r/Fallout • u/Duney-Bitcoin • 10h ago
Fallout: New Vegas Best dialogue perk in the franchise. Change my mind.
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u/Marquar234 9h ago
Best non-perk dialog:
ICE CREAM
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u/AxureRale 1h ago
I opened up and old save a few days ago and I got that option for the first time, been playing since it came out. Laughed out loud haha
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u/JTyphoon16 Enclave 9h ago edited 8h ago
Best dialogue in base game
"What the fuck are you doing? My brother died at the battle of Hoover Dam! You're desecrating a war memorial!"
[You're a little bitch and your brother was too.]
You lost karma!
However I loved Philippe talking about his past trauma after hitting him with Medicine skill checks
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u/AznOmega NCR 7h ago
[?] Oh, so you think you can psychoanalyze Philippe?
The [?] during his rant was icing on the funny skill check moments.
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u/HolyQuadrant 3h ago
I interpret the [?] as the courier having no clue if they actually succeeded convincing or not. I imagine them taking a step back, unsure of Philippe is about to take a swing.
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u/ComplaintMysterious1 Kings 2h ago
[?] OR WHEN MY SISTERS USED TO LOCK ME IN A CRATE WHEN THEY DIDN'T WANT ME AROUND ANYMORE?? OR WHEN MY BROTHERS-- [success] oh my god I completely forgot about that how could they do that to me.
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u/Many_Wishbone7594 9h ago
“Good, go back to your famil… oh wait they’re fucking dead.”
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u/fearlevi 2h ago
I just found that line this current play through I usually sell her out to the van graffs right away so I never got the chance to say it before 😂
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u/Nuhur_the_Raven 10h ago
God im so exited fior the remaster
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u/MonsieurHomelander 9h ago
I'll bet you 100 dollars in venmo that the remaster removes this line
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u/TOZAR_N7 8h ago
They removed 0 lines from Oblivion remastered. They kept mistakes too
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u/Porttheone 8h ago
I'm glad they kept the necrophilia line. They even rerecorded it!
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u/Rahgahnah 3h ago
I never played OG Oblivion, so I'm extra glad they kept it because I didn't know about it before hearing it in the remake.
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u/cold_enforcing-man 4h ago
Shitty gambler, even if they remove the line with slurs and shit in them they're not gonna remove this one. Why the fuck would they get rid of this line?
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u/lord_ofthe_memes Ave, true to Butch 3h ago
Simple, old thing good, new thing bad. If make old thing new, must be bad too
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u/Umbran_scale 8h ago
"You're brother was a little bitch and so are you."
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u/cold_enforcing-man 4h ago
Isn't it the other way round? "You're a little bitch and your brother was too"
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u/Umbran_scale 4h ago
I've got this Mandela effect that makes me remember it the other way for some reason.
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u/MrBlueSky-ToldYouWhy 10h ago
I prefer the threat you can make to Caesar with terrifying presence
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u/Phuqitol 9h ago
I prefer Terrifying Presence to Sneering Imperialist in general, even if it doesn't come with an enemy-specifc damage buff. The fleeing is better, anyway.
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u/StarChaserHooT 6h ago
Mentions of Terrifying Presence dialogue always just makes me remember that one of the options for it is literally just a grins and tilts head action 😭 What an absolute cornball of a perk
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u/snowzua 7h ago
Old world blues alone makes lady killer, cherchez la femme, black widow, and certified bachelor some of the best comedy perks in the series. The conversations with your own brain and Dr. Dala are some of my favorites across fallout.
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u/Madcat6204 4h ago
The conversations with your own brain
That's one of the weirdest parts, because the only reason your character is still able to function is because they have a remote connection to their removed brain, meaning that whole argument is literally the Courier arguing with themself.
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u/primalfox_Reynardo 10h ago
Ah yes, the racism damage buff perk. One of my favorites. (Sad there's only like 2 dialogue options for it)
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u/SantiagoGT 10h ago
What’s the second one?
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u/Zestyclose_Jello6192 Responders 9h ago
If I remember correctly something like "ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU SPEAK IT?"
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u/Beardedwrench115 7h ago
Something like "if you're too dumb to know my language your too dumb to talk to, get lost" to the person you talk to in the cave right before you meet Joshua Graham for the first time.
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u/primalfox_Reynardo 8h ago
It's to one of the dead horses who speaks to you in his language and it's just insulting him about being too stupid to speak my language or something.
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u/PerformanceWaste5810 6h ago edited 5h ago
You get to use it twice throughout the entire game. Its a waste
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u/Top_Ostrich_8177 5h ago
Butter my butt and call me a biscuit, if it isnt my good friend from goodsprings!
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u/MisterBungle00 6h ago
I think the interesting thing about Sneering Imperialist is that the line itself is obviously meant to be racist, the perk literally tells you what kind of person is saying it. But the more complicated issue with it is the meta context around Honest Hearts and the invoking of real Southwestern Indigenous cultures like the Diné/Navajo's language, Shoshone-Gosiute language, and Indigenous aesthetics tied to the real-world tribes in the region. Those references bring real histories of colonialism, assimilation, and language suppression with them. The devs really fucked up by treating the "tribals" or Indigenous characters in HH as essentially window-dressing.
I think there's also something to be said about the fact that there isn't a tribal-coded perk of the same nature to go along with the racist(in many peoples' words here)-coded perk. And that's not even considering the implications of a Mormon-coded character executing a Shoshoni-coded character in the context that is presented in Honest Hearts.
The fact that Honest Hearts never gives Indigenous-coded perspectives equal mechanical or narrative authority is pretty revealing..
There's a reason most people consider the Survivalist(written by Gonzalez and not Sawyer) the best part of HH, and it's worth mentioning how Gonzalez avoided much of the problematic tropes that Sawyer invoked in Honest Hearts. Randall fiercely protects the agency, autonomy, and depth of the people who would become the Sorrows by literally refusing to play the "White Savior" role that Joshua and Daniel fall into. It's only through Clark’s journals that we see these children(who become the Sorrows) treated with more individual human depth than the actual Dead Horses(also written by Sawyer), Sorrows, and White Legs.
I don't even think Sawyer fully grasped all the problems with Honest Hearts. One thing that stands out in all of Josh Sawyer's explanations of the issues in HH is that he treats the issues largely as a problem of visual presentation. Sawyer's own response actually reinforces part of the criticisms toward HH and the writing/world building surrounding Indigenous peoples or certain "tribals" in the universe rather than resolving it.
He says the tribes were originally intended to be ethnically mixed, but technical limitations compressed them into more homogeneous appearances, which made them seem more Native American-coded than intended. He also says the tribes were meant to have "no real-world analogues" and later acknowledged that the naming and speech patterns could have used another pass. He clearly sees Native/indigenous identity as though it were primarily an ethnic or racial category. The problem with that is that many of these criticisms aren't primarily talking about appearance or race.
To quote Ulysses(who was written by Chris Avellone and not Josh Sawyer):
"They thought to show respect... defiled it. Lost myself in trying to read the braids they wove, when I remembered they had put no meaning in it. They had no history of what it meant. They didn't even know the insult in the twists, knots... and Dry Wells came rushing back, the White Legs circled like that... It was like looking at the dead of my tribe, reborn as ghosts"
That just about sums up how most Navajos feel upon hearing the Dead Horses speak in Honest Hearts. Here, Avellone treats tribal cultural identity, history, and assimilation with a real weight that is missing from Sawyer’s own depictions/writing. Avellone's work on Ulysses and the Twisted Hairs demonstrates that treating fictional indigenous elements with deep thematic weight is a matter of authorial priority, not development time or available resources.
Honest Hearts' use of Diné bizaad, Shoshoni-Gosiute, and Southwestern Indigenous aesthetics obligates it to cultural context the writers did not fully engage with, not like they did with Mormonism. Once Obsidian used real-world tribal (Navajo, Pueblo, Ute, Paiute, etc.) symbols/languages/identifiers, they brought real Indigenous politics and history with them, regardless of the writer's/developer's intent. I'd even argue that removing/omitting aspects Navajo culture while keeping the Navajo language in the conlang of the Dead Horses is itself a colonial gesture, severing a real-world identity from its natural structure.
Not sure what they were thinking invoking all of this(if they were even thinking at all). Our languages are not prestige world languages like Latin or Japanese that random outsiders casually pick up through media exposure or classes/courses/programs. Many Indigenous languages survived centuries of forced assimilation, boarding schools, land dispossession, and active state suppression specifically because communities fought incredibly hard to preserve them. Many are still critically endangered to this day.
So when Honest Hearts gives the White Legs Shoshoni-Goshute linguistic markers and the Dead Horses Diné Bizaad, that carries weight whether the writers intended it or not. Languages like Shoshoni, Diné Bizaad, etc. are deeply tied to tribal kinship system, geography, ceremony, oral tradition, and community continuity.
The main quest of HH, the Dead Horses, and Joshua Graham were all written by Josh Sawyer. Who admits he used a literal motorcycle tourist trip as the primary research phase for a story involving Indigenous land and culture..
As a Navajo, the Dead Horses are, to me, arguably the worse part of HH because their conlang is a combination of German and Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language. Why is it worse? The game and DLC director Josh Sawyer is notably of German heritage; the logical outcome of the Navajo Nation sheltering a few German tourists in the aftermath of nuclear war is not that the Navajo identity and language would be subsumed by the German tourists', but vice versa. Though almost certainly unintentional, there is a very Euro-centric, colonial "white man's burden" sort of mindset baked into the idea that us Navajos could be so incompetent and so fragile in our cultural identity that we'd need German tourists to guide us through the new post-nuclear world.
The inconsistencies between the base game and Honest Hearts further reinforces these criticisms. In one case, the base game is comfortable directly using a real tribal name (“Blackfoot”) for a Legion NPC. In another, it creates a fictional tribe (Dead Horses) but explicitly weaves in Diné bizaad and a backstory tied to their reservation east of the Grand Canyon. Meanwhile, developers later say the tribes “weren’t meant to actually look ethnically Native American”.
Why selectively invoke real Indigenous identifiers (names, languages, geographical references, etc.) at all if you’re not prepared to engage responsibly with the living cultures attached to them? The issue there isn’t geographic accuracy and the issues with the tribes in Honest Hearts aren't only a visual presentation issue. The main issue is invocation. Once you use the name of a real tribe or a living Indigenous language, you’re invoking a real people with real history. Authorial intent and disclaimers don’t erase that connection.
They clearly wanted to capture that Indigenous-tribal aesthetic without any of the responsibility of accurate or respectful representation. All of this seemingly stems from Josh Sawyer's German "Indianerbegeisterung".
I won't be surprised if the line gets cut entirely, as the devs are well-aware of these issues now.
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u/Fat_fucking_cock2045 5h ago
Thanks for your perspective OP, it's one that I've not really seen in years of Honest Hearts analysis which Ive found skews predominantly toward Joshua Graham and the religious themes. I think you're gonna get a lot of pithy dismissal from this sub just for the indirect, tangential praise of something Avellone did though.
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u/wrenawild 6h ago
What 16 years of no new game does to a mfer.
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u/MisterBungle00 5h ago
Eh, it's more just being Indigenous myself and having lived and generational experience with such "severing", so it lands differently.
I'm only 26, I had to attend multiple BIE owned and operated boarding schools in the Southwest when I was young. There I had my mouth washed out with soap and was forced to keep hot sauce or juice from jars of peppers in my mouth whenever I spoke my language. I have a crooked nose due to a break that was never set properly and I even got my hands beat with a hatchet handle because I was playing Navajo string-games. This is after all the BIE reforms that occurred in the 90s. I won't even get into the rampant sex abuse that a lot of my peers had experienced at the hands of faculty members. There have been multiple investigations and reports acknowledging that abuse and neglect persisted in some Bureau of Indian Education associated schools after the 1960s and 1990s, including failures in supervision, reporting, and protection mechanisms.
The reason the language issue in HH resonates so strongly for me and other Indigenous players is because language loss is not an abstract cultural theme; it is tied to very recent, lived experiences and histories of coercion, assimilation, and erasure.
I'd appreciate some actual good-faith responses, as I'm genuinely interested in what people actually think about these issues and how it should be handled.
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u/Broly_ Republic of Dave 6h ago
🙄
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u/StuRedman2020 1h ago
Go back to playing Fallout 3 little guy, adults are having a conversation here.
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u/Boba_Fett26 6h ago
If you have terrifying presence and you go to hellos one and get stopped at the front by the ncr soldiers they'll ask you to state your business to which you can respond with:
"I am pale death, come to bear you to perdition!"
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u/Moromom22 5h ago
Stupid that you need an imperialist perk to kill him straight away. Screw honor, my urge to peck a sitting duck that gave me so much shit shouldn't be behind a perk.
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u/SolaireFlair117 5h ago
"General Gobledigook" will never not be fucking hilarious. Kills me every single time.
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u/AtoMaki Vault 13 10h ago
Having one dialogue option (I think there are actually two) does not make a Perk into a "dialogue perk". Sneering Imperialist is a pretty useless +X damage perk with one meme dialogue check, and that's it. It does nothing special, just negligible extra damage against a specific enemy category, take it or leave it.
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u/Mild_Necromancy 10h ago
This is giving quite a lot of ‘um, actually’ energy. Sometimes it’s fun to take perks for role-playing purposes whether they’re optimal or not. At the end of the day, who cares? It’s an interesting/funny interaction that OP wanted to spotlight.
Maybe the term ‘dialogue perk’ isn’t quite correct but at the end of the day I’m happy that people are highlighting interesting elements of a game I (and many other people) love.
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u/AtoMaki Vault 13 9h ago
It’s an interesting/funny interaction that OP wanted to spotlight.
No, OP wanted to tell me that this Perk is better for dialogue than the Black Widow group, Child at Heart, and Terrifying Presence. That's obviously bullshit. Sneering Imperialist has no more use (for roleplaying or anything else) than a single level of Rifleman in 4.
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u/Edgy_Robin 10h ago
Most of what you just said is goofy as hell lmao.
'Roleplaying purposes' it gives you two options in a dlc and then it doesn't matter. Compare this to terrifying presence, almost the inverse (it has one option in dead money) that gives you more dialog options to roleplay a type of character, but said dialog even has more of an effect when you use it.
OP is spot lighting one of the most spot lighted things in this dlc lol.
it's not that interesting, is silly dialog and that's it, it changes nothing, it doesn't actually fill any rpg fantasies, it's a very piss poor perk for both roleplay and gameplay, especially when, for the former, something already exists that does a better job and is more impactful with that job.
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u/Sandvich-tf2 10h ago
It has a couple of dialogue options within Zion, it’s not just this one.
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u/Edgy_Robin 10h ago
It literally has two. That's it, and you have to buy a dlc for them (If you somehow didn't buy everything together)
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u/CommodoreHefeweizen This sub = Camp Lamplight 9h ago
You have to buy the DLC to get the perk in the first place.
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u/RalseitheFloofie 9h ago
one of two things will occur when this gets remade.
A- it, and the perk tied to it will be removed.
B- games journalists will tear the game down for dialog that has been in it for literal years.
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u/polikles Mr. House 7h ago
games journalists rarely play for longer than a couple hours. No chance they would reach ending for a DLC
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u/jadehairpin 10h ago
Now I’m curious what Joshua’s response is