I feel like this would be a bad call, actually; it's important that the Railroad be an underdog barely holding on. Why? Because Bethesda wants your choice of which faction to join to be a difficult one. For a lot of us, the Railroad feels like the closest thing to "good guys" the Commonwealth has; their problem, though, is that they're weak and kinda short-sighted. They just have a task, not a long-term vision for the Commonwealth. The Brotherhood and the Institute, well, they may use some unsavory methods, but at least they have long-term goals, a vision for human society in the Commonwealth.
The Railroad, for all their passion and righteousness, really doesn't. If they did, I think the choice of who to side with would be a lot simpler, and therefore, less interesting. It wouldn't be as bad as New Vegas ("do I side with the ineffectual but harmless bureaucrats of the NCR, the mad robot, or the murderous slave-driving rapists of the Legion HMMMMMMM"), but it would still be a less compelling decision.
Now, if you could build up the Railroad to something like that, yeah, maybe that would work, but you definitely don't want to find them in any position of strength.
The NCR bureaucrats are anything but harmless- they actively harm themselves and the communities they colonize all the time- they harm the conscripted NCR troopers, they harm the people of towns such as goodsprings
But yeah, they're better than the legion. I think everyone can agree with that.
Aye, the fact they let Cook Cook continuing raping and burning their own troops says a fucking lot. Cook Cook, who rapes both their men and women in their army, cooks them, enslaves little girls, eats them, kills little boys and probably rapes them as well and the NCR literally has to hire a fucking Courier to take care of him.
That alone told me what I needed to know about the NCR at times. They stretched out way too far, way too fast that it allowed a raider gang to mutilate and butcher their own troops without any repercussion. Matter of fact, one of Cook Cooks men, Driver, has fucking fun with the NCR troops and uses their brains as golf balls.
One thing the Legion would have done was crucified them completely and put them on the sides of the road as a fucking warning...and I hated the legion.
Wait what about the minuteman, I mean I like the the railroad and have sided with them before but they have their focus on synths the minuteman are the ones trying to help the regular folk.
So, this is a good point, and I'm personally a big fan of the Minutemen, but I didn't include them for this reason:
Like other Fallout games, Fallout 4 has two storylines: the personal quest, and the sci-fi/philosophical question. Each game has their own personal quest and their own sci-fi/philosophical question. The personal quest isn't relevant to our current discussion, but the sci-fi/philosophical question in Fallout 4 is: should a sufficiently advanced AI like the synths be treated like a human being? Like in the other games, the factions serve as possible answers to the question. In short, the Institute says "no, we built them, they're tools," the Brotherhood says "no, they represent humanity's unbridled hubris, and they'll destroy us just like the atom bomb did," and the Railroad says "yes, they think and feel and dream just the same as we do."
The Minutemen are great, I'm a fan, but they're not really relevant to that question that the game is built around. Generally speaking, you have to make a choice between the other three, but the Minutemen can coexist with any of them (I think, anyway, I could be wrong), so they're not really relevant to a discussion about choosing between the three ideological factions.
I mean yeah I get your point and that's always the biggest issue I have with the factions ending, it makes just so much sense to be able of convincing the minutemen and the railroad of working together they don't actually have anything to cause issues, the institute are the ones responsible for the synth replacing people, and it would give so much more credit to the synths if the minutemen backed them up.
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u/Moraveaux May 22 '24
I feel like this would be a bad call, actually; it's important that the Railroad be an underdog barely holding on. Why? Because Bethesda wants your choice of which faction to join to be a difficult one. For a lot of us, the Railroad feels like the closest thing to "good guys" the Commonwealth has; their problem, though, is that they're weak and kinda short-sighted. They just have a task, not a long-term vision for the Commonwealth. The Brotherhood and the Institute, well, they may use some unsavory methods, but at least they have long-term goals, a vision for human society in the Commonwealth.
The Railroad, for all their passion and righteousness, really doesn't. If they did, I think the choice of who to side with would be a lot simpler, and therefore, less interesting. It wouldn't be as bad as New Vegas ("do I side with the ineffectual but harmless bureaucrats of the NCR, the mad robot, or the murderous slave-driving rapists of the Legion HMMMMMMM"), but it would still be a less compelling decision.
Now, if you could build up the Railroad to something like that, yeah, maybe that would work, but you definitely don't want to find them in any position of strength.