For me, I want Raiders to exist because they're an iconic part of post-apocalyspe fiction and enjoy the idea that the true face of civilization will be those who will tear it down. If NCR is ever destroyed, I'd love it to be the hands of a massive Hun army like Lanius versus something with pretensions of organization like Caesar.
*pause*
I guess what I'm saying is I'm overtly fond of Raiders the way I am the Helghast, WOW Horde, and Zeon.
Basically the Khans, in other words. An actual Fallout raider faction, the archnemesis of the NCR since its first day, sharing the same origin and yet, they turned into a Genghis Khan kind of horde. A faction that is logical, has reasons for what they do, an economy, a social structure, a past, a future and actual geopolitical struggles. Basically what most fans of the good old Fallout cheer and want to see again!
Hell, even the Fiends have something that drives them. They fight for a future of their own, they feel like defending a clearly defined territory against a foreign invador that threaten to force them to abandon their "traditional" way of life or to die by their hands. They have an economy, and they tie alliances, make compromises for preserving their identity etc.
We could take examples of many raider factions here and there, even cartoonish ones to illustrate the point. Mad Max 2 raiders may be cheesy, but lord Humungus (my hero) has a good reason why he's brutal and why he's raiding forts : an immediate resource. And the movie is not very subtle at showing that in any other context, he'd be a civilized, intelligent man.
Immortan Joe is a raider warlord, not because he's twisting his mustache and eating orphan puppies, but because he imposed his rule during the oil wars, took control of a rare resource and established a working trade triangle with gastown and the bullet farm, where he made sure his own family rules. And he's not a civilization destroyer. One generation after the apocalypse only, he actually BUILT his own civilization, with its own social, religious, political and military structure. Give him just one more generation and his army could become an actual, proper society like Caesar's Legion.
The Helghasts are a very interesting faction. Killzone may be a brainless console shooter, but the antagonist faction is very, very well written, and the ending when you finally get to Scholar Visari clearly shows that the writers made researches on the complexity of actual geopolitical situations, and why tyrants can turn themselves into necessary evils for their own gain. And it gets better with every title, with the Helghan struggles with their private/public takeovers of the military, their refugees crisis etc.
In other words, having warlords wearing tight leather and twirling their evil mustache is perfectly fine in Fallout. But in all these examples, these factions still have depth, logic, a reflexion on the time they're in, a past, a future and a logical resource. Basically, they're believable.
I already said before that the Pitt raiders are the exception to the rule, in my opinion. They may be simple but they make sense, just like Skyrim's brigands make sense. They represent something, they have an economy, a resource and some sort of history. But when you compare them to Fallout 3 or 4 raiders (not slavers), I really have trouble finding even a quota of the depth of the previously mentionned raider factions.
What's their story? What's their motive? What unites them? What are their beliefs, their goals, their past and the future they want to write? What do they represent? What power drives them?
