Fallout: New Vegas

I like NCR the most. A problem I have though, is that they don't really give a character motivation for joining any faction other than House. House saved your life, the player has an obvious motive to want to continue working for him. NCR, Legion? They don't.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Very much yes, House (and Yes Man) are the most obvious choices, and could even have worked as a binary narrative. Then again, I like the game's hands-off approach, where Fallout 3 forced you along one path. I think it would be annoying to have to deal with owing the Legion and NCR something.

Me and my friend's collaborative webcomic: Forged Men

Eh, character motivations are somewhat holding your hand. It's fine to have an impetus for the central story, but all they need to do for the side factions is build their world enough to let you see their philosophy, and let you come up with the motivations for joining them.

You support the NCR because you believe in their ideals. For all its flaws, you believe in the two-headed bear, and in a government whose ideals resemble those of the Noughties-era USA of our world (as opposed to the dystopian-Fifties USA of the Enclave). It's not really a faction to support if you're a pure mercenary.

House and Wild Card offer a better deal (depending on whether you think you can profit more from Wild Card than from working under House) for someone whose loyalty goes to the highest bidder. House even makes a better offer than Caesar if all you want is money and hot sex slaves, since unlike the Legion, he'll also supply you with chems and doesn't care about your sexuality. (No, House doesn't give you slaves. He subcontracts that business to the Gomorrah.)

Supporting the Legion either makes sense if you want a license to kill and plunder with impunity (this is not the same as Stupid Evil, just extremely barbarian), or if you think that their organizational structure and methodology are the best way to establish a functional post-apocalyptic society.

I despise hypocrisy, unless of course it is my own.

I believe the "best" for the Mojave are House > NCR > Independent > Legion in that order.

I just think the weakness of the NCR is its overextension, and even if they took over new Vegas, they still do not have the means or the technology for communication or counters of corruption to make sure it's not going to end up a place that people will fuck over for profit, political or economical. But other than that the NCR is good. It has a lot of good people. Problem is, it takes only a few among them to be awful people to make life a living hell for many, many others.

House also involves less loss of life: His army is robotic. More people will be available in New Vegas to do other stuff other than fighting and whoever wants to pick up a gun has to think "Is this gun enough to fight robots with rocket launchers?"

Independent...is just the same. With no one in power, I honestly wonder what is keeping bands from forming up again? The Courier and his robo army won't extend beyond the strip; they can't. The NCR is not welcome anymore, and there's no venue for jobs unless we assume the Courier will now spend the rest of his life doing administrative work to see who or who is not selling drugs to 6 year olds. AND that he/she would be effective at it. But for all we know, all it takes is someone aiming a gun at the courier for him to go into a months long vendetta against this person, no?

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

I just wanted to complete my delivery.

There is also a "personal motivation" by which I mean finding someone you think is worth following.

This is something I don't think a lot of people understand or at leas thtey don't want to understand. Yet it has shaped human history for ages upon ages.

My grandmother told me something growing up that I have, as I've gotten older, come to recognize as a very true fact. "it's not what you say but how you say it."

Jesus wants to save your soul and all of humanity? Don't think he'd have gone over as big if he kept calling everyone a motherfucker. "I Have A Dream" probably wouldn't have been as iconic if Dr. King had said "I done have a dream about how all us be equalized no matter we wops or honkies or redskins."

It doesn't matter if you preach life and peace or war and death. What matters is if you have the charisma and the vocabulary and the sheer force of will to lead. If you have these traits, people will follow you and they will die for you.

I saw no one in the NCR worth dying for. And I guess it's part of my cynical nature but I would never die for an abstract ideal but I would die for a person.

edited 26th Apr '15 4:34:27 AM by Nikkolas

If you want to go by that, I can't think of a single person in the Mojave worth following.

You have a cold, unfeeling bureaucracy, a distant businessman from the past, and a psychotic manchild, and the option to say "sod them all, I'll Start My Own".

But then, my mindset is also much more one of nations and ideals, and I would sooner die for the ideal of America than most of the individual people within it.

edited 26th Apr '15 4:44:18 AM by Balmung

Not gonna lie, this sounds more like my kind of saviour.

That doesn't mean they'd be right to follow them, and that doesn't mean just because someone has a good vocabulary you should buck up right behind them. If you have reason, you should be able to form ideals, and you should be able to key out your future in things. Ignoring these abilities and simply following whoever seems most in charge, whoever seems most commanding, is embracing the mind of a lesser animal.

And sacrificing yourself for no ideal but instead a single man who would never do the same for you, is short-sighted to say the least.

If you want to win people over, you should watch how you say things. But if you want to join up with a side, you should look past that, and watch what they're saying.

It's a valid motivation for a character to be charmed and suckered, but I would hope your own mindset is at least a bit wider to see more in what's going on.

edited 26th Apr '15 5:08:09 AM by Lavaeolus

It's all about recognizing your limitations. I struggled for years to find a belief that I could follow. For a long time I was a Marxist. A Leninist to be specific. Then I bounced to the other side of the spectrum and was entertaining ideas of Fascism for quite some time. (the original Italian variant, which was free of racial ideology. In fact a lot of forms of Fascism have nothing to do with racism)

Then after I gave up on politics I tried to find a religion. No luck there either.

I thought about why I couldn't find anything I truly could commit myself to and eventually I realized it's because everything is wrong. I know everything is wrong because, no matter what you believe in, you'll find a ton of people who say it is. Moreover, a lot of these people are far more intelligent and learned than you are. Okay, well, forgive me. I'm not trying to insult you. I should have said they are more intelligent and learned than I am. But you get my point.

Pick a school of philosophy or a form of government or a spiritual belief. Books have been written about why it is wrong by people who have spent decades studying the matter. People with PH.D's in history will laugh at Marxism or scoff at Fascism or list all the holes in Republicanism. I'm in no position to dispute or argue with them.I have a high school education and even if I went to college tomorrow I'd never know as much as them.

Same goes for if I wanted to find a philosophy I could believe in or a religion too. Centuries of scholars and geniuses exist to utterly disprove and shit on all of it.

So, if everything is flawed and I recognize that, there is no point in wasting my time with it. It is all the verdy definition of YMMV.

People though...I guess you could say they're no less subjective. Depending on who you ask Napoleon was a great man or proto-Hitler. Then again, in another century or two, Hitler probably won't be the "Hitler" anymore. He'll just be another guy who killed a bunch of people nobody cares about. That's one of the more fascinating trends in history. The further away you get from something, the less people care.

But I'm getting off-topic. To make a long story short, I'm in no position to debate ideology with anyone. I understand my limitations and I'm comfortable with them. Faith in a person is much less easily shaken though. Maybe that person is "wrong" but I'd still give everything for them assuming they earned my respect and trust.

I'd go with the NCR myself for these reasons. They are the only faction trying to change things to be more positive which is difficult instead of looking out for just them and theirs, they want to instill basic rights for everyone and avoid a lot of the racism and sexism of the old world, and their troops aren't obsessive loyalists who preech ideology all day long.

The Legion however is ultimately looking out just to cause pain and misery because that is what they believe in. Caesar may not but it's how he got the Legion under his thumb. Slavery, Crucifixion, Rape, Slaughter, these are things we know of the Legion. Each and every soldier is indoctrinated.

It isn't just that the Legion is less practical than the NCR in terms of region holding. It's also how their troops are, Manny and Boone were never killed for any form of failure and never had assassins sent after them for leaving. Joshua Graham can recount first hand what Caesar did to him for failure and insubordination.

Those are my reasons at least why I go NCR.

NCR spreads itself too thin. As a vacation spot for its off duty soldiers and touring citizens, the Strip is great! But an NCR occupation? They have enough issues back home without trying to grab more land. As long as House is willing to sell energy back to them, and is willing to listen to suggestions from his top agents? He's probably the BEST thing for the Mojave.

Less "cynical" and more "gullible", I'd say.

If you say so. Feel free to die for something as meaningless as "freedom" but the only thing worth dying for in my life is my girlfriend or my family.

There;s a difference between caring about the people you love and a ruler.

For all intents and purposes, dying for a president, or a caesar or a king is just as meaningless as dying for some abstract concept.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

So, I'd just like to point out that I went through the same "looking for a philosophy" phase that Nik did, starting with an adolescent fascination with communism, and then with modern liberalism (because that's what all the girls in high school believed), and then gradually becoming more and more right-ist minus the religion bits (because of that quote about being liberal/conservative and the prescence/lack of heart/brain before/after the age of thirty). The conclusion I got out of it is that philosophy is for salons and coffee shops, it's what someone will actually do is how you judge them. Have no faith except in what you can observe and extrapolate, utilizing respected peers as sounding boards when appropriate (that is, most if not all the time).

So, with that in mind, House all the way, because he seems like a Mojave version of Lee Kuan Yew, the only statist I ever admired.

Really, if you want to support an authoritarian type, how is House not better than Caesar in ever which possible way? Especially when Caesar apparently knows enough Roman history to know how they were founded, and yet insists on doing it all out of order and discarding all the good parts of Rome.

Following an ideology or a person will be, without a doubt, a doomed venture. The NCR is rife with corruption, the Independent ending leaves too many loose ends (on purpose) to wreak havoc, and House can and has slipped up in the past (Benny, the Chip, and if you do not ally with him: The Courier).

So strip everything. Strip the ideals and analyze things individually. Fuck ideology. If you hear someone speak to you and say "I am doing this for FREEDOM!" or "I am doing this for THE EMPEROR!" as he stabs a child, this does not make the stabbing of the child ok in any way.

Analyze the events. The actions. Not the words.

And in that sense, any conclusion of "this systematic crucifying, slavery, raping, and mysoginy is a good thing" is frankly, blind, specially if the sole reason behind it is to find a banner under which to cozy yourself to. "It's not murder/rape/slavery because X-ism says that..." is bullshit. Fuck religion. Fuck ideology. Fuck people. Look at the actions.

True, none of the four ending choices are in any way GoldenEndings, but this does not mean that just because none of them is perfect, they are all equally as bad.

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

I still think NCR is the best answer and that's only with a lot of effort.

You are insane. The NCR soldiers preach ideology all day long.

The ideology of hoping there would be more gambling, and how patrolling the mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

Mojave's a hot place dude. And really who goes to Vegas just to patrol?

Yup, they do the loose ends thing on purpose because "Fuck you, you pissant little nation builder, we're not letting you rebuild the Mojave." We try to improve the Mojave in general, and they backstab us. Give us enough power at Helios to run NCR territory, but not enough to bring the Mojave back online? Assholes. Give us an army of robots but not the ability to make more or send them out to secure the Mojave from raiders? Double assholes.

I think the NCR is the second best option.

I just think they are spread too thin. It's just that it leaves way too many holes open to deal with them effectively, with no motivation for the people to actually listen to this loosely connected line of authority while creating resentment with taxes, and no way to monitor this, not to mention risk of lives (NCR soldiers are flesh and blood) it is just a doomed venue.

Eventually, the NCR could be better than House. But as they are right now, too many political interests would potentially make the mojave a playground for political interests, as it already is to Kimball.

I think the NCR benefits a lot more from a House-controlled Vegas. The NCR citizens would have a safe haven to tourist in, there would be prosperous, beneficial trade between the two of them, there would be no bureaocracy attached to this further trading, there would be more electricity from a better run Hoover Dam, and corruption with the New Vegas overlord would be nigh impossible when individual corporations or Caravans try to sneak in something. Add to this the fact that now there would be a HUGE buffer zone of safety from everything East of The Mojave as a line of defense for the NCR that they would not have to hold, and bear absolutely no risk of death.

And the people of the Mojave have a ruler that is not overly bureaocratic but provides venues for health and education (Even if he does not institute them himself), jobs, but more importantly, offers safety.

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

I think Vegas more than anywhere else gets a ruler. Vegas is protected by Securitrons, Vegas gets safety. Vegas is the shining beacon meant to lead humanity to the stars. House's own rule, while controlling in some ways, also has his pretty laissez-faire attitude which leaves the only real healthcare to the Followers — who are swamped as-is, so this will be hell for them and they probably won't be able to keep up with demand.

It may hurt the NCR for a bit as their stretched, but ultimately the NCR probably provide more protection to the Mojave as a whole than House. The Legion do offer a lot of stability and protection for those who don't resist, though their medicine/general-technology isn't exactly advanced and to a large extent people of the Mojave would prefer the current chaos over the Legion's brand of rule.

Of course, House's rule, in spite of his "Old World" sense, is focused largely on progress, and he's got the best technology — he could even release ways of making certain people immortal. He very well could carve out a future for mankind in general, though I expect it'll come with a pricetag, so how much will that actually benefit the Mojave? Still, if everyone else is just offering people regurgitations of the past in a post-apocalyptic setting, who else will move things forward for mankind in general? So, arguably, that's still going for him. No one's perfect in Vegas, which is probably to its credit.

edited 27th Apr '15 3:57:40 PM by Lavaeolus

In respect to the followers thing I agree, the brunt of the thing would befall on them.

However, it is precisely why I prefer House over the NCR for health issues. If you notice, the NCR is expansionist yet overstretched. As such (and this is seen for example in the unmarked quest of the farm) they have health only if you are serving them. So you must either be in the army, or a settler, to get any healthcare from the NCR. And if you want to be an army member or a settler member then the resource has got to be put to use. And this means the NCR will soon have to start looking into either expanding more to provide these jobs...or not hire anyone as either leaving them to their own means anyways.

House has enough knowledge, and the motivation (not wanting fly infested corpses in Vegas) to simply share what he knows with the Followers. And that will help the Followers immensely. With security in The Strip and no taxation or rampant crime, The Followers at Mormon Fort could even become a learning and education center, where they would not just provide healthcare...but also create new doctors.

The NCR would quell this opportunity with taxation. The Legion just crushes it, and independent gives absolutely no chance for this to happen.

Healthcare wise, this is why I think House is better for the Mojave. More doctors. More learning. More resources alloted to something other than the army and farming. Not saying farming is not important, just talking about available personnel.

In other news...I managed to install mods on my game! HUZZAH!

Got the EVE, and New Vegas Weather effects.

edited 28th Apr '15 10:27:11 AM by Aszur

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes

So, did anyone play this game and get the urge to visit these places for real at some point, before they get nuked into wasteland in 62 years?

Because I *really* want to go to Zion right now.