I'd fuck those lightswitches and I'm not even going to pretend otherwise.

Anyway, OWB doesn't have much to chew on, so this'll be brief.

Humor is the name of the game here and they've unfortunately put it on the same shelf where the other parts of New Vegas put themes and actual writing. I feel like everyone's opinion of OWB is always going to be coloured by how well the humor lands for them, and for me OWB's never has.
There is a token attempt made to add some depth to the story - which is debatably about losing one's humanity through clinging to the future in opposition to Dead Money being the same but with the past - but it gets about as much focus as the Lobotomite NPCs do.
In many ways the 'story' is a microcosm of New Vegas actual; someone took your brain, go get it back, oops more complicated story. Except, since this DLC is about an hour or four long depending on how inquisitive you are, the format results in it feeling like an anticlimax? I have vivid memories of younger Mira being deeply confused that the DLC ended.

At the very least I do somewhat appreciate how tightly the developers cling to the pulp sci-fi influences. The LAER and Sonic Emitter in this DLC are better "b-movie alien weapons" than Mothership Zeta's attempt at such in the last game. Same goes for the Trauma Harnesses, the Stealth Suit, and the other doo-dads hanging around. It's a nice degree of aesthetic coherence that I don't typically expect from Gamebryo games.

That said, as a relatively neutral aside: Some of the asset reuse from Fallout 3 is hilarious. Tranquility Lane is reused for Higgs Village - interiors and all - while an entire cell of Fallout 3's Citadel is reused for a lab. There's an entire cave which is just ripped from somewhere in Little Lamplight and, in general, a lot of this DLC reuses Fallout 3 stuff more than anywhere else in the game. I don't mind, it's just funny.

Really, the only emotions this DLC stokes in me aren't even related to Old World Blues. Instead, I only feel things when I think about how this DLC reflects on the rest of NV.

OWB is an odd prequel to Dead Money. Traces of Christine and Elijah's conflict dot the landscape, telling their story in whatever dysfunctional order you find them in. Admittedly, I don't actually like most of this? NV isn't the most subtle masterwork of CRPGs, but it knew when to leave some things up to interpretation or in subtext. Almost all of the stuff relating to DM in OWB amounts to little more than saying the implicit part out loud. I know it was probably planned - the Big MT is mentioned in NV and Elijah mentions coming here a few times in DM - but it still feels very condescending.

But also... I find the repeated assertions that the Big MT are responsible for so many of the evils that dot the landscape of the Mojave to be kind of annoying. It's an ongoing theme in NV that you can't exactly pin all evil on one person or institution, so having the Big MT pop up and go "Hi! We made Cazadors and Nightstalkers!" is eye-rolling. I'd call it un-needed, and I say that as a person that hates being a prescriptive critic. Not helping matters is that these reveals pretty much exist solely as the butt of jokes involvin Dr Borous and not much else?

Oh, and before I forget: I hate the chat with the brain. People unjustly lambast Lonesome Road for "forcing a backstory on the player" (and they're wrong to do so) but IMO forcing the Courier to be an obnoxious redditor is even worse.

I came into OWB expecting it to be an unremarkable stepping stone until I start Lonesome Road, but I was amazed to realize just how unremarkable it is.

Ah well, time to end it.

I've realised I don't actually have all that much to say about Old World Blues - the third of the four main Fallout: New Vegas DLCs. The sandbox of Big MT feels like a very Fallout: New Vegas kinda take on Bethesda Fallout world design. It's (literally) artificial and kinda shallow, but there's a constant focus on shootin' and lootin' that's pretty fun when combined with some of the zany antics you get in this DLC. I especially liked the stealth suit infiltration missions sidequest, it felt like a unique challenge.

The problem is that outside of the Courier having a (not-so) pleasant conversation with their own brain, the story of Old World Blues, like Honest Hearts before it, feels pretty inconsequential. I respect the campy 50's sci-fi vibes they're going for here, but the comedy is just too zany for its own good, especially when towards the end this DLC is trying to communicate to the player an actually serious message about over-attachment to the past, which is watered down by the "reddit humor".

Also, the conversation with the scientists at the start is literally 4 times longer than it has any right to be and drains my will to live.

I always dread the first conversation with the Think Tank, not just because they're loud and zany in place of anything like an actual joke, but because that scene always seems to stretch on endlessly. This was the first time I actually thought to time it: it takes thirty minutes from Klein's first line of dialogue to the resumption of gameplay.

Like all hazing rituals, this serves the purpose of making one overrate what comes after. It hadn't struck me in previous playthroughs just how little there actually is to the open world: it's a small handful of combat arenas built on the same assets as the base game with some neon flourishes. As in Honest Hearts, a few of these arenas are made mandatory in lieu of quest design: the bulk of the experience is fucking around between the introductory sequence and the ending sequence. It's a pivot to a style of world design closer to Bethesda's, but without the involved dungeon design that makes that approach compelling. Half a star for the hemlock joke, though.

If you loved New Vegas for it's deep and interesting characters, well designed open world, strong writing, and versatile game design - expect absolutely none of that in this DLC which answers the question: What if FONV was a corridor shooter with dick and fart jokes?

Old Wolrd Blues is in every way the exact opposite of the base game. It kicks off with a 20 minute non-stop exposition fest from a group of badly written unfunny characters who make at least 3 dick and fart jokes before you even start the DLC proper. Your objective is to travel 3 paths, find 3 items, and beat the cartoonishly evil bad guy.

As I've mentioned in the main game review, Fallout's shooting is the weakest aspect of its design. There's no mobility, the vats is clunky and interrupts, and shooting is more RPG than simulational making it feel like you're trading numbers with bullet sponges. So treating FONV as any other FPS game of its time and inserting a bunch of shooting corridors is one of the worst directions to take the game. It's laborious, slow, and un-fun.

Meanwhile all the content that made FONV is entirely absent. The open world is replaced with a small domed city with 3 main paths and a few extra labs to explore. The extra areas are themselves incredibly mundane and have little to discover. The characters are incredibly shallow, unfunny, and cartoonish so there's no depth to explore there. You have no companions. Your skills do not factor into the mission design. But you do get a new gimmicky sound gun which does nothing to spice up the awful combat.

I get that whoever made this wanted to produce a light-hearted silly low-stakes story that gave players a break from the bleak serious tone of the base game but it gave me whiplash coming into this off the ending. It actively erodes the nuance, seriousness, and depth of the game - entirely evaporated by the end of the opening monologue. It nosedives into the most banal and generic FPS action imaginable of its time, discards every strength of the core game and wallows in it's weakest design aspects. It actively undermines the creativity and effort that went into avoiding that with the base game. It feels lazy, uninspired, and tonally divorced from the core game.

I couldn't stomach even finishing this DLC and, since I can't go back to the main game without finishing it, if I ever play the other DLC it will be on a new play through of the core game. I hated this experience and it actively harmed my appreciation for the base game. Do not recommend.

Old World Blues tiene el mismo problema que el anterior dlc, con la mayoría de misiones consistiendo en "fetch quests" ,con poco o nada en medio, metidas en un mapa lleno de enemigos que te detectarán a 5 kilómetros de distancia detrás de un muro, viniendo uno tras otro y otro más. Es insoportable

Por fortuna este DLC SÍ contiene diálogos divertidos y personajes carismáticos que hacen la experiencia mucho más llevadera y añaden opciones más interesantes al roleplay de cada jugador. Lamentablemente, aunque los personajes en sí sean interesantes, ninguno se siente debidamente desarrollado para ser más que cerebros graciosos.

This one to me always stood out as way more out there and bizarre than way other recent expansions. One of the reasons I hold this and 3 at a much higher regard than Fallout 4/76. The story and dialogue gets pretty crazy and comedic and exploring the big MT is nice and this one really rewards exploration with lots of new weapons and armor to find. The stealth suit MK II was just like the assassin suit from dead money, but became super annoying once it would keep repeating the same dialogue over and over. I get what they were trying to do, but kinda backfired lol. I did not do all the side quests, but the ones I did were pretty interesting and fitted right into my science build I was doing. One of the biggest issues I ran into was I had never had my game crash until starting this expansion and I could replicate the same crash unknowingly over and over again by looking in certain containers or picking up certain items at a certain time. Besides that a pretty nice expansion!

I'm surprised noone's tried to gaslight people into thinking this is "reddit humor" or whatever yet

Not because they'd be right, they wouldn't be, this DLC's still a riot, but just because if people were able to do it with something as universally lauded as PORTAL 2 I can easily envision them doing it here.

This expansion's just great overall. Better then I remember too. I thought the writing would carry most of it but the gameplay is great here too. There's so much on the map to explore and all the items you can find are really cool and fun to use, on top of all the random buffs you get from having your body parts replaced. All the Sink AIs emphasize getting random items for scrapping to make new materials even more then before which is awesome, I just wish these were in the base game by default, since chances are 90% of people aren't gonna do this quest until they reach endgame lol.

My only real complaint i'd say aside from robo scorpions being sometimes annoying to fight is that for me at least the Sink commissary didn't always have the ammo I was primarily using at this point in the game (12/20ga shotshells, .50 MG, 5mm, 12.7mm specifically) and when they did it'd be such a small amount that it wouldn't matter. Most of what you find throughout this game's map are going to be .357s, .44s and energy ammo (namely for the new weapons + cyberdog gun) and while I can always break that shit down to make materials to make my own ammo, primers for ammo types are so hard to find in the main overworld that by a certain point I just had like 5000k+ lead in my inventory with nothing to do with it and still no ammo for the guns I actually used lol. Other then that tho great expansion, easily the best of the NV bunch.

A step down from Dead Money, but there's still a lot to like here.

There are a ton of unique items, apparel, and weapons scattered throughout the Big Empty, not all of which are too compelling, but some of them are fun and all of them are creative. It's a good way to motivate exploration of its quite large hub world, even though that hub itself is a bit tedious to traverse despite plenty of unique art design along the way. I enjoyed discovering traces of Father Elijah from the previous DLC and finding the patient zero plant creatures that led to that one overgrown vault in the main game.

The level design within the facilities has enough to set them apart from each other but lacks the intricacy and intuitiveness that I loved about the Sierra Madre (the waypoint markers were necessary to find where you were going this time). But there are still a couple of smaller areas that provide rewarding exploration and offer up fun and clever environmental storytelling, like when you go past a bunch of empty cages in a kennel and figure the dogs must be long gone, but then you read a log that describes the dogs eating a bunch of Stealth Boys and you get that "oh fuck" sensation realizing you now have to fight through a bunch of invisible robo-dogs on your way back out.

The story and theme of Old World Blues is certainly distinctive, focusing entirely on humor and science-fiction as its two drives. The jokes can be rather hit or miss (the slow pauses during speaker changes kills the pacing of what was clearly meant to be rapid-fire back and forth dialogue at points) but there's plenty of funny material in here to be sure; the personalities in The Sink are all fun.

The sci-fi angle is almost a little too over-the-top for my liking. It's not canon-breaking necessarily, but undergoing a complete brain, spine, and heart transplant is just a bit hard to buy in this world and stretched my suspension of disbelief a touch too far. It at least gives you a motivating core objective, but then the actual quest design isn't particularly interesting — it basically boils down to a long fetch quest throughout the middle with a big list of things to gather.

Heading into the Big MT - a world of mad science and even madder science...

The Good
-Characters are obviously the star of the show. A genocidal toaster, clean freak sink, the 5 (6 really) main scientists... exceptional, punchy writing.
-OWB is the DLC that ties all the others together most strongly. It sets up the other 3 very well and I got a chuckle every time Elijah is mentioned (have fun in that vault buddy)
-Stronggg foreshadowing of Ulysses. Wanted to hear a bit more though about what he was up to
-New guns are cool... for Energy weapons users!!! Not so much for me

The Bad
-The typical fallout issue of a lot of quests being too thinly-veiled fetch quests
-Roboscorpions are verrrry tanky for gun builds. The other enemies have a good lethality to them but also aren't too hard to kill. The scorpions had me running as often as fighting, just to save on bullets..
-The Scientist brains are great, absolutely hilarious, but a bit underutilized. Or more, are too packed in? You can do like 90% of their content in your first conversation with them. The intro with them needs to be shorter, then spread out a bit more over the DLC. Even if its just one more meeting with them for extra exposition before the finale.

The Meh
-The world map has some cool bits to it but ultimately is ruined buildings on more ruined buildings. The interior maps are pretty samey too.

The Hmmm
-Why do you have to destroy Moebius at the end? Did I miss a dialogue or sidequest somehow?

A hilarious and fun romp through the mad science that has always been in the background of Fallout but never quite front and center - plus its usual splash of genuine horror at just how fucked up everything is in this wasteland. A good story (with an interesting 'twist' ending) with great characters and some worthwhile sidequests.

Old World Blues really encapsulates Obsidan’s, and especially Chris Avellone’s, lack of restraint. I don’t mind that the opening is 15 minutes of a dialogue. What I do mind, however, is that the rest of the content is 40 more minutes of dialogue padded with a few hours worth of unnecessary fetch quests, bullet sponges, and a boring map.

Many people love the writing and humour in OWB. Personally, I think it’s just okay. It would’ve been more effective if the content itself was more tuned.

Behind the horrible gameplay and quirky humour is the age of old question: has science gone too far? Specifically, where do we draw the line on scientific progress. The backset to this is, ironically, a bombed out mountain where scientists (well, their brains) have been fighting for 200 years in stalemate.

Unfortunately, the theme becomes fairly muddied in between the humour, drawn out dialogue, and horrid quests.

Like Dead Money, Old World Blues would’ve been better served with minimal combat and a more refined map.

Jumped into this DLC before I did literally anything else in New Vegas. Under prepared and under ranked. This was genuinely a very fun challenge to grind through, it had me playing differently and prioritizing my equipment better than I have before.

Although, the repetitious "testing" missions got on my nerves a bit and the exposition here can be exhausting. I'm all for dialogue and world building in games, but nearly 10 mins of talking when I wanna start moving/exploring/and fighting just felt really patronizing.

I liked this DLC, but did not LOVE it in the slightest