The world doesn’t end. Fallout has always been about that core message – there’s always life, always something going. Emerging into the light of day from Vault 101 is less about discovering a dead world and more about discovering yourself amidst the remnants of humanity, discovering what matters to you, what you find interesting. Will you ignore the people of the Vault and do…well, whatever you want to do, or will you carve your way through super mutants to keep them safe?
Each iteration of the Fallout series is about this core of human endurance at its heart. Each time we examine its world we see how life has grown, has determination has blossomed into new civilization. Fallout 3 hints at how big the world really is, how durable life is. Fallout: New Vegas shows how deep these trends run, how cultures develop and grow in this new world. It’s about history, the history you find, the history you make. And Lonesome Road, the latest Fallout: New Vegas DLC, is a sort of capstone on this entire tale of endurance, which is odd considering how lifeless the Divide is. But it manages to drive home this trend of endurance and the sense of history at the heart of New Vegas.
Lonesome Road is the final piece of DLC announced for New Vegas, so it was tough for me to approach it without a touch of melancholy. I’ve been enjoying New Vegas’ DLC for months now, watching as it slowly grew the world out from the Mojave, hinting at the places you could find beyond it. Chicago, the east coast, the lands of the NCR to the west and the hidden world of technology buried under the earth in caves, bunkers and craters. I’ve liked watching the narrative of Ulysses develop among the people outside of the Mojave, watching how his travels mirrored my own, hearing his musing about the world around him. I’ve learned a lot from him, about The Legion, about being a Tribal beyond the reach of the NCR. And in his footsteps I’ve learned a lot about what the world of Fallout used to be like – more than I have in any other game. The varied settings of New Vegas’ DLC have done a fantastic job of concise world building both in their settings and in the world at large.
And Lonesome Road heralded the end of these slices of stories. Which has to happen, I suppose, life being what it is, but I still felt a little pang when I loaded it up and stepped through the trailer into The Divide. What I found wasn’t what I expected at all.
The previous downloadable content focused primarily on exploring new parts of the Fallout landscape – places we’d never been before. But, spoiler alert, Lonesome Road wants you to return to a place you’ve visited long, long ago back when Fallout had an isometric view and bugs that would make the fair-weather kiddies of this gaming generation quake in their quakey-boots. It all ties into a bigger idea about histories: the ones you find and the one you make, the central theme to Lonesome Road and, once you’ve finished it, Fallout: New Vegas in general.
Lonesome Road is all about Ulysses: who he is, where he’s been and what he wants. It’s as close to a character study as video games have managed to create to date and it manages its task of relating you to its subject with virtually no contact with him during your journey. You occasionally receive messages from a loudspeaker that hangs on your heels every couple of minutes, but mostly you’ll spend your time wandering through the silent ruins around you, listening to old audio tapes and reading journal entries. There’s a lot of spectacle to admire, and I felt more like I was in a devastated cityscape than ever before within the Divide’s confines, but spectacle is old hat for games. What’s really impressive is how the spectacle forms its own narrative and informs your impression of Ulysses.
By game’s end you’ll know him well – better than he knows himself if you look hard enough. And you’ll know more about the war between Legion and NCR, just what happened to New Canaan and what makes people like Joshua Graham and Christine tick. There’s an obsession with obsession that Ulysses embodies and narratives skillfully, and it’s a pleasure to watch it unfold. If I get around to writing about a piece about storytelling and voice in games in the next few months, it’ll be about Ulysses and the Divide.
But I’m dancing around the topic of the game itself: what’s new, how does it play. Obviously it tackles big themes skillfully – Avelone has been doing that since he was a wee twenty-something decades ago. But how does it play?
The careful selection of skills that makes New Vegas such a wonderful challenge will likely have evaporated by the time you reach The Divide – the extended level cap makes the game easy, sure, but it kind of makes it too easy. I made huge mistakes creating and leveling up my character and I still managed to do just fine in every fight I ran into. I managed to max out all but two of my skills and had a collection of resources at my disposal that let me deal with any situation (barring some one hit kill scenarios that came up while fighting the jacked up Deathclaws of the divide – dick move, Obsidian) without breaking a sweat. The hard fought battles with a scrappy, under-dog character against incredible odds that made the core game of New Vegas so enjoyable at times have been reduced – you’ll still fight droves of enemies, but you’ll be able to breeze through them unless you make some serious mistakes.
That said, there’s a lot to explore, and that’s probably why you’re still playing New Vegas at this point. The array of gear and the new enemies, while well designed and engaging, aren’t too interesting. Flashbangs add a new element to combat, one well suited to my style of play. There’s some interplay between these new toys and the new enemies you’ll encounter, but for the most part I stuck with my old gear and wasn’t poorer for it. And the strange new foes you’ll encounter will actually play in a pretty familiar way. I found myself falling back on old tactics almost immediately.
But the world these creatures inhabit, the structure and design of the new places you can explore, is awesome. Surveying toppled skyscrapers is breathtaking, and blowing up nukes to scavenge goodies from their ruins is a bit like cracking open an irradiated piñata: even when you don’t get anything decent out of the exchange the act of blowing them up is satisfying, and key to Lonesome Road. But there isn’t a whole lot of new experience to recommend it: just an abundance of old.
In a way, that’s just consistency of theme: everything old is made new again in Lonesome Road, and some of the choices you make can change the Old World you’ve spent so much time in already, shaking up the relationship between Legion and NCR in a way you might not expect. But if you’ve read this far and if you’re still playing New Vegas at this point you should probably just admit to yourself that you’ll love Lonesome Road and all the bullshit it has on offer.
I’m not sure I’d consider it a revolution of design – as a game there isn’t a lot to recommend Lonesome Road over previous iterations of New Vegas. But as a work of writing, art design and level design there’s a lot going on in Lonesome Road. Ulysses has one of the most distinctive video game voices that I’ve heard in recent years, right up there with Far Cry 2’s Jackal. And the dialogue and the story chunks that populate Lonesome Road hold up well to close reading as well as the normal gaming pass-through.
So if you care about storytelling in games, if you care about how a game can reinforce its own story by removing ideas like urgency and structure from its narrative and if you’re a Fallout: New Vegas fan then Lonesome Road is a no-brainer. If you played through Fallout: New Vegas and it didn’t grab you the first time around, why are you reading this review? Yeesh – you should probably know that you won’t enjoy additional content for a game you didn’t like in the first place. Dummy.
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