A Who's Who of the Commonwealth

Within the first few hours of Fallout 4, you will probably come into contact with, or at least hear about, the four major factions that populate the game. Since you're allowed to join multiple factions, and some of them don't exactly like each other, it can be difficult to see in advance the pros and cons of each, or what actions might cause you to lose a faction's support.

The Minutemen

This is probably the first group you will encounter after exiting the prologue. You can run into them by following the road out of your starting location, Sanctuary, or learn of their location from your robot butler Codsworth. The Minutemen are the closest to a group that you can truly run and be in charge of in Fallout 4, with the bulk of them generally willing to go along with nearly any decision that you make.

Along with being the easiest group to get along with, the Minutemen provide a great deal of benefits to the player. Building up a relationship with this faction provides a flare gun to call in backup during combat, and later the ability to build artillery emplacements in your settlements and use them to call in fire support. If you are determined, the vast majority of the map can be in range of at least one artillery emplacement.

The beliefs of the Minutemen are simple – people need to take care of and defend each other for there to be any chance of survival and the return of civilization. A great number of their quests are oriented around building up and gaining more settlements, factors which complement their group benefits.

The Brotherhood of Steel    

Chances are, you’ll first encounter Fallout 4’s Brotherhood of Steel at the Cambridge Police Station, where a stranded scouting party has bunkered down and is in need of the player’s help. If you miss them there, you’ll certainly run into them later on your adventures across the Wasteland.

The Brotherhood believes only they can be trusted to recover and preserve pre-war technology. This technological superiority grants them access to Vertibird helicopters, upgraded power armor, and heavy weapons. Allying with them also gives you access to these resources, including the ability to call in minigun-armed Vertibirds for transportation.

For those who have played previous games, this is not the friendly Brotherhood from Fallout 3. Their distrust of outsiders extends outside of just the limiting of access to technology – they also believe ghouls, super mutants, and synths are abominations, which should be purified from the Wasteland. Despite these views, they don’t tend to go out of their way to defend others from these threats unless it aligns with their interests.



The Railroad

Returning after a brief appearance in a sidequest in Fallout 3, the Railroad is now one of the major factions in the Commonwealth. As a secret organization, you will probably hear about them long before you get to meet them, which usually happens in the course of another major plot quest. Their abilities and equipment rewards generally boost the player’s stealth capabilities.

Another major benefit to the group is their base – upon acceptance into their ranks, it provides one of the best one-stop shops for all the resources you could need, including merchants, a doctor, and every type of workbench. You’ll eventually be able to call in Vertibirds, similar to the Brotherhood, as well as the ability to add resilient ballistic weaves to everyday clothing.

The Railroad believes that synths, as intelligent life, deserve freedom. This is, by and large, the entirety of their political platform. The abolishment of the so-called slavery of synths puts them in direct opposition with the Institute.

The Institute

Viewed as the big bad or ‘boogeyman’ of the Commonwealth, the Institute is the secretive creator of synths that has been built up from the ruins of the Cambridge Institute of Technology (CIT). Their technology is among the most advanced of any group that has been seen in any Fallout game thus far, and access to it is yours if you decide to side with this group. This includes support from synths in firefights and access to certain higher-end weapons and armors.

The Institute has developed underground for generations and has come to believe that all pre-war culture on the surface needs to be exterminated. Their society is strongly technocratic, with a strong focus on the development of various lines of scientific inquiry, including the creation and development of the synths. Their view is that the synths are tools to be used, which puts them at odds with the Railroad. Their emphasis on high technology, and their belief that only the Institute’s scientific minds can be trusted to run the new society, also set them in opposition to the Brotherhood. Most of the missions for this faction will have the player killing feral ghouls, reclaiming lost synths, and dealing with the politics of the Institute.

Choices, Choices

When a faction goes hostile to the player, their benefits are most often lost, except when they can be taken from their corpses. As the game goes on, especially into the second and third acts, it becomes harder to balance the competing interests of these groups until you are, inevitably, forced to side with one of the factions against the others. The game revolves around the Institute, and most major plot points converge on their activities. When the decisions start to revolve around the Institute and their activities, you should know that you’re reaching the end game and your decisions will start to block out certain content.

Tyler Omichinski is a freelance and fiction writer from the northern wastes of Canada. Thoughts and blatant self-promotion at @Tyler_roi.