the writing for the legion was shit
"we are what the wasteland needs and we are all evil and slavers and self-righteous and shit"
it would have been easy to make them a survivalist group with some "good" inclinations, or some kind of anarchists who though NCR's mindset of "big government" was what brought for the apocalypse or some shit that made sense, the cookie cutter "evil guys" really cheapened the experience for me...
Either way, he explains it better than myself.
he's the usual "i know better than anyone else" dictator who rationalizes why he wants to build a "glorious empire"
Man, I keep coming back to this thread and these two posts keep pissing me off, because it's simply not true, and the fact that the game had so much cut from the legion is the reason you'd think so, which only highlights the main issue I have with the game, which is
exactly that.
The fact of the matter is that the Legion
isn't just "we are all evil and slavers and shit", but the slaughter of Nipton and the overall conflict in the Mojave easily gives that impression, whereas all the bits of piece of the Legion and Caesar himself suggests otherwise, which could've been reinforced by actually having a legion region to the east of the dam as originally intended. They keep slaves, yes, but slaves are also protected by the law and generally have it better than they had beforehand. Yes, the Legion conquers and enslaves tribes and raiders, but they also incorporate those into their ranks and their supply lines.
Hell, the Mojave and the NCR is a shit-pile of factions, slavers, raiders, and political bickering, while
supposedly, the legion lands are well-ordered, structured, and safe - there are no powder gangers, no rape gangs, no raiders. But it's also highly militarized, stratified, and generally poor. While you may argue that Caesar is "the usual" "i know better than anyone else" dictator, and hell, you might even be under the delusion that dictatorships or monarchies are somehow
inherently evil, the fact is that it's completely absurd, because contrary to the vast majority of "dictatorial" bad-guys in fiction, Caesar isn't actually kick-the-puppy evil, and has actually created his dictatorship with forethought and a plan - a plan that even does not necessitate himself at the head of it, since his ideal is obviously to create a synthesis. "The Legion" as it
is not his ideal, it is merely a means to an end in order to create a completely different, functional society, because he
realizes that his legion as it is cannot survive or grow in it's current form.
And before anyone goes
"hurr durr, Lanius was retarded, Caesar didn't even plan for his own progression", with the aforementioned in mind, you have to be
retarded if you think that Lanius was the intended successor of Caesar. Lanius was the blunt object that guaranteed Caesar's reign, and his position as second ensured both Lanius loyalty as well as the fear of potential enemies, much like how both the political left and the political right of our contemporary America has joked that Trump cannot be killed, because that would make Mike "Electric Fence" Pence president. While far from as serious, again, someone have to be
stupid to think that that's a mistake.
The fact that we can piece these things together based on scraps (and being informed by Caesar, who we have no specific reason to trust at that time) infuriates me, because from the perspective of the player character, because we don't get to interact with the Legion and it's lands in the way we interact with the NCR and the de facto NCR-ified part of the Mojave, it's extremely hard to not consider the Legion a band of murderers, and if that's your first initial reaction (which it pretty much is forced to be, due to Nipton), it pretty much excludes any future reasonable interaction with the Legion unless you're already playing an asshole.
Had the east of the Colorado river not been cut and Nipton not been the first impression of the Legion (and maybe placed, say, North of the dam, effectively much later in the game), the nature of the Legion would've been a lot clearer. The writing is fine. The storytelling, the narrative in which how this is conveyed to the player, in a large part due to cut content and cut areas, is suffering, and I think this is largely due to what was described earlier in the thread, that FONV is sadly a bloodied stump of ideas originally explored and considered as a part of Van Buren.
Edit: Fucked up East/West.
