12 Ways Bethesda Should Have Made Fallout 4

6. Story (Part 3) - Do Something Impactful With The Slavery Allegories

What does it mean to create life? How much sentience and anthropomorphic features does a given 'thing' have to have, before we can attribute human qualities to it? And does any of that matter, if said creation isn't flesh and blood?

Such questions are bandied about in Fallout 4, as it attempts to weave in what should've been a Blade Runner-meets-slavery theme, but wraps things up a little too conveniently in the end. See, back in 1857, a truly disgusting ruling from a retrospectively despised court case (that was later overturned 11 years later) ruled that "A free negro of the African race [...] is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States."

This fundamentally wrong way of thinking is at the heart of all racial disputes, and is connoted throughout Fallout, as various characters talk about the indistinguishably humanoid synths not having the same rights as the rest of us, or generally talking in a xenophobic manner.

Whilst it would be disrespectful to compare a race to an A.I. construct, the idea of "foreign entities living among us" is a fear tactic you'll see on a nightly Fox News report. Now, for a game to even tackle these themes so subtly should be applauded, but it's all handled with the detached, Fallout-style sense of humour.

You can choose from a menu at the close of the game where you stand on the matter, no matter what, as oppose to facilitating something that only comes about based on many integral decisions or dialogue choices along the way.

The fact that segregation could be a primal/human response and not necessarily a political or social one is massive, yet only comes to the surface if you scoop it out yourself.