Fallout: New Vegas

My philosophy about the DLCs have definitely changed over time.

I once regarded Dead Money fairly high (either top or second-best behind Lonesome Road), but the narrative, gameplay loops and overall "annoyingness" of the Madre wears thin quick. (Small wonder I now play with mods that disable the collar and cloud damage.) There are a variety of reasons, but the poor navigation and confusing layout of the Villa (which I don't believe was intentional), the way it tends to screw with the in-game economy if you do anything at all (trade in junk for Pre-War Money, get the snowglobe, do decently well at the Casino) and the derpy way the devs handled the gold and final confrontation instead of some critical fixes (like the Ghost People perception bug) led it to take a hit over the years. I've played it three times, and it just gets more and more ridiculous each time.

Honest Hearts has what I consider to be the best sidestory in a mainline title or DLC (Randall Clark's), which is absolutely absurd because the main plot is just a glorified series of fetch quests. I never gave a care about Daniel's predicament (his treatment of Waking Cloud notwithstanding), Randall's story gives far more credence to supporting Joshua (also an awesome character extremely underutilized) and I've always hated the finale for forcing the player to run long distances with no fast-travel so it can funnel you into a tunnel with a few ho-hum encounters. It's because of the in-game lore and the sidestory that I tend to rate this higher than most DLCs.

I've come to hate Old World Blues. It's just fetch quest upon fetch quest — the actual meat of the story, once you get past the initial conversation with the Think Tank, is extremely thin. The whole thing kind of feels like one big experiment on the part of the devs to see how much they could fix several underutilized aspects of gameplay and in-game lore (Ulysses knowing Christine, Elijah's escape, other Legendary variants of animals), but just didn't do enough to make you give a reason to care about the Think Tank or the personalities in the Sink beyond a quest marker.

Lonesome Road still holds up, despite how annoying Ulysses' rants get to be. I love the difficulty, the fact that you can come and go from the Divide as you please, the weapons and armor (Elite Riot Gear is still my go-to in most playthroughs) and the... ambience of the Divide and the Courier's Mile.

Edited by crazyrabbits on Feb 13th 2022 at 7:40:41 PM

Debated between posting it in the general Fallout thread or here but figured it would get more traction here: I finally got around to making a page for All Roads, the graphic novel prequel that came with the Collector's Edition and was briefly sold digitally by Dark Horse. Anyone who has a copy or, ah... stumbles upon one (that isn't hard these days, it's on the first page of google) is welcome to contribute. Gonna work on crosswicking examples later today.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Sep 12th 2022 at 10:36:41 AM

Man, Caesar is a shitty human being, but he was certainly an engaging faux intellectual.

He does eventually explain that he and the rest of the Institute have written off the entire surface as a lost cause. Hence why they don't see anything wrong with exploiting it and its inhabitants for all it's worth to maintain their own living standards.

Edited by M84 on Sep 29th 2022 at 8:11:54 PM

PC: Son, what you're doing is making a better world for yourselves.

Father: That's what heroes do right?

This may be an unpopular opinion, but Wild card doesn't work for me as an ending.

The problem is that the Courier does nothing. S/he is not a good ruler, nor is a tyrant.

S/he does not send his/her robots to protect or oppress the inhabitants.

S/he doesn't send his robots to kill fiends or force them to be his vassal.

General kimball was right about the Courier.

Edited by LucienRen on May 22nd 2023 at 9:36:15 AM

I can kinda understand why people picks wild card option because they cannot see positive things about NCR or House as well. You can see multiple time that NCR is very bureaucratic which may turn some people off. And House being very cold and detached towards faction doesn't help either.

"No Gods, No Masters"

Every time that screenshot comes up in this thread, I feel obligated to say that Caesar never actually answers the question asked.

As for the ending, much as people seemed to have grown less agreeable with House over the years due to the real-life autocrats proving to be much less glamorous and competent, I feel the similar way about Wild Card. The fact that you're basically smashing everything to bits and leaving the rest of the region to figure it out doesn't do it any favors IMO. And sure, Yes Man is around to impose your will, whatever that might be, but it's still basically just leaving food on the table in the heat and not expecting bugs and maggots to swarm it shortly after.

I mean, Wild Card basically has two outcomes - either you essentially usurp House and become the ruler of the Mojave (which can be good or bad depending on your character's disposition).... or you basically keep the Mojave disunified, but also vulnerable to the next would-be conqueror.

Yes Man, despite his inability to actually openly criticise the player, still manages to make pretty clear what he thinks of them blowing up the robot army.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 23rd 2023 at 11:45:17 AM

An upgraded Securiton army is quite powerful and makes invading the Mojave far riskier and expensive than it was before, so there is a good chance it will be left alone. Especially since the NCR still trades with it and Vegas remains a tourist destination. So the NCR won't invade. It's too expensive, the human cost would be too great, and it would be a deeply unpopular decision among the NCR's citizens.

That just leaves the Legion, who everyone thinks will collapse shortly after Caesar's death. Even if he survives the game he won't live forever, and if the Courier doesn't treat his brain tumor he will die soon. Even Lanius knows, if he survives, that smashing the Legion against Vegas and the NCR will not make it stronger. So the Legion is likely to collapse, and even if it doesn't they're more interested in fighting the tribes to the east than they are invading the Mojave or the NCR.

So the biggest threats to the region are effectively dealt with by the end of the Wild Card ending.

Edited by SilentColossus on May 23rd 2023 at 1:16:12 PM

Until the Courier kicks it and now there's another leaderless army of killer robots patrolling the Mojave. There's a lot of 'but what if...' reliant on the courier's morality and ability to find a successor, there.

At least you know what the successions for the other endings are: presidential, a non-issue unless the Lucky 38 is breached despite said army, and it's a brutal slave-owning hellscape so if anything goes wrong it's an improvement.

The Wild Card ending has the advantage of essentially being whatever your headcanon says it will be. However, the actual benefits of it from a strategic point of view are pretty good and are as follows:

• NCR is forced to treat with the Mojave as a border state and cannot annex it. This allows them to focus on dealing with their internal issues of food insecurity and other infrastructural issues that they have to deal with.
• There's the moral benefit of the fact that the Mojave does not have a government necessarily imposed on it.
• Caesar's Legion is essentially crushed in its Westword expansion because House's Securitron forces means that they cannot successfully invade.
• From a moral benefit, NCR is not required to waste however many troopers fighting the Legion because the Securitrons are a self-sustaining army that provide an entirely free security of the Eastern Border of NCR.
• A good aligned Courier will be able to use New Vegas' tourist income, Hoover Dam, and Poseidon's solar plant to build up the region as all of these things will belong to them as infrastructural resources.
• The PC can ally with the Kings and expand into Westside, making New Vegas a proper city state.
• The PC can also ally with the Brotherhood of Steel and provide them a sanctuary in the area.

Arguably, you could also have the PC make arrangements for New Vegas to join NCR later but only after the region is more unified or the Colorado situation has changed.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on May 23rd 2023 at 10:27:48 AM

No, they can't. The NCR ending is the only one where you can have BOS around as an ally; otherwise you either need to kill them off or leave them be as tech-raiders terrorizing the locals.

And the main problem is that in all endings, the Courier will inevitably leave the Mojave. Whether temporarily or for good, that presents a problem of them not being there and not being able to handle things as they come up. There's only so much Yes Man can do.

Mr. House pays me, so that's pretty much why I'm only doing that ending.

A Courier has to eat after all.

I did something similar in my first game, my character was created with the intention that she doesn't have strong political ideologies, so she only worked for House because he was a client.

In the future I will create a misogynistic man who will ally himself with the Legion.

"Yes Man, despite his inability to actually openly criticise the player, still manages to make pretty clear what he thinks of them blowing up the robot army."

Speaking of Wild Card, being intended as an impossible-to-lose ending means you can make stupid decisions, like destroying your own army of Elite Mooks, and killing potential allies, without getting a "mission failed" signal. .

Edited by LucienRen on May 23rd 2023 at 11:11:29 AM

..Even I don't have the guts to do a single Legion run.

That's why I plan to play as a misogynistic man, to introduce a character who would logically ally himself with Cesar.

Playing as a woman or good Karma man who believes in equality would make it feel weird.

Edited by LucienRen on May 23rd 2023 at 11:09:51 AM

I did it once as a completely Ax-Crazy lady. Who cares what they think? I can kill an entire army without a sweat, if they object, it'll be fun. Especially with all those nice cybernetic toys~

My Courier is a greedy con-girl who just wants money and comfort so Caesar's legion is certainly not going to be a good prospective employer and the NCR can skim outsiders over so I just went with House since he gives every possible luxury to a Courier aligned with him.

x9 Personally I find myself rather doubtful of House's longevity. Even if we make the very generous assumption there are no medical problems his mummy-like body is nearing that his technology can't handle, a single breach of his pod could kill him, or even a simple malfunction in the centuries-old tech he relies on to survive and interact with the outside world.

Considering how long it endured the Lucky 38's systems being out of operation, and that in a House ending he has full access to what resources there are (and useful industrial knowledge and a robot factory), I give him reasonably good odds of working around that.

Also, this is a pulp magazine setting, of course the centuries old super industrialist-turned-man-behind-the-curtain is going to last until someone specifically goes over and kills him.

Am I the only one who blows BOS bunker whatever courier I play? Those guys are like Khans and I just blow them up for safety measure.

They made Veronica cry in my run.

So they die.

how did they do that?