The entire motivating factor for me all throughout the game was to find my son.

I didn’t, it turned out, and instead of being some final blow-out battle mission, this stage of the game revealed that The Institute was yet another faction, one that I could actually join. “This is actually pretty fantastic,” I thought. The robots weren’t trying to murder me, and were mostly sweeping floors. The scientists were friendly and eager to show me around. It literally looked like what the year 2200 probably would have been like, had nuclear war not screwed everything up. Instead, the place was pristine, a stark contrast to the mangled wasteland above. I thought there’d be crackling tesla coils and vats of bubbling chemicals with evil robots stalking the halls. The Institute was not at all what I expected. He’d grown up knowing nothing but the comfort of The Institute and eventually rose in the ranks to run the place, decades later. Shaun explained to me that while I thought I’d been refrozen for another ten years, it was actually sixty. He broke the news to me that he was actually Shaun, my son, not the ten year-old I’d been chasing around the countryside, who was actually just a prototype child Synth based on his DNA. “Father,” their elderly leader, approached me almost immediately. The Institute welcomed me with open arms, and I soon found out why. What I got instead was something completely unexpected. You know, that kind of “which ending cutscene will I get” video game “choice.” I thought maybe at the end I’d face some moral dilemma about whether I should blow the place up or salvage its technology for the good of mankind. I expected a pretty tough level that would have me shooting Synths and killing cackling evil scientists as I butchered my way to my lost son, who I knew had now sprouted into a ten year old, as I’d been frozen again after he was taken from my vault. I stepped inside and began what I thought was going to be the final mission of the game. I choose the Brotherhood as my primary allies, and built the teleporter in their airport base. You appropriate this technology, and with the help of either the Brotherhood of Steel, the Minutemen, or the Railroad, you are tasked with warping into their base to get your son back, along with gathering info and killing things. No one has ever found it because there isn’t an actual entrance. You spend the whole game knowing practically nothing about The Institute, only that they were the ones who hired a mercenary to kidnap your son (with the death of your spouse being an unfortunate side-effect), and they release angry robots onto the landscape to do their bidding.Įventually, you learn that Synths get in and out of The Institute using teleportation.

Fallout 4 terminator armor