Bruh, every leader who thinks they're right in Vegas is delusional to a degree. Caesar is aware of his hypocrisy but ignores it in favor of following his dream through, Kimball and Oliver completely buy their own horse shit while everyone else suffers for it, Papa Khan is the boss of a bunch of neverbeen WE WUZ raiders, the Boomers are Boomers in every sense of the word with how inconsequential and unimportant they are in the long term, the Brotherhood of Steel is on the chopping block but the elders can't break muh codex, the families think they have any idea what they're doing, you think somehow you can do a better job even though you took power mostly for its own sake rather than to rule a shithole city state, the Followers are dumb enough to help addicts, the King is a bumbling albeit well-meaning idiot, Marcus thinks super mutants can establish a stable community despite the fact they can't breed, Hsu thinks everything will be fine if he just shuts up and does the best he can with what he's ordered to do, and House is so blinded by his past success he thinks somehow he can control the future when everything hinges on you doing what he tells you or buying his bullshit.
It's all a manner of picking your poison.
-Caesar's whole modus operandi changes every time he sees fit to change. The Legion used to be a confederacy of tribes under him before he crowned himself Caesar and formed the Legion. Doubtless they'll start changing their ways again once they take Vegas and push into California. They may even allow women into their ranks and allow the use of robots and drugs in the future, once the Legion transitions from a nomadic horde to a standing army protecting the citizenry and the power of the dictator.
-Kimball and Oliver buy into their own propaganda, but mostly because they've won the previous Battle of Hoover Dam and because the Dam provides power. So even though their smartest military mind (Chief Hanlon) sees the Mojave campaign as stupid, they still need that Dam, if anything, to deny it to the Legion and to give power and clean water to NCR territories.
-Papa Khan and his people are pissed at the NCR and are being used by Caesar as proxies. They're depressed because they got their butts kicked and Caesar is obviously taking advantage of it. If you nudge them the right way, you can get them to quit and leave, where they gain new strength with the Followers of the Apocalypse joining them, and they become a nicer version of Caesar's Legion up in the Northwest.
-The Boomers are anything but inconsequential, since if they're pissed off enough, they can easily turn any encampment into a burning hole, including New Vegas. And all three major factions want the Boomers on their team so they can lob shells at the enemy.
-The Brotherhood of Steel are pretty much zealous morons just waiting to die, because they don't want to change due to "muh codex". The only way to change that for them is for you to do their errands, and through the reports from the scouts that you collect for them, the Brotherhood realizes how weak the NCR really is, and they give the NCR an offer they can't refuse-help against the Legion in the Battle for Hoover Dam.
-The Families just swing whatever way they please. If the Legion is winning, they'll side with the Legion. If the NCR is winning, they'll side with the NCR. If House or the Courier keep Vegas independent, they'll support an independent Vegas. The only constant is that the Omerta bosses are in the Legion's pocket, the other two families just don't care and will roll with whoever's got the power to back up their claims.
-The Courier is a different ball game altogether. If the Courier is some IQ 70 motherfucker, then Yes Man is going to puppet the Courier. But if the Courier is some kind of supergenius, then they're on par with House and Caesar in terms of threat level, especially since New Vegas' army is an army of hundreds of rocket-launching, grenade-chucking robots that make both the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave's forces look like cavemen throwing rocks at people. If you got some genius Courier behind that, then the Mojave is as good as theirs, and they can use Hoover Dam's electricity and water to expand their influence beyond the borders of the Mojave.
-The Followers are just naive goodie-two-shoes. Like, imagine an entire faction that thinks like Padme Amidala from Star Wars, except they're not as heavily-armed as she is. The only reason they haven't been wiped out is because their learning is useful.
-Marcus probably just wants a trading post run by his Super Mutant buddies. At most, he probably just wants a good place for his people to die in peace, and I don't begrudge him that. Some random traders and travelers will probably take over Jacobstown one day when the Super Mutants die off.
-Hsu at most, is one of the smarter NCR folks, but not smart enough to figure out that his top lieutenant is a Legion spy. If he actually had his officers observed, he'd have figured out that his buddy Curtis is a Legion spy who's making it harder for the NCR to fight the Fiends. Considering how easy it is for some random mailman with a shotgun to just casually eradicate the Fiends, that reflects badly upon Hsu and his forces.
-Of course House is cocky as fuck. He averted the nuclear apocalypse for the Mojave Wasteland, shooting down and disabling nukes while the rest of the country got blasted into radioactive rubble. It's like talking to a wealthy, well-educated, and powerful Roman warlord/authority figure whose power base survived through the Dark Ages. He sees everyone around him as far beneath him in terms of smarts and tactical/technological genius, because they are. The only one who's even close to being how smart he is would be Caesar. And even then, Caesar is merely using the knowledge of the past to build a future, whereas House INVENTED a lot of the machinery, including robots and computers in Fallout.
So of course, House acts like an arrogant shit who expects you to buy his propaganda, because his genius is the sole reason why New Vegas is even worth conquering in the first place. He literally was the smartest man among America's elite prior to the nuclear apocalypse. If the leaders of the country were as smart as he was when the bombs dropped, they'd have shot down the Chinese nukes like he did and the USA would have survived the nuclear apocalypse.
Frontier's complete failure doesn't vindicate Bethesda for their admittedly inconsistent writing but I can't help shaking my head at their bullshit claims of superiority. In terms of game design, I would've preferred they stuck with 3 and NV's style, even if it was basically Oblivion with guns.
The never ending Gorgnard Fallout Vs Modern Fallout conflict as a whole is pretty retarded. I can see why 1&2 were lauded even though the games themselves were pretty basic. One thing I absolutely hated in both but more so in 2 is that it makes Deus Ex HR's morality reward schtick look tame in comparison, but that's never brought up. Bethesda Fallout relied too much on past works before entering this weird mid-ground where they're not doing enough of their own thing while still having some oldschool elements and trying to change-up the ARPG format by having a voiced protagonist.
If there's one thing I'm sure of, Fallout would've almost definitely been forgotten if Bethesda hadn't bought it and made 3: No Mutants Allowed is a horrible nostalgia filled community to have representing a franchise and the game mechanics that boiled down to maxing two stats aged like shit.
It kind of does, in a way. I mean, Bethesda's writing is still pretty basic, but when the people shitting on their writing can't even make a good story worth a damn, then all Bethesda can do is sit back and laugh at how retarded the stories for the fan mods are. I bet Todd Howard and his cronies were passing the popcorn as the whole Frontier fiasco exploded in the fanbase's faces.
Oblivion was a good game. Adding guns to it and putting it in the Fallout universe was a good idea. Fallout was at its best with Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Fallout 4, for all its virtues, just wasn't as good as 3 or NV, although it did try to be.
The whole conflict between old and new Fallout is pretty retarded. Things were different back then. Back in the mid 90s you didn't have people whining about video games turning kids into violent animals. That was before the era of Jack Thompson and Hillary Clinton whining about violent video games and how they were screwing our kids. Which is why 3 and NV couldn't have killable children the way the first two games just allowed you to kill everything, because if they did have those, the games would get kiboshed by the press rather hard.
Fallout became big because of Fallout 3. It was dying after Fallout 2, and Fallout: BoS didn't help matters. And no matter what people say, the first two games' mechanics did age like shit. Even guys like Spoony, who usually were RPG buffs who loved the first two Fallout games, couldn't come back to them after playing FO3 because the music was not at the same level as FO3.
