Let's Play Fallout: New Vegas Without a Big Iron on our Hip

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Let's Play Fallout: New Vegas Without a Big Iron on our Hip

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Glazius posted:

Look, the thing about Pluto is this: despite everything, Pluto's not special. We spotted it as early as we did because it was doing the gravity tango with Charon out beyond the beyond, and two Plutos moving are a lot easier to spot than one Pluto standing still. There's a cloud of debris out there, about as far from Neptune as it is from you, that just never got the gravitic impetus to make much of itself. Dust and rocks and bigger rocks and rocks almost as big as Pluto. Preliminary readings suggest there may be as many as four dozen of the things out there.

So we can put a little line in the by-laws about keeping your orbit clear and have eight planets, or we can have fifty-eight planets and most of them are rubbish planets you can't even see.

Look, buddy, there are a lot of Roman gods that go unused that deserve more attention. I know what side I'm leaning towards here.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2018 02:31

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 22:49

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I love Vault 11. It captures a lot of the series' best qualities in a microcosm. Note the recording at the entrance to the vault- five voices, four bodies.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Apr 12, 2018

# ¿ Apr 12, 2018 06:50

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I want the vault 11 survivor to come back as the new Enclave president; someone who learned the lessons of the old world democracy in the worst possible form.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2018 20:45

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Enh, the boomers are ok. They're not particularly well fleshed out, but the same could be said of many things in NV.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 19:09

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I think all of the New Vegas DLC are stellar in their own way, aside from Honest Hearts, which is pretty anemic.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2018 19:31

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I do hope Sun Vulture will find a way to take it all with her.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2018 15:04

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

bafanada.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2018 21:27

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Check out Elijah's radio signal. I'm pretty confident that at originally, the Sierra Madre was going to be revistable like other DLC locations, and Elijah would have appeared as a hologram using those lines.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 22:49

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Some of Beatrix Russell's dialogue (pics and text) appears to be scrambled out of order.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2018 18:52

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Blizzard-style Legendary creatures were always a goofy and unwelcome addition to fallout imo, especially when, as in that gif, they also import the �this one is HUGE� element.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Aug 8, 2018

# ¿ Aug 7, 2018 19:47

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Given the origins of the "res" language, the abusive environment implied, and the other concepts discussed in the DLC, my guess would be that the School was one of these. If so, this definitely puts the depiction of other elements of the DLC in a different light.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2018 02:19

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Gravity Cant Apple posted:

I somehow never made this connection even though I'm native and my grandfather was sent to a residential school.

I want to emphasize that this is a guess, entirely of my own making. I can find the idea nowhere else online, at all!

# ¿ Sep 11, 2018 07:03

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

sniper4625 posted:

I never made the Rawls connection, and I doff my hat with the rest at that ending. Yowza.

Rawls? Is this related to the big weird philosophy influence/overarching metaphor going on across the span of Fallout NV?

# ¿ Sep 26, 2018 01:08

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

We had a discussion of this recently (and it gets argued periodically) in the main FONV games thread. I don't think there are any spoilers here, but if there are, let me know.

I'll avoid going into any detail here, but House doesn't fit the metaphors the game uses very well for the rest of its content. House and his Securitrons aren't really a part of the whole "East meets West, reliving cold war" metaphor. Even if the situation and some parts of Vegas match a third world nation, what with the ~~oil~~ I mean access to the Hoover Dam and the autocratic dictator thing, House's ideology doesn't square with that.

House is also much less trapped in the past compared with any of the other characters, factions, leaders, etc that are discussed in the game. The theme with every other character is letting go, forgetting/moving on from the tragedies of the past, avoiding making the same mistakes...and House is literally doing that, even if he's doing it by being a colossal dick.

With the NCR or the Legion, we're given pretty explicit "these people are imitating Old World Ideas, and this is going to cause them to fail via XYZ." Though he was set up as a Wizard of Oz metaphor on one level, and Howard Hughes on another, he's also the House in Vegas, the thing that has rigged the game and can't fail. House is a futurist with a several-hundred year game plan, and is so cloistered that aside from Benny and the player character, he's pretty much got every angle covered. No one but the player even knows House's long term goals, so there's no one to tell you what's wrong with them. This is made even worse because House is, even taking his ego into account, written to be ridiculously, absurdly competent compared to literally everyone else in the game. Dude made his own billions from scratch, ran the company that made most robotics in the world, and computers in the world, predicted the apocalypse, shot down most of the nukes targeting the region, and tamed the apocalypse from his fainting couch. Elon Musk he is not.

There was cut content for some sort of sidequest involving worming your way into House's security, and the process of getting to his isolation tank was originally going to be a vault-sized mini-dungeon unto itself. It's possible that if that material had been built out, we would have had a clearer sense of the problems and weaknesses of his ideology. As it stands, though, his weaknesses are a) he's got an ego the size of New Vegas, b) he's not literally omnipotent, just semi-omniscient, and c)

he's lunch. Plot Reasons and planned, cut security make House trivial to kill for player characters in New Vegas, who are absurdly overpowered. In my first playthrough I accidentally killed House because I didn't realize the initial monitor leading to his room would permanently make everyone hostile!

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Sep 29, 2018

# ¿ Sep 29, 2018 20:12

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The NCR is in the Mojave because of Hoover dam, not because of the Legion. They need the region's ~~oil~~ power, you see. It's simultaneously a portrayal of Cold War US and the US politics of the time of its creation (which are now beyond all parody).

Anticheese posted:

House also stops being a power once you remember that he has no infrastructure outside of a few casinos. He has killbots, sure, but no way to replenish any losses, build materiel, or generally re-settle the wasteland. He's also not showing any interest at all in the people other than knowing that, in some abstract sense, they're necessary for getting off the planet.

An upgrade that gives the Securitrons hands as the player watches them restore the old House factory would be way scarier, since House wouldn't just receive a 240% boost to his firepower - he would have not only the strongest industrial base in New Vegas, but a degree of control over it that autocrats only dream of.

While he might be fabulously wealthy, there's never any sense that the wealth is ever invested into his ambitions...Apart from his dream to own a complete snow globe collection. I think that House is imitating old-world values to his downfall there - he's stuck in the mindset of an investor, which isn't one that can work in this new world. He's caught between two forces of imperialism, and he took no responsibility for that.

House's resources, or lack thereof, is another piece of semi-cut content; the Platinum Chip also lets House restart the Lucky 38's self-sustaining reactor, which (in cut material) is indicated to be many times more powerful than any other power source, more than equivalent to the Hoover Dam. There is a cut bit (because it's way less impressive in-engine than intended) where after leaving the Fort, Victor approaches you and leads you to a cliff, where you see the entirety of Vegas go from "slightly lit" to "disney electric light parade". This also expands House's electronic reach across the entire region, and it's the reason he's confident in the rest of his development capabilities.

Ultimately House's weaknesses are the plot device agentic superiority of the player, Benny's betrayal, and the timing of the delivery of the Platinum Chip. The latter of these would be significant if they weren't the only times he is wrong, ever.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2018 20:16

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

David Corbett posted:

The parallels between the United States and the New California Republic are also far clearer than the parallels between the USSR and Caesar's Legion.

I can't get into the Legion's USSR parallels yet.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2018 05:51

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Say, if you have companion death turned on, can you chow down on your loved ones?

# ¿ Oct 19, 2018 17:26

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Hanlon really suffered from the weird pace of development. His actions and their outcomes don't match up with his intentions at all. I'm guessing (like with those computer logs) that Camp Golf is yet another rump of removed content/questlines.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2018 18:57

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I wonder if the Tesla-Beaton is named for Kate Beaton.

fake edit: wiki sez yes, though it's not properly cited.

also

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# ¿ Jan 29, 2019 05:46

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

PurpleXVI posted:

I remember what comes next, and it bloooooows.

Generally this DLC really suffers from "hmmm, we need the highest level enemies we can find! How do we make them really scary?" "We could just take normal enemies and give them tons of health and damage?" "Brilliant!"

Which contributes to making every fight take way too long while at the same time making it very easy for most characters to get one-shotted by some of the poo poo you'll be dealing with.

I agree, but it's also true that the constriants of an RPG with a lot of different character builds makes good endgame enemy design really tough.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2019 23:45

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Ulysses' vault was stocked with copies of Fallout 76. It's all overcompensation.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 16:21

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

While the idea of a speech battle with a complex, ideological character (who you can beat by revealing their hypocrisies) can be a good one and has been done before in the series, Ulysses is a particularly weak example. A lot of this is because a) the game heavily frames and favors Ulysses' perspective, making his weakness or fallibility implicit at most, and b) he's damned frustrating to listen to or even understand.

You could write Ulysses a lot less punchable by just losing the weird prophetic certainty framing that makes him come across as a smug edgelord. Uly being traumatized and searching for meaning is fine, and him having concocted a scheme to...test? to whatever courier six sort of works, and you can even preserve the weird Children of Tama overuse of metaphor to some limited extent. But a lot of Uly's dialogue is unnecessarily hard to parse, dropping subjects and shifting terms (notice how often he drops "I" from the start of a statement"). The net result is a character who takes effort to understand, talking down to you, forcing you into contrived moral choices, with a vocabulary of concepts that is noticeably the same as the game's authorial voice.

A more openly emotional, unbalanced Ulysses could still speak about the symbols of the old world and accomplish the same narrative goals, while being more sympathetic and less infuriating.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2019 17:01

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

good

I'd argue that Uly's weird unstated existentialism is also an ideology of sorts, it's just really poorly articulated and you wind up having to sort of play along with it- which, you know, doesn't help the whole gary stu perception. It doesn't help that absent the wordiness and abstraction of it, Uly's plan is really dumb and pointless. Yes, I know, traumatized, but I don't feel a lot of sympathy or depth to this You But Deeper Character who Challenges your Actions and has a Tragic Backstory and Symbolic Weapons. There's not enough there there beneath all the stylization. Basically,

Explosions posted:

eat ulysses plz

# ¿ Mar 29, 2019 01:37

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 22:49

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Fantastic LP, well done!

# ¿ Apr 4, 2019 02:38

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Let's Play Fallout: New Vegas Without a Big Iron on our Hip