EPTAs yet another installment of my ongoing "I have too much time on my hands" series, here's my thoughts on the DLCs, whether they were good/bad. Hopefully not too many spoilers, but if you haven't played and plan to play you may not want to read this.
Dead Money: 3.5 / 5
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/XMktN.jpg)
The ghost of e-sports future
Dead Money is the first DLC released for Fallout: New Vegas. You, the courier, arrive at the abandoned Sierra Madre casino minus all of your equipment plus one bomb collar around your neck. You then spend the rest of the DLC running around doing errands for the person who put the collar around your neck in the first place until in the end, you confront that person and defeat him to save your own ass.
This DLC is basically New Vegas' take on the Survival Horror genre using the Fallout 3 engine. As such, it makes several interesting design choices that weren't very well received by game review companies, though one can easily see why the choices were made.
The Pros: This is by far the most compelling of the DLCs for F:NV. The pacing is a good mix of action, stealth, and character interactions. By forcing you to start the DLC without any of your equipment, the game is free to force you to play the way it wants you to. You are a rat stuck in a maze both as a player and as the character in the game. Ammunition, guns, and health are all rare enough that you never quite feel safe in the game, adding to the atmosphere and sense of tension. This tension along with the dark and dreary atmosphere is very effective in creating a real sense of danger that keeps one on the edge of one's seat for the entire duration of the DLC.
You also get a separate set of companions for this DLC, since you cannot import companions from the Mojave. They are initially all split up in a way that you must recruit them on individual quests, "Samurai Seven" style. These companions all have bomb collars just like you, giving weight to the sense of team work that you're all in it together. Unfortunately, you can only have one companion follow you at any given time, which feels a bit contrived.
The Cons The first 20% of this DLC is not too difficult, since the game is walking you through the ropes of how it's gonna be for the rest of the game. The last 80% of the game, however, relies on a strangely ancient game play mechanic, that of trial and error. While the mechanic itself isn't a con per se, it is definitely a strange direction to take when the rest of F:NV (and most games today) no longer use this mechanic in their game designs.
Here's what I mean. One obstacle in the game is that certain radios and speakers in the game emit the same frequency as that attached to your bomb collar's communication device. If you venture near these radios or speakers, your collar will beep with increasing speed until it explodes, which is instant death no matter how much health you have. A lot of the time the challenges of the DLC involve having your collar start beeping with no radio or speaker in sight, and you need to find it before your collar goes off. This leads to a lot of quick saving along with "suicide trial runs" into the new area to try to find the damn radio before your head explodes.
This type of level design breaks the immersion of a game where you do not have multiple lives and you are supposed to be able to take your time to figure out everything on the first go. It is a faster, "lazier" way to challenge players than to take the time to design good, elaborate puzzles for a player to solve.
Overall this isn't a bad DLC, but it's one of those games that you don't ever feel like going back to again after playing through it the first time.
Honest Hearts: 3.5 / 5
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You're gonna need that many guns given how fast those things degrade in Fallout
Honest Hearts is a rather fast play through, with maybe 5-6 hours of game play. You run around with a bunch of Native American-like tribes in some Badlands-esque canyon in the middle of Utah, and eventually end up deciding the fates of two tribes, whether to flee the area or to stay and fight the invading White Legs tribe. Unlike Dead Money, you are allowed to carry equipment into the area, albeit limited to 70 pounds (100 if you pass a Survival check).
The premises of the DLC is interesting, since you travel to Zion (a place near the Salt Lake in Utah) to explore the legends of the Burned Man, who was supposed to be the first Legate of Caesar (general of all his troops). He was set on fire and tossed down a canyon for his defeat by the NCR during the first battle of Hoover's dam. He allegedly survives and is now in Utah.
SPOILERS AHEAD What you really end up getting is a Mormon dressed as a mummy who likes to use .45 semiautomatics. Granted, the art direction makes him look pretty badass, but it's pretty anticlimactic considering he was the fucking right hand man of Caesar.
Anyhow, the game play features a lot of fetch quests in the new canyon setting. The scenery is quite beautiful, but the game play doesn't drive you anywhere and doesn't invoke any feeling of urgency or weight. You never get attached to any of the tribes and there aren't many unique characters to interact with. Not terrible, not amazing either.
In the end I chose to help the tribes fight those White Legs, but spared their leader so he can lead the remnants of his ragtag tripe out of Zion (100 Speech skill, like a bawss).
Old World Blues: 4 / 5
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/v21Uw.jpg)
Secret dialogue unlocked when you play as http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=288344.
Structurally Old World Blues isn't so different from Honest Hearts. It's a series of fetch quests in an open-ended area that leads to a final confrontation (with a plot twist somewhere in the middle), except this time it's in a 1950's science type setting instead of a red rock canyon.
In some ways, the game play aspect is even worse than Honest Hearts because of how broken the pacing is. There is frequent and constant combat both on the overworld and inside dungeons, while much of the dialogue interactions are also concentrated into their own isolated segments so you have long periods of combat and long periods of dialogue instead of it all being properly spaced out.
The combat itself is also more tedious than in the main game. High hitpoint enemies spawn abundantly (often directly in front of you out of thin air). I entered this DLC with my level in the high 40's and with tens of thousands of stockpiled ammunition. I ended up expending probably 30% of my entire stockpile playing through this DLC, including some 4000 rounds of 12.7mm ammunition, probably more than all the rounds I had fired in the main game up to that point.
What really redeems this DLC, and actually makes it the best of the bunch, is the abundant and brilliantly funny dialogue. There is about three times as much dialogue in this DLC as in the previous ones. Hell, the 15 minutes or so of the DLC is spent talking to the main characters of the game, but it never feels boring or overly dramatized. If you liked Sheogorath in the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion (tbh I thought he was only mediocre), the dialogue here is even better.
The dialogue alone is more than enough to make this DLC a compelling playthrough despite the problems with combat and pacing. This reinforces the fact that cleverly placed humor can always make even the most mediocre movies/games/books more worthwhile.
Lonesome Road: 3 / 5
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/1CBvp.jpg)
Is he a badass walking towards the sunset or an idiot who can't see the bridge is out ahead? You tell me.
Well, all the stories in the main game and the DLCs refer to this one. This was supposed to be the big finale to the player-character's story, the Courier. Was it worth it?
You can probably tell by the score the answer was "nah, not really". Much of the story is told by the courier Ulysses (not to be confused with the player-Courier, henceforth known as Courier Six) through vague monologues that sound weighty but ultimately don't mean anything. Even in the end, I was still a bit baffled by what the story really was all about.
SPOILERS AHEAD From what I can gather, Ulysses is a courier who had settled once on the land known as the "Great Divide". Then you came along with a package and destroyed the place much in the same way Cecil destroyed the mist village in FFIV (a cookie to those who get the reference) in a probably nuclear-related accident. Now Ulysses is pissed. He became a courier who works for the opposite faction that you decide to work for in the main game, and he attempts to launch a series of nuke at your faction (NCR/Legion) as revenge for your destruction of the Divide.
You are called to the Divide by Ulysses the courier, fighting through environmental hazards, mercenaries, and native life to stop his attempt to launch a nuclear attack at the faction you work for. The DLC is a linear journey 4-5 hours in length. The scenery is quite impressive, mostly ruined cities. At one point you travel through a stretch of elevated highway in the middle of ruined skyscrapers, and at another point you travel through a fissure filled with fallen skyscrapers presumably caused by an earthquake set off by underground nuclear detonations.
Traveling along with you for the mission is another eye robot (also named ED-E). ED-E's character is a mix between R2-D2 and a dog in that it responds expressively with happy/sad beeps depending on how you treat it in dialogues. However, I didn't really find myself attached to the new ED-E at all, probably because the character design is like a spiky sputnik satellite and not that adorable. In the end the new ED-E sacrifices itself to stop the nuclear launch (presumably there are other endings, but this is probably the "canon" ending), which isn't that surprising since story wise it serves no function whatsoever once you've killed Ulysses and stopped the launch. The game isn't big enough for two ED-Es.
So linear structure, average combat, confusing story that tries too hard to sound epic but fails. The combat design for this DLC is somewhat noteworthy. The best mechanic is the addition of this nuclear detonator which you can use and aim at live nuclear warheads scattered through the DLC, which allows you to set off the nukes to unlock new areas of the map. It is quite fun to play around with and to try to spot warheads to detonate. The shitty part of the combat design is that enemies sometimes insta-spawn close to you, suddenly appearing as red blips on your radar that weren't there before, forcing a lot of messy gunfights. Even if you are the stealthy type who prefers to sneak around picking off enemies from a distance, most enemies are placed in such a way (behind walls and buildings) that it is impossible to surprise them before they detect you, making even 100 sneak points useless.
Epilogue
Even though individually the DLCs don't rate that highly, as a whole package I'd rate them at about a 4 / 5. They add a lot of diversity to Fallout: New Vegas' gameplay, which is already one of the best single player gaming experiences out there. I recommend the DLCs to anyone who has played New Vegas and would rate it an 8.8/10 or higher.
. i had that logans loophole trait plus daytripper and all the perks that extended chem duration. pretty sure it lasted a good 30seconds-1min
