why downtown is a war zone and why there are so many generic raiders. They are all scav gangs fighting for fresh turfs

Allow me to sex Assaultron Curie. I play Fallout 4 for everything but the story.

>>715805958
This but also make the gunners a major player, you could probably have Kellogg be with them. Maybe have a culmination to the Minutemen side quest line be to take Gunner Plaza and expand Radio Freedom beyond the Commonwealth.

>>715802839 (OP)
you cant
game was rigged from the start

I would add more suckin' and fuckin'

>>715802839 (OP)
Just scrap all of it. It all sucks. The father/son shit, the railroad, the BoS, Diamond "city". The only story I like is the part where you put your robo waifu AI's mind into the body of a young woman and then fuck her. You could make a whole game out of that.

>>715802839 (OP)
Main problem for me is that “I need to find my baby son” is too urgent a story for a game which is about exploring randomly and pissing about. Breaks role play instantly.

>>715802839 (OP)
There's really no way to make the Institute compelling villains without making them a re-hash of the Master from Fallout 1.

>>715817283
>“I need to find my baby son” is too urgent
Especially cause if this was a realistic scenario there's a 99% chance the kid's dead already anyway. You'd exit the vault, see the deathclaw and instantly think "ah yeah that kids long fuckin gone" then go find some kind of post-apocalyptic strip club or something.

>>715802839 (OP)
There's already a fixed version of FO4, it's called FO76.

>>715817283
The entire intro is so retarded once you actually play through the game and then think about it for more than a second. Why the fuck would they kill everyone in the Vault for no reason? Nora's death is not just completely unnecessary, but fucking idiotic. They could've had all the townspeople survive too and the first big quest of the game could have been resolving the dispute between the pre-war Sanctuary residents and Preston's group trying to settle there.
Either way, a setup where the hunt for Kellogg is just for revenge/information without the immediate urgency, ala Benny, is a much more straightforward and fitting plot for this kind of game.

>>715802839 (OP)
Honestly the story is actually surface level pretty good. Mostly breaks down when you pick apart the logic.

>The whole Shaun being an old man needed to be way less telegraphed. Revealing a 10 year old shaun so early in the game makes the player realize too soon "hey I went back into cryosleep so ANY amount of time could have passed".

>Shaun needed a way less retarded reason for letting his surviving parent stay frozen and then subsequently letting his synths try to murder them as they look for the institute.

>There should have been an option to imprison kellog so that the retarded "walking through his brain" level could have taken place through conversations or interrogations with him in his cell.

Other than that, it's just nitpicky things like Kellog's complete lack of ageing, while shaun just up and dies of cancer.

>>715814439
Also every new bit of technology is revealed to be actually post-war and they are purposely made to look like pre-war tech to scare people.of technology.