Possibly unpopular opinion for an old-timer here, but I've honestly always felt like the main faction endings of New Vegas WERE one of the places the game could use a little polish, most especially the Wild Card ones. It would've been hard to account for every single choice and intention of the player, and they did what they could with the limited dev cycle, but it was slightly unsatisfactory as shipped. The lack of a lead faction with pre-defined goals to use as a skeleton for the writing made it fairly vague.
I think that's kind of the point, though-- THEY can't tell YOU what you're going to do with New Vegas and they didn't want to. They describe chaos in the post-Hoover Mojave following independence, IF you're evil, but-- there IS going to be chaos. There is always chaos when the established order in a region is upended, even in the most peaceful of revolutions. There's chaos BEFORE you even get to the Mojave, and that's with a political landscape that's roughly stabilized and 3 major faction's worth of infrastructure and logistics that aren't there when you're done. Whatever you do, there will be chaos.
They don't tell you that you don't establish a robot mafia cobbled together from the lesser factions. They don't tell you you don't organize with the Followers and eventually turn the tide, or remake the wasteland with a slow, plotted trickle of Big MT tech, or turn everyone into spore carriers and live in the .38 like a lonesome warrior-king either. They can't know. So they describe the immediate and intermediate results of your actions and the rest is headcanon.
The endings for the other areas and factions paint you a general picture without too many constraints, but no Fallout has ever given your still-very-much-alive Player Character outsize consideration in their ongoing presence in the world. Maybe my tribal from Arroyo in F2 was going to raze New Reno, shoot up FEV and go to Mexico with Marcus instead of becoming a senator, or steer the NCR into communism.
The Followers struggling in an independent Vegas is unfortunate, but it could well be temporary, and they struggled before it was independent, too-- there aren't always good endings for good intentions in Fallout, and governance of an isolated, high resource-inequality region has always been difficult, even with a Player Character god-king helping out.
And Fallout 3? It's been a long time, but don't they just basically give you 2 shitty unspecific ending options for the main game and 2 shitty unspecific ending options for Broken Steel? Yeah, they let you run around afterwards in a largely unchanged game world where you can see a few token consequences of your actions, but that's it. You're entitled to your opinion, @Hoplite, and I'm not trying to shout you down, but I don't see how someone could give a pass to F3 for a short ending with no branches that generally didn't project too far into the future or account for the player's future circumstances, and say that New Vegas did a bad job because they gave us a *detailed, tailored ending full of choice and consequence* that generally didn't project too far into the future but, by and large, took care to set the stage for the sort of life the player had won for themself.
Sweet mother of God this is long. I should never have feelings before morning coffee
I think that's kind of the point, though-- THEY can't tell YOU what you're going to do with New Vegas and they didn't want to. They describe chaos in the post-Hoover Mojave following independence, IF you're evil, but-- there IS going to be chaos. There is always chaos when the established order in a region is upended, even in the most peaceful of revolutions. There's chaos BEFORE you even get to the Mojave, and that's with a political landscape that's roughly stabilized and 3 major faction's worth of infrastructure and logistics that aren't there when you're done. Whatever you do, there will be chaos.
They don't tell you that you don't establish a robot mafia cobbled together from the lesser factions. They don't tell you you don't organize with the Followers and eventually turn the tide, or remake the wasteland with a slow, plotted trickle of Big MT tech, or turn everyone into spore carriers and live in the .38 like a lonesome warrior-king either. They can't know. So they describe the immediate and intermediate results of your actions and the rest is headcanon.
The endings for the other areas and factions paint you a general picture without too many constraints, but no Fallout has ever given your still-very-much-alive Player Character outsize consideration in their ongoing presence in the world. Maybe my tribal from Arroyo in F2 was going to raze New Reno, shoot up FEV and go to Mexico with Marcus instead of becoming a senator, or steer the NCR into communism.
The Followers struggling in an independent Vegas is unfortunate, but it could well be temporary, and they struggled before it was independent, too-- there aren't always good endings for good intentions in Fallout, and governance of an isolated, high resource-inequality region has always been difficult, even with a Player Character god-king helping out.
And Fallout 3? It's been a long time, but don't they just basically give you 2 shitty unspecific ending options for the main game and 2 shitty unspecific ending options for Broken Steel? Yeah, they let you run around afterwards in a largely unchanged game world where you can see a few token consequences of your actions, but that's it. You're entitled to your opinion, @Hoplite, and I'm not trying to shout you down, but I don't see how someone could give a pass to F3 for a short ending with no branches that generally didn't project too far into the future or account for the player's future circumstances, and say that New Vegas did a bad job because they gave us a *detailed, tailored ending full of choice and consequence* that generally didn't project too far into the future but, by and large, took care to set the stage for the sort of life the player had won for themself.
Sweet mother of God this is long. I should never have feelings before morning coffee
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