Fallout New Vegas DLC thread

[Eazy-E]

What do people think of New Vegas DLC? I personally think they are all frankly dull and don't add anything to New Vegas. We routinely hear about Obsidians lack of development time, in regards to the Legion and its lack of side quests/content, something the DLC could and should of addressed. I imagine this as visiting the Legions eastern territories allowing us a new perspective on Caesars rule, the internal politics and lives of non legion people in the amalgamated society of the tribal East. Instead Obsidian gave us Old World Blues, which outside of voice acting feels like fan fictionqesue modded content. The whole place feels "moddy" with new lands out of zone design, not connecting to the rest of the game in the slightest nor resembling the worlds of fallout 1 and 2. Something we see the institute of Fallout 4 rightly maligned for. Offical lore from which be identified the provenance of such modder dross like the Frontierits technology and laser shit. A dlc where your modder types find the impetus for their original lore friendly wank. If this was done correctly it should have been done in the vein of Fallout 2s EPA which is sick and feels other technological facilities found in the setting such as the Glow, Mariposa or the depths of the Cathedral.

My personal fav is honest hearts because it actually deals with people and post apocalyptic society, its not perfect tho and blows questwise

 

[Butter]

Honest Hearts is too ambitious a concept for its limited scope as a DLC. You can't side with the White Legs, the quests are mostly naked fetch quests, and the moral dilemma isn't explored sufficiently so the player is left wondering why you would ever spare the hostile outgroup.

Dead Money is the best of the bunch by far, having a cool location with great backstory, great atmosphere, memorable characters, and interesting gameplay. As a bonus it filters most of the Bethestards because you have to pay attention to your surroundings.

Lonesome Road is a cool concept, but suffers from Chris Avellone's uncontrollable urge to vomit essays at the player. I don't know anyone who actually pays attention to Ulysses when he rambles about the bear and the bull for the tenth time. LR also has an unkillable companion because without that you'd miss out on all the great dialogue. Pure decline.

Old World Blues is basically Reddit in video game form. It appeals to people who liked Fagout 3. The story is nonsense, but it's W A C K Y and exploration-focused.

 

[Jacov]

Dead Money is the best one imo and the favorite of mine. It has great writing with its underlying themes of human nature, greed and change, and solid cast of characters. The experimental gameplay is good: it limits the player and feels like a breath of fresh air. The overall atmosphere and visuals are top notch: decrepit Mexican style villa, Ar Deco casino, both full of ghosts. It's really good, and I like how they have managed to tie in existing Fallout concepts into this casino heist survival horror (nightkins and schizophrenia, BoS and their obsession with tech, ghouls, inhumane pre-war experiments). Casuls hated it, obviously.

Honest Hearts is polarizing to me. The writing is good, I really liked the themes, the characters. But IIRC it was made in a very short period of time by B team while A team was creating Old World Blues (pity). So because of that it has boring open world, boring collectathon quests and almost no c&c. If they'd put those resources into the development of HH instead of OWB we could have had something truly great. But alas.

Old World Blues is fucking weird. I completely agree that it doesn't feel Fallout and the writing is too goofy. It actually looks like a fan mod (comparable to The Frontier: at first glance both are full of stupid weird concepts and out of place sci-fi shit). The gameplay is collectathon with no c&c again, but this time even more tedious. At least Honest Hearts was short with its shit, Old World Blues drags for too much. The only redeeming quality of this one is voice actors — they did amazing job.

Lonesome Road is... Yeah, it's Avellone The Game. Protagonist with amnesia is being asked about the nature of «Bear and Bull». Idk, it's alright. It's a linear shooting gallery with good atmosphere and decent writing. Not much to say tbh.

 

[Eazy-E]

Honest Hearts is too ambitious a concept for its limited scope as a DLC. You can't side with the White Legs, the quests are mostly naked fetch quests, and the moral dilemma isn't explored sufficiently so the player is left wondering why you would ever spare the hostile outgroup.

Dead Money is the best of the bunch by far, having a cool location with great backstory, great atmosphere, memorable characters, and interesting gameplay. As a bonus it filters most of the Bethestards because you have to pay attention to your surroundings.

Lonesome Road is a cool concept, but suffers from Chris Avellone's uncontrollable urge to vomit essays at the player. I don't know anyone who actually pays attention to Ulysses when he rambles about the bear and the bull for the tenth time. LR also has an unkillable companion because without that you'd miss out on all the great dialogue. Pure decline.

Old World Blues is basically Reddit in video game form. It appeals to people who liked Fagout 3. The story is nonsense, but it's W A C K Y and exploration-focused.

Facts brooo, RPG writers love the smell of their own farts a little too much. I wasn't in love with dead money, but it never made me want to reload a save the way old world blues does.

 

[Eazy-E]

Dead Money is the best one imo and the favorite of mine. It has great writing with its underlying themes of human nature, greed and change, and solid cast of characters. The experimental gameplay is good: it limits the player and feels like a breath of fresh air. The overall atmosphere and visuals are top notch: decrepit Mexican style villa, Ar Deco casino, both full of ghosts. It's really good, and I like how they have managed to tie in existing Fallout concepts into this casino heist survival horror (nightkins and schizophrenia, BoS and their obsession with tech, ghouls, inhumane pre-war experiments). Casuls hated it, obviously.

Honest Hearts is polarizing to me. The writing is good, I really liked the themes, the characters. But IIRC it was made in a very short period of time by B team while A team was creating Old World Blues (pity). So because of that it has boring open world, boring collectathon quests and almost no c&c. If they'd put those resources into the development of HH instead of OWB we could have had something truly great. But alas.

Old World Blues is fucking weird. I completely agree that it doesn't feel Fallout and the writing is too goofy. It actually looks like a fan mod (comparable to The Frontier: at first glance both are full of stupid weird concepts and out of place sci-fi shit). The gameplay is collectathon with no c&c again, but this time even more tedious. At least Honest Hearts was short with its shit, Old World Blues drags for too much. The only redeeming quality of this one is voice actors — they did amazing job.

Lonesome Road is... Yeah, it's Avellone The Game. Protagonist with amnesia is being asked about the nature of «Bear and Bull». Idk, it's alright. It's a linear shooting gallery with good atmosphere and decent writing. Not much to say tbh.

Lonesome roads setting is cool it has the day after the apocalypse feel, I like the use of the Highways, simulating my dream massive fallout cityscape; the boneyard of the original made anew by Obsidian. The fatal flaw is the addition of "courier" player backstory, and for me Ed-E is annoying and gay. With Ulysses we deal with the writer self insert 'THIS IS MY ART, LOOK AT THE DEPTH OF MY VIDEO GAME WRITING, IM VERY SMART"

 

[Late Bloomer]

Lonesome Road - A real test of patience. It's the DLC that crawled up inside it own asshole, shit itself out, then asks the player to clean up it's mess. It has a very cool setting, ruined by everything else.

Dead Money - It should have just been it's own game. It simply doesn't belong as part of New Vegas. It is pretentious schlock. Playing through it is like trying to fit a square piece in a triangular hole. It's the Rick and Morty of DLC's, fan disposition included.

Honest Hearts - Great setting. Stayed the most true to the design concept of New Vegas in regards to playability. I don't consider it essential to a New Vegas playthrough. But it is a welcome addition for certain characters I play as.

Old World Blues is basically Reddit in video game form. It appeals to people who liked Fagout 3. The story is nonsense, but it's W A C K Y and exploration-focused.

Old World Blues - My favourite of the bunch. Butter nailed it about it being exploration-focused. Which is why I enjoy it the most. I rather like the wacky parts of Fallout. Again, I don't do any of the DLC's as a mandatory part of playing New Vegas. But Old World Blues is the one I have done the most. I like exploration and cringe inducing humour.

 

[Yosharian]

Honest Hearts is boring
Dead Money is brilliant but flawed, and divisive
Lonesome Roads is pretentious and also boring
Old World Blues is great but it's a little too long and some of the humour grates, especially on a replay

These days when I replay FNV for the hundredth time I often don't bother with any of them

 

[Cologno]

Dead Money or Honest Hearts, the one with Sierra Madre casino, was a fun challenge. IIIRC you get a little advantage when going in with an energy weapons build. Twists and foreshadowing aside, getting that gold out was possible, but a could be a bitch anyway.

 

[NaturallyCarnivorousSheep]

Essential transcore just like the main game.

 

[NotSweeper]

HH has Graham.
DM is ludo.
OWB is reddit.
And LR is pretentious hackery.
Avellone has a 50/50 chance to write kino or pretentious garbage. For every Durance he writes a Grieving Mother. For every Father Elijah - a Ulysses.
Hopefully his false rape accusation tribulations will result in a Dostoyevskian magnum opus. Dosto had the Siberian work camp, Avellone had Karissa Barrows.

Essential transcore just like the main game.

Also this but unironically.

Spoiler

 

[Cologno]

Yeah, Sawyer, given how despised the LGBT shit has become, I wouldn't take credit or coyly hint you had some part in it.

 

[Eazy-E]

HH has Graham.
DM is ludo.
OWB is reddit.
And LR is pretentious hackery.
Avellone has a 50/50 chance to write kino or pretentious garbage. For every Durance he writes a Grieving Mother. For every Father Elijah - a Ulysses.
Hopefully his false rape accusation tribulations will result in a Dostoyevskian magnum opus. Dosto had the Siberian work camp, Avellone had Karissa Barrows.

Essential transcore just like the main game.

Also this but unironically.

Spoiler

is Sawyer a fag or does he just dress like a lesbian school librarian on accident?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Three of the four DLCs made the same mistake of disconnecting the player from the main New Vegas game world, so that once the DLC is started the player cannot return until the main quest of the DLC is completed. Old World Blues at least allowed the player to then travel freely between the DLC environment and the main game world, but for Dead Money and Honest Hearts those DLC worlds become off-limits once you return.

Lonesome Road, despite allowing the player to travel freely between its DLC world and the main New Vegas game world, is easily the worst of the four DLCs. It has terrible, linear level design, a nonsensical backstory (the courier delivered something to the area that somehow triggered nuclear explosions, which are never mentioned in the main game), and had just one NPC (Ulysses) who babbled incoherently, in what must be Avellone's worst character writing ever, via radio transmission before an anticlimactic confrontation in which Ulysses' plan for nuclear devastation can be averted by two or three sentences from the Courier.

Dead Money was an attempt to turn an Open World FPS/RPG hybrid into a survival horror game, with predictable results. Good writing, though.

Honest Hearts at least had an open environment, but there wasn't enough content, and both the NPCs (with the exception of Joshua Graham, the Burned Man) and the main quest were boring (not a surprise, coming from Josh Sawyer).

Old World Blues is easily the best of the four DLCs, as it gives the player a sizeable exterior area to muck about in, with a number of interesting interior locations, including optional areas. The tongue-in-cheek tone is a much better fit for Fallout: New Vegas than the tone of other three DLCs.

 

[Yosharian]

HH has Graham.
DM is ludo.
OWB is reddit.
And LR is pretentious hackery.
Avellone has a 50/50 chance to write kino or pretentious garbage. For every Durance he writes a Grieving Mother. For every Father Elijah - a Ulysses.
Hopefully his false rape accusation tribulations will result in a Dostoyevskian magnum opus. Dosto had the Siberian work camp, Avellone had Karissa Barrows.

Essential transcore just like the main game.

Also this but unironically.

Spoiler

'Cracking eggs'? What the fuck is this coded language

 

[Socrates]

Three of the four DLCs made the same mistake of disconnecting the player from the main New Vegas game world, so that once the DLC is started the player cannot return until the main quest of the DLC is completed. Old World Blues at least allowed the player to then travel freely between the DLC environment and the main game world, but for Dead Money and Honest Hearts those DLC worlds become off-limits once you return.

This is true and my guess is as to why they did it was to somehow mitigate an already bug riddled unstable game.

Lonesome Road, despite allowing the player to travel freely between its DLC world and the main New Vegas game world, is easily the worst of the four DLCs. It has terrible, linear level design, a nonsensical backstory (the courier delivered something to the area that somehow triggered nuclear explosions, which are never mentioned in the main game), and had just one NPC (Ulysses) who babbled incoherently, in what must be Avellone's worst character writing ever, via radio transmission before an anticlimactic confrontation in which Ulysses' plan for nuclear devastation can be averted by two or three sentences from the Courier.

Lonesome road was necessary to conclude the courier's story beginning all the way back when you first hear mention of him in Primm. LR is mostly a slog to get through but I actually did enjoy the conclusion of it. The question then becomes does the slog justify the conclusion and eh thats tough.

Dead Money was an attempt to turn an Open World FPS/RPG hybrid into a survival horror game, with predictable results. Good writing, though.

Dead money is not very good. I wanted to like it because some of the characters were interesting but it has aged poorly. Return playthroughs just make me want to groan because they remove character items disrupting player agency. Risky choice and I don't think it paid off. Secret ending was appreciated however.

Honest Hearts at least had an open environment, but there wasn't enough content, and both the NPCs (with the exception of Joshua Graham, the Burned Man) and the main quest were boring (not a surprise, coming from Josh Sawyer).

Yeah JG carried honest hearts. I would find that DLC to be utterly forgettable without him as the prop holding it up. Not big on the tribal themes in general.

Old World Blues is easily the best of the four DLCs, as it gives the player a sizeable exterior area to muck about in, with a number of interesting interior locations, including optional areas. The tongue-in-cheek tone is a much better fit for Fallout: New Vegas than the tone of other three DLCs.

I would say in terms of objective quality it is the best despite my bias for LR. Very wacky but that to me is what gives it, it's standout quality.

 

[Butter]

'Cracking eggs'? What the fuck is this coded language

It means "groomed to become trans".

 

[Dave the Druid]

Old World Blues legit made me drop the game for a while. There's some genuinely funny lines in there but they JUST WON'T STOP TALKING and so the few funny lines get buried under the verbiage. Insufferable. In the end I nuked them all to scrap so it least has that going for it

 

[Multidirectional]

I finished the main game 3 times, finished Dead Money DLC once. All the other DLCs left unfinished. Yeah they didn't do much for me. If I were to replay the game today, I might give Dead Money another run, wouldn't even bother with the rest of them.

 

[Zarniwoop]

OP is a retard, exemplified by his last sentence.

Also there is a thread about this already.

 

[laclongquan]

Dead Money is very much aesthetic. Vibe. The red cloud plus bomb collar make for some restrained exploration and it feel very much 3D, nothing in F3 come close. The stories are is nice, but well, there's some lacking in more storytelling about Vera vs Dean, or more about crazy Elijah him being nowhere near crazy enough. Or not and me being wishful for the best DLC in term of story and exploration... Suitable for any time before level 16, considering the lvel of the loot.
+++ Note that there's AWOP mod expand this DLC, and later on incorporated into DMT mod.

Honest Heart is 3D exploration in the wild open and it feel like a safari. It's like Fallout 3 wild open once again, but much more colorful, trees, and water. joshua story is also pretty good, but that's about the only main theme of the story. The branch on Daniel, or Waking Cloud, is too undeveloped. Honestly, if they push Follow-Chalk into Waking Cloud's one of many suitors, it would create more gossip to talk about. As such, there's only talking about Joshua, and not much. Suitable into end game, since White Legs can have high level equipment, which make for persuasive main opponent, as they fight two and push all back.
+++ There is mod to provide an intermediate area between Zion and MOjave, but there's a dearth of extensive modding on Zion itself.

Old World Blues is a combo of 3D exploration, and Fallout 3 high level combat, with a huge variety of hostile. Stories take a big beating, because the crazy abominations take stage and keep telling their tales. Good enough if you like crazy tales, but nowhere crazy enough to be REALLY interesting. Overall this DLC feel like Point Lookout.
+++There's a dearth of extensive modding on Big MT itself. The tiny details, yeah, but not big project.

Lonesome Road is deserty. The rambling of a mad man mix in with the howling of sandy zephyr and crackle of radioactive broken equipments. For a pure FNV, the ramblings provide a possible origin for Courier Six, which is very nice in storytelling: we dont like rootless drifters. But with TTW active (or Fallout New California), it make clear Ulyssess is off his rocker, absolutely schizo. Combat and exploration is hard to say~ It's not disctinctive like 3 other dlcs to make a sentence to announce (or denounce) it.
+++There's a dearth of extensive modding on The Divide itself.

 

[Crichton]

I really loved Dead Money; for me, it easily it beats out any questline/area from the main game. I like having to pay attention to one's surroundings, I like the writing for the companions and I like the old school western double-cross / heist set-up. With all that said, there are problems with the plot (it's a little too convenient that everything is being resolved right now, why was Sinclair the only one with these fancy holograms?) and having House and Sinclair in the same setting is off-putting because they're both total pastiches of Howard Hughes.

I like the area design of Honest Hearts, it's a nice break from the rest of the game, but as others have noted, there's just not much there.

Old World Blues and Lonesome Road are both okish from a gameplay standpoint (LR, in particular, has some of the best high-level human/humanoid encounters), but I think both settings are garbage: OWB is too "wacky" for the setting. LR revolves around ghoulification, which I've always thought is the absolute dumbest part of Fallout's setting and it doesn't help that CMA's self-insert is droning on about shit I don't care about the entire time.

 

[Jacov]

why was Sinclair the only one with these fancy holograms?

I think the idea was that holograms were a relatively new technology, and Big MT used Sierra Madre as a test site for them (as well as the cloud). Sinclair didn't care about anything other than packing his Casino with the best security measures possible.

 

[Justicar]

Boring trash with recycled assets felt like a mod.

 

[Spukrian]

I really liked Dead Money. I liked the change in gameplay, I enjoy stealth. The setting and the atmosphere was great.

I enjoyed Old World Blues for its excellent exploration. Yeah, it's quite silly and dumb, but I didn't mind. I actually thought it was funny at times...

Honest Hearts had a good setting and Graham was a good character, but the DLC didn't really click with me.

Lonesome Road also had a good setting, but I did find Ulysses a bit tedious. It didn't click with me either.

 

[Fink]

OWB made me want to tear my eyes and ears out, will never play that dlc again. Painfully cringe and the gameplay sucks too. I can't believe there are people here who are into it, tbh.