Perfectly stated I could leave my love of New Vegas there, at a - TopicsExpress

Perfectly stated I could leave my love of New Vegas there, at a sort of metaphor for the time of Manifest Destiny, but that’s still not just it. See, this is a game written (in part, with much more input on the DLC) by Chris Avellone. You might know the name from KOTOR 2, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, games that were all deconstructions of their genres and universes. New Vegas is no exception, as it takes that retelling of the past and turns it into a commentary on why we are obsessed with the past and revisionism. Obsessed with the old world, dead and gone and since replaced. And why there’s kind of a problem with the way in which Fallout 3 used that old world sheen. And it does that, bizarrely, in a way that really makes New Vegas the sterling game of the franchise’s modern era to me, through its protagonist and its DLC. Every fiber, every location, every character in the four DLCs of New Vegas feed a protracted treatise on why it is we obsess with the past, why we fight so many wars in the past’s name. Dead Money’s Sierra Madre Casino is like New Vegas but the rotten interior has been made its exterior, and the empty ghosts of the casinos in the Mojave are really just more honest about their true nature there among the rust. Honest Hearts is a complicated tale of moral quandaries, putting you in the position of dealing with the white savior complex of the Manifest Destiny era and deciding if dealing with the past means uneasy peace or morally questionable war. Old World Blues is a hilarious satire of 50s science fiction that is about, in and of itself, our love of 50s science fiction, and what it means when we glorify an era for what we remember it as. And Lonesome Road? Lonesome Road might be one of my favorite game stories of all time. Taking a page from the Torment book, Lonesome Road is a commentary on the some-assembly-required nature of characters in RPGs, an entirely inward journey into the past you didn’t even know you had. The past turns into a horrible, twisted visual metaphor for the entirety of the Fallout universe, with the strange, god-like Ulysses as the speaker and the previously blank Courier as the entirety of mankind being judged. A long time ago, the Courier detonated The Divide and turned into the torched, scarred world of Lonesome Road. But it seems as though the Courier did not remember it; for the Courier, it was just another package to deliver to yet another town. The Courier was well on his way back home before his package ignited the missile silos and tore a fledgling civilization to pieces, and the Courier was none the wiser. But someone was – another courier, the man Ulysses, saw this happen. Saw you blow up a city and not even care. That can change a man. It made him obsessed with the nature of history, and the past. So obsessed that he lured you all the way out here to become a part of a grand, dangerous metaphor. The Lonesome Road you walk in the DLC is the walk of an ignorant man into his own past that he ignored for the sake of looking into the future, and in a place so steeped in American flags, its hard not to see the point. The Courier is America, and Ulysses is America’s guide through the past that it chose to forget on the way to a future, and a reminder of those we stomped on to get there. And the missiles he threatens to launch? The punch line to the bad joke that is America’s gleeful ignorance of the past…and, by proxy, the nature of Fallout 3 not bothering with the tone of its own series. At the end of Lonesome Road, the final narration adds a caveat to the famous tagline of the Fallout series; “War. War never changes. But men do, through the roads they walk.” It effectively taunts the gleeful wallowing the previous Fallout games have taken. New Vegas, with its DLC and its brave choice of historical backdrop, acts as a deconstruction of both America and the Fallout series’ last installment. New Vegas dares to dig into the darkness of America’s past and the ways we ignore the sketchier parts of our history. In a world where the nuke is king, Fallout 3 was about the flash and the glory; New Vegas is a stern reminder of the radiation, death, and destruction that linger in our historical past, and in our love for Fallout 3. But it also gives you a chance to change it. Why do you think the option exists to take Vegas for yourself at the end of the game? It is a chance to impart the lessons of the Lonesome Road, of Big Mountain, of Zion, and of the Sierra Madre. It is a dare to the player to recognize these sins, and ask, in the end, “Can you do any better? Can you fix this? Not just in a historical way, but in gaming as an art form as well?” It is bold, ambitious, and brave, and I will forever love it for that.