Lonesome Road is the fourth and final story DLC for Fallout: New Vegas. It is a very focused story that wraps up the tale hinted at in the base game and throughout the three DLCs, that of another courier named Ulysses, and his conflict with the game’s player character, the Courier.
The strength of Obsidian’s DLC design has been to make each experience very different from the main game experience, and different from one another. Lonesome Road is no exception. It is a very linear and dense experience, with the majority of gameplay spent in combat, and the focus outside of combat is on the story and atmosphere. It is closest to Dead Money of the New Vegas DLC so far, and very different from the more open experiences in Honest Hearts and Old World Blues (OWB).
The player is called into the Divide for Lonesome Road by way of a message from Ulysses. The player might already be familiar with the man, as NPCs and ending slides hint at his existence in the first two DLCs, and he visited the Big MT before the player did, leaving marks and tapes behind for the player to find in OWB. The Divide is an area wrecked by a recent catastrophe, for which the Courier is to blame (in his travels prior to the events of New Vegas). The goal of the DLC is to reach and confront Ulysses, and learn more about his history, that of the Courier, and that of ED-E, who joins you for your travels (in a certain way).
As you’d expect from a high-level DLC, Lonesome Road contains the toughest fights available to New Vegas gamers so far, with enemies that have less HP than those in OWB, but deal much more damage to the player. On top of hard-to-avoid encounters with deathclaws, there are the skin-less, savage ghoul-like marked men (reminiscent of one of the older designs of the ghouls in Fallout 1, called bloodmen) who fight with high-level weapons, and another reskin for the trogs (from the Fallout 3 DLC The Pit) in the tunnelers. The game gives you flare guns to scare away the tunnelers and deathclaws, but this is more of a tool for certain situations than a bypass for non-combat characters. In the course of the DLC, it starts unlocking optional and very high-level areas, flooded with radiation, and they provide as tough an environment as any Fallout ever has.
Marked men ambush the player throughout the DLC, often with little warning or with a few flares shot into the sky to call their comrades towards the fight. Tunnelers crawl out of the ground to swarm you. Deathclaws spawn at moments to trap you, for example when you’re looting some ammo from a bus, and at one point you’re even trapped inside a cave with the most difficult unique deathclaw ever created. It’s all about the combat, and at times it feels like a very FPS-like experience. The usage of spawning points means you’re not often given the option to snipe the enemies from a distance. At one point in the DLC, the PC is on an elevator and has to fend off tunnelers as they jump onto the moving platform. That sequence is as big a shooter cliché as you can imagine. None of this is improved by the rather clunky shooter action of Bethesda’s adapted Gamebryo engine.
To aid the player in fending off these enemies, some new high-level weaponry was added. The flare gun was mentioned, and is supported by a similarly-functioning flash-bang. The DLC adds two big guns with a packet of upgrades to them, the Red Glare rocket launcher and the Shoulder-Mounted Machine Gun. It also adds some new close combat weapons, and unique versions of them. Perhaps to compensate for OWB’s brimming energy arsenal, this DLC adds only one useful energy weapon, the arc welder. The DLC also adds immensely useful and snazzy riot gear, which looks like the NCR ranger gear but is much more powerful, and includes special night vision on its helmet. The DLC has added some consumables, including auto-injecting stimpaks, which just annoyed me but presumably were put in, so the player can get on with the shooting without minding his health. And, of course, the DLC ups the level cap by 5, and adds a few new perks.
The path you follow through the DLC is extremely linear, having to go through tunnels to reach specific areas, and even said areas aren’t very open. Near the beginning of the DLC, you have to find a laser detonator to explode warheads that are occasionally in your path, and said warheads are used to demarcate the boundaries of sub-areas. There’s no way around many points except to blow up a warhead. This whole experience is kind of reminiscent of the whole Fat Man mini-nuke launcher fiasco in Fallout 3, in that it really makes frivolous the whole impact of nuclear weaponry on a setting that is all about the seriousness of nuclear weaponry. The warhead explosions rarely leave a dent, and the radiation passes by in moments.
The DLC is also very focused. What I mean by that is that it has no side-quests, just its main quests done in a pre-set order. It has no non-hostile NPCs other than ED-E and Ulysses. It doesn’t have a lot of explorable optional areas. So it figures this DLC is pretty short compared to the others. I clocked in at about 5 hours, but it is also much denser than the two preceding DLC. You go from fight to fight and dialog to dialog, with no walking back and forth or searching around in between, as opposed to the main game and the preceding two DLCs.
The DLC’s strongest point is atmosphere. Unlike the other DLCs, you’re given no background through slideshows or expository opening dialogs. You just wander in and have to discover more yourself. The Divide is by far the most thoroughly destroyed area seen in any Fallout. After the post-post-apocalyptic feel of much of New Vegas does a great job of giving us a place more freshly off an apocalyptic event, deadly to travel in, wandering through buildings askew (warning: may cause nausea) and crumbling around you. A “Damnation Alley”-esque atmosphere, as creative director Chris Avellone put it, that book’s story happening decades after the apocalypse, rather than centuries. There is a constant feeling of danger, and it is underscored very well by having ED-E around, responding to imminent threats with whimpering sounds. There are a lot of little moments, such as the first time you meet the tunnelers, you see a deathclaw in the distance attacking one and promptly getting torn to bits. Whatever can do that to a deathclaw can surely put a dent in your armor.
The other driving point of the DLC is story, both the more important story of Ulysses and the Courier’s past and the secondary story of ED-E’s past. Ulysses communicates with you through the DLC through ED-E, and you can find holotapes filled with his thoughts. Sadly, this is not one of the DLC’s strongest points. Ulysses speaks in an elliptical, esoteric manner on his thoughts and philosophies that all too soon turn into garbled ramblings of a madman. It is hard to take an interest in, and I wouldn’t blame many players for mentally checking out.
The underlying intent of the DLC is interesting. Ulysses is very similar to a player character, in that he seems to have actual agency to change the world, rather than wait passively for the player to come along and save him. The fact that he’s a courier but with a very different path highlights how he is kind of a mirror reflection of the Courier himself, learning different lessons from similar travels. This is all very well-done. Additionally, the motivation of the PC and player are the same in this DLC. It is curiosity that drives you on. You have no real reason to explore except to find Ulysses and get your answers, though more immediate motivations are added. It is reminiscent of Dead Money in how it was curiosity that brought you there and got you to carry on.
Where it falls apart is Ulysses’ philosophy and the actual choice of the player. One of the important points of the DLC seems to be to highlight how even small choices can have major consequences. But the big events aren’t by the player’s choice, either happening before the events of New Vegas or in segments where you’re given no choice if you want to proceed. It makes a mockery of player agency in a way that would fit BioShock but seems really out of place in a Fallout game. The choice that led to this path, while not made by the player, was indeed a very minor one, so minor in fact that the player doesn’t even remember it, which is bound to make amnesia theories resurface.
Ulysses used to be a member of the Tangled Hairs, a tribe (originally from Van Buren) that was betrayed and destroyed by the Legion in this story. He carries both the symbol of his tribe (the dreadlocks) and of the old world nation (the US flag), and believes powerfully in symbols and nations. But after the destruction of the Divide, he does not believe any remaining nation has the potential to carry the future, all will inevitably collapse. He idealizes the “nation” that existed in the Divide before the disaster, but it is never explained in the DLC how this nation was particularly perfect. Ulysses scoffs at the NCR, calling it corrupt and divided about its direction. This is something Obsidian has struggled with through New Vegas’ stories: we can clearly see with our own eyes that NCR is by far the best option for mankind, and doubtlessly superior to the Legion, which never show any redeeming features. Yet instead of showing us that NCR has serious flaws, they just keep telling us it does, as if that’s going to convince anyone. Ulysses wishes to end the current dominant factions and build a new nation, with some vague allusions to idealizing the old world.
Everything about Ulysses remains vague. His obsession with the Courier and the old Divide is never explained in anything but the vaguest terms, by having the Divide as the focus of his obsession over symbols and the Courier as the catalyst in its destruction. His plans for the future or goals are never explained at all. A lot of this makes sense because Ulysses is a world-weary individual who is disillusioned with the meaningless nature of the symbols he is obsessed with. His esoteric and philosophical nature reminds me of a lot of Avellone’s earlier works, including Planescape: Torment, but where they fluidly worked with the setting there, they just clash with Fallout’s pragmatic and realistic setting here. Ulysses’ desperate and beaten-down nature come across well, but he is ill-focused and his dislike of the Courier is not based on anything the player did, which combines to make him a very poor antagonist. The closing dialog with him does have shades of greatness, with many paths and options based on how well you listened to ED-E, to Ulysses’ holotapes, or how well you can convince him based on your own speech skills. It’s a classic of having to have paid attention to pick the right options because many options Ulysses will simply dismiss as “you understood nothing I said” before forcing you to fight him.
ED-E’s story is delivered by it playing logs of its past before it was sent from the east coast towards Navarro in the west. ED-E still can’t talk in more than “hopeful beeping” or “sad beeping,” but it’s surprisingly effective in a loyal dog kind of way to talk with it about its creator/father and the hardship of its travels. ED-E acts as a bit of a MacGuffin for the DLC’s plot and it’s not entirely clear why it was added here specifically, but it’s nice to round up its story in a more meaningful way than the main game. I was personally much more interested in ED-E’s part of the story than Ulysses’.
Unlike other DLCs, there are some consequences in the Mojave to the choices you make. You can wreck or increase your reputation with the factions in the Mojave, and depending on the choices you make, unlock up to two additional areas in the main map, which are very small but provide a little extra, including unique weapons and armor. These high-level areas (including one in the DLC itself) provide tons and tons of ammo to players that were starved of ammo for some reason.
Getting past its linear, combat-focused design, which I’m not a huge fan of, the biggest failing of this DLC lies in its vagueness and lack of picking up loose ends in a satisfactory way. The player is given too little reason to care about the pre-disaster Divide. Many little things could’ve been handled better, like the explanation of ED-E’s presence or why pre-war commissary machines give out bottle caps or credit chips indistinguishable from bottle caps. The loose end of the tunnelers is never picked up. There was a lot of build-up for this plot, with the “legendary battle of the two couriers,” but the pay-off, especially storywise, is slight, and how exactly this battle became a legend is not adequately explained (there are no sane witnesses around).
Before this DLC’s release, Chris Avellone explained in a developer blog that the narrative of Fallout games comes largely from the players. And he’s right. That has always been one of the series’ main strengths. How ironic it is, then, that Lonesome Road is the very antithesis of this ideal, with an antagonist who hates you because of events that happened outside of the player’s control, and a linear, railroaded path that will play out pretty much the same for everyone, differences in dialog depending on your faction allegiance aside.
Content-wise, Lonesome Road is satisfactory, and it’s almost worth it just for the pretty amazing atmosphere and look of the Divide. But this linear, combat-focused gameplay path will not appeal to everyone, and anyone expecting a satisfactory conclusion to the story arc of Ulysses and the Courier might be in for a let-down. If you reflect on it for a while, there is some appreciation to be found in the clever way Ulysses’ arc ties in with lessons the Courier learned over previous DLC, and like Elijah in Dead Money he’s an image of the cost of obsessing and failing to let go, but this does not make the main narrative structure any more satisfying in an immediate sense. It’s not a bad DLC overall, but it suffers from coming right behind the excellent Old World Blues.
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