Fallout: New Vegas

No, as in 'I don't care about companions'. Not even bothering to interact with them. I mean, there's a difference between primarily using Boone, and using him to the exclusion of all else.

Cass was the best companion. That or LR ED-E.

Also I suppose, technically, the Brotherhood "asks" you to do something Anti-NCR when they have you get rid of that Ranger who is camped near their base. Mind you, this only happens if you go to their bunker without Veronica in your party.

In which case, you should kill them all anyway because they almost blew you up.

Also if you go near their bunker at night you are gonna get shredded by guards armed with Gatling Lasers. Man that sucked.

edited 24th Jun '15 9:23:17 PM by Nikkolas

The funny thing about Sarah Lyons is, if you send her into the chamber she dies. She literally has the least plot armour of anyone involved.

One thing that kind of sucks is if your playing New Vegas on anything besides a PC since you can't download mods. I have it on PS 3 and it's an awesome game, but I would love to have the mod where the Legion assassins don't constantly come after you {I have a low reputation with them since I went and wrecked their lives by killing Ceaser along with countless Legion members, not to mention I hate the Legion anyway}.

Speaking of which, a question I want to ask: What's the appeal in siding with the Legion anyway, unless your planning to double cross them and then proceed to get the Independent ending {I will admit, joining them and then betraying them for your own gain does sound fun}? If it's because some players want to be an evil bastard, you can still easily do that without joining them. I sometimes do evil things in the game if I benefit from it in some way {And sometimes just to be a cruel bastard, like killing certain really minor characters who I don't have to kill}, but Ceaser and The Legion are way too evil for my tastes. They don't even fall into the Evil Is Cool category IMO, with the possible exception of Legate Lanius. I don't mean to offend and I have no problem with anyone who actually did side with them, I'm just curious.

edited 25th Jun '15 7:46:28 AM by marston

I find the Legion to be Evil Is Cool - except for Caesar, he's a hypocritical asshat. But making Lanius into Caesar is a good way to turn the Legion into something worse - just a pillaging band of raiders without any of Caesar's (already somewhat limited) point. The Legion is very good at burning the world.

Also, as I've said quite a lot upthread, I wanted to see the more gray side of the Legion that Obsidian had intended to implement but ran out of time for.

edited 25th Jun '15 8:32:05 AM by Ramidel

So originally the Legion wasn't just going to be completely awful? Now I'm interested. Did Bethesda give out info on what the content would have been?

And yeah, I'm aware that Lanius is horrible too. Not to mention that I've heard he borders on Stupid Evil if he becomes The Legion's leader.

What's cool about the Legion? They're an oppressive fascist state that dress up in scavenged football gear.

Even if you like being evil that's basically the least cool kind of evil you can be.

Use this mod, it makes shooting them more fun any way

It gets boring shooting sports players after a while.

NCR Equivilent

I finished Cass's companion quest. Reverse pickpocketing a live dynamite stick is fun.

I'm having trouble triggering Boone's companion quest. I already got him to say how he knew his wife died, but I can't get past that.

Also, the NCR Rescue Radio is buggy. I laughed after walking through the gate with all the robots, and they shot down the NCR Ranger because she didn't have a passport.

The appeal for me is really fun quests and a cool backstory that's superior to the the NCR's "we left the vault and started a town." And I like the football gear. It makes sense. I like their scavenger look a lot.

@marston: We've got Word of God from JE Sawyer, as well as in-game discussion from Cass and Raul.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Caesar%27s_Legion has a word from Sawyer on some of Caesar's reasoning behind enslaving women, along with how the Legion operates in "home territory." They're still awful people, but it does a good job of explaining why reasonable people might consider the Legion the best option - though that statement would have more teeth if Cass were right about the NCR's dick not being long enough for the Mojave.

Is Cass wrong about that? The way we see it, they really do have issues keeping control. At least with the Legion around. I suppose if you take the Legion out of the equation they'd have enough resources to go around, but for now they're too focused in one area to fix everything else.

Not any beter, they shall still meet the wrong end of my AMR and Boone's .308

Cass is very right when saying the NCR's dick is not long enough for the Mojave. Brahmin Barons like Gunderson alone can fuck up people unchecked as is seen in quests, the communications between the military are so fucked up and improverly supervised that even the most senior offier of them thinks they are so fucked that he is willing to commit suicide, the communication depends severely on the long-15, the fact the Hoover Dam is run inefficiently, and the NCR has done little to gain the trust of the locals...

You never fuck with the locals. That will fuck it up in the long run.

And despite all that, the NCR is still probably one of the best options for the Mojave. But they are overextended. Grotesquely so.

She is right. Everyone in game says the NCR is stretched thin. They're expanding for the sake of expansion and it's retarded and doomed to make the whole thing collapse.

"Greed runs rampant. The government is corrupt, accepting bribes from Brahmin barons and landowners, to the detriment of citizens. The NCR is a loose conglomerate of individuals looking out for themselves. It's lost virtue. No one cares about the collective, the greater good. It's not built to last."

edited 26th Jun '15 8:49:21 AM by Nikkolas

Only if you do everything in their questline proper and do the sidequests properly the NCR stay there in force and end up being stronger than ever.

The NCR are a hell of a lot more powerful and stable than most people give them credit.

You solve their current problems, but not the underlying issues. But that is more than what is achieved with the Legion, or Independent Endings, so the NCR remains one of the best options. They are powerful, and they are organized, just not quite enough to have enough of a hold over the Mojave to guarantee its safety and prosperity.

I beg to differ on how bad the Independent ending is if you are willing to do ALL the work necessary to get it as good as possible. There's no Fiends left post-game, because you've killed them all from their leaders on down, and made some good NCR coin for doing so. There's also no Great Khans left in the Mojave - they're either all dead at your hand, at the Legion's or at the NC Rs. Or, even better, they've buggered off out of the Mojave and built themselves an empire in Wyoming.

All the minor raiding gangs like the Scorpions and Vipers are also dead, but they're usually targets of opportunity rather than anything you get paid for by a faction. Freeside's main gang, the Kings, have made a peace deal with the NCR that stops that running sore causing any more trouble. The Followers of the Apocalypse are so better off thanks to their deal with the Garrett twins, and the recovery from addiction of their two top tech guys, that the ending slide saying things went to shit after an Indy ending make no sense whatsoever. None. And I'll probably keep on saying that til they nail down the lid of whatever pine box I end up in.

The Powder Ganger's main two camps, at the NCRCF and Vault 19, have been eliminated as a factor - with all the population of the former being shot the crap out of - seriously FUCK those guys, and the latter surrendering to the NCR after all their access to sulphur for bangy stuff gets taken away.

And, best of all, the ordinary civpop are no longer caught in a crossfire between the NCR and Sallow's forces. Because the Legion are all dead and the NCR have ran back to California with their tails firmly between their legs after their humiliation at Second Hoover.

So Dust continues. There is a glitch that crashes the game whenever I try to use a modded gun.

Even with the sidequest of the garret twins, the followers of the apocalypse end up serving way too many people that they cannot handle. The Followersare the best organization out there and the most altruistic, but they are not as big as NCR, or the Legion. It would be like leaving the healthcare of a nation to an NGO.

Problem is, you remove a few raider groups, but are setting up nothing to rpevent any more from coming out. What is going to stop more junkies from flowing to setting up on the vault the Fiends used to be, warlike tribes to settle where the Khans were, or the Kings to suddenly decide they want the squatters out after all?

Not the Securitrons. Not the Centurions, and not the Rangers. Without any government, the population is left to their own means, and given that, they will do exactly what is the problem: radicalized individual tribal identities that will devolve into war sooner or later.

Did you miss the massive army of Securitron Mark I Is, some of which would be easily enough to do a patrol routine in Outer Vegas? I'd also like to see the raider gang that could take Vault 3 or Vault 19 from those - that's if they even got close enough to see the front doors of them before they got eradicated by intense grenade and missile fire. And what would form the warlike tribes when anyone who would be a part of one has seen what happens when you piss off the Courier and his buddies? Indeed you've slaughtered the most dangerous one wholesale, as well as all its top leaders, given that Sallow rolled the dice and took all his best commanders into the Mojave with him because he was soo convinced that New Vegas would be his Rome.

As for the Followers, what you give them is a place to stand and build from, as well as a secure supply source - there's no way that folks are going to stop drinking at the Atomic Wrangler any time soon, so the source chemicals for their medicines are always available. And since the Kings have their position secured, since the NCR are no longer shooting at them, there's far less gunshot wounds and other trauma to deal with.

The only major loose end is the Brotherhood of Steel chapter in Hidden Valley, and they've made the mistake of letting the Courier know where they are, and he or she knows a lot of folks with artillery and air support, should they really get on the nerves of the one person they should make a point of avoiding doing that to.

The followers struggling bit was no headcanon at all. Again, it is the slide endings, with all sidequests completed in their favor, when gone independent. They cannot handle the massive influx of attention that they get because they are not possibly prepared for it, Garrets or not.

And the patroling thing is indeed, headcanon, for the Securitrons and Outer Vegas is controlled not by the Secuitrons but by their individuals. That is the whole point of the independent ending. Independence. Primm and Goodsprings and such get legion, securitron, or others if you go with them but if a securitron army ends up overtaking them in an independent ending that is not independent ending at all...that is pretty much dictatorship ending which is not implied at all from the ending slides.

The Securitrons in independent are the police of the Strip. And while the Courier can have Yes Man drag them elsewhere, he is but one person that cannot possibly administrate everything that is going on all over the mojave at once. Like people settling in places. Using drugs. Drug traffic. Market control.

Trade fostering (in fact any trade would severely depend on that the courier and securitron army would allow a heavy level of independence to people, instead of shoving securitrons down their gullets whenever anything he/she dislikes goes on) would depend heavily on other people forming groups but there would be no way to give this any regulation.

This are stuff that The Legion,the NCR, and House already have established and planned. Independent leaves the administration in the hands of scavengers.

How about one cyborg in pre-war armor who's already killed entire packs of Deathclaws, who has full access to the technology of Big MT, and who single-handedly exterminated the Mojave Brotherhood because they couldn't get their shit together and stop robbing travelers? The Klaus Wulfenbach method of maintaining peace and order in the Mojave is entirely in-keeping with the capabilities of one Courier and a bunch of Mark II Securitrons.

That said, as noted, according to the good endings, you can fix the NCR's problems and make their dick long enough to police the Mojave properly, while thwarting their more stupid leaders from doing stupid things. Their horrible overextension is just quest fodder for you. Furthermore, one thing that the Legion can do easily, and the NCR apparently can do after Hoover Dam, is keep the roads policed and safe. The player can get rid of the Khans, the Fiends and the Powder Gangers, but not the Freeside Thugs, the Jackals and the Vipers - this kind of implies the limits of the Courier's ability to keep the roads clear. You can ensure that no major raider gangs spring up without getting a Courier dropped on them, but stopping minor bandits requires boots on the ground that you don't have. If you're willing to accept that caveat, then the towns on the road to Vegas can flourish, and Vegas can remain a relatively peaceful collection of towns; any tribe that gets the idea to become the next Nipton...will become the next Nipton.

I think the NCR losing in the Mojave does it better than them winning. I think supporting the NCR directly is encouraging their behavior and not fixing any of their internal issues like Kimball and Moore.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the only reason that the Legion CAN do such things is because their solution is to simply kill everyone. It might be effective, but it's brutal, and rather reminiscent of the very raiders they slaughter.