Do you think Ulysses was written well?

[Vex Hilarius]

Personally I think he's one of the most pretentious characters in the game and honestly stains how well written other major characters in the base game and other dlc are.

I do like his final message about how men must change and if not nuclear war will happen again but other than that, what a mess.

I also think he brings down Lonesome Road, which would be my 2nd or even favorite dlc for NV if he wasn't in it.

I feel like the writers just decided to use a cut companion and try to mesh it another planned character and the result became Ulysses.

[Danny]

He's just a sad little hippy man, who blames your character for destroying the place he wanted to call home.
And for what?! Your character just doing their flipping JOB as a courier!

Talk about shooting the messenger...
His anger is completely misdirected, he should be angry at the person who HIRED your character to deliver that package.

[Akasaki]

"hey you are a ♥♥♥♥ so I gonna bomb the wasteland"
"...But... Why ??"
"Because f-ck you that's why !!!"

[Mr_Faorry]

He's awful for all the same reasons Kreia from Kotor 2 is but with a few extra thrown in too. Also to go beyond his ♥♥♥♥♥♥ character he's also the vehicle through which the game forces a full backstory on your character who previously had none which severly limited roleplay opportunities actively harming the rest of the game since you could no longer be whoever you wanted you had to be a career courier from California with Amnesia.

He was originally meant to be a companion who was tied to most of the game (literally just Kreia) but was thankfully cut because his 15,000 lines of dialogue made the game too big, so count your blessings and all because it could have been so much worse.

[Danny]

Originally posted by Mr_Faorry:

Also to go beyond his ♥♥♥♥♥♥ character he's also the vehicle through which the game forces a full backstory on your character who previously had none which severly limited roleplay opportunities actively harming the rest of the game since you could no longer be whoever you wanted you had to be a career courier from California with Amnesia.

I disagree on the FULL forced backstory.
The base game already suggests your character being a bit of a career courier.
As the list of couriers for delivery of the platinum chip was carefully made by Mr House.

Do you really think Mr House would let a rookie courier deliver the most important piece of his master plan?!

Besides, Ulyssses really just says your character travelled around a bit.
And that your character was the first to find a route through the divide.
Very easy to build around that.

[psychotron666]

Yeah, I agree. Chris avellone was at the point in his career where he's been hearing he's the greatest writer ever and I think he just phoned it in cus in his mind whatever he touches turns to gold. This is definitely one of the low points of his career

[Vali Riversong]

God no, he's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ whinny and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and talks for hours and hours about ♥♥♥♥ no one cares about so he can justify bombing your home in the NCR, which really lacks any substance if you aren't an NCR aligned character. He is like, one of the most pretentious self-righteous person I've met in a game.

[Scheneighnay]

Originally posted by Danny:

Talk about shooting the messenger...

You're thinking Benny

[ccostigan]

I have some friends who go hiking solo and stuff like that a lot. He's wordy because he hasn't talked to anybody in weeks or months. He's walked the world his entire life, and that changes a man.

I'm not justifying how snobbish he is or how he lives in his own little world, but it's not an abnormal thing to see happen. All humans get a little nutty when they don't talk to other people.

I think he's well-written because his character gets that point across though.

[PopCultureReference]

You guys just don't understand history

[psychotron666]

Originally posted by PopCultureReference:

You guys just don't understand history

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Ulysses. The nuance is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the words will go over a typical player's head. There's also Ulysses's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these dialogues, to realise that they're not just deep- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Ulysses truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the intelligence in Ulysses's existential catchphrase "bear.. and the bull..." which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Chris avellone's genius wit unfolds itself on their screens. What fools.. how I pity them. 😂

And yes, by the way, i DO have an Ulysses tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid 😎

[Yang Xiao Long: Ace Attorney]

I just finished Lonesome Road today and I f*cking hated Ulysses. I'm surprised because I generally like Avellones writing (I love Kreia, for example) but I just felt so...detached. Like, he was being a prick about stuff that I didn't even do, and he didn't make room for debate. I could never shut him up or talk things out with him (it didn't help that the whole dlc was a linear dungeon gauntlet with little story whatsoever). Even his motivation and "master plan" felt like that from a petulant 5 years old kid whos really angry.

I'm surprised I didn't even have to kill him in the end. I really, REALLY wanted to just shot him but that's not the way I roll, yet I thought he wouldn't listen to me. I told him some silly stuff and suddenly "YOU ARE RIGHT WE SHOULD STICK TOGETHER LETS GOOO" instant friend. I was tempted to reload and just shoot him but meh.

[Mr_Faorry]

Originally posted by Tomise Jedisu ゴゴゴゴ:

I'm surprised I didn't even have to kill him in the end. I really, REALLY wanted to just shot him but that's not the way I roll, yet I thought he wouldn't listen to me. I told him some silly stuff and suddenly "YOU ARE RIGHT WE SHOULD STICK TOGETHER LETS GOOO" instant friend. I was tempted to reload and just shoot him but meh.

Fun fact but I've never actually heard his final conversation nor do I have any want to, first time I played I decided to be a meme a shoot him in the back of the head with the AMR expecting him to be invincible until after you speak with him like he is in all his previous appearances throughout the dlc.
I've done that every playthrough since for the sake of my ears.

[veldt]

Originally posted by ccostigan:

I have some friends who go hiking solo and stuff like that a lot. He's wordy because he hasn't talked to anybody in weeks or months. He's walked the world his entire life, and that changes a man.

I'm not justifying how snobbish he is or how he lives in his own little world, but it's not an abnormal thing to see happen. All humans get a little nutty when they don't talk to other people.

I think he's well-written because his character gets that point across though.

Disclaimer: I am obviously biased, take everything I say with a grain of salt.

This is correct. He had just enough interaction to learn English but not enough to get past his native language's quirks. And even were that not the case, as you mentioned he doesn't even need to not be a native English speaker.

There's more to why he acts weird, though.
His tribe was assimilated by the Legion and he probably knew a few if not many of the people that were killed. He survived a nuclear detonation [multiple at once, it seems] by pure chance. He spent years looking for something, anything worthy of placing his hope in after the Divide and never found it. After all that, he's completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up and his tone of voice even reflects this. [Well, his most common one. There are exceptions.] By the time you meet him, he's basically a bunch of disjointed bits. Him being completely nuts is to be expected in all honesty.
Some other things to note: he has a full personality, likes & dislikes + all of his SPECIALs are very heavily implied to be high long before you meet him. And that's just through dialogue and physical evidence. There's no "Ulysses disliked that" message in the top corner holding your hand, looking at you FO4 and your horrible writing.
I would go into detail about the above [since it sounds like "BUHUHU but he has a personality!!" the way I put it...] but I don't feel like anyone here particularly wants to sit and read that.

I'm not saying that he isn't Avellone's mouthpiece, though. He absolutely is. And he is placing his blame on the wrong person, but it was all he had to go off of. He doesn't even know the Enclave's responsible unless you use ED-E to talk him down and even in that event he still doesn't really 'know,' just that it was remnants of America in Navarro & that the emblem on the package represented them.
Nothing more than a cut companion that was reused? Probably true, but it got LR finished faster because the antagonist was already mostly done. Waste not, want not. F:NV in and of itself is largely a reused idea too, as you know.

He wants to nuke the NCR because he sees a reset as the only option to allow for a new nation to rise. He's so out of it that he doesn't stop to consider that you could help to birth another the same way you helped the Divide to get on its feet [or that you could change the NCR / Legion] unless you go down the speech path during the confrontation.
As he says himself he also wants you to know how he feels. Yes, that part of his plan falls flat on its face if you don't care about the NCR. But it also likely spells doom for the Legion & House just by blocking off NCR access, since the Legion thrives on war and wants to take New Vegas. He doesn't need to nuke both the Legion & NCR, just one or the other. And aiming his missiles at House wouldn't work, so he has to look elsewhere.
The Long 15 is a good option: by getting the NCR out of the Mojave, he can destroy House and speed the Legion to its death plus get rid of the NCR's electricity. And the NCR won't throw everything it has at the Divide to rip him out of it since he didn't aim his missiles at a densely populated location. They'll be hunting him for a while, but they'll eventually give up and assume he's dead. It's probably the best place he could've chosen.
His plan is somewhat sound, but it's definitely not ethical.

Written well? Yes. He's a very good representation of someone who's lost all their will to live + someone who hasn't had much interaction with other people. And he has more depth than that, too.
Generally likable? Well... no. Hell no. You're meant to hate him.
He's a surprisingly realistic person but it doesn't mean you're obligated to like him. I don't blame a single person here for wanting him dead. But it's not an issue of the writing's quality, it's a matter of opinion. For example, I want to kill Caesar every single time I see him but it's not because he's written poorly. Awful person =/= badly written character.


TL;DR: he's a character with pretty good writing, you just hate him and that's fine.

EDIT: fixed a weird sentence.

[Beautiful Ham Sandwich]

I like the idea of him more than anything, but yeah his execution is a bit too much for me to consider him well written. His story is good, but his dialogue reminds me of people who think fancy sounding sentences is all it takes to make good dialogue. Intellectual phrases and words, and constant metaphors gets very tedious and exhausting when it's literally the only thing someone will spout in every dialogue tree.

Which is a shame, his voice is top tier, and we see Joshua Graham doesn't suffer from the same issues, he's able to convey what he means without being unnecessarily cryptic but still mysterious enough.

[The Smoking Gun (TFP).]

Originally posted by psychotron666:

Originally posted by PopCultureReference:

You guys just don't understand history

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Ulysses. The nuance is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the words will go over a typical player's head. There's also Ulysses's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these dialogues, to realise that they're not just deep- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Ulysses truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the intelligence in Ulysses's existential catchphrase "bear.. and the bull..." which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Chris avellone's genius wit unfolds itself on their screens. What fools.. how I pity them. 😂

And yes, by the way, i DO have an Ulysses tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid 😎

Bad guys waffle on so good guys have time to shoot them in face. Yeah it's really high IQ writing for sure.