TL;DR – Both Old World Blues and Lonesome Road are enjoyable DLCs, although neither is as unorthodox as Dead Money was. Old World Blues doesn’t take itself very seriously and is essentially a light-hearted extra zone full of high-level loot wrapped around an amusing if content-light main quest chain. Lonesome Road on the other hand is an enjoyable piece of narrative, but one that lacks side-content and is thus fairly short even if it is engaging. Regardless of these niggles, both expansion packs are worth playing through and my only caveat would be that they both have lengthy dialogue sections, then lengthy combat sections with little mixing of the two aspects occurring.
Quick Note: Much like with my playthroughs of Fallout: New Vegas and the previous 2 DLCs, I played through both of these in Hardcore mode. Unlike Dead Money this didn’t really change anything, aside from making the mountains of ammunition littering both locations a pain to transport back to the occasional vendor.
Wrapping up the Big Boaby Gaming account of F:NV, this week we’re taking a look at the final two DLCs for the game – Old World Blues and Lonesome Road. The former is directly inspired by cheesy science fiction movies and novels of the early half of the 20th century and has the player exploring the pre-war research centre of “Big Mountain”. The main quest chain in Old World Blues focuses on what to do with the various semi-sane researchers that are still in control of the facility and which have thus far failed to do anything other than bicker with each other. LR on the other hand is directly related to the story that has been building across the rest of F:NV and deals with the character of Ulysses, a courier who has been involved with your character’s story since they first held onto the Platinum Chip in the first place. Unlike Old World Blues it is much more po-faced about the pre-war world, with the main plot thread revolving around your conflict with Ulysses who keeps trying to get under your character’s skin and ultimately threatens the Mojave as part of his quest to rattle you. Just like the other DLCs for F:NV, both of these DLCs are accessed via a quest which is given to your character upon starting the game and which directs them to a new area from which they’ll be teleported to the new zone. Both of these new areas can be re-accessed once their respective main quests have been completed, which works out well as they both have multiple challenges (as opposed to side quests) which provide rare equipment and upgrades.
Starting with Old World Blues, this DLC has you teleport to Big Mountain (or the Big Empty as most wastelanders call it) after interacting with a crashed satellite. You then wake up in a pleasant balcony with a view of the new area, which still has active industry dotted across it’s myriad craters and ruined masonry. You quickly encounter the “Think Tank” running the facility of Big Mountain who have, erm, removed your spine, heart and brain. Ordinarily after dealing with this sort of assault you’d be entirely justified to respond with violence, but the Think Tank have been smart enough to active a pacification shield around their facility which means that you can’t deliver swift wasteland justice. Instead you’ll need to figure out where your brain and other organs went and so you’ll be acting as their errand boy until you can piece yourself back together. Fortunately these delusional scientists are still able to provide clear objectives, even as the centuries of mental decay have rendered them little more than talking imbeciles. Their first task for you is to find multiple items with which to enter The Forbidden Zone, an area they think houses your brain but is unfortunately under the control(?) of Dr Mobius. Mobius is a dissident madman who is as insane as the think-tank, but who has fallen out with them and has spent the past two centuries creating fearsome robo-scorpions with which to bring Big Mountain to heel. Once you begin gathering the various items which are needed to enter the Forbidden Zone, you start on a fairly short quest-chain where you potter around the Big Mountain facilities, gather some required items, gun down various Robo-Scorpions and other failed experiments before you’re able to confront Mobius, your own brain and finally the Think Tank to decide the fate of the facility.
While this quest chain is definitely tongue-in-cheek and has some amusing dialogue, the main meat if this expansion is actually contained in side-content which resolves around upgrading your player home and a couple of the major new items found in this DLC. The player home component is seemingly straight-forward but actually has a fair amount of depth to it, as your home away from home at Big Mountain contains 10 different appliances which can each offer various services to your character. Unfortunately, when you initially move into your sweet new digs, you’re informed that all of these devices are inoperable and as such you’ll need to find the 10 corresponding holotapes which are necessary for them to begin operating. Fortunately these are marked as quest items and as such finding them isn’t too hard, but trekking to the locations they’re in and dealing with the various threats that are occasionally guarding them is more of a challenge. Once you’ve activated all of these appliances (each of which has their own neurotic personality by the way, from a miniature Securitron who is obsessed with mugs to a saucy, seductive seedbank) you’re then informed that they can all be further upgraded by gathering… even more holotapes! If you take the time to do all of this, then you’ll be glad to hear that you can benefit from an assortment of buffs – some of which are temporary such as increases to SPECIAL stats, while others are permanent including 3 new perks from the auto-doc and the ability to craft new skill books from the overly patriotic book-chute. Some of these upgrades are again sign-posted via a pertinent quest, but the skill books are not and will require some careful hunting to find.
Alongside upgrading your player home and the appliances within, you can also upgrade a few of the more noteworthy items that you can find within Big Mountain including a stealth suit and two new weapons – an energy weapon that fires sonic blasts and a powerful rifle that is improved with the addition of a canine brain. Upgrading the first two items requires running a gauntlet of “simulations” which require you to either sneak through an area without getting detected by patrolling robobrains, trip-wires and proximity mines or fight your way through a high-school while dealing with turrets, attack dogs and protectrons respectively. The K9-gun is a bit more straight forward and instead only asks for you to gather some schematics to upgrade the weapon, which might sound disappointing but honestly the combat gauntlet for the ray-gun was a pain in the butt to deal with. Fortunately whether you choose to upgrade your home and new gear or not, you’ll be readily compensated as the Big Mountain complex is positively brimming with lootable equipment including mentats, pre-war money, cigarettes galore (seriously, almost every container has a pack or a carton) and other valuable but low-weight loot. Plus there is ammo seemingly everywhere and most enemies you face off against are equipped with valuable items, including saturnite power fists, shishkebabs and hunting revolvers.
Aside from the new equipment and potential to get rich, the main reason to bother with Old World Blues is the writing which is generally pretty funny. Whether you’re running an upgrade gauntlet for improving the ray-gun, exploring the zone in the hopes of finding new gear or interacting with NPCs there is a consistent level of mad-cap insanity that permeates every molecule of this expansion. I do personally wish that it had been integrated better with the combat sections in this DLC, as generally I found that you’d either be talking-talking-talking to the Think Tank (or whoever) and then you’d be fighting-fighting-fighting your way through a zone so that you can complete whatever mission it is that you’d set for yourself. It does feel like an expansion of two halves, with the writing and combat both being largely separate with each other and most quests involving you going to location A, fighting the baddies, gathering item Z, going back to location B and handing it in before you get hit with another couple minutes of exposition. Fortunately the irreverent yet amusing dialogue should keep you coming back for more, and if it doesn’t then perhaps the multiple ties with the other DLCs (via the previous interjections of Elijah and Ulysses into the zone) and occasional glimpses of the unglamorous nature of the fallout world (via the Little Yahtzee concentration camp and some experiments that went awry) will provide some motivation. With all that being said, the main quest is fairly short and will only take you a few hours if you rush through it. You can also get the best possible outcome for everyone, but you’ll need a relatively high speech level and a high science level too. Or you can just beat all those nerds to death, it’s your call.
Lonesome Road on the other hand is much less of a tongue-in-cheek affair, although it can also be resolved by punching some nerds to death. In LR you’re trying to track down Ulysses, a courier who has it out for you and who seems to know a great deal about your past. For whatever reason, it’s this past that has lead Ulysses to become obsessed with you to the detriment of both himself and, if you can’t stop him, the entire Mojave wasteland. As mentioned, LR starts with you receiving a quest to enter a region called “The Divide” which forces your companion to head back home. Upon entering this new area, you quickly find yourself inside a military bunker which was used by the pre-war US military to store nuclear weapons and which also contains another ED-E eyebot. This new ED-E gives you the ability to open up new automatic commissary vending machines, that give you a way to sell the endless amounts of high end equipment you come across. He(?) also gives you the ability to trigger various switches and terminals which are required for you to progress in the main quest. The quest itself is fairly simple, as you’re tasked with making your way from one end of this Lonesome Road to the other, where Ulysses has established his base and makes his multiple foreboding messages and warnings to you. Unlike Old World Blues there aren’t really any side objectives to complete here, although there are 5 upgrades for ED-E which can be transferred back to the old ED-E in the Mojave, alongside a challenge (and CHEEVO) to explode 30 warheads which litter the area and that can be detonated to provide you with alternative routes around areas or to reveal rare items.
Generally speaking though these mini side-objectives don’t provide much extra content and as a consequence the main reason to engage with LR is to find out more about the overall story of F:NV, especially as your character has a nasty cause of amnesia following the time when Benny shot them in the head. That’s not to say that there isn’t some good equipment to pilfer here, as one of the two new enemy types are positively brimming with valuable weapons, but generally speaking the handful of new weapons aren’t that impressive and the main point of interest is the storyline. Fortunately this narrative is pretty engaging, as not only do you learn a great deal about your courier’s past via Ulysses multiple diatribes, but you also gain an insight into a new threat that will wreck havoc in the Mojave and get to learn some more about the lands between the Capitol Wasteland in the East and the Mojave in the West. Ulysses is probably one of the most interesting characters contained within F:NV and as he was intended to be a companion during development, he has a lot of dialogue about the state of the setting and a lot to tell the player. Plus ED-E has his own story to tell too, which comes up at random points during your journey to track down Ulysses and which is also engaging. ED-E is a little sweetheart of a companion and oddly enough for F:NV he is “immortal” in Hardcore mode, probably as he is crucial to various points in the story that wouldn’t make sense where he not there. In addition, he’s also one of very few characters in the game that you can sass after basically every line of dialogue, should you so be inclined.
As for the gameplay side of LR, it’s pretty standard and while (almost) all the enemies are new they basically fit into two camps – excluding a handful of deathclaws and security bots who get caught in the fray. You’ve got the “Marked Men” who are monstrously overcooked ghouls that are lacking in skin and as such are a vibrant shade of red due to the combination of relentless winds and radiation which make The Divide hostile to all life. These guys basically function as the armed NPCs of the run and aren’t particularly worth noting, aside from the fact that they are composed of a mix of turned NCR and Legion troops and as such have access to a large amount of otherwise rare and unusual weapons. They can’t be reasoned with or bartered with, and aside from a handful of named individuals don’t seem to possess any sentience at all. The other main enemies of The Divide are the “Tunnelers”, a new type of swarming reptilian enemy that is dangerous in close combat and which can be a headache for lesser levelled players – but who didn’t pose much of a threat for my melee build with ample reserves of Action Points, stimpacks and a heated saturnite power-fist. These tunnelers are meant to pose an existential threat to the world as they breed quickly and hunt in packs, but there are multiple areas where the courier has to fight around 10 of them and so I can’t help but imagine that the Mojave is going to be fine no matter what happens. But I digress, as the main takeaway here is that LR has the same combat as the rest of the game and without any real side-quests or NPCs to interact with you’re basically just fighting your way through various areas, grabbing whatever isn’t nailed to the ground and occasionally setting off a warhead to gain access to a new route or loot.
While I don’t want to spend too much time discussing the narrative of LR as doing so will inevitably involve a range of spoilers, one thing that makes it interesting is the fact that it’s tailored to your existing playthrough to an extent as Ulysses refers to multiple events that have occurred and is hostile to both the NCR and the legion (to a lesser extent). As such there are various points in the DLC where having a high-rating with either the NCR or Legion can be used to gain further insight into the setting, and even help with some speech checks like the one at the end of the DLC. Due to this you really should leave LR until you’ve gone through a decent amount of the base game, although you can take advantage of the reputation reset that occurs at a certain point in the main quest chain to have high ratings with the NCR and/or Legion despite having the option to cause a lot of trouble for them in this DLC. It’s also worth noting that if you choose to avoid fighting Ulysses, you can interact with him later on and he will provide commentary on your actions and some events that have occurred in the Mojave. With that being said, LR is intended as late-game content for a reason and I’m fairly confident that regardless of your factional inclinations this DLC is best experienced at a high level.
In summary, both LR and Old World Blues are enjoyable pieces of DLC that add their own flair to the game even if both take radically different tonal directions. Old World Blues is a silly little story with hints of darkness at it’s heart, but ultimately it’s a fun and campy adventure as you explore the exaggerated caricature of the old world that Big Mountain has become. LR on the other hand is all about the backstory of the courier and the Mojave, with some sprinklings of humour occasionally found within. Both have decent rewards for the player that takes the time to finish them, including player housing, permanent buffs and a range of powerful items. But the main benefit to both is the narrative experience they provide, one in which you get to save the world multiple times over.
