Interview Massive Wasteland 2 Audio Interview with Brian Fargo and Nathan Long at Through the Aftermath

[crawlkill]

I wouldn't, because you can still wipe 'em all out, and I in fact did this. Same result, slightly different method.

The game doesn't actually notice you've wiped them all out if you do it on your own without the NCR coming along, if I remember. You have to follow the narrowly-scripted no-PG-hate path to get the NCR to register that they're gone.

Video games aren't real life, basically. It would be awesome if there could somehow be the time and resources to allow infinite action in an imaginary space, but the story being told is the story being told. It's not a "bad story" because it's not telling some entirely other story, and it makes no sense to criticize it on those terms. If you want 360 degree narrative articulation, get on inventing an artificially intelligent dialogue generation engine, because that's what it's gonna take. In this pre-Singularity era, though, there are some conceits you have to accept: Your PC already has a place in the world when you arrive from the Outer Dark to mind control him. He's already decided he's working with the Rangers (or whoever it may be). We just don't have the sentient machine life we'd need to let you have played A Mole From the Very Beginning or A Guy Who Suffers a Complete Nervous Break and have those choices be as meaningfully supported as the story intended to be told.

now if what you're REALLY complaining about is the tendency to be a blue blue Paragorn last king of the Andals virtuous superhero awesome negotiator mediation man in vidya games I think you're forgetting how cynical PCs in 90s cRPGs often were even when they were going around doing relatively good works

 

[Roguey]

The game doesn't actually notice you've wiped them all out if you do it on your own without the NCR coming along, if I remember. You have to follow the narrowly-scripted no-PG-hate path to get the NCR to register that they're gone.

Nope, the ending slide just checks to see if Eddie is dead. My game acknowledged it just fine.

I imagine the reason you couldn't have the NCR help you out is because it would be what Josh Sawyer would refer to as a "complex Fabergé egg" of scripting. Also the reason why Honest Hearts is full of straightforward fetch and fed-ex quests. But you can still kill every storyline essential character and explore the map to its fullest.