[DLC Idea] Institute Expansion

When I first thought of the Institute as an in-game faction, I thought I'd be exploring a massive recreation of the MIT Campus with somewhere close to 50 unique NPC's and an even larger array of unnamed characters. Considering there are only 4 established cities in F4 that are SMALLER than the ones in Skyrim, my disappointment ruined a good bit of the experience.

What if, at the very least, Bethesda could rectify this oversight by making the Institute achieve it's mythical status as a secretive hub of research and groundbreaking innovation? Bear with me for a moment.

By the time you reach the Institute, you'd expect a rather large complex of labs and living quarters for an organization capable of projecting power by mass-producing androids with their own home-developed line of armor and weaponry. Instead you get a few measly rooms, some roaming synths/researchers and a few labs that could barely produce results stimulating enough to win 1st place at a high school science fair.

With a DLC focused on the Institute, the player could get the chance to have some in-game power over the direction the Institute takes. The whole facility was built by desperate students and professors in the aftermath of the Great War, digging large tunnels that eventually became the gleaming bastion of technological wonder it is now.

What if there were a series of missions that expanded on the role of each department in the Institute? If you work with the SRB, you should be able to expand their workspace and introduce new active Coursers along with repeatable missions to hunt synths down ala Blade Runner.

If you decide that one day you should check up on Advanced Systems, maybe you can get new Institute designed weapons and tools for your excursions into the wasteland. The expanded labs would house new recruits from the wasteland that have the intellectual aptitude to work at the Institute. As the facility gets bigger, it begins to feel more alive and active.

Ideally by the end of the "expansion" questline, the Institute should have enough space to house 100 NPC's with four-six different radiant quests that revolve around the different branches of the Institute (SRB, Advanced Systems, Robotics, Maintenance, Biosciences). Maybe you could even re-purpose the FEV labs and convert them into extra space for botanical/hydroponic research.

There is so much that can be done with that facility when you have no exterior space considerations to worry about.

But what I'm really trying to get at is the ability for the Institute to become not only a viable home for the player, but a viable faction as well. The vanilla Institute feels more like a research outpost/office than it does a hub of innovation. With scarcely more than 25 humans residing there, I'm surprised the Institute hasn't tackled their demographic crisis. Diamond City has the wasteland to worry about, so a low population is understandable. Vault 81 started with a small and insular population, so growth was bound to decline as the gene pool shortened.

The Institute actively kidnaps/recruits people into their organization, so it would seem odd that they don't have enough people to staff a gas station (as even with synths, you would want a viable population to continue your research and establish a sense of community).

So really, I hope that someone at Bethesda reads this and gets their creative juices flowing on a DLC that gives the Institute the treatment it deserved in vanilla Fallout 4.

MAKE THE INSTITUTE GREAT AGAIN!