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Sally posted:Easy to imagine. Americans (and Canadians) get wound up real easily over taxes. they might help someone less fortunate than me! how dare!?
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May 2, 2021 17:27
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"Say what you will about Caesar's Legion but taxes are low and they get poo poo done!"
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May 2, 2021 17:37
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Bloodborne and DS3 both suffer from the same problem - healing is so fast and abundant that either you're able to tank loads of hits and just keep healing, or you get unlucky and the boss hits you rapidly in succession and splats you from full health. Add DS2 to that as well because of the light gems. Only DS1 does healing right in the entire lot (I haven't played Sekiro). I don't know why they felt the need to keep changing things. Dark Souls 1 might literally have the best health system in a video game period. It was honestly a revelation for me and contextualized a lot of other games' health systems and how different ways of doing that suit different styles of games. But that was apparently not good enough for From. EDIT: And NCR people complaining about taxes when the NCR can't even keep their lands safe is kinda fair. I mean, the focus should be less on the taxes and more on the not getting anything from those taxes part, but if a state doesn't even keep you safe from outside forces what good is it and why are you paying it taxes? The very least you should be able to depend on a state for is to actually be the only significant armed force within their borders. Phigs has a new favorite as of 17:53 on May 2, 2021 |
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May 2, 2021 17:45
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:I always found it hilarious how the rap against the NCR was bad governing like its somehow even comparable. I imagine someone saying "Join our rapists and slavers because the other team takes forever to file your tax return" Isn't that how actual fascists irl gain power? Like "hey that other guy isn't actually getting poo poo done, join up with us and we'll actually clean up your neighborhood / get you jobs / whatever! Please pay no mind to the genocide behind the curtain until we've had enough time to radicalize you."
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May 2, 2021 18:17
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It's less that the taxes are high and more that you end up paying taxes to an occupying power that cannot protect it's frontier but keeps annexing more land to keep the brahmin barons in power and keep getting the president elected. The NCR government let's crimson caravan crush any local competition, and let's the brahmin barons hire mercenaries to terrorize farmers so they'll sell to the barons. All while waging two separate imperialist wars.
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May 2, 2021 18:31
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Tandi was the president of the NCR for fifty years.
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May 2, 2021 18:43
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:Isn't that how actual fascists irl gain power? This is what bugs me about Caesar's Legion - the game just sort of takes this argument at face value for them.
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May 2, 2021 18:45
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serefin99 posted:The Switch doesn't have trophies and that kills my enthusiasm for doing side content in games. This is a good thing imo, freeing you from doing video game stuff that you are only doing to make a little icon appear and don't enjoy enough to do on its own
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May 2, 2021 18:46
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:I always found it hilarious how the rap against the NCR was bad governing like its somehow even comparable. I imagine someone saying "Join our rapists and slavers because the other team takes forever to file your tax return" Feels like we should insert that "I tried to shoot the NCR president because he was going to tax me!" "Understandable" edit here somewhere  .For a long while I thought it might have been more interesting if the Legion was a little less cartoonishly evil (pulling the rape and sexism out doesn't SEEM like a big change, for instance), but real life watching of fascists has finally educated me that yes, that IS the inevitable result of any "order uber alles" society because it will inevitably gravitate to that kind of evil bigoted crap by its nature of needing "enemies to fight/punish". Caesar may claim he wants to reform into a less militant style government "after the conquest is done", but can you really see him accepting the lower personal authority any state like that would require? He'd just shift to internal persecution of "undesirables" instead, because that's the only way he'd keep his authority, by redirecting hatred of the results of his policies towards whatever scapegoats were established. So really, I suppose one little things dragging down New Vegas is it kind of established NCR and Legion as equals, which has lead too many people to consider them MORAL equals. Thematically it might have been better to compare them as drawing two different lessons from pre-War, with the NCR chasing the ideal the US held up, with the Legion probably more reflective of the reality since the pre-War USA had some pretty obvious fascist overtones to a lot of stuff. Not sure what the best way to contrast the House/no faction would be under that theme though.
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May 2, 2021 18:52
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I finished Yakuza 7. The JRPG mechanics aren’t very good! It’s not bad, the mechanics are extremely serviceable, but they’re extremely bland and basic. I wish there was more too them
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May 2, 2021 18:54
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Folks, I have been playing Mortal Kombat 11. If you've played it for any length of time you can probably guess what is coming. Overall, fantastic game. Easy to get into, everything seems to make sense, all of the mechanics are really fun. It actual has a significant amount of single player content which is really great. I haven't played a game in the series since MK9 so it all feels amazing. I went to do a classic tower and decided to pump up the difficulty to hard, just to see how I could do. It actually went fairly well, I struggled a bit in some of the matches, it felt fair overall and I had to put in some real effort. It was fun, they I got to the boss. Kronika is the final boss of MK11 and she has a number of quirks that distinguish her from regular opponents. In particular she: - cannot be juggled (as far as I can tell) - cannot be thrown or command-grabbed - cannot be hit with a super (it just knocks her back and she takes minor damage, no animation plays) - eventually gets knocked out of combos, can also just teleport in the middle of a string - has a highly abusable teleport (zoning is out) - has about 40-50% more health than a regular character - after losing about 33% health, she calls in a random fighter to take her place. they have about half their normal health but are the same as they otherwise would be. Kronika does this again after losing 66% health. On medium difficulty it's possible, largely by just spamming jump kicks and uppercuts, Kronika's quirks make most of my character's toolkit irrelevant. She's a bit passive on medium so the whole thing winds up being doable, challenging with little margin for error, but doable. On hard I can't even really touch her. I tried four times and was never able to get her under 50% of health on any round. If I whiff, that's 25-30% of my health gone, if she teleports out of a string (like we're talking a two-hit string) that's health gone, et cetera and so on. Netherrealm has a pretty rough track record on bosses, in the sense that they seem to be operating under totally different rules than you do. Shao Kahn in MK9 is a huge bastard, Brainiac in Injustice 2 is also a nightmare, for example. I don't know if it's bias from having my rear end handed to me last night, but I think Kronika may actually be worse. Brainiac I could at least combo and more easily avoid his unrelenting 50% combos, but with Kronika I can barely get any hits in at all. It's super unfun and I get whiplash from it since the rest of the game is so good. Even the bosses in the Towers are way better, they also tend to have some ridiculous buffs, but you can at least actually perform combos on them or attempt to zone them out.
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May 2, 2021 21:28
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The independent New Vegas ending, especially if you had done all of the earlier quests to build up the area and the local factions seemed by far the best outcome for the story that all of the other options seemed bad. I did the NCR ending for the achievement on my second play and it felt like a big mistake.
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May 2, 2021 21:50
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I tried Iron Harvest since it was having a free weekend and holy crap, someone made a spiritual sequel to Company of Heroes?? Except they dropped the ball by not having easily the most popular multiplayer mode in every RTS game ever: online co-op vs computers. There's no lobby browser either. Either that or they made it difficult to find those options. Either way, there's some poor design decisions in this game.
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May 2, 2021 22:28
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Whatev posted:Finishing up Bloodborne! I feel compelled to say that the Orphan of Kos boss is just too much, dude. Even as the DLC final boss! His difficulty is so massively disproportionate to all the other bosses that he entirely defines their difficulty tiers; the next toughest bosses are maybe C+ while he's S+. I have also gone through DS1 and DS2 for the first time this past year, and even the drat strong DLC bosses in DS2 don't hold a candle to this awful baby. Orphan is really tough but I always had at least as much trouble with the first DLC boss, which is even shittier since so much cool stuff is gated behind him so basically all I get to use it for on a non-ng+ playthrough is the remainder of the DLC. Sally posted:Easy to imagine. Americans (and Canadians) get wound up real easily over taxes. To be fair there exist high powered corporate lobbyists whose entire job is to make it hard to do your taxes. The Moon Monster has a new favorite as of 01:26 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 01:23
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Phigs posted:Add DS2 to that as well because of the light gems. Only DS1 does healing right in the entire lot (I haven't played Sekiro). I don't know why they felt the need to keep changing things. Dark Souls 1 might literally have the best health system in a video game period. It was honestly a revelation for me and contextualized a lot of other games' health systems and how different ways of doing that suit different styles of games. But that was apparently not good enough for From. I think DS2's way of doing things succeeds at creating an interesting healing economy...at first. The problem is that it eventually hits a tipping point where you have both a fully upgraded flask AND can easily afford to carry 99 life gems in your pocket as well so it creates weird redundancies and uninteresting optimizations. Doesn't help that you can only easily get infinite basic life gems, and they're very cheap, so once you have those on lock there's no reason to really pay attention to any other non-estus healing option, even superior life gems. (IIRC there's also restrictions on estus use while invading and/or co-oping so they may have been also trying to add an additional tax to online stuff the same way you can only invade via cracked red orbs that need to be farmed.) For the record, Sekiro actually uses a cleaned up and streamlined version of DS2's system. One healing item that applies a long term heal over time plus your estus equivalent which only gains extra chugs via collectible items, no +1 potency upgrades. All that said, I very much agree that the estus flask is one of, if not the, single most important mechanics in defining the feel of Dark Souls and it's incredibly sad how vanishingly few other developers have realized that.
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May 3, 2021 02:35
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The Surge 1 had an estus-like mechanic. In The Surge 2 healing instead used the energy you got by hitting people, which worked well but could get a little silly if you optimised for it and literally could not run out of healing. (There was also a chip that gave you energy when you got hit, and combined with various other things you'd end up with a net energy surplus even after healing the damage you just took)
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May 3, 2021 03:44
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IIRC the rare, expensive, higher-tier lifegems give you the same regen buff as the lovely cheap ones, just for a longer duration. But popping multiple lifegems has them run alongside each other instead of one after the other. So popping two of the basic infinitely-buyable can-carry-99-at-once lifegems back-to-back doubles the healing per second and is actually better than using one of the ultra-rare highest-tier lifegems. e: Also lots of non-soulslike games have recognized Estus as being a cool mechanic and copied it. Actually a lot of metroidvanias in particular, like Blasphemous, Dandara, or (kind of) Hollow Knight. The dynamic of having a small pool of immediate health and then a bigger but limited pool of healing is really neat in the way it makes damage matter. RPATDO_LAMD has a new favorite as of 03:59 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 03:52
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The way games like Skyrim or Breath of the Wild let you carry a hundred full heal items in your inventory if you feel like it, and pause the game to use them at any time, is a big part of why I can't find the combat in them interesting. It's like you can only really die by getting fed up enough with the crafting or inventory systems that you just can't be hosed to carry enough healing items, instead of, like...a fight being difficult.
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May 3, 2021 04:08
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The Lone Badger posted:The Surge 1 had an estus-like mechanic. In The Surge 2 healing instead used the energy you got by hitting people, which worked well but could get a little silly if you optimised for it and literally could not run out of healing. I think the first game had both of those, actually. But if I remember right the estus-like healing on demand was also instantaneous, which means they didn't quite get it right. (Not to be too harsh The Surge, mind, I'm actually fond of it.) Triarii posted:The way games like Skyrim or Breath of the Wild let you carry a hundred full heal items in your inventory if you feel like it, and pause the game to use them at any time, is a big part of why I can't find the combat in them interesting. It's like you can only really die by getting fed up enough with the crafting or inventory systems that you just can't be hosed to carry enough healing items, instead of, like...a fight being difficult. It is interesting to me that Bethesda seemed to have cottoned onto this problem, because healing items in Fallout 4 all take a bit of time to heal and Stimpaks in particular also lock you into an animation. You can still stop time to root around in your giant pile of largely pointless bespoke healing items to help you out, but you can't just spam them while standing in front of a gatling laser and expect to brute force your way through the damage. Edit: On the flipside, Fallout 4 gives the two most important healing items, Stimpaks and Rad-Away, zero weight so you can carry an endless supply around with you at all times. (I had multiple hundreds of both in reserve by the end of my playthrough.) Whereas I believe even a lowly basic healing potion takes up at least a little bit of space. Though I'm sure the expectation is also that you'll learn a healing spell and just use that, at which point it basically acts the same way as a functionally-infinite supply of weightless stims... John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 05:26 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 05:15
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Triarii posted:The way games like Skyrim or Breath of the Wild let you carry a hundred full heal items in your inventory if you feel like it, and pause the game to use them at any time, is a big part of why I can't find the combat in them interesting. It's like you can only really die by getting fed up enough with the crafting or inventory systems that you just can't be hosed to carry enough healing items, instead of, like...a fight being difficult. this has never been enough to ruin a game for me as I enjoy breath of the wild and dragon's dogma in spite of it, but it's definitely lame and means that as long as you don't get outright one-shotted, your health bar is effectively as long as you bothered to fill your inventory with healing items - as long as you're willing to keep interrupting the action to use more items, which feels bad. generally, action games should be designed with as few interruptions to the action as possible. it just screws with the flow to pause and pull up a menu to use more instant healing items.
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May 3, 2021 06:56
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The NCR are the lesser evil so they will doom the world in the same way real world lesser evils are currently doing.
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May 3, 2021 07:01
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MadDogMike posted:Feels like we should insert that "I tried to shoot the NCR president because he was going to tax me!" "Understandable" edit here somewhere The funny thing about the whole "they're so cartoonishly evil" aspect of the legion is that a lot of people really, really, like them. Like SA is one of the few communities I've seen where people don't think the legion kicks all kinds of rear end and that everyone should join and support them because ceaser read a book and uses the words "hegelian dialectic". They are cartoonishly evil, but their propaganda still works on a lot of people.
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May 3, 2021 09:34
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To be honest I'm extremely sceptical about "Legion territory being safe". I doubt they do a better job than anyone else who claims territory, especially with so much of their effort turned outward. Nobody talks about the problems in Legion territory though because that's a quick way up a crucifix.
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May 3, 2021 09:56
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Its also two completely separate issues of "what was in the game" and "what was in the Fallout bible and the designs". They ended up making the Legion the cartoon evil guys because the game needed the something other than the third "greedy assholes"-faction. Well, fourth if you also count in the Brotherhood as a faction although you cannot end the game with them. Cutting out the Legion-held territories, putting the slaves and rape to the front and center, while burying the "NCR are corrupt shitheads running a facade of democracy to subjugate regions" to the details, things that have already happened, and implied events did them also no favors balance-wise. The game was so rushed that even with all the cuts, there still is one city the is mostly just placeholder and generic assets in the game.
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May 3, 2021 10:38
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:e: Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath had a pretty great healing mechanic - you could take a few moments to shake off your injuries and convert your Stamina bar into Health. Your Stamina would regen really slowly over tim, so you had a decently large health pool in fights, and would basically go into any encounter with full health/stamina, but you couldn't keep healing your way through any of the difficult battles. And yeah, Estus + Bonfire Checkpoints is pretty much the ultimate way to do metroidvanias. Playing older ones (or throwbacks, like Bloodstained) just feels so janky by comparison. Gotta love re-doing boss fights because I finished the battle on 1hp and couldnt get to a save station!
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May 3, 2021 11:26
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Nuebot posted:The funny thing about the whole "they're so cartoonishly evil" aspect of the legion is that a lot of people really, really, like them. Like SA is one of the few communities I've seen where people don't think the legion kicks all kinds of rear end and that everyone should join and support them because ceaser read a book and uses the words "hegelian dialectic". They are cartoonishly evil, but their propaganda still works on a lot of people. Untrue. Look at the completion statistics on steam. Wild card is most popular followed by NCR than house. Legion trails them at 3.8% completion. More people have won three hands of caravan than have done the legion storyline
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May 3, 2021 12:14
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That's probably the dissonance between loud people online and people just playing the game. And I can totally see people who love the Legion being Loud People Online.
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May 3, 2021 12:29
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Odin’s Sphere has some very large men but you can only play as a regular sized person. This is a mistake, imo
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May 3, 2021 12:30
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John Murdoch posted:I think the first game had both of those, actually. But if I remember right the estus-like healing on demand was also instantaneous, which means they didn't quite get it right. (Not to be too harsh The Surge, mind, I'm actually fond of it.) Gonna disagree here, I don’t think changing how dark souls did it is doing it wrong and The Surge is a faster game so having a heal animation just would not have worked. I keep getting souls likes because they should be my cup of tea and the Surge games are the only ones I’ve really enjoyed.
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May 3, 2021 12:31
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Adding to my earlier comment about the Legion design. What is in the game is clearly a cartoon villain, but I kinda "get" what they were probably aiming for in the original Fallout bible designs (also for the Van Buren): "Old style" slaves and caste system of the guys larping Mongol horde/Roman empire vs. "New style" with robber barons and indentured servitude doing a direct-to-shitter version of the pre-war society. EDIT: On the other hand IIRC Van Buren also started by the player character escaping a NCR-operated forced labor camp and prison complex, so the setting is not 1:1 to begin with. Der Kyhe has a new favorite as of 12:56 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 3, 2021 12:47
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The NCR robber baron poo poo is a result of corruption and exploitation that's not implicit in the NCR. Lack of oversight, failure of judicial system, whatever, is not what majority of the citizens of the NCR want. Caesar's legion on the other hand is literally fash idiot dynamite fodder kill on sight raping slavers.
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May 3, 2021 13:27
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Yeah part of it is the NCR's problems are not anywhere near as surface level as the Legion. It takes digging and thinking to see the NCR as anything other than just the good guys. A lot of the bitching comes off as libertarian types being grumpy at first. But regardless of what the NCR wants, or purport to want, it's not really a good thing for the Mojave. Personally for me the NCR is the lazy option, House is the selfish option, and Wild Card is the responsible hard option. NCR just feels like the default sure lets just let the old-world style empire keep expanding and pretend like it's a good thing option. House is for if you just want to retire as the pampered pet of an immortal dictator. Wild Card is the only option with a chance to go well but it's a long shot and would require a shitload of work and stress on your part to make it work. Legion is not an option. I guess maybe if you could be Caesar's successor and were the kind of person to want to run a brutal slave empire.
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May 3, 2021 13:45
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If we're giving every option the benefit of doubt and optimism for positive change in the future, NCR comes out on top. It's pretty cool because the game doesn't give you the option to 100% paragon a game for once, because IRL no such option exists because people are flawed, selfish and poo poo. Games usually let you fix social injustice by killing a bad guy but that's not how it works. I mean after you're done punching rome-a-boo faces in with a power fist. After that it's pretty much education and social programs.
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May 3, 2021 14:29
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I always thought the Legion was never intended to be a "morally equivalent" choice. Its there because the genre of games its in tends to advertise or value being able to write your own story to some extent, which explicitly means allowing you to write your character as a Quisling or villain. The Legion are supposed to be awful antagonists, with maybe (i agree with the poster who doubted the actual peaceful nature of Legion-controlled Arizona) some degree of safety for (some, favored) citizens. There is just enough of a veneer there that you could see someone in-universe justifying joining, especially since they'll be jumping into the upper echelons of the society. That doesn't mean that is presented, or intended, to be a good thing. I don't think the Legion are supposed to be anything other than antagonists, and if you want to join them...fine. The game won't stop you, but you're definitely just playing a villain at that point.
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May 3, 2021 14:42
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The only ethical thing to do in the Mojave is to super-sledge in the face/balls all the factions until there's no one standing.
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May 3, 2021 14:44
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Der Kyhe posted:Adding to my earlier comment about the Legion design. What is in the game is clearly a cartoon villain, but I kinda "get" what they were probably aiming for in the original Fallout bible designs (also for the Van Buren): So to make the fascist warlods more palatable, you start by escaping unlawful imprisonment by s failed empire to get a poor first impression. Todd Howard, you've done it again!
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May 3, 2021 16:00
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The Bee posted:So to make the fascist warlods more palatable, you start by escaping unlawful imprisonment by s failed empire to get a poor first impression. It just works!
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May 3, 2021 16:04
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I finished the Bowser’s Fury part of Mario 3D World this weekend. It’s one big map with shines to collect and platforming challenges. Bowser frequently comes to rain fire on you and is generally a thing dragging it down. You can banish him by getting a shine, and some shines require you to get him to break special blocks. He goes away on his own sometimes? I was never quite able to figure that out when. Maybe it was just annoyances sticking in my memory more, but it seemed like he stayed when I wanted him to go away and left as I was making my way to some blocks I wanted him to break. The last few shines I needed involved bringing kittens back to their mother. They turn into hostile shadow creatures during Bowser Attacks, and since I had gotten every other shine at that point, there was no easy to make him go away. He appeared more than once as I was 3/4 of the way through carrying a cat back.
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May 3, 2021 16:11
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tripwood posted:The only ethical thing to do in the Mojave is to super-sledge in the face/balls all the factions until there's no one standing. Especially the boomers. Murderous fucks.
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May 3, 2021 16:18
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Wow New Vegas was really ahead of the times with letting you take out a bunch of boomers 
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May 3, 2021 16:24
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