Fallout: New Vegas

Yeah, I've got to agree. The Brotherhood of Steel is only akin to the Legion in that they're a conquering army and a military dictatorship; they lack Caesar's psychotic social engineering.

@Jerek Laz: Well, the Legion can maintain order and peace in the Mojave, if that's how you want to do it...Didn't think so.

How many aircraft carriers with working reactors in the fallout universe can you think of?

Maybe not to the same extent but the east coast brotherhood does have the "Ad Victoriam" thing going on.

Edited by Kaiseror on Aug 9th 2019 at 6:31:12 AM

I'm just saying, we know so little about the event that we can't really make any assumptions about how it went down.

"Not out committing atrocities"? Their mission in the Commonwealth is explicitly genocide. And guess what, other genocidal lunatics saw the people they were slaughtering as monsters, too. They even wage a nuclear war, which might I remind you, is a war crime, against the Institute using Liberty Prime.

To be fair, every other faction wages a nuclear war against the institute. It's literally the only way to destroy them.

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

Vote Institute today, for the only faction that won't wage nuclear war against the Institute.

Well, probably.

Edited by Lavaeolus on Aug 10th 2019 at 9:09:23 AM

But think of all the Science that could come out of nuking your self.

You've got a point there, Nik. Guess our hands are tied.

To be less fair, not everyone activates a 50 meter tall robot, arms it with infinite nukes, and has it hurl them like footballs at anything in their way.

Though also to be fair, the use of mini-nukes is never given much weight in the game. The player is downright encouraged to give weapons like the Fat Man a try. In Fallout 3, it practically demands you use them.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Weren't they an invention of Bethesda?

@Kaiseror Depends a bit on what you mean. As far as I can tell, Fallout 3 (Bethesda's first Fallout) is the first game to have The Fat Man in it, so yes. It should be noted though that The Fat Man is very similar to a real-life weapon called The Davy Crockett.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

There a Mini nuke grenade in Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel [1]

Not to mention every single fallout game before 3 ends with you nuking someone. 1 had the Cathedral's self-destruct, 2 had the Oil Rig's reactor, Tactics had the Calculator's self-destruct, BoS had Attis's base self-destruct... okay, yeah, most of these are self-destruct mechanisms you activate but the point still stands that they're all nuclear bombs and their detonation is treated as a good thing.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Aug 10th 2019 at 9:16:38 AM

They're a weapon. They're far more powerful than any regular gun but the difference is in scale. Fallout 76 especially encourages nuke use. And yes one of the motivations is the For Science! aspect of harvesting radioactive flux, which can be created into very powerful items

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

Using a few low grade tactical nukes isn't going to make the Wasteland that much worse at this point.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

I can't remember if I brought this up here so forgive me if I did.

A while ago I watched an LP of somebody doing the Atomic Wrangler "find sex workers" quest. It's really fucked up when you think about it. The one guy you "recruit" is like "selling myself made me feel dead inside." And you just use Protagonist Power to make him do it again anyway.

It reminded me so hard of when I first played DA Origins and refused to Persuade Alistair into being King. He. Does. Not. Want. It. I will not abuse my almighty powers as the PC to fuck over his characterization.

These Persuasion and Speech Checks are just mind control. You make people do whatever you want.

Really need to get around to playing those Shadowrun games. Everyone suggested them for better, more believable speech encounters.

I'm reminded of, so, occasionally I run a D&D campaign for a friend or two. Inevitably, of course, the players will ask to do something so dumb, so completely contrary to logic and the established world, so mad and bizarre that the very idea could break a man's mind. Naturally my response will be, exasperated, 'Yeah, sure, roll to persuade the beggar to hand you the item he doesn't have'. Inevitably, if I do this they will roll 20s.

I do like that, depending on your relationship with Alistair, it's possible for him to just blow you off, or require further convincing before he'll agree. The high-approval, high-coercion dialogue flows hilariously, though: 'I think it'll be great.' 'hm you've convinced me.'

I do also like that Alistair will actually not particularly commit to this choice. He'll be all too happy to leave Anora on her own / rule by himself if you don't press them on the marriage later. And while a hardened Alistair eventually grows to want crowning, an unhardened Alistair who doesn't will completely blow you off if you try for the obvious ending where he marries but Loghain lives, because it'd make no sense with him to go through with it.

Obviously some moments are better than others, in Fallout. There's a reason debating with Lanius, whatever route you take, isn't over and done with in one 100 Speech check, even if it may as well be — it shows you repeatedly pushing and leading Lanius to a conclusion. I think New Vegas does well with its failed dialogue, as well; when Persuasion is just directly a chance, and the stated message is the same, it can feel like I'm relying on a coin-flip to decide the other character's characterisation than my own, say, oratory or intimidatory skills. That's probably especially true if a game has voice-acting, FO4 being an obvious example.

If you're interested in something a bit more involved with its Persuadey bits, I'd recommend checking out Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You've probably heard of its 'social battles' before, but essentially there are bits where you have to read a person, judge what you know about them, their current mood and body language — and lead them to whatever you want. I'm making them maybe sound cooler than they are in practice, and there's only a few of them scattered around the game (you may miss some depending on playstyle as well), but they're handled well enough.

Edited by Lavaeolus on Aug 11th 2019 at 9:20:28 AM

The "Dialogue Bosses" of Deus Ex Human Revolution are pretty good, though there are only a few of them and it's more the writing of them than the gameplay that makes them good.

I have considered making a turn-based RPG and have dialogue mechanics as a regular feature. IE, when you get into random encounters, you can persuade them to leave you alone. The problem in practice though is that debates in a video game by their very nature don't allow for a lot of emergent gameplay. For example, with the random encounter idea, the problem is that you'd essentially be having a lot of the same conversations against the same types of mooks.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

There's ways around that if you sim the mooks talking to each other off-screen. Basically if you manage to talk your way out of trouble, have a little die roll in the back that sets the next mook's disposition to either "This guy's cool and doesn't just attack us on sight" or "You're not talking your way out of this one, your luck's up." It could get more complex than that, especially if you build a rep system based on it and have different characters react in different ways to a high or low rep. Some might want a fight, so being a high rep talker might just piss them off into shooting on sight. whereas someone who admires a persuasive chap might be convinced to give or do something to or for the hero. Might even be a companion or two hidden behind that.

@Ramdiel Yeah, definitely a no to the Legion. Buuuuut the Bo S have their own faintly cultish behaviour and have become Enclave Lite by F4. Yes, there's some minor dissension, but no one objections to massacring mutants or ghouls or anyone who "gets in the way".

On DX, the social combat was great - there's also a couple of people who the augment that enhances it DOES NOT WORK ON - which is a great bit of internal consistency. Some of the conversations do feel a bit arbitrary or not in line with the "Beta / Omega / Alpha" designations for people, but it was a good variation on how dialogue usually works in games.

And anything is better than the OBLIVION WHEEEEEEL.

I have (had?) over 300 hours on Oblivion on my PS3 ages back, and I'm pretty sure I never actually figured out how that bloody wheel worked.

Hitokiri in the streets, daishouri in the sheets.

Gather round, my friend, and I will teach you all of the dreaded 'Oblivion wheel'.

We play as the Hero of Kvatch, Savior of Bruma, Champion of Cyrodiil, hero of the world who unfortunately has a compulsion to systematically threaten, joke with, boast, and admire a person whenever they talk to them. They must do each once before they can repeat any of them.

Now, of course, as we all know everyone in the world slightly likes one of those four, deeply likes one of them, slightly dislikes another, and deeply dislikes the last. I for one enjoy being admired, and being threatened. Is there any way quicker to a man's heart than 'I'm gonna stab you in your beautiful, handsome face'? Such are the words of Shakespeare.

Of course, beware! Depending on when you try each method of communication, the piewheel in the sky that rotates each time you broach a topic — just like in real-life — determines how much of an impact it'll have. So you must time things so that joking with someone has more of an effect than threatening to bash their face in. Unless they want you to bash their face in.

Oblivion's speech system is, possibly, very abstract. The truth is it's probably hard to accept, in an otherwise immersive game, conversation suddenly being some mini-game (and a relatively uninteresting one). I think there's a flip-side: I know Griftlands, a game I don't have, is a card game where combat and negotiation are split into two different types of card battle. It seems fun, although it's probably not the best method for most RPGs because it's freer to abstract those systems without disrupting the game's feel.

Edited by Lavaeolus on Aug 12th 2019 at 12:59:12 PM

I saw MXR play Oblivion. Jeannie was a real pro at that conversation system. She basically picked things from least impact to greatest, and every time she ended on a better number than she started.

What do you all think of the start of New Vegas? Do you feel the hunt for Benny is as forced as some say looking for your father or son is?

My problem with FO 4 in par ticular was it gave me this pretty demanding motivation. I w want to find my son. I don't have time to do sidequests and fuck around. But what is an open world game if not something designed for you to do sidequests and fuck around in? As soon as I found Cait I was like Shaun who?

But others feel like tracking down the guy who put a bullet in your head is pretty ridiculous compared to being dumped alone in the wasteland and searching for the one person out ther who knows or cares bout you. Looking for your dad makes a lot more sense.

And me, I liked Benny so I had no desire to get vengeance on him. I mostly just wanted answers since there are so many questions at the start of NV and they only pile up even more as you get on Benny's trail.