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It's high past time I caught up on this LP, and so I have. It's still great! I don't mind so much that Ulysses blames you for things you've done, even when you have no choice. I don't mind it so much in Spec Ops or Bioshock either. What I DO mind is that he blames you for things that you haven't done, and have no knowledge of. Not you the character, you the player. Okay, fine, pin the Ashton missile launch on me. It's a cheap trick, but I sat there and did it, and I got to experience it as a player. It acknowledges the interactive medium of video games. But saying "oh you totally did something bad in the past but you had no choice about it, no determination, and it matters so little that you didn't know about it and no one else ever mentions it and now it's the main plot point" is really lovely. This does not even slightly play to the strength of video games as a storytelling medium. I haven't experienced it, I didn't choose it, nothing about this feels like I care to own the consequences of it. The story beat falls completely flat.
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Mar 19, 2019 10:11
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It's kind of funny since Bioshock: Infinite does something pretty similar in hindsight, but it also has the advantage of the entire narrative being written around that trick. "You did something awful in the past, we're not going to tell you quite what, but we'll drop constant hints that it was horrible and there's no redeeming you, you sick gently caress." This DLC is what happens when you jump straight to the reveal and there's nothing in-between
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Mar 19, 2019 10:56
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I kind of wonder, if this was going to be "smarter" DLC at one point. By that I mean if it was going to behave more like the end of other fallout games where you get a slide show and narration saying "The lone wanderer blew up the bomb in megaton, which lead to this scenario. Then they joined the brotherhood of steel, which had these dire consequences.." and on and on for a fair portion of the story beats. But did they originally intend for Ulysses to be born from that same mechanic, and then cross with Kreia so that no matter what option you picked he always disagreed with you? Because that would have been kind of neat. "I watched you courier, from the moment you woke up from your attempted assassination. You helped the powder gangers destroy that sleepy little town, and for what? Because you were mad at someone who had nothing to do with it?" That would at least have been interesting and made you feel somewhat responsible for all the things he lays at your feet. It's kind of hard to justify being upset at someone for doing the "right" thing, but I'm sure there are ways to make it work. Again, I wonder if that was the original intent, but because you could do this DLC at almost any time, they had to have some backup "I'm mad at the courier for what they did before you gained control of them" beats.
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Mar 19, 2019 15:16
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He does reference your Mojave adventures to some extent; the reason he's particularly hostile towards the NCR is because that's the faction Sun has done the most to support. If she'd been working with the Legion, he'd expand more on why he's convinced it's doomed to fail, and if she had spent more time buddying up to Yes Man or Mr. House his criticism would mostly be about New Vegas' society on the whole. I don't think there were ever plans for him to dog on the player for something that happened in-game, though. The destruction of the Divide is kind of the driving point of his entire character.
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Mar 19, 2019 19:08
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You should have seen this coming. Chapter 79: Sun Vulture and the Lonesome Road 
ApeHawk fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Apr 10, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 21:54
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CzarChasm posted:That would at least have been interesting and made you feel somewhat responsible for all the things he lays at your feet. It's kind of hard to justify being upset at someone for doing the "right" thing, but I'm sure there are ways to make it work. I mean, KOTOR 2 did it. Ulysses is a Kreia, only worse written than Kreia. Kreia worked because it was drat near impossible to suss out what she actually wants to you do, and frankly in the context of Star Wars she's deadass wrong. Her ideology is raging against the Gods, in a setting where you can objectively measure the Gods' effect on the world. She's a character who doesn't think the Gods are worth worshipping, and should even be actively opposed, but it is a hard sell if you are going into things believing one ideology or the other about the Force. The scene I'm thinking of is on Nar Shadda. If you give the beggar a dollar, Kreia chides you saying even "helpful" actions have consequences, and you see a vision of the dude getting shanked for his dollar. You can disagree with her and point out that it isn't your fault that you can't personally be everywhere to stop every injustice ever, and you can only work with what you've got, but she just tut tuts at you. I also haven't played KOTOR 2 in a minute, and I can't remember if you see the beggar's body, or just the vision, because that leaves in a certain level of unreliable narration given who Kreia is. edit: Speaking of KOTOR 2, the filter they put on Roger Cross makes Ulysses sound a lot like Darth Sion when he's on the radio. Warmachine fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 22:22
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I feel like the only thing to really disagree with here is the statement that Avellone is a competent writer. He was a competent writer, once, who wrote a good thing, and has been repeating the exact same themes with the serial numbers filed off ever since. And with every repetition it gets that much more tiresome. The main flaw with Ulysses isn't so much that he's tiresome and intolerable(though that's definitely a flaw if you build the entire thing around him and seem to insist that he has a point!!!!!!), but that you can't just blow a raspberry at him every time he talks and ignore him. You're kind of trapped having to deal with his bullshit.
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Mar 19, 2019 22:45
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Shoutout to the Outlook joke on the email server, and by god I didn't think Sun would pull the triggers.
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Mar 19, 2019 23:27
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Oh yeah: Sun, the earthquakes were nukes. 
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Mar 19, 2019 23:39
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If you've seen the "what could have been" design documents for Van Buren, you can see the parallels between Lonesome Road and how that game was supposed to end. They're not the same, obviously. The climax of Van Buren was on a space station equipped to launch nukes to the surface, and once you dealt with the final bosses you were faced with a nuclear launch you could not completely stop. You had to decide what major settlements from the main game were going to get nuked. The numbers were such that it was simply not possible to spare all the "good" locations or all the "evil" locations. You were probably going to obliviate some of the side quests you'd worked on. In any event, you weren't going to leave that satellite alive to see the world after you launched those nukes. Whereas here, by launching nukes, you open up some new, freshly exploded areas to explore before you finish the game. Without having any real impact on the main game world. That's one way to incentivize going the "bad" path, I suppose.
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Mar 19, 2019 23:45
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Seeing all those dialogue trees lumped together made me realize something. Ulysses says he doesn't resent you for blowing up the Divide, but for having no idea that you were doing it in the first place, which he follows up by calling you out for having no greater purpose or belief in anything. There's a constant undercurrent of self-resentment, that Ulysses himself has lost everything in which he believed and is fumbling for meaning, and that all his dogging on you is him railing against aspects of himself he sees reflected in you. He's not trying to destroy you or get revenge, he's goading you to prove him wrong, to help him find the purpose he's lost. That's basically every Chris Avellone character. The main difference is that you don't talk him down by logically arguing your position or appealing to his compassion. Any attempt to humor him or take a detached, rational viewpoint is a trap option that will set him off, because the only thing he's looking for is conviction. Either demonstrating the Courier's conviction by saying you believe in NCR/the Legion/Mr. House/Vegas, or by reigniting Ulysses' own faith in the Divide or the duties of a courier. I remember thinking Ulysses' dialogue tree being really frustrating and arbitrary, but I finally think I get it.
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Mar 19, 2019 23:56
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 I didn’t think Sun would have had the balls to trigger a second nuclear apocalypse upon the NCR and the Legion. Holy crap baskets, that was a satisfying end to that DLC and to Sun’s story there.
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Mar 20, 2019 00:02
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To echo some earlier sentiments - I don't think Ulysses is a bad character. I think he's a pretty interesting character. I think he (and Lonesome Road in general) is badly written. The whole "here's this incident from your past you never knew about and which was never hinted at before now" bit really irked me - still does, really - in that it felt tacked-on. Avellone has said he was interested in having Ulysses hold a grudge against the character because of something the player didn't do and might not be aware of, and that's an interesting idea to play with, but the fact that there's nothing, at any point in the game, to actually hook into that idea means it felt disconnected and tacked on. And Ulysses could have used a whole passel of editors. But having said that... the way he's looking for conviction, for meaning - the way he needs the Courier to believe in something because he just doesn't anymore and isn't sure he ever will - that's a really interesting way to approach a character and should have made this a fun, intriguing DLC. But it doesn't, more's the pity. I'm not mad at you, Lonesome Road, I'm just disappointed.
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Mar 20, 2019 00:21
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Kinda suprised he didn't get et. Also: A Kill-Nobody option that doesn't sacrifice ED-E 
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Mar 20, 2019 02:20
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Well there goes the neighbourhood ...and there goes the other neighbourhood
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Mar 20, 2019 06:40
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But the radwhales are the only thing keeping the dreadcoral from devouring all my stuff!
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Mar 20, 2019 08:30
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Part of Avellone's impetus here as well is that he feels the world of Fallout, particularly New Vegas, has gotten too civilized and that it needs another good nuking to bring it back to its roots. For once, I agree with him.
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Mar 20, 2019 11:03
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aniviron posted:Part of Avellone's impetus here as well is that he feels the world of Fallout, particularly New Vegas, has gotten too civilized and that it needs another good nuking to bring it back to its roots. For once, I agree with him. Yeah. Completely agree. Fallout 2's NCR was jarring as gently caress on it's own and I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I want run down barely held together crap towns that consider a shambles to something a settlement aspires to be someday. That feeling of walking into Junktown which was lovely and run down as gently caress and being impressed and immersed because everything else was desert and ruins was just never really replicated for me. And then finding the Hub after that and being all  , ah good times.
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Mar 23, 2019 06:19
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See, I'm on the complete opposite position. I like the fact that there's burgeoning cities and governments and whatnot, it makes the game stand out in comparison to other post-apoc games. I've seen Fallout described as post-post-apocalyptic, and I think that's probably the best way to put it. The war happened, but it was ages ago and people moved on. If it was entirely ruins and shacks, it'd get boring quickly. Stuff like New Vegas + the Strip feels nice because it's clearly a decently sized city, but it's run down, bombed out, and barricaded to hell and back. People are doing well enough to have cities again, but they're still in the wasteland, and need to prepare accordingly. (That being said, I'd kind of get where you're coming from if you were talking about Fallout 4. Diamond City really does not feel like it belongs in fallout at all. The mayor does not feel like he's part of the wasteland, he feels like a modern politician. It's weird.) Admittedly, I am kinda biased because New Vegas was where I started, and I've only ever seen Fallout 1/2 through let's plays and what not, I can't really get a feel for the old HUD & UI myself.
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Mar 23, 2019 10:17
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Avellone just fetishizes misery. A wasteland where nothing ever improves, where no one ever builds anything new, repairs the old world, etc. just becomes eye-rolly grimdarkness ala WH40k. FO3 and NV are kind of lazy in that regard, even, because literally every standing wall is an old, repaired wall. No one's built anything new from scratch even decades after the war. If you just keep re-nuking when anyone makes any progress, attempting to do anything at all in the setting becomes pointless. FO1 was believable was being in the immediate aftermath of the war, and FO2 was believable as being decades after the war where people got over living in fixer-upper ruins and realized they could make their own concrete.
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Mar 23, 2019 10:44
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I just wish that brooms and a fresh coat of paint weren't lostech in the Fallout universe.
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Mar 23, 2019 11:09
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Anticheese posted:I just wish that brooms and a fresh coat of paint weren't lostech in the Fallout universe. Oh there's a whole quest in FO4 about helping a guy paint the fence in diamond city. They know what paint is. They just forgot the most basic of color theory and didn't know you could make green paint from blue and yellow paint. Unfortunately, you end up using the last blue and yellow paint in all of Boston, so it's back to crushing up bugs and flowers for pigments.
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Mar 24, 2019 04:03
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CzarChasm posted:Oh there's a whole quest in FO4 about helping a guy paint the fence in diamond city. They know what paint is. They just forgot the most basic of color theory and didn't know you could make green paint from blue and yellow paint. Unfortunately, you end up using the last blue and yellow paint in all of Boston, so it's back to crushing up bugs and flowers for pigments. That may be a good thing because while RadBeetles MAY eat you alive and RadRoses would melt your face off, the expired and seperated pre war HyperLast Ura-Lead-Glow (R) paint will kill you, your children and every single squatter who enters your town. Or turn them into mutants. Either or.
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Mar 24, 2019 09:11
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Anticheese posted:I just wish that brooms and a fresh coat of paint weren't lostech in the Fallout universe. Most places I understand. If you're a dirtfarmer who has to work all day just to not starve and then you stay up all night hoping to not get shot or mauled, cleaning is pretty low on your priority list. Plus there's probably good stuff in the pile of trash to salvage as fire fuel or something. But when there's dirt all over the floors in the Ultra Luxe yeah wtf are they doing.
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Mar 26, 2019 10:25
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Chapter 80: Sun Vulture and the Courier's Mile Just one more thing to do before the grand finale. ApeHawk fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Apr 10, 2019 |
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Mar 27, 2019 21:31
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It's nice to see Ulysees not trying to kill us and have a nice little chat. Also give some hints at what to do with the Legate should you somehow NOT want to murder him. Sun's totally gonna murder the gently caress outta him, right? Have a snack outta him just to show the legion what's what?
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Mar 27, 2019 23:39
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I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Divide's nukes that caused the Marked Men mutation, but the experimental weather used there by the brains at the Big Empty.
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Mar 28, 2019 01:20
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JackSplater posted:I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Divide's nukes that caused the Marked Men mutation, but the experimental weather used there by the brains at the Big Empty. That actually raises more questions, since the Long 15 and Dry Wells are nowhere near the Divide and you see Marked Men at both locations.
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Mar 28, 2019 01:36
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Sun Vulture, turning the world green again! Installing the mod that removes the green/sepia overlay made the game a lot more pleasant for me.
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Mar 28, 2019 14:57
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While the idea of a speech battle with a complex, ideological character (who you can beat by revealing their hypocrisies) can be a good one and has been done before in the series, Ulysses is a particularly weak example. A lot of this is because a) the game heavily frames and favors Ulysses' perspective, making his weakness or fallibility implicit at most, and b) he's damned frustrating to listen to or even understand. You could write Ulysses a lot less punchable by just losing the weird prophetic certainty framing that makes him come across as a smug edgelord. Uly being traumatized and searching for meaning is fine, and him having concocted a scheme to...test? to whatever courier six sort of works, and you can even preserve the weird Children of Tama overuse of metaphor to some limited extent. But a lot of Uly's dialogue is unnecessarily hard to parse, dropping subjects and shifting terms (notice how often he drops "I" from the start of a statement"). The net result is a character who takes effort to understand, talking down to you, forcing you into contrived moral choices, with a vocabulary of concepts that is noticeably the same as the game's authorial voice. A more openly emotional, unbalanced Ulysses could still speak about the symbols of the old world and accomplish the same narrative goals, while being more sympathetic and less infuriating.
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Mar 28, 2019 17:01
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You can't talk Ulysses down by revealing the faults in his perspective. That's rather the point of the character. It is hard to parse through his grandstanding, but he's decidedly not an ideological character, and the loss of his ability to believe in a greater purpose is what defines him. His perspective is deliberately opposed to the Courier's, and he went out of his way to tear down the NCR because it was the faction with which Sun Vulture had aligned, and if ApeHawk hadn't hacked her reputation scores, the conversation would have ended much faster. I have a hard time envisioning the character without the dispassionate certainty, but I definitely agree that he's way harder to parse than he needs to be. I think an editing pass for those conversations where he spouts a lot of words but you have no idea what he's actually saying would have helped him a lot, especially since the engine does not have any kind of dialogue log. Also, for the curious, Ulysses was originally intended to be a companion for the base game, whose main purpose was to have an inside scoop on Caesar's Legion, and to remind the Courier that Hoover Dam was the central plot element of the game. His Duster was supposed to change based on how you handled his personal quest, which probably carried over into the Courier Duster you get at the end of the DLC. Sun Vulture ended up with the Bear duster for being an NCR supporter (even if it's probably not who she'll support in the end game), but she could also have gotten a Bull duster (Legion, gives strength and AP), a Vegas duster (Yes Man, gives luck and poison resistance; it's the one with a spade and the vault 21 symbol shown in the ending slides), or even her own Old World duster (Mr. House, gives agility and rad resistance).
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Mar 28, 2019 23:19
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eat ulysses plz
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Mar 29, 2019 01:11
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I'd argue that Uly's weird unstated existentialism is also an ideology of sorts, it's just really poorly articulated and you wind up having to sort of play along with it- which, you know, doesn't help the whole gary stu perception. It doesn't help that absent the wordiness and abstraction of it, Uly's plan is really dumb and pointless. Yes, I know, traumatized, but I don't feel a lot of sympathy or depth to this You But Deeper Character who Challenges your Actions and has a Tragic Backstory and Symbolic Weapons. There's not enough there there beneath all the stylization. Basically, Explosions posted:eat ulysses plz
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Mar 29, 2019 01:37
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:
I really wish the game just gave you all the variants of the duster instead of going off the reputation system. Don't worry; I'll show off the rest of them in the final update.
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Mar 29, 2019 04:17
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Discendo Vox posted:I'd argue that Uly's weird unstated existentialism is also an ideology of sorts, it's just really poorly articulated and you wind up having to sort of play along with it- which, you know, doesn't help the whole gary stu perception. It doesn't help that absent the wordiness and abstraction of it, Uly's plan is really dumb and pointless. Yes, I know, traumatized, but I don't feel a lot of sympathy or depth to this You But Deeper Character who Challenges your Actions and has a Tragic Backstory and Symbolic Weapons. There's not enough there there beneath all the stylization. Basically, Yeah, that's entirely fair. I just have a massive soft spot for the "guide looking for guidance" character that Avellone tends to write. I appreciate him a lot more after this LP, because this time I was reading everything he said with the context that he was lost and searching for meaning and that all his grandstanding was as much aimed at convincing himself as it was at you (and had the ability to scroll up and re-read his dialogue at my leisure). The first time I played through Lonesome Road I left with very little of an impression of Ulysses and having no idea how or why I'd managed to talk him down, outside of the found recordings which were replayable. He's not a good fit for the Bethesda dialogue system. ApeHawk posted:I really wish the game just gave you all the variants of the duster instead of going off the reputation system. Don't worry; I'll show off the rest of them in the final update. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to jump the gun on anything you were planning to show off later.
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Mar 29, 2019 11:53
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Zulily Zoetrope posted:Yeah, that's entirely fair. I just have a massive soft spot for the "guide looking for guidance" character that Avellone tends to write. I appreciate him a lot more after this LP, because this time I was reading everything he said with the context that he was lost and searching for meaning and that all his grandstanding was as much aimed at convincing himself as it was at you (and had the ability to scroll up and re-read his dialogue at my leisure). Nah, it's cool. Especially since... I may have, ahem... forgotten about the different dusters, ah hahahahaha!
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Mar 29, 2019 14:15
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So, did you just nuke California and Arizona, or just the Long 15 and Dry wells?
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Mar 30, 2019 00:56
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Servetus posted:So, did you just nuke California and Arizona, or just the Long 15 and Dry wells? The nukes just cut off the supply routes the NCR and Legion are using to reach NV, unfortunately you can't destroy California
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Mar 30, 2019 01:11
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What the hell kind of launch system can't even reach it's originally intended Target CONTINENT? drat things were supposed to reach Asia, right? Unless the nukes Sun launched were from silos built as part of a Scorched Earth contingency plan for Alaska? I get the narrative choice and all, but place for you the logging of attack coordinates and the launch command place are in entirely different facilities as a failsafe IIRC. But it's Fallout so gently caress it I guess. Otherwise I suppose we should all be SUPER WORRIED if such safeguards are not around. I just hate picturing missiles launching upwards only to what is essentially an immediate U-Turn LooneyToons style relationship I've to the trajectory of an intercontinental strike. Blasphemaster fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Mar 30, 2019 |
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Mar 30, 2019 06:36
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Blasphemaster posted:What the hell kind of launch system can't even reach it's originally intended Target CONTINENT? drat things were supposed to reach Asia, right? Unless the nukes Sun launched were from silos built as part of a Scorched Earth contingency plan for Alaska? I get the narrative choice and all, but place for you the logging of attack coordinates and the launch command place are in entirely different facilities as a failsafe IIRC. But it's Fallout so gently caress it I guess. Otherwise I suppose we should all be SUPER WORRIED if such safeguards are not around. Those nukes are like 200 years old. Their guidance systems are probably corroded to gently caress, and I'll bet about half the fuel is inert at this point. It's a small wonder they even still LAUNCH.
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Mar 30, 2019 19:24
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