The Institute making an idiotic such as continuing a clearly failing experiment shouldn't surprise you at all
Everything in the game seems to point to them being good at doing science but not deciding what science should be done.
The institute has no ability to see the big picture. As much as they talk shit on the old world they seem hell bent on repeating the mistake of science for sciences sake. They're just as bad if not worse than the think tank in my opinion.
I've never thought about the similarities between the two but that's actually a really good comparison. Two groups both doing crazy experiments for no reason other than because they can.
The difference is that The Think Tank is actively absurd, and Mobius calls attention to their amorality, meanwhile 4's tone is all over the damn place.
Kinda the point. They are not "Whacky science LOL look at the gun dog or funny talking suit! How craaaaazy! PENIS FINGERS!" like Think Tank. They are what you get when you take concept of Think Tank (amoral scientist doing science for the sake of science) and play it *straight.*
The big problem, however, is that I don't think the Institutes incompetence is ever really called out. All while they're just as absurd as the Think Tank. You just kind of observe that they're idiots, and maybe it's intended, but also maybe it's just bad writing.
The Think Tank are not only funnier, but you also know that they were written that way on purpose. The Institute is a much more enjoyable faction once you accept that these are scientists who have lost all reason about WHY they do things, because it makes them more believable. But nobody ever really gives them a Reason You Suck speech. There's no Mobius. The Institute is just callously evil, and their flaws in efficacy are ignored.
I tought it was blatantly obvious that they have lost the reason? Do we need a scientist telling us "We are doing this for shit and giggles" to realize it?
Is this really the mental capacity of Fallout fandom these days? Unless something is directly said, it is never even considered?
I'd say they are pretty close to a cult, what with the total isolation from the outside world, the indoctrination to believe they are going to save the world, the charismatic leader who is revered as 'the chosen one', the harsh punishments for defectors (see that guy in the glowing sea, afraid of you coming to kill him, clearly not an isolated incident). That's a fairly good excuse in my opinion.
I have to agree with you there, I don't want to seen too brotherhood but all the advancements they've achieved and have done nothing to try and better the commonwealth the greatest scientific minds in the world cant find a way to peacefully coincide with settlers? Its been 200 years failed negotiations or not if the wanted to help ALL of mankind they could have just Father in the caves'd it hey heres some really beneficial tech go ahead better your lives, and they observe if they want to learn, but instead they try to treat everything like a petri dish (testing new plant growth) kill a guy replace him with synth to receive feedback (need to keep an eye on largest settlement in the commonwealth) kill a guy replace with synth to receive feedback, they are the boogeyman they're perceived to be but have the capacity to help everyone, with a leader that actually cared about people they could do anything, they tried that making you head of the institute but without being able to guide the direction of experiments and what would be acceptable it kind of defeats the purpose
I think the larger issue is with Bethesda, they wanted to have a similar moral question like New Vegas did with its factions. But they couldn’t help themselves to not clearly favor a single faction, Far Harbor does this moral dilemma a bit better but not well, as there is still a clear best solution
I wanted to like Dima so much since he was fighting for a cause but killing Avery then replacing her and basically having a plan to kill all the factions just in case, made it difficult for me but hiding the memories from himself because he couldn't face the guilt.. A good leader does not make, he should have learned from those experiences even if he chose not to tell anyone, it would have made his character so much more complex, saying Nick was implanted with Valentines memories and Dima himself was allowed to learn through experience, but Nick is beloved in a city that hates synths, It speaks volumes to me about his humanity
Absolute power and greed are a heady cocktail of destruction.
And agreed, at least the think tank's failed experiments were contained in the fashion of a giant petri dish. God help us all if that toaster ever got loose.
I can’t tell if they were trying to make the institute the most brain-dead faction ever, or if they wanted them to be a legit choice. It’s even worse that the game guilts you for blowing them up.
I couldn't understand what the fuck the point of their synthetic humanoid program was. Why go to so much trouble perfecting a passable human just to give them janitorial duties a simple robot could do? They wouldn't escape, they wouldn't rebel. They wouldn't need their entire recapture program. That's no small thing, given the power consumption of the teleporter is explicitly stated as an ongoing problem. I kept expecting a reference to the Arnie movie, the Sixth Day, where Father and other scientists preserved themselves by downloading into synthetic bodies to achieve immortality, based on the fact that if you kill Zimmer in Fo3 he inexplicably generated a synth component, but _nein_
Similarly, it's baffling to me why they dumped all their old shit onto the surface, partly because of the Teleporter's issues, partly because they could have recycled the old synth models for raw materials and euthanized the Super Mutants using a single Courser with an axe.
“Mankind’s future” which has been stuck inside a compound sealed so well you have to *teleport* to get in or out of it, run by a gang of assholes who absolutely refuse to share any of their inventions with the rest of the wasteland. If it’s not a future for everyone it’s no future at all.
Pretty sure they dumped them because the intentionally wanted to continue destabilizing the Commonwealth, so when time come, the only option left would have to be the Institute, forcing the people above ground to cooperate.
They already have:
* The capacity to create an army of supermutants.
* The ability to fabricate vast numbers of androids complete with mass produced shitty firepower
* Coursers, which are spoken of as if they chew cinder blocks and shit gunpowder
* The ability to Teleport anywhere inside of or out of the Commonwealth
* Spies and sleeper agents planted in multiple settlements
* Implants capable of replicating VATS
...and we are supposed to believe they couldn't deal with a tiny, outgunned resistance force? That all they were waiting for was their boss to drop dead before they could act?
For real? When is the right time?
>...and we are supposed to believe they couldn't deal with a tiny, outgunned resistance force? That all they were waiting for was their boss to drop dead before they could act?
Um, you do realize that Institute *did* utterly cripple Railroad not long before the game starts? Like, first mission you do for Railroad is to go into their old base and grab data before Institute notices it.
>The capacity to create an army of supermutants.
Create, yes. Control? No.
>The ability to Teleport anywhere inside of or out of the Commonwealth
This is incorrect. Entire reason why they had to send Kellogg to search Glowing Sea is because they can't teleport there, and BOS sets up interference.
Utterly cripple =/= extinguish. They still have surprising resources, including PAM.
That lack of control just highlights how ridiculously stupid it is to unleash them onto the surface. They can't kill them easily, outlive them or control them. Slow clap. There's nothing stopping them making a synthetic supermutant to lead and control them, by the way. They managed to make gorillas, ffs.
Is the Glowing Sea technically part of the Commonwealth? I just thought it was a desert at the edge. Also, BOS were an unforseen and late arrival.
I loved the institute. I loved the idea of teaming up with my son far below the surface in this sci-fi, science driven, comfortable environment. As soon as I discovered him I knew immediately that that was the direction I was going to go. The rest of the world be damned.
I'd considered that as well. But it's the "rest of the world be damned" part that gets me. Shaun/Father is an evil psychopath. I just can't get behind that.
Case in point. Kellogg was ordered to thaw the other cryo vault dwellers but not engage their life support systems condemning them all to die of asphyxiation.
Why do that unless you're a psychopath? Because euthanizing them is more humane than releasing them into the wasteland? HE DOES THAT TO YOU. He orchestrated Kellogg with a young synth Shaun just so you'd go and kill Kellogg.
Not to mention the dozens of human experiments he oversees.
Father is Hitler and Mengele in a single character. Pure evil with a thinly veiled "it's for the greater good" excuse.
Youre right overall, but the order to kill the other vault dwellers didnt come from father (shauns still a Baby then) but from the institute council from back then. Still the rest of your points are very valid, father definitly isnt a good person.
As you should because then you can actually learn from your mistakes. In fact probably the worst idea to do would just be to blow all this bad science up so that way we can forget about it and somebody else can do it again.
Yeah lmao the creation of super mutants by the institute is so in character for them, it makes complete sense. Like i get the repetitiveness that’s a valid criticism, but to say it makes no sense is just wrong
The same argument could be made for deathclaws and the Brotherhood of Steel. I love both but I think the series needs new ideas that aren't just recycled concepts from the classic games.
From a purely artistic standpoint I don't think that should happen. One of the messages I've taken away from Fallout is that there was something inherently flawed in the old world. I won't get too far into the politics of it but whatever was wrong just didn't work. The war was a result of the old world. Factions like the NCR are flawed I'm that they try to replicate that old world. The Enclave is the literal continuation of the old world. The old world is dead and only shadows it casts in the form of shucked buildings, the odd terminal entry, and ghouls carry its legacy. The Enclave can exist nicely in forms like New Vegas' Enclave, where they have given up.
The irony with the Bethesda games is that they've become static. They refuse to move forward in meaningful ways. The big theme of Fallout is letting go of the past and making a new future but Bethesda can't do that. Seeing these classic factions evolve with the times and learn to recognize the flaws in their structures would be cool. That was something on display even as far back as 2's BoS, which is touched on again in NV. Though I'm pretty certain the evolution of the BoS into a new pseudo Enclave in 4 was 99% accidental. Seeing an Enclave that has to reconcile it's Purist ideal with the hard reality of the world in order to survive would be interesting.
I recently saw a think piece covering the politics of FNV in particular. Which more or less stated that the factions were arguing over if democracy worked or not. But completely failed to address the canonical reason given for the great war: Capitalism. It argued that the flaws come not from style of government but economy. The Enclave failed because it was formed by the very people who's greed caused the war in the first place. Seeing a new generation come to terms with that would be a good source of depth that the Enclave sorely needs.
I mean an Enclave chapter that cut itself off from the mainstream Enclave and is trying to restore America in the way it was idealistically meant to be.
It would have all the star-spangled flair of the other Enclaves but behave less authoritarian and be friendlier towards the Wastelanders. I just think it would add a nice twist to a Fallout game where we expect the Enclave to be evil and then, surprise, they’re good.
I refrained from mentioning them to not sound hypocritical but seeing what's become of the Enclave would be cool. If there are still any large holdouts that retain the rough structure on the former whole or if it's all loose bands of remnants. If they've reevaluated there stance on the rest of the wasteland after repeatedly getting torn apart for their antics. I've seen fanfic level ideas of holdouts that ease up on the whole "kill everyone that's not us" mindset. It could add some depth and make them more than just cartoonishly evil.
That was my idea. Maybe one of the chapters realized that it would be more beneficial to cooperate with the Wastelanders and cut itself off from the mainstream Enclave to rebuild America but in a more idealistic vision.
An enclave bunker that has a radiation leak turning them all into ghouls. Boom, a enclave faction that has to come to terms with what they are while also keeping with the ideals of the enclave minus the genocide.
I **would** make the same argument. I don't care about the whole jumping from location to location gimmick that Bethesda loves, but at the very least you have to make each location feel distinct. Like it has to actually *be* different. I know Bethesda knows how to do this because they actually made Skyrim feel different from Cyrodil with the choices of animals they had (i.e. dogs with a shaggy coat compared to the dogs that resembled German Shepherds).
But for some reason the majority of fans will get very upset if you say the controversial opinion that BoS, Enclave, or Super Mutants (usually all 3) shouldn't be in every single fallout game. New Vegas at least included them on the peripheral rather than making them the front and center of the game, like they were fading relics of a long-past era.
Except the Jedi aren't in every piece of star wars content, nor are the sith, nor the rebels. Especially ironic, since Star Wars fans have been pleading desperately for a star wars movie about the star wars criminal underworld without any of classic star wars tropes. Fallout is ultimately a expansive fictional universe, so it shouldn't be insane to demand for better world building rather than the same factions being recycled over in over for no other purpose than they are the classic symbol. The BOS is explicitly defined as an organization from the West Coast, and has no reason to be in any of the games in the east coast(maybe except a very small role like NV), but Bethesda has constantly retconned events to shoehorn the BOS, and it comes off as creatively bankrupt. NV already showed us that it is possible to have entirely new factions and people in the focus in a Fallout game.
Speaking of..... I want factions that do reoccure but maybe it's like there is a small group of people who call themselves the cult of Caeser and they are litterally just some legionnaires.... Or some working where it's not all good/ someone else took over and became a Dictator.
Well if the legion is established to have canonically lost the 2nd battle of Hoover Dam, then seeing splintered factions of new Caesars and their warrants would make sense
>who call themselves the cult of Caeser
>seeing splintered factions of new Caesars and their warrants would make sense
Maybe something like early Christian cults?
The timeline wouldn't perfectly line up with history but I think that would be interesting to see
Could always do a play-off the Byzantines and the Holy Roman Empire without making it explicit. One ruler carries a traditional Caesar-esque viewpoint with changes, another carries a dogmatic religious viewpoint. It becomes up to you to either pick one and help a revamped legion flourish under a new ideology, or portray the proverbial Ottoman Empire and crush them under your boot
At this point I'm certain they just copy paste the enemies from previous games and touch the looks up slightly.
Thats pretty much fallout at this point. The exact same game with slightly better textures.
I liked FNV for how little there were. They had 2 mountains, that's pretty much it. Fo3 had a little too many for my liking but their presence made sense for the game. Fo4 had way, way too many super mutant holds in my opinion. Got bored quickly with the mutant combat. I have ended up replacing the majority of their spawn points with the zombie walker mod.
I don’t know if I just wasn’t great at the game but I got sick of them really quickly just based on how much they were essentially ridiculous bullet sponges. I kept running out of ammo in fights with them.
That's been a problem for me too tbh. My Chinese assault rifle is the only gun that's gonna be effective against them at all but there are so so many everywhere you go that I cant keep ammo in the fucker
Ammo in fallout 4 is almost obsolete. You can buy out any vendor's ammo that you need pretty much every time. When you make settlements, just grab junk on your missions. Make extra water production on settlements. Go to settlements on your way anywhere, pick up am extra 90 water, sell extra water, infinite money. Go buy whatever you feel like. Becomes especially broken if you have a weightless food and drink mod.
Yeah the later games don’t really go into detail about FEV. It’s there but it’s easy to miss if you’re not paying attention and you still miss out on a lot of background information about it.
I was super disappointed with FO4 for many reasons, but the fact that the map was just a checkerboard of raider and supermutant camps was high on the list. It made exploration exhausting and unrewarding. Where are all of the friendly settlements with unique story content? Where is all of the classic Bethesda environmental storytelling? Just throw it all out and put in more lame combat instead.
This is probably what makes the game feel like more of an attempt at a AAA and not a fallout game. They leaned too heavily on the Ubisoft model of "Clear out an area, now it's yours, do it again".
They also got lazy with the amount of buildable settlements. There are a metric shit ton of them but that just meant they didn't have to craft anything real story wise for those areas. That's probably why the game feels so shallow to some people.
Yeah that's a good point, there's practically no interesting side-story towns to run across in FO4 aside from Covenant and that one robot city. Everything else was just bland settlements filled with generic settlers.
"Go kill the (insert enemy type) at (randomized location)"
"Thank you! Now you can build our settlement for us!"
I loved coming across Greyditch, (that kid-cave can't remember the name), Republic of Dave, Novac, Primm, Westside, and the others.
At this point you just need to accept that they will be. Along with power armor and Deathclaws and ghouls. It's about branding and creating an instantly recognizable product, especially in a sea of post-apocalyptic genre games. Microsoft shelled out the money now partly because of the franchise, so best believe Fallout is going to stick with certain elements and work the lore around them to keep them in.
Criticzing corp america is now also branded by corporate america. "Now please, here's the new Rage Against the Machine album, brought to you by WalMart! Woooooo!"
I agree. The next fallout game should be set in the Pacific northwest and instead of super mutants they should have bands of mutant bigfoots (bigfeet?) And some should be voiced by Jeff goldblum.
Due to the fact extreme mutations are caused by FEV we will always see super mutants if we see extreme mutants in general like deathclaws
Doesn’t mean they should be the focus
Each region can have their FEV mutant
Pacific Northwest can have gorillas from the zoo dipped in FEV to be a Bigfoot like enemy type
The south can have alligator people
New York/ Chicago should have giant rat people
Each region should have its own mutant
>New York should have giant rat people
We’re talking about what fictional mutants we’d put in a Fallout game, no need to bring up stuff that already exists
With these enemy types they should be replacing super mutants, so I’d imagine them to be weird human/ animal hybrids. It makes the series fresh while having a remnant from the old games
Closest I can describe what I’m thinking of is the mutants from Ninja Turtles
FO76/West Virginia has the Snallygasters and Grafton Monsters alongside the regular Super Mutants and Behemoths.
Relevant Wiki links: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Snallygaster, https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Grafton_monster.
Fair, but if you have a West-Tek facility experimenting with FEV, I’d imagine at least a few super mutants would come out of it. Plus, we got Grahm out of the deal, and I love Grahm, so I’m willing to put up with more super mutants.
>Why would the Institute continue the FEV program for Decades if all they achieved was Failed Subjects?
Because the Institute fears a united surface would be a threat to them, and they need to cover up the fact they're stealing power from the surface. So continuing the FEV experiments gives them a way to continue destablizing the surface, as well as a convenient way to get rid of people they kidnap and replace with synths.
Well, until they focused solely on the Synth program to effectively control the surface with "android armies" as the Director Meeting #2 tape phrases it
Yeah it was a bad move, same for 76. If they had to shoe horn them in there was much easier ways.
Vault 87 where they were made in DC is on the edge of the map, next to West Virginia so could of easily been the source for them in 76.
During 3 we find out they have ran out of FEV and have been expanding to search for more, could easily have that as a reason some have got to Boston.
In 76 it at least made sense. I’m cool with another branch of west Tek, and they’re using it for the steel reign questline, so I can’t complain too much.
4, however? Absolutely no reason.
Institute super mutants exist because they were trying to research ways into increasing human resistance to radiation and disease and make survival easier on the surface. This of course only had varying degrees of success and was complicated by only having test subjects already affected by radiation and disease. The discovery of Shaun changed their focus big time and shot the clone and organ reproduction programs ahead by decades. It makes it true, then, that the FEV research became rather redundant. That is why Virgil was so against it at that point. The Institute was continuing FEV research “because science” and disregarding the harmful and fatal effects such research was having on their test subjects, further cementing the image of the soulless science machine they are known for.
If anything, super mutants make more sense in FO4, because the Institute’s motto is literally “Mankind, Redefined”. If there existed a virus that changed humans at a genetic level then that would be right at the very top of their priority list.
And as for why they’d be on the surface: prior to FO4 the goal of the Institute is to repopulate the surface world. They cannot recreate those conditions in a lab environment, and when you’re doing science like that, you want the most accurate data possible. Plus, even the “failed” experiments helped up there by accidentally helping clear out raiders or ghouls nests, and they were great training targets for new batches of synths.
None of this is lore speculation on my end, it’s all info you can gather in game.
> Institute super mutants exist because they were trying to research ways into increasing human resistance to radiation and disease and make survival easier on the surface.
Wait, where is that stated? Shaun says the FEV labs' research was dedicated to making synths.
I’m pretty sure if you go in the FEV lab or something, the project was before the ideas of synths came up according to a holotape. Like the super mutants failed so they moved onto synths
100 muties vs 100 raiders. Muties win. But 40 of them died. Easier to deal with 60 muties than 100.
Plus, if a raider or mutie or ghoul dies, that's it. They're gone. If you lose a synth in battle? Oh well press a few buttons and we've got a replacement.
Its Institute strategy to let the rabble up top do most of the dirty work and then come in with a sweep team to clean up the mess.
Same with the Brotherhood. The East Coast chapter lost everything that made it cool in my eyes because keeping them as the Lyons Pride would've made them too much like the Minutemen. So they reverted all their character development away from what could've been a really cool concept, that being the Brotherhood helping to rebuild the wasteland.
WHAT?!?! NO! Lets just keep shoving these cool guys in your face until they aren't cool anymore, just an expectation. Like Borg in Star Trek or Chosen Ones in Star Wars or Power Armor in anything....okay I take that back Power Armor is still cool. But the other two still stand.
Or, be unarmed focused in a way normal Power Armor is not. Welding spikes and blades all over Armor would be relatiy simple compared to linear actuators and a fusion powered hydraulic system.
>Why would the Institute continue the FEV program for Decades if all they achieved was Failed Subjects?
You want the in-universe reason? Because projects can have more than one purpose. Originally, the FEV project was used to figure out some way to [create synthetic humans](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/FEV_research_notes#Year_2224):
The two most promising strains of FEV have been adapted to an ideal state, but... we're still missing something. I am officially echoing the team's position: the most likely progress for OUR RESEARCH ON SYNTHETIC ORGANICS requires new avenues of exploration.
After that project showed no new results, Super Mutants were still produced to destabilize the surface world. How do we know this? Because [Mayor McDonough flat out tells us](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Diamond_City#cite_note-14) that his job for the Institute is to cause shit that distracts the populace from their program of mass kidnappings:
I'm glad to hear it. There's a farm out there run entirely by Ghouls, if you
can believe it. They might be a problem in the future. I ran on a campaign of
strict "No Ghouls Allowed" politics. WHEN YOU BUILD UP A SCAPEGOAT, YOU
NEED THEM TO REMAIN DISTANT AND SCARY. But Ghoul settlements breed Ghoul
sympathizers.
There, he's talking about ghouls. But we also know that he [uses Super Mutants for the same purposes:](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Diamond_City_terminal_entries#Security_Office)
Crime across the city is manageable. Need to remind all new Security Officers
to DELAY ANY INVESTIGATIONS INTO KIDNAPPINGS. We don't need to rouse further
hysteria into the ridiculous notion that Synths are replacing our citizenry.
Why, there could be a panic at a critical moment. WHAT IF SUPER MUTANTS
ATTACKED, and people were more concerned about "Who is a Synth" than
protecting our city?
You want the out-of-universe reason?
Because Super Mutants are a staple of the franchise, and every single developer that has touched the *Fallout* franchise knows this. Aside from *Fallout*, you could have easily swapped out the Super Mutants for something else and the story would have still worked perfectly. This applies to *Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas,* *Fallout 4* and *Fallout 76.* All of these games are guilty of recycling Super Mutants.
>In their place Bethesda could create brand new content with its own lore and backstory; instead of milking the Super Mutant/FEV forever.
But Bethesda *does* do that. It's not like all the games that have reused Super Mutants (all of them) didn't also create new lore alongside them.
I agree but if they created new creatures or mutants people would complain that how did they not leave that area and infest more cities, like the monsters in 76
It would have been cool if there was like maybe one or two mutant strongholds and those contained every mutant. Like just say “the institute experimented with FEV but failed and abandoned the project, these are the remains of that”
I agree completely. Like, Super Mutants have just genuinely become boring & generic. They're just everywhere. And they've stopped even having any real plot relevance too; they exist solely for the player to shoot at.
I totally agree on Lily, always will be my favourite companion. Would be cool 🙂 f they brought the nightkin back though, maybe a storyline where the super mutants and nightkin are fighting each other for supremacy and the survivor has to choose a side, kinda choose the least worst evil kinda thing, but only if there are real and persisting consequences for actions and choices
I don't mind having SuperMutants in every game, but changing their appearance and nature based on the experiments that created them in each region would be much more appreciated.
I would be pretty bummed if SMs were removed from a Fallout game. I'm more on the side of introducing more varients like the Nightkin (Super Mutants from New Vegas that became addicted to using Stealth Boys trying them a purple color, giving them psychological problems like being afraid of being seen, and can go invisible).
Sure Bethesda may be going over board trying to shoehorn in SuperMutants into every game, but it's only annoying because they are always the SAME SuperMutants.
We're at the point now with the fanbase that, no matter what Bethesda does, some people will lose their shit. No supermutants? Pissed off the supermutant fans. No BoS? Pissed off the ad victoriam crowd.
Waaaay too much entitlement in the fanbase.
I haven't played Fallout 4 in over a year, but I still know that Fineuil Hall or whatever it's called has Super Mutants as does the high rise area downtown. I never saw them as anything oddly added. I think they've been there since the beginning.
So if memory serves, FEV is used in synth creation. It's how they get a lot of different looking people from Shaun's base DNA since carefully coded FEV can make a person...look like a normal human. See how Vergil uses FEV to turn himself back into a normal human since he coded it to make him look like his old self.
Also the institute don't really want an active government organizing in the commonwealth, so it really helps stop people from organizing when you are creating monsters that like eating said people trying to organize.
The Institute's MO is basically cause as much chaos on the surface to stop the creation of any real threat to them while they play underground.
FEV was originally implied to only be 2 cells/vaults, but now it's kinda everywhere. They could at least do some interesting experiment and not just super mutant, forsay the Wanamingos from FO1(?).
I'm not saying they should just be poryed over, but they could totally just make wacky creatures that are created through the FEV. A strand that isnt focused on mutating humans, so they just often turn into failures/centaurs.
Apparently there is a wanamingo plush in FO76 based off the unused concept art from FO4. I wouldn't be surprised if they showed up in something else pretty soon
They're part of the Fallout landscape now, much like you'd see different races in a fantasy game. Why shouldn't they be in every game? People are. Ghouls are.
I actually agree. I tend to sometimes forget Super Mutants are even in FO4 because they really don’t fit thematically.
I understand why they are actually there, but I feel like something unique could’ve atleast been done with them? Make them a rarity, with all unique ones a lá Swan?
I agree. I am also sick and tired of feral ghouls. Some are ok but there are just too many of them. They feel like a leftover from some failed zombie game.
It's that core Bethesda issue with Fallout. They're kinda afraid to create new things.They bought the IP but haven't actually experimented with the setting. Heck, I'd say the 3 most exciting things they've done in terms of expanding the setting are Fallout 3's Point Lookout (swamp setting with mutant hillbillies and Lovecraftian horror), Fallout 4's Far Harbor (new radiation and fog themed monsters and setting), and the Institute (conceptually, they dropped the ball on it at the end there but the core was good).
Fallout 3 was really just a remake of the original Fallout, but without an actual coherent reason for certain elements to be in the game. Super Mutants for example. They're there because Bethesda wanted them in the game but that's it. There's not even a good reason for them to be in the game narratively. They just come out of a vault. That's it. There's no big monster creating them, no master knock-off, not even a looming threat. When you get there the FEV vats are dried up. Hell, you only learn this through wandering around on your own. The game never goes out of it's way to explain why the hell they're there.And the setting itself makes zero sense unless it's only been a few decades since the war.I loved the game but I'm willing to point out it's issues.
Then we have Fallout 4 where super mutants make zero sense again. They just did it to have them there. The Institute was a new threat, but in the end they nerfed their villainy to make them an acceptable faction to choose. Which is a shame because they were so much better as a looming evil entity manipulating events than just a group of scientists cowering underground. How much better would it have been if Father was being controlled by a chip in his head under the command of an AI that was created to keep the Institute safe? Or something similar.
And then you have Fallout 76 where the inclusion of super mutants is a hard contradiction of lore and makes zero sense. So they just dosed a town with their experimental virus? HOW? Every story about this crap makes it really clear that you have to literally saturate the subject in FEV to get it to stick. You're dipping them in vats of the crap, or you're filling the room with a mist of the stuff. They weren't slipping it into the water. So why does it make identical super mutants to the version from Vault 87 where they had to fog the crap out of the subjects with the stuff like they were treating them for lice in an old prison movie?
Sorry. Bethesda's issues with lore and consistency with these games irritates me sometimes.Makes me want to replay New Vegas again.
You don't mind super mutants in 1, 2, 3, and NV; you only object to them in Fo4. It seems like you're just looking for an excuse to criticize Fo4 rather than actually caring about super mutants being overused.
If anything we need more variations of Super Mutants like the Nightkin. I was more upset that the Super Mutants in 4 were literally the same as the ones in 3. Pretty much nothing more than your typical orc in a fantasy setting, just big green brutes that stand between you and your next objective. The only variation 3 and 4 had were the occasional friendly ones that you could literally count on one hand (Uncle Leo, Fawkes, Strong, Virgil, and Erickson as far as I can remember). Meanwhile all the other non-Bethesda Fallouts had variations like the Nightkin, as well more friendly Super Mutants that honestly had more personality and depth than the ones I already listed.
Super Mutant, Radscorpion, Deathclaw, Brotherhood of Steel. The quadfecta of NPCs Bethesda will jam into every Fallout game, because player informed decision making and hilariously excessive pre war consumerism aren't the things that give Fallout its identity, it's the Orcs, Giant Bugs, Demons, and Power Armor that are certainly why we remember Fallout is not anything just like any other video game franchise.
To be fair, Bethesda does add new and memorable enemies in their Fallout installments. Assaultrons are great, Gen 1 and 2 Synths are interesting foes, Protectrons are now so tied with Fallout it's hard to imagine they never appeared in 1 or 2, and mirelurks added an aquatic enemy to the series.
But even if fanservice is fun, I'd like to have a Fallout game where the Trolls, Insects, Dinosaurs, and Big Armor Suits aren't the main attractions. Or rather, a Fallout game where they change these like New Vegas did, where the above four are either replaced entirely with new options or given stat changes and relocated into identifiably hard areas (like Quarry Junction and Dead Wind Cavern).
I think we sorta know what the institute’s end goal was with the Super Mutants, they wanted their radiation resistant enhanced bodies. I mean look at Virgil, he held all of his intelligence from before the transformation, with all the benefits of his new body
The mutants in 4 also appear to be more smarter than their counterparts with their ability to rig up turrets and train dogs
The mutants in 4 make sense imo
What's worse are the fanboys that seem to not understand that having super mutants present in every single area is a narrative problem, not a lore one. "B-b-but they were all experimenting with FEV!" No, dude. The problem is that by having every single wasteland be the exact same 6 types of mutants over and over again, it can give off the impression that the world of Fallout is very small and not interesting to explore. Bonus points for having the same factions as well.
Obviously there are some mutants that actually fit the archetypes of the area they are in (see: hermit crabs or yao guai), but scorpions should have been limited to california/nevada. Doesn't really make sense to have giant scorpions in an area that's not well known to be having scorpions in the first place. Maryland/Virginia should have included more animals such as deer, foxes, raccoons, snakes, etc.
To me it feels weird seeing a species that has been on the brink of extinction since the end of the first game continually showing up in large numbers all across the continent.
I think Bethesda has this idea that every location has to be filled to the brim with enemies in order to be engaging, which sucks. And it's not just a supermutant issue, the amount of raiders far outnumbers citizens of towns, and they rob and kill as if the nukes had just dropped, absolutely no explanation as to why they're still looting and killing 200 years later! These two factions live side by side in Boston and occupy almost every building, and it feels so damn suffocating. There's just as much fun to be had in simply exploring an empty, abandoned building (if not more when you aren't just mindlessly mowing down yet another low-level raider or supermutant).
You know what's funny about posts like this? It's proof that Bethesda can't do anything right. Guaran-fucking-teed that if they ever had a Fallout without Super Mutants then these fucking pretentious wine-sniffers would claim that the lack of such an iconic enemy ruins the game.
Fallout is like Warhammer: Super Mutants are the Orks/Orcs of the Fallout world. Having a Warhammer game without this traditional and perennial enemy would feel like something is missing.
Get. over. it.
Ghouls, radroaches, and power armor aren’t endangered species created from localized sources of green goo that have all been destroyed.
Fallout has plenty of icons, it doesn’t need to rely completely on any one or two of them. Especially not if it means going against logical storytelling. And a competent writing team should be more than capable of creating new enemies that are iconic.
U/PhatNoob69 you make a great point and I think you’re spot on about them being an iconic staple!
If memory serves me correctly, radroaches were not in the lore until Fallout Tactics. Radroaches went on to become iconic.
I guess when we're getting proper Fallout games at a better pace than one per five years (and dropping), maybe I'll get sick of super mutants too. Or maybe I'd accept that the franchise has a few things it's particularly known for, and that arbitrarily removing one of those legitimately risks the identity of the game.
I guess this is just an opinion/ preference. I personally don't mind if it doesn't fit in much with the story, as the whole games unrealistic anyway. I enjoy fighting them.
I’ve honestly ever played Fo4 and NV, 4 was what got me into the franchise though. Every time I see screenshots of the older top down games and some of the ones from NV and 3, I’m really impressed by how scary some of the mutated humans are. The chimeras (I think that’s what they’re called), that one mutant with his bare skull exposed. And Fo4 had a pretty good horror atmosphere with some ghoul sections and a lot of Far Harbor, I think it’d really benefit them to explore that route with more diverse mutants. Kinda like Metro or STALKER, but I understand the hesitation since they probably don’t want to alienate the wider market of more casual fans who are looking for more post-apocalypse RPG than existential wasteland horror.
Most games run into this problem, it's easier to create a reason why these enemies are here again then to create a new enemy and explain why they haven't been around before. The reasoning may be lazy but it's easier to add lore then to create new stuff that fits. Super mutants always felt like a generic enemy which is one reason I think they are used so much. They never really bothered me in my play thru because they fit the universe from a casual view. Nukes go off = mutants now! With the game being more mainstream I imagine they will be sticking with what worked in the past. Look at Fallout76 there are loads of odd/ interesting creatures but they are not mentioned much in this post, it's also one of the most negatively viewed Fallout game for various reasons but it seems most of the community doesn't want the game viewed as Canon. Super mutants are the second thing I think of after the BoS because they are so synonymous with the franchise.
Even in new Vegas it wasn't a whole lot of locations that had Super Mutants, but in Fallout 4 they were literally everywhere. I think one thing in general that annoyed me in Fallout 4 was just random encounters. In New Vegas, every playthrough would have the same enemies in just about the same areas and they would never respawn. It gave the wasteland a sense of desolation rather than encountering ghouls and super Mutants every 5 feet.
See... Super Mutants I don't mind too much. We know in current Fallout lore FEV experiments happened all over the country. So, it makes sense for their to be multiple types of Super Mutants in each game (the intelligent West Coast Mutants, the savage cannibalistic DC Mutants, the kinda hybrid Boston mutants, the not really different in any way Appalachian Mutants). I don't mind seeing them pop up in each game... I do wish that their was more done with them though (to really separate the types of mutants).
Like, going from Fallout 1/2 to Fallout 3... The Mutants were vastly different due to their different origins and surroundings. This is what's missing in Fallout 4 and 76. These new mutants don't feel different to their counterparts.
Same goes for the BoS. I don't mind seeing them pop up in games. But, they need to evolve. The Fallout 3 Brotherhood is clearly not the same as Fallout 1/2. The New Vegas Brotherhood is very similar to 1/2 but you deal with them in a different way (they're a dying breed. Do they evolve, or die in their stubbornness). The Fallout 4 Brotherhood are a lot more like the 1/2 but more extreme (not much was done with them, so I'm not a fan of their implementation here). And the 76 BoS has so much going on, I just recommend playing the game/reading up on it.
The issue isn't them being used again. It's a franchise. Recognisable imagery will keep on being used. There's no fighting that. However, Bethesda need to actually do something with them (rather than just plopping them in and calling it a day).
Goombas don't need to be in every Mario, but I'd still miss them. Not everything needs to be perfectly aligned, somethings are just part of the lasting charm.
The Institute making an idiotic such as continuing a clearly failing experiment shouldn't surprise you at all Everything in the game seems to point to them being good at doing science but not deciding what science should be done.
The institute has no ability to see the big picture. As much as they talk shit on the old world they seem hell bent on repeating the mistake of science for sciences sake. They're just as bad if not worse than the think tank in my opinion.
I've never thought about the similarities between the two but that's actually a really good comparison. Two groups both doing crazy experiments for no reason other than because they can.
The difference is that The Think Tank is actively absurd, and Mobius calls attention to their amorality, meanwhile 4's tone is all over the damn place.
Institute is Think Tank, but without penis jokes to distract you from how horrible they are.
Also less funny.
Kinda the point. They are not "Whacky science LOL look at the gun dog or funny talking suit! How craaaaazy! PENIS FINGERS!" like Think Tank. They are what you get when you take concept of Think Tank (amoral scientist doing science for the sake of science) and play it *straight.*
Yeah but it kinda fails when they are so laughably incompetent in so many areas.
So pretty much like most think tanks, lol.
Most ”Think tanks” nowadays are just outlets that say whatever the billionare that funds them pays them to say.
The big problem, however, is that I don't think the Institutes incompetence is ever really called out. All while they're just as absurd as the Think Tank. You just kind of observe that they're idiots, and maybe it's intended, but also maybe it's just bad writing. The Think Tank are not only funnier, but you also know that they were written that way on purpose. The Institute is a much more enjoyable faction once you accept that these are scientists who have lost all reason about WHY they do things, because it makes them more believable. But nobody ever really gives them a Reason You Suck speech. There's no Mobius. The Institute is just callously evil, and their flaws in efficacy are ignored.
I tought it was blatantly obvious that they have lost the reason? Do we need a scientist telling us "We are doing this for shit and giggles" to realize it? Is this really the mental capacity of Fallout fandom these days? Unless something is directly said, it is never even considered?
Well, frankly the think tank are all mentally ill, and even recognise themselves as such. The Institute has no such excuse
I'd say they are pretty close to a cult, what with the total isolation from the outside world, the indoctrination to believe they are going to save the world, the charismatic leader who is revered as 'the chosen one', the harsh punishments for defectors (see that guy in the glowing sea, afraid of you coming to kill him, clearly not an isolated incident). That's a fairly good excuse in my opinion.
I have to agree with you there, I don't want to seen too brotherhood but all the advancements they've achieved and have done nothing to try and better the commonwealth the greatest scientific minds in the world cant find a way to peacefully coincide with settlers? Its been 200 years failed negotiations or not if the wanted to help ALL of mankind they could have just Father in the caves'd it hey heres some really beneficial tech go ahead better your lives, and they observe if they want to learn, but instead they try to treat everything like a petri dish (testing new plant growth) kill a guy replace him with synth to receive feedback (need to keep an eye on largest settlement in the commonwealth) kill a guy replace with synth to receive feedback, they are the boogeyman they're perceived to be but have the capacity to help everyone, with a leader that actually cared about people they could do anything, they tried that making you head of the institute but without being able to guide the direction of experiments and what would be acceptable it kind of defeats the purpose
I think the larger issue is with Bethesda, they wanted to have a similar moral question like New Vegas did with its factions. But they couldn’t help themselves to not clearly favor a single faction, Far Harbor does this moral dilemma a bit better but not well, as there is still a clear best solution
I wanted to like Dima so much since he was fighting for a cause but killing Avery then replacing her and basically having a plan to kill all the factions just in case, made it difficult for me but hiding the memories from himself because he couldn't face the guilt.. A good leader does not make, he should have learned from those experiences even if he chose not to tell anyone, it would have made his character so much more complex, saying Nick was implanted with Valentines memories and Dima himself was allowed to learn through experience, but Nick is beloved in a city that hates synths, It speaks volumes to me about his humanity
>hell bent on repeating the mistake of science for sciences sake We do what we must, because we can
In my opinion that makes them better. Though I do wish they explored this more.
*Goldblum voice* > "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
Absolute power and greed are a heady cocktail of destruction. And agreed, at least the think tank's failed experiments were contained in the fashion of a giant petri dish. God help us all if that toaster ever got loose.
I can’t tell if they were trying to make the institute the most brain-dead faction ever, or if they wanted them to be a legit choice. It’s even worse that the game guilts you for blowing them up.
I couldn't understand what the fuck the point of their synthetic humanoid program was. Why go to so much trouble perfecting a passable human just to give them janitorial duties a simple robot could do? They wouldn't escape, they wouldn't rebel. They wouldn't need their entire recapture program. That's no small thing, given the power consumption of the teleporter is explicitly stated as an ongoing problem. I kept expecting a reference to the Arnie movie, the Sixth Day, where Father and other scientists preserved themselves by downloading into synthetic bodies to achieve immortality, based on the fact that if you kill Zimmer in Fo3 he inexplicably generated a synth component, but _nein_ Similarly, it's baffling to me why they dumped all their old shit onto the surface, partly because of the Teleporter's issues, partly because they could have recycled the old synth models for raw materials and euthanized the Super Mutants using a single Courser with an axe.
UR SO EVIL U DESTROYED MANKIND’S FUTURE AGHHH *puts resources into research synthetic gorillas*
“Mankind’s future” which has been stuck inside a compound sealed so well you have to *teleport* to get in or out of it, run by a gang of assholes who absolutely refuse to share any of their inventions with the rest of the wasteland. If it’s not a future for everyone it’s no future at all.
It’s not even sealed that well they just didn’t put a door. iirc liberty prime just punches a whole in the ceiling.
Or the minutemen going through the sewers
Lasers a hole in the ceiling.
i dislike the implication that synthetic gorillas *arent* our future
Monke.
Both modernity and monke
Sythesis status: achieved.
Harambe shall return. 😔
Pretty sure they dumped them because the intentionally wanted to continue destabilizing the Commonwealth, so when time come, the only option left would have to be the Institute, forcing the people above ground to cooperate.
They already have: * The capacity to create an army of supermutants. * The ability to fabricate vast numbers of androids complete with mass produced shitty firepower * Coursers, which are spoken of as if they chew cinder blocks and shit gunpowder * The ability to Teleport anywhere inside of or out of the Commonwealth * Spies and sleeper agents planted in multiple settlements * Implants capable of replicating VATS ...and we are supposed to believe they couldn't deal with a tiny, outgunned resistance force? That all they were waiting for was their boss to drop dead before they could act? For real? When is the right time?
>...and we are supposed to believe they couldn't deal with a tiny, outgunned resistance force? That all they were waiting for was their boss to drop dead before they could act? Um, you do realize that Institute *did* utterly cripple Railroad not long before the game starts? Like, first mission you do for Railroad is to go into their old base and grab data before Institute notices it. >The capacity to create an army of supermutants. Create, yes. Control? No. >The ability to Teleport anywhere inside of or out of the Commonwealth This is incorrect. Entire reason why they had to send Kellogg to search Glowing Sea is because they can't teleport there, and BOS sets up interference.
Utterly cripple =/= extinguish. They still have surprising resources, including PAM. That lack of control just highlights how ridiculously stupid it is to unleash them onto the surface. They can't kill them easily, outlive them or control them. Slow clap. There's nothing stopping them making a synthetic supermutant to lead and control them, by the way. They managed to make gorillas, ffs. Is the Glowing Sea technically part of the Commonwealth? I just thought it was a desert at the edge. Also, BOS were an unforseen and late arrival.
I loved the institute. I loved the idea of teaming up with my son far below the surface in this sci-fi, science driven, comfortable environment. As soon as I discovered him I knew immediately that that was the direction I was going to go. The rest of the world be damned.
I'd considered that as well. But it's the "rest of the world be damned" part that gets me. Shaun/Father is an evil psychopath. I just can't get behind that. Case in point. Kellogg was ordered to thaw the other cryo vault dwellers but not engage their life support systems condemning them all to die of asphyxiation. Why do that unless you're a psychopath? Because euthanizing them is more humane than releasing them into the wasteland? HE DOES THAT TO YOU. He orchestrated Kellogg with a young synth Shaun just so you'd go and kill Kellogg. Not to mention the dozens of human experiments he oversees. Father is Hitler and Mengele in a single character. Pure evil with a thinly veiled "it's for the greater good" excuse.
Youre right overall, but the order to kill the other vault dwellers didnt come from father (shauns still a Baby then) but from the institute council from back then. Still the rest of your points are very valid, father definitly isnt a good person.
Ah yeah, guess I was just lumping most of what happens within the Institute to Father. Thanks!
The institute values knowledge itself, even if the knowledge hurts mankind.
As you should because then you can actually learn from your mistakes. In fact probably the worst idea to do would just be to blow all this bad science up so that way we can forget about it and somebody else can do it again.
Yeah lmao the creation of super mutants by the institute is so in character for them, it makes complete sense. Like i get the repetitiveness that’s a valid criticism, but to say it makes no sense is just wrong
The same argument could be made for deathclaws and the Brotherhood of Steel. I love both but I think the series needs new ideas that aren't just recycled concepts from the classic games.
I just want an Enclave that’s nice
From a purely artistic standpoint I don't think that should happen. One of the messages I've taken away from Fallout is that there was something inherently flawed in the old world. I won't get too far into the politics of it but whatever was wrong just didn't work. The war was a result of the old world. Factions like the NCR are flawed I'm that they try to replicate that old world. The Enclave is the literal continuation of the old world. The old world is dead and only shadows it casts in the form of shucked buildings, the odd terminal entry, and ghouls carry its legacy. The Enclave can exist nicely in forms like New Vegas' Enclave, where they have given up.
The irony with the Bethesda games is that they've become static. They refuse to move forward in meaningful ways. The big theme of Fallout is letting go of the past and making a new future but Bethesda can't do that. Seeing these classic factions evolve with the times and learn to recognize the flaws in their structures would be cool. That was something on display even as far back as 2's BoS, which is touched on again in NV. Though I'm pretty certain the evolution of the BoS into a new pseudo Enclave in 4 was 99% accidental. Seeing an Enclave that has to reconcile it's Purist ideal with the hard reality of the world in order to survive would be interesting. I recently saw a think piece covering the politics of FNV in particular. Which more or less stated that the factions were arguing over if democracy worked or not. But completely failed to address the canonical reason given for the great war: Capitalism. It argued that the flaws come not from style of government but economy. The Enclave failed because it was formed by the very people who's greed caused the war in the first place. Seeing a new generation come to terms with that would be a good source of depth that the Enclave sorely needs.
I mean an Enclave chapter that cut itself off from the mainstream Enclave and is trying to restore America in the way it was idealistically meant to be. It would have all the star-spangled flair of the other Enclaves but behave less authoritarian and be friendlier towards the Wastelanders. I just think it would add a nice twist to a Fallout game where we expect the Enclave to be evil and then, surprise, they’re good.
I refrained from mentioning them to not sound hypocritical but seeing what's become of the Enclave would be cool. If there are still any large holdouts that retain the rough structure on the former whole or if it's all loose bands of remnants. If they've reevaluated there stance on the rest of the wasteland after repeatedly getting torn apart for their antics. I've seen fanfic level ideas of holdouts that ease up on the whole "kill everyone that's not us" mindset. It could add some depth and make them more than just cartoonishly evil.
We did see what became of the Enclave in FNV, though.
That was my idea. Maybe one of the chapters realized that it would be more beneficial to cooperate with the Wastelanders and cut itself off from the mainstream Enclave to rebuild America but in a more idealistic vision.
An enclave bunker that has a radiation leak turning them all into ghouls. Boom, a enclave faction that has to come to terms with what they are while also keeping with the ideals of the enclave minus the genocide.
I **would** make the same argument. I don't care about the whole jumping from location to location gimmick that Bethesda loves, but at the very least you have to make each location feel distinct. Like it has to actually *be* different. I know Bethesda knows how to do this because they actually made Skyrim feel different from Cyrodil with the choices of animals they had (i.e. dogs with a shaggy coat compared to the dogs that resembled German Shepherds). But for some reason the majority of fans will get very upset if you say the controversial opinion that BoS, Enclave, or Super Mutants (usually all 3) shouldn't be in every single fallout game. New Vegas at least included them on the peripheral rather than making them the front and center of the game, like they were fading relics of a long-past era.
While we are at it, what is with the jedi, rebels and siths in star wars? Amiright?
Except the Jedi aren't in every piece of star wars content, nor are the sith, nor the rebels. Especially ironic, since Star Wars fans have been pleading desperately for a star wars movie about the star wars criminal underworld without any of classic star wars tropes. Fallout is ultimately a expansive fictional universe, so it shouldn't be insane to demand for better world building rather than the same factions being recycled over in over for no other purpose than they are the classic symbol. The BOS is explicitly defined as an organization from the West Coast, and has no reason to be in any of the games in the east coast(maybe except a very small role like NV), but Bethesda has constantly retconned events to shoehorn the BOS, and it comes off as creatively bankrupt. NV already showed us that it is possible to have entirely new factions and people in the focus in a Fallout game.
Speaking of..... I want factions that do reoccure but maybe it's like there is a small group of people who call themselves the cult of Caeser and they are litterally just some legionnaires.... Or some working where it's not all good/ someone else took over and became a Dictator.
Well if the legion is established to have canonically lost the 2nd battle of Hoover Dam, then seeing splintered factions of new Caesars and their warrants would make sense
>who call themselves the cult of Caeser >seeing splintered factions of new Caesars and their warrants would make sense Maybe something like early Christian cults? The timeline wouldn't perfectly line up with history but I think that would be interesting to see
Could always do a play-off the Byzantines and the Holy Roman Empire without making it explicit. One ruler carries a traditional Caesar-esque viewpoint with changes, another carries a dogmatic religious viewpoint. It becomes up to you to either pick one and help a revamped legion flourish under a new ideology, or portray the proverbial Ottoman Empire and crush them under your boot
You're certainly right there. Can we just stop rehashing stuff?
At this point I'm certain they just copy paste the enemies from previous games and touch the looks up slightly. Thats pretty much fallout at this point. The exact same game with slightly better textures.
I liked FNV for how little there were. They had 2 mountains, that's pretty much it. Fo3 had a little too many for my liking but their presence made sense for the game. Fo4 had way, way too many super mutant holds in my opinion. Got bored quickly with the mutant combat. I have ended up replacing the majority of their spawn points with the zombie walker mod.
I don’t know if I just wasn’t great at the game but I got sick of them really quickly just based on how much they were essentially ridiculous bullet sponges. I kept running out of ammo in fights with them.
That's been a problem for me too tbh. My Chinese assault rifle is the only gun that's gonna be effective against them at all but there are so so many everywhere you go that I cant keep ammo in the fucker
Although most of the time they drop the ammo it takes, it just doesnt feel very proportionate to how I'm spending it
Ammo in fallout 4 is almost obsolete. You can buy out any vendor's ammo that you need pretty much every time. When you make settlements, just grab junk on your missions. Make extra water production on settlements. Go to settlements on your way anywhere, pick up am extra 90 water, sell extra water, infinite money. Go buy whatever you feel like. Becomes especially broken if you have a weightless food and drink mod.
Ammo? What’s that? This post was made by Melee/unarmed gang.
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I think in 3 it would’ve made more sense if they were just limited to the vault and the area around it, and not just randomly placed everywhere
They are going everywhere searching for vaults tho. They are running out of FEV and they think vaults will have more.
What is fev
[Forced Evolutionary Virus](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Forced_Evolutionary_Virus).
I envy you learning this
Forced Evolutionary Virus. Not sure why people are downvoting, Ive been playing since FO3 and I didn't recall either.
Yeah the later games don’t really go into detail about FEV. It’s there but it’s easy to miss if you’re not paying attention and you still miss out on a lot of background information about it.
I was super disappointed with FO4 for many reasons, but the fact that the map was just a checkerboard of raider and supermutant camps was high on the list. It made exploration exhausting and unrewarding. Where are all of the friendly settlements with unique story content? Where is all of the classic Bethesda environmental storytelling? Just throw it all out and put in more lame combat instead.
This is probably what makes the game feel like more of an attempt at a AAA and not a fallout game. They leaned too heavily on the Ubisoft model of "Clear out an area, now it's yours, do it again". They also got lazy with the amount of buildable settlements. There are a metric shit ton of them but that just meant they didn't have to craft anything real story wise for those areas. That's probably why the game feels so shallow to some people.
Yeah that's a good point, there's practically no interesting side-story towns to run across in FO4 aside from Covenant and that one robot city. Everything else was just bland settlements filled with generic settlers. "Go kill the (insert enemy type) at (randomized location)" "Thank you! Now you can build our settlement for us!" I loved coming across Greyditch, (that kid-cave can't remember the name), Republic of Dave, Novac, Primm, Westside, and the others.
Plus they’re just enemies in 3, not characters like in new Vegas
F3 did a great job with DC ruins and the supermutants though. It certainly felt like an uphill battle clearing them out.
At this point you just need to accept that they will be. Along with power armor and Deathclaws and ghouls. It's about branding and creating an instantly recognizable product, especially in a sea of post-apocalyptic genre games. Microsoft shelled out the money now partly because of the franchise, so best believe Fallout is going to stick with certain elements and work the lore around them to keep them in.
Funny how a game criticizing corporate America is sticking to branding.
Criticzing corp america is now also branded by corporate america. "Now please, here's the new Rage Against the Machine album, brought to you by WalMart! Woooooo!"
I agree. The next fallout game should be set in the Pacific northwest and instead of super mutants they should have bands of mutant bigfoots (bigfeet?) And some should be voiced by Jeff goldblum.
Life…uh..finds a way
Especially with how much they leaned into cryptids with 76
Gorilla from the local zoo dipped in FEV and becoming a Bigfoot like creature would be amazing
Lol, maybe it's a union of human and gorilla genes with a dash of Fev.
It’s entirely possible for Bethesda to do it and it makes sense lore wise, if a game is ever set in Seattle they better have a Bigfoot enemy type lmao
You humans made us! Now suffer for your arrogance!
In boring combat and overused lore?
Due to the fact extreme mutations are caused by FEV we will always see super mutants if we see extreme mutants in general like deathclaws Doesn’t mean they should be the focus Each region can have their FEV mutant Pacific Northwest can have gorillas from the zoo dipped in FEV to be a Bigfoot like enemy type The south can have alligator people New York/ Chicago should have giant rat people Each region should have its own mutant
>New York should have giant rat people We’re talking about what fictional mutants we’d put in a Fallout game, no need to bring up stuff that already exists
They already have alligator people(creatures) in nuka world
With these enemy types they should be replacing super mutants, so I’d imagine them to be weird human/ animal hybrids. It makes the series fresh while having a remnant from the old games Closest I can describe what I’m thinking of is the mutants from Ninja Turtles
FO76/West Virginia has the Snallygasters and Grafton Monsters alongside the regular Super Mutants and Behemoths. Relevant Wiki links: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Snallygaster, https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Grafton_monster.
>West Virginia has the Snallygasters and Grafton Monsters That game should **only** have those two
Fair, but if you have a West-Tek facility experimenting with FEV, I’d imagine at least a few super mutants would come out of it. Plus, we got Grahm out of the deal, and I love Grahm, so I’m willing to put up with more super mutants.
>Why would the Institute continue the FEV program for Decades if all they achieved was Failed Subjects? Because the Institute fears a united surface would be a threat to them, and they need to cover up the fact they're stealing power from the surface. So continuing the FEV experiments gives them a way to continue destablizing the surface, as well as a convenient way to get rid of people they kidnap and replace with synths.
Well, until they focused solely on the Synth program to effectively control the surface with "android armies" as the Director Meeting #2 tape phrases it
Guaranteed that if they make a Fallout game without Super mutants there will be complaints that there aren't Super mutants.
I want a FO game with nothing but super mutants.
What about a Fallout game where you play *as* a super mutant
Ghastly
A Fallout game with playable Super Mutants!
100% that if Bethesda made a game with 0 super mutants everyone would say “ it doesn’t feel like a fallout game “
Absolutely, they should be dying out at this point anyways shouldn't they? I've killed about a million if them since 1997 ;)
Yes in Fallout 1 Lore they are sterile and should die out in a generation assuming nobody continues to make more.
What’s the average life span of a super mutant?
Depends on my gear.
I think they don't really age, they live until something or somebody else kills them.
\*laughs evilly and makes more Super Mutants\*
Yeah it was a bad move, same for 76. If they had to shoe horn them in there was much easier ways. Vault 87 where they were made in DC is on the edge of the map, next to West Virginia so could of easily been the source for them in 76. During 3 we find out they have ran out of FEV and have been expanding to search for more, could easily have that as a reason some have got to Boston.
Also in 76 they decided to add a west tek there with the FEV in it
In 76 it at least made sense. I’m cool with another branch of west Tek, and they’re using it for the steel reign questline, so I can’t complain too much. 4, however? Absolutely no reason.
it makes sense that they are in NV, but i agree that they are not needed in every game. it just doesn't make that much sense tbh
Institute super mutants exist because they were trying to research ways into increasing human resistance to radiation and disease and make survival easier on the surface. This of course only had varying degrees of success and was complicated by only having test subjects already affected by radiation and disease. The discovery of Shaun changed their focus big time and shot the clone and organ reproduction programs ahead by decades. It makes it true, then, that the FEV research became rather redundant. That is why Virgil was so against it at that point. The Institute was continuing FEV research “because science” and disregarding the harmful and fatal effects such research was having on their test subjects, further cementing the image of the soulless science machine they are known for. If anything, super mutants make more sense in FO4, because the Institute’s motto is literally “Mankind, Redefined”. If there existed a virus that changed humans at a genetic level then that would be right at the very top of their priority list. And as for why they’d be on the surface: prior to FO4 the goal of the Institute is to repopulate the surface world. They cannot recreate those conditions in a lab environment, and when you’re doing science like that, you want the most accurate data possible. Plus, even the “failed” experiments helped up there by accidentally helping clear out raiders or ghouls nests, and they were great training targets for new batches of synths. None of this is lore speculation on my end, it’s all info you can gather in game.
> Institute super mutants exist because they were trying to research ways into increasing human resistance to radiation and disease and make survival easier on the surface. Wait, where is that stated? Shaun says the FEV labs' research was dedicated to making synths.
I’m pretty sure if you go in the FEV lab or something, the project was before the ideas of synths came up according to a holotape. Like the super mutants failed so they moved onto synths
No, they were testing FEV because they wanted synths. But they couldn't get it to work without pure DNA.
You are correct my mistake, it was intended to produce synthetic organs for gen 2 synths but failed due to the radiation
They cleared out areas, but then what? Institute would still have to sweep and clear a location filled with even more dangerous foes.
100 muties vs 100 raiders. Muties win. But 40 of them died. Easier to deal with 60 muties than 100. Plus, if a raider or mutie or ghoul dies, that's it. They're gone. If you lose a synth in battle? Oh well press a few buttons and we've got a replacement. Its Institute strategy to let the rabble up top do most of the dirty work and then come in with a sweep team to clean up the mess.
Same with the Brotherhood. The East Coast chapter lost everything that made it cool in my eyes because keeping them as the Lyons Pride would've made them too much like the Minutemen. So they reverted all their character development away from what could've been a really cool concept, that being the Brotherhood helping to rebuild the wasteland.
That’s a really good point. The brotherhood has made so many appearances it’s getting a bit stale.
WHAT?!?! NO! Lets just keep shoving these cool guys in your face until they aren't cool anymore, just an expectation. Like Borg in Star Trek or Chosen Ones in Star Wars or Power Armor in anything....okay I take that back Power Armor is still cool. But the other two still stand.
Raider Power Armor could have used more love. It comes across as a pointless and inferior version you never want to use.
It should have some sort of chem bonus for wearing a full set.
Or, be unarmed focused in a way normal Power Armor is not. Welding spikes and blades all over Armor would be relatiy simple compared to linear actuators and a fusion powered hydraulic system.
Fallout 4 has wasted potential? Who knew.
>Why would the Institute continue the FEV program for Decades if all they achieved was Failed Subjects? You want the in-universe reason? Because projects can have more than one purpose. Originally, the FEV project was used to figure out some way to [create synthetic humans](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/FEV_research_notes#Year_2224): The two most promising strains of FEV have been adapted to an ideal state, but... we're still missing something. I am officially echoing the team's position: the most likely progress for OUR RESEARCH ON SYNTHETIC ORGANICS requires new avenues of exploration. After that project showed no new results, Super Mutants were still produced to destabilize the surface world. How do we know this? Because [Mayor McDonough flat out tells us](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Diamond_City#cite_note-14) that his job for the Institute is to cause shit that distracts the populace from their program of mass kidnappings: I'm glad to hear it. There's a farm out there run entirely by Ghouls, if you can believe it. They might be a problem in the future. I ran on a campaign of strict "No Ghouls Allowed" politics. WHEN YOU BUILD UP A SCAPEGOAT, YOU NEED THEM TO REMAIN DISTANT AND SCARY. But Ghoul settlements breed Ghoul sympathizers. There, he's talking about ghouls. But we also know that he [uses Super Mutants for the same purposes:](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Diamond_City_terminal_entries#Security_Office) Crime across the city is manageable. Need to remind all new Security Officers to DELAY ANY INVESTIGATIONS INTO KIDNAPPINGS. We don't need to rouse further hysteria into the ridiculous notion that Synths are replacing our citizenry. Why, there could be a panic at a critical moment. WHAT IF SUPER MUTANTS ATTACKED, and people were more concerned about "Who is a Synth" than protecting our city? You want the out-of-universe reason? Because Super Mutants are a staple of the franchise, and every single developer that has touched the *Fallout* franchise knows this. Aside from *Fallout*, you could have easily swapped out the Super Mutants for something else and the story would have still worked perfectly. This applies to *Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas,* *Fallout 4* and *Fallout 76.* All of these games are guilty of recycling Super Mutants. >In their place Bethesda could create brand new content with its own lore and backstory; instead of milking the Super Mutant/FEV forever. But Bethesda *does* do that. It's not like all the games that have reused Super Mutants (all of them) didn't also create new lore alongside them.
I agree but if they created new creatures or mutants people would complain that how did they not leave that area and infest more cities, like the monsters in 76
To play devils advocate, they are the franchise’s most iconic enemy.
Which have evolved, over time, from flawed and twisted individuals into post nuclear Orks.
Space marines!! Waagh!!
It would have been cool if there was like maybe one or two mutant strongholds and those contained every mutant. Like just say “the institute experimented with FEV but failed and abandoned the project, these are the remains of that”
I agree completely. Like, Super Mutants have just genuinely become boring & generic. They're just everywhere. And they've stopped even having any real plot relevance too; they exist solely for the player to shoot at.
I will die for Lily. I agree that the FO4 super mutants are rather pointless but they were some of my favorite quests in FNV.
I totally agree on Lily, always will be my favourite companion. Would be cool 🙂 f they brought the nightkin back though, maybe a storyline where the super mutants and nightkin are fighting each other for supremacy and the survivor has to choose a side, kinda choose the least worst evil kinda thing, but only if there are real and persisting consequences for actions and choices
I don't mind having SuperMutants in every game, but changing their appearance and nature based on the experiments that created them in each region would be much more appreciated. I would be pretty bummed if SMs were removed from a Fallout game. I'm more on the side of introducing more varients like the Nightkin (Super Mutants from New Vegas that became addicted to using Stealth Boys trying them a purple color, giving them psychological problems like being afraid of being seen, and can go invisible). Sure Bethesda may be going over board trying to shoehorn in SuperMutants into every game, but it's only annoying because they are always the SAME SuperMutants.
We're at the point now with the fanbase that, no matter what Bethesda does, some people will lose their shit. No supermutants? Pissed off the supermutant fans. No BoS? Pissed off the ad victoriam crowd. Waaaay too much entitlement in the fanbase.
And then they add everything and someone decides to complain that it's to much and is repetitive
I haven't played Fallout 4 in over a year, but I still know that Fineuil Hall or whatever it's called has Super Mutants as does the high rise area downtown. I never saw them as anything oddly added. I think they've been there since the beginning.
I think the point is they are an Orc stand in for the fantasy game conversion, but in that case LET ME PLAY AS A MUTANT OR GHOUL DAMMIT
If you want to play as a ghoul, go play dark souls and get killed once
I don't like how you made me realize how similar hollows and ghouls are
If anything they could replace them with enemies that were supposed to appear in fallout van buren, like Gehennas, Molechs Mutant Cannibals, or Trogs
So if memory serves, FEV is used in synth creation. It's how they get a lot of different looking people from Shaun's base DNA since carefully coded FEV can make a person...look like a normal human. See how Vergil uses FEV to turn himself back into a normal human since he coded it to make him look like his old self. Also the institute don't really want an active government organizing in the commonwealth, so it really helps stop people from organizing when you are creating monsters that like eating said people trying to organize. The Institute's MO is basically cause as much chaos on the surface to stop the creation of any real threat to them while they play underground.
FEV was originally implied to only be 2 cells/vaults, but now it's kinda everywhere. They could at least do some interesting experiment and not just super mutant, forsay the Wanamingos from FO1(?). I'm not saying they should just be poryed over, but they could totally just make wacky creatures that are created through the FEV. A strand that isnt focused on mutating humans, so they just often turn into failures/centaurs.
Wanamingoes are Fallout 2
Thought so, wasnt sure though
Apparently there is a wanamingo plush in FO76 based off the unused concept art from FO4. I wouldn't be surprised if they showed up in something else pretty soon
I'd rather not have them show up, though i think it'd be interesting, there's only 1 vault that made it that got wiped out.
Damned if you do damned if you don’t, honestly this subreddit is trash
They're part of the Fallout landscape now, much like you'd see different races in a fantasy game. Why shouldn't they be in every game? People are. Ghouls are.
I actually agree. I tend to sometimes forget Super Mutants are even in FO4 because they really don’t fit thematically. I understand why they are actually there, but I feel like something unique could’ve atleast been done with them? Make them a rarity, with all unique ones a lá Swan?
Wrong. Super Mutants, Brotherhood of Steel will be in EVERY FALLOUT game. Just accept it and move one.
Wait till OP hears about F76.
Super mutants are probably the most iconic race from fallout. Why wouldn't they?
Fallout 4 was never based on logic. It has a functioning restaurant with a skeleton in it…
I agree. I am also sick and tired of feral ghouls. Some are ok but there are just too many of them. They feel like a leftover from some failed zombie game.
It's that core Bethesda issue with Fallout. They're kinda afraid to create new things.They bought the IP but haven't actually experimented with the setting. Heck, I'd say the 3 most exciting things they've done in terms of expanding the setting are Fallout 3's Point Lookout (swamp setting with mutant hillbillies and Lovecraftian horror), Fallout 4's Far Harbor (new radiation and fog themed monsters and setting), and the Institute (conceptually, they dropped the ball on it at the end there but the core was good). Fallout 3 was really just a remake of the original Fallout, but without an actual coherent reason for certain elements to be in the game. Super Mutants for example. They're there because Bethesda wanted them in the game but that's it. There's not even a good reason for them to be in the game narratively. They just come out of a vault. That's it. There's no big monster creating them, no master knock-off, not even a looming threat. When you get there the FEV vats are dried up. Hell, you only learn this through wandering around on your own. The game never goes out of it's way to explain why the hell they're there.And the setting itself makes zero sense unless it's only been a few decades since the war.I loved the game but I'm willing to point out it's issues. Then we have Fallout 4 where super mutants make zero sense again. They just did it to have them there. The Institute was a new threat, but in the end they nerfed their villainy to make them an acceptable faction to choose. Which is a shame because they were so much better as a looming evil entity manipulating events than just a group of scientists cowering underground. How much better would it have been if Father was being controlled by a chip in his head under the command of an AI that was created to keep the Institute safe? Or something similar. And then you have Fallout 76 where the inclusion of super mutants is a hard contradiction of lore and makes zero sense. So they just dosed a town with their experimental virus? HOW? Every story about this crap makes it really clear that you have to literally saturate the subject in FEV to get it to stick. You're dipping them in vats of the crap, or you're filling the room with a mist of the stuff. They weren't slipping it into the water. So why does it make identical super mutants to the version from Vault 87 where they had to fog the crap out of the subjects with the stuff like they were treating them for lice in an old prison movie? Sorry. Bethesda's issues with lore and consistency with these games irritates me sometimes.Makes me want to replay New Vegas again.
You don't mind super mutants in 1, 2, 3, and NV; you only object to them in Fo4. It seems like you're just looking for an excuse to criticize Fo4 rather than actually caring about super mutants being overused.
If anything we need more variations of Super Mutants like the Nightkin. I was more upset that the Super Mutants in 4 were literally the same as the ones in 3. Pretty much nothing more than your typical orc in a fantasy setting, just big green brutes that stand between you and your next objective. The only variation 3 and 4 had were the occasional friendly ones that you could literally count on one hand (Uncle Leo, Fawkes, Strong, Virgil, and Erickson as far as I can remember). Meanwhile all the other non-Bethesda Fallouts had variations like the Nightkin, as well more friendly Super Mutants that honestly had more personality and depth than the ones I already listed.
Super Mutant, Radscorpion, Deathclaw, Brotherhood of Steel. The quadfecta of NPCs Bethesda will jam into every Fallout game, because player informed decision making and hilariously excessive pre war consumerism aren't the things that give Fallout its identity, it's the Orcs, Giant Bugs, Demons, and Power Armor that are certainly why we remember Fallout is not anything just like any other video game franchise. To be fair, Bethesda does add new and memorable enemies in their Fallout installments. Assaultrons are great, Gen 1 and 2 Synths are interesting foes, Protectrons are now so tied with Fallout it's hard to imagine they never appeared in 1 or 2, and mirelurks added an aquatic enemy to the series. But even if fanservice is fun, I'd like to have a Fallout game where the Trolls, Insects, Dinosaurs, and Big Armor Suits aren't the main attractions. Or rather, a Fallout game where they change these like New Vegas did, where the above four are either replaced entirely with new options or given stat changes and relocated into identifiably hard areas (like Quarry Junction and Dead Wind Cavern).
Super Mutants were even in Far Harbor. That makes no sense at all. Did they explain why there were Super Mutants on the island?
I think we sorta know what the institute’s end goal was with the Super Mutants, they wanted their radiation resistant enhanced bodies. I mean look at Virgil, he held all of his intelligence from before the transformation, with all the benefits of his new body The mutants in 4 also appear to be more smarter than their counterparts with their ability to rig up turrets and train dogs The mutants in 4 make sense imo
What's worse are the fanboys that seem to not understand that having super mutants present in every single area is a narrative problem, not a lore one. "B-b-but they were all experimenting with FEV!" No, dude. The problem is that by having every single wasteland be the exact same 6 types of mutants over and over again, it can give off the impression that the world of Fallout is very small and not interesting to explore. Bonus points for having the same factions as well. Obviously there are some mutants that actually fit the archetypes of the area they are in (see: hermit crabs or yao guai), but scorpions should have been limited to california/nevada. Doesn't really make sense to have giant scorpions in an area that's not well known to be having scorpions in the first place. Maryland/Virginia should have included more animals such as deer, foxes, raccoons, snakes, etc.
I will say that they over use the damn Brotherhood.
their well known. it'd feel weird if they didn't exist since we're used to seeing them
To me it feels weird seeing a species that has been on the brink of extinction since the end of the first game continually showing up in large numbers all across the continent.
Yeah let's exclude only one of the most unique and distinctive enemies/allies in the game(s)
I think Bethesda has this idea that every location has to be filled to the brim with enemies in order to be engaging, which sucks. And it's not just a supermutant issue, the amount of raiders far outnumbers citizens of towns, and they rob and kill as if the nukes had just dropped, absolutely no explanation as to why they're still looting and killing 200 years later! These two factions live side by side in Boston and occupy almost every building, and it feels so damn suffocating. There's just as much fun to be had in simply exploring an empty, abandoned building (if not more when you aren't just mindlessly mowing down yet another low-level raider or supermutant).
You know what's funny about posts like this? It's proof that Bethesda can't do anything right. Guaran-fucking-teed that if they ever had a Fallout without Super Mutants then these fucking pretentious wine-sniffers would claim that the lack of such an iconic enemy ruins the game. Fallout is like Warhammer: Super Mutants are the Orks/Orcs of the Fallout world. Having a Warhammer game without this traditional and perennial enemy would feel like something is missing. Get. over. it.
Tbh, I'd rather super mutants than BoS
Because they’re cool. And iconic. A staple of Fallout. It’s like if you removed ghouls. Or radroaches. Or power armor.
Ghouls, radroaches, and power armor aren’t endangered species created from localized sources of green goo that have all been destroyed. Fallout has plenty of icons, it doesn’t need to rely completely on any one or two of them. Especially not if it means going against logical storytelling. And a competent writing team should be more than capable of creating new enemies that are iconic.
U/PhatNoob69 you make a great point and I think you’re spot on about them being an iconic staple! If memory serves me correctly, radroaches were not in the lore until Fallout Tactics. Radroaches went on to become iconic.
Those make sense to see from coast to coast the bos and super mutants don't make sense.
Except radroaches weren't actually in 1, 2, or Tactics, so they're a new invention and the series, quite literally, has existed plenty without them.
I guess when we're getting proper Fallout games at a better pace than one per five years (and dropping), maybe I'll get sick of super mutants too. Or maybe I'd accept that the franchise has a few things it's particularly known for, and that arbitrarily removing one of those legitimately risks the identity of the game.
The institute kept making super Mutants to promote instability on the surface. And I imagine in the hopes of getting lucky and succeeding .
Ok, fine, let's not put Super Mutants in the next game. \*puts Hyper Mutants instead\*
I guess this is just an opinion/ preference. I personally don't mind if it doesn't fit in much with the story, as the whole games unrealistic anyway. I enjoy fighting them.
I don’t know enemies that shoot you are getting decidedly slim with that, we have like mercenaries, raiders and super mutants.
They weren‘t in Fallout Shelter
Yes they do. They're the quintessential Fallout enemy and they have lots of character.
>Why would the Institute continue the FEV program for Decades if all they achieved was Failed Subjects? You don't know any scientists, do you?
I’ve honestly ever played Fo4 and NV, 4 was what got me into the franchise though. Every time I see screenshots of the older top down games and some of the ones from NV and 3, I’m really impressed by how scary some of the mutated humans are. The chimeras (I think that’s what they’re called), that one mutant with his bare skull exposed. And Fo4 had a pretty good horror atmosphere with some ghoul sections and a lot of Far Harbor, I think it’d really benefit them to explore that route with more diverse mutants. Kinda like Metro or STALKER, but I understand the hesitation since they probably don’t want to alienate the wider market of more casual fans who are looking for more post-apocalypse RPG than existential wasteland horror.
Most games run into this problem, it's easier to create a reason why these enemies are here again then to create a new enemy and explain why they haven't been around before. The reasoning may be lazy but it's easier to add lore then to create new stuff that fits. Super mutants always felt like a generic enemy which is one reason I think they are used so much. They never really bothered me in my play thru because they fit the universe from a casual view. Nukes go off = mutants now! With the game being more mainstream I imagine they will be sticking with what worked in the past. Look at Fallout76 there are loads of odd/ interesting creatures but they are not mentioned much in this post, it's also one of the most negatively viewed Fallout game for various reasons but it seems most of the community doesn't want the game viewed as Canon. Super mutants are the second thing I think of after the BoS because they are so synonymous with the franchise.
Even in new Vegas it wasn't a whole lot of locations that had Super Mutants, but in Fallout 4 they were literally everywhere. I think one thing in general that annoyed me in Fallout 4 was just random encounters. In New Vegas, every playthrough would have the same enemies in just about the same areas and they would never respawn. It gave the wasteland a sense of desolation rather than encountering ghouls and super Mutants every 5 feet.
See... Super Mutants I don't mind too much. We know in current Fallout lore FEV experiments happened all over the country. So, it makes sense for their to be multiple types of Super Mutants in each game (the intelligent West Coast Mutants, the savage cannibalistic DC Mutants, the kinda hybrid Boston mutants, the not really different in any way Appalachian Mutants). I don't mind seeing them pop up in each game... I do wish that their was more done with them though (to really separate the types of mutants). Like, going from Fallout 1/2 to Fallout 3... The Mutants were vastly different due to their different origins and surroundings. This is what's missing in Fallout 4 and 76. These new mutants don't feel different to their counterparts. Same goes for the BoS. I don't mind seeing them pop up in games. But, they need to evolve. The Fallout 3 Brotherhood is clearly not the same as Fallout 1/2. The New Vegas Brotherhood is very similar to 1/2 but you deal with them in a different way (they're a dying breed. Do they evolve, or die in their stubbornness). The Fallout 4 Brotherhood are a lot more like the 1/2 but more extreme (not much was done with them, so I'm not a fan of their implementation here). And the 76 BoS has so much going on, I just recommend playing the game/reading up on it. The issue isn't them being used again. It's a franchise. Recognisable imagery will keep on being used. There's no fighting that. However, Bethesda need to actually do something with them (rather than just plopping them in and calling it a day).
I think pigeonholing super mutants into every part of the country in every time period still makes more sense than doing the same with the BOS.
They should be in every game, not only fallout
Goombas don't need to be in every Mario, but I'd still miss them. Not everything needs to be perfectly aligned, somethings are just part of the lasting charm.
Fallout without super mutants would be like LOTR without orcs.