Video Game Review: Fallout New Vegas DLC: Lonesome Road

Ulysses' mark, the trail continues.

Ulysses, the man that refused to carry the Platinum Chip, whose decision set in motion the events that saw the courier shot in the head. A man who has remained unseen, but whose actions shaped the fate of the courier and, by extension, the entire Mojave. Through each subsequent DLC pack, his presence has been slightly more pronounced: his logs, his marks and the consequences of his actions, all part of a trail that, each time, felt like it was getting slightly warmer. Now, finally, the time has come, for the Courier to travel the Lonesome Road, to cross the divide, and to find out the truth about Ulysses, and their pasts.

This is Lonesome Road’s baggage. These are the expectations that this DLC has to come to terms with in order to provide a fulfilling experience. It has the unenviable task of having to give the player closure to the story of the Ulysses and the Courier, a backstory that has been nothing if not built up by the hints and clues throughout all previous New Vegas content; as well as having to provide a good final send off for New Vegas as a game, and the Fallout universe as a whole for the foreseeable future. Still, in spite of its many flaws, New Vegas was a well crafted game set in an amazing world, being written by the very guys who created this world back in the late nineties, so if anyone could pull this off, they could. Unfortunately, they haven’t.

There is no way of getting around this; Lonesome Road is a big disappointment. Maybe expectations were a little high coming off of Old World Blues, but it’s hard to see LR as anything other than average. But for Fallout content, especially this as the final piece of announced content, average just isn’t good enough.

Easily the most interesting view of The Divide

The greatest strength of Fallout has always been in the universe, the gameplay having always been solid but never stellar. Even in 1997, the original Fallout’s gameplay was a little clunky, but the beautifully realised world more than made up for it and ensured that the game appeared on ‘Best Games Ever’ lists for years afterwards. Sadly, LR really does nothing with the setting, The Divide being more of a generic post-apocalyptic world than Fallout retro-futurist one. The area designs are appropriately bombed-out and destroyed but fail to invoke any real emotional response. The outdoor areas especially feel very phoned-in, never being more than a generic destroyed town. The problem is further compounded by the linearity of The Divide, there is very much a set path to be following with limited chances for exploring around the road you have to be taking. As such the bombed out buildings that would often be explorable in, say, the main game of New Vegas, are merely there to hem the player in to the path that they should be taking. The whole area design of the game feels more like a nineties FPS than a modern (or even retro) Fallout title. It’s too restrictive, and the way in which these restrictions are imposed clashes with the conventions of the rest of the game wherein buildings generally provide a door to, not a barrier against, further exploration.

In spite of the irritation of the linearity, it is only a real problem because of the aforementioned charmlessness of the design of The Divide. An apt comparison can be made between LR and Dead Money, which too was quite linear. The major difference is that Dead Money used the aforementioned Fallout trick of using its world to provide a compelling experience in spite of giving the player little free choice (in Fallout terms). The Sierra Madre was well designed, aesthetically interesting and enigmatic; The Divide is visually uninspiring, clichéd, and dull.

Still, credit where it’s due, The Divide may be lacking as a setting, but the designers did at least do a good job of ensuring that Lonesome Road lived up to its title. Without giving too much away, the only character you can really have any meaningful dialogue is Ulysses, and unsurprisingly you don’t meet him until the climax. Apart from that, there are no other people to talk to in the divide. Even the mysterious ‘Marked Men’ that roam the divide don’t have much to say, not even a battle cry as they shoot you. This does work to give the quest a degree of isolation, The Courier really has no one else to count on. Sadly even this is limited by the aforementioned design issues of LR that work to ensure that there’s never quite enough immersion for the game’s attempts at fostering isolation to really work.

Never meet your heroes... or villains

Moreover, when the isolation is finally broken there’s just more disappointment. Much like many other once enigmatic characters; The Emperor from Star Wars; Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII;... the shark from Jaws; once Ulysses is standing there before the Courier, the veil of mystery removed, exposition spewing from every orifice, he loses his magic. What you get is character with iffy voice acting (though the voice is really cool), spouting philoso-nonesense, that ends up coming across as just another wasteland madman. This in turn ensures that there is a really unsatisfying climax to it all; dealing with Ulysses loses some of its lustre when he himself is no longer what you expected.  The snippets of information given by audiologs, terminals and the comments of NPCs painted a picture that the character could never live up to. It’s interesting that Ulysses’ best performance is in an audiolog you receive at the end. Much like Lonesome Road as a whole, Ulysses as a character ultimately comes off worse for the expectations built up by the implicit promises scattered New Vegas and its DLC.

This seems completely safe...

As far as the actual mechanics of the gameplay go, LR is generally just more New Vegas. However, there are a couple of elements that do deserve a closer look in the context of LR. The most prominent is the introduction of warheads around the map that can, and in some cases must, be detonated by the player using a ‘laser detonator’. Some warheads unblock passages you need to take, others just open the way to items and some merely do damage to surrounding enemies. There is nothing really wrong with the idea; it just comes across as a bit half baked. It doesn’t add anything special to gameplay, beyond an achievement.  Also, in a world devastated by nuclear war, somehow the idea of blowing up a nuclear warhead from less than a hundred yards away with no consequences to you is a little immersion breaking, especially given the damage that they can inflict in scripted events.

Not pictured: 5 subsequent quick loads

The standard combat of the game is classic New Vegas, though it does come across as a little on the difficult side. A level 45 character (the maximum possible level to attain before LR came out) had better be packing a boatload of ammunition and stimpacks or else face frequent deaths, not so much at the hands of firearm wielding Marked Men, more usually at the hands of Deathclaws or a new enemy: Tunnelers; an enemy introduced in a sequence that sees a Deathclaw being torn apart. Hmmmm. The difficulty of the enemies may be a stylistic choice to reflect the harshness of The Divide, or to give previously level maxed characters something to provide a challenge (maybe both). The latter seems a little difficult to believe unless the whole thing scales very effectively by level as the only way to reach level 45 is to have all previous DLCs and it would seem odd for Obsidian to want to limit the potential audience of Lonesome Road to people that have all of the other DLC packs. Still, elements of difficulty such as unavoidable Deathclaws comes across as cheap in a series whose gameplay is generally centred around being able to approach a problem in multiple ways. There is the impression that some of the harder fights can be avoided by strategically detonating the warheads scattered around the map, but these tend to lack the punch (surprisingly) to take down tougher enemies. This is further compounded by the fact that enemies usually see you when you begin to try to detonate a warhead and will, rather rudely, move away from the warhead towards you.

Beyond of the meat of the new content: the storyline and map, Lonesome Road, also has the expected compliment of new weapons, armour and items. Again, these are nothing special. They aren’t atrocious, just not really all that inspiring. The new Shoulder Mounted Machine Gun and Red Glare Rocket Launcher, both look cool but they lack any real feeling of punch when you use them. There’s nothing quite like pumping thirteen bright red rapid fire rockets into an unsuspecting group of enemies only to be gunned down within ten seconds because none of them have gone down, and they now know exactly where you are. Other items of note include lesser quality versions of Legate Lanius’ gear. The inclusion of this makes storyline sense, but it seems a little lazy: just old items with tweaked stats. On the bright side, it does mean that the Courier can finally run around in that cool mask for longer than the time taken between killing Lanius and initiating the ending sequence. There are other new items, but none really worthy of note, which, if anything, only highlights the problem.

To reiterate, at its core, Lonesome Road is very much an average piece of content. It’s by no means atrocious, but when it’s being added to what is a very well designed game, it does come off looking and feeling worse than it would in isolation. It provides a less than satisfying ending what seemed to be a parallel saga of the DLC, a story of Ulysses and the unfinished business of the Courier’s old life to compliment the story of the Mojave and the Courier’s new. At £7.49 for around 5 hours of content, it’s cheaper than a film but it really can’t be recommended over any of the other DLC for New Vegas. For those that want completion, get it, you were going to anyway. Anyone who isn’t all that interested in the whole Ulysses storyline however, had best leave it alone as there is little else to recommend it and it falls below the standard of the main game or the other DLC.