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I think you can argue for most of the factions being some mirror of what we might want or might fear in a post-apocalyptic world. The NCR and the Enclave are straight-up "put things back the way they were" although in starkly different ways, the NCR being old institutions under a new name and the Enclave an appeal to some sort of nominal continuity (the legal U.S. government before the bombs.) The Great Khans and the Boomers are falling back to closer group ties, a sort of reversion to older concepts of society. The Fiends are lawless hedonism. The Brotherhood of Steel and the Followers are both takes on the "never let this happen a second time" though again in very different directions, with the Brotherhood bigger on self-restraint and the Followers on repentance. The Legion is harder to parse in this context but it's basically taking the idea of an apocalypse being punishment for the past society's problems to some kind of lunatic extreme. The Kings are explicitly a sort of cargo-cult that sees the importance of certain destroyed symbols but not their context. The same could be said to a lesser extent of the casino families.
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Jan 17, 2013 07:16
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2house2fly posted:The companions too. Veronica's realising that the Brotherhood has to stop clinging to its old ways or they'll die out; Arcade is caught between the memory of his father and his desire to follow his own path; Lily is deliberately not taking her meds so that she can remember her past life; Raul is facing up to the idea that he's an old man and it might be time to leave his days as a badass adventurer behind; Boone did something terrible and feels that everything bad that happens to him is punishment for it; Rex has a 200 year old brain that needs to be replaced; Cass can't get over the loss of her caravan; ED-E is carrying data to a place that doesn't exist any more, plus in Lonesome Road he spends half the time reminiscing about his creator and the other half reminiscing about the Ralphie show. Oh, speaking of the DLCs: Father Elijah can't get over Helios One, Joshua Graham can't move on from his violent past, the Think Tank are unable to even conceive of the concept of time, and Ulysses can't get over the player character specifically, as well as being obsessed with the symbols of the past. It's most obvious in the DLC's, probably because they're shorter, more self contained stories (Dead Money does it the most; Christine can't let go of how Elijah hurt her, Dean can't let go of his hate for Sinclair, Dog can't let go of his need for authority and God can't let go of Dog long enough to realize that he is in no way helping). My interpretation so far is that if New Vegas has a core theme at all it's that you need to let go of the past in order to prosper. Almost everyone who suffers for clinging to the past can be convinced to let go, or at least face forward and not allow themselves to be controlled by their past, and it results in the best ending they can get. (Joshua can finally let go of his hate and be more at peace with himself, Boone will start trying to pay for his mistakes instead of waiting for a karmic death, Ulyssess can be convinced to hope again, etc.) So even if it's a little sad or depressing at times, I'd say it's still hopeful, overall.
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Jan 17, 2013 07:33
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becrumbac posted:Where was it implied winning the Mojave would cripple the NCR? I've probably missed something here. The problems is the NCR Hawks get in office and they become the Enclave without noticing it. Kimball gets another term in Office, Hsu and Crocker will be eventualy relieved of their duties and replaced with men and women more suiting ot Kimball's views on expansion. Also if House had surrendered to NCR, the NCR is hosed in the long term since he is going to teach how democracy worked in Pre War America. House 2290!!!! Turtlicious posted:Yes we do, on Mothership Zeta it's proven aliens start the great war for vague unclarified reasons. Guess who started the social experiments in the first place. I think the aliens go "Ah gently caress sending failed scout probes down to Earth as puny beings strip our ships of items and make silly things with it, lets just fire our bombardment laser and see what happens" gyrobot fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Jan 17, 2013 |
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Jan 17, 2013 07:48
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You could also say that House's biggest sin is probably just how little he reacted to the end of the world. When he finally got handle on staying alive well enough to tell what was going on in the rest of the world, he wasn't sorrowful at all of the loss, or astonished by the depravities that mankind, he was just annoyed at how much work there was in front of him to get his plans back on track. He took the barbaric tribes of Vegas and turned them into a civilized front to present to the NCR scouts. He took one savage tribe of slavers and drug runners, and he taught them enough for them to masquerade as businessmen simply scamming any suckers who come by. He taught the warlike boot riders to be cool. A clan of cannibals? Well, he just taught them the ways of classism and let them learn how to cook irradiated beef instead of their fellow man. And then he took the quirky inhabitants of a vault who were unsullied by the ravages of the surface world and kicked them all out. I guess they weren't part of his plans (which leaves the question of why house let there be a vault in Vegas in the first place). The NCR would've refused to work with most of the people who had survived in Vegas on moral grounds and they would've supported less barbaric but also less powerful tribes. The Legion would've tried to murder them all to cleanse the land of their taint. House just rounded up the tribes who he saw as the top dogs and gave them all suits and casinos. It's also a bit unfair to compare the Legion or House to the NCR. By the time of FONV, the NCR has around a century of history behind it, and it's finally starting to stagnate and fall apart. House has only been active in the wasteland for a very short time, and the Legion was built from the ground up by Caesar himself. They all have about an equal chance of taking Nevada because: It's far away from the NCR's home where they've built themselves up the strongest with only a single route to and from Vegas. House has the horrible disadvantage of a late start and a lack of access to his most important assets, but he at least has the NCR to keep outer Nevada mollified and to siphon resources out of while he gets a handle on things. The Legion is an unstoppable juggernaut, but crippled by a large amount of terrible philosophical choices, one of the foremost being the choice to eschew the more technological remnants of the old world and never developing their own lands. The NCR doesn't have the right to Nevada just because they're the greatest civilization we've seen since the war; they've already tried to develop the land around Vegas, and it's all come apart by the time the game starts. Deathclaws have taken over the quarry, the prisoners that the NCR was using for labor (which in itself is practically slavery) have broken loose and just wreak havoc wherever they go. They've blockaded trading because they simply just don't think it's safe and can't do anything to make it safe. The Rangers are spread too thin, and they're too focused on the Legion to care about any local matters anyways. The NCR can't even properly maintain their moral high ground; Nevada is too far away from the democratic center of the NCR, and there is nothing stopping the army from blundering into awful tragedies like at Bitter Springs. Some of the trading organizations that are based in the heart of the NCR have managed to set up horribly immoral practices in Nevada without any sort of agency to stand a chance of stopping them, save for the kindness of strangers to provide evidence as to what was going on. Even their attempts at an organized farming effort have twisted into an awful system of sharecropping. If you value the NCR's democracy, then House is still the man to support, since Kimball and Oliver are leading them down the same path that the Roman Republic was led down by Julius Caesar millennia ago. Their lust for glory and conquest will never be mitigated until they run out of spoils of war to placate the people with, and they'll devolve into the same sort of monarchy that Edward Sallow predicted they would. And while it may be tempting to define House as an objectivist due to him being a businessman and disliking any constraints that others would put on him, that's really missing the point of the character. He may try to harness market forces rather than directly instituting an ironfisted rule, but he's clearly a firm believer in a government with absolute power. New Vegas is totally under his thrall whether the businesses like it or not. There's enough regulations that a woman couldn't sell alcohol on the streets, it's accepted that all weapons be confiscated upon entrance to a casino, and while any NCR citizen gets a free pass into the city, House is determined to make sure that not just any riff-raff from outer Vegas can make it into his fortress. Many of the simpler immoral practices around Vegas continue mainly because House doesn't have the resources to restrict them, and they're much further down on his priority list than the survival and expansion of his city (although I like to believe that he helped suggest that the White Gloves stop eating people when they were writing their charter). House is on the opposite side from objectivism, and you could make a decent argument for him believing in the classical concept of a philosopher-king.
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Jan 17, 2013 07:56
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Merry Magpie posted:Trustworthy, I think you misunderstood House's role in the Mojave. You mean other than the fact that he owned much of the city and has for longer than anyone except Raul has been alive, saved the city from imminent nuclear destruction, renovated it from being yet another burned-out shithole full of junkies and raiders like the rest of the wasteland and did so without the NCR's resources, let alone before they even showed up? He quite possibly has the most justified claim to sovereignty of anyone for anything in the Fallout universe, since he's one of the few people who's just protecting the same home he's lived in from before the war. I will admit he doesn't provide any representation, but what faction does? The Legion answers to one man, and at best you can hope to be a non-female slave. The NCR leaders are a bunch of power-grabbing incompetent bureaucrats stifling anyone below them who may actually be trying to do any good. The independent ending still has the securitron army running the show, but they just keep the status quo at the behest of an absentee courier rather than having any kind of vision for the future. quote:When he realized an organized government was approaching, he recruited three tribes to scam the NCR. Within the year, he signed the New Vegas treaty making Vegas a protectorate and requiring NCR to provide food, water, and power to the Strip. This is due to him working with a few hundred securitrons instead of his army of thousands, not his intended goals. He actively expands his operations past Vegas into Freeside (and possibly Primm) at the end of the game. Dude just didn't bite off more than his meager securitron army and shaky tribal partnership could chew. Also, that 'organized government' is quite literally waiting to murder him at the first possible chance for no justifiable reason. quote:His "government" is one of oppression and neglect without the safety of the NCR or Caesar. One subject to the whims of a petty man. The NCR can't even protect its own caravans in its own territory back west, and the Legion is subject to the whims of an even pettier man who's dying of cancer and forgot to let anyone else in on the Hegelian dialectics thing. House is very much the best of a bad situation.
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Jan 17, 2013 07:58
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Eiba posted:I've said this before, but I'll say it again. If there's one reason the choice is clear, it's this: The NCR purport to be humanists. They often don't live up to their own ideals, but that's what they try to be. House isn't. His goals are not to elevate human welfare, or to eliminate human suffering. It doesn't matter how great he is at intelligently accomplishing his goals, when those goals themselves aren't worthy. House does not deserve to die because of NCR imperialism. You aren't ordered to kill House because he's a tyrant, or because of humanism, or because House is in any way a threat or antagonistic to the Republic. You're ordered to do it because the NCR feels everything is theirs because it is. As for humanism, look at the Followers. The NCR outright attacks them unless you go in and say "kiss the Republic's rear end, guys". House leaves them alone no matter what. I agree with the NCR's ideals, but I refuse to support the actions they carry out while shouting those ideals. The NCR needs to be broken of its "Manifest Destiny".
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Jan 17, 2013 08:02
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I just wanna know, at the end of Lonesome Road it made me choose between Nuking a large area of either Arizona or Californa vs saving one Robot, and I chose the Robot so I wonder what that says about me as a person.
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Jan 17, 2013 08:07
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Byzantine posted:House does not deserve to die because of NCR imperialism. You aren't ordered to kill House because he's a tyrant, or because of humanism, or because House is in any way a threat or antagonistic to the Republic. You're ordered to do it because the NCR feels everything is theirs because it is. Yeah, people give House a lot of poo poo for 'scamming' the NCR when they've been planning to kill him as soon as they got there, because having to peacefully negotiate for land instead of taking it by force just isn't palatable for those imperialist fuckers. There's also a lot of little things that the game hints at to show how lovely life in the NCR really is; there's very little opportunity outside of joining the army or shoveling brahmin poo poo, they practice conscription, people committing non-violent offenses are doing hard time right alongside the mass murderers and psychotics... quote:I agree with the NCR's ideals, but I refuse to support the actions they carry out while shouting those ideals. The NCR needs to be broken of its "Manifest Destiny". Preferably, as one can choose at Lonesome Road's end, with atomic fire 
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Jan 17, 2013 08:16
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Keeshhound posted:It's most obvious in the DLC's, probably because they're shorter, more self contained stories (Dead Money does it the most; Christine can't let go of how Elijah hurt her, Dean can't let go of his hate for Sinclair, Dog can't let go of his need for authority and God can't let go of Dog long enough to realize that he is in no way helping). That's actually literally the message of Dead Money. It resonates excessively there, because that's what the Sierra Madre was about : Letting go and carrying on. Or whatever the hell that message carried on about forever. House blocked off Vault 21 because i think it's the only spot that could really prove a problem to fight in. He may have had intentions for the escape tunnel that Benny ends up using/trying to use, or he may have just wanted to block access to 21's reactor or something. I thought that was the reason for it. As for the NCR, IIRC, House or Caesar points out that it's fracturing and corruption is inevitable, as it was really only founded and held together by Tandi, who is now dead and gone. It gives a glimpse of what's liable to happen to any of these factions without their iconic leader. Also, I too choose a little robot buddy over not annihilating huge swathes of lands with nuclear fire.
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Jan 17, 2013 09:16
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Orange Crush Rush posted:I just wanna know, at the end of Lonesome Road it made me choose between Nuking a large area of either Arizona or Californa vs saving one Robot, and I chose the Robot so I wonder what that says about me as a person. Hey, at the end of Lonesome Road he's a pretty kickass robot. I will not fault you there.
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Jan 17, 2013 09:18
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SpookyLizard posted:That's actually literally the message of Dead Money. It resonates excessively there, because that's what the Sierra Madre was about : Letting go and carrying on. Or whatever the hell that message carried on about forever. I think the idea is that it runs under Vegas and more importantly the Lucky 38, and was basically the first place anyone trying to sneak into the Lucky 38 to murder House (Benny) would go. That's also where he kept part of his securitron army, so yeah, pretty big weak spot. Also worth noting that he didn't forcefully take Vault 21 from the vault-dwellers, he played them for it using their own set of rules. Unfortunately for them, the House always wins 
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Jan 17, 2013 09:21
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Also I'm pretty sure House stripped a lot of parts from Vault 21 to help rebuild the Strip and Lucky 38.
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Jan 17, 2013 09:22
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Yeah, that too. Also, is it weird to anyone else that Sarah is one of the few non-prostitutes in the game you can have sex with? That always struck me as weird.
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Jan 17, 2013 09:27
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Orange Crush Rush posted:I just wanna know, at the end of Lonesome Road it made me choose between Nuking a large area of either Arizona or Californa vs saving one Robot, and I chose the Robot so I wonder what that says about me as a person. You get some really nice armor from nuking both sides so I don't blame you. If you do it right that won't even effect your rep with the factions.
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Jan 17, 2013 09:34
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Wow, weird bug. I've heard No-Bark Noonan's spiel a dozen times, but now of all times the "No-Bark has a different voice" bug appears. Specifically his "we got a chupacabra with an automatic weapon!" line. Is this because I rented the "Fallout NV Ultimate Edition" this time around?
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Jan 17, 2013 09:38
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Wolfsheim posted:Yeah, that too. Also, is it weird to anyone else that Sarah is one of the few non-prostitutes in the game you can have sex with? That always struck me as weird. Yeah, her and Red Lucy will have sex with a male character as a quest reward. No equivalent for female characters that I've seen. The game usually is pretty decent sexism wise, for a mainstream game made in 2010 at least, it's a shame this particular bit made it through. I remember reading that they were both written by the same guy, so I choose to blame him.
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Jan 17, 2013 13:30
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Is Red Lucy the owner of the Thorn? If so, she'd definitely bonk a female Courier. Girl likes badasses regardless of gender, it seems.
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Jan 17, 2013 13:40
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steinrokkan posted:That and the fact that the virtues of any dictatorships are only convincing if you don't bother investigating experiences of the silenced and marginalized subjects that haven't been given chance to write their side of history. House seems charming and competent because his narrative totally ignores all those who don't benefit from his project (that is, almost everyone). Unlike democracies, which
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Jan 17, 2013 15:17
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Orange Crush Rush posted:I just wanna know, at the end of Lonesome Road it made me choose between Nuking a large area of either Arizona or Californa vs saving one Robot, and I chose the Robot so I wonder what that says about me as a person. I wanted to go back in time and beat the crap out the Enclave that was hurting ED-E.  Oh - I accidentally nuked a bunch of legion and maybe Phoenix? okay whatever
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Jan 17, 2013 15:38
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SpookyLizard posted:So if it's cool you just put it into the game right? Exploding cars are cool so just throw 'em in. Doesn't matter if it fits in or anything or makes sense. Cool games have exploding cars, right? Call of Duty has exploding cars, and Call of Duty is the coolest. Sorry the fun thing broke your immersion, I guess. I don't see you complaining about the perfectly functional robots still wandering the wastes after 200 years, though. They run on the same power source as the cars.
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Jan 17, 2013 15:51
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Is this a House thing or do we write massive blocks of text debating every faction? I seem to remember when I first started posting in this thread that the Legion was a hot topic for similar such discussions. Anyway, the accounts about the NCR not being all that great back home have to be offset by the fact that there are a large number of NCR visitors who have the disposable income to make an expensive and dangerous trip to Vegas, the NCR has enough money to support the largest army in the Mojave with what appears to be recently manufactured weapons and armor, and the accounts that say back home isn't so much bad as it is boring (Jas Wilkins comes to mind.) They're overstretched, but whatever they have going back in California has to be working quite well, or what they have going on in the Mojave is a bit of a non sequitur.
StandardVC10 fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jan 17, 2013 |
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Jan 17, 2013 16:27
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Whether or not the Legion is evil got played out, and debating the NCR just ends with everybody projecting their current issues with US politics onto it. So House it is.
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Jan 17, 2013 16:30
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Daktar posted:Sorry the fun thing broke your immersion, I guess. I don't see you complaining about the perfectly functional robots still wandering the wastes after 200 years, though. They run on the same power source as the cars. I'm not even sure why we're complaining about the presence of Nuclear powered cars. If I remember the Fallout Bible correctly, they only came to the public a short few years to a decade before the Bombs fell, in the midst of the war. In fact I believe the wide-spread adoption of the atomic-powered cars in the US was an instigating factor towards the end, as China felt it meant the US was holding on to oil it didn't need.
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Jan 17, 2013 16:52
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Does House's vision for New Vegas in the long run remind anyone else of Walt Disney's plans for EPCOT?
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Jan 17, 2013 17:26
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i am tim! posted:I'm not even sure why we're complaining about the presence of Nuclear powered cars. I think it's just a shorthand for Bethesda's somewhat schizophrenic worldbuilding - 200 years after the war, but it looks like only 20 have passed.
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Jan 17, 2013 17:33
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Lt. Danger posted:I think it's just a shorthand for Bethesda's somewhat schizophrenic worldbuilding - 200 years after the war, but it looks like only 20 have passed. Nevermind that already-exploded cars explode some more. Daktar posted:Sorry the fun thing broke your immersion, I guess. I don't see you complaining about the perfectly functional robots still wandering the wastes after 200 years, though. They run on the same power source as the cars. Random wandering robots are pretty dumb too, bethesda is bad at making games that make sense, i'm complaining about things that don't make sense breaking my immersion.
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Jan 17, 2013 18:00
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2house2fly posted:It's a pretty sad game, really. It's like the whole New World is still grieving the loss of the old one. Plus the deathclaws. They make me sad too.
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Jan 17, 2013 18:02
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Lt. Danger posted:I think it's just a shorthand for Bethesda's somewhat schizophrenic worldbuilding - 200 years after the war, but it looks like only 20 have passed. I don't feel like immersion or storytelling have ever been at the forefront of Bethesda's design philosophy. Their main concern has always seemed to be making a cool looking world with cool things to see and explore, or fun set-pieces to play through, and then trying to thread a coherent narrative through that. Hence why we get stuff like that completely out of place Lovecraft homage, a field of chain-reaction exploding cars, and the super secret but not actually hard to find Oasis.
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Jan 17, 2013 18:21
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2house2fly posted:Yeah, her and Red Lucy will have sex with a male character as a quest reward. No equivalent for female characters that I've seen. The game usually is pretty decent sexism wise, for a mainstream game made in 2010 at least, it's a shame this particular bit made it through. I remember reading that they were both written by the same guy, so I choose to blame him. Can't female Couriers sleep with Benny? :iamafag:
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Jan 17, 2013 18:24
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PBJ posted:Does House's vision for New Vegas in the long run remind anyone else of Walt Disney's plans for EPCOT?   Surely, I'm not the first to see this.
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Jan 17, 2013 18:27
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Orange Crush Rush posted:I just wanna know, at the end of Lonesome Road it made me choose between Nuking a large area of either Arizona or Californa vs saving one Robot, and I chose the Robot so I wonder what that says about me as a person. 
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Jan 17, 2013 18:35
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If I remember correctly: House is actually based off of Howard Hughes, though there is a resemblance there too.
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Jan 17, 2013 18:38
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HitTheTargets posted:Can't female Couriers sleep with Benny? :iamafag: Well handling packages is the Courier's job.
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Jan 17, 2013 18:57
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Kalos posted:I don't feel like immersion or storytelling have ever been at the forefront of Bethesda's design philosophy. Their main concern has always seemed to be making a cool looking world with cool things to see and explore, or fun set-pieces to play through, and then trying to thread a coherent narrative through that. Hence why we get stuff like that completely out of place Lovecraft homage, a field of chain-reaction exploding cars, and the super secret but not actually hard to find Oasis. Kalos posted:If I remember correctly: House is actually based off of Howard Hughes, though there is a resemblance there too.  
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Jan 17, 2013 19:04
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achillesforever6 posted:I love the "There Will Come Soft Rains" house Which reminds me... One thing that bugged me about Fallout 3 and New Vegas is that they wrote Tenpenny a semi-Hughes-like character (with the hotel and the milk bottles and such). He wasn't a perfect analogue, but there were enough references that there was a very clear connection. Then when Fallout New Vegas announcements started coming out, Mr. House was explicitly another Hughes-like character, only this time with the volume cranked up to 11. In hindsight, Mr. House is a much more compelling character, and I'm glad the creators wrote him how they did. But it's kind of weird/annoying that they dipped into that well twice. I wonder what sort of design thought went into that. Did the devs like the character concept so much that they were thrilled to use the character motif twice? Was a Hughes character just so vital to the FNV storyline that they just had to make peace with that bit minor repetition? Or, perhaps, did they think they didn't do a good enough job with the concept the first time (it did feel a little shoehorned in), and Mr. House is a second, more whole-hearted attempt to really nail it? 
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Jan 17, 2013 19:22
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Trustworthy posted:Which reminds me... One thing that bugged me about Fallout 3 and New Vegas is that they wrote Tenpenny a semi-Hughes-like character (with the hotel and the milk bottles and such). He wasn't a perfect analogue, but there were enough references that there was a very clear connection. Tenpenny was part of one of dozens of throwaway isolated joke set pieces, that really had no rhyme or reason, they were just supposed to be kind of fun. House was a central part of the game, referencing one of the more memorable parts of Vegas' very memorable history. If you're calling your game New Vegas, you've better got a good picture of what New Vegas is like, and New Vegas is House. If anything it's retroactively annoying how bad Tenpenny was in comparison to House.
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Jan 17, 2013 19:32
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Trustworthy posted:I wonder what sort of design thought went into that. Did the devs like the character concept so much that they were thrilled to use the character motif twice? Was a Hughes character just so vital to the FNV storyline that they just had to make peace with that bit minor repetition? Or, perhaps, did they think they didn't do a good enough job with the concept the first time (it did feel a little shoehorned in), and Mr. House is a second, more whole-hearted attempt to really nail it?
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Jan 17, 2013 19:35
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Trustworthy posted:I wonder what sort of design thought went into that. Did the devs like the character concept so much that they were thrilled to use the character motif twice?
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Jan 17, 2013 19:35
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Turtlicious posted:
Being a massive nerd, I made a different connection. 
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Jan 17, 2013 20:02
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I think what we're really trying to say, the elephant in the room if you will, is that all rich white people look exactly the same, as long as they wear mustaches.
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Jan 17, 2013 20:07
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