I find Fallout: New Vegas incredibly dull

[sXeth]

By the way. House is independant but does not allow independence or liberty. In fact, he's the same as the Legion. If you're in, you have to be a slave to 50s troupes. While he doesnt kill people who diagree, he banishes them. It doesnt matter if House or Legion take over. You are a slave. In fact, if I actually got a choice in the game, I'd take over becuase they are all terrible. I have the army, I should be able to do that - but Obsidan was to tied to telling the story they wanted.

You can take over. Though its basically a non-story, since the game ends before you can do anything with your newfound rulership, and you're playing a nebulous blank slate who's primarily defined by who's errand runner they've been up to that point rather then as an independent entity with individual goals and ideals.

Its actually pretty similar to SKyrim and Fallout 4's approaches. You can achieve all the power and influence, even hypothetically gaining total leadership of a faction, but never exercise that influence in any meaningful way because its the end of the quest/storyline and there's nothing further to do.

 

[Terminal Blue]

You've realised that you have been suckered in. You let your distaste for one villan blind you to another villan. I dont think Fallout 3 beats NV in this regard. But people's desire to prove NV betterness leads to overreaches like "there is only black and white in F3"

So, I don't think the problem is that everything in F3 is black and white. I mean, a lot of things are, but that's kind of the problem with a binary moral choice system. A lot of choices in Fallout 1 and 2 were black and white, corresponding to good and bad karma respectively. The two main problems I have with fallout 3 are:

1) It reduced characters, themes and motivations to the absolute barest bones possible. The brotherhood of steel helped you out in Fallout 1 so they're just generic good guy space marines now. Super mutants were the enemy in Fallout, and also some of them were kind of stupid, so now they're just big angry shreks who want to murder everything because they're inherently evil and like killing stuff. Ghouls look a bit like zombies, and some ghouls in Fallout had lost their minds and would attack you, so now almost all ghouls are mindless zombies who want to eat you.

In Fallout 1 and 2, most characters, groups and organisations had reasons for what they were doing, and sometimes they were dumb reasons or shortsighted reasons or selfish reasons, but they existed and you could understand them. Super mutants didn't need to be psychotic, generic orcs because Fallout 1 provided reasons why thinking (albeit sometimes dumb and violent) beings might still want to oppose the main character. The brotherhood didn't need to be the ultimate good guys because, again, the game provided reasons why a flawed organisation would finally get off its ass and do something when faced with a world-ending threat.

Meanwhile, in Fallout 3 the random nice guy cop who went to your birthday party is a psycho murderer who will chase you through the entire vault and beat you to death without remorse based on nothing but completely misguided orders from the overseer, because that's character motivation!

2) It had the general problem which all Bethesda games have to some degree of having been written by people who seemingly never spoke to each other during development. I mean, it produced one of the most obvious and egregious examples of this ever which even people who liked the game noticed, because somehow noone in the development process realised that having a climax revolving around the decision of whether or not to enter an irradiated room is kind of silly when two quests earlier in the main story you introduced a character whose entire role is to enter an irradiated room because they're immune to radiation.

One of the big joys of classic roleplaying games is being immersed in what feels like a living world where actions have consequences. This is created through interconnection. In Planescape torment, for example, talking to random NPCs but with a different member in your party or having done a particular quest or course of action can yield whole new dialogue trees and really complex interactions which you could easily miss. The Fallout games were never quite there, but there was still an incredible ammount of cross-interaction between different characters, plots and story elements. Fallout 3 has none of that. Everything is entirely self-contained.

Even by having a faction specific reputation system, New Vegas is leaps and bounds ahead of Fallout 3 in terms of creating the sense of a persistent universe.

By the way. House is independant but does not allow independence or liberty. In fact, he's the same as the Legion.

Well, yeah in that both house and ceasar are dictators, but so is the player if they side with Yes Man. There are still immense differences between the two and they represent very, very different philosophical positions.

Bethsheda definitely needs help with quest structures but I'd take the map layout of F3 and 4 anyday.

To be fair, Fallout 4 does have an amazing map, probably due to just having a better engine. The city itself is particularly impressive, and I love how you can navigate it like a real place by following landmarks. F3 had two problems, in that all the buildings essentially looked the same, and it relied on nonsensical subway connections to create the illusion of interconnectivity which didn't exist.

New Vegas' map is very empty, but it does at least have landmarks. I also actually like the map layout, and it feels like a weird homage to F1 and F2 where you could get to seriously endgame areas quite easily and grab all the awesome loot, but as a new player you wouldn't know which direction to go. Fallout 3, of course, didn't have endgame areas due to excessive scaling. So sure, you could go in any direction, it just didn't matter.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

I don't find arguing which game's storytelling is overall superior based on the morality presented in any individual game, or what lore is agreeable, really productive. It's preferable to dive deep on each game in its own context.

The whole point of Hard Luck Blues is the player/Courier doesn't have all the information all the time, there are going to be unintended consequences of choices, and choices are rarely between good or evil, they're between "easy ways" and "hard ways". Rerouting reactor control to the Vault dwellers is actually the worst possible resolution, because if you can make your way through the (more) radioactive and flooded sections of the Vault you can make contact with the Dwellers, explain the situation to them, and evacuate them to the NCR, allowing reactor shut-down without harm. Even with reactor control, the dwellers' situation is untenable and the sooner they evacuate the better chances they have at survival.

That's where the central ethical conflict lies in FNV. Everyone, at least the major factions, wants to take the easy way and that leads to conflict, refusal to compromise, and long-term harm.

FO3 had tons of problems, sure, but the Brotherhood, feral ghouls, and even Vault 101 weren't among them:

Vault 101 was basically an Overseer cult, but even then Gomez is actually non-hostile unless harmed first. Even if the player kills the other guards, as long as they didn't harm Gomez he still helps them escape the Vault. It's just not something you're likely to encounter because you are (or someone else is) likely to have harmed Gomez in the fight.

The 3D games have all made it clear becoming a ghoul isn't true immortality, going feral is inevitable over a long enough time span, and ghouls across the Fallout world are just coming to grips with their new reality. It's not been conclusively stated, but my takeaway was the first generation of ghouls created by the War are just hitting the end of their "life spans". The entire point of Raul's companion story is he's already slipping, and it's up to him to decide what to do with the time he has left.

Likewise, the Brotherhood exterminatus'ing the Pitt triggered an ethical crisis among the eastern Brotherhood. Lyons' leadership diverged too far from the Brotherhood's original mission, which triggered a backlash that began with the Outcasts and culminated in the Brotherhood as presented in FO4.

 

[CaitSeith]

As I went on in Fallout NV, I kept up thinking: what am I fighting for? Why should I care about a dumb war between factions I have no investment with? Really, I didn't found a compelling initial incentive to explore that world. Revenge? "Oh, no! Some unknown person tried to kill me for some reason. Just like every freaking hostile in the wasteland!"

 

[Terminal Blue]

Vault 101 was basically an Overseer cult, but even then Gomez is actually non-hostile unless harmed first. Even if the player kills the other guards, as long as they didn't harm Gomez he still helps them escape the Vault. It's just not something you're likely to encounter because you are (or someone else is) likely to have harmed Gomez in the fight.

I meant Kendall, not Gomez. Although I guess Kendall doesn't actually attend the party, now I remember, he's present. I mean, we can talk about wanting to go on a date with his daughter. Said daughter takes the GOAT exam with you. Then the game puts you in a position where you basically have to murder her father because if you don't he will follow you through the entire vault on broken legs trying to beat you to death and there are zero consequences for killing him. The game makes a huge deal over whether or not you kill the overseer, or how Amata feels about it because she's your friend and has more dialogue, and the overseer is responsible for everything that's gone wrong. He's an explicitly bad person, not just a cop doing his job. But your first act as an adult in the game is to literally pop the head off Christine's dad like a melon and noone bats an eyelid.

This is not a problem on its own. Most players probably never made the connection between Officer Kendall, the Christine Kendall you can refer to in the birthday party sequence and the Christine you meet in the GOAT. Kendall is just presented as some random mook who wants to kill you, except he has a name for some reason. However, it's indicative of an entire game in which virtually noone has reasons for what they do, and none of the choices or consequences you are presented with make sense.

Fallout 1 and 2 had a lot of enemies who will kill you on sight, but it also had situations in which enemies would try and secure your surrender before attacking. How hard would it have been to have a dialogue option where Kendall offers you a chance to surrender and takes you to the overseer, where you are ultimately forced to fight for your life, and maybe the fight is harder to justify skipping all the fights in Vault 101. But oh no, that means the player might not encounter the deep moral choice of whether or not to save Butch's mum from radroaches or let an innocent woman die because her son is a bully (and not even a hardcore Steven King bully, just a bit of a troubled kid).

The 3D games have all made it clear becoming a ghoul isn't true immortality, going feral is inevitable over a long enough time span, and ghouls across the Fallout world are just coming to grips with their new reality.

Yeah, and that's not a bad thing. I don't mind stuff being retconned or expanded on, that's a big part of what I think new vegas did right. But, as you say, it wasn't until New Vegas when any of this was explained or even hinted at. Fallout 3 didn't really try to explain it at all, it just used feral ghouls as random generic enemies because it needed something the player could shoot. The problem isn't that things changed, the problem, again, is that all complexity is stripped out of things until they are just the most generic archetypes which are ultimately only there for fan service.

Like, look at Far Harbour in Fallout 4. It's an incredibly creatively designed area full of mostly original creature and enemy designs which are really cool. 3 of the 4 playable factions in Fallout 4 are completely original and I actually really like them. Bethesda could have created their own things to replace ghouls, super mutants and the brotherhood of steel. They didn't, because they wanted that sweet fan service, but they weren't willing to create actual stories and motivations for any of the things they wanted to copy and paste, so they just wrote situations where they didn't have to. Feral ghouls are not inherently a problem on their own, they're a problem with the wider approach to throwing in old stuff purely as references boiled down to their most simple elements.

Again, Fallout 1 and 2 could find reasons for ghouls to be bad without needing to be feral, because people cut off from human society could easily go bad. Feral ghouls aren't a bad idea, but they're used here as a crutch to avoid writing.

Likewise, the Brotherhood exterminatus'ing the Pitt triggered an ethical crisis among the eastern Brotherhood. Lyons' leadership diverged too far from the Brotherhood's original mission, which triggered a backlash that began with the Outcasts and culminated in the Brotherhood as presented in FO4.

And again, that is a functional in-universe explanation. It's not very good, and I'll get to why, but even if it was good there is still the issue that a) it's not clearly explained in game at all, and b) the brotherhood don't actually exist. There is no reason why they should be on the east coast because in universe they originated in California, but they are a recognizable element of the original Fallout series who can be milked for fan service. That is ultimately why they are there. They're the good guys because people remember them as the good guys, so that's all they are now. The most basic, simple, archetypal representation of what they represented.

Secondly, the scourge doesn't make sense as the turning point for the brotherhood, because it's not the kind of thing the brotherhood of fallout 1 and 2 would actually do. They don't particularly care about raiders, and while they don't like obvious mutants they aren't 40k space marines looking to purge the unclean. Their goal is ultimately preservation, both of the brotherhood itself and of the technology they hoard. Bethesda made the brotherhood black and white (literally) when originally they were very firmly grey. Their acknowledgement to the fact that the brotherhood were morally complex in previous games is literally just having them commit genocide for no reason but then turn into good guys because they felt bad, because that's moral complexity.

Fallout Tactics did the same story better, and that's such a bad game it's not even considered canon.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Secondly, the scourge doesn't make sense as the turning point for the brotherhood, because it's not the kind of thing the brotherhood of fallout 1 and 2 would actually do. They don't particularly care about raiders, and while they don't like obvious mutants they aren't 40k space marines looking to purge the unclean. Their goal is ultimately preservation, both of the brotherhood itself and of the technology they hoard. Bethesda made the brotherhood black and white (literally) when originally they were very firmly grey. Their acknowledgement to the fact that the brotherhood were morally complex in previous games is literally just having them commit genocide for no reason but then turn into good guys because they felt bad, because that's moral complexity.

The worst part about this in Fallout 3 for me is that you have the Outcasts (I think that was their name), the people that disagreed with Lyons and split off in order to remain true to the original BoS goal and methods. Which means that Bethesda at some level was aware of what they were doing with the BoS, realized it clashed with previous canon and still went ahead with their changes, without providing adequate explanation.

To make matters worse, it seems at least some of the writers at Bethesda felt the BoS in Fo3 was a bad idea, since they walk it all the way back in Fo4 and make the Brotherhood you see in the Commonwealth much more closely aligned with the original BoS. I don't mind characters or organizations changing in my stories, but this heavy-handed, ambivalent approach just makes both Fo3 and Fo4 look bad.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

FO3 intro sequence stuff.

You clearly missed the part where I pointed out Vault 101 is a cult. No crap, the Vault security officers roll hard on you and only Gomez questions his orders enough to be friendly to you. That's the entire point of all the "obey the Overseer" propaganda you encounter in the entire intro sequence; for having specifically mentioned the GOAT, you're missing the environmental storytelling in which the GOAT is the most obvious part that directly informs you, the player, why and how later events play out as they do.

Environmental storytelling is pretty much the defining characteristic of the 3D Fallout games.

Now, that disposed, really you're going to characterize killing Kendall as murder? Really?

Feral ghouls.

Actually, there was quite a bit of dialogue about it in Underworld, and a little bit from the Warrington ghouls.

Brotherhood.

You're thinking of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, not Fallout Tactics. The former game is considered universally non-canon, but Bethesda's trying to be cheeky little shits about the canonicity of the latter, picking and choosing only what they like but ignoring the rest. They lifted the BoS's odyssey from west to east straight from the game -- they just seem to not like being called out on it. FO4 actually reinforces FOT's dubious canonicity in Kells' dialogue.

And, your memory of the Scourge is divorced from what was actually said of it in-game. Ashur and Kodiak lay it out. Lyons' detachment got there, and was so disgusted by the brutality, chaos, suffering, and utter inhumanity of what was going on they decided to just burn it all and save who could be saved. That was the turning point, not any sense of collective guilt over having done it. Was the Scourge an act of excessive zeal, and was it foolish for the Brotherhood to just leave afterwards? sure.

Now, the funny thing is, my first Fallout game was 2, and just like today I used to lurk in early forums, email discussion lists, and bulletin boards. The biggest grouch people had of the Brotherhood then was they weren't using their power and technology to help the people of the wastes, and treated the emergence of Maxson and BoS outposts within the NCR as a sign they were taking (baby) steps in the "right" direction. In other words, older Fallout fans actually got what they wanted out of Lyons' faction, but when presented it went 'okay, that's a step too far!'.

Don't get me started on how ridiculous people sound when they claim the BoS in FO4 is in any way "closer" to the BoS in 1 and 2. Yes, the aggressively-expansionist, borderline imperialist, power whose modus operandi is the acquisition of exclusively military technology to exploit against others, who not only intervene in external politics and society but actually work to subvert or overcome the status quo going so far as to extort farmers, is totally more in line with the "original" Brotherhood than Lyons' minimally-interventionist order.

 

[Terminal Blue]

You clearly missed the part where I pointed out Vault 101 is a cult.

And when is this indicated?

Like, if Vault 101 is a cult, then your character was raised in a cult. Amata was raised in a cult. Butch was raised in a cult. Even if we accept that Kendall has been promised 72 sweetrolls in paradise and is thus totally fanatically devoted to martyring himself trying to kill you, it makes no sense that every other character in the Vault except the security team is still perfectly capable of reason.

Vault 101 is an authoritarian society. All the vaults are authoritarian societies, because resources are scarce and ultimately because they are social experiments set up by an authoritarian government. But there is no evidence that Vault 101 was set up to be a cult.

That's the entire point of all the "obey the Overseer" propaganda you encounter in the entire intro sequence; for having specifically mentioned the GOAT, you're missing the environmental storytelling in which the GOAT is the most obvious part that directly informs you, the player, why and how later events play out as they do.

Every Vault has that propaganda though. Like, every single one, and some of them were pretty nice. Again, the vaults are a social experiment set up by an authoritarian society which made extensive use of propaganda in all areas of public life.

I mean, if you want to talk about environmental storytelling, let's talk about one of the most obvious things in he GOAT sequence..


Again, let's imagine this is a cult. Here you have a group of kids who wear different clothes, maintain an internal identity separate to the other vault dwellers and have a self-consciously rebellious and anti-authoriarian attitude. None of these things are compatible with Vault 101 being a cult. Cults do not produce rebellious kids, they fix rebellious kids. They fix them so badly that kids who are raised in cults often never rehabilitate into normal society. But in Vault 101, tunnel snakes rule.

You're thinking of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, not Fallout Tactics.

Nah, Fallout Tactics is non-canon. The Midwestern brotherhood and their expedition to Chicago is mentioned in other games, but the events of Fallout Tactics involve some massive retcon of some very important details to the backstory the Fallout setting, and as such it's always been treated as non-canon.

But the Midwestern Brotherhood wasn't the problem. In fact, they make vastly, vastly more sense than the east coast brotherhood because they have actual reasons to do stuff. Their airship crashed near Chicago, and they could not survive with their remaining resources and manpower, so they formed alliances with local settlements and tribes who send them recruits and resources in exchange for protection. Voila, you have a brotherhood of steel who are less isolationist and more helpful, but who are still the same organisation and still have the same objectives. It's believable change, because it's driven by material circumstance.. not spontaneous conversion.

Lyons' detachment got there, and was so disgusted by the brutality, chaos, suffering, and utter inhumanity of what was going on they decided to just burn it all and save who could be saved.

Why?

In every previous incarnation, the brotherhood never cared about what was going on in the rest of the world. This was the fundamental problem with their organisation and their way of life. They were detached from the world in their bunker, and they preferred it that way. In Fallout 1, they are paralysed over how to respond to the super mutant threat because it violated their isolationist ideals. The vault dweller has to convince the brotherhood elders to even help, because they won't do anything on their own. In Fallout 2, the brotherhood is in decline, their presence in Northern California is reduced to a couple of agents. The influence of the brotherhood has never expanded, and they aren't interested in using their remaining power to do anything. Even when one of their agents is murdered by the Enclave, they do nothing. Canonically, after the game ended they didn't even have the power to attack the Enclave remnants in Navarro on their own, and relied on an alliance with NCR.

And sure, it's not a problem if the brotherhood find a new lease of life after the defeat of the enclave. Like, the problems they face in Fallout 2 would be a really good motivation for them to change their ways, like the midwestern brotherhood did in Fallout Tactics and like Veronica wants the Mojave brotherhood to do in New Vegas. But it isn't like the brotherhood was completely unaware that the world outside their bunker was horrible and cruel, that's kind of why they stayed in the bunker in the first place. To have an organisation with literally centuries of culture and tradition based around rationalizing their isolationism suddenly flip on dime because of a sense of moral duty to people who the brotherhood has always believed are primitives who are doomed anyway just isn't good motivation, it's a cheap justification to boil the brotherhood down to the rawest possible elements of just being the "good guys".

Don't get me started on how ridiculous people sound when they claim the BoS in FO4 is in any way "closer" to the BoS in 1 and 2. Yes, the aggressively-expansionist, borderline imperialist, power whose modus operandi is the acquisition of exclusively military technology to exploit against others, who not only intervene in external politics and society but actually work to subvert or overcome the status quo going so far as to extort farmers, is totally more in line with the "original" Brotherhood than Lyons' minimally-interventionist order.

That's true. The FO4 brotherhood are very different from the Brotherhood in Fallout 1 and 2. But, and I think this is what people mean, they have believable motivations. They come across as an organisation trying to do what they think is right, but who ultimately know they can't help everyone and have to put their own needs first.

Also, imperialists? Like, their entire reason for being there is to destroy the institute, which they see as an existential threat to humanity as a whole through the abuse of technology and in particularly, the creation of humanlike synths. The acquisition of technology is military focused because the brotherhood expedition to the commonwealth is military in nature. Extorting farmers is an actual military practice that pre-modern armies relied on to be able to march and fight.

 

[Trunkage]

Secondly, the scourge doesn't make sense as the turning point for the brotherhood, because it's not the kind of thing the brotherhood of fallout 1 and 2 would actually do. They don't particularly care about raiders, and while they don't like obvious mutants they aren't 40k space marines looking to purge the unclean. Their goal is ultimately preservation, both of the brotherhood itself and of the technology they hoard. Bethesda made the brotherhood black and white (literally) when originally they were very firmly grey. Their acknowledgement to the fact that the brotherhood were morally complex in previous games is literally just having them commit genocide for no reason but then turn into good guys because they felt bad, because that's moral complexity.

The worst part about this in Fallout 3 for me is that you have the Outcasts (I think that was their name), the people that disagreed with Lyons and split off in order to remain true to the original BoS goal and methods. Which means that Bethesda at some level was aware of what they were doing with the BoS, realized it clashed with previous canon and still went ahead with their changes, without providing adequate explanation.

To make matters worse, it seems at least some of the writers at Bethesda felt the BoS in Fo3 was a bad idea, since they walk it all the way back in Fo4 and make the Brotherhood you see in the Commonwealth much more closely aligned with the original BoS. I don't mind characters or organizations changing in my stories, but this heavy-handed, ambivalent approach just makes both Fo3 and Fo4 look bad.

So I interpret F4 BoS as the synthesis of "we are better than the rest of humanity" Outcast doctrine and "Let's help people" of normal F3 BoS into a "we will force humanity into a better future". They still retained the ideals of the Outcasts of deny technology to the average person but now weren't against "helping" the average person if they were in control. They got rid of the isolationists ideals of the Outcasts and they got rid of the egalitarian normal BoS and decided they knew what was best for society.

But then I wasn't offended that F3 BoS was different than 1 and 2. Staying the same over long periods of time or distance makes little sense to me, even for isolationists. Plus F2, in my mind, broke the cannon far more than F3. So much so that when I replayed the first two a couple of years ago, I quickly played and loved F1 again but quickly turned 2 off. And to this the silliness of having a group in Fallut means everyone follows the leader with no self determination makes no sense to me. Eg. In Beyond the Beef, you choose if they are cannibals or not and for some reason the WHOLE group follows suit. Somehow being tricked into eating human makes you want to be a cannibal? Blackmail etc, is irrelevant becuase we are talking about continuing cannibalism. It's not a hard choice. But, since it's Obsidian and groups define who you are, NPCs can't think for themselves. F3 BoS and Outcast clearly are thinking for themselves and even the Outcasts are split into those wanting to attack BoS and others wanting to go their own way.

Me personally, I think the Outcasts were created as a "we recognise the old games but we want to try to do BoS better". Maybe that's offensive to some people but I personally don't want a remake of F1 and 2. I'm looking for a different story. If you don't like that new story, all power to you. If you want the old story and characters repeated, I'm out. But then I think people getting triggered by MCU movies becuase characters aren't exactly the same as the comics is over the top too and that exactly like this. Letting old stories burden new ones too much is a negative in my books. Bethsheda didn't let BoS stay as they for their second game. It morphed into a new interpretation.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

Like, if Vault 101 is a cult, then your character was raised in a cult. Amata was raised in a cult. Butch was raised in a cult. Even if we accept that Kendall has been promised 72 sweetrolls in paradise and is thus totally fanatically devoted to martyring himself trying to kill you, it makes no sense that every other character in the Vault except the security team is still perfectly capable of reason.

Except for the fact everyone but the security team was freaked out over the radroach infestation at the time, sure.

Again, let's imagine this is a cult. Here you have a group of kids who wear different clothes, maintain an internal identity separate to the other vault dwellers and have a self-consciously rebellious and anti-authoriarian attitude. None of these things are compatible with Vault 101 being a cult. Cults do not produce rebellious kids, they fix rebellious kids. They fix them so badly that kids who are raised in cults often never rehabilitate into normal society. But in Vault 101, tunnel snakes rule.

Yeah, about that...the Overseer's terminal entries highlight that he approved of the Tunnel Snakes and was using them to harass other dwellers, fostering dependency on the security team and compliance to their power. In an enclosed system where one doesn't have an enemy to identify, create one. The entire argument falls apart once one realizes they were a part of the Overseer's regime.

But the Midwestern Brotherhood wasn't the problem. In fact, they make vastly, vastly more sense than the east coast brotherhood because they have actual reasons to do stuff. Their airship crashed near Chicago, and they could not survive with their remaining resources and manpower, so they formed alliances with local settlements and tribes who send them recruits and resources in exchange for protection. Voila, you have a brotherhood of steel who are less isolationist and more helpful, but who are still the same organisation and still have the same objectives. It's believable change, because it's driven by material circumstance.. not spontaneous conversion.

The Midwestern Brotherhood was also comprised of BoS members who questioned the Elders' isolationist regime in the wake of the Master's death and the discovery of the Enclave, and were sent on the mission to quell further dissent in the ranks. They were already inclined to break away from the Brotherhood's initial mission, and given what was said of Lyons' leadership and ethics prior to the Scourge there's little reason to believe it wasn't the case with him. It's clear other Brothers in the west shared Lyons' ethics, since it was stated and shown back west others looked to him as an exemplar of the group's future.

Especially since by the time Lyons was sent on his expedition, Jeremy Maxson was already High Elder, the war with the NCR was underway, and he was looking for reasons to get rid of dissenting Brothers. And don't even try to give me that "but that's from Van Buren and non-canon" shit, there's direct reference to Maxson, the war, and his ideology in both FO3 and FNV.

Conditions for Lyons' expedition would have been worse than those of the expedition that led to the Midwestern Brotherhood's creation, since it's never stated he had an airship nor that his expedition was particularly large. The need to make compromises in the Brotherhood's mission for success would have then been greater than that of the Midwestern Brotherhood.

Why?

This entire argument fails to accommodate one big thing: as isolationist as they were, even though the Brotherhood prior to the events of Fallout 2 may have known about the suffering outside intellectually, they'd never experienced it firsthand. And accommodating the events of FO2 and even FNV, those who did were simply one or two people attempting to speak truth to power in the face of generations' worth of tradition and cold detachment.

Lyons' group did. And, based on Ashur's and Kodiak's accounts, it was on a scale of both size and depravity to beggar belief. It wasn't a "dime flip", it was a moment of catalysis. It should say something, that across the entire franchise, the most axiomatically isolationist Brotherhood members were the ones who never left their bunkers. And of those who did, more often than not they came back with a belief the Brotherhood should get off its ass and do something.

Also, imperialists?

Yeah, imperialists. Destroying the Institute with the Minutemen while still allied with the BoS reinforces, through overhead and direct dialogue, the BoS has little respect for the Minutemen, and the demonstration of the Minutemen's power already has the Brotherhood viewing them as a potential enemy. That, combined with all the side quests and dialogue, makes it clear the Brotherhood is far more interested in the Commonwealth than simply the immediate mission of destroying the Institute. So much so it makes one question if the Institute's presence is simply an excuse to invade and occupy the Commonwealth. They certainly don't seem to be any hurry to leave once the Institute is destroyed, which directly refutes the very notion their mission to the Commonwealth was so narrowly-constructed.

And...extorting farmers was an actual historical military practice? Ya don't say. God forbid we ask why, or why scorched-earth tactics' primary uses were to stymie invaders, or to stop desertion and defection on the part of an invading force.

 

[Terminal Blue]

snip

Okay, so we can go back and forth on the story elements of Vault 101 and whether it makes sense for the vault security team to be berserk fanatics who will go to any lengths to murder one person because their dad left the vault, but even if you can personally believe that, even if it doesn't stretch your credibility, even if you believe that every member of the security team is desperate for martyrdom because they've been religiously indoctrinated by the GOAT exam, let's look at it as a game for a second.

The game gives you a choice whether to kill or spare the overseer. Killing the overseer is an evil act. The game even gives you bad karma for it, and Amata will confront you and make you feel bad.

The game gives you no real choice whether to kill or spare officer Kendall. Killing him is not a choice, unless you like being pursued through the vault by Vault-tec's answer to the terminator, who doesn't feel pity or remorse and will never stop until you are dead.

Even if we take your interpretation at face value. The overseer is personally responsible for the deaths not only of those who were clearly killed by the Vault security (like Jonas) but also all of the Vault security officers you killed on the way out. He's a cult leader, after all, his mujahideen are fanatically loyal and willing to kill and die at his every command because they've been brainwashed and indoctrinated. If he gets a weapon (by taking yours or having one pickpocketed onto him) he will attack you with it immediately, but remember kids, it's still moral choice time so if you kill him you're a bad person.

You're not supposed to think about killing Kendall, but you're supposed to think about killing the overseer because this is the specific time where you think, this is the roleplaying moment, this is the bit where you define who your character is, and it all takes place in a separate universe to the one in which you shot officer Kendall's head into bloody chunks and made his daughter an orphan, because that didn't matter.

And yes, it's a pretty small event in a big game, except it is your first real introduction to the way this game is written, and every part of the game is written specifically in this way, to reduce the impact of choice and to relegate all characters, groups and organisations to the absolute bare bones of their narrative role (generally as bullet receptacles) until it's suddenly time for a #importantmoraldecision.

Conditions for Lyons' expedition would have been worse than those of the expedition that led to the Midwestern Brotherhood's creation, since it's never stated he had an airship nor that his expedition was particularly large. The need to make compromises in the Brotherhood's mission for success would have then been greater than that of the Midwestern Brotherhood.

So why waste manpower and resources killing an entire city just because the people living there are bad?

Again, I am not adverse to changing the brotherhood, or having a chapter of the brotherhood who are less xenophobic or more about using their technological mastery to help or protect people, or who otherwise fix their internal problems and come away stronger for it. That's not where my problem is. My problem is with not doing the work to justify that, and not explaining how it happened. Bethesda should be paying you, because you're doing their job for them and filling in their terrible writing decisions with information that should have been presented to the person playing the game. Just handwaving it away with "oh, but Lyons is nice and so the brotherhood are nice now" isn't enough, it's the seed of an idea but it doesn't explain how that organisation changed, how it's culture (established over two games) changed beyond just the person in charge being hit by a light from the heavens.

And again, if it were just the brotherhood, then fine, we could brush that off, but it isn't.. it's everyone and everything. What about the Enclave. They're mindless grunts in power armour who show up at random to do random things, and sacrifice their own people in open warfare against the brotherhood despite the entire ideology being about saving pure humanity. You barely saw the enclave in Fallout 2, when they showed up or someone dropped a clue about their existence it was a carefully considered exercise in building the mystery and the sense that something big was happening behind all these little events you were getting involved in in the wasteland. You only actually fought them when you went to Navarro at what was probably the end of the game, and even then the ones you fought had immediately apparent motivation to fight you because they were protecting their base on the mainland. In Fallout 2, the enclave were human beings (and one super mutant), they were bad human beings who wanted to do naughty things and needed to be stopped, but the were set up to give the illusion of an enemy force which actually had a plan and were carrying it out intelligently and thus really were the threat they were hyped up to be. Fallout 3 doesn't care about this kind of storytelling, Fallout 3 only remembers that the Enclave were bad guys who wore cool power armour and had vertibirds.

Yeah, imperialists. Destroying the Institute with the Minutemen while still allied with the BoS reinforces, through overhead and direct dialogue, the BoS has little respect for the Minutemen, and the demonstration of the Minutemen's power already has the Brotherhood viewing them as a potential enemy.

Yeah, that's true.

Okay, I'll give you that one. The brotherhood in F4 are kind of dicks, but they do have comprehensible motivations. I mean, let's be honest, the minutemen are a threat to the brotherhood.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

It's pretty much the same as every Fallout game for me. I just can't get into this series no matter how hard I try. But I can sink thousands of hours into every TES game.

 

[Padwolf]

Honestly, I feel similar about it. It didn't give me a good reason to do the stuff it wants you to do. I couldn't get into the story at all. I don't know. I'll own up to the rose tinted spectacles that I have on whenever I look at Fallout 3.

It has taken me 3 times of selling and re-buying Fallout 4 to get into it. I'm actually loving it.