Well every Fallout game needs at least one military or governmental faction, but it sort of bothers me how static and boring the NCR is. They are made up of a collection of camps run by demoralized soldiers who will either complain about stuff or ask you to go kill 10 Fire Ants. There are no exciting motives, quests, scripted events or skirmishes. Compare them to the Capital Wasteland Brotherhood of Steel from Fallout 3 who's purpose was to protect the surrounding cities, figure out what the Super Mutants were and where they come from, while also fighting off the Enclave.
while i'm not really going to try to argue that the NCR was particularly well done(i don't think it really was), i think this is a pretty large oversimplification. as far as i can see the major issue you're taking with the pure drama surrounding the NCR is that you don't see them fighting an awful lot. while i think this is valid, i don't think it's necessarily something which negates the value of what they bring to the game's story.
they were obviously very careful with the NCR in new vegas so as not to make them especially sympathetic. the reason why you don't see them really DOING ANYTHING is so you don't really find yourself rallying behind them, which was a phenomenally important component to the way the game's story works.
in fallout 3 the BoS are really DYNAMIC. they're doing stuff, they're noble, they're helping you out, they're all kinds of great and kickass. even though they're pretty much deplorable human beings in every other fallout game, the BoS become SUPER GOOD GUYS in fallout 3. to be perfectly frank, i don't think that's particularly worthwhile storytelling. even though there was a lot more in the EPIC BATTLE department in fallout 3, i think the brotherhood of steel was a phenomenally boring waste of time with virtually no worthwhile intrinsic conflict outside of them just wanting to blast the BAD GUYS. it's overwhelmingly clear that obsidian DID NOT want to have anything like that in this game. they didn't want to have some sort of tremendously inspirational group doing all kinds of wonderful and exciting things. they wanted you to more or less dislike the warring factions of the game.
the NCR, as you can obviously tell, do not fill that role in the game, mainly because they aren't actually the GOOD GUYS. it's an occupation, not a liberation. dismissing them because they aren't the brotherhood of steel from fallout 3 is really approaching this game incorrectly. you're acting like they aren't the brotherhood of steel because obsidian was lazy or something, while that isn't the case. they knew what they were doing, which was creating this uneasy political landscape rather than creating an epic battlefield. i'm not really seeing how the NCR is invalid in light of the BoS, but that might just be my opinion.
anyway, new vegas really wanted to go back to the roots of fallout, where pretty much EVERYONE is fucking terrible and the most help you can get are from a couple of random assholes that join you along the way. that ultimately becomes the point of the story. it's not about the MACGUFFIN like the other fallouts, it's about deciding who inherits new vegas. if that really does not appeal to you, then this is probably not a game you should continue playing, because that's all there is to it. the game is about you, this random dumbshit with phenomenally good luck, roaming around the world getting a feel for how everything in the region works, so you can ultimately decide the outcome of all the factions and towns present in the game. it's really not a GOAL-oriented game exactly, where you very clearly know what you are aiming for at the end of the game. you're just trying to make sense of it all.
i'm not going to blow smoke up your ass and tell you this isn't a somewhat cheap way of telling a story in the greater scheme of game creation. i took exception to how much the NCR/Legion conflict was almost imaginary in how it's referenced but infrequently shown, and in general they could have tried a lot harder to integrate interesting scripted events into the game experience. but i think ultimately these were solid decisions in the scope of the story, as it helped them avoid the game turning into some worthless GOOD/EVIL slugfest like all other mindless games. you're ultimately forced to decide between different shades of awful for a rather large amount of the quests and major decisions in the game. i definitely appreciate this, as it makes for more interesting storytelling. it was reasonably frequent that i had to really stop and think about what the best thing to do in fallout 3 was, but it was extremely frequent in new vegas.
to me, that's good storytelling. not a lot of people really fiercely agree with me on that, but that's not my problem.
also i completely disagree that the motives and quests within the NCR are less interesting than the brotherhood of steel, but i have no idea who you've talked to or what you've done, or what you find interesting from the standpoint of storytelling. kind of a worthless point to really debate and try to quantify.
You really got to know them through at least 10 key characters and they took you across the wasteland in a lot of interesting and cool missions, and I have yet to see any of this in New Vegas.
again, i think you've approached this game wrong, expecting them to do things that conflict with the core design of it. nobody takes you across the wasteland in this game. there are no KEY ALLIES. there are maybe like two or three characters in the entire game that aren't disgusting human beings. you don't really get to know anybody particularly well, because most people aren't really worth getting to know or simply have no reason to become involved in what you're doing.
i absolutely wouldn't call this a failure of the game's characters. there are a lot of unusually interesting people in this game, particularly as far as videogames go. they're just less dynamic, for the reasons i explained above.
I'm not arguing that there are no politics in New Vegas though. By bad political shit I meant that you always had a feeling that there were secret organizations running things behind the curtains in Fallout 3, and I thought that was an effective way to make the world feel bigger.I don't even know what to compare Fallout 3 to because it feels like New Vegas has no storytelling at all due to the reason I mentioned above.
i'm not really seeing how there is an absence of story in new vegas. the game is lacking a clear GOAL at the end, but i don't necessarily think that's the only way to tell a story. the game is obviously more about minor narratives building up steam in the larger narrative rather than there being this primary THING that ultimately trumps everything you do. that isn't an invalid way to tell a story, although it certainly does make you work a little more for it.
I haven't finished the game yet so maybe there's more stuff to come that I haven't seen, but can you remember any part of New Vegas that was actually engaging in terms of story/writing?
quite a few, actually. if you'd like i could suggest them to you.
They basically feel like two completely different games where Fallout 3 is storydriven and New Vegas is more of a static sandbox game I guess.
i just don't see the fundamental distinction. i would actually call new vegas a lot more story-driven than fallout 3 was, mainly in that pretty much everything in the game is designed and laid out to service the story. there's really not a lot of RANDOM stuff in new vegas when you break it all down. there's this core of a couple ideas and the map/town/dungeon layout is geared almost solely to cater to that.
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