Fallout series

[Auntie Fester]

I think the reason people tend to love other major characters in the New Vegas setting like House, Caesar and Joshua Graham, whilst not giving a shit about Ulysses is that Ulysses has a sense of manufactured importance. He would not be that interesting if he wasn't tied so closely to the story of the Courier and the DLC. People like House, Caesar and Joshua Graham would be.

That's not to say Ulysses was a concept dead on arrival, but he drones on and on like an autist with no sense of social cues, taking 15 sentences to say something that should take 3. The script places far too much importance on him having a lot to say rather than making him more interesting outside of his personal attachment to the Courier. There's a good reason why I can remember several quotes from House, Caesar and Graham, and not one from Ulysses. He's fucking boring.

 

[Tanner Glass]

I think the reason people tend to love other major characters in the New Vegas setting like House, Caesar and Joshua Graham, whilst not giving a shit about Ulysses is that Ulysses has a sense of manufactured importance. He would not be that interesting if he wasn't tied so closely to the story of the Courier and the DLC. People like House, Caesar and Joshua Graham would be.

That's not to say Ulysses was a concept dead on arrival, but he drones on and on like an autist with no sense of social cues, taking 15 sentences to say something that should take 3. The script places far too much importance on him having a lot to say rather than making him more interesting outside of his personal attachment to the Courier. There's a good reason why I can remember several quotes from House, Caesar and Graham, and not one from Ulysses. He's fucking boring.

I think Ulysses suffers a lot because they already kind of did an arc of "someone similar to the character who has issues with all of the various factions that you have to confront" in Benny during the main story.

Benny is also much more likable, has a much clearer history with your character, has a much better plan and nearly realizes it. He also has a much better understanding of Mr. House's plan than anyone else in the known world - where as Ulysses (and everyone else) just kind of loosely knows about him.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

I think the reason people tend to love other major characters in the New Vegas setting like House, Caesar and Joshua Graham, whilst not giving a shit about Ulysses is that Ulysses has a sense of manufactured importance. He would not be that interesting if he wasn't tied so closely to the story of the Courier and the DLC. People like House, Caesar and Joshua Graham would be.

That's not to say Ulysses was a concept dead on arrival, but he drones on and on like an autist with no sense of social cues, taking 15 sentences to say something that should take 3. The script places far too much importance on him having a lot to say rather than making him more interesting outside of his personal attachment to the Courier. There's a good reason why I can remember several quotes from House, Caesar and Graham, and not one from Ulysses. He's fucking boring.

Ulysses was meant to be a final boss outside of Lanius and the Hoover Dam battle. That, and he's Chris Avellone's author avatar, he's basically a creator's pet, so of course, being the creator's favored talking doll, he gets played up as to how awesome and important he is, down to the point where other DLC characters will talk about him. So just like how Kreia (Chris Avellone's author avatar in KOTOR 2) ends up being the final boss of KOTOR 2 (when in reality, it should have been the much more powerful Darth Nihilus) Ulysses wound up being the "TRUE" final boss of New Vegas, down to having complete 10s across the board for all his attributes. (It still didn't stop me from exploding his skull like an overripe tomato, however. Not even on the highest difficulty.)

Ulysses would have worked better if A) they trimmed down his dialogue by 75%, and B) if you actually got to destroy his hometown in-game. This whole crap about him whining about you destroying a place he could have called home falls flat when you didn't even do it in the game. It's like if someone in Skyrim harasses the Dragonborn over something they did before getting captured and sent to Helgen. Bethesda didn't do that because that would make no fucking sense. But alas, Obsidian does it and gets away with it because their writing is better than Bethesda's by a margin of 50% and they have a really rabid fanbase that's as bad as the Morrowind fandom.

It's also funny that Ulysses was pissed off about how you destroyed a place he could have called home, when he quite literally destroyed New Canaan, AND his "new home" was swarming with both Legion and NCR troops, meaning that if Courier Six didn't destroy the Divide, it would have become a bloody warzone, with both the Legion and the NCR turning it into another front in their war. It would probably get bloodier than the war in the Mojave, especially once either side discovers that the place still has working nuclear missiles that they can launch against the enemy.

There's people who build their houses on quicksand, and then there's guys like Ulysses who think that settling down and building a home on a nuclear powder keg is a good idea.

If I made the DLC, I'd have it so that the Lonesome Road DLC starts with the Courier searching for Enclave tech that would potentially be useful for them. They then get introduced to the Divide, a place which many rejects from both the NCR and the Legion have come to call home, with deserters from both sides who didn't want to fight in the war settling down in the Divide and making friends with each other. In the middle of their quest, the Courier activates something that accidentally ends up destroying the place. You try to make contact with any survivors, but there are none, save one-the leader of this community, Ulysses, who's really pissed off that you destroyed his home. With his people being disillusioned with both the Legion and the NCR, he talks smack about you if you serve either one. He goes after you and tries to kill you, because he thinks that in your greed and lust for treasure, you destroyed his hometown. That would work far better than having you destroy the Divide before the game's events started, because at least this time, it really would be your fault that Ulysses is a homeless hobo.

I think Ulysses suffers a lot because they already kind of did an arc of "someone similar to the character who has issues with all of the various factions that you have to confront" in Benny during the main story.

Benny is also much more likable, has a much clearer history with your character, has a much better plan and nearly realizes it. He also has a much better understanding of Mr. House's plan than anyone else in the known world - where as Ulysses (and everyone else) just kind of loosely knows about him.

Benny is actually a good character. Smart, charming, funny, and he's the guy who blew your brains out, so you've got a real reason to want his head on a plate. Ulysses just seemed like he was made to be awesome, whereas Benny is shown to be cool because of how smart and underhanded he is. It's like Littlefinger, if he was more charming and had more bling. Not to mention the fact that he shot you and stole the platinum chip from you means that you have a real motivation to go and blow his brains out, whereas with Ulysses, my only motivation to get to him was to shut his pretentious ass up and point my anti-materiel rifle at his face and fire an explosive round. Ulysses wants to drag you into the Divide, and he wants to fire nukes at the NCR, all because he's having a temper tantrum. Benny shot you because he's got a well-designed plan to take Vegas from House and defeat both the NCR and the Legion, so he can take the Mojave for himself.

 

[Mnutu]

Ulysses was meant to be a final boss outside of Lanius and the Hoover Dam battle. That, and he's Chris Avellone's author avatar, he's basically a creator's pet, so of course, being the creator's favored talking doll, he gets played up as to how awesome and important he is, down to the point where other DLC characters will talk about him. So just like how Kreia (Chris Avellone's author avatar in KOTOR 2) ends up being the final boss of KOTOR 2 (when in reality, it should have been the much more powerful Darth Nihilus) Ulysses wound up being the "TRUE" final boss of New Vegas, down to having complete 10s across the board for all his attributes. (It still didn't stop me from exploding his skull like an overripe tomato, however. Not even on the highest difficulty.)

Ulysses would have worked better if A) they trimmed down his dialogue by 75%, and B) if you actually got to destroy his hometown in-game. This whole crap about him whining about you destroying a place he could have called home falls flat when you didn't even do it in the game. It's like if someone in Skyrim harasses the Dragonborn over something they did before getting captured and sent to Helgen. Bethesda didn't do that because that would make no fucking sense. But alas, Obsidian does it and gets away with it because their writing is better than Bethesda's by a margin of 50% and they have a really rabid fanbase that's as bad as the Morrowind fandom.

It's also funny that Ulysses was pissed off about how you destroyed a place he could have called home, when he quite literally destroyed New Canaan, AND his "new home" was swarming with both Legion and NCR troops, meaning that if Courier Six didn't destroy the Divide, it would have become a bloody warzone, with both the Legion and the NCR turning it into another front in their war. It would probably get bloodier than the war in the Mojave, especially once either side discovers that the place still has working nuclear missiles that they can launch against the enemy.

There's people who build their houses on quicksand, and then there's guys like Ulysses who think that settling down and building a home on a nuclear powder keg is a good idea.

If I made the DLC, I'd have it so that the Lonesome Road DLC starts with the Courier searching for Enclave tech that would potentially be useful for them. They then get introduced to the Divide, a place which many rejects from both the NCR and the Legion have come to call home, with deserters from both sides who didn't want to fight in the war settling down in the Divide and making friends with each other. In the middle of their quest, the Courier activates something that accidentally ends up destroying the place. You try to make contact with any survivors, but there are none, save one-the leader of this community, Ulysses, who's really pissed off that you destroyed his home. With his people being disillusioned with both the Legion and the NCR, he talks smack about you if you serve either one. He goes after you and tries to kill you, because he thinks that in your greed and lust for treasure, you destroyed his hometown. That would work far better than having you destroy the Divide before the game's events started, because at least this time, it really would be your fault that Ulysses is a homeless hobo.


Benny is actually a good character. Smart, charming, funny, and he's the guy who blew your brains out, so you've got a real reason to want his head on a plate. Ulysses just seemed like he was made to be awesome, whereas Benny is shown to be cool because of how smart and underhanded he is. It's like Littlefinger, if he was more charming and had more bling. Not to mention the fact that he shot you and stole the platinum chip from you means that you have a real motivation to go and blow his brains out, whereas with Ulysses, my only motivation to get to him was to shut his pretentious ass up and point my anti-materiel rifle at his face and fire an explosive round. Ulysses wants to drag you into the Divide, and he wants to fire nukes at the NCR, all because he's having a temper tantrum. Benny shot you because he's got a well-designed plan to take Vegas from House and defeat both the NCR and the Legion, so he can take the Mojave for himself.

Or instead just continually offer the player dialogue choices that boil down to “I don’t know you and I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I’ve never been to Hopeville and I sure as shit didn’t nuke it”. Allows the player to actually mold their character to whatever they thought of, while painting Ulyssess as a nutty weirdo like No-Bark obsessed with the wrong guy over a case of mistaken identity.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Or instead just continually offer the player dialogue choices that boil down to “I don’t know you and I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I’ve never been to Hopeville and I sure as shit didn’t nuke it”. Allows the player to actually mold their character to whatever they thought of, while painting Ulyssess as a nutty weirdo like No-Bark obsessed with the wrong guy over a case of mistaken identity.

That would be the optimal choice, however, that would go against the fact that the game wants to blame you for something you didn't do. And the writers can't have that, because the main point of Lonesome Road is that you destroyed Hopeville without knowing it.

 

[Exceptionally Exceptional]

Or instead just continually offer the player dialogue choices that boil down to “I don’t know you and I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I’ve never been to Hopeville and I sure as shit didn’t nuke it”. Allows the player to actually mold their character to whatever they thought of, while painting Ulyssess as a nutty weirdo like No-Bark obsessed with the wrong guy over a case of mistaken identity.

I wish someone would make a mod that introduces a new "Shut the fuck up" dialoge option at the start of every one of Ulysses spiels that skips it just so I don't have to spend 15 minutes at a time locked in conversation with him.

I absolutely love the way a Legion aligned female courier can shut Ulysses the fuck down with a burn so wicked it makes the Mojave look like the fucking Arctic.

 

[The Dude]

The story of Lonesome Road is pretty weak and Ulysses does wear out his welcome pretty fast. He could have been a much more interesting character, and I wonder how he would have turned out if he had been a companion as originally intended instead of an antagonist. Really the only reason I typically will play Lonesome Road is for the kick-ass weapons and armor (the Shoulder Mounted Machine Gun and Elite Riot Gear are so rad), and because the environment is really cool. And it's a nice touch that depending on the choices you make in the Divide that new areas will open up for you to explore and loot. They may not be big areas, but it is at least something unique and different that you don't often see in other games.

My favorite Fallout DLC of any game is Old World Blues. I love the parody of cheesy 50s sci-fi flicks and the overall off-the-wall whackiness of the writing and environment. And the weapons are pretty awesome. I really enjoy the Think Tanks, especially Doctor 0 since I'm a big fan of the Venture Bros.

 

[A_Callow_Youth]

The thing that hurts Lonesome Road most of all is the decision to introduce a backstory for the Courier in the final DLC. After over a year of letting the player come up with whatever the fuck they want, they slap you with the requirement that the Courier had to have made that delivery from Navarro to Hopeville. That alone immediately sours the experience and further exacerbates all of the other problems it carries. Linear? I can deal with that. A new type of creature that's going to wipe out everything? Sounds like a great setup for the next game. Avelonne wanting to have a wank at the player's expense? I can even put up with that. But without question, it's the "YOU KILLED THE DIVIDE" getting dropped completely out of the blue that takes it over the edge and into downright mistake territory.

 

[ThickBroly]

anyone here familiar with this old russian fallout 2 project? http://olympus2207.com/en/o1-2/ I remember looking at it back in 2011 and it must have passed way under my radar because it released in 2015. Anyway my friend brought it up and said that it still doesn't have a translation, so i'm working on that now. I finished the first file out of 238. Someone on the nma forums is like 50% done but their translation looked purely machine translation, and i hated it.

 

[Exceptionally Exceptional]

The thing that hurts Lonesome Road most of all is the decision to introduce a backstory for the Courier in the final DLC. After over a year of letting the player come up with whatever the fuck they want, they slap you with the requirement that the Courier had to have made that delivery from Navarro to Hopeville. That alone immediately sours the experience and further exacerbates all of the other problems it carries. Linear? I can deal with that. A new type of creature that's going to wipe out everything? Sounds like a great setup for the next game. Avelonne wanting to have a wank at the player's expense? I can even put up with that. But without question, it's the "YOU KILLED THE DIVIDE" getting dropped completely out of the blue that takes it over the edge and into downright mistake territory.

A lot of people hated that shit. Especially because sometimes it can fly in the face of all the logic behind your headcanon for your character.
Like when I played New Vegas The first time I liked to imagine I was a fresh faced youngster of about 18. This means that somehow my Courier was walking the divide since he was a boy and accidentally blew it up at 15.

Good job for blaming someone for a mistake they made when they were a minor, Ulysses. Ya jerk. I hope you never have kids, you'd probably crucify them for breaking a window playing baseball.

 

[Mola Ram]

A lot of people hated that shit. Especially because sometimes it can fly in the face of all the logic behind your headcanon for your character.
Like when I played New Vegas The first time I liked to imagine I was a fresh faced youngster of about 18. This means that somehow my Courier was walking the divide since he was a boy and accidentally blew it up at 15.

Good job for blaming someone for a mistake they made when they were a minor, Ulysses. Ya jerk. I hope you never have kids, you'd probably crucify them for breaking a window playing baseball.

I mentioned this a while ago, but I think there's a valid interpretation that Ulysses's beloved Divide community never actually existed. There's no evidence of it outside of Ulysses's ramblings, even in the surviving journals from NCR troops you find scattered around. There isn't even a place where it could conceivably be, although I suppose the nukes might have wiped it from existence. Beyond that, your Courier seems to have no memory of it.

Somebody here summed this theory up as saying "Ulysses is nothing but a schizophrenic tribal having a psychotic episode" and I kinda love that.

 

[Shaka Brah]

anyone here familiar with this old russian fallout 2 project? http://olympus2207.com/en/o1-2/ I remember looking at it back in 2011 and it must have passed way under my radar because it released in 2015. Anyway my friend brought it up and said that it still doesn't have a translation, so i'm working on that now. I finished the first file out of 238. Someone on the nma forums is like 50% done but their translation looked purely machine translation, and i hated it.

That sounds legit. I hope you get it finished!

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

The thing that hurts Lonesome Road most of all is the decision to introduce a backstory for the Courier in the final DLC. After over a year of letting the player come up with whatever the fuck they want, they slap you with the requirement that the Courier had to have made that delivery from Navarro to Hopeville. That alone immediately sours the experience and further exacerbates all of the other problems it carries. Linear? I can deal with that. A new type of creature that's going to wipe out everything? Sounds like a great setup for the next game. Avelonne wanting to have a wank at the player's expense? I can even put up with that. But without question, it's the "YOU KILLED THE DIVIDE" getting dropped completely out of the blue that takes it over the edge and into downright mistake territory.

I think it's the combination of forcing a backstory on the Courier, mixed with constant reminders of "YOU KILLED THE DIVIDE, FUCK YOU" and Ulysses waxing poetically as if we're supposed to take every word he says verbatim, all three of those elements combined ruined the story for most folks. The gameplay is fine, good even, if you have the right equipment. But the way the story handles things made it even worse than Fallout 3. At least Fallout 3 allowed YOU to destroy Megaton in-game, which then made it fun when people sought revenge against you for it, because you WERE that kind of bastard who'd nuke a town, and people were reacting to your puppy-kicking ways of pure evil.

Part of what gives Fallout New Vegas an advantage over many other RPGs where you have pre-determined characters like the Vault Dweller, the Lone Wanderer, or the Chosen One is that you could make up any backstory for your Courier in New Vegas, making the idea of roleplaying that much more fun. As I said before, the Courier could have been anyone. Anything is possible, anything. The Lone Wanderer and the Vault Dweller came from vaults, the Chosen One came from a tribe. The Courier could have come from the NCR, the Legion territories, the Enclave, or anywhere else. You can even come up with the most ridiculous stories, from making the Courier into some kind of space traveler whose ship crashed in Nevada, forcing them to seek work to survive, to having the Courier be a former porn star from New Reno who got tired of whoring around, so they decided to take up a new line of work in a completely different town.

Then in comes Lonesome Road saying that the Courier destroyed Hopeville, and nothing changes that, which ruins the roleplaying aspect as it forces a character history on a character whose sole advantage over other RPG protagonists was being a blank slate. Then you combine that with a villain who acts like a petulant know-it-all who drones on for minutes on end. Add in the fact that with the villain, the environment, and the DLC as a whole are all whining about how you destroyed Hopeville, WITHOUT actually letting you destroy it the way you can blow up Megaton in FO3.

It's a story that's already skating on thin ice, and it could have worked, if the villain wasn't some hypocritical tribal having a PMS episode with nukes. Kreia managed to work despite being an author avatar because Kreia actually had purpose and a sense of personal responsibility; while she failed as a Jedi Master and as a Sith Lord, she is actually working to prevent any more damage caused by her wayward disciples.

Meanwhile, Ulysses basically is whining about how his new home was destroyed by the big bad Courier, and he wants to nuke others and drag the Courier into this hell for revenge. Even though A) the fucker had no problems destroying other people's homes like how he turned the White Legs loose on New Canaan and destroyed the people there, and B) his new home would have been destroyed anyways, since Legion and NCR troops were flooding the area, and it wouldn't have taken long before both sides would start fighting over it. Heck, if they stumbled across the nukes, Hopeville would become a far more desirable target for both the NCR and the Legion, one far more important than New Vegas, and the latter would become nothing more but a footnote when both sides start fighting like cats and dogs over who gets to launch Hopeville's nukes against the other side first, turning the Divide into a pit full of corpses.

In short, Ulysses was an idiot for choosing a potential warzone with nukes for his new home, he has no moral high ground to condemn the Courier for destroying Hopeville when he destroyed New Canaan with the White Legs, and he's a filthy deserter from the Legion who has no business calling the Courier out for walking away from the responsibility of destroying Hopeville, when he walked out on Caesar and the Legion, showing that for all the evil he's done, he's just as much a coward as he sees the Courier as.

 

[sockies]

that's as bad as the Morrowind fandom.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

I won't back down from that position. The Morrowind fandom bash other Elder Scrolls games and force them to match up to such a high standard, but the game they idolize is a piece of junk that's barely playable and has a so-so story at best. The fact that some people saw it as the best RPG of the early 2000s goes to show me that there's a lot of people who didn't play other RPGs of that era at all.

On other news, I've made a stunning discovery.

After binge-watching some old flicks, I just found out where Interplay took the plot of Fallout 2 from.

And ironically enough, it's a movie that the Enclave would find to be good for propaganda.

IT'S THE 1980s GI JOE MOVIE!

Of all the places, Interplay took the Enclave's plan from Cobra-La's plan to destroy the surface world. The snake-men of Cobra-La used to rule the planet 40,000 years before the modern day in the Hasbro Generation 1 universe timeline, until a cataclysmic Ice Age destroyed their civilization and forced them to go underground in the Himalayas. The human race eventually supplanted them as the rulers of the planet, but the snake-men of Cobra-La never accepted that and saw the humans as barbarians far beneath them in terms of civilization, hence why they sent Cobra Commander to try and destroy them by assembling a mighty army that wound up being the Cobra organization.

Cobra-La's leadership hatched a plan to use a machine developed by the American government named the Broadcast Energy Transmitter to energize spore pods that they were launching in orbit, and the pods would release spores that would destroy human civilization while those safe within Cobra-La's walls would remain safe as the humans mutate into primitive beasts that would be of no threat to Cobra-La, allowing the snake-men to eventually retake the surface, with only them and those humans who joined Cobra being spared from the spores, and they would end up inheriting the Earth as the only sapient beings left in the planet.

Think about it. The Enclave used to rule the United States of America, until a nuclear cataclysm forced the government to go underground, or in this case, to an oil rig. The nation was eventually taken over by mutated humans and other mutants, whom the pure humans of the Enclave saw as beneath them. They then hatched a plan to get rid of those mutated humans with the Forced Evolutionary Virus they took from an old abandoned American military base, and once the world has been scoured of mutated creatures, those who live within the hallowed halls of the Enclave control station would inherit the earth as the only sapient life-forms left on the planet.

Both plots have similar beats.

-The enemy is a precursor faction that used to rule a powerful nation before a cataclysm (nuclear war/ice age) destroyed their empire and forced them to hide.

-Both the Enclave and Cobra-La see the civilizations and people who came to dominate what used to be their land as barbarians, and they seek to retake those lands from said barbarians and restore their place as the apex civilization of their world.

-They plan to use something seized from an American base (Forced Evolutionary Virus, Broadcast Energy Transmitter) to fulfill a plan made to get rid of the civilizations that popped up on land that used to be theirs. The Enclave wants to use the FEV to kill all mutated humans above ground, Cobra-La and the Cobra organization wants to use the BET to energize spores and turn humankind into animals, getting rid of them. Both plans end with the perpetrators being the only sapient beings left on the planet.

-There's even the fact that their weapons and tech are far above those of the people above ground. Enclave energy weapons and power armor far outclass anything the Brotherhood or the NCR can throw at them, while Cobra-La's biotech and organic monstrosities had no problems crushing the GI Joe forces guarding the BET and capturing a large number of them when they tried to attack Cobra-La twice.

The differences between the Enclave plot in Fallout 2 and the Cobra-La plot in GI Joe's first film are so minor that they're practically just small changes to avoid getting sued. (The FO2 Enclave doesn't have an organization that recruits outsiders, they also want to kill everyone instead of turning them into beasts, but the effect is the same-they become the only sapient beings left on the planet after the FEV does its work.)

I really can't help but laugh at the idea that Fallout 2, a game made to satirize American patriotism and the military, stole its main plot from a movie made as a tribute to the American military.

This really blows the lid off on the Interplay/Obsidian fanboys. They see Fallout 2 as the best Fallout game, and yet, aside from the fact that it doesn't even have alternate endings for the main plot with the Enclave, the whole plot concerning the Enclave was just them ripping off the Cobra-La plot from the GI Joe movie, with the Enclave just being an evil version of the uber-patriotic and militaristic GI Joes replacing Cobra-La as the bad guys.

Damn.

 

[Ruin]

I liked shooting Ulysses in his stupid face. To this day it's one of the most satisfying things I've ever done in a videogame.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

I liked shooting Ulysses in his stupid face. To this day it's one of the most satisfying things I've ever done in a videogame.

As I said, stealth mode plus an AP anti-materiel rifle round to the face puts an end to that nuisance. And even at Very Hard, it will take half his life points away.

A shame you can't shut down his healing bots before the match. It would have made the battle too easy, I suppose, and Avellone doesn't want your fight with his OC to be THAT easy.

 

[biophonic]

I think the reason people tend to love other major characters in the New Vegas setting like House, Caesar and Joshua Graham, whilst not giving a shit about Ulysses is that Ulysses has a sense of manufactured importance. He would not be that interesting if he wasn't tied so closely to the story of the Courier and the DLC. People like House, Caesar and Joshua Graham would be.

That's not to say Ulysses was a concept dead on arrival, but he drones on and on like an autist with no sense of social cues, taking 15 sentences to say something that should take 3. The script places far too much importance on him having a lot to say rather than making him more interesting outside of his personal attachment to the Courier. There's a good reason why I can remember several quotes from House, Caesar and Graham, and not one from Ulysses. He's fucking boring.

It's also because Lonesome Road DLC feels the need to preach about how you "the courier" is a bad person for choices you made in the main game. To the point you would think your choices would have an influence over the outcome. Despite that it's essentially just Chris Avellone having a self insert saying "YOU BAD BECAUSE I SAY SO, PAY MORE ATTENTION TO YOUR ACTIONS!" Regardless, the choices you make doesn't even matter considering ulysses either tries to kill you or, you convince him with almost no speech check requirements thats he's a fucking retard and thats all lonesome road is. Point A to Point B with a dreadlock wearing spastic screeching to the point that fallout 4 had more choices.
P.S it amazes me how there's people who'll say Dead Money is the worst DLC for being "Too Different from fallout" despite dead money actually giving you choices and consequences to them for the ending and speech checks unlike lonesome road which at best, the speech checks only slightly alter dialogue. "MUH BEAR MUH BULL"

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

It's also because Lonesome Road DLC feels the need to preach about how you "the courier" is a bad person for choices you made in the main game. To the point you would think your choices would have an influence over the outcome. Despite that it's essentially just Chris Avellone having a self insert saying "YOU BAD BECAUSE I SAY SO, PAY MORE ATTENTION TO YOUR ACTIONS!"

It backfires because you didn't make the choice to destroy Hopeville, and yet the DLC spends the entire time blaming you for what happened there. It's not smart, it's not poetic, all it does is annoy people. Even though the place would have been destroyed by the war anyways, since soldiers from both sides were present there.

Regardless, the choices you make doesn't even matter considering ulysses either tries to kill you or, you convince him with almost no speech check requirements thats he's a fucking retard and thats all lonesome road is. Point A to Point B with a dreadlock wearing spastic screeching to the point that fallout 4 had more choices.

And the sad thing is, Fallout 3 already did it better-you actually do have the chance to destroy Megaton, and when people like the Regulators and Megaton survivors go after you, and when Galaxy News Radio condemns you for it, it's the world reacting to your evil. So when the game calls me evil for what I did, I actually feel proud of it, because I really did commit such evil acts because I'm roleplaying as a complete monster.

P.S it amazes me how there's people who'll say Dead Money is the worst DLC for being "Too Different from fallout" despite dead money actually giving you choices and consequences to them for the ending and speech checks unlike lonesome road which at best, the speech checks only slightly alter dialogue. "MUH BEAR MUH BULL"

Dead Money is the exact opposite of Lonesome Road. Dead Money has a great story, but the gameplay is Kaizo Mario levels of hard. Lonesome Road is OK gameplay-wise, but the story is complete dogshite. But in terms of atmosphere, Dead Money does nail the Fallout feel rather well, especially with the Brotherhood Elder who wants all the tech and who wants to keep others from getting their hands on old-world tech.

Ulysses whining about the Bear and the Bull is completely funny when he did the bidding of the Legion for quite some time, then deserted them like a filthy coward. Instead of an impartial observer who could give insight from a neutral perspective, he's just a deserter who never knew the NCR from the inside the way other Frumentarii did, and he's a deserter from the Legion, which means he's not even their most devoted. He's skilled at killing, but he's only a threat because the eyebots thought he was an Enclave member. Without them, killing him would be as easy as pie.

 

[Alcatraz]

You and a lot of others but in this thread and elsewhere, it seems the most common tactic is to start the final fight by slamming a large caliber round into his head. I quicksaved and did that.. then reloaded after to talk to his stupid self when the battle ended. Killing him without a conversation was the more satisfying option.


The Mojave is basically built to be a nightmare for Tunnelers both with the extreme sunlight, large stretches of open ground, and multiple locations with extremely loud settlements. With a little time to pay attention to how they act the NCR, Brotherhood, and House would handle it easily. I'm not as sure about the Legion but they're not going to be afraid of mutants or casualties, so they'd suss it out.

The mention of Deathclaws is 'backed up' by a Deathclaw at one point being seen dying to one in the Divide, except in gameplay a Deathclaw fighting a Tunneler is extremely tilted towards the 'Claw. It takes one hit to kill a Tunneler and I believe you can get them to spawn in the Divide later on, so they can turf-war with Tunnelers. Though that's likely meant to be story and gameplay segregation.

I'm reminded of Fallout: Dust, the superduper edgy survival concept mod that was the bane of my existence for an odd number of years, simply because no one could shut the fuck up about it.
The only feasible way the Tunnelers could ever thrive in the Mojave, and this is according to Dust, is the cloud from the Sierra Madre blanketed the mojave. This blotted out the sun, and despite the courier winning the Hoover Dam battle for the NCR, they turned on him and labeled him as a terrorist. The NCR then proceeds to make every single war crime in Heart of Darkness look like a schoolyard playground in comparison, conducting bio weapon experiments, abducting innocents, and destroying food crops in an effort to control and maintain it their way.

Then, and only then, do the tunnelers work, and even then, they only really work because you're made deliberately underpowered by being incredibly shitty at everything with sanity more fragile than a house of cards while being harangued by entire packs of them at a time.

God I fucking hate Dust.