New Vegas’s DLC serves as a capstone to overarching plotlines that have its threads in the base game, but even more than that, it serves to mine out the behind-the-scenes stories and missed encounters. Van Buren characters return, canned plot threads are unsealed, and Ulysses, originally a base-game companion, gets top billing. It’s hard to look at the DLC without considering its context. This is, almost certainly, the last West Coast Fallout game made by anybody who worked at Black Isle in any meaningful capacity. The add-on storyline is, then, something of a swan song - the series’ central themes are given a variety of tonal and thematic viewpoints, the serialized nature of it all allowing for extreme variety.
How badly are people trapped by their past? Are they in control of their future? How much can one great man truly accomplish, and will it last? These meat-and-potatoes Fallout-ass questions are stressed across genre, tone, visual style, and character perspective, to varying results. Lonesome Road represents the ultimate culmination of these themes and delivers it as the ultimate test to the player. It’s cool to see these gameplay systems be used for a grueling mega-dungeon lined with the most fearsome enemies in the game, and it takes the base game’s yellow-washed concrete and turns it into a thin orange haze amidst a skyline on fire. It’s paced better than any other of Avellone’s DLC, and it can be beaten in an evening (if you’re willing to stay up an hour past bedtime.)
It frustrates that it struggles to live up to its potential. After three expansions of hype, the much-vaunted confrontation between couriers is mostly conveyed through rambling phone calls. Ulysses rants about the obvious and doesn’t dig into the interesting, the Courier is given a backstory that they’re about as baffled by as the player, and incredibly bizarre questions about their past are raised and dismissed as quickly as they came (logistically, how would they even be a Legion spy at level zero, having lived their entire life west of the Hoover Dam and taking jobs for the NCR? If the Courier is a woman, they literally can’t have been in the Legion while still having the freedom to do... anything they do at all because of the patriarchal systems in place!!!)
Ulysses trembles in fear at the Big Empty’s scientists, claiming that somebody would need to be “a hundred Elijahs” to take them down - but the explicit mechanical and narrative point in Old World Blues is that they’re complete pushovers when they don’t hold all the cards - cards they did not hold at the time of Ulysses’ internment. He tells the Courier that they built a city they don’t remember, on roads they never walked. He systematically genocides a model society because they proved his ideology wrong by virtue of not collapsing like Ashton did, then high-roads the player because they delivered a package several years ago . He talks at length about the threat the Tunnelers pose to the Mojave, the unpreparedness and menace they bring, despite many, many slides in the base game ending contradicting this event’s occurrence and the DLC’s level design ensuring the Courier will have killed about eleventy bazillion singlehandedly. He castigates the player’s lack of beliefs even if they’re at the point of no return for the NCR. He tells the protagonist “remember... you could have turned away at any time... none of this had to happen...” in intonation that makes even a Spec Ops: The Line defender make dismissive jerk-off motions.
Constraining the protagonist’s backstory is not a bad thing. Knights of the Republic 2 and Planescape: Torment both do this extremely well; they indisputably did things that affected the world for better and for worse before the player took control, and it’s said player’s job to figure out how much responsibility they want to take and how much they can grow and change. This is baked into the core of both games, and the player is given a range of responses and reactions, through which they develop their character’s personality in meaningful ways. Lonesome Road is terrified of committing to this, and the Courier isn’t even concerned with taking responsibility inasmuch as they’re baffled at even having a backstory. There’s “the MC pathologically cannot take responsibility for their part in Peragus’ destruction in a healthy way and is incentivized to avoid taking any,” and there’s “in-universe, in-character, the MC asks what the fuck is going on and points out that this retcon breaks the lore, and the GMPC just kind of goes ‘nuh-uh’ and continues their screed anyways.”
This half-baked intrusion further suffers from its placement: there is a time to deny the player agency, and there is a time to establish constraints on their past and behavior, and that time is not in the victory lap dungeon crawl forty-four hours into a forty-five hour game. The Tunnelers obliterate the meaningfulness of literally any decisions the player makes in Lonesome Road, in the other DLC, and in the base game, because 80% of the Mojave will die overnight in the near future. Doing quests and character interactions with an assumed backstory becomes frustrating when the Courier suddenly grows a decade-plus of experience for just delivering mail (frustrating that the player has to spend their entire life doing this one thing to make the plot work, but Ulysses gets to do it as a side gig inbetween being a frumentarii and community-builder and still proclaims that he’s a full-fledged Capital C Courier) and has precious little space for anything not built around that single backstory and character concept.
Its finale has a bugged reputation check, a boring wave defense, and a genuinely great conversation that can be ignored with a 90 Speech check. The player is given a binary choice that’s never very hard to make at all given that they have to pick between NCR or Legion to beat the game, then are offered a get-out-of-jail-free sacrifice that textually loses absolutely nothing because all the relevant data was transmitted elsewhere and the Courier can just fill in the gaps later on if they want to. The ending slide has Chris Avellone finally remember that he forgot to make female characters feel weird and shitty, so the mic drop gets a gendered line that reads “War never changes. But women do!”
From the start, Fallout excelled at captivating the imagination and letting the player fill in the gaps, and going from a base game with eighteen months of development time to four DLCs that cost five bucks a pop means a lot is gonna get lost in the shuffle, shoved aside, or get served undercooked. Lonesome Road tries, and it threads together locations, characters, and concepts from every Fallout game up to that point - including Tactics and Van Buren - to create one final confrontation, begging the past to stay dead, the mistakes to be remembered, and the future to be written anew. Memories of the past were already falling apart or warped to fit new ends, and ghosts are put to rest or brought back incomplete and screaming. The end of the West Coast was never really going to be dignified, after all.
How badly are people trapped by their past? Are they in control of their future? How much can one great man truly accomplish, and will it last? These meat-and-potatoes Fallout-ass questions are stressed across genre, tone, visual style, and character perspective, to varying results. Lonesome Road represents the ultimate culmination of these themes and delivers it as the ultimate test to the player. It’s cool to see these gameplay systems be used for a grueling mega-dungeon lined with the most fearsome enemies in the game, and it takes the base game’s yellow-washed concrete and turns it into a thin orange haze amidst a skyline on fire. It’s paced better than any other of Avellone’s DLC, and it can be beaten in an evening (if you’re willing to stay up an hour past bedtime.)
It frustrates that it struggles to live up to its potential. After three expansions of hype, the much-vaunted confrontation between couriers is mostly conveyed through rambling phone calls. Ulysses rants about the obvious and doesn’t dig into the interesting, the Courier is given a backstory that they’re about as baffled by as the player, and incredibly bizarre questions about their past are raised and dismissed as quickly as they came (logistically, how would they even be a Legion spy at level zero, having lived their entire life west of the Hoover Dam and taking jobs for the NCR? If the Courier is a woman, they literally can’t have been in the Legion while still having the freedom to do... anything they do at all because of the patriarchal systems in place!!!)
Ulysses trembles in fear at the Big Empty’s scientists, claiming that somebody would need to be “a hundred Elijahs” to take them down - but the explicit mechanical and narrative point in Old World Blues is that they’re complete pushovers when they don’t hold all the cards - cards they did not hold at the time of Ulysses’ internment. He tells the Courier that they built a city they don’t remember, on roads they never walked. He systematically genocides a model society because they proved his ideology wrong by virtue of not collapsing like Ashton did, then high-roads the player because they delivered a package several years ago . He talks at length about the threat the Tunnelers pose to the Mojave, the unpreparedness and menace they bring, despite many, many slides in the base game ending contradicting this event’s occurrence and the DLC’s level design ensuring the Courier will have killed about eleventy bazillion singlehandedly. He castigates the player’s lack of beliefs even if they’re at the point of no return for the NCR. He tells the protagonist “remember... you could have turned away at any time... none of this had to happen...” in intonation that makes even a Spec Ops: The Line defender make dismissive jerk-off motions.
Constraining the protagonist’s backstory is not a bad thing. Knights of the Republic 2 and Planescape: Torment both do this extremely well; they indisputably did things that affected the world for better and for worse before the player took control, and it’s said player’s job to figure out how much responsibility they want to take and how much they can grow and change. This is baked into the core of both games, and the player is given a range of responses and reactions, through which they develop their character’s personality in meaningful ways. Lonesome Road is terrified of committing to this, and the Courier isn’t even concerned with taking responsibility inasmuch as they’re baffled at even having a backstory. There’s “the MC pathologically cannot take responsibility for their part in Peragus’ destruction in a healthy way and is incentivized to avoid taking any,” and there’s “in-universe, in-character, the MC asks what the fuck is going on and points out that this retcon breaks the lore, and the GMPC just kind of goes ‘nuh-uh’ and continues their screed anyways.”
This half-baked intrusion further suffers from its placement: there is a time to deny the player agency, and there is a time to establish constraints on their past and behavior, and that time is not in the victory lap dungeon crawl forty-four hours into a forty-five hour game. The Tunnelers obliterate the meaningfulness of literally any decisions the player makes in Lonesome Road, in the other DLC, and in the base game, because 80% of the Mojave will die overnight in the near future. Doing quests and character interactions with an assumed backstory becomes frustrating when the Courier suddenly grows a decade-plus of experience for just delivering mail (frustrating that the player has to spend their entire life doing this one thing to make the plot work, but Ulysses gets to do it as a side gig inbetween being a frumentarii and community-builder and still proclaims that he’s a full-fledged Capital C Courier) and has precious little space for anything not built around that single backstory and character concept.
Its finale has a bugged reputation check, a boring wave defense, and a genuinely great conversation that can be ignored with a 90 Speech check. The player is given a binary choice that’s never very hard to make at all given that they have to pick between NCR or Legion to beat the game, then are offered a get-out-of-jail-free sacrifice that textually loses absolutely nothing because all the relevant data was transmitted elsewhere and the Courier can just fill in the gaps later on if they want to. The ending slide has Chris Avellone finally remember that he forgot to make female characters feel weird and shitty, so the mic drop gets a gendered line that reads “War never changes. But women do!”
From the start, Fallout excelled at captivating the imagination and letting the player fill in the gaps, and going from a base game with eighteen months of development time to four DLCs that cost five bucks a pop means a lot is gonna get lost in the shuffle, shoved aside, or get served undercooked. Lonesome Road tries, and it threads together locations, characters, and concepts from every Fallout game up to that point - including Tactics and Van Buren - to create one final confrontation, begging the past to stay dead, the mistakes to be remembered, and the future to be written anew. Memories of the past were already falling apart or warped to fit new ends, and ghosts are put to rest or brought back incomplete and screaming. The end of the West Coast was never really going to be dignified, after all.