I personally found "Lonesome Road" an excellent DLC. My main gripes with it were largely functional. I hated how overpowered the enemies in LR and OWB were, compared to EVERYTHING ELSE. You could beat "Dead Money" AND "Honest Hearts" with a level 1 character (that is, you'll START at level 1, but finish them closer to 10), because the enemies aren't unreasonably powerful, yet they still pose a challenge at all player levels. But Marked Men? Sure, let's give them AMRs! Sure, let's script them to KNOW where you are, regardless of your Sneak ability and the level of stealth you approach each barricade. I don't mind some scripted events, like blowing up your first Warhead and a group showing up in response. That was pretty cool... in concept. The execution left much to be desired, but the idea of making large explosions causing small groups to investigate and leave me in a closed space with curious hostiles was a nice touch.
But most of all, I wished that LR, like ALL of FONV's DLCs, had triggers to start them, not be triggered at the beginning of the game. I would have loved to see a "recruiter" in Freeside or North Vegas that tipped the courier off to joining the Happy Trails Caravan into Zion Valley and thus starting off "Honest Hearts". I would have loved to see some kind of event draw the Courier to the crashed satellite that brought them to BigMT and began "Old World Blues". As mentioned by others, LR was "intended" to be completed last, so I really wished that there were some triggers put in place that would delay Ulysses contacting the Courier with his message until certain prerequisites had been met, such as completing the rest of the DLCs first. I understand that because they had to be treated as separate and compartmentalized "packages", since it was up to the player to decide how many and in what order of the DLCs they would even purchase, if any at all, but that doesn't mean a few lines of code couldn't have been written to take this into account. If you ONLY have LR, place a time delay, and you must have spoken to Nash about the "Original Courier 6" before Ulysses contacts you. If you have some, but not all of the DLCs, you must complete them first before Ulysses will contact you. Etc etc...
But I had zero problems with the writing, so I cannot relate to all the negativity you have for it, Josan. I found Ulysses to be a well constructed, effectively portrayed, and relatable character, even if I found his plans to be monstrous. There's a great many, really powerful reasons that I consider Ulysses to be the second best
Fallout antagonist of all time, because for being one mere man, he has an incredible presence, both in terms of story, and in terms of actually meeting and speaking to him. The more pieces of his backstory you pick up, the more you realize that he's experienced life changing events that have left him disillusioned and hellbent on completing a task that would shake the entire Core Region of the Wasteland. I only wish that stopping Ulysses had been the final confrontation of the game, not a DLC that you could revisit, and had to complete prior to the 2nd Battle of Hoover Dam. After facing the horrors of the Divide, the petty politics of the Mojave just seemed trivial to me.
The one and only "writing" qualm I had with "Lonesome Road" was the assertion that Ulysses was there when "The Divide" happened, yet he was the one and only person to NOT be instantly ghoulified and flayed alive and transformed into a Marked Man. Okay, he was lucky in that the medical bots tended to him, but it's still a stretch that the more I think about the more I doubt. But in the grand scheme of the DLC, that's still just a tiny spec of a qualm compared to all the rest.
Josan12 said:
Please tell me Dead Money isn't in such bad humour?
I take it that means you (for reasons I can't fathom) haven't played it? Well FIX THAT!!! "Dead Money" is EASILY the best add-on to the original game. Even the simple consequence of "once you leave, you can never return" makes you approach the DLC in a completely original perspective. Every DLC for FONV was designed with a specific theme in mind, and DM rammed home the theme of "Greed" PERFECTLY. Even if you find yourself at the Sierra Madre purely because a compass marker drew you there, when you arrive, you will genuinely feel a powerful attachment to the wealth you'll find. You won't want to leave all of it behind, but you'll have to. It was brilliantly designed, and the backstory surrounding the place was made to match it, flawlessly. The characters, the story they provide, the setting, the plot, it's all stellar. "Dead Money" is pretty dark and the vast majority of the time spent you'll be fighting for survival, an aspect of the Post Apocalypse that hadn't been covered effective until DM. For a "mere casino heist", the plot surrounding the events of DM are monumental and it's really a shame that the events that take place during the Courier's time at the Sierra Madre go completely unheard of in the rest of the wasteland... It's like if the Vault Dweller beat the Master and destroyed the Vats, and nobody ever heard about it. At least he became a legend, regardless of how many people believe in it...
