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steinrokkan posted:The trader you meet at the Fort says the Legion land outside the frontlines is well run - if you are member of the ruling class. With roads, commerce, towns (?) and slaves for everybody. It would be missing the point to assume Caesar was just a flash in the pan raider boss. He kind of is. Many characters mention the fact that the Legion is done once Caesar kicks the bucket, no matter whether they win Hoover Dam or not.
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Nov 26, 2018 22:00
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CharlestonJew posted:He kind of is. Many characters mention the fact that the Legion is done once Caesar kicks the bucket, no matter whether they win Hoover Dam or not. Yea I thought the whole point was that once his cult of personality is gone the legion will fall apart since the only strongman left just wants to fight and kill poo poo, not govern.
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Nov 26, 2018 22:06
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BillyC posted:Yea I thought the whole point was that once his cult of personality is gone the legion will fall apart since the only strongman left just wants to fight and kill poo poo, not govern. yep. the legion will only last as long as Caesar is alive. sure, there is lanius would take over but he is just a useful monster who is cruel for cruelties sake. you have maybe like 5 people who know all of Caesars greater ideals but most of the leadership class doesn't know and doesn't care. they are happy with the way life is.
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Nov 26, 2018 22:29
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I find Caesar to be less interesting than Lanius, and it's telling that Lanius is one of the final bosses while Caesar can be killed at any point in the game. Lanius is built up as a bloodthirsty monster of the East who butchers people and would have the Legion burn if it suited him. When you meet him, he's incredibly well spoken and surprisingly not above reasonable discourse. While Caesar might come off as an rear end in a top hat who managed to grift a bunch of people into joining his dumb cult, it's his legates who really seem to back up their words with prowess. Graham and Lanius are both terrifying figures who command more respect from the player, while they are considered secondary to an old man with a brain tumor by the idiots who followed them.
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Nov 26, 2018 23:15
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Isn't "the legion is done for once Caesar kicks the bucket" only half of it? It's been so long since I played NV and did a legion run, but I thought his intent was to defeat and absorb the NCR specifically so the new amalgamated entity that results from the conquest could carry on past his death.
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Nov 26, 2018 23:41
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Yes. The Legion fails without Caesar if, well, Caesar fails. And even then there isn't anything guaranteeing that the vast regions he united wouldn't produce a bunch of powerful warlords, still much more dangerous than whatever existed there before him.
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Nov 26, 2018 23:48
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The Legion, and Caesar, are expressly a) evil and b) an expression of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. This is intentional and borne out through all aspects of its ideology and practices.
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Nov 27, 2018 02:41
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I like the Legion's sexism in that it's an interesting unintended consequence of Caesar min-maxing his army by making women constantly bear children instead of fighting, even as it makes the Legion offputting in terms of player choice. I always wondered if the women of the Legion similarly disdained men as being only worthy to fight and diesteinrokkan posted:To this day I don't understand what Autumn's / Eden's motivations were as they were portrayed in the game, or what they were supposed to be in the mind of the developers.
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Nov 27, 2018 03:03
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Discendo Vox posted:The Legion, and Caesar, are expressly a) evil and b) an expression of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. This is intentional and borne out through all aspects of its ideology and practices. yeah and thats partly why it would never work once Caesar dies. none of the other leaders have any higher ambition outside some dumb fash strong man poo poo.
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Nov 27, 2018 03:14
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Communist Walrus posted:Isn't "the legion is done for once Caesar kicks the bucket" only half of it? It's been so long since I played NV and did a legion run, but I thought his intent was to defeat and absorb the NCR specifically so the new amalgamated entity that results from the conquest could carry on past his death. thats just what he tells himself to justify poo poo.
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Nov 27, 2018 03:17
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steinrokkan posted:To this day I don't understand what Autumn's / Eden's motivations were as they were portrayed in the game, or what they were supposed to be in the mind of the developers. Autumn wants to use Project Purity as a tool for subjugating the capital wasteland through having a near-monopoly on an essential good. He might also be planning to use their water monopoly as a way to curry goodwill with the local populace, sort of like what the BoS ended up doing in Broken Steel Eden is programmed with certain directives in mind, particularly bringing back the America that was lost. Implicit in that lies having an un-mutated citizenry. It's sort of a HAL/Asimov situation where he interprets his commands in ways his designers potentially didn't expect. Or at least that's what I'm guessing, the writers never really gave us much info to work with
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Nov 27, 2018 03:17
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I don't know that he's really behaving in a way his designers didn't expect, since his designers (or people related to/descended from them) planned to kill everyone on the continent in Fallout 2
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Nov 27, 2018 03:20
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2house2fly posted:I don't know that he's really behaving in a way his designers didn't expect, since his designers (or people related to/descended from them) planned to kill everyone on the continent in Fallout 2 Whelp that's what I get for not playing the originals
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Nov 27, 2018 03:21
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Unfortunately this is a lot more thought about Eden and Autumn than what went into their creation, I think.
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Nov 27, 2018 03:21
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hmm does this mean that Autumn, being way less extremist than his compatriots (Eden had to keep the genocide poison secret from him), sorta acts as a counterpart to Lyons? Like they're both "moderates" within their orgs, so to speakMalpais Legate posted:Unfortunately this is a lot more thought about Eden and Autumn than what went into their creation, I think. honestly, I can believe this  Fallout 3 was my first open-world rpg aside from Runescape, so I found it enthralling, even tho so much about it bugged me ThaumPenguin fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Nov 27, 2018 |
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Nov 27, 2018 03:25
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Dapper_Swindler posted:thats just what he tells himself to justify poo poo. And even then Caesar's counting on living long enough to guide the Legion through that transition. Even if the Legion manages to survive that long, and even if it manages to become the synthesis of old and new Caesar wanted, it'd still need Caesar's will to keep it together. Best case scenario for the Legion I could see is it Balkanizing into various smaller nations post-Caesar.
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Nov 27, 2018 03:27
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ThaumPenguin posted:hmm does this mean that Autumn, being way less extremist than his compatriots (Eden had to keep the genocide poison secret from him), sorta acts as a counterpart to Lyons? Like they're both "moderates" within their orgs, so to speak
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Nov 27, 2018 03:41
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Dapper_Swindler posted:yeah and thats partly why it would never work once Caesar dies. none of the other leaders have any higher ambition outside some dumb fash strong man poo poo. Because Caesar killed or chased off any member of the legion who displayed signs of intelligence (Like Ulysses and Joshua Graham) because he considered them a threat to his leadership. It's only now that he's dying that he realizes "Oh gently caress, once I die there won't be any one left to run this poo poo show will there?" and finally starts to panic about be surrounded by nothing but violent morons. This is something that happens a lot in real world fascist dictatorships too.
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Nov 27, 2018 03:42
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Despite their theme, Caesar imagines the Legion serving a role like that the Mongols or the Manchu seemed to serve in Chinese history.
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Nov 27, 2018 03:43
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The true mystery of Eden is why none of his followers seem at all interested in the mystery he presents. Autumn directly countermands his orders, and nobody in the base acts like it's anything out of the ordinary. Nobody seems at all concerned about the fact that the president they serve has never actually been seen in person, or finds it puzzling when he waxes nostalgic about his childhood before the war. Apparently, Autumn's dad was the only one who was even aware he was a computer. The rest of the Enclave survivors just picked up a radio transmission one day to the effect of "Dick's dead, now I'm the president," and decided to truck across the country and swear allegiance to the guy without asking any questions. Though I guess it's a good thing for them that none of them ever actually interacted with him, since the first time someone does get an audience with him, it's trivially easy to convince him to start a shooting war with his own subordinates.
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Nov 27, 2018 03:52
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King Superman posted:The true mystery of Eden is why none of his followers seem at all interested in the mystery he presents. Autumn directly countermands his orders, and nobody in the base acts like it's anything out of the ordinary. Nobody seems at all concerned about the fact that the president they serve has never actually been seen in person, or finds it puzzling when he waxes nostalgic about his childhood before the war. Apparently, Autumn's dad was the only one who was even aware he was a computer. The rest of the Enclave survivors just picked up a radio transmission one day to the effect of "Dick's dead, now I'm the president," and decided to truck across the country and swear allegiance to the guy without asking any questions. [int 10] YOU'RE A COMPUTER edit: wait lmfao it's one of my first posts in the thread Fereydun posted:Also since my game bugged out I got to replay the main quest and take screenshots of the magic of Fallout 3 writing:
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Nov 27, 2018 03:53
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2house2fly posted:I hadn't thought about it before, but yeah that nakes sense. I wonder if that was intentional; if so surely it'd be Autumn you side with? I also wonder if there was an original story outline that had you choosing between these two guys who each want to do something different with their faction While it would have been interesting to see the Enclave trying to adapt with becoming just a localized imperial power with a tech advantage (not to mention actually having to govern), I feel that would have been even less well-received by the fanbase oldtimers than the Lyons Brotherhood
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Nov 27, 2018 03:53
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Part of me would like to see a genuinely seductive, evenhanded depiction of the threat that a competent, smooth-talking, intelligent successor Enclave could represent. The idea that evil can be competent and have clear, valid, nuanced elements, and give players a choice. It would be worthwhile, I think, to give players a genuinely doubt-inducing, appealing, subtle depiction of evil groups that preach racial, genetic supremacism and genocide. I genuinely had an NCR civil war-themed design doc a couple pages long going for a bit. Then I remembered that the sexism of the Legion, and their synthetic destruction of other cultures, is actually source accurate. Then I remembered the Legion, despite being obviously monstrous, harmful, incompetent and self-destroying, is actually popular with a seriously hosed up set of players. Then I remembered that the earlier fallout games just gave you a horrible game over screen when you sided with the monsters. Then I remembered evil does exist, and it isn't competent, and it's not subtle, and it's not evenhanded, and to some it's still appealing, and it's still a threat. I remembered who is President. We don't need to create complex, subtle moral choices when we're failing to communicate and teach the easy ones, in games or in life. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Nov 27, 2018 |
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Nov 27, 2018 04:20
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Discendo Vox posted:The Legion, and Caesar, are expressly a) evil and b) an expression of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. This is intentional and borne out through all aspects of its ideology and practices. What? Did a dev say this somewhere? This doesn't track at all imo.
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Nov 27, 2018 04:28
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It’s actually about the reunification of Germany in the post soviet era.
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Nov 27, 2018 04:29
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steinrokkan posted:To this day I don't understand what Autumn's / Eden's motivations were as they were portrayed in the game, or what they were supposed to be in the mind of the developers. Autumn realizes the old path of the Enclave is not feasible and wants to take control of the water purifier to begin rebuilding the Capital Wasteland into a new state. Eden is locked into the Enclave's plans from 2, ie, kill all the mutants so pure humanity can rebuild.
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Nov 27, 2018 04:39
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Lightningproof posted:What? Did a dev say this somewhere? This doesn't track at all imo. NV's central conflict is an extended cold war metaphor, with Vegas and the wild card groups representing contested third world nations. This is the basis of the role of the Hoover Dam, the different roles of capitalism and safety and parallel government structure in Legion lands. It's also why Ulysses yammers on about recreating the wars of the past. The most direct and blatant sign is buried in Caesar's dialogue tree. His underlying inspiration and basis for his whole ideology is a hosed up interpretation of Hegelian dialectics. Sawyer asked specifically for that, and Caesar's "force the end of history via leveraging immutable forces to homogenize culture through ultraviolence" is basically abusive Marxism.txt. I mean, we can discuss the validity or ethics of making the Soviet stand-in the unambiguously morally worst faction, but it's definitely intentional. El_Elegante posted:It’s actually about the reunification of Germany in the post soviet era. I can see it. It'd have been a better reason for that drat wall down the middle of the strip, if nothing else. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Nov 27, 2018 |
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Nov 27, 2018 04:40
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Discendo Vox posted:I can see it. It'd have been a better reason for that drat wall down the middle of the strip, if nothing else. "MR. HOUSE, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!" 
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Nov 27, 2018 04:44
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I think the writing is more inspired by history than a direct parallel of it. The Legion doesn’t seem to have any interest in maintaining client states, though their espionage service clearly seems to ape Cold War intrigue. My overall impression was also that the legion was more ideological and less pragmatic than its historic analogues.
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Nov 27, 2018 04:55
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Discendo Vox posted:I can see it. It'd have been a better reason for that drat wall down the middle of the strip, if nothing else. The wall is because of
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Nov 27, 2018 05:05
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Delacroix posted:The wall is because of I know, I was just joking about how perfect it was as a cold war germany tie-in
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Nov 27, 2018 05:19
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Discendo Vox posted:NV's central conflict is an extended cold war metaphor, with Vegas and the wild card groups representing contested third world nations. This is the basis of the role of the Hoover Dam, the different roles of capitalism and safety and parallel government structure in Legion lands. It's also why Ulysses yammers on about recreating the wars of the past. The most direct and blatant sign is buried in Caesar's dialogue tree. His underlying inspiration and basis for his whole ideology is a hosed up interpretation of Hegelian dialectics. Sawyer asked specifically for that, and Caesar's "force the end of history via leveraging immutable forces to homogenize culture through ultraviolence" is basically abusive Marxism.txt. I mean, we can discuss the validity or ethics of making the Soviet stand-in the unambiguously morally worst faction, but it's definitely intentional. I feel like this tries to force a range of historical reference points that were definitely used to model the NCR/Legion conflict into a single, small box. It's not like two big powers competing for dominance over smaller periphery states is unique to the Cold War, and beyond a reference to (idealist) dialectics, the Legion doesn't resemble the USSR in form, structure or ideology at all. It's more like a weird head-on collision between Genghis Khan and Mussolini. As to Ulysses' yammering, it doesn't have to refer to the Cold War any more than it could refer to basically any war. I heard somewhere it never changes.
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Nov 27, 2018 05:25
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El_Elegante posted:I think the writing is more inspired by history than a direct parallel of it. The Legion doesn’t seem to have any interest in maintaining client states, though their espionage service clearly seems to ape Cold War intrigue. true. casar basicaly just took legion warrior culture part from roman history and thats it. there is no senate or anything enlightened like that.
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Nov 27, 2018 05:33
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Discendo Vox posted:Part of me would like to see a genuinely seductive, evenhanded depiction of the threat that a competent, smooth-talking, intelligent successor Enclave could represent... Pretty much. I think the Legion works perfectly fine as a villainous faction as is. As ridiculous and monstrous as they are, they've always felt plenty real to me. The idea of a frustrated intellectual gathering men into a hyper-macho cult of conquest was already a serviceable idea for a villain to begin with, and it's only become more resonant in the past decade as the "Dark Enlightenment" dweebs have metastasized into honest to God street gangs*. The Legion doesn't need redeeming characteristics to make compelling points about society. Some characters/factions don't need moral complexity; some ideologies are just rotten. Lightningproof posted:I feel like this tries to force a range of historical reference points that were definitely used to model the NCR/Legion conflict into a single, small box. It's not like two big powers competing for dominance over smaller periphery states is unique to the Cold War, and beyond a reference to (idealist) dialectics, the Legion doesn't resemble the USSR in form, structure or ideology at all. It's more like a weird head-on collision between Genghis Khan and Mussolini. As to Ulysses' yammering, it doesn't have to refer to the Cold War any more than it could refer to basically any war. I heard somewhere it never changes. It's definitely not a 1:1 comparison, in that the Legion's ideology has no basis in Soviet communism. It's more that the Legion's role in the setting mirrors that of the USSR's, which becomes pretty explicit once Ulysses starts metonymizing the NCR and the Legion as "The West" and "The East" respectively. The Legion is a dictatorial cult of personality that serves as a foil to the dysfunctional liberal democratic West. It operates under a value system alien to the West that makes rapprochement between the two rival powers impossible; indeed, the East's philosophy predicts an inevitable conflict with the values of the West which will birth the next stage of history. You're right that the idea of rival empires playing tug of war over non-aligned powers isn't exclusively a Cold War thing, but a dictator who justifies the cruelty of his reign by citing Hegel is more peculiar. *As an example for how real monsters can be perfectly ridiculous, note that one of the more infamous bands of alt-right storm troopers, the Proud Boys, chose that name because they're mad about a song from the Aladdin stage show about how he loves his mom.
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Nov 27, 2018 05:52
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It's an interesting case study to compare Fallout 3/4 and Fallout New Vegas from a pure writing standpoint, because it really showcases the stark difference in approaches the two teams had. In New Vegas, you could tell the game was built around several core questions and themes, chiefly among them: "How do choose to move on from the past, and what should we take from it?" Factions, quests, and many characters were influenced by this theme, and ultimately it helped to give the writing direction and focus, as well as influencing the characterization of a huge number of NPCs throughout the game. With Fallout 3 and 4, there are no identifiable themes that are present throughout the works. The games were written in an utterly scattershot fashion, and it's very likely that there was no real communication between writing teams. As a result, the games are less of a coherent story than a series of vignettes, which weakens the overall narrative and roleplaying experience. And it's unfortunate, because if there had been more direction, they could have likely been able to raise the overall quality of the writing to at least competent. Just take Fallout 3's main plot—as it stands, it's a muddled tale of a man's journey to find his father turning into a quest to finish his father's work... with giant robots and a genocidal computer mixed in. I don't need to go into a huge amount of detail about how bad Fallout 3's plot was, since everyone here knows that already—but when you look at some of the elements that were already in the game, it wouldn't have taken much work to shape it into a more meaningful and coherent narrative. I mean, poo poo, the player character is called the Lone Wanderer, and you start in a Vault where "No one ever enters, and no one ever leaves." Right there, you've got a theme of isolation—cutting yourself or your group off from the rest of society out of a belief you'll be better off. To expand that to the main quest, you could easily adjust the central question of the plot from whether the player will turn the purifier on (and whether they'll kill everyone in the wasteland for shits and giggles), to whether they turn the purifier on and who gets the water. Do they keep the water in the hands of the Brotherhood and Rivet City, to strengthen those isolated communities while the rest of the wasteland dies of thirst? Does the player break the isolation and distribute it to everyone, risking that the demand may outstrip their supply and ultimately weaken their adopted faction? Or do they give it to the Enclave, who in this scenario presumably offers to make the Player a senator instead of being genocidal maniacs? There's a few directions they could have gone to make Fallout 3 a much stronger and more coherent narrative, but they didn't because Bethesda simply isn't structured to be able to write a narrative with strong central themes, or otherwise simply doesn't have the interest in doing so. By contrast, Obsidian is, and that's why New Vegas (And most of their other games) are so much stronger from a narrative strongpoint.
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Nov 27, 2018 05:54
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having good karma legion endings is really dumb when i think about it.
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Nov 27, 2018 05:56
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King Superman posted:Pretty much. I think the Legion works perfectly fine as a villainous faction as is. As ridiculous and monstrous as they are, they've always felt plenty real to me. The idea of a frustrated intellectual gathering men into a hyper-macho cult of conquest was already a serviceable idea for a villain to begin with, and it's only become more resonant in the past decade as the "Dark Enlightenment" dweebs have metastasized into honest to God street gangs*. The Legion doesn't need redeeming characteristics to make compelling points about society. Some characters/factions don't need moral complexity; some ideologies are just rotten. Very well put. Fair play. I largely just got hung up on the notion that the Legion was a Soviet analogue, rather than the space it occupies in the conflict is analogous to that of the USSR in the Cold War. My misunderstanding! It's great that I'm still discovering new ways to think about the game nearly a decade after release.
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Nov 27, 2018 06:07
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It's definitely true that there aren't many open world games that satisfactorily cover "this is how they eat" and "this is how non-state actors play in an intractable conflict between competing parallel power structures" at the same time.
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Nov 27, 2018 06:31
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I think the question of what people eat stands out the most in medieval settings where farming is big money and basically the bedrock upon which all the power structures of the world are built on. We think of farmers these days as this humble profession, but there's a reason why back in the day everybody wanted to retire to a nice farm. Dapper_Swindler posted:true. casar basicaly just took legion warrior culture part from roman history and thats it. there is no senate or anything enlightened like that. He probably would have an entire essay written on how he has endeavored to produce the glories of pre-republican Rome so that when he finally acquires a great city to be the capital of his army it'll be basically the same. The only reason it isn't in the game is because the writers of the game figured the courier wouldn't know enough about ancient Rome to bother asking. Caesar is a genocidal maniac and a monster, but underneath all of that, he is a huge dork and the worst kind of nerd.
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Nov 27, 2018 06:51
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Wild Wasteland really shouldn't be a trait and should just be a toggle the same as Hardcore Mode. I shouldn't have to give up on traits with tangible benefits and negatives just because I like my games goofier than half the dev team apparently wanted.
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Nov 27, 2018 07:04
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