Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[Fairfax]

I think it speaks volumes that his main takeaways from roman society for the Legion were slavery, rape, medieval (!) misogyny, luddism (the most absurd) and titles. Sometimes it's hard to believe he's a history major.

Caesar specifically kept everything he liked about the Roman Empire and threw away the rest. http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...discussion-thread.84849/page-153#post-4864838

The problem is that many aspects of the Legion have nothing to do with the Roman Empire. The luddism is particularly stupid and the very opposite of roman society.
It's also the opposite of the original concept in VB:

You can see that the Legion didn't oppose technology, and silly as it may be, this shows they were supposed to create things of their own as well.

 

[Roguey]

The problem is that many aspects of the Legion have nothing to do with the Roman Empire. The luddism is particularly stupid and the very opposite of roman society.

Luddism makes sense when you want to be the only god-king around and don't want history repeating itself.

It's also the opposite of the original concept in VB:

No one has working vehicles in Fallout 3/New Vegas.

 

[Barnabas]

I think it speaks volumes that his main takeaways from roman society for the Legion were slavery, rape, medieval (!) misogyny, luddism (the most absurd) and titles. Sometimes it's hard to believe he's a history major.

But it's not hard to believe that he knows more than you ever will.

 

[Fairfax]

The problem is that many aspects of the Legion have nothing to do with the Roman Empire. The luddism is particularly stupid and the very opposite of roman society.

Luddism makes sense when you want to be the only god-king around and don't want history repeating itself.

It's also the opposite of the original concept in VB:

No one has working vehicles in Fallout 3/New Vegas.

If you want to be the only god-king around, it doesn't make sense to create a deliberately inferior society in almost every way, specially when it's vastly inferior compared to your own source of inspiration. It was also bad design because rather than the interesting, morally ambiguous neo-roman society it could've been, Sawyer made some evil caricature. Take away the titles and the aesthetic, and there's very little that's remotely roman about it. It's rule of cool with fake highbrow design.

 

[an Administrator]

Lololol he believes raping women is bad what a cuck xDDDDDddDDd

 

[Roguey]

If you want to be the only god-king around, it doesn't make sense to create a deliberately inferior society in almost every way, specially when it's vastly inferior compared to your own source of inspiration. It was also bad design because rather than the interesting, morally ambiguous neo-roman society it could've been, Sawyer made some evil caricature. Take away the titles and the aesthetic, and there's very little that's remotely roman about it. It's rule of cool with fake highbrow design.

Deliberately inferior to what? Legion-controlled areas are more orderly than NCR's and they've successfully conquered every tribe they've come across.

 

[Sizzle]

Many of the Legion's in-game narrative problems (lack of quests and overall content when compared with the NCR) could have been solved if they had let MCA keep his original vision of Ulysses

 

[Tigranes]

The problem is that many aspects of the Legion have nothing to do with the Roman Empire. The luddism is particularly stupid and the very opposite of roman society.

Luddism makes sense when you want to be the only god-king around and don't want history repeating itself.

It's also the opposite of the original concept in VB:

No one has working vehicles in Fallout 3/New Vegas.

If you want to be the only god-king around, it doesn't make sense to create a deliberately inferior society in almost every way, specially when it's vastly inferior compared to your own source of inspiration. It was also bad design because rather than the interesting, morally ambiguous neo-roman society it could've been, Sawyer made some evil caricature. Take away the titles and the aesthetic, and there's very little that's remotely roman about it. It's rule of cool with fake highbrow design.

It makes a certain amount of sense that Caesar would end up creating a caricature-copy of the superficial aspects of the Roman Empire, rather than a kind of empire that is as innovative and disruptive relative to its surroundings as the Romans were in their own historical context. From what we see of him, Caesar is not a sophisticated historian or a genius; what he is is a highly determined, ambitious, charismatic man. It makes sense that he would focus on military organisation, discipline, command structure and striking aesthetics; these are the kind of things that the violent tribes he started off with would be able to respect and rally behind, and these are the kind of things that would be required for Caesar to achieve crucial early successes against enemy tribes and focus power around himself.

Where it falls down a bit is that you'd think Caesar's Legion would also be very focused on roads, infrastructure, trade, and other things that are also part of the superficial image of the Roman Empire and things that a man like Caesar would readily recognise as important. Instead, the bits of the Legion we do see seem to retain a curiously regressive primitivism in their determination to live life the hard way. (In this regard, it would have been very interesting to see more of the tribal background of the Legion and its members, and to be able to speak more with ordinary members of the Legion - or with Graham in the DLC - and learn more about how the various tribes of Arizona and their own customs and traditions were folded into the Legion, explaining some of its idiosyncracies. ) Thea misogyny really doesn't fit either way. There doesn't seem to be any pressing reason for Caesar to emphasise the treatment of women one way or another; you'd expect him not to really care about women one way or another, or to instate certain policies that moderns would consider unequal but would make practical sense in the context, e.g. the 'farming' of female bodies for birthing strong babies.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

WTF are these questions

 

[LESS T_T]

Who wrote what in New Vegas question answered (again?):

 

[pippin]

Randall Clark is still one of my favorite bits of Fallout lore.

 

[Quillon]

WTF. He wrote Hanlon? That guy who talked for 20 mins and I wanted more? Josh is a talented writer?

 

[Morality Games]

I think it speaks volumes that his main takeaways from roman society for the Legion were slavery, rape, medieval (!) misogyny, luddism (the most absurd) and titles. Sometimes it's hard to believe he's a history major.

... I mean, they were the practitioners of decimation where 1/10 of a disgraced unit were slaughtered by their comrades according to the results of a lottery. That part wasn't made up.

Roman generals were expected (and did) to execute their own sons for disobeying military orders even if that disobedience resulted in success.

Other Latin states ganged up and (constantly) tried to burn Rome to the ground in its infancy (they saw the writing was on the wall), so traditional Roman culture was pretty militaristic and hard ass.

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[Roguey]

"Haha, I haven't suffered..."
\

 

[Jazz_]

Well, Sawyer has never produced any art. While I can picture Avellone drinking like a sailor on payday late at night, writing memorable pages in the grip of existential despair, battling the demons of self-doubt and artistic integrity. An obsidian curse slowly gnawing away at his soul.

 

[Mozg]

Did FNV get anything positive out of using the Roman motifs as opposed to giving the "Legion" and "Caesar" some other gloss? I mostly just found it confusing since it had almost nothing to do with Roman government, law, the historical Caesars, etc. I figured it was an issue of awkwardly transplanting names and story tidbits from Van Buren between writers/designers with very different styles (Sawyer pseudohistory vs. late Black Isle comic bookiness). I guess I'd ask Sawyer, if he'd been more central to all those decisions, whether he'd have dropped that stuff.

 

[Infinitron]

awkwardly transplanting names and story tidbits

This is what Edward Sallow did in-world.

But I don't know if Van Buren was any better about this.

 

[Mozg]

I haven't looked at it in a long time but IIRC van Buren was more comic book fantastic and less grounded, like the Daughter of Hecate stuff (itself a throwaway Greco-Roman reference). They could have thrown in random Roman stuff as an allusion without some simulated guy in the game needing to be explained to have chosen Roman cosplay for so and so reasons. It's like Romulans in Star Trek, an extra-textual reference (I think - I bet they explained Romulans visiting ancient Earth in some gay novel or something).

 

[Infinitron]

Josh Sawyer doesn't give a fuck about your taxonomical quandaries:

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

You messed up the last 2 images.

They work fine here, but wikia has been known to do weird shit when you try to hotlink images.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

So, it's weird but I started replaying the game again recently.
Not too sure how I feel about it overall. It's good, but falls short of great, and there's a lot that I dislike that's mostly due to the limitations of the engine unfortunately.

 

[Sentinel]

What game are you talking about? PoE or New Vegas?