Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Old World Love!

If I factor in the time it took me to finish Old World Blues, I’ve been playing Fallout: New Vegas for over a year at this point. I sank a considerable amount of time in to Fallout 3 and Oblivion, sure, but I’ve spent most of the last year sustainably interested in Fallout: New Vegas, which is pretty impressive considering it’s a single player game based on a largely recycled engine in a world I’ve explored pretty thoroughly at this point. And with one last piece of Downloadable Content on the horizon I’ll be playing it again ere long. So even though I’ll end up sinking almost $100 into Fallout: New Vegas with DLC, I’m confident that I’ll spend at least eleven months playing the game, possibly more with graduate school. Hell, if I start replaying it again I might even sink more time into it. And after finishing Old World Blues I’m seriously considering replaying it again.

Old World Blues is a rare expansion by any measure. It takes a small space and packs it with dense bits of exploration. It’s marked with enough waypoints that you’ll likely see everything you care to pretty quickly, but if you take the time to crawl around on your own you’ll find far, far more and sink a pretty fantastic amount of time into it. It tells buckets and buckets of story with relatively little real dialogue. It makes me form a relationship with a character who spits white noise at me. It constantly references penises, but the dirtiest moments come from me simply breathing.

It’s sick, funny, disturbing and deadly serious without ever taking itself too seriously. It plays with the idea of internment camps, government experiments, friendship and mental illness, all the while cracking a smile. It has overtones of the Venture Brothers coloring it throughout, including a small hidden room filled with Walking Eyes (the pinnacle of super science). It’s just good through and through, and despite its relatively small size I invested a pretty significant chunk of time in it.

To get down to brass tacks, the central storyline of Old World Blues is the briefest of any of the expansions so far. You can breeze through it in a handful of hours given a maxed out character. In fact, I’d bet you can complete the entire thing without every initializing the Sink, although if you never initialize the AutoDoc you’ll be leaving some pretty personal things behind. There are really only four segments to the main quest, and three of them are open-ended, simultaneously accomplished bits of it. Old World Blues packs a lot of storytelling, character development and intrigue into its handful of hours, sure, but for all of that it is quite brief. Unless, of course, you choose to explore on your own or engage Old World Blues’ robust side quests. Then the game will stretch out to quite a bit.

And really, you didn’t buy an expansion featuring James Urbaniak as a brain in the jar, the world’s angriest toaster and sexy twin light switches, to breeze through it. You bought an expansion like Old World Blues to drink it in, and Old World Blues wants to reward you for it.

Old World Blues is scattered with various miscellany more than New Vegas itself was, filled with tiny little dungeons, each of them containing a neat little reward. If you simply play through all of the various quests you’ll be prompted to visit the majority of the locations in order to acquire modules in what is one of the most rewarding base-building sub-games I’ve ever engaged in, but I wasn’t aware of this when I first stepped in to Big Mountain. I spent the bulk of my time wandering aimlessly, searching the corners of each base looking for clues as to just what was going on and what had transpired in the Big Empty. In fact the bulk of my time was spent exploring places unprompted, and many of my most rewarding experiences came from searching random locales completely unrelated to the central plot. Most of these locations tied into Dead Money’s storyline and the greater intertextuality of all of Fallout: New Vegas’ DLC to boot. While wandering through the ruins of Big Mountain I felt like I was learning as much about the world that came before as I was about Ulysses, and what is to come in the final Lonesome Road DLC. My curiosity was piqued, as if Dead Money didn’t do that well enough before, and I’m sure I’ll be very distracted for one to two weeks when Lonesome Road finally hits and I find myself in The Great Divide.

But the single biggest thing that Old World Blues accomplished was reminding me why I loved New Vegas in the first place. The rich exploration, the colorful characters and then customization is so unique. It’s so willing to make its inventory system fiddly and finicky, happy to let you play without engaging huge chunks of its gameplay but deeply rewarding when you choose to hand craft those bullets or change out that energy weapon’s normal power cells for some max charged cells. In the desolate ruin of Big Mountain I found myself looking for water, for upgrades, for anything I could use to stay alive. It was strange and challenging and, in the end, wonderful.

That’s the power that New Vegas brought to bear, the power Old World Blues is here to remind you of: it offered up a world for you to explore at your leisure, a world that can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be. Do you have lengthy conversations with the inhabitants of Big Mountain, or do you brush them off, rush through their tasks and kill them all without a second thought? Do you tediously micromanage your food and water supply (which people like me love, I should add) or do you carelessly charge into battle with a flaming power fist, crashing into lobotomites and sending body parts careening left and right? These are the choices that New Vegas presented its players with, and Old World Blues is back to remind you why you made them.