Best and worst New Vegas DLC?

[d1r]

They are all great, but their implementation is always what pisses me off the most. Instead of explanding the pretty barebone main map with new regions, everything has to be its own region, completely cut off from the main game. Also, it feels like that every DLC is being catered to a certain type pf playstyle. Dead Money feels like something for a character with a high Sneak + Barter + Repair skill , trying to manipulate the surroundings, while Honest Hearst is full Adventuring + Survival. Old World Blues has a lot of Speech, and Science, while Lonesome Road is straightup fighting.

Considering the last DLC, I always liked the idea of Lonesome Road being a great alternate ending to the main game, if the courier decided to get revenge on Benny, but doesn't give a fuck about New Vegas, House, or whatever politics he is getting involved with when dealing with the Chip. Sadly, the DLC starts way too late, and actually doesn't give you the option to finish the main game. Honest Hearts was really fun to explore without using the map (self imposed on my first run), though it was disappointing to see, that Follows-Chalk just disappears from the game completely if you tell him to leave the tribe and wander around the world. I would have loved to see an ecounter in the Mojave with him. Something I absolutely loved about Old World Blues was the very long conversation at the very beginning of the DLC. It just felt wonderful to get all those Speech options and checks, and having this weird conversation with Dr.Klein. I just loved the writing of the DLC in general. Last but not least, I can see what they were trying to do with Dead Money, but it was the least impactful DLC for me, even the location was pretty good.

All in all, all the DLC's are better than Fallout 3, and Emil Pagliarulo can suck a fat dick.

 

[pomenitul]

They all felt like a slog to me despite being conceptually stimulating, each in its own way.

 

[Valdetiosi]

Gun Runners Arsenal is the best. You can argue many things about other DLCs what's good and bad, but GRA, the only thing you could argue is the college fund - priced value on the weapons and GRA - counterpart basic weapons. The exclusive weapons are great.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

I like Fallout New Vegas her DLCs. They added some extra story when I had completed the main campaign two times.
And I really liked how they had been set up or mentioned in the main game, giving us little hints here and there such as the "Burned Man Walks", Sierra Madre etc, to make us curious about these places before we could visit them.
And I also liked how there was this sort of long running story thread running through all four about Courier 6/Ulysses, and that there is a connection between him and the Courier, giving us a little mystery even if the reveal was a bit disappointing.

My enthusiasm however has somewhat dampened over the years. The FNV DLC's started very strong with Dead Money, but Honest Hearts despite offering more freedom and having some well written parts in it, never seemed to completely live up to DM. OBW was very divisive because of the writing but I liked it a lot of the themes, and I also really liked Lonesome Road though it was indeed very linear and definitely a shooter masquerading as a FPS that was complete with an elevator sequence.
But when I played them a while back I realized that the DLCs, especially HH, OWB, and LR had large stretches of 'filler', parts of the game were the player is mostly busy shooting things, looking up all the locations on the DLC maps, and collecting stuff. Any quests usually also involve collecting stuff such as the lone in which the player has to collect holodiscs containing personalities for the Sink appliances. That is what a big part of these DLCs are about.

I was thinking about it when I played those DLCs for TOW, especially Peril on Gorgon also has big sections that are just about collecting stuff.
I can perhaps forgive it at the time and I do still think the DLCs of FNV are superior to those of most other games, but if this is all that can be done with DLCs because of perhaps limited time and budgets I am not sure if I really want to see more of them.
I would really much rather have a full and complete main campaign instead that may take more time to develop and to complete for the player.

Did the expansion packs for the old Gold Box games also suffer from this?

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I liked the one with the brains in a can the best, I think.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Did the expansion packs for the old Gold Box games also suffer from this?

For the Gold Box games, the "expansion packs" were the full sequels in each series.

 

[Hace El Oso]

Gameplay, movement and space is always awkward in the Bethesda Fallouts. With that understanding, honest hearts was by far my favorite. Joshua Graham and the Survivalist alone were enough to make it easily my top choice, but working with the tribe and their particular culture (speaking fragmented German was a great touch) was engaging and could have been great in an engine with better space and gameplay.

I appreciated one of the few good-faith efforts I’d seen in a video game to depict Christians and the role of the Missions, and was very surprised and disappointed with how Sawyer turned out afterwards.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I appreciated one of the few good-faith efforts I’d seen in a video game to depict Christians and the role of the Missions, and was very surprised and disappointed with how Sawyer turned out afterward.

I'm just here to ruin your day tbh

I think the naming and speech patterns could use another pass to avoid falling into negative tropes.

I’ve also said before that Daniel was supposed to be Asian, but for whatever weird reason, somehow his data was switched over to Caucasian (which, in that engine, automatically flips a bunch of face and skin data). This was again done to avoid having it be “two white guys saving Native Americans”. But that’s exactly what it looked like in execution.

The core plot of Honest Hearts was based on Lawrence of Arabia and The Mission. I think it cleaves too tightly to the inspirational material in making the outsiders be the main drivers of the native groups’ destinies. As a result, the native groups feel sidelined in importance/voice.

Finally, I think involving Native American consultants, especially from the American SW, at some stage would have been a good idea.

I take responsibility for the bad representation in HH. I think we did a better job in Deadfire because we did ask Asian devs within the studio to look at the Huana and Rauatai characters and their representation, but we should have also hired some Māori consultants specifically to look at the Huana. The Huana aren’t really Māori (just like the Rauatai aren’t really Japanese), but even a fictional culture that’s only “inspired by” a mix of real world cultures can still get into uncomfortable or outright bad territory.
A few Pacific Islanders have contacted me to tell me that they appreciate that Deadfire deals with PI-type cultures and colonial themes. I’m genuinely glad for that, but we could have very easily done something incredibly shitty through pure ignorance. It never hurts to ask ahead of time.

I don't think it's vitally important to determine exactly how it would go as much as it is to acknowledge that the people being "helped" have agency and voices of their own. Follows-Chalk and Waking Cloud are good characters, but they are followers of JG and Daniel more than drivers of the plotline.

Lawrence of Arabia was another inspiration for Honest Hearts because it's another example of a colonizer stepping in and trying to "help", but a difference between LoA and The Mission is that LoA has Sherif Ali (played by Omar Sharif) as a full participant in / objector to what's happening. The Mission and Mississippi Burning and, unfortunately, Honest Hearts all feature a pair of outsiders wrestling with moral quandaries to figure out what to do while the locals go, "Hmm, if you say so," quietly in the background.

Even the pidgin languages the tribes speak in Honest Hearts were just an attempt to keep costs down. All of the DLCs feature very few speaking characters because Fallout games have localized text and VO. That includes background characters and their reactive barks, so we made pidgin languages for the tribes so they wouldn't need to be re-recorded. Of course, the tribes were also supposed to be multi-ethnic, so you'd see white Dead Horses, black Dead Horses, etc. And again, Daniel was supposed to be Asian. It was incredibly frustrating to get halfway through production only to discover that making ethnic variants for every tribe would completely blow the already limited in-game memory limit. It wasn't a problem of "Ah, this will take more work," but, "The game will crash as soon as this area loads."
And it was white-hot inferno rage when I saw that the shipped version of Daniel had been set to Caucasian. I honestly don't know how or why it happened. Sometimes devs accidentally change data when editing something else and don't even realize they've changed something. For all I know it could have been me. In any case, the confluence of changes and omissions just resulted in it looking pretty bad.

tfw you accidentally make something decent due to technical and budget restraints

 

[Hace El Oso]

tfw you accidentally make something decent due to technical and budget restraints

Hmm. That’s a post-Deadfire interview, with many intervening years for Sawyer to reimagine his own past work and state of mind and memory hole the rest to save and ingratiate himself.

Back at that time(Honest Hearts) and before Sawyer really conveyed himself like a totally different man.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

tfw you accidentally make something decent due to technical and budget restraints

Hmm. That’s a post-Deadfire interview, with many intervening years for Sawyer to reimagine his own past work and state of mind and memory hole the rest to save and ingratiate himself.

Back at that time(Honest Hearts) and before Sawyer really conveyed himself like a totally different man.

Damn I guess a soy diet and cycling everywhere exacts a heavy price upon its practitioners.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

For the Gold Box games, the "expansion packs" were the full sequels in each series.

Yeah, then the DLCs really can't compare.

 

[Delphik]

Dead Money is the only DLC that puts a little bit of a twist on the usual FNV gameplay by adding more mechanics and stripping you of your gear, and the story is sublime and has a message, Honest Hearts would have been great if there were any interesting character other than Joshua Graham,
Old World Blues is all-around good but nothing really interesting happens in it, and Lonesome "Ulysses" Road has the coolest gear and challenges you if you have shit gear and gets the award for the most misunderstood character in all of gaming who has been reduced down to "bear and bull" and is only enjoyed by storyfags, but I hate it because it gives a little bit of a backstory to the courier.
1- Dead Money
2- Old World Blues
3- Lonesome Road
4- Honest Hearts