Homer2137
Still Mildly Glowing
Disney wishes they had Star Wars fans be as shill as Fallout fans.
My review of Fallout: the Series Season One 9/10
- Thread starter CT Phipps
- Start date
Still Mildly Glowing
Yet in the Legion controlled area people can live a relatively safe life. Caravans are not pestered by raiders, and crime is severely punished. Freedom vs security, some people in NV mention that life in the Legion areas isn't too bad if you keep your head down. All a matter of perspective, within the gameworld the strict authoritarian regime of Caesar has its benefits in the eyes of some people.
It's an unambiguously evil faction from the real world perspective, but within the game world, Caesar can absolutely be seen as having a point.
I, as real human, don't agree with it, but I can easily justify a character that would think so.
CT Phipps
Carbon Dated and Proud
The freedom versus security argument kind of falls apart if your security is dependent entirely on the good will of the men around you. Women don't have any freedom and are the property of the men--which means they aren't terribly secure. Plus, there's the fact the slaves aren't very secure either. Plus the Legion shares the usual disgust for ghouls and mutants.
Which is to say, if you are a human male Legionaire or merchant, life is very good.
Which is fine, that's worked for plenty of cultures throughout history. We shouldn't just overly pretend life is good if you obey, though.
As Isaac Asimov said, "I don't like fantasy because in the Middle Ages, I'd have been screwed."
Women aren't safe anywhere else. The Legion isn't supposed to be the permanent solution, it's the first conquering step to unify and pacify the wasteland before actual civilisation is reestablished. Caesar wants the people to be hard to survive, but ultimately he doesn't see the Legion as the final goal. There's no point to a brutal conquering army when there is nothing left to conquer.
CT Phipps
Carbon Dated and Proud
I mean, Caesar wants to make a bunch of cannibals to be the new nobility of his capital in an electricity-less New Vegas.
Just saying.
R.Graves
Confirmed Retard
i will always hate this idea forever. replacing handcrafted content with randomly generated nonsense is gay and cringe
Bradylama
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
Caesar also says that he intends to conquer California, which is the final step in his dialectical process. Caesar thinks that the Legion and NCR will mix and integrate cultures to form a synthesis that is more suited to meeting the harsh realities of the world as it is while also realizing some modicum of modernity.
IMO that's a naive assumption. Caesar has already nurtured too many anti-modernist beliefs among the Legion. Once they conquer California Caesar wouldn't be able to control them and it'd end in a genocide, where southern Californian culture is either wiped out or made completely subservient to their conquerors. The Legion would end up tearing down the industrial base and complex technology at NCR's disposal as profligacies and supplant them with a more traditional slave-based political economy. Not understanding that they're ultimately recreating the crisis of the late Roman empire with far fewer resources.
Nonetheless it's what Caesar plans. His vision for the future would have to rise out of the ashes of the republic.
Hardboiled Android
Vault Fossil
Which is to say, if you are a human male Legionaire or merchant, life is very good.
Which is fine, that's worked for plenty of cultures throughout history. We shouldn't just overly pretend life is good if you obey, though.
As Isaac Asimov said, "I don't like fantasy because in the Middle Ages, I'd have been screwed."[/QUOTE]
This is a conflation of people within the Legion and people living in the territory that the legion has conquered. Dale Barton might be the only one we meet in the game, but from what we know most "non-tribal" people are left alone by the Legion. They get to enjoy all the benefits of Legion security without having to adhere to tis strictures, aside from rare requests for tribute in kind and corvee labor, though seemingly not even to the degree that people in the ancient Near East wer esubjected to it.
I do appreciate that you are willing to stick around NMA and engage in these conversations without being ran off easily. But you are missing the core of what people are talking about with the Legion in the replies to you. They are evil, yes, multiple have said that.
You can keep saying, "Well, look at this, see? He's an evil awful bad guy." Which, yeah, he is. But the point is that when you are in the Midwest full of warring tribes and you start to unify them and there's still plenty of other tribes who will violently resist your expansion alongside the common gang of raiders or thieves, you will need to conquer. There are things to critique about Caesar besides his lack of modern sensibilities. His lack of modern sensibilities is deplorable, sure, but Caesar, the people who follow him, and/or live in his protected territory don't really give a rat's ass about that. They are focused on not being the next one enslaved or executed or robbed. And if Caesar provides insurance that if you just work and trade like a normal person that you avoid that fate? Yeah, people will follow him. He's bringing order to chaos and for now, that's all people will care about.
Look what Hass has said to you too,
This isn't how even Caesar would have his nation be once he's done with conquering. He must set up a more concrete nation and focus more on the progress of his people than on the accumulation of those people. Which would likely lead to less deplorable treatment of people overall. I hate the Legion too, but I get why some characters in this world see a secure territory to live in and think to themselves, "It's better than a bullet to the head." If the NCR provides an inconsistent security of life but with humanitarian rights and the Legion provides a consistent security of life but of that without all the humanitarian rights, some people will find that more appealing.
I think @Bradylama has a good point about how he's a bit shortsighted in his dialect goals with California/NCR and whatnot though. His men would probably not adapt well to the life they would need to. Somewhat reminds me of how apparently the Taliban were not very content with their office jobs when they took control of Afghanistan.
Indeed. Caesar is a pretty well thought out villain that in the context of the game world kinda makes sense. Its realistic that people would follow him and also that some people under his rule are pretty content.
He's not a villain that is just evil. His plans are pretty damn evil, but it takes quite some close looks until they stop making sense.
It's not like the Enclave particularly in Fallout 3, which made zero sense front to back.
He's not a villain that is just evil. His plans are pretty damn evil, but it takes quite some close looks until they stop making sense.
It's not like the Enclave particularly in Fallout 3, which made zero sense front to back.
Bradylama
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
I appreciate CT's obligate contrarianism and disordered thinking. It's gotten me to think about stuff I wouldn't have considered otherwise.
Bradylama
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
Caesar's plans only stop making sense because of the limitations in his thinking. Caesar isn't even aware of how thoroughly he's alienated himself as a cynical actor ruling over a society of illiterate fanatics. The ironic thing about him is that he's a thoroughly modern character, produced by the civilizing mission of the Followers of the Apocalypse. Caesar turned on the Followers to save his own skin, and opportunistically spun that into his own civilization building project based on his critiques of the NCR.
Point being, it's all well supported by the writing and doesn't fall apart because it was an afterthought that the creatives didn't really care to think about.
CT Phipps
Carbon Dated and Proud
My interpretation of Caesar is that he is three stages:
1. That he's apparently just a crazy Wasteland Warlord
2. You meet him and discover that he's an intelligent cultured individual who is well aware that what he's peddling to the tribals is bullshit. To quote Seneva, 'Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.'
3. After you hear his explanations and rationalizations, I feel there's a third stage to understanding caesar, which is the fact that he's not nearly as in control or smart as he think he is. Whether because of his brain tumor or the fact he's a megalomaniac, a lot of his plans are based on faulty premises and simply wouldn't work but he's begun to drink his own Kool-Aid.
Like the fact that he has created a clear chain of command according to Boone but the Legion will utterly fall apart after his death and the NCR economy is like 3x the size of the Legions. There's no way he could ever conquer it or invade it or win at Hoover Dam if not for the fact that General Oliver is FANTASTICALLY incompetent.
I fully believe without Joshua Graham, caesar was never going to be able to stabilize his empire.
Bradylama
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
The Legion won't necessarily fall apart after Caesar dies because Legate Lanius is the actual avatar of everything the Legion represents. Lanius would be able to hold the Legion together as a conquering horde, but wouldn't know a single thing about managing a civilization.
The Legion and the NCR are two sides of the same coin, because they're trying to reconstruct the old world from the ashes of the new. Caesar thinks he's creating something new with old forms, similar to Marx's line about revolutionaries claiming the mantle of the past.
The big and obvious snag in Caesar's plan is that all the Legion knows are the forms he's given them. Nobody gets Caesar's actual objective because they wouldn't understand it.
The Legion and the NCR are two sides of the same coin, because they're trying to reconstruct the old world from the ashes of the new. Caesar thinks he's creating something new with old forms, similar to Marx's line about revolutionaries claiming the mantle of the past.
The big and obvious snag in Caesar's plan is that all the Legion knows are the forms he's given them. Nobody gets Caesar's actual objective because they wouldn't understand it.
CT Phipps
Carbon Dated and Proud
Yeah,
Caesar is also a modern day cult leader. All of his child soldiers are raised by the priestesses of Mars with a fully indoctrinated worldview and the tribals are broken down until they fully embrace their new culture. Lanius is a beast but all indications are he's someone who also believes the lunacy of the Legion so there's no one he's groomed as an heir or even a caste of people who can understand that it is a fraud.
Which might be why he wants to conquer Vegas and make the White Glove society his new nobility because they will be people who can serve as a new aristocracy.
It may also be why he's recruiting the Courier because he needs agents who aren't believers.
AgentBJ09
Vault Dweller
Giving up the reactivity such a system would provide, and which video games are designed for, would leave us with nothing better than what we got in F4 or 76.
Try playing Mount and Blade sometime, see how the kingdom and conquest system in that works. Then imagine that for Tamriel or Fallout and tell me that wouldn't be fun to try.
I think at most the surrounding landscape could be generated with handmade important locations, but I think its better to just go thr classic fallout way and do everything in individual maps with high detail. No need for compression of the world to walkable distances.
Bradylama
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
Speaking of walkable distances, it's very funny that Kyle McLachlan walked all the way from Griffith observatory to New Vegas in a power armor suit that smelled like a dead guy.
CT Phipps
Carbon Dated and Proud
Maybe he fast traveled. Either way, I felt his character was underdeveloped and I hope we get flashbacks to him and his wife.
AgentBJ09
Vault Dweller
Daggerfall did that to a degree, though there was landscaping data for when and if you had an encounter while fast-traveling. When the Unity build was made, one of the mods for Daggerfall used that landscaping data to simulate real-time to 50X traveling speed, and you can naturally find places like caves and forts traveling this way. If a new Fallout was made with this in mind, I'd be in favor of it.
The hub structure that Fallout had was what Arena used. You can walk forever in any direction when outside of the cities, but you'll never go anywhere else by doing this. You have to fast travel to get to new locations, and those always eat up virtual days and weeks at a time. No landscaping data for this game though, so all emulators can do is try to keep that game from crashing or bugging out.