For fuck's sake, Infinitron, just create a 'try-hard pro-legion millennial faggot' subforum and put all these fucking threads in it!
I replayed New Vegas last year and chose what I think is the most satisfying ending, NCR + Boomers, Khans, Enclave and BoS with a revitalized Hanlon. I also enjoyed similar independent (+ minor factions) ending year ago; I've never tried the House ending (won't sell out the Brotherhood). I really enjoyed the character writing in New Vegas; I just wish they could have cut some of the stupid shit out of the setting (Caesar's Legion, the Vegas families being recently-repurposed raiders, ghouls with pre-war knowledge that apparently no one will listen to). 10 years on, I'd say the game holds up, but some of the same issues still bother me. Without rehashing all the same points from this thread and it's 134325463 predecessors, the three biggest cognitive dissonance issues I saw in NV are:
1) All these Shakespeare-in-the-park larpers cluttering up my post-apocolyptic game. It's difficult to keep your western post-apoc vibes when legioniggers dressed like this (
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Legion_centurion_armor) are literally chucking spears at you. The whole thing is so stupid looking that I can't understand why Sawyer was able to sell the others on it; it reminds me strongly of the Black Panther movie, all these spear-chuckers, but I'm supposed to take it seriously because they're
vibranium spears. I suppose in the abstract it isn't much dumber than things like rippers and power fists and whatnot, but that stuff never bothered me the same way (I played 2nd edition warhammer 40K around the same time I first played Fallout). This is more like some of the new 40K art where you have space marines in primitive-looking armor, wielding power swords that just look like swords and I can't tell if this is supposed to be fantasy or science fiction.
2) The NCR/Legion/BoS needs you! (to solve all of our problems). It may be unfair to pick on NV for this since so many games have this problem, but I really felt like it was shoved in my face this time. There's this legion-occupied town named Nelson which has two groups of NCR troops camped outside of it (one of rangers, one of draftees), wishing they could reoccupy it. But of course, they sit on their hands until you come along. If you add up all the NCR troops, I think they outnumber the legion garrison 2:1 and they all have decent guns, where as half of Caesar's legioniggers are equipped with nothing but machetes and radroach meat (to be fair, one is a magical
unique machete) and their meager numbers are bolstered by stray dogs. A low-level player with a varmint rifle can clear the town on his own, but this is still some insurmountable problem for a whole camp of armed NPCs.
3) Too many cooks spoil the soup. I haven't dug through the wiki to figure out who wrote every quest in NV, but I can't reconcile the different parts of the NCR ending. The player is able to convince the BoS, Enclave (remnants) and Khans to bury the hatchet and support the NCR despite the recent bloodshed between them (ok perhaps he's really convincing) but cannot convince the NCR and House to work together despite the fact that they've been working together for years (???). It gets even dumber, an independent-minded player can force the NCR and Legion out of New Vegas with his army of stolen Securitrons, but a pro-Legion or pro-NCR player has no way of using these super-robots to support his chosen faction. He can't even tell his allies about them.