Is Ulysses the best example of a character you're supposed to think is really fucking cool but almost everyone universally agrees is totally retarded both in concept and execution?
With his 10 in every stat and edgy fence sitting, he's like if Coldsteel the Hedgehog actually showed up in a mainstream release.
It's amazing how after we get two top tier central characters in the DLCS, Elder Elijah at the start with Dead Money and then immediately followed by the GOAT Joshua Graham in Honest Hearts, and the funny if kinda annoyingly quirky cast of Old World Blues, besides my beloved the Stealth Suit, they finish with probably the most divisive character the franchise will ever have, Chris Avellone's mouth piece.
EDIT: Typo and removed an unfinished thought I left in by accident.
The only cool thing about Ulysses was his playing card.
Dude is cringe incarnate. The only good/entertaining thing about him is I can point to him when people tell me New Vegas has the best writing ever and watch them sneed.
The only cool thing about Ulysses was his playing card.
Dude is cringe incarnate. The only good/entertaining thing about him is I can point to him when people tell me New Vegas has the best writing ever and watch them sneed.
I wouldn't have cared so much about how lame Ulysses was if they hadn't been giving the guy a handjob through all of the previous DLCs, all those breathless hints about "the first courier" and the amazing impending showdown and all that. Dead Money had the most fun gameplay by actually forcing you to scrounge and scrimp to survive through it, Old World Blues was quirky fun, Honest Hearts had Joshua Graham being pretty interesting, Lonesome Road had zero redeeming features.
Ulysses really suffers from being cut from the game along with most of the Legion's side quests. It's like the devs were convinced they needed to add him back and better than just a companion that's Legion aligned. He just has so many OC qualities added on top of him to justify him being cut and reintroduced. It just sucks. Graham is amazing because his character arc was already written for Van Buren and just adapted into new context. Elijah was developed at the same time as the base game for the DLC so he fits. Ulysses just had to go through Avellone trying so hard to justify him just being cut that it added too much. Rather than waxing poetically about nonsense like "packages you carry" with nonstop edge, it would make more sense for him to just be raw emotion. The man you face because you inadvertently destroyed something of his instead of 500 lines of autism about it, he should've just held onto vitriol or loss and your dialogue is basically trying to talk him down from how irrational nuking the world again over the loss of the town is.
It floors me that this was never addressed by DLC or modders. I know modders are in general total fags but you'd think one enterprising autist would have done the obvious thing and expanded The Legion's side of the river into a fully playable area.
Honestly, you could technically start the dlc, get the robot and buy the armor even at level 1 then walk back to the mojave. Also idk if anybody else has this issue, but I actually feel a bit ill walking around some areas in the lonesome road dlc.
The man you face because you inadvertently destroyed something of his instead of 500 lines of autism about it, he should've just held onto vitriol or loss and your dialogue is basically trying to talk him down from how irrational nuking the world again over the loss of the town is.
What happened at the Divide broke Ulysses because it has happened to him before. The Legion did it to his own people, the Twisted Hairs. Vulpes showed up, spoke honeyed words to get the Twisted Hairs to do his bidding, and then they ended up crucified.
Ulysses crossed the Colorado, reported to Caesar that he saw a giant dam, and now wars have been fought over it. Not just for the energy it contained but the symbolic historical value of that Rubicon.
Caesar later ordered Ulysses to direct the destruction of New Canaan. Ulysses lied to the White Legs, promising them a place in the Legion like Vulpes did to the Twisted Hairs. Ulysses didn’t know at the time why New Canaan had to be destroyed, that he would be wiping out the Malpais Legate’s people and the Mormon religion. But he did it anyway.
Then he saw what the White Legs did to honor him:
They brought me before the campfire one night, showed me how they changed themselves, how they wore their hair now. It was like my entire dead tribe in the firelight, teeth grinning red in the dark - eager corpses, blood-covered ghosts. They... had taken my braids, the way of the Twisted Hairs, as if it showed they were like me, of me... ...while every knot in their braids spoke of raping, violence - and ignorance of what the knots meant. They thought to show respect... defiled it. Lost myself in trying to read the braids they wove, when I remembered they had put no meaning in it. They had no history of what it meant. They didn't even know the insult in the twists, knots... and Dry Wells came rushing back, the White Legs circled like that... It was like looking at the dead of my tribe, reborn as ghosts - hateful, hungry, bowing to Caesar. Another history... gone, carried by me alone.
Ulysses is mentally broken. His whole life has been destruction and suffering through ignorance. Everyone is using history without knowing it, and so the meaning of history is lost. Like seeing Christ on the Cross and believing that it represents punishment and not sacrifice and then crucifying criminals in the name of Jesus.
Ulysses saw the Divide as a civilization free of history. They built a culture free of the past. Ulysses thought that such a reset of history would be a way to peace. But then history came to them in the form of a courier delivering a package with an Old World symbol and subsequent mushroom clouds.
Ulysses is at this point all but dead, anything he cherished is ash. However, there is one last thing he can do. Restart everything. Destroy the Bear and the Bull with the Old World. Spread the lesson he learned from the Divide so that everyone knows its history.
To do that he needs the person who accidentally created the Divide, Courier 6. He drones on and on about his history and the history of the Divide so that you carry that message everywhere you go so that communities change.
There’s a lesson in that. Tell me, Courier, have you ever heard of “Sneed’s Feed and Seed”?
It’s an Old World legend. A small store, in the dusty, rural country. A wooden sign stands above it reading, “Sneed’s Feed and Seed. Formerly Chuck’s”. There’s a subtle joke in there. Sneed. Feed. Seed. There’s a pattern, like the tracks of a Brahmin herd, young following the old.
Replace Sneed’s with Chuck’s. Take the three letters: U, C, K. Put them in place of the -eed in Feed and Seed. Do you see it now, Courier?
There’s a lesson in that. Tell me, Courier, have you ever heard of “Sneed’s Feed and Seed”?
It’s an Old World legend. A small store, in the dusty, rural country. A wooden sign stands above it reading, “Sneed’s Feed and Seed. Formerly Chuck’s”. There’s a subtle joke in there. Sneed. Feed. Seed. There’s a pattern, like the tracks of a Brahmin herd, young following the old.
Replace Sneed’s with Chuck’s. Take the three letters: U, C, K. Put them in place of the -eed in Feed and Seed. Do you see it now, Courier?
Don't forget the Desert Ranger Combat Armor in HH.
Doesn't have the armor effects of the LR riot gears and doesn't match the look exactly either, but its got more DT for the same weight compared to the NCR Ranger Combat Armor.
You can speech check his ass into being your bitch just by finding all of ED-E's upgrades. Which you should because ED-E is a fucking great companion even before them. Doesn't say much and spots enemies for you.
Don't forget the Desert Ranger Combat Armor in HH. View attachment 5219856
Doesn't have the armor effects of the LR riot gears and doesn't match the look exactly either, but its got more DT for the same weight compared to the NCR Ranger Combat Armor.
You can speech check his ass into being your bitch just by finding all of ED-E's upgrades. Which you should because ED-E is a fucking great companion even before them. Doesn't say much and spots enemies for you.
Good time to join the thread; it's been a few years since the last run so figured I'd give it another go, currently going through Lonesome Road.
Coming back in I was struck again by how much better written the game is, and not just main characters like House or Caesar.
Random water merchants will sell you pure water or cheap irradiated crap and if you ask them they'll tell you about how the NCR charges for an expensive water license to get limited access to clean water from Hoover Dam she then resells for a small profit. She'll remark she doesn't like the taxes but the NCR does keep things under control in the wasteland. She doesn't do anything but sell water but she contributes to the world-building that was so poorly done in FO3, pressing how important Hoover Dam is and providing a view of one of the main factions.
The world itself makes more sense too: FO3 built a world where it didn't make sense how anyone doesn't starve to death, but in new vegas there's ranches, trade caravans, farms.
Ulysses is pretty shit though; the only way I see they could have done him better is to have him already long dead and you only hear old recordings and broadcasts. Instead of debating with a cringelord about THE BULL AND THE BEAR you're just trawling through the ashes of of a borderline schizos journey, same way he did yours.
