okay there is one downside to FONV. The "golden ending" is the one where you side with the NCR and help them take over the mojave in its entirety. An independant Mojave has its upsides, but basically it's mired in "well it just wouldn't work because you need militarised cops or else everyone will just murder and pillage as much as they like!" bullshit, which frankly is untrue. And that's kinda depressing, but eh... guess that's the fallout universe for ya.
@Nine how is it the golden ending?
@vbus golden ending refers to an ending where everything turns out the best it can. Specifically for the majority to end up as best as they can, you gotta have good karma, do the NCR ending, and complete all the companion quests. A truly independent New Vegas does have good points (Goodsprings actually prospers) but regardless the Followers suffer badly, and no matter what the Mojave apparently becomes chaotic and lawless.
@vbus which, you know, is kind of a stretch. You can do everything as best as possible and as far as the game is concerned, if you didn't side with the expansionist NCR then too bad magically bandits appear everywhere and there's too much violence.
@vbus which you know, wouldn't be a problem but for the fact that the writers decided that "okay sure you can go truly independant but just for even wanting to not pick between our favourite factions we're going to make your decision basically silly and prove it to you" like, wow, guys, fuck you.
@vbus Ah well. I mean the gameplay itself is pretty rock solid and all, and fallout's world IS a colossal crap-sack in general with awfulness abound even before the nukes, the story just grates a little now... even if it is leagues better than Fallout three hahaha
@Nine true. What I've realized playing this is that the game deliberately makes it really hard to choose a side. So even the NCR, which stands for democracy, something many if not most people agree with, is bad at dealing with the rampant poverty going on. I want to believe the NCR symbolizes modern America because of their expansionism and fake democratic values.
I do agree it's much better than Fallout 3 though. That's just a easy and binary "BoS good, Enclave bad"
@Nine I don't think the writers necessarily wanted the players to pick NCR though. I feel like if anything the writers made every effort to vilify the Legion
@vbus Oh they definitely did that right, yeah. The Legion absolutely IS the Wrong Moral Choice in every sense of the word, you REALLY have to go through some proper wild mental gymnastics that would make professional parkour artists go "dang bro I give up that's too extreme for me" to even THINK that the Legion are "good actually if you think about it" like holy fuuuuck.
I will say that even though they could have made them stock villains tho they fleshed them out pretty nicely. Fuck em tho.
@vbus yeah though that's kinda awful in its own right, like "hey this group of fascist-loving male-supremacist larpers who like to murder and pillage their way across the wasteland for their own form of 'order' aren't so bad! They deal with the bandits after all!". problem is, the NCR's as colonial and expansionist as the legion is they're just slightly more polite about it, but they still don't give two jack shits about anybody but what's "theirs" :/