Fallout: New Vegas

To all you old-school fans and folks who're curious about the old: the first Fallout is being offered for free on Steam until September 30 11:59PDT.

Is there anyone in the Mojave who could stop the Boomers bombing them to hell?

Maybe I'm just looking for more justifications for my extreme hatred of the group but helping them get air superiority seems like it could backfire spectacularly.

The Brotherhood's bunker was probably built to survive nukes, so they probably could win a war with the Boomers.

But why would you ever want to stop the Boomers from carrying out their right to bear and detonate nuclear warheads?

To be honest, I'm more inclined to help the Boomers, considering they're arguably the least problematic faction out of all of them in New Vegas, both minor and major.

The Boomers mostly just want to be left alone. Of course, they could turn into a conquering army somewhere down the line— it happened to the Brotherhood, after all— but that's true of any group of people. The punishment's got to follow the crime. And the Boomers are a pretty good example of how diplomacy can work.

They say that NCR salvaged power armour strips out all the motors from inside, but it always looked like you'd kind of need at least some hydraulics just to walk around in the thing. They'd probably strip out all the things they couldn't repair— pre-war microtechnology and fusion power, the stuff where the Brotherhood really is one of the few groups capable of maintaining it.

The thing about the NCR is that their best armour, combat armour and the rangers' vests and masks, is all well beyond their ability to replicate. They literally don't have the technology to make more. All the combat armour in the games is hundreds of years old at this point.

edited 30th Sep '17 11:45:40 AM by Unsung

The NCR has lots of guns and they have vertibirds (and helicopters are actually pretty dangerous to fixed-wing aircraft, even when the latter has missiles and can go faster than sound). House has a shitload of robots with missiles and lasers and has something or other that stopped most of the nukes pointed at Vegas. So both of them could probably stop a lone B-29 if they had to.

Yeah but they would probably only do that after someone got bombed. At least the NCR wouldn't be able to call in their own aircraft until afterward.

Also, new comment, sorry. Is Yes Man being a Starscream complete fanon? I just don't trust him.

He also REALLY plainly wants to call you an idiot if you destroy the Secuitron army and go Independent.

Yes Man is programmed to obey you. Even if he wanted to, he can't betray you. (and from a Doylist perspective, you need to have him around in case you lock yourself out of the other three endings to finish the game)

Well, it is extremely counterproductive. What would be your end goal, in that situation? Because you're not going to be able to hold the Dam if it's you just standing in the middle of it with a machete, growling at anyone who comes near. You're giving up your own personal army without really having anything to replace it with.

That being said, it sure sounds like Yes Man is plotting against you when he talks about his 'upgrades'. Word of God would have it that no, he's just ensuring nobody uses him against you the way you used him against Benny, so maybe that particular tone was just Dave Foley reading his own take into the character.

Though I wouldn't have said no to some post-game DLC where you had to take back the Strip from Yes Man, myself.

Edited by Unsung on Oct 19th 2018 at 12:42:33 PM

Maybe you're playing some kind of Luddite Courier. Or, maybe a better way to put it is you agree with the Legion's "don't grow overly dependent on technology" ideas but disagree with, well, everything else for obvious reasons.

You don't want Vegas enslaved to machines or to feel like you are dependent on these machines to rule.

The DLC's all add up together in a variety of interesting ways. Honest Hearts and Lonesome Road might push you towards Independent Vegas because they tell stories of "mini civilizations" that can grow outside of the reach of empires like the Legion or NCR. Simple little places where honest people can live happily, even after the apocalypse. And then Dead Money and Old World Blues tell stories of technology run amok and how you can lose your humanity in pursuit of that technological power.

edited 29th Sep '17 7:22:22 PM by Nikkolas

If you're badass enough to win the final battle without an army of any kind on your side, I think you've earned an independent Mojave. Just drag Boone and Ed-E along for the ride. Seriously, dream team of the companions right there.

Personally I feel if you end up at the final battle for Hoover Dam without a multitude of armies at your back, it isn't bad ass, you're just not maximising your networking skills. I can't even contemplate NOT trying to get the B-29 raised from the lake, thus welding the Boomers to me, or making a good stab at getting the Enclave Outcasts along for the ride as well. (I don't bring along the Great Khans - for reasons I've gone on at length before in the thread I prefer to just get them the hell out of the Mojave Wasteland.)

PS, thanks ITNW 1989 for heads-up on free Fallout game.

edited 29th Sep '17 7:31:40 PM by TamH70

The Yes-Man is called that because he's designed to be completely subordinate to his master. What you say goes and he'll approve of it because he's a yes man.

My first time, I didn't have a robot army because I didn't realize I could just lie about it and I wanted to assassinate Caesar by way of "botched" surgery, but then the NCR demanded knock it off, so I killed everyone in the fort, but I was also playing a Courier who would want to take the Mojave for herself.

I never even knew the Enclave Remnant were a thing until after I played NV. I think they're part of Arcade's quest and I never even recruited him.

I never went far enough with him to do that one. Too busy rolling with Veronica. I shoot bullets and she shoots plasma bolts.

Or Cass or Boone.

I don't think I ever even recruited Lily or Rex, and I almost never use Raul.

edited 29th Sep '17 7:40:04 PM by Balmung

I feel like this isn't quite on the level of the multipart clusterfuck of different technologies that had to collide to make the Sierra Madre the hellscape it is, and if anything, Old World Blues shows that what's important is that technology be wielded responsibly— that destroying the past, living in fear of it, that's as much a way of letting it rule over you as constantly trying to rebuild and relive the past exactly as it once was. All the useful technologies you can pick up in the big MT, even the Think Thank themselves, that can all be a force for good.

A Luddite Courier is perfectly valid from a roleplaying perspective, sure, but, pretty understandably I think, not workable for what Yes Man has been programmed to help you do. His operating parameters are based on House's plan, which, at least for a start, was all about creating stability in the region. Making sure no one gets the Dam right now, making sure you yourself don't have your own ace in the hole in the form of the Securitrons— people will be free, but you lose the means of protecting that freedom. Even with the NCR and Legion gone, a lot of the factions in the Mojave are enemies with each other. So if your Courier really believed no one at all should hold power, I can respect that, but whether or not anyone in the game other than maybe the Followers feels the same way, that's a separate question.

I went Wild Card during my initial run. I didn't want to lead Vegas, just to make sure the Dam was helping as many people as possible and the people of the Mojave weren't in danger of being occupied or overrun. I think I got there.

edited 29th Sep '17 8:00:04 PM by Unsung

New Vegas obviously did the best it could but in the end, the "big" endings are pretty restrictive. Like, Independent has no clear-cut answer to what will happen next, does it? It doesn't say if the Courier sets themselves up as the new House or if she just decides to leave, right?

You're perfectly right that there needs to be some kind of military presence. Even the most idealistic works about pacifism tend to acknowledge this fact. "But without power, what future can you claim? What good a kingdom you cannot defend?"

So a Luddite-ish but reasonable Courier is kinda stuck because he/she can't substitute a standing human army for their Securitron one.

This is hardly a big deal, it's just something I thought of right now.

edited 29th Sep '17 7:55:27 PM by Nikkolas

The thing about Independent is that it has to be open-ended, since the only one who can really make the decision what happens next is the player, and in order to show that they'd basically have to keep making the game.

But it makes sense that the factions have a bigger impact by far than any one individual. Individuals can and do change the course of history, but factions are full of individuals.

The main game's ending is more about the Mojave and all the many people whose lives end up being affected by this huge skirmish in the desert. For closure on the Courier, you need to look to the DLC. Which is why I like saving Old World Blues for last. It seems the most personal.

That's an odd opinion. OWB was the least personal one for me. I just regarded it as quirky fun time. And while this might mean less than nothing to people and that's fine, I think the narrative intent is that Lonesome Road be last.

I'm thinking in my next run I'll maybe try to do LR first, though. I hear you get interesting responses if you have it done by the time you do Dead Money or Old World Blues.

It starts as a quirky fun time, but by the end I found my Courier was most personally attached to what happened in OWB.

Mostly the ending of OWB, not so much the Big Empty as a whole. Although the opening dialogue with the Think Tank is one of my favourite sequences in the game.

It's the goofiness of the DLC that makes that ending work for me, the pathetic quality of the Think Tanks if you convince them to join you, and the way that ultimately lays bare the pettiness of all this ideological squabbling in the Mojave, the way no one's motives are ever that pure. You can spend your whole life trying to make up for past mistakes— you can spend centuries trying to recover the glory of days long gone. That's all anyone's been trying to do ever since the bombs were dropped. But eventually, you have to accept that there is no going back, only forward, that this is the world you're living in now, and the regrets of the past are only going to hold you back. As Dead Money puts it: Let go. Begin again.

edited 29th Sep '17 8:50:02 PM by Unsung

I admittedly didn't give Old World Blues enough of a chance. I got there, saw it was all kooky, silly shit, and then just kinda half-assed the rest of it. I barely talked to the Think Tank and didn't really try to do anything for them. I think they all had quests for you to do too but I just wasn't interested.

I had just done Dead Money and as much as that DLC physically pained me to actually play, I did like the atmosphere and story. OWB was...too different.

Plus I ran into some glitch that made me kill Mobius. I DIDN'T WANT TO. I got shit on for killing him but I swear it wasn't my fault. I just selected all the dialogue options and then the only one that was left was fighting him.

But point is, as far as I know, I missed a TON of plot in OWB.

edited 29th Sep '17 9:44:10 PM by Nikkolas

If you like the story to DM but find it frustrating, consider using the console to give yourself some real gear and 500 stimpaks.

Sierra Madre's a whole lot less frustrating if you have a riot shotgun and 3000 rounds of coin shot or a good, fully functional laser rifle and a whole pallet of overcharged microfusion cells, or if you can evaporate every speaker in 40 meters with a mini-nuke. If you can't get a good shot, instead use a nuka mine and set it off with a brick of C4. Or hell, even just the ammo to really use the guns the DLC gives you.

"Let go. Begin again. Preferably with ALLL THE GOLDZ that you've carried out because you've entered a more carry weight code in the console instead of just one or two because screw this DLC."

Because that's the only moral I take from that horrible travesty. The one interesting character in there is the hardest to save. And you're expected not to like him because he's slightly cleverer than you in a lot of ways.

edited 29th Sep '17 11:01:43 PM by TamH70

Funnilly enough, gold bars aren't even that valuable. Sure per item they're expensive, but to be honest their value to the pound of weight is pretty lacking (roughly 300 caps per pound if I recall).

edited 29th Sep '17 11:05:55 PM by ITNW1989