Fallout series

The Legion is probably more unpopular than it would normally be because half the map is controlled by the NCR and you have to be in a constant disguise to not get shot at. There's also far more side quests that give you NCR reputation and push you towards them compared to the Legion at the start of the game. It's been beaten to death how unfinished the Legion content was, but even if there were Legion towns, people would still be more likely to join the NCR just because your first exposure to the major factions is the NCR.
The Legion is unpopular because of the slavery and institutionalized rape thing. Not because of disguises. In fact, most NCR troops are barely a challenge for the player, outside of the heavy troopers, the NCR Rangers and their hit squads, so running across NCR trooper garrisons just ends with them getting shot by the player if you have any form of decent weapon. Heck, when I played as a Legion courier, I had no problems going back and forth the Mojave and killing any dumb NCR mofo that got in my way. It just gives you an excuse to kill them and loot their corpses for stuff to sell to the Gun Runners.

Also, the unfinished nature of the game gives you an exploit to farm reputation from the Legion-you can tell one of the Legion soldiers in Cottonwood Cove (Decanus Severus) how to disarm NCR mines and keep repeating the dialogue for an increase in positive reputation. That's if you're not up to just slaughtering NCR troopers left and right and giving their dogtags over to the Legion, which also gives you Legion fame.

Most players join the NCR because "hurr durr, democracy and freedom!" and they take one look at the Legion enslaving and crucifying people and automatically judge them to be the bad guys. Which, if the karma system is any indication, is exactly the notion the game gives you.
 
First time I played Lonesome Road, the weekend it came out, when I got to the end I saw what's his fuck over there babbling at himself, crouched down, and took his head clean off with a sniper rifle, then fought my free of the ambush.

I had no clue he goes on some fucking rambling speech. I was just out to fucking kill him before he rambled on at me like Grampa Simpson for another 20 minutes.
 
First time I played Lonesome Road, the weekend it came out, when I got to the end I saw what's his fuck over there babbling at himself, crouched down, and took his head clean off with a sniper rifle, then fought my free of the ambush.

I had no clue he goes on some fucking rambling speech. I was just out to fucking kill him before he rambled on at me like Grampa Simpson for another 20 minutes.
Ulysses yeah? Yeah, he does kinda blather on. A lot.

You know that fenced off gate you can't access at the NCR Outpost? If you choose the option to nuke the NCR at the end of Lonesome Road, you can go through that gate and explore Long 15. Now that area's a real fucking cunt. Highly irradiated NCR troopers in heavy armour and the colonel coming to rape you with his plasma gun, all the while taking a max of 20 rads a second. I quite rightfully pussied out of that shit.
 
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First time I played Lonesome Road, the weekend it came out, when I got to the end I saw what's his fuck over there babbling at himself, crouched down, and took his head clean off with a sniper rifle, then fought my free of the ambush.

I had no clue he goes on some fucking rambling speech. I was just out to fucking kill him before he rambled on at me like Grampa Simpson for another 20 minutes.
Lonesome Road certainly showed the shortcomings of relying on exposition dumps to tell your story (really, was it that hard to give Hopeville any visible sign of post-war habitation?). Granted, Dead Money and Old World Blues also talked your ear off, but the characters there were interesting and didn't speak like tedious assholes.
 
Ulysses yeah? Yeah, he does kinda blather on. A lot.

You know that fenced off gate you can't access at the NCR Outpost? If you choose the option to nuke the NCR at the end of Lonesome Road, you can go through that gate and explore Long 15. Now that area's a real fucking cunt. Highly irradiated NCR troopers in heavy armour and the colonel coming to rape you with his plasma gun, all the while taking a max of 20 rads a second. I quite rightfully pussied out of that shit.
I went in there, but only to take the colonel's armor, and because I had a shit ton of med supplies that held off the radiation sickness and the damage.
 
Lonesome Road certainly showed the shortcomings of relying on exposition dumps to tell your story (really, was it that hard to give Hopeville any visible sign of post-war habitation?). Granted, Dead Money and Old World Blues also talked your ear off, but the characters there were interesting and didn't speak like tedious assholes.
It would have been better if you destroyed Hopeville DURING the DLC. Like, you go there, and you go to some military base and plunder it to get some loot, but you accidentally hit something on your way that causes the nearby nukes to go off and explode, killing the locals and causing the land to transform into a radioactive hellscape.

At least THEN Ulysses would have every right to shit on you, since your greed for loot would literally have caused the death of thousands. At least games like Spec Ops: The Line did that right-everything bad the game piles on you for, YOU DID, during the game's story.
 
It would have been better if you destroyed Hopeville DURING the DLC. Like, you go there, and you go to some military base and plunder it to get some loot, but you accidentally hit something on your way that causes the nearby nukes to go off and explode, killing the locals and causing the land to transform into a radioactive hellscape.

At least THEN Ulysses would have every right to shit on you, since your greed for loot would literally have caused the death of thousands. At least games like Spec Ops: The Line did that right-everything bad the game piles on you for, YOU DID, during the game's story.
Sure, but the base game and DLCs already established that the Divide was a hell scape before LR came out.

What they should've done was better explain how there used to be a thriving community there (both in the base game/DLCs and within Lonesome Road itself) instead of Ulysses suddenly pulling that factoid out of his ass. As it is, it comes so out of nowhere that I can't take it seriously as his motivation for wanting vengeance.

Same with the Tunnelers, I'm seriously supposed to believe these Trog reskins will wipe the NCR and New Vegas out?
 
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I always felt that some of the developers in some of the games should have invested into one of the Enclave storylines, particulally into the whole space resettlement thing.
The whole Vault experiment was conducted to prepare for any possibility during the space flight and colonization of a new planet. They were even supposed to use the same equipment the Vaults were using, which explains why some of it is extremely overengineered (in terms of fantasy magic Fallout engineering)- durable, covered with bomb-proof shells and capable of working for hundrets and hundrets of years with almost no failure.
But this line is never explored beyond the mentioning if F2- like "oh, thats why they did it, ok".
So the player must presume the programm has either failed at some point or was never implemented- but then it raises the question- why carry on with the experiments?
To me its a neat little touch to the Enclave- they destroyed the planet so they can move to another one and suck it up dry too. It even gives some ground to the presumption that USA in fact might have started the war. Enclave bombs the world and kills it. But as long as some small cadre of "important" people survive and move to another planet the Enclave and america have "won".
 
Sure, but the base game and DLCs already established that the Divide was a hell scape before LR came out.
And that was the flaw. If they were going to make it so that you'll have an OP Mary Sue Author Insert character whine about how bad the player is for destroying a city, then the best way to make it meaningful is to have the player DESTROY IT DURING THE GAME. This isn't KOTOR 1&2 where your character already has a storied past as a former Jedi general who fought war-worshiping nutcases that burned entire worlds. The main point of the Courier is that they're the average schmuck who got dragged into a conflict and through circumstance, became the kingmaker for the Mojave. Suddenly taking this blank slate of a character and putting them through hell so they can be blamed for something the player didn't do isn't a compelling story; it's just padded bullshit.

What they should've done was better explain how there used to be a thriving community there (both in the base game/DLCs and within Lonesome Road itself) instead of Ulysses suddenly pulling that factoid out of his ass. As it is, it comes so out of nowhere that I can't take it seriously as his motivation for wanting vengeance.
Imagine if you actually got to experience the Divide/Hopeville before it got blasted to smithereens. You can see the towns, the soldiers, the people, imagine having actually experienced it, only for it to be destroyed. Then you'd understand more where Ulysses came from.

Shit, this is why the destruction of Taris in the first KOTOR game was one hell of a gut punch for the player. You got to know these people, live in their world, seeking work, helping people, learning how the place worked. And then it all gets blasted to hell when your former intern didn't want to comb through several billions of people just to find one woman. But when someone from Taris starts talking about how hard it is that their home got destroyed, you can actually sympathize, because you saw that home, you lived there for a while, and you saw it get destroyed.

As it stands, I couldn't give two shits about the people in the Divide. I didn't give a damn when I slaughtered what was left of them. I couldn't care less about who I was fighting and why, I only cared about the loot I could ply off from their cold, dead bodies, because the loot sold well and I was able to buy more shit because of it.

And the only reason I cared about Ulysses is because he's a challenging final boss-if you ramp up the difficulty. If you don't, then he's just one headshot away from being a footnote; and I couldn't care less for his endless diatribes about how the Legion and the NCR don't understand past history and how they're just appropriating symbols of the past for their future, when the NCR and the Legion are very much aware of that reality and are OK with it.

Same with the Tunnelers, I'm seriously supposed to believe these Trog reskins will wipe the NCR and New Vegas out?
The average army with .50 caliber machine guns, radios, and lights can easily decimate whole armies of them. Given that there are portable miniguns available for purchase from local merchants, eradicating entire swarms of them won't be a problem, and I'm sure it also won't be a problem for some doctor to create some kind of poison that can kill the Tunnelers on contact.
 
A quick search doesn't show anything so I was wondering if anyone heard of Fallout: Sonora. Its a mod for Fallout 2 set in southern Arizona and northern Mexico a few years after the events of Fallout 1 (so no Legion or NCR). Apparently it was done mostly by one guy.

It even has animated talking heads like the old games!
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Unfortunately, as you can see, its only in Russian at this point (though a translation patch is in the works)
 
The Legion is unpopular because of the slavery and institutionalized rape thing. Not because of disguises. In fact, most NCR troops are barely a challenge for the player, outside of the heavy troopers, the NCR Rangers and their hit squads, so running across NCR trooper garrisons just ends with them getting shot by the player if you have any form of decent weapon.
I agree, but at some point there was a patch that increased the random encounter rates and if you weren't at least neutral with the Legion you'd encounter a pack of them every minute or two.

At least a few of them were armed with Brush guns at least at my level, and they could do some pretty hefty damage if they caught you off guard.
 
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I always felt that some of the developers in some of the games should have invested into one of the Enclave storylines, particulally into the whole space resettlement thing.
The whole Vault experiment was conducted to prepare for any possibility during the space flight and colonization of a new planet. They were even supposed to use the same equipment the Vaults were using, which explains why some of it is extremely overengineered (in terms of fantasy magic Fallout engineering)- durable, covered with bomb-proof shells and capable of working for hundrets and hundrets of years with almost no failure.
But this line is never explored beyond the mentioning if F2- like "oh, thats why they did it, ok".
So the player must presume the programm has either failed at some point or was never implemented- but then it raises the question- why carry on with the experiments?
To me its a neat little touch to the Enclave- they destroyed the planet so they can move to another one and suck it up dry too. It even gives some ground to the presumption that USA in fact might have started the war. Enclave bombs the world and kills it. But as long as some small cadre of "important" people survive and move to another planet the Enclave and america have "won".
akschully in Nuka World in Fallout 4 there is a space Vault Exhibit you can explore, so it hasn't been completely abandoned... but other than that yeah you are right its mostly just an afterthought, and I agree they should expand more on the Enclave, in my autistic pitch for a hypthetical Fallout 5 I made several posts back I mentioned the main conflict could be between the Enclave and the Brotherhood, with the Brotherhood fighting them because they consider democracy to have failed and the Enclave's advanced tech to be repeating the "same mistakes" of the past, while the Enclave considers the BoS as a bunch of retards and fanatics who don't know what they are doing
 
I agree, but at some point there was a patch that increased the random encounter rates and if you weren't at least neutral with the Legion you'd encounter a pack of them every minute or two.

At least a few of them were armed with Brush guns at least at my level, and they could do some pretty hefty damage if they caught you off guard.
By that time, I have more than enough high-caliber weapons and stims to cheese through them. And of course, once you take out the first squad of assassins, they come with such fine loot that you can just upgrade it or sell it for stims.
 
And that was the flaw. If they were going to make it so that you'll have an OP Mary Sue Author Insert character whine about how bad the player is for destroying a city, then the best way to make it meaningful is to have the player DESTROY IT DURING THE GAME. This isn't KOTOR 1&2 where your character already has a storied past as a former Jedi general who fought war-worshiping nutcases that burned entire worlds. The main point of the Courier is that they're the average schmuck who got dragged into a conflict and through circumstance, became the kingmaker for the Mojave. Suddenly taking this blank slate of a character and putting them through hell so they can be blamed for something the player didn't do isn't a compelling story; it's just padded bullshit.
The Courier does have a history, though. The game, through quite a few dialogue options, shows the Courier as being at least in their mid 30s and having visited multiple NCR locations delivering packages. This was all before Lonesome Road. Chris should have done a lot more showing rather than telling in Lonesome Road but blowing up Hopeville during the DLC was impossible. Way too many things that reference Ulysses' interest in the courier are in the main game. For instance, you can talk to Johnson Nash about a courier who cancelled once he saw your name on the list.
 
The Courier does have a history, though. The game, through quite a few dialogue options, shows the Courier as being at least in their mid 30s and having visited multiple NCR locations delivering packages. This was all before Lonesome Road. Chris should have done a lot more showing rather than telling in Lonesome Road but blowing up Hopeville during the DLC was impossible. Way too many things that reference Ulysses' interest in the courier are in the main game. For instance, you can talk to Johnson Nash about a courier who cancelled once he saw your name on the list.
And? That's not much to go on. At most, you're just a mailman who did deliver things here and there, not someone who had a kill count of an entire town.

They designed the main game and the DLC ahead of time. They should have made it so that all you get in the main game is a reference to Hopeville and how there's a lot of old world loot there, which would then set up the events that lead to you blowing up the place in the Lonesome Road DLC.
 
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