Classic Fallout Games has better characters

SiriusShenanigans said:
Yes, there is a certain amount of taste to it, but the way I see it is that New Vegas plays a lot of their characters straight and doesn't do anything interesting with them. Big Sal works in Gomorrah. Pretty much anybody there looks like they would take drugs and beat women. Its also the kind of location where they just look like they would support the legion from the get-go. There is no nuance to speak of. Stuff like Joana being a prostitute with a heart of gold is another tired trope that I've seen before and have come to expect. Meanwhile, I find that characters like the bartender in gecko have no reason to be playing tragic the gathering, but it becomes an aspect of their character rather than yet another feather in an established trope or a feature of the environment that he comes from. Sometimes having the environment affect the area is nice, but it should be done in interesting ways. There needs to be intrigue and upset, and I find more often than not, New Vegas is in the business of straightforward storytelling. I get frustrated with how characters don't seem to have life in them, or only on occasion. It feels like it is a story where factions dictate the outcomes of things and not by the individuals that make up those factions. The Omerta's obviously side with the legion. The White Glove are obviously cannibals. The Chairmen are obviously going to try to use the chip they shot you in the head to get.
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I don't really disagree with you for the most part in that it does feel like more often than not NV plays it safe/straight, but I don't necessarily think that's the worst thing in the world. Some tropes have become tiresome and could probably stand to see less use, but many exist and are perpetuated because they're actually decent storytelling devices with real-world parallels (and thus relatability).

Also, I wouldn't say the White Gloves are obviously cannibals (until you talk with Mortimer or Marjorie and they let that slip, anyway), but there is clearly something WRONG there, yes. And to be fair, it was only Benny who had designs on the chip - there didn't seem to be any indication Swank or any of the others had any idea what Benny was planning. Lastly, the Omerta/Legion connection is actually kind of strange when you think about it - Omertas like hookers and blow, Legion probably doesn't think highly of the first and definitely frowns on the second.
 
Cliffy McEdgeface said:
Also, I wouldn't say the White Gloves are obviously cannibals
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Cannibals is just occam's razor for them. I told my sister who knows nothing about Fallout that there was a group called the White Glove Society and that their big thing was that they had a fancy restaurant, which is information you can get about them from the radio, which is one of the main hooks for getting you to want to investigate the Ultralux, and I asked my sister what the plot twist would be. It didn't take more than one guess for her to get that they were cannibals.

I wouldn't say that the legion looks down on hookers or blow. They use archaic medicines that are essentially old world drugs, and they enslave women and use them as a tool. Prostitution is one of the classic ways of women serving an army in the old world. It just fits their motif. They would love the Omertas and Gomorrah. The legion is based on Rome, a nation that fell because of its love of indulgence. They aren't sparta.

Also, when I say the chairmen want to use the chip, I only mean Benny, because the Chairmen are essentially the most boring of the vegas tribes. There isn't a single character that stands out among them beyond Benny. They are the control group of the casinos.
 
SiriusShenanigans said:
Cannibals is just occam's razor for them. I told my sister who knows nothing about Fallout that there was a group called the White Glove Society and that their big thing was that they had a fancy restaurant, which is information you can get about them from the radio, which is one of the main hooks for getting you to want to investigate the Ultralux, and I asked my sister what the plot twist would be. It didn't take more than one guess for her to get that they were cannibals.
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Yeah, fair enough. In retrospect it might have been interesting for the game to make you THINK cannibalism was at play with the WGS but go somewhere else entirely with Beyond the Beef, but eh.

SiriusShenanigans said:
I wouldn't say that the legion looks down on hookers or blow. They use archaic medicines that are essentially old world drugs, and they enslave women and use them as a tool. Prostitution is one of the classic ways of women serving an army in the old world. It just fits their motif. They would love the Omertas and Gomorrah. The legion is based on Rome, a nation that fell because of its love of indulgence. They aren't sparta.
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There's Rome and then there's Rome. There are multiple periods/versions of Rome and while one of the commonly known ones is the Rome of Nero et al. (drunken debauchery, orgies and so on) there's other periods of Rome that someone like Edward Sallow aka Caesar would probably be aiming more for in concept. As for drugs, while they do use things like Healing Powder and Bitter Drinks (which are definitely botanically-derived primitive drugs) they really don't like most anything else (hence their veiled distaste for the Khans and their "no fun stuff" rule for staying in the Fort) and the Omertas are all about the "fun stuff", not so much the curatives.

SiriusShenanigans said:
Also, when I say the chairmen want to use the chip, I only mean Benny, because the Chairmen are essentially the most boring of the vegas tribes. There isn't a single character that stands out among them beyond Benny. They are the control group of the casinos.
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Yeah, agreed re: "control group". The Chairmen are simply patterned after show-biz "face" Vegas Mafiosi, whereas Omertas are much more in line with the commonly-held view of Mafiosi outside of Vegas.
 
Cliffy McEdgeface said:
There's Rome and then there's Rome. There are multiple periods/versions of Rome and while one of the commonly known ones is the Rome of Nero et al. (drunken debauchery, orgies and so on) there's other periods of Rome that someone like Edward Sallow aka Caesar would probably be aiming more for in concept. As for drugs, while they do use things like Healing Powder and Bitter Drinks (which are definitely botanically-derived primitive drugs) they really don't like most anything else (hence their veiled distaste for the Khans and their "no fun stuff" rule for staying in the Fort) and the Omertas are all about the "fun stuff", not so much the curatives.
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Much of the time when they try to present the Legion as this incorruptible force, it seems like a farce. They are an indulgent group by nature as they appeal to the crueler sides of society. Its also restrictive in how people may behave, so the way I see it, they need to have groups that can give relief to their soldiers if they want to keep their ranks stable.

I get that sometimes tropes can be good and relateable and all, but I find they make for a more boring story overall. There are two aspects necessary for a story, its got to be surprising, yet convincing. New Vegas is often convincing, but not surprising. I think fallout 2 tends to be surprising, and sometimes it has trouble being convincing. I think that's ultimately where my tastes lie. I'd rather have something surprising than I would like to have something convincing.
 
SiriusShenanigans said:
Much of the time when they try to present the Legion as this incorruptible force, it seems like a farce. They are an indulgent group by nature as they appeal to the crueler sides of society. Its also restrictive in how people may behave, so the way I see it, they need to have groups that can give relief to their soldiers if they want to keep their ranks stable.
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I wouldn't say that the Legion is devoid of debauched behavior per se but they're very particular in which vices they will allow/indulge. (The Legion in NV is, as a story device, probably a hollow parody of what it was in VB but we got what we got)

SiriusShenanigans said:
I get that sometimes tropes can be good and relateable and all, but I find they make for a more boring story overall. There are two aspects necessary for a story, its got to be surprising, yet convincing. New Vegas is often convincing, but not surprising. I think fallout 2 tends to be surprising, and sometimes it has trouble being convincing. I think that's ultimately where my tastes lie. I'd rather have something surprising than I would like to have something convincing.
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Different strokes, I guess, but given I tend to rank FO2 and FNV nearly the same (advantage FO2 simply because it's not saddled with Gamebryo) I'm not sure I rank one over the other at all, personally.
 
Fo1, Fo2 and FoNV have many excellent characters. FoT has a couple of them. FoBos-Fo3-Fo4-FoS has none.
 
I think its all pretty heavily perspective, but I'd have to say I'd prefer convincing. Surprising is what you build up once you have convincing built, because that come from building the world and societies that inhabit it. Surprising by itself is almost the same as people who tout the benefits of change by itself. Something convincing, or stable, will be effective by design. Something changed, or made surprising, inevitably has a chance of making things worse by being poorly presented or considered. I definitely want surprising to be worked on, just how I want improvements always made, but convincing's way more important for enabling that.
 
Convincing on its own is boring, which is not what I'm looking for in entertainment. That's ultimately my problem with New Vegas. It just doesn't surprise me at all. It doesn't impress me. It doesn't make me fall in love with the world. When those things start to happen, I end up walking away from the game.
 
Joan Lynette

Father Elijah

Marcus

Dr. Mobius

The Master

Most good characters in the newer Fallouts appear in FNV's DLC imo.
 
Cliffy McEdgeface said:
>no Joshua Graham

Disappoint.
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Joshua Graham is nice on paper (although, a bit Mary-sue-esque), had a great voice actor, but ultimately, the interactions with him are a bit underwhelming.

It is like they tried so hard to tell you that he was cool, without putting the extra effort to make you feel it.
 
naossano said:
Joshua Graham is nice on paper (although, a bit Mary-sue-esque), had a great voice actor, but ultimately, the interactions with him are a bit underwhelming.

It is like they tried so hard to tell you that he was cool, without putting the extra effort to make you feel it.
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I wouldn't call him Mary-sue-esque - he is DEEPLY flawed and he acknowledges as much. As for cool, I didn't get that from him so much. I felt strong pangs of sympathy and a little revulsion over his past, he did not strike me as someone I wanted to emulate so much as he struck me as someone I wanted to help somehow.
 
Fallout 1 maybe, but not fallout 2. Characters are just bursting with personalities and quirks. Everybody has something weird about them

If you want we can test that statistic. You name 9 boring named npcs in fallout 2 and I'll name 1 interesting one, and we'll see if you can keep up.
 
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Dunno, while there's definitely lots of quirkiness to be found in FO2's dramatis personae, lots of them are what I'd call gimmick or joke characters. The sergeant in Navarro is memorable, but not interesting- his gimmick is yelling a lot and being a dick. Gordon is a capitalist joke about Gordon Ge(c)kko.

But there's no denying they managed to populate the wasteland with a colourful cast. What I assume they did during development was to demand that each named character get some kind of quirk that could be used and communicated in dialogue- a distinctive speech pattern, a weird name with a story behind it, an obsession, compulsion or addiction, or something similar. This is a technique I've used for GM prep myself and it works great.
 
Really, thats just me being a little buttface about how extreme a statistic 90% being uninteresting is in a game I remember so many unimportant characters from, and figure if we named them off, we could do a 1 prop z test to do a confidence test on that assertion. Yay, hypothesis testing.
 
SiriusShenanigans said:
Fallout 1 maybe, but not fallout 2. Characters are just bursting with personalities and quirks. Everybody has something weird about them

If you want we can test that statistic. You name 9 boring named npcs in fallout 2 and I'll name 1 interesting one, and we'll see if you can keep up.
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That's just going to be a game of 'but I feel like these are bursting with character bc reasons!' No thanks. It's a fact, but you can pretend otherwise if you want.
 
Okay, lets try to qualify this first: What do consider to be the measurement for interest or lack there of found in a character in fallout? What is supposed to be heart of a good side character?
 
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