Man of Honour
For me, it's Wasteland 3. A small niggle during the game, utter disappointment for the ending. The small niggle was when I was forced to choose between putting refugees I'd given shelter to in the prison on my base or throwing them out entirely, despite a far better solution being obviously available. There's a huge unused area inside the base where the refugees could be housed and there's nobody staffing the mess at the base. You can get a cook later. A cook. Just one person. The refugees could staff and run the canteen. Win all round - housing for them, respectable work for them, improvement in the relations between the refugees and the base personnel. But that's a small niggle compared to the utter ordure-spattered unfunny farce that is the ending.
In case anyone hasn't played it and is intending to, I'll mark my reasons/extensive rant as spoilers.
I was glad to play Wasteland 3 up until the ending. I was glad when the ending finished, so I didn't have any reason to play it any more.
Now I've got that off my chest, how about anyone else? Any game that made you think "Good game, shame about the ending"?
In case anyone hasn't played it and is intending to, I'll mark my reasons/extensive rant as spoilers.
The setting is western Colorado some time after global nuclear war destroyed civilisation and killed almost everyone. In the town of Colorado Springs, some people survived in bunkers they'd prepared. The town and surrounding area wasn't directly affected by the war due to the military anti-air defences fairly close to it, but of course with civilisation gone everything fell apart. A person took power, created a country and ruled it under the title of Patriarch. They were ruthless and tyrannical, but their goal was a stable and peaceful country and they suceeded. It's a dictatorship, but not a terrible one. As one of the better informed residents says, it's not perfect but it's a lot better than many places. The country has food, water, sewerage, housing, electricity, heating and peace. For 50 years. A lot better than many places in the Wasteland world.
At the time of Wasteland 3, the Patriarch is dying. He's got another year, maybe two. This is a key point in my disatisfaction with the ending.
He also has three children:
Valor is a weak-willed petulant gullible fool who's utterly incapable of ruling anything, let alone a country. They're also a textbook case for "corrupted by power" if they ever had any. At best, they'd be a powerless puppet for someone capable. At best.
Victory is an uncontrolled violent sociopath whose only goal is to torture and kill people for fun. They seek power, but only because it would make it easier for them to torture and kill people for fun. They're also incapable of ruling a country. Maybe a gang, but no more than that.
Liberty is a controlled, disciplined sociopath whose only goal is power. They will torture and kill people, but only as a means of obtaining and maintaining power. Power is their sole objective. They would be capable of ruling a country - as a brutal slave state.
I started to lean towards the Patriarch when he stated that Liberty was unfit to succeed him because they seek to rule, not to govern.
So it's essentially a succession crisis. That's the core of the problem.
Victory and Liberty were exiled by the Patriarch. Victory for being a psycho serial killer and Liberty for attempting a coup. Valor ran off to become a pawn of the leader of a nutjob cult and is too dumb to even realise they're a pawn.
Victory raised a drug-addled hyperviolent gang and turned a small town in the country into a version of hell.
Liberty headed into eastern Colorado, which is controlled by various gangs who are contained only by their constant fighting between gangs and within gangs. Think Fallout-style raiders. They managed to get several gangs to form a loose coalition and accept Liberty as their leader of leaders. They're raiding the outer parts of their father's country. Although the usual modus operandi of the gangs is slavery and murder, Liberty has ordered them to let their victims go, destitute but unharmed. Not out of any sense of mercy (Liberty doesn't have any) but because the influx of refugees will weaken the country, overwhelming its housing, food production and other essential infrastructure.
In the heart of the country itself, the main factions are the Marshals (the Patriarch's private police force), the descendents of the original survivors (effectively an aristocracy) and the refugees (by weight of numbers). There are other factions around the country, but those are the main ones.
So OK...the core of the problem is a succession crisis. There is no viable successor and all the options are bad.
My team turns up and creates a new faction - the Rangers. Set up a base, recruit people, instill the same principles as the Rangers back home. It gains power rapidly - there are a lot of potential recruits. My team go to great lengths to help everyone who needs help, building the reputation of the Rangers. We help all the factions, negotiating mutually acceptable arrangements where possible, killing raiders and dangerous animals. We become known and liked by every faction apart from the nutjob cult, who we force to obey us by stealing their idol. Not perfect, but it was that or war.
That's prep work. Our goal is to ensure a peaceful succession. The core problem is a succession crisis, so our goal is to defuse the crisis. We have a year or two. Keep the Patriarch in power, become a powerful, respected and well liked faction that all the other factions will work with, together. By the time the Patriarch dies, we could have devised a peaceful transition of power, the best way to avert the succession crisis. And we're doing all that.
The fly in the ointment is that we're going to kill Victory and Liberty. Especially Liberty, as they're the biggest danger. Kill them and the gangs will go back to killing each other. It's only a leader of leaders who can bind them into a horde and go conquering. The Patriarch won't like it, but they'll have to deal with it. It's not like they wanted either of those two to succeed them. In fact, they were explicitly opposed to it.
But no, the game won't allow that course of action.
It throws in a character from previous Wasteland games, a highly respected Ranger. Their plan is to free a gang leader who's in the Patriarch's prison, set them up as leader of leaders of the gangs and hope that they lead the gangs east to butcher their way through Kansas, which is that gang leader's stated intention. They're a Genghis Khan figure. They would unite the gangs. Not just a loose coalition, but an actual union. They would lead their horde to slaughter and enslavement on a vast scale. They consider it their blood-soaked destiny. Then this NPC would launch a violent revolution to depose the Patriarch and rule the country themself. This is supposedly the honourable course of action, the Ranger way, as the NPC repeatedly tells you. The Patriarch is a tyrant, so he must be deposed even if it means the failure of the Rangers in Arizona and the deaths of people there (who need aid from Colorado to survive the winter). Deposing a tyrant and saving some lives by helping a far worse tyrant kill far more people. Obviously the best course of action, don't ya know? The game railroads you into a choice between supporting one tyrant and supporting the other and whichever choice you make your newly formed rangers are split and you're forced to fight a ranger on ranger war through your base and the town. With one allowed choice, you kill half your own people, then depose the Patriarch and thus trigger the succession crisis immediately. With the other allowed choice, you kill half your own people, kill the Rangers led by the Ranger from the previous Wasteland games and blow your chance of being a faction that negotiates a transition of power.
It's a badly shoehorned in forced choice between bad and bad. It's not even plausible. The NPC Ranger's position doesn't even pretend to be internally consistent, let alone right.
It blights the game.
Apparently there's a possible ending in which you kill everyone who has or might take power and establish yourself as the new absolute rulers of the country, which is touted as the best ending. It's better than the ones that the game blatantly railroads you into, I suppose.
At the time of Wasteland 3, the Patriarch is dying. He's got another year, maybe two. This is a key point in my disatisfaction with the ending.
He also has three children:
Valor is a weak-willed petulant gullible fool who's utterly incapable of ruling anything, let alone a country. They're also a textbook case for "corrupted by power" if they ever had any. At best, they'd be a powerless puppet for someone capable. At best.
Victory is an uncontrolled violent sociopath whose only goal is to torture and kill people for fun. They seek power, but only because it would make it easier for them to torture and kill people for fun. They're also incapable of ruling a country. Maybe a gang, but no more than that.
Liberty is a controlled, disciplined sociopath whose only goal is power. They will torture and kill people, but only as a means of obtaining and maintaining power. Power is their sole objective. They would be capable of ruling a country - as a brutal slave state.
I started to lean towards the Patriarch when he stated that Liberty was unfit to succeed him because they seek to rule, not to govern.
So it's essentially a succession crisis. That's the core of the problem.
Victory and Liberty were exiled by the Patriarch. Victory for being a psycho serial killer and Liberty for attempting a coup. Valor ran off to become a pawn of the leader of a nutjob cult and is too dumb to even realise they're a pawn.
Victory raised a drug-addled hyperviolent gang and turned a small town in the country into a version of hell.
Liberty headed into eastern Colorado, which is controlled by various gangs who are contained only by their constant fighting between gangs and within gangs. Think Fallout-style raiders. They managed to get several gangs to form a loose coalition and accept Liberty as their leader of leaders. They're raiding the outer parts of their father's country. Although the usual modus operandi of the gangs is slavery and murder, Liberty has ordered them to let their victims go, destitute but unharmed. Not out of any sense of mercy (Liberty doesn't have any) but because the influx of refugees will weaken the country, overwhelming its housing, food production and other essential infrastructure.
In the heart of the country itself, the main factions are the Marshals (the Patriarch's private police force), the descendents of the original survivors (effectively an aristocracy) and the refugees (by weight of numbers). There are other factions around the country, but those are the main ones.
So OK...the core of the problem is a succession crisis. There is no viable successor and all the options are bad.
My team turns up and creates a new faction - the Rangers. Set up a base, recruit people, instill the same principles as the Rangers back home. It gains power rapidly - there are a lot of potential recruits. My team go to great lengths to help everyone who needs help, building the reputation of the Rangers. We help all the factions, negotiating mutually acceptable arrangements where possible, killing raiders and dangerous animals. We become known and liked by every faction apart from the nutjob cult, who we force to obey us by stealing their idol. Not perfect, but it was that or war.
That's prep work. Our goal is to ensure a peaceful succession. The core problem is a succession crisis, so our goal is to defuse the crisis. We have a year or two. Keep the Patriarch in power, become a powerful, respected and well liked faction that all the other factions will work with, together. By the time the Patriarch dies, we could have devised a peaceful transition of power, the best way to avert the succession crisis. And we're doing all that.
The fly in the ointment is that we're going to kill Victory and Liberty. Especially Liberty, as they're the biggest danger. Kill them and the gangs will go back to killing each other. It's only a leader of leaders who can bind them into a horde and go conquering. The Patriarch won't like it, but they'll have to deal with it. It's not like they wanted either of those two to succeed them. In fact, they were explicitly opposed to it.
But no, the game won't allow that course of action.
It throws in a character from previous Wasteland games, a highly respected Ranger. Their plan is to free a gang leader who's in the Patriarch's prison, set them up as leader of leaders of the gangs and hope that they lead the gangs east to butcher their way through Kansas, which is that gang leader's stated intention. They're a Genghis Khan figure. They would unite the gangs. Not just a loose coalition, but an actual union. They would lead their horde to slaughter and enslavement on a vast scale. They consider it their blood-soaked destiny. Then this NPC would launch a violent revolution to depose the Patriarch and rule the country themself. This is supposedly the honourable course of action, the Ranger way, as the NPC repeatedly tells you. The Patriarch is a tyrant, so he must be deposed even if it means the failure of the Rangers in Arizona and the deaths of people there (who need aid from Colorado to survive the winter). Deposing a tyrant and saving some lives by helping a far worse tyrant kill far more people. Obviously the best course of action, don't ya know? The game railroads you into a choice between supporting one tyrant and supporting the other and whichever choice you make your newly formed rangers are split and you're forced to fight a ranger on ranger war through your base and the town. With one allowed choice, you kill half your own people, then depose the Patriarch and thus trigger the succession crisis immediately. With the other allowed choice, you kill half your own people, kill the Rangers led by the Ranger from the previous Wasteland games and blow your chance of being a faction that negotiates a transition of power.
It's a badly shoehorned in forced choice between bad and bad. It's not even plausible. The NPC Ranger's position doesn't even pretend to be internally consistent, let alone right.
It blights the game.
Apparently there's a possible ending in which you kill everyone who has or might take power and establish yourself as the new absolute rulers of the country, which is touted as the best ending. It's better than the ones that the game blatantly railroads you into, I suppose.
I was glad to play Wasteland 3 up until the ending. I was glad when the ending finished, so I didn't have any reason to play it any more.
Now I've got that off my chest, how about anyone else? Any game that made you think "Good game, shame about the ending"?
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