Re: Brotherhood at your service Kids must lap that stuff up. "Look mom I'm the heee-ro!" I felt utterly un-heroic, as I gunned down mentally deficient raiders and "super" mutants. I couldn't imagine that anyone would have been particularly impressed with my exploits in the main quest either. After all, the sum total of my activities had been to run from point A to point B via C,D,E (etc), doing nothing particularly special at any of them. So when the BoS start saying "We love you Randy, make love to me Randy" I couldn't help but think my character must be dreaming.
I agree that the Outcasts should have had a much larger role in the game. A quest that would allow you to join the Outcasts(in a quest that would be in the same vein as F1) would have been sweet, as well as a quest to reunite the factions by either killing Lyons or Casdin, among other possible solutions. Like convincing the BoS sympathetic to the Outcasts' decision to actually leave as well. One example of a ingame consequence would be less BoS outposts in DC(GNR getting overrun? sweet) and more Outcast patrols and outposts around tech sites in the wasteland.(Maybe even a mission clearing Talon company out of fort bannister) Also, I think some people are forgetting though that Outcasts are very small in comparision to other D.C. factions. It was a minority of Lyons' troops that decided to continue the true BoS mission. And they refuse to replenish their ranks with locals as well. There's only a handful of guys at Fort Independence. And their patrols are not nearly as expansive as Lyons' faction's are.
I ran into one as far away as Oasis. That's a lot of ground to cover. It's weird to hear they drop evil fingers when killed, by the way. The Outcasts don't seem like bad guys, just ambivalent guys. Also, I noticed that the BoS computers in the Pentagon mention the NCR state of Maxson, so I'm guessing that if the war from Van Buren happened, we know who won.
Just throwing this out there: I am a fan of the entire postapocalyptic genre, in whatever form. Throughout the genre, be it Road Warrior or The Road, I've found hope to be the main underlying factor...hope or the lack of it, anyway. I'm just sayin'...