Fallout: New Vegas lead writer worries Caesar’s argument for authoritarianism ‘was done a little too well,’ but still believes ‘you can’t just make your tyrants cardboard villains’

If you’ve played New Vegas, you’re familiar with Caesar’s Legion. Slavedriving, overtly fascistic, and wrapped in the aesthetics of the Roman Empire⁠—but with football pads instead of lorica segmentata. It seems like the kind of faction that would be hard to present as anything but one-dimensional, abject evil.

As it turns out, giving the faction’s leader some real substance—even allowing him to make his case in full—was lead writer John Gonzalez’s precise objective, though he sometimes worries he did too good a job on that front.

“[I had] to write a character who had tried to present a robust argument for authoritarianism,” he told PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield. But now, after seeing the rise of fascist movements in the intervening 15 years? “I was like, could we back off of that now?”

“One of the things about writing fiction, if you’re going to try to write it in a way that’s not preaching to a choir, or that’s not propaganda,” Gonzalez argued, “is that you have to try to make your adversaries as strong as possible.

“If you want to write a story where one of your main themes is actually freedom, like liberty from tyranny, you can’t just make your tyrants cardboard villains. You have to make them as substantial as possible in some way. That was really the driving force with Caesar, but occasionally I’ve wondered if that was done a little too well.”

If you haven’t played New Vegas, you can meet with Caesar directly and pick his brain at length. He is a cruel nationalist and imperialist, but remarkably well spoken⁠—partially owed to his education with the ironically humanist, pacifist faction, The Followers of the Apocalypse⁠—and backs up his every action with detailed, if heartless and objectionable, political theory.

“Long-term stability at all costs,” Caesar says in a notably self-serving and subjective assessment of the Pax Romana, Rome’s golden age. “The individual has no value beyond his utility to the state, whether as an instrument of war, or production.”

It’s almost comical how deep the rabbit hole goes (the norm for Obsidian RPGs). When Caesar cites Hegelian dialectics, the player character can ask, “‘Hegelian dialectics?’ What’s that?” and receive Caesar’s full, if highly debatable and biased, explanation. Gonzales gives credit to Josh Sawyer for that bit, though: “I don’t know that you can spend a whole day with Josh without hearing about Hegelian dialectics.”

When PC Gamer’s Litchfield mentioned he went down this rabbit hole with Caesar at only 15, before he had even heard terms like “dialectical materialism,” Gonzales laughed and replied, “Hopefully … we don’t have to exculpate you from some kind of flirtation with dictatorship or authoritarianism.”

It’s easy to see where Gonzalez’s unease comes from. You can still see social media threads pop up every now and again trying to make a case for Caesar’s ideals and actions, and we all exist only a few clicks away from a Discord server where some nasty freak is proudly rocking a Caesar’s Legion profile picture while putting the most vile things you’ve ever heard in writing.

While every Fallout game’s story has intense political implications (it’s literally set in the ruins of society), none hold so close a lens up to the warring philosophies in the wasteland as New Vegas. For more from this interview, Gonzalez also spoke at length about Mr. House, another New Vegas character he wrote, and the robotics mogul’s disturbing resonance with modern Silicon Valley magnates.

You can also hear more from Gonzalez and other Fallout developers in a series retrospective in the upcoming issue of PC Gamer’s print magazine. Read all about videogames, without ruining your sleep schedule with blue light! What will they think of next?

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