Bethesda’s Fallout 4 treats players to a huge open-world, tight FPS combat, and fully-fleshed out companion characters, arguably all the best of the franchise seen so far. Players emerge from Vault 111 where they’ve been in cryostasis for over 200 years since the Great War, searching for their son Shaun who has been kidnapped by the Institute, who’ve been flooding the Commonwealth with android replicas known as “synths.”
Despite its success, the game’s story is not without its valid criticisms. There was an opportunity for a great twist in Fallout 4 that wasn’t taken up despite fitting well with the story elements already included in the game. Fallout 4’s protagonist should find out that they’re a synth.
Fallout 4 takes place in the Commonwealth, where on top of surviving radioactive fallout, fighting giant insects, scavenging for food, and facing down ghouls, raiders, and super mutants, many inhabitants have become extremely fearful of synths. Many people in the Commonwealth are terrified that their neighbors are being replaced by synths sent from the Institute.
This has naturally led to many fan theories that the Sole Survivor themself could be a synth. Evidence for this includes the fact that the player character survives their cryostasis, while all the other occupants aside from the player’s spouse and Shaun die because of their life-support systems failing. The game itself certainly encourages a level of paranoia. One of the most memorable moments in the main quest is when the player character finds what appears to be their young son at last, before the Institute’s leader reveals that it is in fact a synth copy of Shaun and that he is the player’s real son, having been thawed out years earlier.
While some fans prefer the mystery, there are some good reasons that Fallout 4 should have unambiguously revealed that the player is a synth. While the game is broadly sympathetic to synths overall, Fallout 4 backs away from making any decisive statements about what Synths are capable of, humanity-wise. As a result, it’s entirely up to the player themself to decide whether or not they believe the Institute or the Railroad about Synths. Either way, the player’s choice is based on trust, not evidence.
There are situations where this ambiguity can work, and there are plenty of examples from science fiction of characters forced to admit that they have as little direct proof of the consciousness of their fellow humans as they do robots. Star Trek: TNG‘s episode “The Measure of a Man” did it back in 1989, Blade Runner did it seven years earlier, and its novel basis Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? did it in 1968. However, there are reasons that Fallout 4‘s protagonist not explicitly being a synth feels like a missed opportunity.
For a start, the reveal would redeem the game’s extremely prescriptive opening. The opening of Fallout 4 has the player choose between playing either the man or woman in a pre-established heterosexual marriage where they’ve already had a child. If the player chooses the male Sole Survivor, they’re also a veteran, while the female Sole Survivor is a lawyer. This along with the decision to have both versions of the Sole Survivor fully voiced makes them some of most fixed player characters in any Bethesda game, with players unable to imagine their own backstory for their character at all like they can in Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas.
The reveal that the Sole Survivor is a synth would have made that prescriptive backstory make a lot more sense – just as it’s forced on the player, so too was it forced on the player character through false memories. The reveal would also free the player character from that backstory when they explore the world. The silliness of the Silver Shroud questline, for example, would make a lot more sense if the person dressing up wasn’t doing so while their infant child was missing. If the player was a synth, the game would also give them permission to become whoever they want without being tied down by their backstory. It could even lead to a more interesting and bitter-sweet ending if the synthetic Sole Survivor is able to escape the institute with the synthetic Shaun.
By revealing that the viewpoint of the entire game – the player character’s first-person perspective – is actually the perspective of a synth, Bethesda would confirm once and for all that synths experience subjective consciousness. This may not seem like a necessary step to some fans of the franchise, but Fallout’s indecision about synth consciousness has it repeating tropes from older sci-fi series without adding any new commentary to their philosophy. Shows like Westworld might have similar moments where characters realize they’re androids, but only a video game could do it from a definitive first-person perspective.
Fallout stories have always been more prescriptive than those in Bethesda’s other flagship franchise, The Elder Scrolls. Fallout 3 establishes that the player character in 19 and shows their relationship with their father James growing up, for example. However, by leaving whether the player is a synth completely ambiguous, the main quest of Fallout 4, which begins as very plot-driven, loses much of its momentum after Shaun is discovered.
If the player was revealed to be a synth, their presence could also be a great catalyst for conflict within the Institute itself, especially if a synthetic replica of one of his parents caused the real Shaun to have second doubts about synth consciousness that others in the organization could see as him going soft. The twist could have breathed new life into the game’s third act instead of it fizzling out as the player decides which factions they’re going to team up with for the finale. Hopefully the next Fallout game is willing to take bigger risks, and is better able to balance the story of its main character with a broader set of role playing opportunities in its open-world.
Fallout 4 is now available on PC, PS4, Xbox One.
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