Fallout: New Vegas - Lonesome Road

2026-10-04

We out here stripping nasty red men of their Legion armor so I can sell it to an intercom in a ransacked barrack. Building up caps so I can make my rocket gun shoot more rockets.

I'm having a ball of a time. After comfortably achieving god mode some 20 levels ago, even on Hard difficulty, my Courier is finally fighting something that can kick his teeth in. We got chemical-peeled Legion rocking top-tier gear, sparkly tunnelers that swarm, and souped-up deathclaws. Had to reload six times to kill a deathclaw that spawns on top of a blown-out Airstream. Run in, loot caps from briefcase, hear a loud roar right on cue, see giant feet buggily clipping through the roof, run out, die. That boy would send me ragdolling if a single atom of keratin on one of those claws made contact with me. Had to plant a bunch of mines where I knew his scripted ass would spawn and even then it was close.

Ain't much in the way of diversions--though using a laser pointer to detonate nukes scattered across the map is actually deeply satisfying.

We're mostly here to kill and then have the Anti-Courier, Ulysses, lecture us about who we are. Apparently we did a [bad thing] before New Vegas even started that he knows but we don't. Sure, man, whatever. The writing is mechanically adept. Poetic at times, "Even as the fires here burned them from within... the winds of the Divide tore their skin, exposed them... screaming... to the sky." Cryptic at others, "I've been to your home, the place you kept returning to... may not be the place you were born, was the place you gave life to, same thing."

But it's the resolution that, despite all the radiation, left me feeling cold. Ulysses retconning your past, locking you into a background you might not agree with, I don't mind--in fact I like the boldness of it, how opinionated it is. I don't like that, like everything else, you can just [SPEECH 90] Ulysses down and he gives the same ol' weak "Yeah, you're right" response. For the ultimate climax, your unseen antagonist finally revealed, silhouetted by the hulking mass of death in an ICBM, with one stat check he can just throw his hands up, toss his grand plan and say, "Fuck it. I'm good." Lonesome Road is so willing to toss out the player's choices at the start in favor of a grand unifying tale and then wusses out at the last minute and lets you retcon the retcon.

It's a minor critique for the culmination of a set of DLC that are all intertwined weaving threads of lore between each entry and underneath everything that has happened and will happen in New Vegas. For that, I can't help but marvel at the whole package. Plus I got Ulysses' cool-ass jacket.