What did New Vegas DO WRONG? / Would isometric New Vegas with finished content be GOAT?

[aweigh]

i fucking love killing everybody in nipton on first arrival when you're under powered and not meant to be able to take them all out. i usually utilize a bunch of powder ganger dynamite sticks and abuse geometry/roof tops and it's really satisfying to do.

this thread is making me want to replay FNV for the 25th time.

 

[Commissar Draco]

But why to kill good Legionares who dindu nuffin and are good guys in the game? Just reading Nipton Major diary which first part you found way before Nipton, talking to Vulpes Inculta and then five minutes of detective work inside the houses of those ''victims'' show you that razing Nipton was not justified but the right and necessary action to do; Game spoilers ahead obviously:

Spoiler

1) the Mayor being NCR citizen see no evil in selling town services to NCR troops and their mortal enemy Powder Gangers. That's high treason for the start... but its getting only better from this point as the same Mayor sells both those groups to Legion braking the most fundamental law of hospitality every society including Afghan tribesmen uphold.

2) the rest of Citizenry is no better; they accept the obvious crook as Mayor cause he appeals to their nature of egoistical whores; ditto when Legion came they offer NCR and Powder Ganger to Legion on to fall to the trap with them; all of them hold their lottery tickets while Legion butchers and enslaves ''their loved ones''. Total Legion loses are two legionaries one who died inside the house fortified not against the perils of wasteland but his neighbors and second died from combat robot used as means to attract sluts attention and not to defend the town.

3) Even Ghost admits Nipton deserves to be razed... but maybe by no Legion. She is obviously right Nipton was cancer, the town of whores and thanks Mars it was excised.

As to NCR as a whole the familiarity does breed contempt; all you see from Prim to Vegas are either total failures too dumb or stupid to move their asses like 5 minutes and fix their problems or people who care only about their own interests validating Caesar words.

What FNV did wrong? It used Bethseda shit engine; if it was done using F02 or Tactics engine it would be best part of series even with cut out Legion.

 

[aweigh]

do you think i don't know all that shit? an enjoyable little killing spree is more important to me than who did what in the game's story; game play over story always.

unless i get caught, then it's not worth doing. when i play an RPG where i can steal/kill whomever i want i will do so in order to always have as much loot, XP and money as possible unless doing these things will not allow me to experience the game "proper".

it's why in PoE, for example, the first thing do as soon as arrive in 1st town is kill backer NPCs in order to get a half plate. sometimes it takes a few tries but if i can do it without alerting anybody then i will do it; if i can't do it without alerting anyone then i won't.

this is no different than stealing items from BG2 magic shop early on even though you can get caught.

however if killing somebody (or stealing from them) limits my options to continue playing the game then it's not worth doing, i.e. it cuts off quests or banishes me from towns, that sort of thing.

but actually caring about who did what and why and letting that affect how i play the game? that is just larping.

edit: besides the Nipton example allows the FNV player access to Legion armor (disguise) earlier than the devs intend to thus opening up game playing routes earlier on.

 

[vota DC]

No idea why a turkish hobo (Mount and blade) had a better engine for what New Vegas was trying to do (not just a couple of guys on screen for battles, bad aim if you have low skill rather than just damage change) but still New Vegas tried despite knowing it had zero chance of success. In some cases it could be avoided with ease. For example you have to assassinate the president and the crowd is just a couple of guys, the game explain the reason why there are so few people but it feels lame anyway, assassinate him during a secret meeting with a politician or something else would be better to cover the engine limitation. Same with the battle. You can plant a bomb on the undefended Hoover Dam, you can't and shouldn't try to show a proper battle with that engine.

 

[Teut Busnet]

The main reason I'm not a big(ger) fan of post-apoc games / scenarios in general and Fallout in particular is that they always play in a fucking dusty, dry, desert wasteland.

Chernobyl is contaminated but it's still green. So a different location with a rich flora would have been nice.

Of course, if you want to keep the Vegas theme it would take place in a desert anyway.

 

[Quillon]

The main reason I'm not a big(ger) fan of post-apoc games / scenarios in general and Fallout in particular is that they always play in a fucking dusty, dry, desert wasteland.

Chernobyl is contaminated but it's still green. So a different location with a rich flora would have been nice.

Usual post apoc. setting is nuclear wasteland & when you want green, its zombie apocalypse.

 

[Teut Busnet]

I know it's 'the usual' setting. Does it have to be set in stone though?

There would be places with a rich Flora somewhere, no? The first thing you see when you step outside is people farming in Fallout NV, plants can grow - with access to (clean?) water - it's not a nuclear winter.

Hiroshima today:

Spoiler

 

[Black]

Obvious green radioactive water.

 

[commie]

This is all making me want to do a heavily modded playthrough of New Vegas.

Unlike every Fagbryo game since Morrowind, F:NV is actually playable out of the box without mods. I went through it with Sawyer patch and fan fix and the game was good enough like that. I guess when I replay it, I might mod it more to get harder combat, maybe see what graphics and fan addons give, but apart from getting a bit easy towards the end(even with Sawyer's lower level cap), game played great (some shit like Cazadors were still brutal till close till the end if not equipped with decent weapons and I had to cheese the final fight with the Legion 'boss' as didn't take the 'easy mode' companion with me).

 

[undecaf]

Usual post apoc. setting is nuclear wasteland & when you want green, its zombie apocalypse.

 

[Teut Busnet]

Obvious green radioactive water.

Well, there are some horrible side effects:

Spoiler

 

[Scruffy]

Man, I keep coming back to this thread and these two posts keep pissing me off, because it's simply not true

you're rationalizing too
they're rapists, slavers, murderers
"we burned them alive because they were degenerates", and you think that makes sense
NCR is closer to a modern democracy, which entails infighting, bureaucracy, corruption, etc.

that's still preferable to a "society" of slaves (both literal slaves and the assimilated tribes, not to talk about the women)
in the words of good ol' Marcus: "Caesar thinks he can change human nature. Most of the Legion is following Caesar, not Caesar's ideals. When he's gone, it'll crumble."

as Ulysses points out, without the NCR, the Legion would aslo turn on itself. Like the Roman empire, once there were no more enemies to conquer, it all crumbled, because the internal fighting took the place of the "external" fighting for expansion.

 

[Quillon]

I know it's 'the usual' setting. Does it have to be set in stone though?

There would be places with a rich Flora somewhere, no? The first thing you see when you step outside is people farming in Fallout NV, plants can grow - with access to (clean?) water - it's not a nuclear winter.

Hiroshima today:

Spoiler

Well its the art direction, people have been arguing that there should be more green in fallout games for years but devs don't do it for some reason. They want it to look more bleak I guess.

 

[Luckmann]

Man, I keep coming back to this thread and these two posts keep pissing me off, because it's simply not true

you're rationalizing too

If by "rationalizing" you mean "considering it rationally", then yes. I'm not saying that they're pleasant, by any stretch of the imagination, but saying that they're cookie-cutter evil is simply wrong. You can disagree with them, for sure, but the fact is that as a faction, with their own motivations and a solid philosophy, they are far deeper than, say, the Sith or the Empire of Star Wars (outside the expanded universe) or any depiction of would-be "nazis" in modern-day popular propaganda.

they're rapists, slavers, murderers

And some are, I assume, good people.

"we burned them alive because they were degenerates", and you think that makes sense

It absolutely makes sense, especially in the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is the Fallout setting. Them coming down like a hammer on Nipton was arguably entirely warranted, and it's destruction was a long-term good and a necessity for progress. That entire place was a cesspit full of vipers and degenerates, and the Legion did what they felt was genuinely best, while also capitalizing on it to the best of their ability. It's a harsh-ass wasteland, man, and this army is very much made up of slavers and murderers that have been whipped into shape in order to serve a civilization-building purpose.

But that's just Caesar's point. That's all they are. They're an army, and on it's own, that has no purpose.

NCR is closer to a modern democracy, which entails infighting, bureaucracy, corruption, etc.

You say that like it's a good thing, and not a massively corrupt and decadent conglomerate of favor-currying and diseased bickering, all the while people die on imaginary fronts only so that it can expand further, and like the NCR aren't just rebuilding the exact kind of diseased system that lead to the apocalypse to begin with.

that's still preferable to a "society" of slaves (both literal slaves and the assimilated tribes, not to talk about the women)

First of all, what about the women? In the Legion lands, they are likely valued much like the wives of Sparta, or at least there would likely be an attempt at that. And in the Legion lands, they do not risk being raided and raped by slavers. By everything we know, the Legion lands are materially harsh and technologically backwards, but fundamentally safe. Meanwhile, the NCR is divided by plutocrats that couldn't put their collective minds to a cause even if their heads were all up the same ass.

in the words of good ol' Marcus: "Caesar thinks he can change human nature. Most of the Legion is following Caesar, not Caesar's ideals. When he's gone, it'll crumble."

It's quite literally like you didn't read the post you're responding to. Caesar's goal was to actually conquer the NCR and create a synthesis. The Legion as the sole existing hierarchy was meant to die from it, and become a standing army to a literal empire. Lanius was never intended to become Caesar, and it's ridiculous to think that Caesar wouldn't have known that the Legion itself would crumble without him, unless he actually conquered the NCR before he died.

as Ulysses points out, without the NCR, the Legion would aslo turn on itself. Like the Roman empire, once there were no more enemies to conquer, it all crumbled, because the internal fighting took the place of the "external" fighting for expansion.

First of all, again, The Legion was not intended to be the government of a conquered NCR, but more importantly, have you ever even opened a history book?

The Roman Empire hardly turned on itself, and under the Empire, Rome enjoyed it's longest period of uninterrupted peace and prosperity, for 200 years. The internal strife of Rome was not primarily military or a matter of violent unrest, and it sure as hell wasn't because of the legions turning on themselves. Rome fell due to a combination of subversive cultural influences (Christianity, primarily, eroding the old order), ethnic migration & change (primarily from the north and from slave liberalization) and violent foreign pressure (partially from the north, but Germanic invaders actually supplanted the ruling class but maintained the Empire; southern and eastern invaders did not, but relentlessly engaged with the Empire).

If anything, that's the point of this scenario in Fallout; that the NCR represents the corrupt and failing Roman Republic, with it's infinite fronts and it's poor management, trying to relive lost glories, whereas Caesar is the proverbial Caesar that crosses the Rubicon to return to his home, to dispose of the incompetent elite. And despite Caesar explaining this to you in detail, you're sitting here, pretending like the real-life historical Caesar went into Rome and established a complete military dictatorship for 200 years, where his soldiers were free to pillage forever, as if this constituted some perpetual front-line. It's absolutely absurd.

 

[Scruffy]

Some in the Legion are good people, but everyone in the whole town of Nipton were obviously deserving of death

stopped reading right there

 

[Luckmann]

Some in the Legion are good people, but everyone in the whole town of Nipton were obviously deserving of death

stopped reading right there

I can only conclude that you're literally retarded for not grasping the reference. Fucking libtards, I swear.

 

[Scruffy]

First of all, what about the women? In the Legion lands, they are likely valued much like the wives of Sparta, or at least there would likely be an attempt at that. And in the Legion lands, they do not risk being raided and raped by slavers. By everything we know, the Legion lands are materially harsh and technologically backwards, but fundamentally safe.

you haven't played the game, have you, you little retard?

The internal strife of Rome was not primarily military

Vegetius disagrees with you

 

[Luckmann]

First of all, what about the women? In the Legion lands, they are likely valued much like the wives of Sparta, or at least there would likely be an attempt at that. And in the Legion lands, they do not risk being raided and raped by slavers. By everything we know, the Legion lands are materially harsh and technologically backwards, but fundamentally safe.

you haven't played the game, have you, you little retard?

I love how you cite that as some kind of argument, even though it does absolutely nothing to actually address the point. I didn't say that The Legion was some kind of gender-egalitarian utopia. Women have been considered "property" of one type or another for a lot longer than they've enjoyed equal legal status, yet women weren't necessarily abused because of it. The fact that they do not let women serve and that women are considered important for the continued existence of mankind is hardly surprising, but it is also fundamentally irrelevant to any point that I've been making.

I'm not sure why I'm wasting letters, though, you're obviously too retarded to actually read, anyway.

The internal strife of Rome was not primarily military

Vegetius disagrees with you

Vegetius, the fourth-century veterinarian? The man noted as being "neither a historian nor a soldier: his work is a compilation carelessly constructed from material of all ages, a congeries of inconsistencies."? The Vegetius, who didn't primarily even describe internal strife in the military, but whose highly questionable work actually dealt with it's organization almost four hundred years after Caesar crossed the Rubicon? The Vegetius that idolized the army of the early roman empire to the point of absurdity, while criticizing the state of the contemporary imperial army? That Vegetius?

Spoiler

You're seriously one dumb sack of willfully ignorant shit.

 

[Beastro]

No no, you are getting it wrong. It's bad of me to put it simplicitic like that. Mea xima culpa.

There's a fuckload of thing that can fell a wooden house in the course of two century: natural disaster like earthquake, tornado... or flame, always a favourite in dry-desert conditions in which it can be best preserved. hell, in a slightly moist-er air the wood get fungus or insect that feast on wood.

And we are talking about a land that experience the Great Nuclear War.

What make you think a preWar wooden house can survive two centuries like that? When a wooden house wouldnt survive untouched in nowaday America. Can you give me an image of a 2-century old wooden house WITHOUT constant maintance?

The problem is how much of the structure is still standing. Wood left to desecrate can hang around for a while, but it still gets "brittle" and can barely support it's own weight. Having the remains of house foundations and scraps of wood and other pieces is something I could see.

 

[Scruffy]

So, you quote one guy's opinion because it serves your pre-conceived notions. Good job there.

The Legion is a bunch of assimilated tribes that are being forced to lose their own identity. The individual is unimportant, if one is useful as a soldier or in some other way, he basically becomes a slave, if he's not useful he gets killed.

The Legion uses the old pseudo-trick of "if you're not with us, you're against us and a subhuman, so killing you because you disagree with us is not immoral".

Not just that: individualism is a danger, and the individualist type is seen as an actual threat.

It's also a bunch of sadists, seen in things like "the lottery".

Caesar is a narcissist as described in the game (he thought of himself as much better than his peers in the Followers), who literally read a book on ancient Rome and decided he wanted to become Caesar.

The rest is rationalization, the same you are using to try and sustain a retarded point of view. The fact that you are sadly trying to throw politics in this and throwing tantrums like a child tells me all I need to know. Keep enjoying your delusions.

 

[Beastro]

I know it's 'the usual' setting. Does it have to be set in stone though?

There would be places with a rich Flora somewhere, no? The first thing you see when you step outside is people farming in Fallout NV, plants can grow - with access to (clean?) water - it's not a nuclear winter.

Hiroshima today:

Spoiler

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were air bursts, which maximize damage a nuclear initiation causes while also having the benefit of cutting down on fallout. They are perfect for targeting large, exposed targets like cities. The initiation happens higher up so it sucks up less material to be irradiated.

Any major fallout (and nowhere near as much as people would think, not to say there wouldn't be any, just not extinction level amounts like On the Beach) would have come from ground bursts, but those would only be used against buried, hardened targets like missile silos, where the destruction of a specific target was of primary importance, not hitting simple government buildings in the middle of city and taking out as many as possible. Silos are usually placed in the middle of nowhere to help avoid population centers being lumped in with them when they're targeted while the only thing that would mix the two would be if the old Soviet era bunkers just outside Moscow built under a plate of granite are targeted, which they certainly are still (in the Cold War, Moscow was a distraction, a sponge to add to virtual attrition. Nothing of value was in it that wasn't redundant or couldn't be quickly relocated and would have eaten up the entirety of Britain's nuclear arsenal since they got assigned with hitting it in the event of a war.).

When it comes to post-apoc with nukes nothing accurate applies in any medium... and in Fallout? The entire point of the game is to capture the feel of what people 1950s American pop culture thought would happen, right down to radiation glowing green and tons of crazy mutations.

Usual post apoc. setting is nuclear wasteland & when you want green, its zombie apocalypse.

The Stand was a global pandemic that wipes out most people. In most people's mind that only targets people and leaves everything else untouched, unlike nukes which wipe everything out. The reality with be without anyone to keep things going there's be a lot of happenstance destruction with fires breaking out and left to go wild while animals would be having a hell of a time scavenging all the dead. Cities would quickly become dens of disease, and afterwards dens of random dangers from neglect as things like multi-story buildings become death traps and begin to collapse since they require constant maintenance to keep them from falling apart.

The sedate, focusing on small community things in The Stand is closer to the truth, but even then it wouldn't be the way it was presented, would be more like small villages from centuries ago with people having to get their shit together and suffer to bring in the crops for winter while the freedoms women have would be gone as we'd be back to having to breed like rabbits to simply keep up with attrition even with all the potential medical knowledge we might be able to maintain.

But that's just Caesar's point. That's all they are. They're an army, and on it's own, that has no purpose.

And it's the only thing we can see coming from Caesar. The rest is that we're supposed to trust that what he plans will turn out like he imagines..... because he read some Hegel when he was in the Followers of the Apocalypse.

The foundation of what he plans comes from a 19th Century theory of history and cultural development that might have nothing to do with reality, and everything in the Southwest hinges on it working if the Legion defeats the NCR.

The NCR is corrupt, flawed and messed up, just like every other nation Mnakind has created, but it's not wedded to a fix idea that has to remain in place or else the entire edifice falls apart, like The Masters mutants inability to reproduce or the Legion not doing exactly what Caesar expects they will once they hold dominion over a conquered NCR. The NCR is simply going about what humans have always done, especially when in a vacuum, and they will rise and fall depending on how they adapt and none of that is a bad thing.

There are some things that can only be learned from genuine mistakes and bad decisions and cannot be accomplished through deliberate manipulation like what Caesar is doing. If the NCR is doomed to collapse even in the very way Caesar predicts, then let it, just as all empires must fall so too will it and from its ashes will come successors to continue on learning mistakes the hard way, the way we've always done them.

First of all, what about the women? In the Legion lands, they are likely valued much like the wives of Sparta, or at least there would likely be an attempt at that. And in the Legion lands, they do not risk being raided and raped by slavers. By everything we know, the Legion lands are materially harsh and technologically backwards, but fundamentally safe.

you haven't played the game, have you, you little retard?

This is all a side show given the circumstances. Life for women would become hard again out of the simple necessities of survival and perpetuating the species. All the conveniences of most social positions would be wiped out with the surviving groups who tossed them out the window at the quickest opportunity having the greatest chance of survival.

All of our specialized, low to zero physical activity jobs would condemn those people to being only good for farm work and other menial, low skill jobs while more practical blue collar professions would get a leg up. About the only real career field that would remain in place would be those in the medical field, only the status of doctors and nurses would sky rocket.

Trying to maintain a society that values IT careers or tries to find places to make use of a lawyers skills, having a woman do physical labour, especially when young, when there's a profusion of men to do it in the tenuous period between we're able to relearn all the old preindustrial lessons we've thrown away before we all starve to death is to too big a risk to place over sheer survival.

 

[Trashos]

My major gripe (apart from the idiotic combat) with NV is the way the Legion is depicted. Their intro was epic enough, but quickly they were reduced to stereotypical "bad dudes". Practically speaking, the Legion needed a serious philosopher (at least on the level of House himself) to present the reasoning behind their way of life to the player.

Maybe whoever wrote the Legion parts was a progressive trying to think like his enemy. Or maybe not, but that's what it looks like. The damage is done, and the game is poorer because of it.

On the other hand, I am very happy with the way the NCR and House were depicted.

 

[Lahey]

Practically speaking, the Legion needed a serious philosopher (at least on the level of House himself) to present the reasoning behind their way of life to the player..

Spoiler

 

[Teut Busnet]

Beastro (Mutiquote broken)

I can't argue against the spirit of the Fallout series (and appreciate your knowledge about nuclear warfare).

So wishing for a different environment for a 'Fallout' game might have been unrealistic and would have possibly even created some backlash from fans.

I still think not every post apocalyptic scenario has to be set in a desert wasteland and if anyone could take a risk and not play it safe (only settings-wise, of course), it could have been Obsidian. The picture of Hiroshima was a bit tongue in cheek and just included to show some lush vegetation relatively short after a nuclear strike, not to scientifically proof anything.

 

[Beastro]

On the other hand, I am very happy with the way the NCR and House were depicted.

Mr. "Join me and let's go colonize another planet!" House?

If it isn't a a deliberate thematic point, then a big problem is that you either go your own way, help the NCR or trust the word of two guys who have big, complex and outlandish plans to save the Southwest/Mankind.

Beastro (Mutiquote broken)

I can't argue against the spirit of the Fallout series (and appreciate your knowledge about nuclear warfare).

So wishing for a different environment for a 'Fallout' game might have been unrealistic and would have possibly even created some backlash from fans.

I still think not every post apocalyptic scenario has to be set in a desert wasteland and if anyone could take a risk and not play it safe (only settings-wise, of course), it could have been Obsidian. The picture of Hiroshima was a bit tongue in cheek and just included to show some lush vegetation relatively short after a nuclear strike, not to scientifically proof anything.

I get what you mean and fully agree. I'm sick of the way the nuclear post-apocalyptic is treated, and it's why I replied in the fashion I did, it's so misunderstood about it.

For Fallout, it couldn't work, but another franchise with the expressed intent of making a more subdued and serious look at what things would be like is something I'd be interested in. In fact, without changing much a game like Banished would fit (only thing is tech easy to retain and reproduce, like radios and bolt action rifles, would be able to persist with those able to keep the skills to produce and maintain them alive), only with some form of combat, not that combat should be the primary focus.

About the only situation I'd see combat taking center stage in a post-apoc world is one where civilization collpases without massive loss of life, where the agricultural industry breaks down and billions of people suddenly realize that once they scrape the world bare of everything to eat the most abundant course of food that's been kicking around is each other (Think about how long Pandas and other animals in China would last if the entire food supply feeding all the Chinese suddenly shut down never to restart).

If you want to place blame for the whole desert thing, look to Mad Max. Mad Max itself is some odd combination of sci-fi and modern day fairy tail where a guy drives off into the outback and suddenly finds himself in this world that doesn't have anything to do with reality.

Fallout was massively inspired by it, hence the placing of the series in the Southwest US (until Bethesda came along at least....), but if anything I wish people had taken from Mad Max, it's the sense in the first film that it doesn't take place before WWIII, but after it. What we see is the remnants of civilization and central government in Australia fighting to keep themselves going fighting a war they cannot win with Max and the Main Force Patrol being a last gasp at holding onto the semi-remote between the east and west coasts. WWIII didn't destroy civlization, but crippled it so badly people are giving up on the belief in it, banding together to make their own little groups and look out for themselves while enjoying what they can do free from law and order and able to revel in the dark side of their nature.

My major gripe (apart from the idiotic combat) with NV is the way the Legion is depicted. Their intro was epic enough, but quickly they were reduced to stereotypical "bad dudes". Practically speaking, the Legion needed a serious philosopher (at least on the level of House himself) to present the reasoning behind their way of life to the player.

Maybe whoever wrote the Legion parts was a progressive trying to think like his enemy. Or maybe not, but that's what it looks like. The damage is done, and the game is poorer because of it.

On the other hand, I am very happy with the way the NCR and House were depicted.

So much of that I see being the result of skipping over Van Buren's plot and moving on towards what would've happened in Fallout 4. Instead of the Legion going from being a minor faction whose forward scouts are moving into the Mojave as the NCR's scouts to better establish them without them being central to the plot we have it all rushed with most of what survived from VB being contained in Ron Perlman's opening monologue.