From the Fallout Wiki:

"RE: Caesar’s Karma being neutral: I believe at the time my rationale for that Karma setting is that Caesar is in a Mr. Kurtz-like state of unmoored morality. Whatever moral framework he had as Edward Sallow among the Followers has disintegrated after years of being Caesar. I.e., it’s not so much that his Karma is neutral as much as it is alien. That said, I don’t feel strongly about that designation and largely feel that the Karma system was vestigial in New Vegas. If we’re trying to encourage players to form their own opinions about factions and individuals, having a design layer that assigns (essentially) alignment is weird."

"I'm sure individual players might want to engage in ranking atrocities -- something I've never really found was productive in discussions about history -- but Caesar and his crew in the same league as other brutal warlords. He was inspired (on our end) by people like Charles Taylor, Timur, and Simon de Montfort (the crusader). "Caesar" is a persona he adopted, but he effectively operates as a warlord with no regard for individual human lives outside of how he can use them."

I think Josh Sawyer confused karma with alignment.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's not his fault. Fallout 3 use Karma as alignment in a very heavy handed way, while the system in FOI and FOII was much more nuanced and more about consequences than morality. FONV was built on the FOIII engine and I assume the karma system carried over.