You know what something?
The Institute is less evil than the Brotherhood and its "erradication" of all the scientists.
I always saw them as misguided as fuck by the other departaments, and they are the most close of your background (pre-war war veteran) if you ignore mods.
If they just use the informants and not replacing people, maybe the paranoid thing can't be so much.
Institute isn't evil, it's stupid. Their synths are a nuisance, but they're not the end of the world, like Master/Calculator/Enclave were. They're a regional threat similar to Angel from London mod, even if they wanted to they can't take over the world, and they say they don't care to straight to your face. They're a bunch of basement dwellers who want to play with their toys, everything they do on the surface is there to ensure their survival or for some crackpot experiment. This last part is what makes them "evil" in any sense, but at least they tend to get results(for example, radiation resistant hardy pumpkins from the Warwick experiment).
Thing is, you can become the director of the entire Institute, in fact this role just falls straight on your lap in typical Bethesda fashion. This invalidates every single con Institute have since you're in charge, you can just make them stop. If you want the Brotherhood to infiltrate Institute, you can do that without eliminating them, in fact I believe there is a mod where you can do just that(and more). If you want them to stop the stupid evil scientist nonsense and focus on actual science, you can do that too, there is no limit here.
BOS on the other hand is just retarded in this one. Just like in F3 with Lyons, this time with Maxson, they're being lead by the nose by a radical retard who is twisting the codex to fit his agenda. This kid is supposed to unite all the BOS branches around the country as of Fallout 4 btw, including reuniting Outcasts back with DC.
Instantly get a mod that retcons the shitty F4 assault rifle into the R91 from Fallout 3. I'm still utterly offended by how gross the guns look in F4 yet at the same time it's a pain in the ass trying to find any gun mods that aren't IRL mall ninja shit either.
It would be fine if they just called it what it is, a heavy machine gun and chambered it in .308. Instead, it is an "assault rifle" and we had to wait for Nuka World to get a proper one(unless you count the Radium Rifle in Far Harbor, except that one is chambered in a pistol cartridge for some god awful reason, much like Combat Rifle in the vanilla game). I'm not offended by it, but that's once I modded it to do what I just said and upped it's damage, at least now it fills a niche.
So, I got a question to be asking everyone; I was picking up Fallout 4 for the first time in... quite a while, but does anyone have suggestions on what to try and go for? Like, which faction(s) do you guys recommend I work with? What weapons/builds do you suggest?
I'm already familiar with the story, so no need to worry about that.
You can become a Raider in Nuka World. It's a proper faction with their own main quest, only problem is that you can't technically end the game with them unless you suck up to Railroad or Institute, in which case you're just doing these routes. I suggest a mod that can kill Preston Garvey(I use Father mod that I covered in my London review) and
this mod that lets you destroy every faction HQ by yourself, that includes Diamond City which is appropriate for a Raider playthru. There used to be a mod called "True Overboss" that let you actually hire your own raiders as soldiers that would follow you, trick here is that they weren't spawned in and the game simply used one of the many raiders milling about in Nuka Town. This means that eventually, if enough of them died, the place became a ghost town, but it also means that you sometimes had one of the Pack animals like the ghoulrilla following you. As is, I recommend something like FCOM if you want to summon proper faction reinforcements, works on all vanilla factions and DLC factions as well like raiders or children of atom.
There is also a sixth route:
Enclave. That's right, there is a mod out there that actually brings an entire faction, this time with their own main quest path that lets you finish the game, and it's all fanmade. You would expect this sort of stuff from a DLC or an expansion. Not gonna talk too much since I don't want to spoil it, but I suggest doing an Enclave playthru with
this mod as well. It's a way older, and jankier, faction mod that also has you join The Enclave. It is incomplete, buggy but it has some neat rewards and I think it synergizes with America Rising well. Here is a pro-tip: If you want to roleplay as an Enclave soldier, first side with the Minutemen to the point where you get to both take back the Castle and then unlock artillery, as the quest starts in that same armory where you unlock it. Then, do Enclave Resurgent questline first, to the very end, before starting America Rising. It feels more organic that way, and you get some neat little bonuses, like a super mutant companion ala Frank Horrigan.
Edit: I checked a few mods on a whim, and they removed the fucking boxcutter mod for London. "This mod has been hidden because I am looking into a few things". Bullshit, this is the simplest 5 minute simple hotfix I have ever seen, all it does is add one weapon to the first NPC you see in the game, and that's that. There is no issues, none that I have seen or any that have been reported. Thankfully, I still have the game on my hard drive, so I can just send you the esp
This is getting out of hand, the frequency in which mods go missing without anyone to back them up is appalling. Well, in the 3D side of things, I don't remember it getting this bad with the classic/2D era games.