Fallout: New Vegas: Ain't that a cuck in the bed?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Fallout: New Vegas: Ain't that a cuck in the bed?

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

LORD OF BOOTY posted:

that's... completely and utterly insane of Bethesda and they really loving need new lawyers who can write less wonky contracts

e: like, unironically, what kind of loving idiot makes a game with voice acting and then doesn't get the rights to that voice acting in perpetuity so they can loving re-release the game without re-recording every single line of dialogue

There are a lot of possible explanations here. Without knowing the details of the contracts, Bethesda may well have the rights, but not be able to release the rights to modders, for instance. One factor may be the sheer volume of lines Bethesda recorded may have driven them to a contract setup that was cheaper.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2018 13:37

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 16:52

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I'm not clear on what House represents in the East vs West metaphor thing F:NV has going.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 15:31

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I appreciate these different responses, and it's interesting how very different they are. I think Timeless Appeal and Arcsquad12's explanation makes the most sense. While House as unaligned nations or first nations makes a degree of sense due to the conglomeration of tribes under him, and his independence, House as the past (in contrast to the Independent ending's future) makes the most sense to me, as House's ideology adheres to old world tech and beliefs, the game's narration emphasizes House's old world role, and NV's alignments don't quite match the real third world despite the clear resource wars metaphor that's running through things. jk he's Satoshi, deliver his Platinum BTC

I always align myself with House or the NCR because although their ideologies might be flawed, both of their approaches to things produce way less death and chaos than the Legion - and the independent ending seems a) oddly detached from the potential suffering it can cause, b) annoyingly fanfiction-y, and c) incomplete due to all the production cuts. Plus House consistently does seem like he's right a good 99% of the time.

Now, what does Fisto represent?

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Apr 15, 2018

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 21:07

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I went back and read House's dialogues and he actually acknowledges making a bunch of mistakes, like recruiting Benny when he was too old.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Apr 16, 2018

# ¿ Apr 16, 2018 22:45

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

After reading some more House dialogue it looks like House is, actually, a futurist. His ultimate gameplan is to build colony ships and forge a new future for humanity somewhere not "stained by the stupidity of our past mistakes" or something to that effect.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2018 02:02

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I think the strongest criticism latent in the text regarding House is his character's total ambivalence about anyone who doesn't "matter", said groups including the Followers and the people living immediately outside the Strip. These can be sort of justified by House's consequentialist perspective and his belief that his cause is at immediate risk, but it's also the blind spot in his reasoning, as it makes him underestimate people like Benny.

House appears to be honest about the spaceships thing, and it's presented as his genuine plan. It's worth remembering that prewar, House and the companies he built up from nothing appear to have invented as much advanced tech as every other actor or group combined, including tech like "all computers" and "all the robots that didn't suck, plus a few that did."

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Apr 20, 2018

# ¿ Apr 20, 2018 06:51

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Neurolimal posted:

I mean, even in the most benevolent of readings House does not give a poo poo about anyone outside his immediate bubble at all. It's like people who think Elon Musk is the great hope for a spacefaring humanity instead of someone looking to expand the blood diamond industry off-world. He's pretty much The Institute in terms of "lol gently caress these mutants, not MY earth!

It just seems callous to favor an autistic technocrat instead of a recovering earth littered with terraforming kits and factions that are actively trying to learn from humanity's past mistakes.

I agree, House just makes things a bit more ambiguous by being generally non malevolent and being way more competent than other figures. The independence ending seems thematically like it�s supposed to be the good option, but all I can think of when it comes to freedom and independence is 1 you�re the new leader and 2 Freeside and West Vegas are terrible exemplars of self-government.

All the recent Fallouts have suffered from the need for a lovely clash of civilizations narrative structure; NV comes closest to justifying it by a (courier�s) mile, but it still can�t take close scrutiny the way something less open ended can.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Apr 20, 2018

# ¿ Apr 20, 2018 13:30

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

jfc

Regarding the NCR, depending on what sources you view, the government is either capable of reform, or doomed to collapse due to the unsustainability of its economy and rampant corruption. That's a large part of what makes it such a fantastic metaphor for the old world US, and why fallout NV's story is so well executed in its broad strokes- the material you're presented with is uncertain just enough to let the player draw divergent conclusions, which is why we're still talking about it.

Regarding the Legion, that's why I love how they're unambiguously terrible, and how they're unsustainable, and how they're revanchist, and built on lies, and how they have so many magnificent parallels to the USSR/China and that era of communism in general...and how the devs were smart enough to not focus on the material about the USSR that wasn't relevant, so we get a couple NPCs that can describe life in Legion territory (in a way that accurately translates to China/USSR), but even there, elements like the relevant issues of state and party corruption were dropped where it didn't jibe well with the NV setting. Some fortification hill material was cut, but we still get a decent idea of what's going on and how a Legion society organizes itself.

With House....well, I think a big part of the problem with House is that the character has less public information available about them, and more setting and grounding material was cut for House than the other main factions. We know he nearly saved Vegas and did impressive things 1-12, but he's the only source for information about his own ideology, and we don't get a really clear sense of what "House's Society" would look like, because although House likes Vegas, it's also clearly a means to an end for him, and his vision is both more obscure and further-looking than anyone else in the game.

All of this is why I want the Enclave back. That group can, if handled properly (I know, let me dream), accomplish all of the most important aspects of the great direct and indirect commentaries and worldbuilding of the NV factions- a clear ideology with flaws, a metaphor for extant real life beliefs, a depiction of what a faction's functional society would look like, and, perhaps most importantly, a clear antagonistic force and ideology in line with the series' overall message, something 4 desperately needed.

What we'd probably get is a bad Trump impression, though.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Apr 21, 2018

# ¿ Apr 21, 2018 14:22

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

It's pretty unsubtly antisemitism and white supremacism, by what simmering has posted. You, uh, have a lot of other options for how to handle something like that.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Apr 21, 2018

# ¿ Apr 21, 2018 15:31

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The Legion's pretty definitely a reference to the Soviet Union, including a number of great ideological details about great man theory, functionality under dictatorship, economics, etc. It's very odd that people would assert that Caesar's Legion is the group trying to "forge something new"; it's the most explicitly backwards-looking and historicist group of the whole set-explicitly founded on both an idiot's reading of Hegel and a profound collection of lies. By comparison the NCR has just sort of fallen into similar behaviors as the old world US, because that's what worked for them so far.

Another NV question: is it supposed to be implied that Yes Man is going to go renegade after the free vegas ending? There are hints that he's basically a horrifying monster being contained by his programming (he gets genuinely, unusually excited about killing people and having the Securitron army), and he talks oddly abruptly at the end about becoming "more assertive". But it doesn't go anywhere. Was there something cut there?

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 16:35 on May 6, 2018

# ¿ May 6, 2018 16:32

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

It's, um, really pretty clear that the conflict between the Western government, with its emulation of the old world US government, including its industrial corruption and internal dysfunction, and the explicit Eastern government, with its great man veneration, internal political conflict surrounding the great man, purges of failed or "failed" leaders, annihilation of other cultures for a new, ideologically driven vocabulary, high degree of internal functionality for those who obey the parallel government structure that supervises everything and occasionally super-murders and ensalves people, and foundation on an inaccurate reading of Hegel, is a representation of groups cyclically reenacting fundamental conflicts mapped onto human society outside and prior to the period of the game.

This is made even more explicit in the Divide, where Ulysses basically stands in a Cold War missile complex and beats you over the head with the conceit by summarizing the sides as East and West. It's the Hegel bit that's the dead giveaway, though.

quote:

No, I'll destroy it because it's inevitable that it be destroyed. It's Hegelian Dialectics, not personal animosity.

Hegelian Dialectics? What are those?

{enjoying the superiority of teacher}How do I put this basically enough? It's a philosophical theory, the kind you might encounter if you took time to read some books. The fundamental premise is to envision history as a sequence of "dialectical" conflicts. Each dialectic begins with a proposition, a thesis......which inherently contains, or creates, its opposite - an antithesis. Thesis and antithesis. The conflict is inevitable. But the resolution of the conflict yields something new - a synthesis - eliminating the flaws in each, leaving behind common elements and ideas.

So what's "dialectic" about you and the NCR?

The bombs wiped the slate clean. Human civilization descended to a level of ignorance that effectively set our cultural progress back to zero. The NCR has all of the problems of the ancient Roman Republic - extreme bureaucracy, corruption, extensive senatorial infighting. Just as with the ancient Republic, it is natural that a military force should conquer and transform the NCR into a military dictatorship. Thesis and antithesis. The Colorado River is my Rubicon. The NCR council will be eradicated, but the new synthesis will change the Legion as well...from a basically nomadic army to a standing military force that protects its citizens, and the power of its dictator.

Marenghi posted:

I would say they are fascist in the way it's organised around a strong leader and try to forge a national unity among its subjects to maintain a stable society. It does lack the ethno-racial oppression usually associated with fascist nations, but given Caesars educated background from an egalitarian organisation you can imagine why he would not want to bring along those reprehensible ideas.

All indications are that life is stable back in the Legion mainland, traders can move through without being raided, though I don't recall if their was any indication as to how oppressive or not life was outside of the Legion war camps in the Mojave.

The details got cut, but...from a devquote on the wiki page for the Legion:

quote:

The general tone would have been what you would expect from life under a stable military dictatorship facing no internal resistance: the majority of people enjoy safe and productive lives (more than they had prior to the Legion's arrival) but have no freedoms, rights, or say in what happens in their communities. Water and power flow consistently, food is adequate, travel is safe, and occasionally someone steps afoul of a legionary and gets his or her head cut off. If the Legion tells someone to do something, they only ask once -- even if that means an entire community has to pick up and move fifty miles away. Corruption within the Legion is rare and Caesar deals with it harshly (even by Legion standards).
In short, residents of Legion territories aren't really citizens and they aren't slaves, but they're also not free. People who keep their mouths shut, go about their business, and nod at the rare requests the Legion makes of them -- they can live very well. Many of them don't care at all that they don't have a say in what happens around them (mostly because they felt they never had a say in it before the Legion came, anyway).

It's true that the Legion isn't supercorrupt or a command economy like the USSR was, but that's largely because the Legion generally takes a "it's bad until we say it isn't" position - Caesar and his guards get high-tech weapons and medical care, and the Legion is in the process of procuring energy weapons.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 03:57 on May 7, 2018

# ¿ May 7, 2018 01:59

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Ulysses is basically the Ted Rall of the Mojave.

# ¿ May 7, 2018 20:35

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

DeathChicken posted:

Yeah, I admittedly never quite got the logic of Caesar rolling with Lanius as a successor, unless it was just a thing where no one else in the Legion was possibly going to beat that guy in an inevitable duel to the death for the throne. And he was probably too useful as a killbot for Caesar to chuck him off of a cliff.

Caesar doesn't seem to have ever really planned for his death; in classic dictator form, he just does the minimum expected. Also bear in mind it's at least implied there have been a few "Legate Lanius"es- the role was basically to be a military puppet.

# ¿ May 8, 2018 02:42

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

If there is one thing that �gamer culture� doesn�t need, it�s a genuine AAA attempt at appealing nazis. The users generate enough of that poo poo on their own, tyvm.

# ¿ May 18, 2018 05:43

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I'm mostly unhappy with the one-two punch of pure jank and cut core material that plague 3, NV, and to some somewhat lesser extent, 4.

4's writing is just atrocious, way worse than 3. 3 was simplistic and shallow, but coherent. 4 is a mess, and almost never a fun one. I still can't tell what they were trying to do thematically. Yeah, noir elements, yeah, robots, but nothing is actually said or developed with any of the concepts that the game raises, and the core plotline requires pretty much every faction to be colossal psychotic morons.

# ¿ May 21, 2018 03:50

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

In poking at the leftovers of the development of Dead Money alongside the current, ongoing LP, I've come to the conclusion that players were originally going to be able to revisit the Sierra Madre after finishing the DLC, like you can with the other DLC areas. Has there been any attempt to mod that function back in?

# ¿ Jul 19, 2018 20:29

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Raygereio posted:

But the fact that all his big reveals happened over on RPGCodex makes it just suspect as that place worships Avellone (because they don't realize other people have worked on Planescape Tormet) and it carried a hateboner for OEI even before Avellone left because OEI employs "females & SJWs".

Could you expand more on this aspect? How deep and widespread is the rot?

# ¿ Jul 31, 2018 22:21

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Issues with the voicework of specific characters (including Mr. Sonofabitch) are, under these circumstances, way more likely to be the fault of the production or recording setup than the actor. Crappy reading is usually a direction problem.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2018 19:22

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Nebrilos posted:

I finally got around to doing some of the plot-related quests in this game. I did the one where you have to activate the securitron vault beneath The Fort. It doesn't make any sense to me why Caesar takes an interest in the Courier in the first place. It make even less sense why he would let you into the vault alone and not even check what you did there.

Nebrilos posted:

I decided to try to see how easy it was to kill House and I was surprised at how little he has defending him. Two computer terminals that don't even have to be hacked and about 4-5 securitrons. You'd think he'd have more, wouldn't you?

I was kind of affected by his actual appearance. He's basically a gaunt, walking corpse. Not at all like the picture he shows everyone. It made me feel bad for him. He's kind of unlucky that he isn't a ghoul or a super-mutant, which would have also let him remain alive since the bombs fell.

From what I recall, both of these areas suffered particularly severely from cut content; much of Caesar's Camp, and a whole mess of locations interacting with the lucky 23 were axed, removing a lot of cultural context information about Caesar's people in the former and Yes Man/House's background and functions in the latter.

The wiki has details somewhere, but iirc getting to House was originally going to require something like a) the moon over the tower hack quest and/or b) a side tunnel through Vault 21, as well as wading through a significantly more complex and oppressive security array.

These removed sections, and the plot holes involved, also reflect the plot constraints of a game built around a multilateral faction system that gives players so many chances to back out of their prior allegiances. Fallout 4 suffers even worse from such issues.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Sep 18, 2018

# ¿ Sep 18, 2018 07:54

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Raygereio posted:

Is Caesar the only one who's looking to the future and wants to create something new?

Uh, what's his name again? Caesar looks back further, harder, more intentionally, than anyone else in the game, both directly (Rome), conceptually (he's intentionally trying to apply Hegelian dialectics) and metaphorically (the Legion is meant as a stand-in for the USSR).

It's worth acknowledging that a big part of why we get these discussions every month or so isn't just because the game is well written (or badly written). It's also because big chunks of the material intended to contextualize each of the factions got cut, so our intuitions about each leader, along with our prior beliefs and rationalizations, are filling in the gaps. We have a pretty clear sense that the Legion is doomed to collapse no matter what. We have several people saying that the NCR is going to fail because they are repeating the mistakes of the past (admittedly, it fits narrative themes and one of the people saying this is Avellone's garbage metaphor fountain Ulysses, but he's not a very unbiased source). You, the player, are the only person who even knows what House's scheme is, and even then it's only if you really pry. Although it sort of fits the narrative conceit of the game that House is similarly caught up in the past, we can't really cleanly judge because

a) a lot of details about House are cut
b) we're not given anywhere near as much information to suggest House's incompetence/weaknesses, and the stuff that did make it into the game intact has him as plot-device-tier competent
c) the overarching ouroboros everybody's trapped repeating the past metaphorical structure of the game has irreconcilable internal tensions with player agency, made worse by a) cutting of content and b) the fanfiction wild card plotline.

The only thing I can say doesn't work for House is equating him with Elon Musk or Trump. House is established as not only actually genuinely self-made, but prescient, skilled, and all-powerful on a level that pushes the credulity of even the fictional setting. House may be amoral, he may be unethical, and he's arguably some flavor of futurist, but he's not incompetent.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Sep 23, 2018

# ¿ Sep 23, 2018 22:39

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Raygereio posted:

Really? The only big thing that I cal recall that got cut and would have influenced how a faction is presented, are the pro-Caesar's Legion voices. We were originally supposed to see some of the land occupied by the Legion, or talk to people from there and get a sense of how they provide a secure environment, safe from raiders, etc.
But I can't recall or find anything big like that for the other factions.

iirc there was going to be more to the underside of Vegas and its sewers, particularly House's tower, 21 and its connection to the Tops, and the whole Moon over the Tower questline, that would give more context and background on House.

It's really annoying to try to dredge up the cut content on NV because there are so many different sources, and things were cut at so many different points in development. At some point you're left reading random social media responses by individual writers and stuff that never got past drawing board. So much of it winds up being a cipher to project our intuitions upon.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2018 23:07

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Yeah, Chris, we really needed the Legion to be more sympathetic, and there was no reason at all they should have been sexist.

cripes.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2018 17:43

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2018 02:41

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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

# ¿ Nov 27, 2018 04:20

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

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

# ¿ Nov 27, 2018 04:40

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Delacroix posted:

The wall is because of ~~consoles~~ performance, it's a restraint of the engine and the little time they had to work with. Even with the memory fix and anti-crash mods, an opened up Strip is a noticeable fps drop and cause of minor instability.

I know, I was just joking about how perfect it was as a cold war germany tie-in

# ¿ Nov 27, 2018 05:19

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Bullfrog posted:

If the "legion is USSR" thing is coming from that "marxist analysis of fallout new vegas" vid by Jason Uhrue, then, yikes. He's not a good marxist analyst.

It's not. I've never seen that video. I do not think that NV is interested in marxism, really; it's interested in the cold war framing, so the Legion has the same abusive, abused trappings of ideology as the USSR.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2018 15:55

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I've provided a bunch of examples, steinrokkan. Even if the main game is quieter about it, Chrislysses and the Divide, the East and West fighting a big proxy war with silos full of nukes that destroy free lands in between them, isn't exactly subtle about the overarching metaphor. I appreciate that you personally might find them morally...offensive? For some reason? But they're there and they're pretty solid.

If you personally object to how Caesar's abuse of Hegel doesn't match Marx's abuse of Hegel, and you want it to match the protofascists' abuse of Hegel, that's...fine? I don't think the devs were trying to be that specific about the full roots of the underlying ideology, because it's not important- in the same way that they also mix in American late empire elements for the NCR, added gambling, and ultimately adapted the Legion from earlier material that was initially "wasteland roman raiders- ooh, they can wear the brush helmet things and, like, hubcap armor."

The Legion mix Roman symbolism and propaganda with the insurgency and numbers tactics, purges, infighting, and hypocrisies of the USSR. They use a Great Man mythology that leads to their collapse, something that could fit Roman, Soviet, Reich or a bunch of other historical analogues. They're not a clean or pure metaphor. It's an overarching setting that primarily depicts what it's like to be trapped in a tinpot despot's petrostate, between Unambiguous Metaphor for the US and Unambiguous Metaphor for the Russians. With Western and 50s futurist and sci-fi themes. And giant scorpions. And a ton of other stuff too, of course- not even touching on the whole loss/past/future material.

This is a really strange thing to get upset about, is what I'm saying.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Nov 28, 2018

# ¿ Nov 28, 2018 21:54

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

That please stand by framing :allears:

# ¿ Nov 28, 2018 22:02

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

moot the hopple posted:

But you were the one claiming Caesar was marxism.txt

abusive marxism.txt .

Lightningproof posted:

I think there's two theses here. One is "the stalemate between the NCR and Legion at Hoover Dam has some Cold War inspired vibes", which I personally think is reasonable, and the other is "the Legion is 100% based on the USSR", which is absurd for a number of reasons.

I am arguing and have always argued the former. Of course the Legion isn't just the USSR! I say that in almost every drat post!

steinrokkan posted:

Your analysis based on a whole lot of wishful thinking, made up things and WWII era Wehrmacht originated propaganda about the Soviet Mindset sure doesn't qualify as good examples in my book. You obviously have a loaded approach to the topic, as seen from your plentiful Conservative-style talking points, and I don't think there is much to be gleaned from continuing this.

oh, gently caress off. "plentiful Conservative-style talking points", my rear end.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Nov 28, 2018

# ¿ Nov 28, 2018 22:59

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

How much sense does it make that a lot of Fallout 4 can be explained as feature and function development for 76?

# ¿ Dec 4, 2018 15:44

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Fallout 4 power armor, like crafting, like robot customization, was probably also building out a 76 feature.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 07:44

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Rinkles posted:

Robot customization isn't in 76. What makes you think the PA overhaul had a 76-like game in mind? I think you're reaching.

It's 76 that's the ramshackle side-project, not the other way around.

I think they're both ramshackle; I think all of the time-consuming content customization stuff for FO3 was material that was intended to be used in a multiplayer context, but that a lot of it didn't work or survive the 76 "development" process. Totally a shot in the dark, I'm just thinking about how much less tacked-on that stuff would be if designed for a multiplayer format.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Dec 5, 2018

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 19:07

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

AFancyQuestionMark posted:

Sorry for reviving this conversation, but I just read the last few pages recently and am really interested to know what's the basis behind Discendo Vox's claim that the Legion is a USSR analogue and that the Cold War is a major theme in this game. Especially given that... there doesn't appear to be any cold war? The war between the NCR and the Legion seems quite hot to me.

I've got the supporting evidence in my prior posts, I'd rather not reignite that particular posting war. If you're looking for the real bash-over-the-head metaphor stuff, you want Ulysses' lines in Lonesome Road.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 19:49

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

AFancyQuestionMark posted:

Since when are Hegelian Dialectics an exclusively USSR or Cold War thing? Also, he literally likens the NCR ot the Roman Republic and the Colorado River to the Rubicon in that same exchange. Why did you choose to emphasize the East and West stuff over that? Couldn't all of these concepts simply be a set of examples to illustrate his overall point, rather than pointing to an explicit analogy with any historical conflict?

Yes, it's possible, but I don't think it's particularly likely given how heavy-handed it gets with the Divide.

vvvv ok if you're trying to be subtle about trolling me you're doing a lovely job of it.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Dec 5, 2018

# ¿ Dec 5, 2018 20:19

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Regarding the Honest Hearts Sorrows tribe, I think the references to their past are intended to invoke:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools

# ¿ Nov 7, 2019 03:49

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

moot the hopple posted:

Barton's problem is I just punched the heads clean off an entire den of geckos. What makes him think his head is connected so soundly?

Well, it's not. That's why.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2020 06:19

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I am wondering if graphics quality settings might substantially change how easy/hard it is to navigate Dead Money.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2020 19:27

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Game development. Game development never changes.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2020 21:49

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 16:52

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Arcsquad12 posted:

Fallout: New Vegas: I love shooting radioactive water up my bunghole.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2020 19:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Fallout: New Vegas: Ain't that a cuck in the bed?

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