Fallout: New Vegas

I mean, you have shortened House's life by a significant degree. Depriving someone of life-extending medical care, especially if they were already receiving said care, isn't what I'd call pacifism. Although defense of others could come into it as well.

Killing the Ghost People could count as a Mercy Kill because they are mindless undying shells of their former selves. They aren't really people anymore, if anything they kind of sound like they are suffering.

Yeah, the whole Mr. House thing is always dodgy. There's no path in New Vegas that really keeps your hands completely clean: you have to eliminate House one way or the other to clear the way for anyone else, and House won't settle for anything less than the Brotherhood's destruction.

In defense of my character: she knew House was planning on making some sort of move with his Securitrons in the battle, that Moore would likely send her own forces to deal with him if she didn't intervene, and she didn't know ahead of time that disabling House's stuff would ultimately involve limiting his future lifespan to a year at most. It was the best of a bad sea of options, and she still avoided outright killing him in the moment — even if you can argue this alternative isn't really that much more merciful.

I'd be hesitant here to view my character as exactly the greatest pacifist ever. She has a very specific (except when not) philosophy that occasionally sounds suspiciously like someone trying to game their kill stat to 0.

I could probably justify it in-character, but I wouldn't be able to actually complete a no-kill run of it, which is half the fun. Though Sue refuses to kill things like deathclaws, such is her commitment to the continuation of life, so even then. She really doesn't like personally removing life. It's a thing.

edited 21st Apr '17 10:26:00 AM by Lavaeolus

I count a run-through of Dead Money wasted if I don't end up trapping Elijah in the vault. Since I'm doing the DLC in random order this time I've got a while to wait.

I don't like trapping him. I'd rather kill him and loot his gun, since I never find other gauss rifles. I mean, why give him a Karmic Death if the unkarmic one benefits me more?

That's what console commands are for. If you're not on PC, then Elijah's gauss rifle may be the only one you can get, but I prefer ballistic weapons anyway, so it's not an option I'd go for.

I don't actually use it either, it's just because when it comes to guns, I Gotta Catch 'Em All.

Though, speaking of the console, poofing a Guass Rifle + all mods + eleven hojillion MFCs into my hand the next time I start DM could be fun. Or at least interesting. Can't detract from the point any more than the extremely powerful, if unreasonably inaccurate, BAR already does.

Would you guys say the second most popular faction choice is Yes Man?

I was talking with some people elsewhere about the necessity of choice in an RPG, even the ones you might consider petty or stupid because that's vital to making a game for everyone. Your wisdom is someone else's idiocy and vice versa.

Anyway, i was curious to see what is the minority position on NV. Unsurprising it was Legion but Independent being second to NCR and both beating House did surprise me. Now, a couple polls with a few hundred replies can hardly be said to be conclusive but NCR and Independent destroying House and Legion fascinates me.

I wonder if the common denominator is "freedom."

I feel like we've been here before.

NCR and Independent are both characterized by a degree of democracy; mostly literal in the former and "do as you will" type of it in the latter. By comparison, House is an unabashed autocrat/technocrat with no desire for democracy, at least as far as governing is concerned.

Whether Independent is actually better than House is a matter of opinion. I don't personally think so, but that's up for everybody to decide themselves.

Yes we have been here before. I'm relatively new to the fandom and even I've talked about this a ton.

I was just wondering if Independent is the second most popular choice, not appraising its merits.

Part of it is probably also the fact that the NCR very much resembles the IRL USA, and with most buyers of Fallout being American, siding with America with the Serial Numbers Filed Off is natural for many of them.

Furthermore, autocracy is... divisive here and perhaps a little less comfortable to talk about in the current political climate. We (broadly speaking) don't like it, at least when we can easily see it, such as when it's imposed from outside (such as by House and Caesar), but we also ignore it when it actually comes to us from within our system because America is exceptional and It Can't Happen Here.

If the popularity rankings are in fact NCR > Independent > House > Legion, I wouldn't exactly be surprised.

edited 3rd May '17 2:24:02 AM by Balmung

That ranking is what I've seen from my experience. I think NCR/House/Independent are all fairly popular but none overwhelmingly so, because all of them have drawbacks. I wouldn't describe any of them as 'golden'.

That's the idea. There's no pure golden ending. Just endings that leave more people alive than dead, or endings that kill more people than others. That's why I prefer open ended games. I don't want to be told the ending of the story. I want to make it happen by the force of my own effort.

In a hypothetical scenario where your Courier actually doesn't survive two bullets to the head...

What happens to the Mojave? Which major players make up the difference? How do things implode without your Courier affecting things? Which dam breaks first? How many people get screwed?

House never gets the Platinum Chip so he's out of the running right off the bat in the No Courier hypothetical.

The Legion should win the Mojave. Oliver is incompetent, there's another NCR officer actively sabotaging their efforts, there's the frumentari at the base, and Lanius has the strategy to get Legion troops into the Dam.

The NCR has nothing going for it in the Mojave and everything going against it.

Of course Caesar might die - does he die of his tumor if you never go to see him? That doesn't make sense to me. I figure he'd kidnap a doctor or something.

But alive or dead, the Legion will break for several reasons. If Caesar lives and doesn't expand into NCR Territory, the Legion Empire might survive. But he will try to expand and he will fail. And if he dies before he can transform the Legion into a genuine empire, then that's it for the Legion.

I guess NCR wins the war but loses the battle. The Legion has the most to gain and lose and that's all very iffy.

edited 3rd May '17 5:31:29 AM by Nikkolas

No matter what happens, even if you've got a living and pro-Legion Courier the NCR is going to take the Mojave in the long run.

They're too powerful and too stable

Making all the choices equally grey was apparently one of the design goals with FNV. In interviews, the devs have mentioned that they regret the Legion not being greyer than they are. None of your options are supposed to be golden, and they're all supposed to have some merit.

I don't much like House, but as far as actually repairing some of the damage done by the War and the centuries of desolation that followed, he does seem to get the best ending if you support him. Of course you have to kill everyone in Hidden Valley along the way. There's a lot of cold blood on your hands along that road, seems like. Carries a high cost to one's soul, etc.

I ultimately went Wild Card, though wanting to keep Vegas free sometimes seems selfish, unless the Families, Followers, and Khans really can gain some traction and start rebuilding civilization the way the other three factions are trying to.

I think a Wild Card on good terms with the NCR is probably better for Vegas than NCR running things outright.

The NCR might turn out okay in the long run, but the NCR as they are in the present is a crooked, belligerent, incompetent mess. Let them come back later. Maybe they'll have mended some in the meantime.

The NCR's got a good model, if you've got the patience and are willing to put in the work.

edited 3rd May '17 12:10:49 PM by Unsung

The NCR is a larger and more stable force, so even loss in the short term means victory in the long term.

As demonstrated in this video.

Yes, fundamentally, the NCR will win that fight, as they have far more resources and manpower than any of the other factions. The Legion cannot remain politically stable in the long term; history has provided ample evidence of that. New Vegas, for all its glimmer, is stuck in a city-state mentality and has no capacity to expand. It will always only be an isolated enclave no matter what House thinks.

It'll be years before the Mojve is a viable NCR state, but it's possible.

The irony is that the NCR is basically Rome and the Legion is Carthage. The latter can win as many brilliant tactical successes as they want, but the former can just keep raising another army and come back for more with the battlecry Flagstaff Delenda Est, and the latter lacks the same ability to recover again and again and come back for yet another round.

It's rather ironic given this that the Legion consciously adopts Roman imagery, whereas the NCR is basically modeled on the United States.

The writers did make the Legion a little too black for my tastes. I suppose the main reason I oppose them intellectually (as opposed to viscerally) is that history has borne out that the political model that Caesar is trying to build cannot survive in the long run. Neither can House's technological dictatorship, nor the quasi-libertarian ideology of New Vegas. The NCR is based on the only successful political model that we know of, so I side with the historical winner.

That said, the Fallout-verse does speculate that representative democracy fell apart in nuclear war, but that is such an aberrant datum that it's hard to fit into any historical model.

I always like to imagine, when I play sandbox RPG games like this (Fallout, The Elder Scrolls), that my character becomes some sort of invincible god-like figure with the power to warp causality itself thanks to Save Scumming, amassing unbelievable combat power and vast wealth, and thus eventually builds a cult of personality focused on their whims.

edited 3rd May '17 7:23:26 AM by Fighteer

The US wasn't even a democracy anymore years before the great war.

It was still pretending to be one, though, so you can understand why people connect democracy to the Great War.

True enough.

What would we call the Fallout Pre-War America if it's not a proper democracy at all?