Fallout: New Vegas is an incredible game, and its factions are its best part. The New California Republic (NCR), Caesar’s Legion, and the Securitrons of Mr House are omnipresent in the Mojave, and there’s barely an NPC in the game that doesn’t shine light on some new aspect of each one.
So many of New Vegas’ interactions add texture to its factions because, well, that was the whole point. In a recent appearance on The Examined Game podcast, New Vegas director Josh Sawyer said that one of his and his team’s key goals for the game was “to make sure that the people in the factions felt like they were humans that were their own people.
“When a faction feels monolithic,” Sawyer continued, “Where every member of the faction is just like, ‘I’m this guy, I believe in this thing, and this is the thing that everyone believes in.’ One, nobody’s like that, and two, it paints too simple of a picture for the player and their decision making.”
Sawyer summons the NCR as a particular example of this design philosophy in action. “I think one of the things that people really wrestled with, with something like NCR, is that NCR is composed of a lot of different people, and some of those people are extremely virtuous and well-meaning, and some are well-meaning but bad-doing, and some are actually malicious and petty and they suck. That’s a democracy, right? That’s being in a republic.”
I have to agree that this kind of texturing with the game’s characters made New Vegas one of my favourite games of all time. My own personal favourite example? Canyon Runner, a Caesar’s Legion slavedriver who is not, all told, anything more than a minor character. He encompasses a lot, though: for all his bragging about the Legion and his fidelity to it, he constantly, subconsciously slips up in ways that reveal he has not completely shed his previous tribal identity. Caesar’s entire pitch—that he will remake the world from scratch by remoulding its inhabitants’ identities into something singular and homogenous—is revealed as a total lie, all through some dialogue with a side-character.
“You have to wrestle with the fact that it contains multitudes,” said Sawyer. “And then, Caesar’s Legion, it’s like, ‘Well, there is an ideology here. And there is Caesar himself, who has a certain intellect that makes a certain amount of sense from a certain perspective, sort of. But then you have his rank and file, who are, for the most part, really repulsive and abhorrent in their beliefs and their outlook.
“I like it when factions and people are complicated and the player, over time, they have to keep thinking about—not just the people they’re talking to, but also their place in it, because they’re a participant, right? I think when role playing games are at their best, you feel like you are really at the center of these decisions and you can’t control everything, but you can control a lot.”
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