Fallout: New Vegas

Good old Nik's logic. "You can blow up an entire inhabited city sitting on a nuke, but it's still worse to sell one person into slavery!" Literally the only Megaton survivor is Moira Brown, and she still winds up a ghoul for her trouble. Of course, I'm still not calling that one the worst decision. The worst one still has to be poisoning project purity, for the sheer scale of the killstreak you'd get for it.

I like how New Vegas has all these evil options you can pull. But you don't have to use them, hell you have a lot of neutral "enh why not" options as well.

I was trying to kill the Super Mutants who were a plague that not even the Brotherhood could stop through force of arms.

I kinda fucked up though by not realizing that by destroying or securing Vault 87 you don't need to go through the extreme measure of using the FEV on the Purifier. I admit that's my bad and I'll never do it again.

The Super Mutants don't get enough credit. When people talk about the strongest groups or factions in Fallout, they neglect the Super Mutants. The ones on the East Coast at least have tremendous numbers and Behemoths and Overlords and they fucking can wreck entire groups of Brotherhood.

edited 28th Sep '17 6:50:11 AM by Nikkolas

That's probably due less to their lack of actual strength/danger and more to their lack of goals/organization.

They seem to want to make more of themselves by using the FEV in Vault 87 but once the Lone Wanderer busts that up, they're kinda out of luck.

Not to say they're not still very dangerous, but they're too loose to be considered a power player, i guess.

, Their Enemy Chatter reveals that they're running low on FEV so they are already starting to lose the war of attrition, also i'm pretty sure the terminals on the Prydwen say they were exterminated (hopefully Fawkes and Uncle Leo are still around).

Nothing can kill Fawkes.

But I guess it's good the Brotherhood won the war with the Super Mutants. As I noted, the Super Mutants aren't really a high tier faction or anything. They had a good, long slugging match with the EC BOS and that's impressive.

So what are the odds the Bright Brotherhood succeeded in finding a new home after their Great Journey?

Provided you haven't slaughtered Novac, they do show up in the ending either to keep Novac independent or to allow many of them to escape unharmed in the evacuation from the Legion. So the good news is that they probably didn't, like, immediately all die in a fiery rockety explosion.

edited 28th Sep '17 6:06:25 PM by Lavaeolus

Sorry for random comments but been reading New Vegascharacter sheets.

As much as I hate Dead Money, Father Elijah is a great character. All the DLC have at least one really memorable character.

And on that note, reading his sheet made me glance at Veronica's. Apparently she is willing to support House because he reminds her of Elijah. Well that's convincing, I know who I'm backing next playthrough.

edited 28th Sep '17 8:46:31 PM by Nikkolas

Truth be told, I don't really remember Veronica ever really talking about House much, or comparing him to Elijah. The only lines I remember her giving about House were the gossipy conspiracy theories everyone has before you actually meet him, her disappointment in the Brotherhood not helping Freeside (as House ignores it entirely from lack of interest), and the joke about him "only [having] the two robot sex slaves".

Which isn't to say the line or something akin to it doesn't exist, because New Vegas is pretty big. But I also don't know if someone's inserting their own headcanon there.

edited 28th Sep '17 9:06:25 PM by Lavaeolus

*All* the characters will still back you if you side with House. I don't think he's anyone's first choice. Veronica saying that the crotchety old tech guy reminds her of Elijah sounds pretty plausible, but 'willing to support' isn't quite a ringing endorsement.

She liked Elijah and the Brotherhood, but she's pretty clear-eyed when it come to seeing their faults (up until they murder that whole Followers Outpost). That probably goes for House, too.

edited 28th Sep '17 9:35:25 PM by Unsung

...the Brotherhood can do that? I knew I was right to wipe them out.

That's a really fuckin' ballsy move, too. Attacking in numbers right there in a hub of NCR and House activity.

edited 28th Sep '17 9:29:40 PM by Nikkolas

If you convince Veronica to try and leave the Brotherhood, a group of Brotherhood members — there's no real indication that the Elder knows anything about them — assault the outpost she joins while you and her are away.

Note: the outpost is not the Fort. It's just a small outpost. House isn't going to be there.

edited 28th Sep '17 9:33:19 PM by Lavaeolus

Nah, not Old Mormon Fort. There's a little Followers outpost outside of town, on the way from Boulder City. If you try and help Veronica leave the Brotherhood and bring her knowledge to the Followers, they have you meet up there, maybe leary that something like this might happen. The Brotherhood sends three Paladins to gun down the four or five doctors and guards who are supposed to talk to you, and ambush you when you walk in the door.

edited 28th Sep '17 9:34:26 PM by Unsung

and Oh, that makes more sense. Thanks for the info.

Still, these Brotherhood guys seem like they're bad news. I knew I could trust President Eden.

She makes a good point that the BOS, apart from everything else, hasn't even succeeded at its mission of protecting people from themselves.

The Legion doesn't have laser weapons or power armor. yet look at what they've, erm, "accomplished." So basically,the BOS' entire mission is kinda a failure.

edited 28th Sep '17 10:13:48 PM by Nikkolas

That was my exact issue with the BOS, actually. Treating symptoms with no clue how the disease works.

What's interesting is that Bethesda and the makers of Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel all looked back at Fallout 1&2 and came away with the idea that these guys should be the heroes, but when Obsidian and thus many of the original devs from Black Isle finally got their hands on the franchise again, they immediately set about tearing down this noble idea the Brotherhood had of itself. The Brotherhood in FNV are dying out and they know it, yet they'll kill outsiders and each other rather than just admit defeat.

The Brotherhood started out as a wing of the US government. They're the same as the Enclave in that respect, yet the NCR far more closely resembles the country than either of the extremist factions who are supposedly trying to rebuild it.

edited 29th Sep '17 5:33:07 AM by Unsung

I've been watching a few videos from that guy I posted justnow and he has one about whyteh FO 4 Brotherhood is evil.

Bethesda tried to "remedy" things but if you wnt a headache, read the comments on his video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovDSvyS8WgQ

People are really bending over bakcward to justify everything the FO 4 BOS does. Some people at least have the good grace to just say the lead guy in FO 4 BOS is a shithead but others are saying everything is justified.

Danse was a Synth? He was awesome! ! And they fucking killed him? That demonstrates suicidal fanaticism, not ideological purity. What's worse, it's ingratitude and disloyalty. He did everything for the BOS and they murdered him or at least wnated him dead. I'm not sure.

I can forgive almost everything but I cannot forgive something like that.

edited 28th Sep '17 11:04:47 PM by Nikkolas

FO4 spoilers, in case you want to go through the context of that yourself: You can convince Maxson to spare Danse, but it is essentially by forcing his hand and making him realise that killing Danse means losing you. He still forces Danse to leave and never interact with the Brotherhood again, and the official word is that Danse was killed.

I mean, the fundamental problem there is, by the Brotherhood's laws, Danse is not alive, he does not feel. If they accept that they do owe Danse, that Danse is or was a true member of the Brotherhood, that Danse is not simply a machine following them out of blind programming, then their whole fundamental worldview (as far as FO4 goes) crashes. If you accept Danse should not be exterminated, that he does have a right to life, then the Brotherhood's position on synths is, no two ways about it, murder. Genocide, even.

Ya, sure. If anyone wants to follow anything up on what I said, feel free to quote me or just directly call me or whathaveyou; I'm following both threads.

edited 29th Sep '17 3:35:11 AM by Lavaeolus

Thank you for that. But I figure it be best if we moved all this to the FO 4 thread.

I am very much reminded of the story of Alan Turing, who saved potentially millions of lives by cracking the German enigma code, allowing the D-Day invasions to even be possible.

He was subsequently discovered to be homosexual and forced to undergo chemical castration, after which he committed suicide.

The kind of people who can betray their comrades this way....

They probably saw it as doing him a favour, is the twisted thing about it. People think sci-fi plots about brainwashing or forced surgery are far-fetched, but these are the kinds of things that happened in real life at the time.

That's an interesting layer of complexity about Danse, though. Maybe I didn't give Fallout 4 enough of a chance.

Worst part about Turing - the government only recently posthumously pardoned him for the "crime" of being homosexual and even went through a whole rigmarole of saying "well, it was the law at the time! We can't be retroactive."

Anyway, BOS in F: NV are at least tangentially aware they're obsolete. But they're basically just cos-players akin to the Legion. When you listen to them you realise that they're essentially rather pathetic.

Imagine if they were more than just hoarders and actually took that tech into NV - I like to think in my wild card ending, the courier is able to strong arm them in a way... but honestly, I do think they'd just rather die than let a single person with robots dominate...

Also, it's weird how in the NCR ending with the Brotherhood, the NCR GIVE the BH their power armour units... or did I imagine that? I got the impression they basically become an almost auxiliary arm of the NCR, akin to what the Rangers are.

You know, whatever your thoughts about the Great Khans, the NCR deciding to kill them after you got them to surrender peacefully is pretty fucked up.

I know you can talk the local commander out of doing it which is what I did but imagine if you didn't do that. The NCR would have killed a bunch of surrendering combatants.

NCR is Renegade, saying it now. No Paragon for you.

It was a trade. The Brotherhood get the NCR's salvaged armor (which doesn't even count as "powered" because its explictly just the metal and none of the energy) and in return the Brotherhood help patrol I-15 and Highway 95.

That is just one examples of how New Vegas by far has the best endings. The Courier can really decide the fate of a lot of people in the Mojave beyond just "this guy won because the PC helped them."

You can work with House as a brutal enforcer, a loyal hired gun, or a noble ally who brings stability and safety, just as one other example.