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.

The post Fallout: New Vegas – DLC Double-Bill #2 appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note: I played through both of these pieces of Fallout: New Vegas DLC in “Hardcore” mode, which normally doesn’t change much in F:NV aside from making healing and limb restoration more difficult. In Dead Money however it makes a huge difference as you will be poisoned by the polluted city itself, making health management much more of a challenge. I’d strongly recommend playing DM in hardcore mode for the best experience, but beware of this mechanic ahead of time!

Hopefully you guys enjoyed my F:NV review last week because I’m following it up with two back-to-back “double-bills” where I’m going to examine the (major) Fallout: New Vegas DLC packs in more detail! This week I’m going to take a look at the first two of the bigger Fallout: New Vegas DLC releases – namely Dead Money and Honest Hearts which in spite of their superficial similarities were actually very different from each other. Dead Money is a narrative focused experience containing a new zone that can only be played through once per character, with little in the way of side content and a heavy focus on the characters and setting contained within it. Honest Hearts on the other hand wouldn’t seem out of place in a Bethesda game, as it contains an area that you’re free to re-enter at will and which contains more in the way of side-quests and hidden loot. Either way they’re both enjoyable experiences and I’d recommend them to anyone who enjoyed the base game – especially as they come bundled with the Ultimate edition that’s frequently $5 during the various Steam/GoG/Epic sales.

Dead Money was the first major DLC to release after F:NV’s launch, so it’s the obvious one to start with. In DM, your character is abducted from the Mojave after entering an abandoned Brotherhood of Steel bunker while hunting for the source of a radio message promising them the ability to begin again at the Sierra Madre casino resort. This narrative device is used to explain why you can’t bring any companions with you and also explains why you can’t bring any of your items with you – not even your bottle caps! This means that DM truly forces you to begin again as you have no weapons, healing supplies, ammo or cold hard caps with which to assist you in exploring this hostile new settlement. Things get even more bleak as when your character awakens at the entrance of the Sierra Madre resort, they are contacted by the antagonist Elijah who reveals that he has orchestrated your abduction and placed a bomb-collar on your neck! The reason for your quasi-enslavement is simple, he needs you to help him break into the Sierra Madre casino so that he can pilfer it’s contents. Fortunately(?) he also reveals that you aren’t the only one he has ensnared in his scheme, as there are also 3 other people trapped in various parts of the Sierra Madre resort who will help you in “your” mission. Unfortunately for you, they’re all equally as annoyed at Elijah as you are and are therefore not the most trusting or reliable of partners. Without their help however you’ll all be stuck in the toxic smog that has engulfed the Sierra Madre for centuries, meaning that you’ll need to work together to pull off Elijah’s insane heist.

Now this toxic smog isn’t just for show, as in Hardcore mode it actively damages you (albeit slowly) over time when you’re outdoors. Of course if you had your healing supplies this wouldn’t be much of an issue, but as mentioned above… you don’t. In fact the start of DM is arguably the most intense part of F:NV, as you’ll be scrambling to find healing supplies with which to offset the perpetual damage that your character is taking. Plus you’ll need to find weapons and armour which suit your character’s build with which to deal with the enemies that have infested the Sierra Madre. These new enemies only come in a few forms of which there are two main types, but there are two important factors which make them stand out from the myriad of foes which roam the wastes of the Mojave. The first is that they’re tough, and trust me when I say this as my character was geared towards Unarmed and Melee attacks but still found it tough going at the start. The various “Ghost Walkers” have large amounts of health, deal solid amounts of damage and often travel in packs which mean they can be overwhelming to deal with – especially when you remember that you’re always taking damage from being outside! To make matters even worse, they’ll revive themselves soon after dying unless you’re able to destroy their bodes via explosives, energy weapon disintegration or flailing wildly at their corpses until they’re just a collection of chunks. As such you need to whittle them down one-by-one and make sure they don’t get back up otherwise fights will drag on and your limited healing supplies & ammo will be exhausted. The other major enemy type in DM takes the form of hologram security guards, who aren’t much of an issue as they have limited patrol routes and don’t open fire right away. There’s just one modest caveat which is that they are immune to your fists, melee weapons, guns and explosives… so you either need to make good use of the hologram rifle you get near the start of this DLC or sneak past them. Fortunately they’re always near an interactive transmitter that can be disabled to turn them off, so long as your repair skill is high enough (the required amount ranges from 25 to 100).

At this stage you’re probably thinking that the enemies sound challenging, but that you can run past the “Ghosts” and sneak past the holograms, so you shouldn’t have too much to worry about. Unfortunately for you and your character, the Sierra Madre is positively littered with traps that have been laid out by previous scavengers and plunderers that came before you. This means that you’ll need to proceed cautiously, lest you get caught by one of the 100+ bear traps, tripwires and pressure plates that are spread out across the entire resort. Some of these traps are particularly fiendish as it feels like the developers knew exactly what they were doing when placing them, with pressure plates appearing right below naturally occurring drops and tripwires being hidden at the top of stairwells so that you can barely see them. To make matters worse, areas of the Sierra Madre are also covered in poisonous fog which deals high amounts of damage and restricts visibility. Often these traps are placed in areas of fog too, as are the enemies you’ll be facing. This means that you’ll need to be simultaneously quick and cautious, lest you get bogged down by enemies or have your legs crippled by deviously placed traps. Oh and before you get too comfortable, there’s one other important set of hazards that can easily claim your characters life. Remember how you’re wearing a bomb collar? Well it’s been fitted with haste and as a consequence is susceptible to early detention from errant radio waves, which means that various radios and speakers will begin initiating a detention sequence that will activate if you remain too close for too long. Some of these radios and speakers can be deactivated, either by interacting with them, powering them down or shooting them – but you had best make your mind up as to how you’ll deal with them quickly, as they don’t give you long to retreat or nullify them before the remains of your head are decorating the Sierra Madre.

With all these challenges laid before you, it would be fair to ask “why bother?” The reasons for both your character and you, the player are simple. The Sierra Madre contains large quantities of valuable loot and recipes, plus plenty of XP from the main quests that should tempt even the most resolute of couriers. As for the player, they’ll get to enjoy a unique gameplay challenge and one of the strongest narratives contained within F:NV. I won’t bore you with the details of the former, but you’ll gain multiple levels while playing through DM in a fairly short space of time and it’s sufficient to say that you’ll be able to loot the mythologised Sierra Madre’s vault should you so choose. As for the narrative, there are two main pieces that make it tick. The first is that the characters you’re trapped in the Sierra Madre with are well-written and interesting, with a split-personality Super Mutant, a mute wastelander who’s been trying to track down Elijah for some time and Dean Domino himself – a pre-war singer (who’s poster is featured in some of the loading screens for the base game) and who has been trapped in the Sierra Madre for centuries. Without wishing to spoil anything, I’ll just say that you’re able to resolve their major issues (well… 2 out of 3) or can sacrifice them after a certain point to make your own life easier. The second part of the narrative that works so well is the back-story of the Sierra Madre, which you’ll need to piece together through fully talking with your companions and reading through the terminals scattered around the resort. It’s a very well done story about one man’s hubris and his desire to protect the one person he loves, even as the world seems to be ending. There are some nice twists (particularly involving Dean) and ultimately the question of who was the largest fool hangs over the entire area like the blade of a guillotine. Ultimately everything hinges on the simple fact that the hardest part of the Sierra Madre is letting go, a central theme that has it’s tendrils in the actions of every single character both living and dead within this area. Even the final choice of this DLC hinges on this simple premise and the ways in which you can decide the fate of every other living character is well integrated with both the gameplay and the narrative. DM is inarguable a great example of intertwining all aspects of a game together so that they reinforce each other, from the gameplay challenges which represent the corrosive nature of the Sierra Madre (both literally and in how it has impacted every other person who has set foot there) to the narrative which frequently reinforces and is reinforced by the gameplay. It’s a great expansion pack and well worth savouring, especially as once you’ve let go you’ll never be able to begin again.

On the other side of the DLC spectrum from DM is Honest Hearts, which is a much more “normal” expansion in the vein of the Shivering Isles from Oblivion or Point Outlook from Fallout 3. While it’s not as expansive as either of those previous DLCs, it does have it’s own unique area and geometry that can be revisited at will and which contains a variety of unique enemies, wildlife and plants. Much like DM, HH doesn’t let you bring a companion although you are allowed to bring up to 75lbs (or more if you have a high Survival skill which… I don’t think anyone ever does) of equipment with you. The DLC starts off with you accompanying a caravan through to New Canaan, a settlement far from the Mojave that supposedly has an interest in trading. Unfortunately for you and the small team you’re with, the caravan is ambushed moments after you reach Zion and your character is the sole survivor. Your ambushers are tribals belonging to the White Legs tribe, who are trying to join the legion and have been told they’ll only be admitted if every other tribe in the area has been exterminated. This might seem like a tall order, but the White Legs are packing some serious firepower and many of them are wielding high end weaponry, including 12.7mm machine guns, anti-material rifles, shishkebabs and mantis gauntlets. Alongside these ferocious human enemies, you’ll also need to contend with a myriad range of hostile wild life including Giant Cazadors and Yao Guais, alongside more “normal” geckos, radscorpions and bullhorns.

Fortunately much like in DM you won’t need to face these new threats alone, as you quickly encounter two peaceful tribes who are willing to help you escape Zion… on the condition that you either eradicate the White Legs or help them escape too. These tribes each provide a native companion, with Follows-Chalk representing the Dead Horses tribe and Waking Cloud representing the Sorrows tribe. The tribes themselves are fairly similar, with both having their own base, one outside leader (that allows for limited trade in caps) and a shared language that has some elements of English but is largely comprised of foreign words and expressions. The main thematic difference between the two is that the Sorrows are an “innocent” tribe of hunters led by Daniel, a Mormon missionary who is the voice for peace in the region while the Dead Horses are a warrior tribe led by Joshua Graham (yes, that Joshua Graham) that is seeking to bring peace via the extermination of the White Legs. In gameplay terms there isn’t much to separate the two tribes, and neither Follows Chalk nor Waking Cloud offer particularly impressive companion perks (either a +3 perception buff when on high ground or a bonus to sneaking against human enemies respectively) but they’re decently useful as the enemies in this DLC are generally tough. In either case the main quest chain of this DLC focuses on your character gathering multiple items that will help both tribes escape the White Legs, which involves exploring the modest new area and looting certain quest items before you bring them back to either Daniel or Joshua.

After a couple different fetch quests you’re then given the option of either helping Daniel ensure the Sorrows escape, or you can work with Joshua and lead an attack on the White Legs which will free Zion of their presence once and for all. Ultimately this decision doesn’t change too much within the DLC, as without wishing to spoil anything I’ll just say that no matter what ending you get the major players don’t have anything else for you to do once the main plot line is over. You can’t take Joshua back to the Mojave and you can’t help Daniel with any other tasks, so really the main factor in choosing which to assist with their view of how to deal with the White Legs is your own gut feeling on the matter. As someone who played it twice and got both the “best” outcome and the most “vengeful” outcome, I’ll just say that you should let your heart be the guide (and that you should be careful what you say to Follows Chalk, because he’s a good kid). Either way once you’ve decided who to help, you’re tasked with shooting a bunch of White Legs to either clear the way for the Sorrows to escape or to just… clear the way for the Sorrows to remain in Zion. If you choose the evacuate route you get a couple of optional bonus objectives that are worth doing, whereas if you choose the exterminate route you get to decide what happens to the chief of the White Legs. Regardless of your choices once everything’s wrapped up you get access to a footlocker containing some rare items that were owned by both Daniel and Joshua, which are pretty neat.

BUT as you can see in the screenshot above, the final mission of the main quest chain will lock you out of the side quests. Now I know that while talking about DM earlier in this double-bill I mentioned that HH has more side quests, which is true, but that doesn’t mean there are that many of them. You’ve got a spirit quest from the Sorrows where you hunt down a Yao Gaui for a unique unarmed gauntlet weapon, one cute quest where you need to lead a lost Bighorner calf back to it’s momma and two quests where you talk to your companions about something that’s bothering them. Technically the side objectives in the Escape Zion final mission are counted as quests, but they don’t really count. As such there are only a handful of side quests and half of them are just talking to your companions, so there are basically two side quests with some meat on them. The vision quest er… quest is pretty enjoyable as it essentially involves tracking down and killing a tough Yao Guai while visual effects mess with you, and of all the quests it’s the only one that offers any real reward. The other main one involves finding a little calf, feeding it some fruit so that it’ll follow you for a bit and then giving it more when it gets scared of you again. The only real nuance to it is that you’re trying not to make the other bighorners hostile, so you need to be somewhat careful with your movements and avoid staying near one for too long. Regardless the side quests in HH aren’t extensive and the main star of the show is the Survivalist’s story, which isn’t a quest but is a series of 6 hidden caches that are scattered across Zion. Five of them are contained within caves which often feature multiple traps but are worth the risk as they have plenty of valuable rewards, while the final cache is with the survivalist himself and contains a unique rifle that is simultaneously cool and powerful. The survivalist’s story is also the narrative highlight of this DLC, as it contains a simple yet earnestly told account of a former US soldier who survives in Zion in the immediate aftermath of the war and becomes entwined with the fates of various groups who come to settle it, both those with good intentions and bad. I’d highly recommend seeking these journal entries out as they round out the DLC nicely and with the exception of the 6th are pretty easy to find. (Light spoiler: You need to find an elevated and unmarked spot near the red rapids docks).

To summarise both DLCs, I’d say that DM is a great narrative-led experience that provides a challenge for players and which deftly combines a bleak and oppressive atmosphere with a bleak and oppressive narrative while still providing players with plenty of choice. HH on the other hand is much more traditional and doesn’t stray exceedingly far from a simple premise, but does still reward players who are willing to invest some time into it’s best features are the beauty of Zion itself and the survivalist’s journal which is sprinkled across it. For the first time playthrough I think that DM is the clear standout, but for players seeking a more simple DLC with clearer rewards HH is there to provide a clear cut narrative and plenty of strong weapons. In spite of their differences, the one thing I can easily say about both is that they’re worth playing through at least once.

The post Fallout: New Vegas DLC Double-Bill #1 appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

Quick Note: As mentioned above, playing this game unmodded can be a needlessly frustrating experience. Fortunately as the game is popular it’s community has spent years releasing free modifications (mods) that resolve most of it’s issues. While I won’t recommend any that are in the realm of personal taste, I would highly recommend you install the following fixes and unofficial patches before playing. You can find them and thousands of others at the Nexusmods website, but I’ll link the specific ones I’d recommend to everyone here as well. I’d also suggest downloading the Nexusmods Vortex program which will make installing these much easier for you. With that being said, here’s my list: New Vegas Script Extender, NVAC – New Vegas Anti Crash, NVTF – New Vegas Tick Fix, JIP LN NVSE Plugin, JohnnyGuitar NVSE, Unofficial Patch NVSE Plus, Yukichigai Unofficial Patch – YUP, Asterra’s Many Fixes.

At this point it’s fair to say that Fallout: New Vegas is the opposite of obscure, as it’s been a darling of the gaming community for over a decade and has remained near and dear to many of it’s players. Due to this popularity I’d assume anyone reading this has either played the game themselves, or at the very least has an understanding of what it’s about and how it plays. Regardless, for the purposes of justifying the 50ish hours I spent recently replaying it I thought I’d write a short-but-sweet review. Now, if by some horrifying twist of fate Big Boaby Gaming is your one and only window into the gaming world, then I’m happy to tell you that Fallout: New Vegas is a large, sprawling western themed post-post-apocalyptic FPS/RPG hybrid that was developed for the 7th generation of consoles by Obsidian. The game is in essence a meaty standalone quasi-expansion for Fallout 3 (Fo3), as it’s not only built on the same engine but shares basically every mechanic and a ton of other content from Fo3 including animations, weapons, mini-games and so on. Unfortunately one way in which Fallout: New Vegas is a chip off the old block is the way in which it frequently encounters bugs and crashes, hence why I really don’t recommend playing it without mods or heaven forbid, on console. Seriously, while the modern Xbox ports aren’t terrible the PS3 version is crippled by a bug wherein your save game will eventually bloat and the whole thing will freeze often and repeatedly – which is caused by the save file trying to remember too many things and thus crashing the game more frequently the longer you’ve played it. With that warning out of the way, let’s take a look at the game on the assumption that you’re playing the PC version with those mods mentioned above.

Fallout: New Vegas starts with a decent quality pre-rendered animation (the only one it has by the way) that sets up the basic premise of the game. Chandler from Friends A mysterious figure known as Benny has shot you in the head and left you for dead, and you’re going to make him pay. This non-consensual act of violence not only serves as your motivation for pursuing the game’s central narrative, but it also justifies your lack of a background (as you have amnesia) and sole obsession with tracking down the person who robbed you of your old memories and life. It also handily justifies the game allowing you to create a character build, and Fallout: New Vegas starts off fairly strong as the amount of customisation and replayability is huge. There are 7 main stats known as your S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats which will be familiar to the exceedingly small minority of you who have played a G.U.R.P.S pen and paper RPG or the majority(?) of you who have past experience with the Fallout franchise. These stats correspond to your Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck and all of these stats not have a modest impact on your skills, but will also be required for Perks and occasionally enable optional responses in dialogue. Your skills are the basic ways in which you interact with the game, for example you’ve got a Guns skill that lets you shoot guns better (if you can believe it), a Speech skill for being persuasive in dialogue, a medicine skill which makes healing items more effective and so on. Again these skills occasionally enable you to access specific dialogue options and these are almost always a superior option to the normal ones. Finally you’ve got Perks, which are granted every other level and which provide various benefits including the ability to knock-down enemies in melee, reducing the damage you do to allies with your explosions, letting you heal from radiation or cannibalism and so much more. The main takeaway here is that you can’t do everything with one character but you can create a wide variety of characters with which to roleplay. You can be a suave diplomat who sucks at combat, a greedy mercenary who always follows the money or a brutish boxer who just runs around and punches everyone to death. There’s a ton of character build variation provided via these systems and honestly Fallout: New Vegas is a game that you’ll most likely come back to every couple of years.

Part of the reason for this is that there’s just so much content squirreled away within the game, and even after playing for around 120 hours I’m still seeing other players mention quests and locations that I’ve yet to see. Even the main narrative is a good example of this, as while it’s largely consistent across playthroughs initially it branches out and let’s you decide which of the four major outcomes will impact the entire game world as you lend your weight to one of three factions or just try and take over everything yourself. This world is the Mojave wasteland, the pre-WW3 remnants of Nevada which is currently being fought over by 3 groups. You’ve got the New Californian Republic, who are the most akin to a successor state to the United States but have endemic issues with supply chains, corruption and various problems back home. Opposing them is Caesar’s Legion, a motley assortment of tribals and warriors who are aggressively LARPing as Romans and led by a new Caesar who is trying to create a civilization that can withstand the wasteland and eventually evolve into a more palatable nation state. Caught in the middle is Robert House, the owner of New Vegas and Howard Hughes stand-in who is trying to milk the NCR for money and use it to turn New Vegas into a futuristic spacefaring city state. Each faction has a bunch of their own quests, items and rewards and then when you include all of the smaller factions into the equation, you have a ton of possible endings even if you ignore most of the side content. And that would be silly, as for all of it’s flaws (which we’ll get to in a minute) Fallout: New Vegas has a lot of enjoyable and unique side quests which give the game a lot of flair and that provide the players with some exceptionally useful rewards and benefits. Plus you’ll find that the more you play, the more you chase after higher levels because “just one more perk” or “just one more item” will make your character even more powerful and help you complete that vision of how they’ll handle certain situations.

And it’s incredibly fortuitous that the game is able to nail that feeling of making you want to keep playing and to keep building up your character, as the start of the game is honestly a drag. Now that’s not to say it’s awful, but the moment to moment combat especially at lower levels isn’t very enjoyable as enemies don’t really react to your damage and during the early game they can be a bit bullet-spongy. This issue still exists to a lesser extent even as your character gets more powerful, but as you start accumulating specific equipment, perks and enough levels in your skills the combat gets a lot less monotonous. To give a pertinent example, I made an unarmed boxer character and the first couple of levels just straight-up sucked. I didn’t do much damage, so I spent a lot of time just punching enemies in the face over and over as they shot me over and over with neither of us ever making that much of an impact on the other’s health bars. It wasn’t until I got some good weapons and a couple of unarmed combat perks, that punching the local fauna and bandits raiders got to be enjoyable. The other issue with the early game is the fact that it’s basically the only point in the game that’s pushing you heavily towards a certain path, as it “railroads” players to go through a sequence of quests and areas in a linear order. That’s not to say you have to go through the game’s main narrative in this way, but unless you know what you’re doing the game will just curb stomp you with high level enemies that are very difficult to avoid. As such I’d easily say that the first five hours of Fallout: New Vegas are the worst, without a shadow of a doubt. Again, that’s not to say the first five hours are bad, but the combination of your poor performance in combat, limited skills outside of combat, low amounts of cash to get equipment/healing supplies and the highly linear nature of the game’s start really do combine to drag down the experience. I pre-ordered this game back in the day, and I distinctly remember being disappointed with my initial impressions (especially as those handy bug fixes hadn’t been created yet, so the game crashed about once per hour).

But you shouldn’t be disheartened by the fairly slow start, as once the game picks it up it maintains a brisk pace due to the addictive nature of building a stronger character and the way that the world truly opens up to allow you to explore it fully. A good example of this would be the companions system, which enables you to have up to two companions that follow you at any given time and who help out in combat (and by carrying stuff when your inventory is full). Initially you’re just all by yourself, but as you explore the world you get opportunities to recruit these characters and each provides a constant bonus to you. As the game also makes use of a level-scaling system, you’ll gradually encounter better weapons and more varied enemies as you play through the game. Of course one caveat of this system is that there’s a point around level 15 to 20 wherein you’re dealing with the tougher enemies, but have only just started gaining access to the better weapons and perks so there’s a bit of a difficulty spike. But you’ll be able to handle it, trust me. The only thing you might not be able to handle is the way in which the game handles it’s lockpicking and hacking skills, as unlike in the Elder Scrolls series you need to have obtained a set number of skill points to even attempt to hack a computer terminal or bypass a locked door. It’s a minor complaint, especially as these alternative routes are generally scaled well, but it is a little niggle that’s worth mentioning as I feel that new players might neglect to put points into these skills as opposed to their combat skills.

Another minor complaint I see mentioned fairly often is the way in which the game has somewhat mediocre visuals. I personally don’t mind how the game looks, but the combination of choppy performance and the not particularly noteworthy visuals can be off-putting especially to players who mainly dabble in the latest and greatest big budget releases. A bigger complaint I have with the game is actually due to the limitations that were imposed on it by the need to maintain parity with the console versions, as it means that larger areas are often riddled with loading screens and transitionary areas so as to avoid overloading the measly RAM capacities of the PS3 and Xbox 360. This means that New Vegas in particularly doesn’t feel very big and many of it’s casinos are weirdly empty inside. But again these are minor issues and shouldn’t detract from the fact that Fallout: New Vegas provides players with a huge amount of quests and often (keyword) enables a wide variety of ways for players to proceed with them. In fact the only major criticism I can level at the game is the fact that it’s structured itself so that you have combat skills and then a speech skill. Now this shouldn’t be a big deal, but I personally found that not levelling up speech basically precludes you from not killing people in a decent amount of situations. You can occasionally talk people down with S.P.E.C.I.A.L checks and the barter skill, but for many of the smaller side quests it can often boil down to passing a speech check or just shooting someone (whether the person you’re trying to persuade or someone they don’t like). The ways in which you can do this killing or pass those speech checks does often have some nuance to it, for example you might be able to coast by on the basis of past reputation, or have obtained evidence but generally the smaller quests have less ways of resolving them peacefully unless you put points into speech. In fact I’d personally consider Speech to be the most overpowered skill in the game, as it lets you get the best outcome in a given situation in the majority of cases.

Balancing issues and nit-picking aside though, Fallout: New Vegas does an admirable job of crafting it’s world and the way that the factions interact is handled pretty well. There’s plenty of reasons to go out of your way to do side quests, as generally they’ll make things easier down the road and the ways in which your choices shape the game world can also have surprisingly deep ramifications. Even outside of some of the obvious examples like a companion being available to recruit or a new vendor being available to sell you items, there is a lot of small touches and changes that can happen due to your actions. Whether it’s helping a town join the NCR causing prices to go up, having an arrest go south because a criminal called the sheriff’s wife a whore or having a group turn hostile because you completed a random side quest, this is a game that does a great job of feeling like a living world. Of course there are some cases that break the immersion slightly (generally related to NPCs not realising that my character is overpowered and thus not scared of them) but by and large Fallout: New Vegas is an immersive and enjoyable experience that gets better the more you play it. The only catch is that you can’t keep playing the game once you’ve finished the main quest, but because there are so many variables in determining the future of the wasteland you’ll generally not want to rush finishing it as otherwise various groups and individuals can encounter some less than ideal outcomes. Plus there are plenty of really interesting side quests that are totally missable, including entire settlements and areas that lie off the beaten track. These include a pre-war bunker filled with mutated and hostile plant life, a settlement of peaceful mutants trying to get by and the irradiated result of a nuclear attack on an NCR outpost. Unless you take the time to explore the game’s world you’ll miss all of these and the way in which the game is able to continually provide new and interesting areas is one of it’s biggest strengths. Indeed one of the reasons the game is so replayable is the simple fact that you’ll hit max level before you’re anywhere near to beating all of it’s content.

In conclusion Fallout: New Vegas is a great RPG that has some niggles, quirks and balancing issues plus a whole lot of bugs which stop it from being a 10/10 game. In spite of these drawbacks however, the sheer scale of the world and potential for roleplaying across multiple playthroughs makes it an easy game to recommend. Even if the combat is initially underwhelming, it definitely picks up and the ways in which character builds diverge helps to keep the gameplay fresh while also imbuing each playthrough of the game with a real sense of progress. The game’s not perfect by any means, but so long as you play on PC and install the mods recommended above you’ll easily be able to get dozens if not hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of this game. Just be sure to pace yourself and explore the world, as your character has just cheated death after all

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