All three options involve basically becoming a puppet. Instead of being able to rule New Vegas on your own with the help of Yes Man. (keep in mind I'm still playing so I don't know how that ends)

Mr. House acts like he has good intentions and he's this amazing guy, but he's pathetic, he can't live without machines, he speaks only though a computer, and he is an egomaniac who kills people who dare try to enter New Vegas. And he's going to use his new killbots to further advance his brutal dictatorship.

Caesar is just a psycho and his society is just evil with all the slavery and crucifixion. Against technology but he has this medical machine near his bed. hypocrite...

Haven't met President Kimball yet but the NCR are a bunch of bureaucratic, corrupt losers, they act like they're good but they have no problem destroying cities or killing loads of civilians. And I'm sure dissent isn't tolerated in the NCR so it is probably still very much a dictatorship. Caesar alluded to this when discussing Tandi and her long reign. NCR just makes the appearance of democracy.

I'm glad they added a fourth option for myself so I didn't have to choose any of these clowns.

Dude, wrong forum and spoilers

Hey, if you didn't already know, Caesar used to be a Follower OTA.
House...not a bad guy, he does not care about vengeance, he cares about progress.
Kimball...protected him once (regreted it) and failed to kill him once and I'm surprised why the NCR would let him come to the danger zone of Hoover Dam.
Independent is my favorite playthrough choice, and its the easiest.

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Maybe some characters thought they couldn't deal with the stress of ruling a city, so they work for one of the three instead.
Maybe they just want all the achivements.
Maybe they really like one of the three and don't want to be their enemy.

I took the yes man route my first play through. It was my least favorite route. You could just tell him not to worry about all the factions. I like the NCR and am almost done with House.
I have a hard time picking the Ceaser route. I didn't play nice with the slavers in FO3, it's a whole camp full of slavers.

Because when I work with myself, I slap my head the whole time because, I don't get the options I would want to choose. basically, every ending in my opinion makes your person look greedy in some way, this being the one with the most greed, and I'm not a greedy person.

The Yes Man route is very boring to me and you can do all of his quests + the other man quest if you do someone elses main quest.

Why I sided with any of them, well, to give a full experience AKA use different characters and playthroughs for every faction.

However I think your generalizations are off.

House, while he is sort of a [censored] and aims to simply keep making money, would ultimately come to renovate Vegas and help its citizens. Though he may not be best for the Wasteland, for the city of New Vegas he definitely wants the best.

Caesar, while from looking at his troops and tactics seems like a barbarian who enslaves and tortures people, is actually a very well learned person with overall good intentions. He would have a united South-West USA, that, while brutal for sure, bans all sorts of drugs and deals with criminals stiffly. While the citizens at first wouldn't like them, similar to the Roman Empire, over time they would gain more freedom and even support the Legion. In the long run, Caesar has a good idea. I think the big anti-Caesar thing is probably the slaves.

NCR is definitely self-centered, corrupt, and overly bureaucratic, but means well. They offer a bit more freedom, in the fact that their citizens vote and the soldiers are paid, not forced to join. While their goal is mainly to control the Dam and New Vegas for electricity and money, respectively, the wasteland would benefit as well.



Who is right? I couldn't say. They all have their pro's and con's, and ultimately I don't know who is best to win. Especially if you are deciding on big or small scale. Just good for Vegas? or good for the Mojave Wasteland? or even for the good of the entire US Wasteland? It's entirely subjective, and I think every faction could be seen as well meaning at heart.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1149186-moded-fallout-new-vegas-screenshot-thread-5/page__view__findpost__p__16811149.

House doesn't care about the people of Vegas, and the city itself is a posession to him (like his snowglobes,) but his ultimate goal isn't to just rule a little patch of dirt or hoard wealth. If you talk to him in depth about his goals, he'll say he's just exploiting the NCR (through gambling,) for the sake of humanity's progress, and says that within 100 years he'll have colonization ships en route to alien planets. Given his track record (self-made xillionaire, MIT graduate, founder of Robco industries, accurately predicted the date of the Great War with a margin of error of one day decades before the war actually occurred and made preparations that saved Las Vegas from the nuclear holocaust as a result,) it might not entirely be delusions of grandeur or bluster.

I don't trust Yes-Man.

True, the people he could care less about. But through his improvements to Vegas (secure roads, reliable food sources, better sanitation), he would help them anyway. it's in his best interest; without people, he has no profit.

Either way, he is just as flawed as the other factions.

I was playing for NCR, then met Yes Man and had second thoughts. In the end, though, I felt too emotionally invested in the NCR soldiers and citizens I'd met, who I felt like were basically good people coming from a decent society, for the most part. It's a flawed society, but under "my" rule, I figured the best that would be achievable would be anarchy because it's not like the wandering mailman is going to stick around to stay in charge.

Now that I've finished it for both the NCR and Yes Man, I'm surprised to read anyone at all saying that the NCR ending is not as morally "good" as the independent ending. I had the exact opposite impression.

The way in which the different factions works is basically the age old debate of Order Versus Chaos. Do you want law and order, or do you wise for freedom and chaos?

From left to right, it goes from extreme chaos to extreme order:
Yes Man/Independent > NCR > Mr. House > Caesar's Legion

The Independent ending represents the ultimate form of chaos. It gives unopposed freedom to the people of the Mojave. But what price are you willing to pay for freedom? In creating a Land of Do-As-You-Please, you effectively doomed all the possibility of long-term progress. As General Oliver Lee pointed out, do you really think you have what it takes to build a nation? To create a workable economy, a military that can protect the people, build infrastructure to support the population, etc? In the end, my answer is no. Vegas lacks any form of heavy industry or even basic manufacturing assembly lines. Without the support of the NCR, there is no future.

That is why I still think of the NCR ending as the only real good ending for the game.

NCR? Peace in the region? Heh.

They tax the crap out of caravaners. And if they're lucky, they only get hit with the government sanctioned taxes and not other "Fees" levied by corrupt checkpoint guards. They let brahmin barons with merc hitsquads run rampant. And do the caravaners actually get anything out of the taxes? Nope. They still get hit by bandits and raiders.

"Peace"? Have you really listened to Kimble's speech? He's a dyed in the wool imperialist hawk.

The NCR needs their noses bloodied in the worst way. The NCR ending does nothing to do so. The region gets sapped of resources for the NCR's core region, Heck Gunderson and his obscenely rich ilk now have brand-new turf to plunder, and the bandits will regroup once the Mojave is no longer NCR frontier and the army moves eastward.

Mr House is a rare Randian dream. A sort of superman who is only concerned with the pragmatic parts of life. A healthy economy means a healthy population and continuous progress means mankind will have a better change to survive. The problem with 'Autocrats' is who to replace a good one with when he dies (he does not look very healthy in person). Until then I figured he would benefit New Vegas and by proxy mankind. I plan on siding with Mr House. (I hated having to slaughter the BoS though).

The NCR is a democracy and so far from ideal but still the best form of government so far invented.

Caesar is just a strong man. The most primitive and most destructive form of government. The most he could accomplish is to forcibly unite a big part of the former US in misery for a while. After that it would depend on his successors.

I was a little disappointed that you could not round up raiders to sell into slavery in new vegas, that was great end game fun in FO3.

If I go Independent, I'm pretty much a puppet of Yes Man, as far as I can see. Oh sure, he's polite and helpful (programmed that way), but what's HIS goal, hmmm?

After much soulsearching, I went for the NCR. They're slobs (clean up those cans! You have nine trillion bored soldiers, put 'em to work with the Abraxo!) and the Mojave people aren't hugely fond of them, but they have way more diversity than the other groups. They have some corrupt, incompetent types, but to my mind, they're outweighed by the run of the mill privates who are just trying to get by. There are a lot of decent people there.

House is the canniest of the lot, unquestionably saved New Vegas, and has the snazziest places, but his reign feels empty. He has no one to bounce his ideas off of except sycophant robots. How sane can he be? And the Legion? Sorry, Legion fans, I can't even go there. Unthinkable for me.

If you choose Yes man apparently theres a bit where he says he's undergoing a personality change at the end of the game, wich could mean he would be the new Mr. House, and boot you from the city, possibly one of Mr. Houses plans to make sure the city is kept in safe hand.

That's why it's good to be a l33t h4x0r character if going Indy and are doing meta-character building.

Both House and Caesar have only ONE objective: To be the ONE that tells everyone else what to do. The differences between the two are 1) That House is practically immortal, 2) House is primarily concerned about making money while Caesar is satisfied to simply be in charge until he dies, and 3) House will kill anyone that gets in his way, but with no real emotional investment, while Caesar WILL creates mountains if dead, just to demonstrate "Obey me or die!" In my book, that makes House the lesser of two evils.

The NCR is a bloated bureaucracy that is feeding the rich and powerful back home, without "wasting" too much money on maintaining peace and stability within the borders that it already has. So things that can provide a large resource boost that lies just beyond its borders is enough motivation for the NCR to find cause to expand its borders. If good intentions were enough to justify such an expansion, then I'd have no complaint. But instead the primary goal is to secure additional resources, no matter what the cost. If there's anything left over, then maybe the NCR will exert effort to maintain Security and infrastructure. It feels that the NCR's interest to "saving people's lives" has a vested self-interest in the taxes that those people will be paying to the NCR. After all, corpses don't pay taxes very well.

My first run-through, I worked strictly for the NCR -- and regretted it when I watched the Aftermath. It seemed that the bureaucrats and Robber Barons made out like bandits (which IS what they are, under that civilized veneer). My next two run-throughs, I went Independent via Yes-Man, and those endings were MUCH more satisfying. It was the closest thing to "They lived happily ever after" as you are likely to get, for the greatest number people. Not so the Legion, or the NCR for that matter, as the NCR started to experience problems because its outward grab for resources was stymied. (I suspect a populist takeover from the Robber Barons in the near future as The People declares "It's _our_ tax money, so it should be spent on ALL of us, not just the privileged few!")

Honestly I question the value in siding with Yes-Man and 'ruling Vegas' because that last dialogue snippet makes me think he will pretty much boot you out of Vegas faster than a pack of Cazadores killing a baby.

If Yes-Man had been programmed by House, I would suspect that he had created an AI that had his own personality imprinted upon it, which is what Yes-Man is now planning on installing onto itself. (I'd still be quite concerned that is the kind of "upgrades" Yes-Man is messing with. HOWEVER, as presented, the Courier should have been able to stop the process immediately simply by yelling, "Yes-Man! I command you to NOT do that!")

I might have my conspiracy theorist goggles on, but when you think about it, Yes-Man 'advises' you on what to do next for every quest. Since Yes-Man seems like a true A.I. akin to JHE from Fallout 3, I have to wonder if Yes-Man just needed a human patsy so that he could surreptitiously take control of Vegas. I also just now thought of something. House didn't seem to concerned with Yes-Man existing when you mentioned him, so what if he somehow coded this 'personality trait' and purposely left it to leave a Neuro Computational Maxtrix copy of Houses Brainwaves, essentially turning him into a Machine God Messiah should the true Mr. House die?

-Puts on the tinfoil hat-

Some of us aren't society leader types. I don't want that kind of responsibility. People would comee and complain to you all the time, wanting this or that, fix this, lower taxes, raise taxes, I need a bigger casino, we need new roads, give me some funding, [censored] [censored] [censored], moan moan moan...eventually I'd have to kill everyone to get them to leave me alone and then I'd be the leader of nothing, anyway. So...

Great thread everybody!

Like many I chose the NCR path for most of the reasons already mentioned. However, even though it was the lesser of the evils I could chose from it still left me feeling WTF?! There were just too many things I didn't agree with how Obsidian said turned out in the end.

If it were possible, here's the path I would have most liked to see and follow:

Basically, it's somewhat Indy but with an agreement similar to what House had with the NCR. (House runs things and NCR can come and go as they please as long as they're peaceful.)

Your character is already the baddest and most influential person in the Mojave, right? Why could he/she not have worked with NCR to eliminate Caesar and then become a sort of Governor/Sheriff of the region. NCR can stay and work in peace, but start crossing the line and you've got the wrath of the courier to deal with. I mean, the guy saved the Mojave, and then suddenly disappears and is never seen again? Maybe, but that's not how I envision it. Also, there are plenty of good people who the Courier could appoint a "cabinet" position to help run the show too. And keeping the hidden robot army would be his ace in the hole of ever needed. Anyway, that's kind of how I like to believe my characters would do it.