No Gods, No Masters: The Yes Man Ending
Let’s talk about the Yes Man ending of Fallout New Vegas. The phrase “No Gods, No Masters,” really highlights the point of this ending. Your aim is to secure an independent New Vegas free of external rule. This means expelling both the Legion and the NCR.
The interesting thing about this ending is the flexibility. Siding with Yes Man gives the Courier the most freedom to handle situations and factions the way they want. Join the Brotherhood of Steel, or destroy them? Upgrade the Securitrons at the Fort or destroy them? Yes Man is a sycophant by design, so he can’t say anything negative about your choices, even if he wanted to.
Dealing with the Legion
Progress far enough with Yes Man’s Wildcard quests and you will fail “Beware the Wrath of Caesar” and the Legion will no longer work with you. More than that, they want revenge and will send hit squads after you. The Legion are not very tolerant of those who would work against them.
This means you will most likely fight the final Battle on the side of NCR, fighting against the Legion as you make your way across Hoover Dam. Eventually you will reach the Legate’s camp and prepare to confront the Butcher of the East. Here’s where there’s a problem.
You Must Have Frontal Lobe Damage
At the beginning of the game, you use a machine to set your SPECIAL statistics. Afterwards, Doc Mitchell will make a comment depending on your most extreme stat. For most players, it’s likely to be him muttering about you suffering frontal lobe damage, due to having the lowest possible Charisma stat of 1. There’s a reason for this.
New Vegas, like all the Fallout games, uses stat and skill checks to determine your success in certain actions. Things like pickpocketing, repairing a broken machine or convincing an NPC through speech checks. In Fallout 3, the chance to succeed was calculated using your Speech skill level and a Charisma multiplier, which means even with high skills and stats, there was a chance to fail the most difficult checks.
Along came New Vegas, where they got rid of the Charisma multiplier, so your chance to succeed was simply determined by having your skills above a certain threshold. This meant that Charisma is pointless. This is purely game mechanics, but it matters because you can still max out Speech at 100 points and pass any speech check in the game.
So you confront Legate Lanius, the Butcher of the East. A man so fearsome and violent, he turned on his own men when they refused to fight any more. And a Courier with the lowest possible Charisma can talk him out of the Mojave by telling him that NCR is too big for the Legion to hold, if they want to hold on to their territory to the East as well.
You don’t have to, of course, if you’d rather just fight him. But the thing everyone loves about this game is the freedom of choice at every turn. You can complete the entire game as a pacifist, killing nothing. You can kill every NPC in the game, except Yes Man. Killing Caesar does not stop you from completing the game on the side of the Legion. No, really.
You And What Army?
You’ve dealt with Legate Lanius, whichever way you chose to do so. The Legion will leave the Dam alone. Fantastic work. On your way out of the camp, the gate is blown off its hinges and a handful of NCR Rangers approach, along with General Oliver. Like Lanius, you have probably heard this guys name mentioned but you don’t meet either of them until the endgame.
General Oliver is impressed and wants to clone you to defeat all of NCRs enemies. Until you tell him that the NCR is not welcome in Vegas any longer and you will be taking charge of the Dam. Or, if you destroyed the Securitrons at the Fort, you will have sabotaged the Dam so nobody wants it. Yes Man appears behind the General, who is angry and threatens you. Again, you could fight, but the other option is to have Yes Man throw him off the Dam.
Afterwards, Yes Man tells you he found a software upgrade for himself, to be more assertive, so he’ll be out of commission for a while. You are left to see an ending slideshow of the outcome of your actions throughout the game. Every faction you had dealings with will get a slide, as will any companions you recruited. The ending they get depends on how you handled things.
The thing I like is that no matter what, no ending is 100% perfect. I find the independent ending the best for the Mojave, but there is still some chaos following the second Battle of Hoover Dam. Goodsprings also does well out of this ending. Others, maybe not so much, depending on what you chose to do.
No Masters – My Thoughts
For me, I like this ending the best for Vegas, as I said. The Legion are clearly the villains, and the NCR represents a society that is as vulnerable to corruption as our current society. Mr House wants to resurrect the Old World to his liking, resurrecting capitalism. A world he did very well out of.
The residents of Vegas don’t really seem to want an outside power coming in and taking over. The Dam produces far more electricity than Vegas needs, but if we allowed the NCR to continue to use it, would they demand more and more of it as their territory grew? At what point would we end up with a system where the power must be paid for, and private companies would start profiting and excluding people who couldn’t pay.
Both Legate Lanius and General Oliver state that this isn’t over, assuming you didn’t fight them. Clearly they have no intention of letting Vegas be, so there’s always a risk of another conflict. War, war never changes. Men do, by the roads they walk. The road has ended for this Courier, so next time we’ll be returning to the crossroads and venturing into Alternative Universe B, where we decide to side with Mr House.
Thanks for reading. If you want to follow along with me in the game, I’ve got full coverage on my YouTube Channel, which you can find below. The video that matches this article is here. I’m also working on some science episodes, covering Wasteland entomology. The first episode, covering Cazadores, drops tomorrow. I’d love it if you would check it out.
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