At first, revenge was the only thing that mattered. The smart, strong, and unusually-lucky Courier had an 18-karat run of bad luck and a bullet lodged in her skull to show for it. She had barely survived the ordeal... and she wasn't about to let it slide. Revenge kept her legs moving through the treacherous, arid sands, the ruined and scorched results of mankind's folly. The normally dangerous and unpredictable trek through the Mojave was little more than a brisk jog for the experienced Courier...
At least, that's what she told herself at first. There were quite a few pit stops on her way to the doorstep of her would-be killer, pit stops that proved to be more eye-opening than she expected. A shootout between the Goodsprings townies that'd saved her from an early grave... and an aimless coterie of dynamite-wielding punks that'd been wronged and abused by the system of the NCR. The daring rescue of the mild-mannered Deputy of Primm... and the realization that an outlaw convict wound up being the best choice for Primm's new sheriff, the only logical choice compared to brutal martial law and a tour-guide robot. The shock and horror of the burnt-down Nipton and the chilly encounter with the red-armored killers responsible for its pillage. Resolving a hostage crisis between some incompetent NCR troops and a pack of drug-dealing tribals that just wanted to go home. The quiet tragedy of Boone and the tongue-in-cheek sageness of Veronica, two followers that tagged along for the ride. The struggling refugees of the Aerotech Park. The decrepit yet weirdly homely nature of Freeside, a somewhat seedy ghetto barely clinging to life in spite of its stone's throw proximity to the gated-off New Vegas Strip, a luxurious and sleazy oasis... but only for those that could afford entry past its walls.
The trek from Goodsprings to Vegas was a relatively short one, courtesy of the Courier's weathered boots and good old-fashioned adrenaline coursing through her veins... but at the same time, it was anything but a simple journey. The things she'd seen, the conflicts she'd stumbled into, and the issues she'd wound up resolving one way or another, for good or ill... had started to change her. It was a breadcrumb trail that had done more than guide her feet. It had opened her eyes. Somehow, someway, that bullet that blasted through her skull had opened up a third eye in her brain, and she'd finally started to see the Mojave Wasteland for what it really was: a broken mess on the verge of collapse, a lived-in but fragile land being fought over and drained by a number of shadowy and undeserving forces, corrupt and contemptible factions that would lie, cheat, and murder in the name of violently claiming land that was never theirs to own. When she finally confronted the man that had popped a cap in her cranium, when she finally learned that he wasn't just some pompous, flannel-suited jackass that talked funny and tried to Kennedy her ass for a quick buck, but an ambitious go-getter that had shot her as part and parcel of a bold, anarchist plot to free the Mojave from the chains that had unfairly bound it for a long, long time...
...Well. It didn't stop her from delivering some karmic justice and blowing Benny's brains out. But it did give her the push she needed to be something more than just a mailman. The moment Benny's corpse hit the floor and she'd pocketed his glitzy 9mm pistol (and his swanky suit) as a personal souvenir... she decided she'd iron out the kinks of his plan and carry out the dream of a liberated Mojave, starting with the choice to turn Vegas into her personal fortress and playground. And it all started with the delivery of a Platinum Chip to an enterprising and self-made billionaire.
From that moment onward, the Courier found herself spiraling into the murky and political underside of the Mojave Wasteland, becoming intimately familiar with each and every one of the ostentatious groups that inhabited it. The bureaucratic and imperialist NCR, a corrupt yet complex beast of a bear, more concerned with lining their pockets and fighting for the interests of the disinterested elites. The arrogant and autocratic Robert House, the constantly-raised and apathetic brow of his monitor's glib avatar belying the man's true nature beneath his grand intelligence and surprising intuition. The violent and flamboyant LARPers of Caesar's Legion, powerful and terrifying yet silly and childish men that create peace through fear and cause silence with atrocity. All of these terrible, self-serving people, nothing more than paper-pushers and wealthy hermits and insecure psychopaths that barely understood the world they were fighting to rule... they were utterly outmatched and outclassed by the Courier's machinations.
The Courier played the game. The long game. She donned an endless array of masks and hats, pretending to serve the Bear, Bull, and House all while bleeding them dry beneath their noses. In one breath, she furthered the cause of the Mighty Caesar by blowing up the monorail of Camp McCarran... and in the next breath, she was rescuing captured Rangers and shooting down mercenaries at the NCR's behest. She played both sides, with House assuming she was playing on his team the entire time, his haughty arrogance clouding his judgment and blinding him to the crossed fingers behind her back. None of them had any idea that they were little more than a pawn in the Courier's anarchist plans, that she'd been slowly killing them with a tactical death by a thousand cuts. All the while, the Courier kept meeting new friends and allies - Arcade, Raul, Lily, Cassidy, the robot dog Rex and the Eyebot ED-E - and did everything in her power to help support and bolster the factions she truly wanted to keep around: the well-meaning and selfless Followers of the Apocalypse, the cool and collected greasers of The Kings, the rough-and-tumble tribals of the Great Khans that had been brutally oppressed for generations, and both the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave Remnants, respectively an isolated battalion and a small, tight-knit group of elderly survivors that, at the end of the day, wanted nothing more than to make amends, make a change, and embrace the future with open arms, legacy be damned.
By the time Mr. House figured out the Courier's treachery, the man was already dead at the hands of the Courier's golf club, a mercy kill for a man that was barely clinging to life in the first place. By the time the NCR and the Legion realized they'd been had, it was far too late. They'd played right into the Courier's hands, and with House's army of war-primed Securitrons and the support of a dozen factions on her side, their downfall was not only imminent, but inevitable. Caesar and his fabled Praetorians were little more than red and black marks on the floor after the Courier made mincemeat of the Legionaries at the Fort. And before the NCR had time to celebrate the fall of Caesar, they found themselves staring at the blasted-open head of their President Kimball, mere days after the demise of their greatest enemy. In a matter of weeks, the three men that held the Mojave a vicegrip were dead. The foundation had been laid, and the Courier's imminent attack on Hoover Dam was not a question of 'if'... but 'when'.
General Oliver and Legate Lanius foolishly thought they could prepare for the arrival of one woman and a bunch of clunky robots. But they were mistaken. The Courier wasn't alone. She had the backing of an entire nation at her flank. All the friends and followers she'd made over the course of her journey. The bombing runs of the Boomers, the sharpshooter gunslinging of the Ghost-Vaquero, the Rose of Sharon, and the Mysterious Stranger, and the explosive and shocking entrance of an invincible squad of Enclave soldiers carving a plasma-drenched path to the Legate's war camp... somehow, none of these shocked the Legate as much as the Courier's silver tongue, a silver tongue that momentarily shook his blind faith in the Legion's warmongering cause... before ultimately striking him down and taking his helmet as the prize for a hard-won battle of liberation. And when General Oliver saw the Courier toss the helmet of the fallen Legate down at his feet... he felt a twinge of fear when he realized that he wasn't just fighting a singular woman and her supervillain-robot army. It was him and the NCR against the entirety of the Mojave Wasteland... and the NCR had lost, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And when Oliver was forcibly thrown into the depths of Hoover Dam, screaming and thrashing all the way down... at that moment, the Courier felt a smile twitch at the corner of her lips. Although it may have taken a path of blood to get there... finally, if only for a moment, there was peace and quiet. The Mojave had a long way to go before it could ever be truly stable, and it would certainly never be a 'peaceful' place. But it was free. Her homeland was finally free. She found herself thanking Benny at the end of it all. That bullet did more than make her life flash before her very eyes. It changed her life. It woke her up.
The game may have been rigged from the start... but the Courier still had a hand to play.
and then the game fuckin crashes cuz of old mormon fort or gets softlocked because rex is standing in the doorframe or some shit like that idk, this game's fucking broken and it's a masterpiece 5/5
At least, that's what she told herself at first. There were quite a few pit stops on her way to the doorstep of her would-be killer, pit stops that proved to be more eye-opening than she expected. A shootout between the Goodsprings townies that'd saved her from an early grave... and an aimless coterie of dynamite-wielding punks that'd been wronged and abused by the system of the NCR. The daring rescue of the mild-mannered Deputy of Primm... and the realization that an outlaw convict wound up being the best choice for Primm's new sheriff, the only logical choice compared to brutal martial law and a tour-guide robot. The shock and horror of the burnt-down Nipton and the chilly encounter with the red-armored killers responsible for its pillage. Resolving a hostage crisis between some incompetent NCR troops and a pack of drug-dealing tribals that just wanted to go home. The quiet tragedy of Boone and the tongue-in-cheek sageness of Veronica, two followers that tagged along for the ride. The struggling refugees of the Aerotech Park. The decrepit yet weirdly homely nature of Freeside, a somewhat seedy ghetto barely clinging to life in spite of its stone's throw proximity to the gated-off New Vegas Strip, a luxurious and sleazy oasis... but only for those that could afford entry past its walls.
The trek from Goodsprings to Vegas was a relatively short one, courtesy of the Courier's weathered boots and good old-fashioned adrenaline coursing through her veins... but at the same time, it was anything but a simple journey. The things she'd seen, the conflicts she'd stumbled into, and the issues she'd wound up resolving one way or another, for good or ill... had started to change her. It was a breadcrumb trail that had done more than guide her feet. It had opened her eyes. Somehow, someway, that bullet that blasted through her skull had opened up a third eye in her brain, and she'd finally started to see the Mojave Wasteland for what it really was: a broken mess on the verge of collapse, a lived-in but fragile land being fought over and drained by a number of shadowy and undeserving forces, corrupt and contemptible factions that would lie, cheat, and murder in the name of violently claiming land that was never theirs to own. When she finally confronted the man that had popped a cap in her cranium, when she finally learned that he wasn't just some pompous, flannel-suited jackass that talked funny and tried to Kennedy her ass for a quick buck, but an ambitious go-getter that had shot her as part and parcel of a bold, anarchist plot to free the Mojave from the chains that had unfairly bound it for a long, long time...
...Well. It didn't stop her from delivering some karmic justice and blowing Benny's brains out. But it did give her the push she needed to be something more than just a mailman. The moment Benny's corpse hit the floor and she'd pocketed his glitzy 9mm pistol (and his swanky suit) as a personal souvenir... she decided she'd iron out the kinks of his plan and carry out the dream of a liberated Mojave, starting with the choice to turn Vegas into her personal fortress and playground. And it all started with the delivery of a Platinum Chip to an enterprising and self-made billionaire.
From that moment onward, the Courier found herself spiraling into the murky and political underside of the Mojave Wasteland, becoming intimately familiar with each and every one of the ostentatious groups that inhabited it. The bureaucratic and imperialist NCR, a corrupt yet complex beast of a bear, more concerned with lining their pockets and fighting for the interests of the disinterested elites. The arrogant and autocratic Robert House, the constantly-raised and apathetic brow of his monitor's glib avatar belying the man's true nature beneath his grand intelligence and surprising intuition. The violent and flamboyant LARPers of Caesar's Legion, powerful and terrifying yet silly and childish men that create peace through fear and cause silence with atrocity. All of these terrible, self-serving people, nothing more than paper-pushers and wealthy hermits and insecure psychopaths that barely understood the world they were fighting to rule... they were utterly outmatched and outclassed by the Courier's machinations.
The Courier played the game. The long game. She donned an endless array of masks and hats, pretending to serve the Bear, Bull, and House all while bleeding them dry beneath their noses. In one breath, she furthered the cause of the Mighty Caesar by blowing up the monorail of Camp McCarran... and in the next breath, she was rescuing captured Rangers and shooting down mercenaries at the NCR's behest. She played both sides, with House assuming she was playing on his team the entire time, his haughty arrogance clouding his judgment and blinding him to the crossed fingers behind her back. None of them had any idea that they were little more than a pawn in the Courier's anarchist plans, that she'd been slowly killing them with a tactical death by a thousand cuts. All the while, the Courier kept meeting new friends and allies - Arcade, Raul, Lily, Cassidy, the robot dog Rex and the Eyebot ED-E - and did everything in her power to help support and bolster the factions she truly wanted to keep around: the well-meaning and selfless Followers of the Apocalypse, the cool and collected greasers of The Kings, the rough-and-tumble tribals of the Great Khans that had been brutally oppressed for generations, and both the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave Remnants, respectively an isolated battalion and a small, tight-knit group of elderly survivors that, at the end of the day, wanted nothing more than to make amends, make a change, and embrace the future with open arms, legacy be damned.
By the time Mr. House figured out the Courier's treachery, the man was already dead at the hands of the Courier's golf club, a mercy kill for a man that was barely clinging to life in the first place. By the time the NCR and the Legion realized they'd been had, it was far too late. They'd played right into the Courier's hands, and with House's army of war-primed Securitrons and the support of a dozen factions on her side, their downfall was not only imminent, but inevitable. Caesar and his fabled Praetorians were little more than red and black marks on the floor after the Courier made mincemeat of the Legionaries at the Fort. And before the NCR had time to celebrate the fall of Caesar, they found themselves staring at the blasted-open head of their President Kimball, mere days after the demise of their greatest enemy. In a matter of weeks, the three men that held the Mojave a vicegrip were dead. The foundation had been laid, and the Courier's imminent attack on Hoover Dam was not a question of 'if'... but 'when'.
General Oliver and Legate Lanius foolishly thought they could prepare for the arrival of one woman and a bunch of clunky robots. But they were mistaken. The Courier wasn't alone. She had the backing of an entire nation at her flank. All the friends and followers she'd made over the course of her journey. The bombing runs of the Boomers, the sharpshooter gunslinging of the Ghost-Vaquero, the Rose of Sharon, and the Mysterious Stranger, and the explosive and shocking entrance of an invincible squad of Enclave soldiers carving a plasma-drenched path to the Legate's war camp... somehow, none of these shocked the Legate as much as the Courier's silver tongue, a silver tongue that momentarily shook his blind faith in the Legion's warmongering cause... before ultimately striking him down and taking his helmet as the prize for a hard-won battle of liberation. And when General Oliver saw the Courier toss the helmet of the fallen Legate down at his feet... he felt a twinge of fear when he realized that he wasn't just fighting a singular woman and her supervillain-robot army. It was him and the NCR against the entirety of the Mojave Wasteland... and the NCR had lost, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And when Oliver was forcibly thrown into the depths of Hoover Dam, screaming and thrashing all the way down... at that moment, the Courier felt a smile twitch at the corner of her lips. Although it may have taken a path of blood to get there... finally, if only for a moment, there was peace and quiet. The Mojave had a long way to go before it could ever be truly stable, and it would certainly never be a 'peaceful' place. But it was free. Her homeland was finally free. She found herself thanking Benny at the end of it all. That bullet did more than make her life flash before her very eyes. It changed her life. It woke her up.
The game may have been rigged from the start... but the Courier still had a hand to play.
and then the game fuckin crashes cuz of old mormon fort or gets softlocked because rex is standing in the doorframe or some shit like that idk, this game's fucking broken and it's a masterpiece 5/5