That's the art of story telling. A great story won't have you be able to choose who the main character sides with... when have you EVER come across a book where you could choose your own destiny? RL Stine? Really?
It's so childish (i'm not saying it directly to you) to want to be picky and be able to choose this or that... sometimes you get stuck with something and have to appreciate it for what it is. In new vegas, I wanted the Yes Man end to be a really cool, positive ending but for me, it seemed like the absolute worst choice you could make.
All of the factions ARE cookie cutters of the other ones, look at what you do for each endgame questline... the SAME things visiting the SAME places. So it's not offering you a variety of choice and what if you want to say "I don't like any of them, I want to fight for myself and myself alone, and want to have my character be smart enough to run vegas ON THEIR OWN" and not have it be a pile of crap with crime and vice all over the place? You can't...
Did you play the game? Yes, many of the quests take place in the same places but that's because they're important to the
As for having to do the same things, that's just not true. The different factions give you different ways of dealing with similar problems. One faction may allow you to solve things peacefully, another factions may want you to eliminate the problem, and another faction might not care how you solve the problem.
And you can fight against everyone, unlike in FO3. There's only one character in the entire game that you cannot kill. You can turn against everyone. You can't do that in FO3, if you don't like the Brotherhood, you still have to help them retake Project Purity. If you like the Enclave, they won't give you an opportunity to make peace and they'll still try to kill you.
Spoiler With this game, if you like Caesar, you can join him, if you like Mr. House, you can work for him, if you like NCR, they'll let you work for them, if you don't like any of them, you can screw everyone.
With Fallout 3, I loved the story line. It was so mysterious. You never knew for the first time how it was going to fold out, what Project Purity meant, hell, for me, I thought it was some kind of genocide machine thing that would get rid of all the bad people, I didn't know it was a water purifier and to have it hooked up to the jefferson memorial... was pure gold. Bethesda made a unique use of every little nook and crany, nothing was left untouched. There were even unmarked things on the map that were special. THat's why I like it so much.
How could you not know what Project Purity meant? They tell you what Project Purity does the first time they mention it. As soon as you talk to Dr. Li, you can ask her about what it does.
It was like a good story, and who cares if you are forced to side with one or the other? You can side with the enclave you know... jeeze been to broken steel? You can blow up their entire base with the AFB crawler... you can poison the water for president Eden and kill everyone except for them... you may not be a Sergeant Major wearing Enclave armor and all of the enclave guys love you... maybe not, but you can forward their goals and help them out just as much as you help out the brotherhood.
Except you can't ally with the Enclave. You can't help the Enclave keep Project Purity from the Brotherhood. You can't sabotage Liberty Prime for the Enclave. You can't just activate Project Purity for the Enclave. Yes, you can poison the water, but only after you've slaughtered the Enclave troops defending Project Purity. Yes, you can blow up the Brotherhood base but only after you've killed all the Enclave troops in the crawler. Forwarding their goals is pointless if you've already killed them all.
Spoiler In FO: NV, you can actually align yourself with the bad guys and Caesar won't try to kill you if you do your job. He'll even reward you for doing your job well.
One minor thing in this game... the power armor for the remnants suxx nutz hardcoe. It looks so UGLY. Where did the sixy armor go to? Lol... sorry, that was a total child moment, I know, i'm sorry.... but for real.
That's what the power armor is supposed to look like. They're not supposed to look like robotic batman suits.
I can connect with characters better in fallout 3 than NV... like Mr. New vegas has NOTHING on three dog. Three Dog is so full of life and tells of your exploits better and you can actually meet him flesh in blood and even kill him if you wish. President Eden is so sinister, but you can see a real logic behind his thinking which makes him so intriguing. Fawkes. Nuff said. Lily doesn't have anything on fawkes in my opinion. Elder Lyons. He really does care about the wastes and you can see he desperately wants to do the right thing. A man who was given a mission, but sees that his desire to show mercy upon people who have been depraved for so long overrides whatever his superiors tell him to do. THAT my friends, is a true leader. The NCR just does whatever it's told... never thinking for itself or outside the box.
Mr. New Vegas is supposed to represent the 50's style Vegas. You ever heard of the Rat Pack or Frank Sinatra?
Eden and his whole plan are a rip off of the Enclave's plan in FO2. You don't like his plan, you like the Enclave's plan in FO2. Plus if you know anything about the Enclave or even encountered them in the game, you'd know that they're evil. Come on, they're a shadow government that help bring about the war that ended the world, turned the vaults into a giant social experiment, and want to repopulate the earth with a "pure" strain of the human race while wiping out all mutants, which include humans that have been exposed to radiation or the FEV, meaning everyone except recently surfaced vault dwellers. In fact, Eden really had no plan other than to do what the Enclave tried to do in FO2. The Enclave in FO3 showed no initiative of their own. Why didn't he have the Enclave take over Project Purity while the Brotherhood's away? There was a whole 16 year period when Project Purity was completely inactive. Did Eden somehow magically predict that James would come out of the vault at the exact right time to return to his work?
Fawkes, really? He has no personality or development. Lily is actually a tragic character
Spoiler who lost everything she had and is now losing memories of her past due to the insanity caused by years of exposure to the stealth boy radiation.
Lyons is just a stereotypical knight in shining armor. The only reason why he's had any kind of success is because the writers completely screwed up the Brotherhood of Steel. The entire BoS originated from a single bunker. The BoS was never a large organization capable of doing what Lyon's people did. They had limited ability to manufacture old world technology, especially power armors. Power armors were treasures to them and preserved at all costs since they couldn't make new ones. A BoS chapter doesn't have the huge number of troops Lyons had. The writers just decided to ignore all the established canon about the BoS and made Lyons' chapter into an army capable of patrolling the wasteland and fighting off the Enclave.
There are tons of others out there like the vault overseer for 101, Amata, the girl you could never have for a friend or perhaps more, going back to bitter sweet memories, your home destroyed and a shell of what it formerly was, a heavy feeling of regret for doing what you did and a heartache that will last a lifetime knowing that there is nothing you can do or say to help out your family in the vault, leaving them as a huge steel door closes upon them for perhaps the last time. You'd have to be a block of steel not to be touched at all by something like that. I'm sorry.
That's a huge exaggeration. Those characters barely had any lines of dialogue and FO3 isn't exactly "Sophie's Choice."
Even the DLC characters got to me, like Ashur from the pit. You know he's not all bad, and he regrets having to do what he did heavily but saw that the bigger picture mattered more than personal comfort and will even fight you to the death over taking his daughter. Mothership Zeta, you listen as people who were abducted describe the area around them in mystery and wonder, only to have the fear and realization of their death fall upon them. The samurai who became friends with a little girl, not only can he not understand the group, but he will never be able to integrate into society or have any purpose in the world anymore, the world he left is now far gone down the river of time. And as you go up to the bridge of the mothership, you see a majestic view of a place you call home, seeing the once blue and green earth now brown and murky grey.
Did you actually talk to any of the characters in NV? The game has 65,000 lines of dialogue, a lot more than FO3.
As for Ashur, he's one of the few morally ambiguous characters in FO3 and just barely, especially if you look at the way his men treats slaves or all the mutilated bodies in the raider town.
» Sun Mar 06, 2011 12:49 pm 
) 
