Karma

T

The Suave Gambler

First time out of the vault
So let me get this straight. The only thing Karma effects is how Ron Pearlman describes me at the end of the game?

IE

Evil
The Courier, who also enjoyed stomping on puppies, brought peace to the wastes.

Good
The Courier, who was a god among men and damn handsome too, brought peace to the wastes.
 
Well, at leats he doesn't call you Jesus and Budah for blowing up a city with a bomb but giving bottles of water to beggars, or a Defiler for killing a bunch of ghouls that killed the peopel that let them into their house.
 
"Karma" in FO3/NV is pretty much retarded (then again it wasn't overly important in 1/2 either, the reputation system in Fallout 2/NV is MUCH better for that), item karma is even worse - it's just a way of the game keeping track of which items belong to which people.

It's not really "evil" to steal from the Powder Gangers or Caesar's Legion, but the game records it as so. Just so if you get caught picking it up they will react.

The counter-example to this is Vault 3 with the Fiends (or at least when I went there in a recent playthrough), all the items, locked doors, locked computers, everything that they should be reacting to me touching were in the default "pick up" colour rather than red, and thus did not alert the Fiends to me messing around and stealing all their shit. This in-turn meant I lost no karma, nor gained any for "stealing" from them.

Don't put too much thought into it.
 
Lies and poor unsubstantiated slander, karma effects a quest for the White Glove Society. Do you not see it's genius!
...
Yea apart from that it does sod all except make you feel bad you nicked stuff from criminals/dead people/boxes with the wrong owner tag on.
Well not bad, more annoyed at that annoying karma jingle.
 
Karma is a stupid concept anyway. It can be used as a general information about your characters actions, but it should never be used when it comes to how NPCs react on you, etc. In general, not only Fo3 / FNV. It didn't worked at all in Fo3 and I am happy, that it has only a very minor role in FNV.
 
Karma shouldn't be in games anymore. It is just clunky and doesn't work well in practice
 
I was just making sure because I just stole everything from mohave outpost, sold it in goodsprings, and repaired a low condition .45 pistol I found early in the game.
 
Walpknut said:
Well, at leats he doesn't call you Jesus and Budah for blowing up a city with a bomb but giving bottles of water to beggars, or a Defiler for killing a bunch of ghouls that killed the peopel that let them into their house.
Click to expand...

Please, don't even try man, karma is very stupid in NV the same way it was in FO3 and the whole concept is lame and revolting.

Kill everyone in Goodsprings, then go killing those Powder Gangers between you and Primm, then kill everyone at the town, then kill those Vipers on the way to Mojave Outpost and be prepared now to kill anyone in there.
Look at you karma level: Saint. :?
 
The most relevant aspect of Karma is that Cassidy will leave you if you talk to her while 'Evil.' So you can lose a companion, if you talk to her, sort of.

Karma was appropriately nebulous. It was very general to an extreme, but had only a general affect on anything else. It wasn't much more than a non-faction reputation bar in application.
 
brfritos said:
Walpknut said:
Well, at leats he doesn't call you Jesus and Budah for blowing up a city with a bomb but giving bottles of water to beggars, or a Defiler for killing a bunch of ghouls that killed the peopel that let them into their house.
Click to expand...

Please, don't even try man, karma is very stupid in NV the same way it was in FO3 and the whole concept is lame and revolting.

Kill everyone in Goodsprings, then go killing those Powder Gangers between you and Primm, then kill everyone at the town, then kill those Vipers on the way to Mojave Outpost and be prepared now to kill anyone in there.
Look at you karma level: Saint. :?
Click to expand...

It was a joke. I forget to use emoticons when writing them. Karma is dumb, it only works in games with specific plot points to affect it, and even then just barely.
 
Oh come on. Good looking people can evil. It doesn't have to do with gameplay it's Roleplaying. If you wanna be good or bad. Will you steal or won't you. Will you kill innocent people or not. I mean damn. Why play a Role Playing Game if you don't wanna have a little fun with it and think about how your character would act. Same thing with a lot of perks like cannibal. It serves no real purpose except to be evil!
 
If I want to be evil, then I can do it myself. I don't need the game moralizing and telling me what a bad person I am.
 
I agree, it's pretty F'n useless. I usually have evil karma for the first bit (ally with the powder gangers then double cross them to NCR). Then after getting Boone, killing Vulpes and doing 'Booted' I'm good again. Even though I just wiped out a town and betrayed people who took me in. yeah.

Also, I still don't have the achievement for LEVEL 8 NEUTRAL KARMA and I dont feel like going back to get it
 
In New Vegas is basically useless and best ignored; it effects Cass leaving if it is very low, getting a quest from Mortimer (which you can get other ways), the level 50 perks, a few minor comments at the end game, I think a quest from one of the NCR guys near Nelson and perhaps a few other minor things, but basically nothing terribly important. If you really care a specific Karma title though the system is easily worked around.
 
Wastelander357 said:
Nave Senrag said:
If I want to be evil, then I can do it myself. I don't need the game moralizing and telling me what a bad person I am.
Click to expand...

You're missing the entire point of the system.
Click to expand...

That is because it has no point. It provides the player with feedback at the end of the game based on how they played and what exploits they were willing to use in order to change their karma. This is the opposite of roleplaying. Real feedback would be a person refusing to talk to you or attacking you if they think they can take you out if they see you kill a friend or family member. Real feedback would be a shopkeeper not selling to you after he catches you stealing, and then only reopening his store to you if you did a favor for him, or if you threatened him at gun point. Unfortunately, this isn't a possibility, but until it is, I don't want these stupid half measures that I have to constantly check to make sure the fact that I picked up a raider's stuff isn't giving me bad karma. Until real feedback from the game becomes a possibility, I'll do the roleplaying myself.
 
Really, the only thing that we would have needed for a game like New Vegas was the reputation system. The idea of 'Karma' in a desolate wasteland is just unrealistic.

Basically, Humans after the war were thrown into the wild with all the other animals. It is now survival of the fittest once again. What if you were faced with a problem. A frail child is in possession of water, surely the kind of water that you need as you are dying of dehydration. Just because it is wrong to steal doesn't mean you should be punished for it in a game where without the water you may die.

This said, Karma hardly effects the world of Fallout New Vegas anymore, unlike in Fallout 3, which is a good thing, in my opinion, but if that was the case, why would we have it in the game in the first place?

The Reputation system makes much more sense. Maybe the child with the water was a member of a settlement which the player had to work with in order to complete an objective. The player would stave off death for another day but find that the reputation with the settlement would go down.

In the real world this makes much more sense. Morality as a whole is defined by what society says it is. Now that settlements are isolated, different concepts of justice and evil would form. This is where the reputation system would come into play and is also where the whole idea of the Karma system doesn't work. It could only work, say, if an all seeing all knowing deity was looking over the character and decided their fate from what the character did, but that's not the case.

Just makes more sense to me is all.
 
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