Gozma
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,951
The legion is so malformed it's hard to enumerate specific points on which it sucks.
A big one is that it has no texture or characters. Nearly every Legion member you interact with has an exactly identical personality and behavior. They have no personal interests, tics, history, natures, anything. That's why I think expanding Legion content wouldn't fix anything, because they're supposed to be perfectly monolithic anyway so met one Legion guy, met 'em all. The Legion as an institution (besides the "free agent" guys like Vulpes and Lonesome Road guy that do whatever the plot needs an independent person to do) has near zero internal structure; no cliques, no feuding sub-forces, no factions, no disputes, no budding oligarchs, no specialists, nothing. If you read Sawyer's shit about them it seems like that was really his intent, not that there's just not enough content-mass to do that stuff. A related problem is that Oblivion facegen and atrocious Bethesda voice casting/direction makes everyone look like a 40 year old nerd when this is obviously "supposed" to be an army of child/teen soldiers that could theoretically be this callow and uniform.
So, basically, they fail to be interesting on the level of a simulated force. There's nothing there and nothing to interact with.
But then they also don't work as a comic book mythic force of evil for plot purposes either, mostly because it's impossible in an engine that can barely have five guys waddle around visible before performance falls apart, so a vast slave army is a pretty serious non-starter. Even just in narrative terms, Obsidian wrote them to have been beaten in the backstory for some reason and never write in a particular reason to make it seem like they wouldn't lose again. They end up being sad mooks and it kills the second half of the game's narrative. The perfect microcosm of the problem is in the town where you rescue the crucified NCR soldiers literally by shooting two dogs and one legion guy - the legion "boss" character in the area is stuck inside a different cell and can't even come out to interact with you while you do this - and then the NCR characters fall all over themselves with dialog about what an amazing badass you are for rescuing these unsavable guys.
A big one is that it has no texture or characters. Nearly every Legion member you interact with has an exactly identical personality and behavior. They have no personal interests, tics, history, natures, anything. That's why I think expanding Legion content wouldn't fix anything, because they're supposed to be perfectly monolithic anyway so met one Legion guy, met 'em all. The Legion as an institution (besides the "free agent" guys like Vulpes and Lonesome Road guy that do whatever the plot needs an independent person to do) has near zero internal structure; no cliques, no feuding sub-forces, no factions, no disputes, no budding oligarchs, no specialists, nothing. If you read Sawyer's shit about them it seems like that was really his intent, not that there's just not enough content-mass to do that stuff. A related problem is that Oblivion facegen and atrocious Bethesda voice casting/direction makes everyone look like a 40 year old nerd when this is obviously "supposed" to be an army of child/teen soldiers that could theoretically be this callow and uniform.
So, basically, they fail to be interesting on the level of a simulated force. There's nothing there and nothing to interact with.
But then they also don't work as a comic book mythic force of evil for plot purposes either, mostly because it's impossible in an engine that can barely have five guys waddle around visible before performance falls apart, so a vast slave army is a pretty serious non-starter. Even just in narrative terms, Obsidian wrote them to have been beaten in the backstory for some reason and never write in a particular reason to make it seem like they wouldn't lose again. They end up being sad mooks and it kills the second half of the game's narrative. The perfect microcosm of the problem is in the town where you rescue the crucified NCR soldiers literally by shooting two dogs and one legion guy - the legion "boss" character in the area is stuck inside a different cell and can't even come out to interact with you while you do this - and then the NCR characters fall all over themselves with dialog about what an amazing badass you are for rescuing these unsavable guys.