Now I don't know about the rest of you players of FO4 out there; although I'm sure many of you will agree, is that the factions in the vanilla game aren't exactly paragons of choice, I mean the Minutemen aka "another god-damn defenceless settlement with a million turrets needs YOU, the GENERAL to personally help defend from a few petty raiders and a bunny rabbit, because you went to the commander Shepard school of delegation and are therefore completely unable to send a small squad of your own men in your place".

Or the institute and Railroad aka "we are going to plan EVERYTHING around you and hinge all our plans present and future on the loyalty of this random johnny we just met because he's/she's like totes going to help us all the way for realsies.

I won't bother going on about the brotherhood because they are basically the INS and the RR with slightly less zeal

The point being I'm not entirely happy with choice of factions or the choices you make in the factions of this game and would like to throw out a few ideas (probably not original) out there to modders more capable than myself (what is GECK?)

Mainly, The Gunners, the Mercs, the IDGAF about the commonwealth, the game paints them as bad guys but I personally see them as "neutral", I mean why couldn't they be a viable faction to join? They're organised and have a clear cut hierarchy system and an even more clear cut goal in mind, caps, you need caps to live so f*ck it, what if I don't care about finding my son, or whether synths should be free or any of that malarchy, what if I just wanna look out for myself and put myself in harms way constantly just for financial gain?

The game seems to offer the illusion of choice but we've all seen the ending by now, just stock footage without any context of the choices you made prior to that "slide-show"

Basically this just boils down too "can someone make a mod that puts me in the gunners so I can rank up within the faction earning slightly better gear and more caps to spend on better gear with which to f*ck up any one I see because I really don't care about your damn settlements Preston, please leave me alone I just got back from 5 settlements and survival mode is really hard and I can't take another trek across the wastes please just leave me alone...."

yeah that

sincerely

Smiley

The Factions look like they were left unfinished.

There are some hints that BOS at least at one point in development was supposed to be able of taking over farms same way as the Minutemen are doing it. For an example, in-game fluff in terminals on Prydwen.
Then there are voice files for NPCs congratulating the player taking Maxson's position.
And a companion NPC weapon for Proctor Ingram in game data indicating that she was considered a possible recrutable follower at some point.

Some hints that you should be capable of changing what the Institute is doing once you're the Director.

I've only heard a rumor that the Gunners were supposed to be a joinable faction, but given how BOS is partially unfinished and the Institute faction looks slightly rushed as well (or streamlined in development), I believe it.

Seems like the game had some corners cut to be delivered in time, so maybe more choices were planned. Then plans got dropped and only the Minutemen were fleshed out.

We won't know unless there's even more digging in game files. This will be quicker to do with the creation kit.

That all makes sense, as the faction in vanilla do seem unpolished and story is too linear in the context of 1 particular faction.

Before release I was expecting some kind of branching path whithin the factions themselves but no,
if you f*ck up something you just hop on to the next faction and continue with the same plot as always, it seems exactly as you described it "unfinished".

5 years in development, I mean how, how do you look cut corners on the main plot of your blockbuster game in that amount of time?

maybe the budget was spent on the PC voice acting I don't know.

But whilst I still consider fallout 4 a good game, hell, even a great game since I'm still playing it after all this time, I still consider it a disappointment with what it Could've been, but then again you should never set your expectations too high right, or you're bound to be disappointed

Given how detailed is FO4 worldspace and if for Bethesda building a worldspace is anything like using the toolkit, as "generating it bare bones then detailing it by hand", I can easily see what's the main "time hog" here.
Skyrim had the same with the civil war being truncated.

Heck, FNV had some corners cut from the game ending.