The very starting sequence of Fallout 4, the cinematics if you will, lead you on a path of vengeance for whoever or whatever is responsible for the kidnapping of your son and the murder of your wife while you were in cryo-sleep. That's a pretty solid character arc if you ask me.
So much happens in Fallout 4 in the meantime though that it can be kind of easy to just simply forget that your character's entire motivation for getting out there and shooting people was because his young family was decimated by this particular organization. A group of advanced sorts of humans or humanoids who are called "The Institute."
You spend so much time and materials building a way of getting to them that when you do finally get there, I think maybe my and other people's expectations were so high that it was always going to disappoint.
I wasn't really prepared for the jaw-dropping boring-ness of it all though and the layout of the labyrinth and the stupid hoops they make you jump through in order to simply be allowed to leave make this portion of the game, which was probably meant to be a high point, a rather horrible low point of the entire game up to now.
Compared to the rest of the world (commonwealth) that you encounter up to this point, The Institute is like stepping into a futuristic spaceship of sorts. Everything is clean and well-put-together and other that the fact that these people are all living underground like Dwarfs, they really seem to have it made.
you are an uninvited guest when you get here and you created some crazy contraption to get in there using a crap ton of supplies at one of your settlements (they can be repurposed, don't worry).
I don't want to spoil what happens in here so I am going to speak in generalities in relation to the rest of the game. I figured that this was going to be a huge turning point for the game so I loaded up on a full kit of grenades, my best weapons, and my power armor. Then upon going inside I realized quite quickly that this wasn't going to be a target-rich environment. The people here are aware you are coming, and they roll out the carpet for you so to speak. There is no chance to actually shoot anyone or anything unless you decide to make the game go all haywire in a way that will certainly result in your death since you cannot get out unless they let you.
This is one really annoying aspect of this section of the game. The Institute is very large and also circular and stacked one level on top of the next. This necessitates very long and boring runs from one place to the next and your only objective during all of this is to "meet the people" and go through really long dialogue sections that I guess for people that are super-interested in the story might read all of for the lore. Me? I was hitting the "skip" button so frequently that I don't really have any idea what these people are doing down here. Hoarding resources and not helping the people above ground, that much is certain.
if you were hoping for some fun battles that maybe would lead to new discoveries and gear well, this is not the place that such a thing is going to happen. Instead you have a series of irritating and time-consuming fetch quests where you have to find all the department heads and get a report from them before it will allow you to move forward.
I, annoyingly, had the wrong mission highlights in my Quest selection section and I don't recall actually activating it so as for as my compass helping me to know which convoluted direction I was supposed to be heading in was damn frustrating since it was constantly sending me up and down this circular stairwell. When I would get to the bottom of it it would tell me to go to the top, and vice versa.
Make sure you have the correct quest highlighted!
This is my own damn fault but good grief. Why would the system ever highlight a quest that was outside of the Institute on its own when you are currently stuck inside of it and unable to fast travel out?
This is another rather annoying but I guess necessary portion of this area. You cannot leave until you meet and greet all the scientists and almost none of the items that you discover along the way have any sort of meaningful value.
All in all I think I spent the better part of an hour just walking from place to place and burning half of a fuel cell for my Power Armor in the process simply trying to get things moving so I could get the hell out of there.
While I am not going to tell you the major plot thing that occurs inside of this facility, I can tell that it is meant to be a real twist or shock and maybe it could have been if they hadn't made the area take like a full episode of Game of Thrones amount of time to get through it with ZERO combat.
Fallout is a combat game at its heart, and to thrust us into a sterile and repeating hallway of glorious levels of electricity that we cannot escape until we perform the super difficult task of TALKING TO PEOPLE, I mean, what were they thinking? For me it was like when Neo gets to "The Architect" in The Matrix film and some dude in a chair just uses really big words for a long time... only, somehow less entertaining.
This sequence, although it doesn't explicitly say so, was likely meant to entice you to side yourself with the Institute and I can see that it is going to become necessary to do something along those lines soon.
For me, these people bored me so much with their stupid quests that despite the assets that they have I feel very compelled to be opposed to them in any way that I can. If for nothing else, to avoid the really long walks and seemingly endless conversation.
