But at the end of the day, you still have to get your hands dirty in this game.

One good example is: BoS or Mr. House. Will you kill a great amount of people but who might become a threat or will you kill Mr. House who is a cold-blooded dictator but who saved your life?

The Developers did this for a simple reason: to make you think. If they give you a good or bad option or a perfect ending, then you don't need to think about it: you just go for the best ending.

By making it a grim choice, you need to think it through... and severity means you think about it more seriously and you will try to think of the best possible ending for yourself. By itself, this is a good intellectual exercise and it's interesting and often enlightening to see what other players decided and what made them do so. Gameplay-wise, it makes all choices acceptable: if you have a good ending which you achieve by just doing good things, then there is only one real option for every situation.

This also really isn't pessimism. To me, stories with pure happy ends feel too much like something written by people who hate the real world and want to live in a simpler fictional world... or stories written by people who think the world is split between right and wrong. I dislike both of those.

I'd call it Cynicism instead, tbh.

That it's not perfect does not mean that it's not safer.

We didn't live with the constant knowledge that, no matter where we are, there is always the chance that we will be the victim of random violence, sometimes leading to our death or the death of someone we care about. That's not just walking down the street, but in a mall, in our schools, in any random business or even in our own homes.

Perhaps it is a result of societal paranoia due to better media coverage, in which case there is not more violence, just more awareness of the potential of such events. Either way it is not a pleasant way to live.l

Frankly, I'd rather be mauled by a bear. At least there'd be a reason for that.

That's correct, and what's more annoying is that these kind of solutions are found plenty in other Bethesda games, no matter that NV was developed by a third party, it's still Bethesda. Why they decided that for Fallout in 2015/16 we would want to just pile corpses up. Like, all the time. I remember my surprise when I found out in Fallout 3 that I could nuke an entire town...or not.

I agree with this, I don't like games that the "good" path is obvious and the "bad" path leads you straight to hell. I like Game of Thrones mind you, but I understand is a difficult thing to pull off.

I expected just a little more creativity in the ways offered to solve the main conflict in the game. I can live with grim choices, the problem is that it has to make sense in some way.

SOME SPOILERS BELOW

For me, it doesn't make any sense to destroy everyone in order to subjugate the oposition. And there are also "dark" solutions that don't imply mass murdering by your hand, I don't know, a speech check (using the fact that he didn't care at all about his own mother) that depresses Father so much that HE decides to destroy his Institute....just a silly example.

I mean in a diplomatic sense, what do the RR got to offer?

War, war never changes.

That's very true, general, but settlements can change and they need our help, I'll mark it on your map.

There's plenty of non-violent games in the market place...personal choice as to which games people play.

And sorry to shatter illusions, but Truman did not order any city to be removed, he merely gave the go ahead for atom bombs to be used if necessary, and he actually did dictate that Kyoto was not to be included on the target list. The actual use and targets were determined at relatively low command level.

Besides which, comparing story related personal violence in video games hardly to the level of violence initiated by certain historic national leaders is a tall call.

violent crime has been on the decline for a long time. ppl just make a bigger deal out of it now days.

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/table-1

I hate to turn this into a "real world" discussion, but the crime rate peaked sometime around 1991 and it's been going down ever since. Probably for multiple reasons. Don't take my word for it. A quick search on "crime rate by year" will suffice.

We're bombarded by news 24/7 these days, which is why it seems like there is more crime.

Back to the game world. One thing I liked about FNV was that it gave you more opportunities for diplomacy. I enjoy a shoot-em-up as much as the next guy but I think it added some nuance to the game.

I'm glad and grateful for all the responses, very nice discussion about the game and real world connections.

The comparison with real world leaders is tricky, I know, and it wasn't meant to troll anyone but to spark some reflection. Luckily everyone brought very intelligent and mature comments about that matter. The 3 WW2 leaders took similar decisions, albeit in a VERY different political context and with VERY different justifications, although with the same results.

In the fantasy world of the game, we are somewhat pushed to take ourselves the same "kill them all" call. That's what I felt while playing it, therefore the "war never changes" motto was rightfully mentioned here.

We all like violence in fantasy worlds (games, movies, etc.) I love Tarantino's movies, but at the same time I agree with Codename_Quincy and Howitt Hertz, in the real world violence is declining all the time, in spite of what the news channels repeat all day to draw audiences. And, in my opinion of course, there's no relation between game violence and real world violence.

Back to the game and topic, the intention was to reflect about what we want as gamers, in the past we were happy with shooting every pixel in those days of DOOM Shareware (yes, I'm old), but I think nowadays a lot of gamers want more options than that. I'm not comparing both games, of course, but I think that many of us would appreciate the POSSIBILITY to resolve the Main Quest differently, to make us think and work to get a different solution than KILL EVERYONE IN THE ROOM. It just felt that the developers took the easy way out instead of crafting alternatives to make the player go forward. Or perhaps it was their intention all the way, to show us that effectively "war never changes" by making the player a mass murderer no matter what, in this case I'd say it's ok, I respect the intention, just not my personal taste in gaming and leave it there.

The Mod Community will surely come with options in the future.

This ^