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Only engage, and then the mind grows heated.
The first time I met Mr. House, I couldn't wait for the chance to betray and murder him. He struck me as creepy, weird, and pathetically holding on to power for way, way too long. I'm still looking forward to pulling the plug on the old bastard.
However, I do feel a fair amount of empathy towards other New Vegas characters. The NCR asked me to assassinate Pacer, and I couldn't bring myself to do it. I really, really want to get the Great Khans on my side before the game ends, because they seem mostly decent and I don't want to have to shoot them in the face. I balked at doing missions for the Van Graffs, given how creepy and bloodthirsty they come off.
Even in Fallout 3, I had a hard time destroying Megaton. I did, just to see what would happen, but exploding a perfectly innocent town with an A-bomb kind of left a bad taste in my mouth. Oddly, the other game series that has tweaked my sense of empathy is GTA. When I had to kill characters with whom I had working relationships, I felt very real feelings of regret and squikiness.
Shadow of the Colossus was one big exercise in acting like a bad person. Every time I killed one of the colossi, I knew that I wasn't doing the right thing.
Which is great! Games can put you in a position where you feel a bit of agency with regards to the good and bad things that happen. It's one thing to see Sonny Corleone die in a hail of gunfire in a movie. It's quite another to do it in a videogame, and then feel awful while you yourself are pulling the trigger.
Also, Yes Man would be a fantastic Strip overlord.
Though I'm with you on the Van Graffs. I worked for them up until the prick brother asked me to help him kill Cass. Cass is a good pal, so instead I just stole everything they owned and sold it all to the Gun Runners.
As for the Van Graffs, my instinct is to just walk into their place, kill their guards, steal their stuff, and erase them from New Vegas altogether. Maybe in a few levels.
Bitches ain't said shit to me 'bout it. Word.
as soon as i saw caesar i wanted to fucking kill him!!!
But I totally feel empathy for many of the characters in New Vegas. The Kings, The Followers, even the Bright Followers... I really do get emotionally involved with their stories and their plights!
(Right now I'm stuck at a stand-still because I don't want to kill Mr. House and I don't want to kill the Brotherhood of Steel, but previous actions have made it pretty much impossible to advance without doing one or the other. It really sucks.)
Regarding the Van Graffs? Total jerks. Took a few hours and killed them all. It took all my stealth boys, many skill magazines and a hell of a lot of stimpaks, but it was totally worth it. All that loot! And, y'know, Cass.
As soon as I started playing Vegas Vegas I was already having quite strong emotional responses to the characters. Doctor Mitchell was incredibly genuine: old, tired, willing to help a young lad down on his luck. Sunny too, that girl was so endearingly sisterly sweet.
Of course the first person I wanted to see face down in mojave dust was Cobb (who was looking for Ringo in Goodsprings). I wanted to kill him that I reloaded from the moment I walked in the salloon just so I could fill the back of his head with lead as soon as he got up to leave. Unfortunately, the good folks of Goodsprings were disappointed with my choice, not enough to banish or try to kill me themselves, but they let me know that they didnt think it decent to kill a man who ain't yet commit a crime, even if his heart is black as tar from sin. I felt right guilty about it and reloaded so that he'd be responsible for his own demise at my hands... soon enough.
I agree completely about the poor supermutants. There was a friendly super mutant that you came across as a random encounter in fallout 3, I think his name was Uncle Joe, he was just roaming the capital wasteland like a leper mourning the loss of his old life as a human and lament his solitude: unable to keep company with his murderous own-kind or with fearful humans. I felt so sorry for him. I even followed him for a while, despite there really being no point in the game, just so this fictional character with pre-written dialogue options wouldn't be alone for a little while. Ridiculous: I know.
The first time through the game I explored a bit too much in the Lucky 38 and found how to kill Mr. House. I felt a bit bad about it, but I kept on going. I met Yes Man and finished the game how he wanted.
Now, I am killing everyone I meet except for Caesar's Legion and their allies. Everyone's pissed at me. I destroyed the Brotherhood's bunker. I killed everyone in Freeside, Camp McCarren, Goodsprings, The Strip, and anyone that happens to be traveling around like merchants and "prospectors." I thought it was hilarious when I changed the trajectory of the Bright Followers' rockets!
I'm not done yet though, still have a lot more killing to do. I'll get bored, quick save, and shoot a named NPC and see how it turns out. I'll feel bad about it and want to reload from before I started shooting, but I just want to see how it turns out at the end. I think it's really neat that I feel regret from doing it.
I have yet to find a moment as epic as watching Megaton getting nuked.
@IndyJeff - I completely Agree. FO3 had an amazing set of music and I too was humming it all the time, even at work. FONV has an okay set of music but.. its a total let down. Johnny Guitar is lame. D:
Choices are definitely less black and white than in Fallout 3. All of the factions have their own good points (however minor) and bad points (however few). The NCR has a history of bloodshed and has all of the ineffectiveness of any government agency, House pulled some shitty moves like filling the vault near the strip full of concrete to seal it off and generally comes off creepy and as if he's hiding something, and so on. It's realistic, though. Very few organizations or people in power are just good or bad. They're all somewhere in between.
I was unable to pull the trigger on Megaton, after talking with the inhabitants it was hard for me to justify blowing up an enitre town of innocents, everyone was so nice to me, and gave me room and board.
It only makes sense that with games like these that we spend so much time on and speaking so indepth with the characters that we start to develop a sense of unity with them, it happens in movies all the time, and that only takes an hour and a half!
Its no wonder when you ask a gamer about their track sheet they always have at least one game they're a die hard for.
@KeriGen: I have no attachment to anything. I should scare you, should anything apocalyptic happen in real life. I am a person who would shoot your kids and steal your food. I'm not denying it.
I know this because I made lots of fictional characters go "ka-boom!" Be afraid. Be very afraid.
When I first visit Yes Man, the thing that flew to my mind is, "how can i take over new vegas for myself"...I think about it so hard and forgot that this is just a game....right....
In the quest "Fly High with me", when in launch control room, suddenly I think about sabotage the rocket.....Then when I passsing Nellis in my first contact with boomer, suddenly I feel really angry and bombard nellis AFB with Fat Man, after it done, I think what've I done ? Sometime when every good thing gone smoothly, there's like an idea to devastate anything always exist...(Helios One, repconn, etc), and it make us that this is real and we really want to see it happens.
Spoilers!
I for one felt no remorse for killing Mr. House. He struck me right off the bat as arrogant and power hungry. He feels nothing for the people of New Vegas, he only wants control. Sure he protected Vegas when the bombs dropped but does that entitle him to rule it and everyone in it forever? He has to go.
NCR is alright, they're just hellbent on expansion like someone above said. I actually sort of sympathized with Caesar when I listened to his story. He started out as a Follower of the Apocalypse and he generally does make better the tribes he absorbs, if you cut out the slavery and sexism. The Brotherhood is just annoying to me in this game.
All in all my favorite group in the game is the Boomers. (: Their biggest fault is the tendency to bomb anyone who comes within range of their home, but I can sympathize with that notion in the wasteland. Boone is my favorite companion, he's so delightfully mysterious and full of angst lol
So yeah, I sympathize with all the people I come across in the game. I love getting to know the characters, I feel the worst for the long dead members of the various vaults. They all seemed to succumb to some strange, Vault-Tec approved experiment that they didn't know about when they signed up for the vaults. Plus it's fun hacking terminals and plundering through holotapes to find out what happened to them all.
It's a perfect example, in my opinion, of the empathy evident in Fallout's writing.
It depicts these ex-Enclave, not as evil hordes that you can just bowl over like so many Nazis in Indiana Jones films, but more as people, who love and care, and regret what they did. Good people who worked for a bad organization.
It made me feel kinda bad about slaughtering them by the dozen in Fallout 3.
But yeah, I've never had this much empathy for characters, or racked with guilt for my decisions in a game series before; aside from choosing to save (which I always do) or 'harvest' Little Sisters in Bioshock. For instance, with the situation surrounding the White Glove Society, I was faced with the choice of saving the annoying little shit of a rancher's son. Now I had encountered the rancher outside the Ultra Luxe who had come to make said shit's dad, Heck Gunderson, pay for what he had done to all the ranchers in the area. Said rancher wanted me to murder previously mentioned shit, but that left me with quite the dilemma: save the son and make it so the White Glove Society doesn't return to cannibalism and in turn allow Heck to go back to ruining people's lives, or kill the son and make Heck pay... and allow the White Gloves to return to cannibalism and continue to murder innocent people (like the fiancée that they kidnapped from their own hotel and murdered). Either way, people end up suffering; it's just a matter of how much, and that's not a good feeling.
For me personally, the Fallout series is the only series that truly makes me question my actions in a game the most, and do what's best for these fictional characters. Because I honestly feel bad when my actions negatively affect the people in this series... unless they're raiders, slavers, alien invaders, and/or with Caesar's Legion; I'll kill them 'till they're dead and feel good doing it too.
I feel like House wants me to be nothing more than his puppet, also I dislike what he's doing with Vegas, and his many "gifts" feel nothing more than a sugarcoated trap.
Seriously? I killed House at the first available opportunity and assumed control of New Vegas alongside Yes Man.
Sympathize with game characters? Fuck that noise! This is MY world, bitch!
In Fallout NV, ED-E's little beeps sounds when you tell him to leave also make me feel kind of bad. But I do love the comments the followers make. I used Boone for most of the game but switching to Arcade in my party really made me enjoy his goofy smart ass banter.
Agreed man, music in New Vegas is nowhere near as good. And i miss Three Dog!! He was the most epic radio man ever :) NV's one sound like sleazy weirdos. Tabitha's radio station was a laugh for a while though. Mind you, I don't much like the setting of New Vegas as much, or the fact that pretty much all schematics from fallout 3 were removed :(
What is with all the brotherhood groupies? The Brotherhood of steel has its head so far up its but they wouldn't be able to see the sunlight even if they didn't live in an underground bunker hiding from the world. A bunch of paranoid misanthropes who don't trust the common man to be smart enough to tie his own shoelaces, hell bent on hoarding all the technology and passably interesting information in the entire wasteland to themselves out of some misguided sense of duty? Do they honestly think they are helping anyone but themselves with their xenophobic seclusionist agenda? You can ask Veronica herself, they have no interest in helping the common man in the wasteland, no interest in sharing any of their potentially life saving technology with the needy. Their only goal in regards to the everyman is to tell them what they can and can't know. Information control? The brotherhood in Fallout 3 is different, as they clearly point out they have gone rouge in that they are trying to help the people of the area so thumbs up to elder Lyons back in D.C. The Outcasts in D.C. are much more akin to the brotherhood in the rest of the wasteland. No interest in the outside world save to take away its plasma rifles to "protect them from themselves". honestly what gives them that right. They act like they are some angelic heroes come to save the stupo dumb dumb's from shooting themselves. Offering all the restrictions of some old world government without any proffering of the basic aid that must by necessity go with any group trying to act as such. Lets not forget the entire brotherhood is a militaristic group with no agenda that goes very far beyond military goals. So yes the brotherhood in D.C., good, the brotherhood in the Mojave and the rest of the wasteland, not so much. Talk about blindly supporting a group without looking at what they are really trying to accomplish.
I feel the same way about the music. The only song that I find catchy is Johnny Guitar and listening to Mr. New Vegas is like listening to Paul Harvey.
At this point I have NO idea who I am going to side with in the end. I just want everybody (not Cesar or the Fiends) to be happy.