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That's kind of the whole thing about it, everything depends on Caesar. Marcus points out that the legionaries follow Caesar and Caesar follows his principles. His take on it is fairly accurate. If you save Caesar from his imminent natural death he should stand a chance of seeing his vision through. Again, I think the Legion is a perfect counterpoint to the NCR. They're essentially the mirror opposite of the NCR - on first glance, the NCR looks pretty great, the only choice really, but the closer you look and the farther you get into bed with them, that greatness starts to become pretty uncertain. They're not white knights.

As I understand it, Caesar aims for a Hegelian synthesis. I haven't gotten the dialog, but the way it's been explained to me, Caesar surmises that by conquering the NCR, the Legion will gain its strengths but not its weaknesses - the rank brutality of the Legion will be tempered by the NCR's liberal Republican ideals, but unlike the NCR the Legion will be efficient, functional, and capable of holding territory and ensuring its safety (many characters, including Raul and the Arizonan / New Mexican trader at the Fort, emphasize how exceptionally safe Legion interior territories are). In this, the Legion is principled in a way that the NCR isn't - for all its high-minded ideals, none of the NCR brass seem terribly interested in living up to their promises so much as they are in building a territorial empire. Caesar's an idealist - he wants to purify the NCR, and it's hard to argue against the notion that the NCR needs purifying. Nearly everyone you meet in a position of power in the NCR (above the Rangers, who all seem fairly sensible but at the end of the day are soldiers under orders) is petty, shortsighted, or buffoonish. In the cases of the McCarran scientist and Fantastic at HELIOS One, you see how careerist dickheads ignore reason and take credit for other people's work and are rewarded for it. The top brass are cronies of the President, who himself is a stereotypical politician, advocating terrible policies and carelessly throwing the grunts of his army into the meat grinder while he goes around making treacly, pointless speeches and currying favor with idiot citizens who don't particularly know or care about how ****ed the NCR's situation really is (none other than Mr. House pegs the NCR as being primarily concerned with comfort and indulgence, and he's an astute dude). The Legion encroaches heavily into NCR territory and they don't even seem to notice. Such dysfunction in the Legion would result in crucifixion or worse, in a very short amount of time. Playing the game for the first time you get the feeling that the NCR is hopelessly outmatched unless you personally carry them to victory, at which point they will promptly forget about you and continue to gleefully make a mess of everything they touch. Before I knew about Caesar's plan (if you can call it that), the Speech victory you can pull over on Legate Lanius when not fighting on behalf of the Legion seemed sort of abrupt and nonsensical, but in the proper context it makes perfect sense - you essentially challenge the dialectic and convince Lanius that contrary to what Caesar believes / believed, conquering the NCR will corrupt the Legion and all the systemic problems that the NCR faces will persist in the new order. So Lanius goes back to Arizona until such a time when the Legion is truly capable of bringing functional civilization to the wastes. The character of Caesar is written by John Gonzalez but the dialectical reasoning is apparently all Sawyer's work. Positing the NCR as the Greece to the Legion's Rome is pretty damn clever, and I think outside of things like quest counts and the like, the Legion is pretty underrated as far as commentary about the game goes. As an ideological counterpoint to the NCR they serve their purpose and then some.

You keep talking about landmarks in FO3, and NV has just as many landmarks. If interest in a setting comes from the fidelity with which the appearance of said landmarks are recreated in-game, then there's no reason why you would favor one over the other. The lottery aspect of Nipton (as in, the lottery aspect of the game comes from the fact that no one ever visited Nipton IRL except to play the lottery) is more clever than any location design in FO3. The only conclusion to come to is that your preference for FO3's setting is arbitrary. You speak of NV as though it lacks things it does not lack. I don't know if it's because you're a lawyer or what, but you should know that in normal everyday conversations, people infer things that are not explicitly stated. I don't know why you go about things as though what you say has no meaning.

One of the things I really like about you is that you say things up until the point where it's better to say you haven't said anything at all. You're faulting Sawyer and Obsidian for your own lack of effort and / or lack of taste for the setting. I haven't been to Vegas but I felt like I was "only catching a few o' the references to locale flavor". Your gripes are completely meaningless. Just say "I find deserts to be boring", or "I wish Vegas had more buildings I feel are important enough to know about". PS all the caves / mines / canyons / mountains / lakes in NV are real places. What constitutes "full advantage" of landmarks? Because it sounds like it has nothing to do with comparitive world design and everything to do with your personal aesthetic sensibility, even though you're framing your critiques in the context of comparitive world design. That's not very fair. People who honestly felt that way were never paying attention. How does realizing that make me an "apologist" unless Obsidian indeed failed to implement TB combat? How can you apologize for a success?

One of the things I really like about you is that you say things up until the point where it's better to say you haven't said anything at all. You're faulting Sawyer and Obsidian for your own lack of effort and / or lack of taste for the setting. I haven't been to Vegas but I felt like I was "only catching a few o' the references to locale flavor". Your gripes are completely meaningless.

PS all the caves / mines / canyons / mountains / lakes in NV are real places. What constitutes "full advantage" of landmarks?

Wait a second, how does FO3 capture the personality of DC? I mean that honestly. There's nothing about FO3 that screamed "DC" to me. For the profoundly easy task of including well-known landmarks in their game, I give Bethesda a polite golf clap. Obsidian's attention to detail matches or exceeds Bethsoft's. Goodspring's layout, the ironic design of Nipton (if that ain't "clever replication" nothing is), etc. Ain't a lot of obvious, phallic monuments to tickle your geography prostate. Sorry! But, you know, MY IMMERSION and all that. Fair point to you on gameplay design, but it's pretty tiring having to read how the terrain around Lake Mead fails to capture and express the essence of jade or whatever. Just say "I find deserts to be boring", or "I wish Vegas had more buildings I feel are important enough to know about". Was a return to turn-based combat ever part of Obsidian's approach to FO:NV? I don't believe it ever was, but maybe there's a quote out there that proves me wrong (I'm sure you've got a whole mess of Sawyer quotes just lying around). Given that, I fail to see much irony. Breaking: Company fails to fulfill imaginary goals, more on this at 11.

Better than magic toys that boost your stats... Really it seems like they exist to give you capital with which to purchase the magic implants. Something tells me Sawyer didn't intend for them to be much more than flavor.

Crosspost! Awesome news, everybody! Now if someone would just buy all the assets and then launch them into the sun... Related: Bethesda's next (non-core team) game will use id Tech 5.

I imagine she has a point system you need to exhaust to get her to turn hostile.

Did you send me your addy? I'm pretty sure the dev's still on SA. I could punt it to him.

Awesome news, everybody! Now if someone would just buy all the assets and then launch them into the sun... Related: Bethesda's next (non-core team) game will use id Tech 5.

Raul, Lily, and Veronica will all be fine (as will Rex and ED-E, natch). Veronica only goes hostile if you kill off the BoS, which you will eventually have to do as a Legion-aligned character, but up until that point she's fine. I've also heard of ways of metagaming around making Veronica hostile, probably having to do with ditching her while you nuke the Brotherhood.

Seems more like a reference to the "Excrement Expeditor" perk from FO2.

You should all pay attention to these. The Fiends recruitment one on p. 3 is the best IMO.

(I just needed an excuse to post that)

Fallout existed prior to 2008.

I'm wagering at this point that it's just a hat tip to VB freaks like myself. It's a huge location (it had its own overland map, if you'll recall), it's a fair ways away, much farther than NCR-> Vegas, though apparently the Legion has had successful raids as far east as New Jersey. But I think the only thing that really makes it a "weak" idea is that the vast majority of enemies are dogs. It was a really cool idea on paper, in that it was basically a zombie apocalypse movie with canines instead of zombies (Doggie Apocalypse? World War D?) with a hardy group of survivors barely holding their own in a city full of ravenous predators. But in actual implementation it would be a laughingstock for gamers who can't see past the endless pooches. The stuff with the Denver PD and getting the scav camp running were all good. Like I said, Boulder Dome is a much stronger candidate. The only problem is that overall, most of the VB locations would be tonally off for NV. Let's face it, NV is fairly campy, with all the darkness in the setting coming from bitter ironies like Vault 11 or the tendency for NCR to reward and encourage blustery incompetence in positions of power, whereas VB was extra-light on the irony and camp and extra-heavy on existential dread, which NV is almost totally lacking in.

There are a lot of things that got chopped up and mixed in with NV, and a whole mess of new stuff, too. If we could just get a Boulder Dome DLC, I will consider the cancellation of VB moot.

So here are all the abundant DLC hints in the game people seem to have found so far: - A map Nav point called "North Passage" on the North (natch) side of the map that appears to be a cave, but it is currently blocked by boulders. In all likelihood this will be the site of the first DLC, probably New Canaan related. - A tunnel with a locked door on the West side of the map, with no apparent key existing. - Antony in the Legion Camp indicates that Denver / Dog City is canon. - In the Legion Camp there is a map on a table that charts a bunch of territory East of the Colorado. - The Boomers mention an "Area 2" to the East of the map that contains many weapons. - If you complete Veronica's quest and reach a certain point in the Brotherhood questline, she says that Elijah, the AWOL former elder who was nearing some sort of breakthrough at HELIOS One before it was taken by the NCR, is still alive and has sent her a message indicating an intent on his part to "cleanse the wastes" so that the BoS can rule them. Sounds awfully familiar.

(warning: Spoilers!)

Considering the amount of content in theg ame, it's more more than generous.

He looks more like a Khan, although he's in the club suit, which is dedicated to Legion characters, far as I can tell. He was supposed to be a counterpart to Boone, apparently (grudge against NCR instead of Legion). Given how much havoc a character who "insta-battles" with NCR the way Boone did with the Legion would cause through most of the game, it makes sense that they would cut him, though he could have ended up being a spy or plainclothes agent, or something. We may never know!

They can probably get away with passing floaters off as a CA phenomenon. I imagine they're harder to replicate in the engine as well - Centaurs certainly underwent some revisions.

Hit enter, and all will be revealed All the horror will be revealed.