grotsnik
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2010
- Messages
- 1,671
Cheers, 'veryone, and Happy New Year! Here follows the penultimate hungover update.
Moving up along a slanted office building infested with Tunnelers, the Courier finally emerges out onto a rooftop, only to find-
Oh, good. You again.
Out of Ulysses' five conversations with us, this is, let it be noted, one of two that doesn't open with a sentence about the fucking NCR.
Before you lies the edge of the Divide. Ahead lies your work, the history you burned into the earth. What you brought to the people here.
I had nothing to do with this.
You delivered a package. Had markings that match those in the Divide. Not all...but enough. Military markings, from some place the Bear had savaged in the West. Maybe seeing those markings reminded you of home...made you carry it.
It was a device, a detonator. One I'd never seen before...or heard before. You carried that thing to the Divide. I know because I watched you do it, followed you as you walked the road. You brought it here, to the community you built. And you are responsible for what happened after - when the device started to speak.
When it did, the Divide answered back. Those missiles you've seen, buried in their silos. They exploded in the ground, cracked the landscape. Sand, ash, the dead...the Divide skies became a graveyard.
When Metaphors Go Wrong: the skies became a graveyard.
Should've died there...the machines here saved me. I was the only survivor, or thought I was. Your package, the message inside, awoke medical machines...close to the one that shadows you...began to build themselves, then others. They only take what parts they can find in the Divide, never roam beyond it - can't even leave the silos without a human to shadow, like hounds. Maybe they saw the flag on my jacket, thought I was of America. If so, history saved me. A sign.
I'm not responsible for this: there's no way I could have known.
If you had been there when it happened. If you had seen the Divide break, you would know it.
Ulysses here uses the fallacy of appealing to emotion and sensational experience. He's also fond of indicating guilt by association. Asshat wouldn't last five minutes in a school debating club.
You carry death wherever you go - if the Mojave doesn't know it yet, it will. What happened here can happen again. You've already proved it, what you did in Ashton. The silo there.
I'm a big fan of the practice of calling the player out on their actions. But this (in case you've forgotten, Ashton is where we set off a nuke in the last update) is forcing the player to do something highly contrived and completely unnecessary in order to complete the challenge they've been set and then calling them out on it, which is just a cheat. It worked (arguably) in shit like Shadow of the Colossus because the player's monster-murdering acts were originally put to them as a heroic quest that they wanted to complete. Here we wanted to get through a door, the game made us press a button, and something ridiculous happened. It's not butterflies flapping their wings to create hurricanes because nothing about the consequences to our actions felt natural.
I didn't intend to set that missile off.
Didn't stop you, though. Like carrying the chip to New Vegas, Old World death in your hand. Pieces of the Old World just need someone careless enough to take them where they need to go, to do their killing.
Like the crooked postman who steams open your Christmas card from Auntie Ethel and takes the twenty quid for himself, Ulysses firmly believes that not to open the package you're supposed to be delivering and check out what's inside for yourself is 'carelessness'. It makes sense as a metaphor for the dangers of NCR et al., using historic technology and symbolism without ever really understanding it, but it makes fuck all sense as relates to the Courier's 'guilt'.
You could have stayed in the Mojave. But you chose to come, couldn't let it be - not in you to let go. Came for no other reason than you were curious, restless, always have been. Had to know the why of it - now I'll show you.
I think these comments about compulsive restlessness are a better reflection on the nature of the open-world player character, but they're still fucking detached from the subject of player responsibility.
So you're angry because I accidentally brought an explosive to the Divide?
Accident? Ignorance is a choice - the Chip, a choice. As for anger, it is what I carry for the dead, and all that come here.
The last line's a cracker. But let's try to pin down his elusive motivations.
The community that was once here, and the package you brought, both had markings of the Divide. Markings of America. Markings like the flag on my back. An Old World symbol. Strong, to survive here - its people, strong. Outlast the Bear, the Bull. Promise of something better. Caesar was right to want it dead. NCR was right to rake their claws into it.
Seeing it changed me, just like Hoover Dam changed Caesar and the NCR. Seeing it end...changed me too.
You gave life to this place. I followed your road here, saw the Divide. You led me here, so that I could see. Then you brought it to an end.
And that's why you want me dead.
My history isn't about revenge, or hate. It's about the message you carried - the one in your package, whether you knew it or not. The message that one can kill a nation. Can kill a symbol. And all who gather beneath its flag. I don't blame you for the Divide. I blame you for what you made me see. Now you will see what you brought to the Mojave, and that will be my message to you.
There is no future in the Bear or the Bull. Killing one will end both. And you made me see how one could do it. Your ignorance, carelessness - can be used with a purpose. I'll start with the West - let that burn. Then if the East falters after, I'll bring the Divide there as well. Burn away the flags. Begin again.
There's a lot in there to chew on, so the Courier mulls it over as he descends into the shattered land.
Okay; so Ulysses hates me because unwittingly I alerted him to the fact that one man can make a nation, or break it, on the simple condition that he happens to be handed the triggering mechanism to nuclear missiles. So it's very much like spending your life trying to kill the butterfly that caused the hurricane.
Or maybe he hates me because he was already obsessed with me; he followed my road, watched me build a civilisation that had the makings of greatness, and then was disillusioned when I accidentally destroyed it. But if this civilisation was so great, and sought after by NCR and the Legion, then why has nobody mentioned it up till now, and why wouldn't he understand that I was a pawn and explain the matter to me, maybe enlist my help in taking down whoever in the NCR was responsible?
Fuck, why hasn't he spent his life obsessively tracking them down instead of me, since they were consciously responsible and therefore the true culprit? Didn't he watch Minority Report?
Okay, so maybe the civilisation itself wasn't important, it was the symbol of America, risen again, that made Ulysses hope that our country could be reborn, since he's into symbols and history. He hates me because he loved the idea of a new, powerful civilisation, based on an Old World symbol. ...wait, like NCR. Why did he hate NCR in the first place again? Because they're over-stretching themselves? Because they use a pre-war flag without understanding its significance, much like the people at the Divide he cared so much about?
He hates me because he believes I was 'ignorant' or 'careless' in doing my job as a Courier, which as already stated doesn't make sense. Ignorance is only a choice when it's a question of educational ignorance, not a lack of available information. He thinks I 'carry death' wherever I go, which is an abstract nonsense particularly as I apparently spent a long time carrying life to the Divide.
He views me as a symbol of the NCR, which he hates and wants to destroy. Which is fine, but suddenly setting up the Courier's backstory in which he used to be a known and thoroughly-travelled agent of one of the game's main factions completely bollockses up all interactions in New Vegas vanilla, since nobody in NCR or elsewhere reacts towards the Courier as a reliable old friend of that republic. ...so why the hell is he obsessed with me, other than that it would be cool, and flattering to have it so?
It's not all illogical, exactly, but it's muddled as hell, especially as expressed in Ulysses' dialogue, and I think it comes back to the fact that Ulysses' relatively simple plan (blow up NCR and the Legion and hopefully better civilisations will rise in their place) is seriously messed around by the requirement to involve the player's past intimately in it.
Once again, the game requires us to set off a nuclear warhead, mysteriously still unexploded after the two successive nuclear explosions that we now know to have taken place here, in order to proceed.
Doing so causes a building to collapse, blocking the way.
DEAR GOD ULYSSES WAS RIGHT DOING WHAT THE GAME FORCES ME TO DO CAN HAVE CONSEQUENCES WHAT KIND OF THOUGHTLESS MONSTER AM I?
As we scout around for another way through, it's time for another ED-E memory glitch, this one apparently from somewhere on his road to 'Navarro'. A burst of cheerful music - then gunshots.
Remember that NV trailer which opened with an Eyebot jittering merrily along a road to the sound of music, before it got shot? You're listening to it - it wasn't just a random teaser, it was part of ED-E's story. Nice touch.
(Beeping)
Looks like the only path is (sigh) an underground area, charmingly named 'Cave of the Abaddon', which is curiously enough part of the main level and not a separate one. Bet there won't be any TUNNELERS down here, eh?
Whaddaya know, there are - including a particularly vicious Tunneler Queen. Fortunately enough, in the screenshot below she's actually used her melee attack to accidentally knock us up onto a too-high-to-climb piece of rubble, so we exploit that for all its worth and cheerily shoot them all without having to actually get hit. It's, er, a perfectly valid use of strategy. Yes, strategy.
We emerge out into another office building, where - oh, for fuck's sake.
If you hadn't picked up on it already, ED-E's adventurous spirit has been influenced by the old videos of the heroic RALPHIE the Robot he used to watch. There are twenty identical posters of RALPHIE scattered about the DLC, and we're challenged to press 'E' on them all!
Another slightly less monotonous time-padder challenge involves tracking down ten Old World diary entries in the Divide. I quite liked this snarky one from the perspective of a soon-to-be-horribly-experimented-on peaceful protestor:
Back out into the Divide. Uh-oh, this must mean-
Knew you'd survive...but no need to go any further. You've brought me what I need - that machine with you, sealed in the Hopeville silo. Needed someone to unlock it for me, bring it home. Now the signal's strong enough, no need for you to carry it any more. I can call your machine to me.
What? ED-E?
Finally. You two fuck off together and maybe I can have a little peace.
You gave it a name. What was it to you? Companion, slave, weapon? All of that nothing, compared to its primary function. It's a messenger. Like us...and it shares our history. If you feel its loss, remember, you could have turned away at any time. Gone back home, and none of this would have happened. But you had to make one last delivery, and that's why I knew you'd come, Courier. Couldn't stay away, it's who you are.
All the machines here, made of wreckage from the Divide...and all that was brought here. Inside its frame, it carries the message you brought here - and it'll do whatever it was programmed to do, whatever it can to get home. The giants here will listen to it. I'll bring the Divide to your home, your nation. Let its flag burn, just like you let the Divide burn. Big Mountain access code...Ulysses. Command override...
And ED-E takes off on command, a loss we feel most painfully due to the fact that all the guns and armour we'd been keeping in his inventory are now transferred to us.
More confusingly, it now seems that Ulysses wasn't as much interested in the Courier as he was in getting his hands on an Eyebot, any Eyebot, and it turns out that luring us to the Divide for the sake of this long masquerade was much easier than just repairing the one he would have seen in Primm or letting this one out of its container in the silo at the start of the DLC, an act which required no skill check. Instead he hung around there for a while painting 'Courier You Can Go Home' on all the walls, then left. He also doesn't seem to mind that he's made an enemy of us, who wished him no harm, and left us to our own devices a short distance from his unlocked front door.
Naturally, since we now know that Ulysses is minutes away from destroying our home, this final Divide area has a number of sections to explore, including a cave containing a gigantic Deathclaw named 'Rawr':
Nuclear warheads are now drilling through cavern faces, I see.
The clifftops ahead prominently display the red flashing lights we've seen all through the adventure, so on my first playthrough I assumed I'd have to make my way up the canyon cliffs in a sort of Where Eagles Dare attack on Ulysses' fortress, but there's actually a handy door visible and easily accessible at the very bottom. Boo.
We re-recruit ED-E, who's presumably served his purpose in setting up the nuclear missiles for launch.
And having gunned down the one robot guarding Ulysses' secret base, we finally come face-to-face with the man himself.
Wait, those are...four Eyebots! You had them all along? But...why did you need ED-E if...I don't...even...
I am going to murder you.
The options for killing Ulysses here occur from the start - one particularly appropriate one is to tell him he's 'wasted enough of my time'. Anyway let's try talking to him instead. (Don't worry, he can still get what's coming to him later on.)
What happened at the Divide, what I did, it was an accident. This is madness.
No, now there is purpose. I believe you when you said you were...careless. The Divide...the Chip...the machine you brought here...many messages can be taken from that, intended or not. What I do now is an act of conviction.
o_O
Blame you? No. Learned from you. Both the weapon to kill a nation, and the strength to do it.
But you just said you know he never meant to do it, so how can the Courier be 'strong'? You're saying you admire the Courier because he taught you, an obsessive student of history and pre-war America, the valuable lesson that nuclear bombs can blow up countries?
You showed me a road, a way to carry my message. You've already answered for what you've done. Now the flag you follow will answer for it.
So, what, you intend to bomb the Mojave?
No, not the Mojave. The West, all that's been built since America died. Same symbols as before the war, now a flag carried by a tribe of children. You walked the West, didn't stay. You know the reason, the Bear grows without structure, follows a symbol without knowing its history. And knowing that you believe in the Bear's sickness and have given it strength...then that gives more reason to lay waste to your homeland.
Legion-oriented players, it should be noted, do have lots of dialogue options throughout the DLC where they point out that they're actually followers of the East now, but I don't think it actually makes Ulysses shut up about the NCR - he'll just complain about how they're both diseased.
After this, only one flag will remain over the Mojave. Let it fly, or destroy itself.
You can't destroy the West, even with all of the bombs here.
No need to destroy the Bear, just cut its throat. You taught me that at the Divide - only need to cut off the supply line, the road, to watch something greater die. I'll turn the Long 15 into miles of fire, cut off the Mojave. NCR will fall back, lose Hoover Dam, and leave their throats exposed to the Legion.
Even if you have no faith in the NCR, I do. My actions have proven it.
If you speak for the two-headed Bear, I'll hear your words. Even if I'll be the only one to hear them. If you believe it should not die this day...then tell me why.
Damn, the Courier's going to have to come up with some compelling reasoning to convince Ulysses...
(Speech) One can build a community, make it stronger. You saw it at the Divide, blamed me for it.
(Succeeded) History has proven this. Our history.
Wait, that's IT?
And you think that you have this strength? For all of the NCR? The West is not the Divide and nothing you can do can prevent the missile's launch. Convincing me - changes nothing.
Actually, preventing the missile's launch is a simple case of turning it off at the missile controls behind us, but we'll get to that.
It may be that...as much destruction has been written in the earth here, you may build something else, as you built the Divide. You have spoken truly; there is a shadow of a nation behind you, the hope of a people. Yet it may not matter. The Divide stands against us.
So now it's 'us'; he's on our side. That's all it took. (If we'd found all his holotapes, we could also have convinced him that his 'lessons' from history were all wrong, which is a better way through the conversation). All we had to do was say, 'Hey, Ulysses, did you ever think that a flawed society could be made better? And as the ignorant, careless idiot who carries death with him wherever he goes, surely you'll admit I'm the right man for the job.' And then he won't care if we decide to nuke it all afterwards all the same. Bah.
Our enemies gather outside...shadows of the Bear and Bull...they will have found their way in, just as you did. It was always my intention, if I could not kill you, that the Marked Man would flood this place, cut off your escape. If we cannot prevent what comes, then let us make our stand here. Two Couriers, together, at the Divide.
Quite a long battle ensues, with lots of Marked Men, energy weapons, explosions, and a general lack of understanding on my part about who's shooting who.
And then, suddenly, it's over. Ulysses has vanished, as quickly as he came...and it's just us, and the missile controls.
So I can set the nukes off, target NCR and the Legion, set the gameworld back a few years and wreck their expansionist plans, help MCA feel like he's taking Fallout a little bit back towards the harsh survivalist Mad Max 2 experience...
But on the other hand...
Is he right to want to do this? I mean, sure, New Vegas felt more 'civilised', more advanced and some distance from a truly survivalist post-apocalyptic setting. But it's the sign of some of the care put into the gameworld that it has developed as the series has gone on, surely, that it hasn't remained in stasis...well, apart from Fallout 3, as it happens . Can you actually maintain that simple, 'crossing the wasteland with two bullets while things try to eat you' tone in a series like this, when you're adding in new factions and locations all the time, new weight and detail to the lore that'll need to be referenced in future (and you've got the facilities for mass-production of robots and super-technology to begin with. Seriously, if anything, I'd nuke a few of those.)? One of the series' big themes and concerns is about rebuilding, so how can the effects of that rebuilding be ignored in favour of a return to the old wasteland days, just because MCA thinks it's cooler?
Codex, it's your choice. To nuke, or not to nuke?
Moving up along a slanted office building infested with Tunnelers, the Courier finally emerges out onto a rooftop, only to find-
Oh, good. You again.
Out of Ulysses' five conversations with us, this is, let it be noted, one of two that doesn't open with a sentence about the fucking NCR.
When Metaphors Go Wrong: the skies became a graveyard.
Ulysses here uses the fallacy of appealing to emotion and sensational experience. He's also fond of indicating guilt by association. Asshat wouldn't last five minutes in a school debating club.
I'm a big fan of the practice of calling the player out on their actions. But this (in case you've forgotten, Ashton is where we set off a nuke in the last update) is forcing the player to do something highly contrived and completely unnecessary in order to complete the challenge they've been set and then calling them out on it, which is just a cheat. It worked (arguably) in shit like Shadow of the Colossus because the player's monster-murdering acts were originally put to them as a heroic quest that they wanted to complete. Here we wanted to get through a door, the game made us press a button, and something ridiculous happened. It's not butterflies flapping their wings to create hurricanes because nothing about the consequences to our actions felt natural.
Like the crooked postman who steams open your Christmas card from Auntie Ethel and takes the twenty quid for himself, Ulysses firmly believes that not to open the package you're supposed to be delivering and check out what's inside for yourself is 'carelessness'. It makes sense as a metaphor for the dangers of NCR et al., using historic technology and symbolism without ever really understanding it, but it makes fuck all sense as relates to the Courier's 'guilt'.
I think these comments about compulsive restlessness are a better reflection on the nature of the open-world player character, but they're still fucking detached from the subject of player responsibility.
The last line's a cracker. But let's try to pin down his elusive motivations.
There's a lot in there to chew on, so the Courier mulls it over as he descends into the shattered land.
It's not all illogical, exactly, but it's muddled as hell, especially as expressed in Ulysses' dialogue, and I think it comes back to the fact that Ulysses' relatively simple plan (blow up NCR and the Legion and hopefully better civilisations will rise in their place) is seriously messed around by the requirement to involve the player's past intimately in it.
Once again, the game requires us to set off a nuclear warhead, mysteriously still unexploded after the two successive nuclear explosions that we now know to have taken place here, in order to proceed.
Doing so causes a building to collapse, blocking the way.
As we scout around for another way through, it's time for another ED-E memory glitch, this one apparently from somewhere on his road to 'Navarro'. A burst of cheerful music - then gunshots.
Remember that NV trailer which opened with an Eyebot jittering merrily along a road to the sound of music, before it got shot? You're listening to it - it wasn't just a random teaser, it was part of ED-E's story. Nice touch.
Looks like the only path is (sigh) an underground area, charmingly named 'Cave of the Abaddon', which is curiously enough part of the main level and not a separate one. Bet there won't be any TUNNELERS down here, eh?
Whaddaya know, there are - including a particularly vicious Tunneler Queen. Fortunately enough, in the screenshot below she's actually used her melee attack to accidentally knock us up onto a too-high-to-climb piece of rubble, so we exploit that for all its worth and cheerily shoot them all without having to actually get hit. It's, er, a perfectly valid use of strategy. Yes, strategy.
We emerge out into another office building, where - oh, for fuck's sake.
If you hadn't picked up on it already, ED-E's adventurous spirit has been influenced by the old videos of the heroic RALPHIE the Robot he used to watch. There are twenty identical posters of RALPHIE scattered about the DLC, and we're challenged to press 'E' on them all!
Another slightly less monotonous time-padder challenge involves tracking down ten Old World diary entries in the Divide. I quite liked this snarky one from the perspective of a soon-to-be-horribly-experimented-on peaceful protestor:
Back out into the Divide. Uh-oh, this must mean-
Finally. You two fuck off together and maybe I can have a little peace.
And ED-E takes off on command, a loss we feel most painfully due to the fact that all the guns and armour we'd been keeping in his inventory are now transferred to us.
More confusingly, it now seems that Ulysses wasn't as much interested in the Courier as he was in getting his hands on an Eyebot, any Eyebot, and it turns out that luring us to the Divide for the sake of this long masquerade was much easier than just repairing the one he would have seen in Primm or letting this one out of its container in the silo at the start of the DLC, an act which required no skill check. Instead he hung around there for a while painting 'Courier You Can Go Home' on all the walls, then left. He also doesn't seem to mind that he's made an enemy of us, who wished him no harm, and left us to our own devices a short distance from his unlocked front door.
Naturally, since we now know that Ulysses is minutes away from destroying our home, this final Divide area has a number of sections to explore, including a cave containing a gigantic Deathclaw named 'Rawr':
Nuclear warheads are now drilling through cavern faces, I see.
The clifftops ahead prominently display the red flashing lights we've seen all through the adventure, so on my first playthrough I assumed I'd have to make my way up the canyon cliffs in a sort of Where Eagles Dare attack on Ulysses' fortress, but there's actually a handy door visible and easily accessible at the very bottom. Boo.
We re-recruit ED-E, who's presumably served his purpose in setting up the nuclear missiles for launch.
And having gunned down the one robot guarding Ulysses' secret base, we finally come face-to-face with the man himself.
The options for killing Ulysses here occur from the start - one particularly appropriate one is to tell him he's 'wasted enough of my time'. Anyway let's try talking to him instead. (Don't worry, he can still get what's coming to him later on.)
But you just said you know he never meant to do it, so how can the Courier be 'strong'? You're saying you admire the Courier because he taught you, an obsessive student of history and pre-war America, the valuable lesson that nuclear bombs can blow up countries?
Legion-oriented players, it should be noted, do have lots of dialogue options throughout the DLC where they point out that they're actually followers of the East now, but I don't think it actually makes Ulysses shut up about the NCR - he'll just complain about how they're both diseased.
Damn, the Courier's going to have to come up with some compelling reasoning to convince Ulysses...
Wait, that's IT?
Actually, preventing the missile's launch is a simple case of turning it off at the missile controls behind us, but we'll get to that.
So now it's 'us'; he's on our side. That's all it took. (If we'd found all his holotapes, we could also have convinced him that his 'lessons' from history were all wrong, which is a better way through the conversation). All we had to do was say, 'Hey, Ulysses, did you ever think that a flawed society could be made better? And as the ignorant, careless idiot who carries death with him wherever he goes, surely you'll admit I'm the right man for the job.' And then he won't care if we decide to nuke it all afterwards all the same. Bah.
Quite a long battle ensues, with lots of Marked Men, energy weapons, explosions, and a general lack of understanding on my part about who's shooting who.
And then, suddenly, it's over. Ulysses has vanished, as quickly as he came...and it's just us, and the missile controls.