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Who's Who In New Vegas
Fallout: New Vegas starts players out with a relatively simple task: Figure out exactly who shot and left you for dead and why. As they work their way through the story and explore the world, players will learn about a greater conflict, and the politics and factional differences behind the tension.
Raiders and gangsters roam the wasteland, but they aren't as organized or dangerous as some of the other groups out in the Mojave. Even in Fallout's shades-of-gray world, Caesar's Legion is a difficult bunch to relate to. They're a band of highly disciplined slavers who were defeated at Hoover Dam by the New California Republic. Since that battle, they retreated east, but they're starting to bleed back into Nevada. That's a terrifying prospect to people who live in the area, since Caesar's Legion kills who it can't capture, often by crucifying and displaying the victims.
"You start out sort of thinking, 'Oh, the NCR is opposing Caesar's Legion, and Caesar's Legion are slavers, they absorb tribes they find in the wasteland, turn them into slaves, conquer other groups and crucify other people, and do all these nasty stuff. Clearly NCR must be the good guys." says Josh Sawyer, the game's project lead. "But then you start interacting with NCR and it's like, 'well, they're kind of strung really thin, they kind of abuse their power sometimes, they're really brutal in dealing with some of the locals. They do control the water supply kind of unfairly, and they don't allow the power to be distributed outside of the Strip or McCarran [airport].' So a lot of it is the practical realities of this very large bureaucratic military that's occupied the territory. And there are things you learn about Caesar's Legion, where Caesar's Legion are brutal and they are nasty and all that stuff, but they also conquered and civilized all of these tribes that were just sort of killing each other. So they turned them into a cohesive fighting force and stopped all of this murdering out in the wastes.
And then there's Mr.House. The elusive character essentially runs New Vegas in isolation. "He's very much inspired by Howard Hughes," says Sawyer. "Howard Hughes has a pretty big history with Las Vegas, so we thought it would be interesting to have this sort of a different, laissez faire dictator, where it's 'Everyone can do whatever they want as long as they follow my rules.' Which is in contrast to Caesar, which is like, 'Everyone follows my rules.' Mr. House has his families. They are tribes that he brought out of the wastes. He's actually a pre-war person who specialized in robotics and research into extending human life. So he was in stasis for several hundred years, and then he woke up. He has minions who control the Strip, and they help control what goes on there."
More interestingly, he also had a hand in how things turned out in the Great War. "Mr.House is also the guy who engineered the fact that Vegas was not destroyed," says Sawyer. "The way that he did that comes out through the course of the game, but because he is this sort of prodigy, he has a talent with machines and probability, he used that to his advantage to extend his own life and also to prevent New Vegas during the Great War from being destroyed. So there were hits in the area, but probability dictated that it wasn't going to get wiped out. He basically played the odds just right to make sure that it wouldn't happen. So he's a very interesting figure and very instrumental in New Vegas itself."
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