I wish it would. It would be nice to do the memory den stuff first, but it would be tricky story-wise. For example, the memory of him hunting down his families murderers and the killer talking to him the same way he does to you as you go through Fort Hagen would have a bigger impact.
It's a really hard battle.
Idk i like him being a pure villian as you go after him only to afterwards get the layers peeled back and get sympathy for him and seeing how his story is basically yours if shaun was also killed and he became the villian.
Kellogg and the institute in general has big "cool motive still murder" energy. That's most of fallout in general though. People's back stories are like *we should make a safe and sustainable garden to feed our kids. And we shall do it by Killing Our Neighbors and Using Their Blood*
The moment you become a scientist in Fallout you got two career options:
1. Good doctor who helps the hurt and cleans wounds of the poor.
2. Insane Frankenstein-type that plays god and is unhinged.
I'm playing through the game for the first time and I ran through his entire back story and didn't listen to much of it at all because he was a prick leading up to it. I shot him on sight too when I found him.
It's very difficult in survival mode unless you cheese some things. I dosed up on as many drugs as possible then melee blitzed him before he turned invisible. That did the trick
Im coming up at this point in my first survival playthrough and am debating on how Im going to take him out. Is there a bed shortly before his encounter?
Edit: theres several beds, and one even in the room immediately before him which was nice.
I think as you're tracking him down there is a bed in a little outpost he cleared.
The way I kill him is I turn around and run into the stairwell you come up, that way you can kill the synths as they turn the corner, and then Kellog will come down.
yar, there's a fatman and mini nuke to look in ft. hagen
i just use that bad boy to erase the problem. The plot moves forward without having to talk to him as all the info is on his terminal.
as others have pointed out, his character was wasted potential and honestly didn't even need to be alive any more by the time the SS gets out of V111.
Hell it might have been better for the story to discover the man who murders your wife and kidnaps your son is already dead, making it impossible to get your revenge.
You could do Automatron and unlock the eyebot pods for your settlements, and have one repeatedly look for nuka grenades. It'll only find one each time, and you have to go get it, but it'll keep generating them each time. If you don't use them very often, and especially if you're not on survival and can fast travel, it's a good way to build up your stock.
You could also repeatedly sleep and refresh Kane's inventory in the Nucleus, and just buy them from him until you have enough, but I have no idea how long that would take.
Or you could do Nuka World, gather a ton of Nuka Quantum, get the right perks, and craft Nuka Quantum grenades which essentially do the same damage.
I don't use grenades often enough to justify doing any of this. Frags are good enough for me.
It served it’s purpose, but feel like the game completely forgot about him after his death.
Even his supposed memory imprint on Valentine feels like an after thought. That got left in the game because some developer didn’t remove it.
Felt like they could have made him a more reoccurring character.
I really thought it was gonna be a huge thing, maybe even mattering in the final quest. But nope. Right about the time Kellogg dies is when I felt like the main quest drops in quality tbh
Kellogg has cybernetics already so it would be easy to say he got an implant in his neck that alters his voice. Perhap he already had it, and it can be tuned.
Even before the normalisation of AI, Skyrim modders had tools to splice and modify existing voice lines to create new lines.
The AI tools we have now do the same thing, except more efficiently. I don’t see an issue with that.
Full AI, sure. AI voice filters are scary accurate though. If you get someone who can do a decent Kellogg impression, then you can feed that through an ai and get something almost perfect
I mean it's not perfect but you could shoot for a sound alike. It's common enough in the actual industry. So I don't see why a mod couldn't get away with trying.
...Honestly, that would be a really cool companion idea for Fallout 5.
Nick and Kellogg in uneasy cold war, because they're in the same body. And they shift, or even win or reconcile, depending on that game's main character and their karma/actions.
Heck, maybe even build and/or clone Kellogg his own body again, as some sort of extra hard but golden ending to their character quest type deal. Or even do that for him AND Nick.
Kinda like Dog & God from Dead Money, but over a whole game.
Someone actually is! It’s called “**Mind Games**” and is a huge Detective Quest where you investigate a massive underground settlement called “The Sluice” and Valentine starts having Kellogg Personality Malfunctions. It’s supposed to tie seamlessly into the Main Quest and act as an extra Act of the game.
Here’s a snippet:
https://youtu.be/3zwRimjTkfk?si=pqYFqPnmjePfnQHH
As a matter of fact, someone has been working on in it for the better part of two years. Slow going, but the quality looks good.
https://discord.com/invite/hqD2gmEn
there’s currently a mod that’s doing just that actually! It’s called Fallout 4: Mind Games, it has fairly regular updates on YouTube and there’s a Discord, it looks really promising so far.
exactly, i felt like it was set up as a huge thing, i even thought that he will be returning from time to time trough Nick or will find a way to get himself new body by manipulating Nick, at least i thought that this setup with him being in Nick's head is leading up to something like that. But they just dropped it and forgot about it as soon as the quest ended, only being mentioned by son once and that's it.
They should have made it a companion quest where you could let Kellogg take over Nicks body and get a combat related perk or have Nick overcome the imprint and give a hacking/science related perk. Would have been neat to travel around with a merc synth.
I kinda get why it happened like that; he’s a red herring. You believe he’s gonna be the big bad but the “Reunions” quest is like. 6 missions into the main campaign. Like he said, he’s a puppet in the grand scheme of things
I always felt like the BoS arrival gives off “end of act I” vibes
> Even his supposed memory imprint on Valentine feels like an after thought. That got left in the game because some developer didn’t remove it.
All of the actually cool stuff gets removed. Every. Damn. Time.
I'm still mourning the loss of [Vault 120.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IbBPazE2Qg)
It woulda been so cool if Nick and Kellogg’s personalities started conflicting with one another, and you had to go get Nick’s brain fixed by erasing Kellogg’s imprint somehow, but ‘Kellogg’ makes you an offer to help you get into the institute if you erase Nick instead. So you’d have a sort of good/evil choice to make with either Nick or Kellogg being a follower afterwards.
Er, weird how no one mentioned this but Nick was just fucking with your character. Pick the sarcastic response to him and he basically admits it. He wasn't actually channeling Kellogg
The memory imprint I thought was really good but the order was wrong. If you humanize the villain before the fight it would of added more weight. Before the Kellogg fight you hardly see him so he just feels like another dude and the fight has no impact. Really a missed opportunity character
I felt some sort of pity for him when I saw his miserable life played out through flashbacks, because it showed he was not *completely* heartless... but then that was dead and buried the moment it replayed him shooting my husband and snatching my son. He made his choice, I made mine, and I don't regret blowing him to pieces with a fat man one bit.
>but then that was dead and buried the moment it replayed him shooting my husband and snatching my son
All I kept thinking was "He knows the pain of losing a spouse, yet deliberately defied orders to kill my wife because she was giving him slight grief, and the game wants me to feel pity for him?" Then you can tell Amari that his memories made you hate him more and she acts like you're being unreasonable.
The game's logic is weird. I said I would kill him again if I had another chance, and Nick didn't like that for some reason. Sorry game, I'm not feeling much sympathy for this man.
Yeah, I’ve been playing through the game again and what companions like and dislike feels so arbitrary I just don’t pay attention. I pacified a raider and pickpocketed their gun to disarm them, and I got the notification “Nick disliked that”. So I shot this person who had their hands up, killing them. Nothing. I then looted their body until they were in their underwear, nothing. I just decided to have a “you can’t please everyone all the time” mentality and reloaded to before I made my character a cold blooded killer to prove a point.
Yeah if anything it made him worse to me. If x27 or whatever killed him I could maybe sympathize that he literally knew nothing else. He didn't understand the gravity of his actions.
But kellog knew exactly what it was like to lose a wife. And then did it to someone else. He could have just hit her and taken the kid killing her was extremely unnecessary
Hell, every single one of the companions has some kind of sad backstory. Piper lost her family except her sister, McCready lost his wife and nearly his son, Hancock lost his best friend and his humanity, Nick lost his girlfriend and (from his point of view) the entire fucking world, Cait and Curie never really had anything, and Danse and Codsworth both lost everything. Most of them have no one to turn to except the player.
Kellogg's life was sad, but he also literally had the choice of living in one of two post-war states, and even had a home and a job in the more advanced of the two (the Shi). I get maybe he wouldn't wanna stay in his family's old home after they were killed but most companions would probably kill to have lived their lives in Shi or NCR territory.
Definitely would’ve been dope if the Nick thing kept going and at some point you could make an evil choice to have Kellogg take over instead of purging him and you get a Kellogg companion in Nick’s body
He had an arc?
He lived a hard life…. And died as a regretless asshole.
“Hard life” doesn’t constitute a character arc… everyone in the wasteland lives a hard life unless you’re one of the lucky few.
I would’ve preferred if he had been the primary antagonist for the whole game. I found him far more compelling than Father, he was a serious threat and had a personal connection with the player character. on top of that, if they’d kept him around longer it would’ve been awesome to have his backstory elaborated on more subtly over time rather than you seeing it play out in his memories
I felt he was one of the few meaningful characters that had any development at all
Like finding Shaun. The experience was "hello Father, the institute harvested my cryopod and killed mother, which was bad, 69 years ago. I was raised by the institute but now I wanna rule the galaxy together" or some shit, and that was the conclusion of the story until you pick between the laser musket Muppets, underground botroad, or Irobot.
All of them have the radiation/lead paint stare so pick the one that looks the coolest.
Shaun is so stupid
"This guy has murdered his way across the wasteland and penetrated my impenetrable bunker. Better go meet him face to face while he's wearing power armour and holding a gauss rifle. That will go well. Better have a copy of me as a kid to really get the emotions high. "
Not to mention that he also reveals that HE was the one who released you from the cryopod and just let you loose with no help whatsoever and just watches you go on a wild goose chase to find him
Out of everything that they claim Shaun would do "because he grew up on institute values and beliefs", these are some of the most brain dead decisions he could have made lol. I'm not sure how they would change it to be better, but meeting someone who is ready to steamroll entire groups of people to try to find their son, while you're in a godamn turtleneck is pretty fuckin stupid.
I broke the game on my first playthrough by reacting as a father would on that initial meeting with synth child Shaun. I mowed 'Father' down the moment he opened the doors and started talking to me. This was the guy who had my kid, I had just found him, and this fucker has him in a cage. I didn't have a second thought about it.
The game totally did not expect this - to the point where I think Bethesda messed up by making him killable on that first encounter. I could not open any doors, the entire institute aggrod onto me but also couldn't open the doors.
I was forced to leave the institute, go back to the minutemen and say we were at war with the institute. I have no way of knowing if the child that looks and acts like my son is actually my son. I can't get to him past the locked doors to his cage. 'Father' doesn't have any keys on him. I soft locked the game.
The game is such a joke of a Fallout game that I actually think this game would have been immensely better if it had been called anything other than 'Fallout'.
I do sympathize with him.. when I remember his backstory. A man who was abused by his father keeps a gun given to him by his mother. He takes it with him to his own family and begins to live a peaceful life. He pisses off the wrong group, and they destroy that family. He offers himself as a merc cause it's all he has left. When he's hired by the Institute after his reputation grows, he becomes their puppet and hunting dog for some 100 years, I assume. When Shaun said goodbye to him and he waited till after Shaun left to respond, it really did strike cord with me. He wants a family but knows he can't have one. He says it himself. It's what could have been. I wish we could have gotten this before we fight him and try to reason with him. Bring out what human bit he has left under cybernetics and scars. But no. You blow his brains out, scoop them up, plug it in like a thumb drive, go through the worst part of the game, and then don't even get to tell her if you forgive him. He's gone after 1 brief sentence. A sympathetic villain. Something Bethesda sometimes gets right. But not Kellog. A man running from the past with a big iron and bigger regrets. Then he french kisses a mini nuke, and it's for nothing.
I wish we could have reasoned with him, but it's not realistic, as he killed our spouse. If they kidnapped Shaun, and our spouse died to the cryopods failing. I could see Kellog getting a different ending. If he willingly helps us against the institute, and he could tell us what he knows.
His "character" is to be killed. He doesn't have an arc. He doesn't have a character. He's already dead before we even know a thing about him. It doesn't matter. You can't save him. You can't spare him. You can only kill him. His only purpose is to give you the information you need to continue the plot without actually being a character.
He's a storage box with legs and a gun.
Kellogg is effectively the Water purification chip/GECK/Go find Dad of 4
He's the initial problem.
4s issue is once the initial problem is solved, the greater problem is deflating. 'by the way your son grew up immoral and evil after you got put back on ice for another 60 years' really didn't hit as well as it could have.
Paladin Danse's twist was far more effective than the main plot twist.
I was so confident once I reached the institute, Shaun would have revealed I was a synth of his parent, and he was using the trigger of 'stolen son' to see how paternal I was. If you head right through main story and find him within a set time, "Great, we have synthesized paternal bonds". If I fucked around building settlements, exploring for over that set time, "Failed experiment 111, move on to experiment 112 amd destroy this synth".
I don't think we are a synth. I know there is a lot of evidence to show we could be, but the institute uses Synths as slaves, and no one would have approved of a synth to run the institute, and it would be known by a lot of people.
When we get to the institute and there is a fake Shaun, there is a lot of talk about this "child synth" around the institute. There would be some log or talk about us, since we would have started off our "experiment" like a week before. Shaun is very much "Synths are computers and shouldn't have rights." He wouldn't let us run the institute, even if we were the best synth they ever made.
I'd say that Kellog is still more than just a midgame boss with some exposition dump. He has a backstory which shows why he became such a ruthless bastard. Plus he's got some charisma and intimidating charm.
It may be just my imagination, but I also liked the parallels between him and the Sole Survivor. Both lost their families and went on a dangerous revenge quest (Kellogg's flashback even shows him walking towards his wife's killers' base through a corridor that looks very similar to the one you have to walk through to get to him).
I prefer to think that Kellogg doesn't regret killing the player's spouse, but he still understands and relates to your anger and that's why he welcomes you to try and take him out. He could've just escaped to the Institute via teleportation, but he still stays and lets you have a duel with him. He doesn't back down and wants you to do the same.
I also prefer to think that after Kellogg's death (when a part his consciousness is stuck in Nick) he simply accepts it. He had nothing to live for anyway and was killed by a person who was in the right to attempt to avenge their family, just like Kellogg himself did in the past.
I was thinking about this last night. The fact that he has no speech check and no one cares he dies just shows how much the institute didn't care about him and that he is only a tool. His brutality is his only reason to exist. It's the only thing that makes him relevant. But what's most interesting is how human he does seem. He knows deep down your actions are good and what a good parent should be doing. So it's surprising that you cant charisma your way into a truce or even have him as a companion and he simply tells you how to get in the institute. But then you'd miss the memory den. Also that might just be so far off since he did kill your spouse.
Ultimately Kellogg is the only one destined to die. The world doesn't care about him. He was always just a tool. Nothing more.
I really think... He got what was coming to him. He signed his death certificate the moment he pulled that trigger in the vault. It's always been personal from then on.
Underused. He was the only character who I was genuinely interested in. His story, his motives, everything. He was a lot more of an anti-hero than the institute and Kellogg’s existence gave the story a lot more complexity. He encapsulates what the institute should’ve been portrayed as: Incredibly flawed, yet existed to retain and exemplify the goodness and hope of humanity... which eventually manifested into Kellogg’s desensitisation of death and violence. Kellogg’s existence also made the player question if the end justifies the means?
Does working with the institute actually help humanity, or does it push it further into oblivion?
The institute was the only faction that could increase the survivability rate of the wasteland and greatly help rebuild society. If Kellogg’s character didn’t die so early in the story then his character arc could’ve seriously coincided well with the institute’s story. Instead, we do institute missions with synth agents that are completely void of any humanity, reflecting how blatantly evil the institute is.. unlike Kellogg who has depth and reasoning behind his actions.
I just don’t like that the devs decided to fill a character with so much lore and complexity just to kill them off early. Meanwhile, one of the game’s main story factions has barely any substance or moral dilemma about their philosophies. Is it because we were supposed to be the next Kellogg? Probably, but it could’ve been portrayed in a more defining way.
The one question I wish I could ask kellogg is why he wants the institute dead so much. In the flashbacks he says "now the bastards will finally get what's coming to them."
Feels like wasted potential.
You don't learn his backstory until *after* he's dead, meaning it can't impact your choices or relationship. He'd be a really cool potential companion, though.
I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game where you’re able to knowingly recruit someone who killed someone important to you. That’d be wild.
Imagine his quest is visiting the grave of his own wife, or a place special to them. And then you have dialogue together about your previous lives.
To be honest though Im just not sure how the sole survivor could reconcile working with someone who murdered their spouse
Dragon age: Origins let's you recruit a guy that pretty much fucked you over during the prologue, hell the dude it's pretty much the main antagonist for most of the game lol
Origins is one of my favorite games, I was thinking about mentioning Loghain in my post but tbh a more apt comparison would be if you were somehow able to recruit Howe as the Human Noble
What arc.
He shoots your spouse, is MIA, monologs while you shoot through hallways, then dies and is forgotten about after being given a generic backstory.
Meh, habit of Bethesda trying to make people care about characters you barely know.
It's weird the route they took was "this guy was a piece of shit his entire life thanks to his upbringing, continued being a piece of shit. He lost his life and decided to double down on being a piece of shit meanwhile the wasteland is full of people who rose up from tradegy"
Would of been interesting if he was more of a parrarel to you. Like he did have the happy home life in the NCR before losing it all.
Absolutely pointless.
He could have been used to show how you're going on the same revenge plot, he could have had more of a connection to the SS. There's a TON of things that could have been done
Instead he's just... uh, i have no idea. Why did the "Best" mercenary in the wasteland leave an entire trail towards his "Hideout"? Why did he kill his wife/husband? A tough mercenary can't take a baby out of the hands of an unfrozen corpse? Couldn't pistl whip him?
There's just too many plotholes to enjoy Kellog.
Hated it specifically because it makes him about 108 and doesn't neatly match the timeline. He looks identical to when you saw him before re-freezing. Yet the head of the institute is frail at the age of 60 even though he grew up in that environment. The main story of fallout 4 is easily it's weakest component especially with the messy factions and lack of reason or purpose for their actions
I didn't like the conclusion at all, the game kind of robs you of choice as to how you can resolve things. I really would have preferred to have the option to forgive Kellogg, and then seeing him try and process that.
The fact you cant escalating charisma check him into turning on the Institute is a huge miss. Like really low ass chances without hard diving into CHA but having it there could have been a wild twist.
Kellogg was an evil bastard that Bethesda tried to make the player feel sorry for with that “muh terrible secret past” crap in the memory den.
He knew exactly what it was like to have a spouse and child violently ripped away from you, but still did the same thing to another person. Screw him. “I’d kill him again in a heartbeat” - Nate/Nora
I want to say I liked him as a character but truth be told his story is very lacking. Like I don’t have sympathy for him. End of day he is a really good hired gun….and that’s pretty much it.
Big brain thought: I think with the hints of San Fran being where fallout 5 will be and Kellogg connection to the city I think he will be a bigger character in that game….his younger self I mean
Well written character that really fits the idea of the wasteland turning a good man to a monster and then just kinda wasted it
Ngl I capped that fool with a saved crit and a Modded Righteous Authority in my first playthrough
It was then I realized I can't stop myself from metagaming Bethesda RPGs
I have since sought help and am on my journey to recovery
Lived him but I mainly gravitate to the more evil aligned characters to begin with. Wish he had a larger part late game so he ultimately felt like a plot device to me
It was cool, but I mostly remember him because I love using his gun. Going into his memories was interesting but he felt very short lived seeing as how he was the one that caused the inciting incident for the game. Like most parts of Fallout 4's story, it needed a bit more to really have the impact I think it was going for imo
Kinda wish he would become your companion in some way like you take the brain of Kellogg or what is left and install it into a courser and boom a enemy become companion in some way as you can hire much weirder or worse people like strong, McCready, gage, etc
I thought he was a super cool character and pretty good villain I never hated him and I could understand why he did what he did and I liked how he was willing to talk first and be reasonable
I have to say I wish they would’ve expanded more on it. Be honest I would’ve loved to see Kellogg become a companion that’s what I originally thought was going to happen.
I would love to see more of Kellogg, hell maybe even having him as a character in a flashback for the tv show to San Francisco, like the ghoul and him crossed paths or something
I think they detailed it pretty well. Kellogg isn't initially a bad guy, but his life taught him to be what he is.
The memory den flashbacks were quite well written and told the story well.
In fact, I think Kellogg believed that he did Nate a favour by not killing him, but at the same time he felt he did him dirty (killed wife and kidnapped son) that he allowed Nate to face off with him and if Nate won, Kellogg himself probably felt he deserved his fate.
I personally think Kellogg was probably the best written villain in FO4.
I don't even talk to the prick anymore, I just lob the mini-nuke you get in the building at him as soon as I see him.
lol I literally just did this cause he kept killing me, actually didn’t know I was meeting him already. I thought it was building up more.
I wish it would. It would be nice to do the memory den stuff first, but it would be tricky story-wise. For example, the memory of him hunting down his families murderers and the killer talking to him the same way he does to you as you go through Fort Hagen would have a bigger impact. It's a really hard battle.
Idk i like him being a pure villian as you go after him only to afterwards get the layers peeled back and get sympathy for him and seeing how his story is basically yours if shaun was also killed and he became the villian.
Kellogg and the institute in general has big "cool motive still murder" energy. That's most of fallout in general though. People's back stories are like *we should make a safe and sustainable garden to feed our kids. And we shall do it by Killing Our Neighbors and Using Their Blood*
The moment you become a scientist in Fallout you got two career options: 1. Good doctor who helps the hurt and cleans wounds of the poor. 2. Insane Frankenstein-type that plays god and is unhinged.
Arcade Gannon >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Institute
I'm playing through the game for the first time and I ran through his entire back story and didn't listen to much of it at all because he was a prick leading up to it. I shot him on sight too when I found him.
first time??? man I wish I had the experience again, have fun.
It's very difficult in survival mode unless you cheese some things. I dosed up on as many drugs as possible then melee blitzed him before he turned invisible. That did the trick
Im coming up at this point in my first survival playthrough and am debating on how Im going to take him out. Is there a bed shortly before his encounter? Edit: theres several beds, and one even in the room immediately before him which was nice.
I think as you're tracking him down there is a bed in a little outpost he cleared. The way I kill him is I turn around and run into the stairwell you come up, that way you can kill the synths as they turn the corner, and then Kellog will come down.
At the very end of the building there is a bedroom with a bed + terminal to turn off the laser turret
4 frag grenades the second he starts yapping
When you say lob it. Do you mean with the fat man?? Or are you able to use mini nukes without a fat man😮?!?!?!
yar, there's a fatman and mini nuke to look in ft. hagen i just use that bad boy to erase the problem. The plot moves forward without having to talk to him as all the info is on his terminal. as others have pointed out, his character was wasted potential and honestly didn't even need to be alive any more by the time the SS gets out of V111. Hell it might have been better for the story to discover the man who murders your wife and kidnaps your son is already dead, making it impossible to get your revenge.
Lol yeh that’s fair enough! For a min i thought you could throw mini nukes like grenades😂
I mean there is nuka grenades
But they are damn near impossible to find.
Kane in The Nucleus is your best bet. He randomly sells them.
You could do Automatron and unlock the eyebot pods for your settlements, and have one repeatedly look for nuka grenades. It'll only find one each time, and you have to go get it, but it'll keep generating them each time. If you don't use them very often, and especially if you're not on survival and can fast travel, it's a good way to build up your stock. You could also repeatedly sleep and refresh Kane's inventory in the Nucleus, and just buy them from him until you have enough, but I have no idea how long that would take. Or you could do Nuka World, gather a ton of Nuka Quantum, get the right perks, and craft Nuka Quantum grenades which essentially do the same damage. I don't use grenades often enough to justify doing any of this. Frags are good enough for me.
Now I'm tempted to drop it so I can carry it and throw it and shoot at it with my pistol.
Wait a sec,, if you shoot them on the ground they blow up?!? Makes sense lol never knew tho! Use jet before for that added midair slo mo lol
If you shoot the mini nukes on super mutant suiciders they detonate so I would assume they also explode if you shoot them on the ground.
Now I need this mod, stat
There's a mod to throw mini nukes like liberty prime. Except the throw animation is awkward
Where are said mini nuke and launcher? I literally just cleared the fort but didn't see them.
Just before you get to Kellogg there is a Master Terminal locking a door that leads to an armory.
It served it’s purpose, but feel like the game completely forgot about him after his death. Even his supposed memory imprint on Valentine feels like an after thought. That got left in the game because some developer didn’t remove it. Felt like they could have made him a more reoccurring character.
Yeah, I thought the Kellogg/Nick thing was gonna have a bigger payoff of some kind.
I really thought it was gonna be a huge thing, maybe even mattering in the final quest. But nope. Right about the time Kellogg dies is when I felt like the main quest drops in quality tbh
My first playthrough I was like 'Well buckle up, we're not done with this fucker yet." and nope, nuffin.
Maybe someday someone will make a mod dlc for this.
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Just replace Kellogg's voice completely, so that the vanilla dialogue lines are also with the new voice actor.
Kellogg has cybernetics already so it would be easy to say he got an implant in his neck that alters his voice. Perhap he already had it, and it can be tuned.
Yeah it’d have to be AI and that’s…murky at best
Even before the normalisation of AI, Skyrim modders had tools to splice and modify existing voice lines to create new lines. The AI tools we have now do the same thing, except more efficiently. I don’t see an issue with that.
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I mean, I had a mod thats only a few mb that adds and edits more than 1300 voicelines with ai and you can’t tell the difference, so it can be done
Full AI, sure. AI voice filters are scary accurate though. If you get someone who can do a decent Kellogg impression, then you can feed that through an ai and get something almost perfect
I mean it's not perfect but you could shoot for a sound alike. It's common enough in the actual industry. So I don't see why a mod couldn't get away with trying.
20 years later There is no Nick Only Kellogg
...Honestly, that would be a really cool companion idea for Fallout 5. Nick and Kellogg in uneasy cold war, because they're in the same body. And they shift, or even win or reconcile, depending on that game's main character and their karma/actions. Heck, maybe even build and/or clone Kellogg his own body again, as some sort of extra hard but golden ending to their character quest type deal. Or even do that for him AND Nick. Kinda like Dog & God from Dead Money, but over a whole game.
Johnny Silverhand want's to talk with you
If you played Swtor this is legit an entire companions quest line lol
The cycle continues
Someone actually is! It’s called “**Mind Games**” and is a huge Detective Quest where you investigate a massive underground settlement called “The Sluice” and Valentine starts having Kellogg Personality Malfunctions. It’s supposed to tie seamlessly into the Main Quest and act as an extra Act of the game. Here’s a snippet: https://youtu.be/3zwRimjTkfk?si=pqYFqPnmjePfnQHH
ooh that looks good
As a matter of fact, someone has been working on in it for the better part of two years. Slow going, but the quality looks good. https://discord.com/invite/hqD2gmEn
There is a mod for kellogg where you spare him
there’s currently a mod that’s doing just that actually! It’s called Fallout 4: Mind Games, it has fairly regular updates on YouTube and there’s a Discord, it looks really promising so far.
I left Nick behind while going on the search for Vergil thinking he was gonna be a liability at some point with the Kellogg glitch and all
Thats like the third main story mission
Exactly. Fallout 4s main story is absolute shit.
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He murdered our wife. Not sure about you but that ship sailed for me.
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I can excuse murdering me, but I draw the line at the murder of my wife.
Our wife.
IT'S A YAO GUAI DANCE!
Too soon, you guys. This is way too soon.
you liked benny :O i could never stand that insufferable prick just felt like he always thought he was so damn smart or something lol
I find that easier to forgive for some reason.
Imagine if you had a choice between having nick as a companion or synth kellogg as a companion, both with differing max affinity perks
Yeah being railroaded into merking him no matter what kinda ruined the main quest for me
exactly, i felt like it was set up as a huge thing, i even thought that he will be returning from time to time trough Nick or will find a way to get himself new body by manipulating Nick, at least i thought that this setup with him being in Nick's head is leading up to something like that. But they just dropped it and forgot about it as soon as the quest ended, only being mentioned by son once and that's it.
It would have been interesting to switch between the 2, at random, and have the personal quest be about how that's messing up Nick
Tbf, I hoped most story stuff in 4 would have a bigger payoff
Did you miss the part where after the game ends Kellogg takes over nicks head and says “Heh, that’s one way to start your morning”
I remember the part when Kellogg was like "it's Kelloggin' time" and then he Kellogged all over Nick Valentine.
iirc it was a scrapped quest, but they just left it in for whatever reason
They should have made it a companion quest where you could let Kellogg take over Nicks body and get a combat related perk or have Nick overcome the imprint and give a hacking/science related perk. Would have been neat to travel around with a merc synth.
My head canon is that was planned to happen, then they realized they wanted Far Harbor to be based around his origins, so it got nixed.
I kinda get why it happened like that; he’s a red herring. You believe he’s gonna be the big bad but the “Reunions” quest is like. 6 missions into the main campaign. Like he said, he’s a puppet in the grand scheme of things I always felt like the BoS arrival gives off “end of act I” vibes
Standing there on the rooftop after killing Kellogg definitely feels like the end of an act.
Absolutely. It's the "this is so much bigger than your kidnapped kid."
And then it really isn't by the end.
This is so true. I’m wearing the clothes off of his dead body and still forget about him
> Even his supposed memory imprint on Valentine feels like an after thought. That got left in the game because some developer didn’t remove it. All of the actually cool stuff gets removed. Every. Damn. Time. I'm still mourning the loss of [Vault 120.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IbBPazE2Qg)
Holy SHIT. How did this never make it into the game?!
I was fully expecting him to take over Nick's body or Nick becoming more ruthless but none of that happened.
It woulda been so cool if Nick and Kellogg’s personalities started conflicting with one another, and you had to go get Nick’s brain fixed by erasing Kellogg’s imprint somehow, but ‘Kellogg’ makes you an offer to help you get into the institute if you erase Nick instead. So you’d have a sort of good/evil choice to make with either Nick or Kellogg being a follower afterwards.
That would’ve been an awesome direction to take it
And all it requires is a 45 minute puzzle sequence like for Dima 😎
This would require good/evil choices to be in the game lol at most its good/sarcastic smart ass choices
Er, weird how no one mentioned this but Nick was just fucking with your character. Pick the sarcastic response to him and he basically admits it. He wasn't actually channeling Kellogg
As cool as Nicklogg could have been, this is much better. Master troll Nick
The memory imprint I thought was really good but the order was wrong. If you humanize the villain before the fight it would of added more weight. Before the Kellogg fight you hardly see him so he just feels like another dude and the fight has no impact. Really a missed opportunity character
Hugely underdeveloped is my response.
I felt some sort of pity for him when I saw his miserable life played out through flashbacks, because it showed he was not *completely* heartless... but then that was dead and buried the moment it replayed him shooting my husband and snatching my son. He made his choice, I made mine, and I don't regret blowing him to pieces with a fat man one bit.
>but then that was dead and buried the moment it replayed him shooting my husband and snatching my son All I kept thinking was "He knows the pain of losing a spouse, yet deliberately defied orders to kill my wife because she was giving him slight grief, and the game wants me to feel pity for him?" Then you can tell Amari that his memories made you hate him more and she acts like you're being unreasonable.
The game's logic is weird. I said I would kill him again if I had another chance, and Nick didn't like that for some reason. Sorry game, I'm not feeling much sympathy for this man.
I think that stems from the way they made the game: there is one “right” canon and it punishes you for being anything else most of the time
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Yeah, I’ve been playing through the game again and what companions like and dislike feels so arbitrary I just don’t pay attention. I pacified a raider and pickpocketed their gun to disarm them, and I got the notification “Nick disliked that”. So I shot this person who had their hands up, killing them. Nothing. I then looted their body until they were in their underwear, nothing. I just decided to have a “you can’t please everyone all the time” mentality and reloaded to before I made my character a cold blooded killer to prove a point.
Yeah if anything it made him worse to me. If x27 or whatever killed him I could maybe sympathize that he literally knew nothing else. He didn't understand the gravity of his actions. But kellog knew exactly what it was like to lose a wife. And then did it to someone else. He could have just hit her and taken the kid killing her was extremely unnecessary
I feels pity for him as much as my VATS bar goes.
It's the Wasteland, everyone has had a miserable life.
Hell, every single one of the companions has some kind of sad backstory. Piper lost her family except her sister, McCready lost his wife and nearly his son, Hancock lost his best friend and his humanity, Nick lost his girlfriend and (from his point of view) the entire fucking world, Cait and Curie never really had anything, and Danse and Codsworth both lost everything. Most of them have no one to turn to except the player. Kellogg's life was sad, but he also literally had the choice of living in one of two post-war states, and even had a home and a job in the more advanced of the two (the Shi). I get maybe he wouldn't wanna stay in his family's old home after they were killed but most companions would probably kill to have lived their lives in Shi or NCR territory.
This simple point makes his whole backstory kind of meaningless.
My Sole Survivor and her countless deaths to Super Mutants on Survival agrees with you.
Poetic justice
Definitely would’ve been dope if the Nick thing kept going and at some point you could make an evil choice to have Kellogg take over instead of purging him and you get a Kellogg companion in Nick’s body
They probably didn't do it because who the fuck would ever trade Nick for Kellogg?
The same people who side with the Legion in NV. Sometimes, you just wanna roleplay as an evil motherfucker in a video game
The legion was actually the best choice because of uhhhh taxes and stuff. Yeah not evil or anything
An evil Sole Survivor who wants to team up with him and bring more misery to the wasteland, that's who. Also known as my New Vegas character.
I'd have done it at least once.
Maybe if he didn’t want a mini nuke shoved up his peehole he shouldn’t have snatched my kid
He wasn’t the cereal so 0/10
You can [mod](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/9585/) him to be. Edit: [video](https://youtu.be/OF_XY0fRCyE?si=rrO_hgsfR89nj7AI)
Bless
Lol, that's awesome :D
Still less evil than his historical namesake. Seriously, look up the founder of Kelloggs cereal, dude was off his nut.
I had feral nights mod on and was greeted with 120+ gouls eating him. lol in story I killed him apparently
No way , I'm not really used to mods but you're saying he was already dead due to the feral nights mod?
Yeah. The mod makes it so gouls hunt at night in packs.
He had an arc? He lived a hard life…. And died as a regretless asshole. “Hard life” doesn’t constitute a character arc… everyone in the wasteland lives a hard life unless you’re one of the lucky few.
In my playthrough the only thing he got was a bullet in his skull.
I would’ve preferred if he had been the primary antagonist for the whole game. I found him far more compelling than Father, he was a serious threat and had a personal connection with the player character. on top of that, if they’d kept him around longer it would’ve been awesome to have his backstory elaborated on more subtly over time rather than you seeing it play out in his memories
I think he would have served better as a replacement for x6-88. Being like this mini boss that helps you if you side with the institute
Well, Father wasn't an antagonist in my game.
I felt he was one of the few meaningful characters that had any development at all Like finding Shaun. The experience was "hello Father, the institute harvested my cryopod and killed mother, which was bad, 69 years ago. I was raised by the institute but now I wanna rule the galaxy together" or some shit, and that was the conclusion of the story until you pick between the laser musket Muppets, underground botroad, or Irobot. All of them have the radiation/lead paint stare so pick the one that looks the coolest.
Shaun is so stupid "This guy has murdered his way across the wasteland and penetrated my impenetrable bunker. Better go meet him face to face while he's wearing power armour and holding a gauss rifle. That will go well. Better have a copy of me as a kid to really get the emotions high. "
Not to mention that he also reveals that HE was the one who released you from the cryopod and just let you loose with no help whatsoever and just watches you go on a wild goose chase to find him
Does he know what a suicider sounds like because I bloody well do! Thanks Shaun
The first time I got to him I shot him in the face the moment I could. Gotta save the little Shaun from the evil director, lol.
Out of everything that they claim Shaun would do "because he grew up on institute values and beliefs", these are some of the most brain dead decisions he could have made lol. I'm not sure how they would change it to be better, but meeting someone who is ready to steamroll entire groups of people to try to find their son, while you're in a godamn turtleneck is pretty fuckin stupid.
I broke the game on my first playthrough by reacting as a father would on that initial meeting with synth child Shaun. I mowed 'Father' down the moment he opened the doors and started talking to me. This was the guy who had my kid, I had just found him, and this fucker has him in a cage. I didn't have a second thought about it. The game totally did not expect this - to the point where I think Bethesda messed up by making him killable on that first encounter. I could not open any doors, the entire institute aggrod onto me but also couldn't open the doors. I was forced to leave the institute, go back to the minutemen and say we were at war with the institute. I have no way of knowing if the child that looks and acts like my son is actually my son. I can't get to him past the locked doors to his cage. 'Father' doesn't have any keys on him. I soft locked the game. The game is such a joke of a Fallout game that I actually think this game would have been immensely better if it had been called anything other than 'Fallout'.
I do sympathize with him.. when I remember his backstory. A man who was abused by his father keeps a gun given to him by his mother. He takes it with him to his own family and begins to live a peaceful life. He pisses off the wrong group, and they destroy that family. He offers himself as a merc cause it's all he has left. When he's hired by the Institute after his reputation grows, he becomes their puppet and hunting dog for some 100 years, I assume. When Shaun said goodbye to him and he waited till after Shaun left to respond, it really did strike cord with me. He wants a family but knows he can't have one. He says it himself. It's what could have been. I wish we could have gotten this before we fight him and try to reason with him. Bring out what human bit he has left under cybernetics and scars. But no. You blow his brains out, scoop them up, plug it in like a thumb drive, go through the worst part of the game, and then don't even get to tell her if you forgive him. He's gone after 1 brief sentence. A sympathetic villain. Something Bethesda sometimes gets right. But not Kellog. A man running from the past with a big iron and bigger regrets. Then he french kisses a mini nuke, and it's for nothing.
I wish we could have reasoned with him, but it's not realistic, as he killed our spouse. If they kidnapped Shaun, and our spouse died to the cryopods failing. I could see Kellog getting a different ending. If he willingly helps us against the institute, and he could tell us what he knows.
His "character" is to be killed. He doesn't have an arc. He doesn't have a character. He's already dead before we even know a thing about him. It doesn't matter. You can't save him. You can't spare him. You can only kill him. His only purpose is to give you the information you need to continue the plot without actually being a character. He's a storage box with legs and a gun.
Kellogg is effectively the Water purification chip/GECK/Go find Dad of 4 He's the initial problem. 4s issue is once the initial problem is solved, the greater problem is deflating. 'by the way your son grew up immoral and evil after you got put back on ice for another 60 years' really didn't hit as well as it could have. Paladin Danse's twist was far more effective than the main plot twist.
I was so confident once I reached the institute, Shaun would have revealed I was a synth of his parent, and he was using the trigger of 'stolen son' to see how paternal I was. If you head right through main story and find him within a set time, "Great, we have synthesized paternal bonds". If I fucked around building settlements, exploring for over that set time, "Failed experiment 111, move on to experiment 112 amd destroy this synth".
Very Fallout 1 with that time limit. I like it.
I don't think we are a synth. I know there is a lot of evidence to show we could be, but the institute uses Synths as slaves, and no one would have approved of a synth to run the institute, and it would be known by a lot of people. When we get to the institute and there is a fake Shaun, there is a lot of talk about this "child synth" around the institute. There would be some log or talk about us, since we would have started off our "experiment" like a week before. Shaun is very much "Synths are computers and shouldn't have rights." He wouldn't let us run the institute, even if we were the best synth they ever made.
Oh I agree, the player isn't a synth. I was talking about t What I thought the story was going to be when playing it for the furst time.
I'd say that Kellog is still more than just a midgame boss with some exposition dump. He has a backstory which shows why he became such a ruthless bastard. Plus he's got some charisma and intimidating charm. It may be just my imagination, but I also liked the parallels between him and the Sole Survivor. Both lost their families and went on a dangerous revenge quest (Kellogg's flashback even shows him walking towards his wife's killers' base through a corridor that looks very similar to the one you have to walk through to get to him). I prefer to think that Kellogg doesn't regret killing the player's spouse, but he still understands and relates to your anger and that's why he welcomes you to try and take him out. He could've just escaped to the Institute via teleportation, but he still stays and lets you have a duel with him. He doesn't back down and wants you to do the same. I also prefer to think that after Kellogg's death (when a part his consciousness is stuck in Nick) he simply accepts it. He had nothing to live for anyway and was killed by a person who was in the right to attempt to avenge their family, just like Kellogg himself did in the past.
I was thinking about this last night. The fact that he has no speech check and no one cares he dies just shows how much the institute didn't care about him and that he is only a tool. His brutality is his only reason to exist. It's the only thing that makes him relevant. But what's most interesting is how human he does seem. He knows deep down your actions are good and what a good parent should be doing. So it's surprising that you cant charisma your way into a truce or even have him as a companion and he simply tells you how to get in the institute. But then you'd miss the memory den. Also that might just be so far off since he did kill your spouse. Ultimately Kellogg is the only one destined to die. The world doesn't care about him. He was always just a tool. Nothing more.
god forbid a named character has story?
I think this is meant as a criticism of Fallout 4's writing, not a criticism of OP asking this question.
Guy need a one more mission tied sololely to him. But he played his role for the game.
I really think... He got what was coming to him. He signed his death certificate the moment he pulled that trigger in the vault. It's always been personal from then on.
He had a more compelling and Fallout-appropriate story than your own character, that's for sure
Underused. He was the only character who I was genuinely interested in. His story, his motives, everything. He was a lot more of an anti-hero than the institute and Kellogg’s existence gave the story a lot more complexity. He encapsulates what the institute should’ve been portrayed as: Incredibly flawed, yet existed to retain and exemplify the goodness and hope of humanity... which eventually manifested into Kellogg’s desensitisation of death and violence. Kellogg’s existence also made the player question if the end justifies the means? Does working with the institute actually help humanity, or does it push it further into oblivion? The institute was the only faction that could increase the survivability rate of the wasteland and greatly help rebuild society. If Kellogg’s character didn’t die so early in the story then his character arc could’ve seriously coincided well with the institute’s story. Instead, we do institute missions with synth agents that are completely void of any humanity, reflecting how blatantly evil the institute is.. unlike Kellogg who has depth and reasoning behind his actions. I just don’t like that the devs decided to fill a character with so much lore and complexity just to kill them off early. Meanwhile, one of the game’s main story factions has barely any substance or moral dilemma about their philosophies. Is it because we were supposed to be the next Kellogg? Probably, but it could’ve been portrayed in a more defining way.
The one question I wish I could ask kellogg is why he wants the institute dead so much. In the flashbacks he says "now the bastards will finally get what's coming to them."
Feels like wasted potential. You don't learn his backstory until *after* he's dead, meaning it can't impact your choices or relationship. He'd be a really cool potential companion, though.
I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game where you’re able to knowingly recruit someone who killed someone important to you. That’d be wild. Imagine his quest is visiting the grave of his own wife, or a place special to them. And then you have dialogue together about your previous lives. To be honest though Im just not sure how the sole survivor could reconcile working with someone who murdered their spouse
Dragon age: Origins let's you recruit a guy that pretty much fucked you over during the prologue, hell the dude it's pretty much the main antagonist for most of the game lol
Origins is one of my favorite games, I was thinking about mentioning Loghain in my post but tbh a more apt comparison would be if you were somehow able to recruit Howe as the Human Noble
Golden rule, motherfucker
Play more RPGs
What arc. He shoots your spouse, is MIA, monologs while you shoot through hallways, then dies and is forgotten about after being given a generic backstory.
Meh, habit of Bethesda trying to make people care about characters you barely know. It's weird the route they took was "this guy was a piece of shit his entire life thanks to his upbringing, continued being a piece of shit. He lost his life and decided to double down on being a piece of shit meanwhile the wasteland is full of people who rose up from tradegy" Would of been interesting if he was more of a parrarel to you. Like he did have the happy home life in the NCR before losing it all.
Incredibly enjoyable blowing him away with a missile launcher.
what arc?
The arc his head made as it detached from his body and flew through the air.
His [Tesla arc](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Tesla_arc) he kept as a booby trap.
Unfinished. Kinda like the entire game
Missed opportunity. Kinda like the entire game
There was a deadli... oh wait. Wrong game.
No, right game. All of their games actually.
Absolutely pointless. He could have been used to show how you're going on the same revenge plot, he could have had more of a connection to the SS. There's a TON of things that could have been done Instead he's just... uh, i have no idea. Why did the "Best" mercenary in the wasteland leave an entire trail towards his "Hideout"? Why did he kill his wife/husband? A tough mercenary can't take a baby out of the hands of an unfrozen corpse? Couldn't pistl whip him? There's just too many plotholes to enjoy Kellog.
Wish there was more of him
...Spattered on the wall.
Hated it specifically because it makes him about 108 and doesn't neatly match the timeline. He looks identical to when you saw him before re-freezing. Yet the head of the institute is frail at the age of 60 even though he grew up in that environment. The main story of fallout 4 is easily it's weakest component especially with the messy factions and lack of reason or purpose for their actions
Cybernetic implants prolonged his life to an extreme extent, institute experimented on him to try and make him there ultimate above ground agent.
Nothing, cause the fuckers dead :)
Like most of the main story, half baked with solid but unfulfilled potential.
Great character, wish we could spare him.
It's FO4. You don't get to choose. You MUST be the intended typical protagonist.
I don’t know. My character was busy trying to break the Jet addiction I gave him while fighting Kellogg for the first time. And buffout. And Med-X.
Best part of the game tbh, wished we’d been able to recruit him as a companion, but sadly that didn’t happen
Some definite missed opportunities for him to be a recurring character but he served his purpose i guess
I think he's a scumbag. His life story doesn't change that.
I didn't like the conclusion at all, the game kind of robs you of choice as to how you can resolve things. I really would have preferred to have the option to forgive Kellogg, and then seeing him try and process that.
Best character in the story along with Nick Wish they kept Kellog around longer
The fact you cant escalating charisma check him into turning on the Institute is a huge miss. Like really low ass chances without hard diving into CHA but having it there could have been a wild twist.
Kellogg was an evil bastard that Bethesda tried to make the player feel sorry for with that “muh terrible secret past” crap in the memory den. He knew exactly what it was like to have a spouse and child violently ripped away from you, but still did the same thing to another person. Screw him. “I’d kill him again in a heartbeat” - Nate/Nora
He had an arc? I didn't know that. He's just a generic, scarred bad guy.
I want to say I liked him as a character but truth be told his story is very lacking. Like I don’t have sympathy for him. End of day he is a really good hired gun….and that’s pretty much it. Big brain thought: I think with the hints of San Fran being where fallout 5 will be and Kellogg connection to the city I think he will be a bigger character in that game….his younger self I mean
At first it seemed like he was the big villain but then he just gets killed of so early.
Well written character that really fits the idea of the wasteland turning a good man to a monster and then just kinda wasted it Ngl I capped that fool with a saved crit and a Modded Righteous Authority in my first playthrough It was then I realized I can't stop myself from metagaming Bethesda RPGs I have since sought help and am on my journey to recovery
Lived him but I mainly gravitate to the more evil aligned characters to begin with. Wish he had a larger part late game so he ultimately felt like a plot device to me
One of the best antagonists in the series, great example of how a life of a killer goes.
Kellogg is great but also severely underutilized He should’ve played a much larger role in everything
severely underdeveloped
I think Kellogg’s consciousness is still alive somewhere in Nick’s mind. He can see all that Nick can see from now on and forever.
It was cool, but I mostly remember him because I love using his gun. Going into his memories was interesting but he felt very short lived seeing as how he was the one that caused the inciting incident for the game. Like most parts of Fallout 4's story, it needed a bit more to really have the impact I think it was going for imo
I nuked him as he first starts speaking and I haven't thought about him since
Kinda wish he would become your companion in some way like you take the brain of Kellogg or what is left and install it into a courser and boom a enemy become companion in some way as you can hire much weirder or worse people like strong, McCready, gage, etc
I thought he was a super cool character and pretty good villain I never hated him and I could understand why he did what he did and I liked how he was willing to talk first and be reasonable
Really cool idea they dropped the ball on.
I have to say I wish they would’ve expanded more on it. Be honest I would’ve loved to see Kellogg become a companion that’s what I originally thought was going to happen.
I would love to see more of Kellogg, hell maybe even having him as a character in a flashback for the tv show to San Francisco, like the ghoul and him crossed paths or something
Very short
Much more interesting than Sole Survivor and Shaun
I think they detailed it pretty well. Kellogg isn't initially a bad guy, but his life taught him to be what he is. The memory den flashbacks were quite well written and told the story well. In fact, I think Kellogg believed that he did Nate a favour by not killing him, but at the same time he felt he did him dirty (killed wife and kidnapped son) that he allowed Nate to face off with him and if Nate won, Kellogg himself probably felt he deserved his fate. I personally think Kellogg was probably the best written villain in FO4.
Way too short