Fallout: New Vegas

Fuck Daniel though. Like his hearts in the right place but wtf is innocence. Nations don't have innocence. If they let THIS group of raiders drive them off their own ancestral lands, what's stopping from happening again and again until they have no one and nothing left? There will always be raiders in the wasteland.

Like he literally wants to just GIVE all that land to the Whitelegs. let them have this place as their seat of power

Like. Fuck Daniel.

Edited by blkwhtrbbt on Mar 25th 2020 at 8:59:28 AM

If there was a reasonable alternative to violence, Daniel's position might be more tenable. I understand he doesn't want these people exposed to the brutality and influences of the outside world. But that's inevitable and the only way to prevent is to have them run forever, ceding their homes to whatever bully comes their way.

I'm a petty idealistic guy at times but Daniel is just a dreamer that will hurt more than help.

The solution is to wipe out every single White Leg and feast on their corpses while Graham goes yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssssssssss.

I actually did once note that Honest Hearts tends to conflict quite a bit with the typical morality of Fallout. Even killing a helpless Salt-Upon-Wounds would normally be a good action in Fallout's Karma system.

Though, to be fair, the Karma system isn't omniscient and there are context issues. Killing Salt-Upon-Wounds isn't necessarily wrong by itself, but it's very bad for Joshua's mental health.

That pretty much sums it up. Leaving isn't an alternative, there will be raiders somewhere else.

Better to guide them through the realities of the best as best as possible.

Edited by deludedmusings on Mar 26th 2020 at 12:43:13 AM

I think you can guide them through those realities without throwing them straight onto the heated iron of actual war, is the thing. But as far as FNV's many and varied tough decisions go, that's one of the better-crafted examples. There really isn't a perfect decision, but neither does the 'imperfect' decision feel totally wrong. The push and pull between the two lingers long after you choose, and that's nicely done. Joshua Graham is one of the best characters in all of Fallout-dom.

Edited by Unsung on Mar 25th 2020 at 8:56:29 AM

Yeah, I always kick out the White Legs.

It depends what I do with Joshua depending on what Karma I'm going with, but I always fight back.

Thank you all for your opinions. That means I choose the right path of evacuation, instead of fighting back.

Daniel's actions are moral, just, and kind.

However, they come off as incredibly hypocritical for a Courier to support after they've killed thousands.

What about a Courier who is great at sneaking and talking their way out? Besides thousands? That's pretty hard to achieve in this game unless you take the nukes in LR.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Mar 25th 2020 at 9:43:43 AM

Hypocritical isn't always a bad thing. Maybe the Courier, despite all the deaths they've caused both directly and indirectly, just can't bring themselves to force this pure-hearted man to ruin the innocence of this tribe.

I mean, I always have them fight back, but I can see the roleplaying in not.

Exaggerated as thousands may be, the Courier is almost certainly not a pacifist nor likely to be a pacifist in the future.

>everybody gives reasons why they think fighting back is preferable to evacuation

???

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Mar 25th 2020 at 9:54:57 AM

There is a difference between fighting in self defense and being a mass murderer.

This is why i went with fighting back with the tribe.

Agreed.

It's also the fact that a large majority of the encounters in the game are based on someone getting killed. The Courier for example must choose between Goodsprings or the Powder Gangers or, well, just abandoning the settlement.

Graham may be justifying his Ax-Crazy Blood Knight status but even by the stringent standards of Catholicism's "Just War" status, this actually fits. Mormonism also does have its own self-defense or defense of others clauses to Christianity.

I tend to fight back myself because while I understand and appreciate Daniel's views, I would go with them in real life, I note that the locals deserve a chance to survive in an environment that isn't a radioactive wasteland.

Yeah, in a vacuum Daniel is fine. But in the game you're just putting off the inevitable if you take his choice.

Again, Daniel is admirable for his values, but there is a time for fighting back when negotiations has failed.

It's not like his now able to fight back tribe will use their skills to wage war or hold slaves like the Legion.

Plus Daniel hiding the death of the husband of waking cloud really rubs me the wrong way.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Mar 25th 2020 at 10:01:45 AM

@ Discar

“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing.”

I did a non-combat, 0-kill run of New Vegas once, which some of you might vaguely recall. It was interesting, and actually pretty well supported. You end up seeing a lot of weird AI stuff and it's obvious the assumption is that most players will be firing upon enemies, but still. There are only a handful of quests that actually require you or a companion to be shooting or hitting people, and none of the main missions require it.

Now, whether you could reasonably call it pacifism might be a different matter. The game pretty much forces you to morally compromise with House; you have an option to leave House breathing but disconnected, which feels to me like it was put there specifically for no-kill runs and the like, but it's still pretty immensely cruel and is probably lethal in the long run anyhow. The Omerta quests are also technically optional, but the "non-combat" solution there is just to get Cachino to shoot the others.^note If you're curious, I went through Hoover Dam with a combination of stealth, disguises and just tanking damage; Lanius will call you out for wearing Legion armour, fun fact.

Likewise, Goodsprings can be solved with you relegating yourself to a support role in the battle, but it's not like you can talk the Powder Gangers down. Is that pacifism? Probably not. I believe some real-world pacifists have done similar things in wartime scenarios, but the Courier's actions in Ghost Town Gunfight — convincing others to fight, armouring up the town — go beyond medical support and the like.

Now, unlike Goodsprings — for whom evacuation is pretty untenable — it is possible for the situation in Zion to be resolved with minimal loss of human life. The White Legs will fall apart in the long run; they do not need to be killed to be stopped, per se. If resettled, the "most" the Sorrows will lose is their homeland, and they can in time resettle. Of course, the White Legs will destroy and pollute Zion in the aftermath. I don't necessarily view it as hypocritical for the Courier to evacuate the Sorrows, though in real life it is a choice that I think should be left up to the tribe. (Although it would be hard for them to make an informed decision.)

Interestingly, Honest Hearts can also almost entirely be solved 100% without resolving to lethal force. The White Legs can be spooked away for the most part, traps can be disabled rather than dealing with the trappers, etc. The vision sidequest is unbeatable, but that's about it. (Collapsing the yao gui cave isn't really pacifistic either, but in both cases we're talking about hostile wildlife.) But at the very end, despite all the other quests making it explicit that killing the White Legs is (Optional), you've got to defeat some White Legs on a bridge if you want to make sure the evacuation is fully successful. So at the last second the game forces you to choose between 1) killing in defense of others or 2) letting a bunch of Sorrows die because you refused to intervene.

It's a bit of a derail, but I thought it was an interesting touch. I might be overexamining it, but if you think of Honest Hearts as a little bit curious about the questions "To what extent is lethal force justified, and how far? Where should the line for self-defense be placed?" Well, it's a noticeable detail, especially since you actually can have the Courier say the Sorrows shouldn't kill any of the White Legs in self-defense. (Daniel will incidentally get mad at you for saying this, since he isn't an absolute-pacifist.)

Edited by Lavaeolus on Mar 25th 2020 at 6:54:42 PM

Impressive.

The big failure of Fallout 4 was the fact that they more or less wrote only two endings and not very long ones at that. There's "Destroy the Institute" and "Save the Institute" with every reaction being one of those two. It really felt like they half-assed the spoken dialogue as a lot of the options get the same reaction. As a cost-cutting measure, it sucks.

Compared to NV, it's got nothing on it.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Mar 26th 2020 at 3:41:31 AM

Impressive is the word. Pacifism does require a certain amount of willingness on the other side's part, too, but it says something about the design philosophy of the game that you *can* get through as much of it as you can without fighting. Self defense and defense of the life of others should factor into it. Did you have the cattle prod, the boxing gloves, stun grenades and the like? And are KO'd enemies just hostile again right away when they get up?

I'd actually argue that Daniel is Wrong Genre Savvy and the game could have done more with this. He's a bit racist and full of a White Savior complex but if not for the presence of the Courier and Joshua Graham then he's actually making the wisest decision here. The White Legs are just the scouts for Caesar's Legion and whether they succeed or not, Caesar's Legion will almost certainly come back to exterminate them all with no possibility of defending themselves. Certainly, Joshua Graham means that Caesar will come again and again with Legate Lanius' next target being him.

It's just the Courier can kill Caesar, defeat the Legion, and defeat the Legion's 2nd and possibly 3rd in Command too. The White Legs are also considered utterly expendable by Caesar and not even someone he wants to recruit (which is just Caesar being a Bad Boss IMHO). In practical terms, if not for the fact Batman and the Punisher are here, Daniel would be right in pragmatic terms.

I did, though I'll be honest and say that I didn't actually get much use of them. That's not to say I didn't get any use of them — when I had to keep aggro on me while Benny escaped, having gloves that did minimal damage was convienent — but KO-ing is very temporary. They ragdoll for a few seconds, then get up again unharmed and still very, very angry. You can stunlock people, but not without some effort first and most of the game is you up against groups of enemies.

So my main strategy, which the devs might or might not have intended, was to have END 10 and, uh, run past people. Frequently, I would VATS-aim at people's guns, which would make them run away once disarmed. Not infrequently, they'd turn up minutes later with some new weapon they'd scavenged, but I'd just shoot it out of their hands again. Cycle of life and all that.

I kept track of skill checks, of course, but then, while I was investing in pretty much every non-weapon skill, I didn't have to put points into Guns or the like. So I had Speech, Science and Medicine up pretty quickly, and a pretty high Stealth. I also had the Animal Friend perk, so some wildlife — nightstalkers being the most deadly example — left me alone.

So a non-combat build in New Vegas isn't really hard, at least on normal difficulty. There is a slight, uh, unrealism in that you can just tank all the bullets sent your way. It's a bit of a silly experience, though probably the intent was that I'd stealth my way past a lot of the enemies. (Which, with the stealth system in the games, probably would've been a whole different category of silliness.)

But you do start noticing how rarely the game sets an objective of "Kill all the X" as opposed to, "Retreive an item from..." or "Talk to Y". It happens, but you're quite free to pickpocket, sneak and talk your way through most objectives. Even with the fiends, you can talk NCR troopers into dealing with one (obviously not really a pacifist solution there), or talk Motor-Runner into handing you his helmet to falsely claim his bounty.

Edited by Lavaeolus on Mar 26th 2020 at 5:38:21 PM

Ah well. It wouldn't be a Bethesda engine game without a little emergent jank. I was hoping there'd be some weird The Dev Team Thinks of Everything interactions with the nonlethal K Os, but I wasn't really expecting it? You'd basically be making almost a whole new game, and FNV doesn't even really go all the way with its Dumb Mode.

But yeah. I do play a pretty diplomatic character. You really can get through a lot of the game without fighting anybody, and I did do a lot of running away and stockpiling Stealth Boys.

I just fucked Benny and now he's got away with the chip,oh deary dear

Mr.House was not happy

How many people don't use that as an opportunity to kill him? In fact, why else would you try?