This is why I prefer New Vegas. Why or why dont you?

I prefer New Vegas because not only is it the first Fallout game I was ever exposed to, it's also the one modern Fallout that most resembles the classics in terms of setting, characters, and world design. It's also incredibly fun and has awesome replay value, especially with all the mods for it. :D
 
I personally preferred 3. Mostly because there was more action going on. Many of the side quests felt like grind in New Vegas, "go here, find this and bring it to me". Fallout 3 wasn't much better, but I wasn't expecting what happened in the letter delivery quest, having to deal with a group of reformed cannibals or how Big Town related to German Town and Paradise Falls. In New Vegas, I didn't get those links as much.

Don't get me wrong, there were things in New Vegas that I really liked. Like the companions having backgrounds and side quests, the Courier having a vague backstory like in TES games. But there just wasn't enough of it to make me happy. The game map was sparse compared to Fallout 3. I know someone will point out the copy/pasted locations in 3, but that's at least some incentive to explore. Instead of Fallout 3: Let's go to Vegas. You're herded to Vegas and kept there by the lack of much outside of it. Hell, I only go back to Primm or Goodsprings when I've run out of people to sell junk to, not as a launch point for more exploration.

I also didn't like how you are guided into either supporting an independent ending or the NCR. The NCR is the easiest because they're everywhere and will kill you. And House is the only person with redeeming value. As for being led down a path, look at it this way, only about 2/3 of the map is accessible and 80% or more of it has NCR people running around in it, who will shoot you for siding with the Legion. I'd rather have no choice in whom to side with then get bashed into siding with one person, or alienating the entire map and most companions.

Another thing I like is how the NCR is a caricature of pre WW2 USA, but it was made to feel one dimensional. As someone who has no nostalgia for the old games, this makes them look bad in my eyes because New Vegas is compared so highly with the old games, and I don't see it as a good game. It has satisfying bites, but not enough of them.

I know Vegas is an empty region to begin with, but you shouldn't make it feel more empty and restrict me to Vegas proper. There are and could have been other things going on in the Mojave that had nothing to do with Vegas, but that didn't happen. I generally rate open world games based on the world and story more heavily than other mechanics like companions and side factions. New Vegas at least to me, had a worse map and a half baked story. I felt no investment to the four main factions/stories. I was more invested and like the Kings and Followers and wished there could have been a Broken Steel like post main quest DLC involving them cleaning up after the NCR and Legion have been pushed out of the Mojave.

I know this post will get a lot of shit from the nostalgia driven purists that hate Bethesda, but they did make a decent game. You wouldn't have gotten NV to fawn over if it weren't for them. So be grateful there are new Fallout games to come and new fans to share experiences and complaints with.
 
TorontRayne said:
DLC. There was plenty to do outside of Vegas. You can also play both sides as far as factions go.
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That ability to say play a Legion Spy is great, helping Silius (?) escape, planting the explosive on the Monorail, screwing over the NCR sharecroppers, just to name a few is very satisfying.
 
Another point that I didn't like about New Vegas is how everything is basically rigged for the NCR. You can't go anywhere without bumping into them and getting shot at if you side with the Legion. I would have been happier if they were less spread over the map so at least I had a chance to be somewhere they weren't and resupply.

As for DLC, I should get a satisfying map for my exploration bug in the vanilla game, not have to wait for mods or DLC to be released. That being said, I did like Honest Hearts. I got drawn in and invested into the plight of the tribals. Not so much with the vanilla game, I had no investment in the NCR, Legion or House. Like I've posted before, I was more invested in the Followers and Kings than I was the main factions. I paid $60 for New Vegas on release, a good game should be delivered, especially since I'm not nostalgia driven or a fan of COD.
 
IDK they did kinda explain that - the NCR have been there for a long period of time and have established a thinly spread hold on the general area, and the legion or the aggressor. they say countless times that their desperate grab for power has left them spread thin, so it's not out of nowhere.
 
It's not really that hard to move around Vegas while allied with the legion, and there is the whole Faction disguise system, so as long as you don't waltz into McCarran or go to the Ranger stations none is gonna shoot you unprovoked. The Gun Runners aren't NCR alligned, there are no Rangers in the 188, Freeside is neutral, The Khans Armory and the Boomer have very good supply. You just gotta actually use mechanics and explore.
 
I have explored, I just never thought of the Boomers. I always felt that the Legion just exists so the developers could check "villain" off on a checklist. They don't have any redeeming value. They could have thrown the Midwestern BoS is and it would have made the game slightly more interesting.
 
>villain checklist
yeah p much. tbh a more organised raider gang or a series of autocrat-run settlements with ties and a history would be much stronger than one universal slaver army. Basically they should have gone into the future and copied Fury Road
 
Except the Legion has a background, territory, histories, philosophies and principles, the yaren't one dimensional (you would know if you talk to them and exahust the dialogue options before killing them) Hell their endings actually allude to a more complex invasion plan than just being villains depending on which of the two leaders ends up on top at the end. They just didn't have much content because of time constraints.
 
Eh, I'd say they were REALLY pushing the 'these guise r bad ok' agenda like even with the endings where you support them they basically say that there was order at the expense of freedom and still a lot of suffering under the rule
 
Well that's kind of the point, they offer security and productivity as long as they follow their rule. There is suffering in every ending because it's the wasteland. Hell the Legion (given Caesar is alive) even treats the Followers with respect and allows them to leave Freeside unharmed. They don't even mess with Goodsprings or the Boomers.
They didn't need to make them "good guys", they only needed to have more content.
 
You can argue that the Legion are better or worse than the other factions for various reasons and you could say they are morally reprehensible, but there is no way they are one-dimensional. Caesar only looks "cartoonishly evil" if the NCR's perspective is taken as fact. If you side with them, you'll be introduced to a noble man, with a very righteous cause, and a brilliant mind to execute it with. The first obvious problem with the Legion is their use of slavery, which I'll get to in a moment. The second is their apparent opression of women, but that is not so much opression as it is cold military logic. He needs soldiers to fight his wars, not just now but also further on. To fulfill this he purposefully forbids women from fighting to ensure survival for new conscripts since he values women's ability to carry and give birth to new children higher than the contribution they could add as legionaries. Is is sexist from our perspective? Absolutely 100%, but understandable in the harsh situation Caesar had to build his Legion in.

The NCR, meanwhile, looks great to support- old world ideals, democracy, freedom, then it turns out they represent none of that. They aren't in the Mojave to spread freedom and civilize the wastes, but to claim resources they have no right to. The leadership you work for if you decide to side with them are dark, self-obsessed, and close-minded bigots; the only exception being Crocker, who has an uncertain position in the future.

The Legion is not the best choice for the Mojave - House or Independent are both better - but they are the only ones who can civilize the surrounding regions in a stable way, which in a world that still hasn't managed to put up the kind of large-scale organization necessary for prosperity, that's a sure path to progress.

What was Dogtown (Denver) before its Legion conquest? It was a pit where survival was harsh, and prosperity was a delusional fantasy. Did the Legion bring it to ruin? No. It wasn't specified what became of Dogtown, but we know its survivors were given a better life.

You can pick apart Caesar in many ways, but you can't claim that he's delusional, or full of shit. He is a liar in the sense that he plays on the more gullible elements of his armies by making a small mythology around him. However those with a firm understanding of the Legion, or those who simply knew him long enough, are well aware that he is a man, but a very capable one, and a remarkable leader. The Legion had followed Caesar this whole way, not Caesar's image. They listened to him because he was intelligent and convincing.

Meanwhile, the very fabric of lies surrounding the NCR's presence in the Mojave is already causing it to buckling in on itself, due to widespread public unrest and discontent over their leadership. They have been proven to be increasingly less effective the farther away they move from their heartland.

When Caesar talks about the philosophies of war, and the fundamental evolutions of societies on a dialectic level, he conveys the presence of a man with a vision and a purpose. He's not spinning words to win you over. He knows what historically worked and what failed, and he's taking all of that knowledge, and using it to shape the wasteland. He may not be perfect, but he has TONS of knowledge and experience backing his convictions, similar to Mr. House in a way.

The true flaws of the Legion are with its lowest level troops. Might is right, to them. They have no vision, and their morality is essentially dictated to them by the more-informed higher ranking members. Finally, the Legion WILL deteriorate when Caesar dies. Unless the new leader was groomed by Caesar to carry on his vision, the Legion would still change in a way that's most likely a regression from the benefits of its current model. This draws many parallels to the NCR after President Tandi's death. Of course, if the Legion actually takes Vegas, it's very likely Caesar would establish a more fair line of sucession (Lanius is only the next in line due to circunstance), but it's less certain than their current situation.

I said I'd get back to slavery. That's the one thing with the Legion I can't justify in any way, moral or logical. But I say this: it's much more likely for the Legion to phase out slavery than it is for a country like the NCR to mantain long-term stability in all its points. Once Caesar has his Rome in New Vegas, he will have many options available to him. Still, slavery is the Legion's most reprehensible characteristic by far and it's hard to argue against that.

It's EASY to vilify the Legion because the whole Mojave is littered with only NCR-centric propaganda. They make Lanius out to be a brutal, savage boogeyman, yet when you meet him he's an honorable warrior who won't sacrifice his men's lives for a hollow victory. Caesar is thought to be a delusional madman, when he's happy to explain all his actions in detail if you ask him. Their bad aspects are shallow reasons to blanket the entirety of the Legion as "not having shades of grey". Clearly they do. You're ignoring their accomplishments, their economic prosperity, their cultural richness, and the human lives they're built on when you just say that the Legion are all cartoon bad guys. Realistically, I'd never side with the Legion when there are much better choices available, but saying they're plain evil without depth is ignoring all the evidence.
 
Let me just say this in the most obvious way possible, I think the Legion is one dimensional, not Caesar himself. I thought he was a well done, if not over confident character. But that doesn't mean the Legion, or a good chunk of the main quest should be called "good" because Obsidian made a few good characters, hell any game studio can make deep characters if they aren't putting time into cave design, **cough Skyrim**. My feeling was that the Legion existed to be the bad guy. To get me more invested, there should have been a post endgame quest where the Mojave was united under either Kings/Followers, who ever you scraped together or NCR/Legion depending on your choice during the main quest.

I would have wanted some missions where you ambush NCR supply caravans, extort some towns or something under the guise of the Legion. Or free some slaves if you didn't side with the Legion. Or literally just more quests to make me think that the main factions aren't just some groups with well thought leaders and not much depth beyond that.

As for the NCR, anyone that knows the lore wasn't expecting the NCR to be the good guys passing out food to the poor people of Vegas as the civilized the land. I've never played Fallout 2 and I was still expecting the NCR to be some land grabbing assholes that weren't helping the Mojave in any appreciable way. That wasn't a surprise, but still throw in some more anti Legion quests where I take the fight to them. Espionage quests are fun, but give me some run and gun action every once and a while to keep me entertained.
 
No one is saying the Legion is good, we all agree they are under developed as far as content goes but they aren't one dimensional at all.
There are missions where you free Slaves from the Legion, you assault camp forlom hope in a Legion sided mission and a handfull of quests have mirrored objectives whe nsiding with Legion (like the Omertas one).

You seem to not have played a lot of sidequests if you think all of those you mentionare absent.
 
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