Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dead Money Love!

This has been a great time to be a gamer. Not just because of new releases like Portal 2, which are pretty incredible. I’ve been digging into my back log of Steam purchases from the holiday sales, finally playing through all the wonderful little titles that escaped my notice when I was so busy back in January and February. Most of them are dross, don’t be mistaken. Some incredible footnotes like VVVVVVV and Super Meat Boy are mixed in there, but mostly I’ve been working on completing archaic shooters no one in their right mind would find fun (I’m looking mostly at Kane and Lynch here).

But mixed in with that dross was the Dead Money DLC for Fallout: New Vegas. I was a huge fan of New Vegas when it dropped over six months ago, and I played through all of Fallout 3’s downloadable content, for better or for worse, so playing Dead Money was a bit of a no-brainer for me. But my expectations were set very, very low. Anyone who played Operation Anchorage or Mothership Zeta knows why.

Fallout DLC has been miserable in the past. The consistently excellent games have been paired with poor, rushed-to-market, hastily constructed downloadable content, and it’s been infuriating to deal with both the technical aspects of Fallout’s DLC and the structural elements of having to play through a series of corridor maps that capture none of what makes the Fallout series in 3D so fantastic. Dead Money has none of these problems.
Dead Money works in a carefully enclosed setting, made with all new, all pitch perfect artistic resources. There’s none of the content recycling that plagued much of the Fallout 3 DLC. Unlike say Broken Steel (ironically my favorite piece of Fallout 3 DLC), which reused assets from previous Fallout games to the exclusion of any new content, Dead Money is a visual feast of new content, a glimpse of what life looks like outside of the Mojave desert. It introduces new combat mechanics, some of the most interesting and rewarding that I’ve ever seen, that contribute to both the setting and the difficulty of play itself.
Let’s face it, most of the DLC packages in Fallout 3 were pathetically easy, and had all the teeth of a kitten when it came to actual new challenges. Dead Money is all about changing the way that Fallout: New Vegas plays as a game. New rules, rules that show how dangerous the world is outside of the Mojave, come into play. And moving through Dead Money is all about coming to terms with these rules, learning them and learning how to manipulate them.

A big part of that is Dead Money’s new characters. Replacing traditional companions, Dead Money has a self contained set of compatriots who offer up bonuses exclusive to the Sierra Madre casino. The end result is not only a brand new cast of characters with their own stories, idiosyncrasies, strengths and weaknesses, but also a set of new mechanics unlocked by having each character in your party, most of them related to exploring world around you. Having a specific companion will make elements of the Sierra Madre that would normally make areas impossible to traverse safe by comparison.

The characters also provide depth and insight to the world of Fallout: New Vegas. New Vegas delves deeper and more incisively into what the world of Fallout is than any other Fallout game ever cared to, and it generates some pretty effective narrative in the process. Visiting the Sierra Madre will teach you volumes about the factions you’ve already met, the factions you haven’t met, the places between Vegas and DC and everything beyond. Fallout 3’s fascination with the war with the Chinese, its focus on the Brotherhood of Steel separatists as noble saviors attempting to impose order on a harsh new land, was all far less interesting to me than New Vegas’ constant struggle, settlement and resettlement. New Vegas is about society recovering, becoming something new and real and horrible and wonderful. Fallout 3 was almost entirely about what had occurred, and how people had trouble letting go of the past.

Dead Money does great service to both of these ends. Thematically it strattles New Vegas and Fallout 3, and it offers up insight on the struggles of the world of Fallout 3 better than Fallout 3 did. It captured the futility and frustrating towards the old world that Point Lookout aspired towards exposing far more adeptly. And it does so in a way which was still incredibly fucking challenging, even to an experienced player with a maxed out character.

It also carries with it all the goodies Fallout DLC is expected to: new weapons, armor and tools. There’s even a new currency, one that generates almost exclusively items that no one would really ever want. It’s a pity Sierra Madre chips cannot be used to secure fresh food and water supplies, but that might’ve made the game too easy.

In fact the only critique I’d have of Dead Money is less a criticism and more a comment: currency, and selling items in Dead Money is a bit difficult. Since vendors never use bottle caps and insist on a combination of chips, goods and old world currency, dropping off loot becomes a mini-game unto itself. It might’ve warranted adding a tracker where you could compare the value of goods you were selling to the value of goods you wanted to exchange for them, the way the old Fallouts did, but instead it takes the shape of a system of trial and error wherein you will repeatedly offer vendors goods and adjust the amount of pre-war money that you want back. It’s not a deal-breaker, just an irritating reality of Dead Money.

And it speaks volumes that that, aside from the sometimes punishing difficulty, is the only negative thing I can think of saying about this game. Dead Money is Downloadable content done right. It grows the world of Fallout: New Vegas as a whole, provides a set of rewards and challenges that were both unexpected and quite enjoyable, introduces new story elements that tie in to the original story of New Vegas and generally just constitutes a great way to spend fifteen dollars. If you like Fallout: New Vegas at all, there’s really no reason not to buy it.