Of Fallout’s narrative high notes, the peak is arguably Fallout: New Vegas, the much-loved installment set in post-apocalyptic Vegas and crafted by Obsidian Entertainment, members of which have shepherded the Fallout aesthetic all the way from the Wasteland games to the Outer Worlds. And although Obsidian were fated never to helm another mainline Fallout game, they did get to revisit the universe four times before being ripped away by cruel reality. It’s those four twists on the formula, those four adventures into the unknown, that we’re here to celebrate today. At the height of their storytelling powers, Obsidian gave us some of the best sci-fi in games with the four Fallout: New Vegas add-ons: Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road. Each veered sharply away from the standard Fallout formula in its own different direction, while simultaneously painting in the secret overstory of the New Vegas universe and the player character, the Courier.
Everyone’s excited about the release of the new Fallout series. Well, that might be an overstatement, but most gamers we know are at least allowing themselves a spark of hope, and basically everyone agrees that Walton Goggins can do no wrong. Fallout, the long-running post-apocalyptic fifties-throwback multi-hyphenate franchise seems perfectly suited for a TV adaptation, focusing as it does on a collection of short, interconnected stories centered in a single location, usually culminating in some kind of climactic event at the end of a game (or season of television??). Of course, you’d need more throughline, more emotional core to sustain a season than a voiceless vault dweller wandering the wastes and continuously stumbling into every huge, region-shaping historical event like a post-apocalyptic Forrest Gump.
By smartly relegating the deep lore and character stuff to the add-ons, the New Vegas writers were able to do just that – create a more intimate, linear story beat to cap off the experience as a whole, and incidentally write some genuinely amazing sci-fi. Whether tackling supermutant genocide, the enslavement of sentient robots, or all-out war between vying factions and their competing philosophies of survival, Fallout always centers a true moral quandary, to make the game’s focus on player choice and morality a dynamic one with plenty of grey area to play in. That Obsidian proved to be equally daring when experimenting with the Fallout formula is what makes the add-ons truly special.
Spoilers for Fallout: New Vegas and all of its DLC below.
Dead Money
The Sierra Madre Casino, site of the Dead Money add-on, is named in reference to the 1948 John Huston western The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart in a tale of greed, duplicity and double-crosses. Anyone familiar with the themes of both stories will see the instant connection, but in case it wasn’t obvious, Father Elijah (Richard Herd Jr.), the story’s primary antagonist, describes the place as “a bright, shining monument luring treasure hunters to their doom…lying in the middle of a city of dead” in the opening narration. Dead Money answers the core DLC question – what do you get the player who has everything? – with a trap.
Lured by a vague promise of wealth and strapped with a bomb collar, the Courier must recruit three NPCs and pull off a daring heist in a cross between Ocean’s 11 and Suicide Squad. Instead of a demolitions expert or master of disguise, we get a ghoul crooner, a mute woman who’s been stuck in an autodoc on repeat against her will, and a supermutant with split personality – about as close as you can get to hanging out with the Hulk in the Fallout universe.
And, like most good stories, the location is a character in its own right. The environs surrounding the Madre are choking with a mysterious red cloud, stalked by tough-to-kill creatures in hazmat suits, and booby-trapped to hell. Not to mention, that bomb collar of yours? It’s not a fancy Marvel number. The odd stray radio signal is liable to set it off, so some vigilance is required. While these elements made navigating the Dead Money map an arduous and sometimes painful experience full of quickloads, today we’re just talking story, and a bomb-collar future heist with the Hulk and his weirdo pals sounds like bingeworthy streaming to us.
What the first New Vegas add-on nailed, from a story standpoint, is ludonarrative – gameplay elements that support or illuminate the themes of the game. Elijah calls your support crew “tools,” often urges you to betray them, and coaches you to “use your team as I use you,” all while you slowly uncover each of your partners’ tragic backstories enough to feel torn about doing so. At the same time, each companion’s unique perk eliminates one of the hideous roadblocks in play. The supermutant Dog/God devours corpses, hazmat suits and all, Dean the ghoul nerfs the effects of the red cloud, and what Christine lacks in chattiness she makes up for by suppressing the radio signals that constantly conspire to blow up your face. Or, as Dean says, “blast your ass so hard through your head it’ll turn the moon cherry pie red.”
The structure of the gameplay invites you to think of each companion as a simple means to an end, while the tidal pull of your constant conversations tugs in the opposite direction, creating a tension that should exist in any story about human greed versus doing the right thing. All the while, you’re roaming through blasted-out casinos, which Elijah calls “the illusion that you can begin again, change your fortunes.” As you make your way through spectral, broken holorecordings of pre-war characters still haunting the hotel, you’re confronted with ghosts both figurative and literal, those of the human victims snuffed out when the bombs fell, and the ghost of the world that once was writ large. And then, there’s the money.
Without spoiling the endings overly, suffice to say Dead Money is a trap wrapped in a trap draped in a velvety trap coating. The whole island is a trap, the bomb collar is definitely a trap, and the legendary vault you worked all this time to open is, spoilers, trap-shaped as well. There’s gold, alright. In fact, there’s so much gold that it’s impossible to even make a dent in the pile before you’re overencumbered, and can’t walk away quickly enough to avoid being killed in an auto-destruct. The little, but very real struggle between “I earned this” and survival that this forces on the player’s brain just at the climax of the plot perfectly echoes the theme of greed’s corrosive power.
Naturally, you also have a hand in the outcomes of each of your partners’ storylines, and can totally just run up real close and shoot Elder Elijah in the head forty times in V.A.T.S. if that’s the way you like to solve problems. But we like the think the true ending is the one where it slowly dawns on you as you listen to the message that was meant for Dean, the one from the casino builder Frederick Sinclair, vowing his revenge and quoting from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado – as you stuff more gold into your pockets and the vault door starts to close – that this wasn’t a vault at all, really. It was a safehouse he made for her, Vera, the one whose voice was the key. It just didn’t work out that way. It’s like the lady sang – “Begin again, but know when to let go.”
Honest Hearts
The main storyline of Fallout: New Vegas climaxes in an epic three-way battle for the Hoover Dam between New California Republic troops, Mr. House’s army of robots, and Caesar’s Legion, a group of brutal survivalists who believe that a return to strict, fascistic order is what post-apocalyptic society needs to thrive. It’s quite a battle, and one that the Courier can tip in many different directions – but it wasn’t the first. At the First Battle of Hoover Dam, Caesar’s right-hand man, Malpais Legate Joshua Graham, led the Legion to an embarrassing defeat and Caesar felt forced to make an example of him. That example included covering the man in pitch, lighting him on fire, and throwing him into the Grand Canyon. Rumor has it he still lives, roaming the wastes as the infamous Burned Man.
The legend of the Burned Man hides at the edges of New Vegas, but the character is never fully explored until the events of Honest Hearts. The mystique surrounding Joshua Graham makes actually meeting him and working with him feel a bit like the Vader cameo at the end of Jedi Survivor – here’s a man you’ve only ever encountered as oblique snatches of dialog tree or on a dusty terminal entry deep in the underground ruins of an office complex. There he sits, covered in bandages like Keifer Southerland at the beginning of Phantom Pain, eternally checking and reloading a pile of handguns as he lectures to you about the necessity of political violence.
And that impossible question – whether the oppressed people of the world are justified in using violence to defend themselves or slay their masters – forms the backbone of the Honest Hearts experience. If Dead Money was an exercise in keeping things chopped up into a collection of bite-size short stories written from various protagonists’ perspectives, Honest Hearts is one long, slow meditation on a single moral conundrum. Can’t we all just get along?
In short, the plot follows two tribes living among the ruins of Zion National Park – the Sorrows and the Dead Horses – both in danger of being run off their land by the latest members of Caesar’s Legion, the White Legs. The Burned Man leads the Dead Horses, while the Sorrows are watched over by a New Canaanite missionary named Daniel. Daniel, believing the Sorrows to be “innocent, if there is such a thing,” would rather see them evacuate the valley than fall to the White Legs or, perhaps worse, fight back and become a militarized society. Joshua has no such reservations, and urges both local tribes to rise up, massacre the White Legs, and secure their homeland.
Rather than serving a particular gameplay function, your add-on companions Follows-Chalk and Waking-Cloud share their differing worldviews in ambient dialog as you traverse the park, inviting you to use most of your brain cells shooting geckos and pondering one of humanity’s great, unanswerable questions. Like Fallout 4’s plotline about the enslavement of sentient androids, Honest Hearts dares tackle a mature subject that still shapes the world today, from Ukraine to Gaza. Is it better to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms and by opposing end them? When a bully pushes you down, do you get back up and dust yourself off, or kick them in the testicles?
Few games force that kind of decision on the player, and whether you side with Daniel’s pacifistic view or subscribe to Joshua’s stance that “when done righteously, killing is just a chore like any other,” the outcome won’t be clean-cut. There is no “good” ending because evacuating means bowing in the face of barbarism, while fighting back means inviting blood and trauma into your life. This is all further complicated by Joshua’s past as the enforcer of Caesar’s repressive regime and his faith as a devout New Canaan Mormon. At one point, in an attempt to reconcile his religion and his militancy, he quotes ‘O daughter of Babylon,’ a psalm about how happy God will be when he “taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”
It’s a nuanced, no-holds-barred, adult story about a complicated topic, and outside of some white savior complex and Daniel’s insistence that “tribals are smart, but…they’re ignorant,” the game navigates that topic with care and thoughtfulness. Which is saying something, considering how many White Legs Storm Drummers you make melt with a laser rifle. Honest Hearts also features perhaps the best story hidden in any Fallout terminal, the survival diary of Randall Dean Clark, a kindhearted man and fierce warrior who oversaw the birth of the Sorrows tribe and inadvertently became their deity, the Father in the Caves. That piece of deep lore was enough to bring tears to our eyes on the first playthrough, and deciding whether to let the Burned Man execute Salt-Upon-Wounds still feels like one of the most fraught clicks we’ve ever made.
Old World Blues
The Fallout universe’s own Manhattan Project, Big Mountain was initially a crater stuffed with mostly white male scientists doing unfettered research into any number of superscience technologies in order to aid the war effort. When the bombs finally fell, it was, as the opening narration puts it, “an answer that put all the scientists’ questions to rest.” The scientists themselves didn’t rest, however. Instead they put their brains in floating jars attached to display monitors and set up shop in the Big Empty’s research center, known only as the Dome. It’s into this chaos the Courier arrives, and they’ll have to kill plenty of robot scorpions before the drama between the Dome scientists and their nemesis Dr. Mobius can be put to rest.
What’s truly incredible about the storytelling across all four New Vegas add-ons is that each serves a different purpose, and is structured to suit that purpose. In the case of Old World Blues, the purpose, beyond letting the writers inject more humor than usual into the proceedings, is to bombard the player with as many sci-fi concepts as humanly possible. The game plays like Philip K. Dick pitching story concepts to his editor, and we mean that in a good way. There’s the stealth suit with an internal monolog. There’s the gun made out of a dog’s brain. There’s the fact that your own heart, spine and brain have been surgically removed and replaced with Tesla coils, leading to a surreal scene in which you chat with your own brain and must convince it to hop back into your skull. With each research outpost the player plunders, they’re treated not only to gameplay upgrades, but to playful and engaging concepts that each add a layer to existing Fallout lore.
It doesn’t end with the actual research, either; unique enemy types also imply a larger story. Take the trauma harness, a semi-sentient metal scaffold meant to hold injured or incapacitated people up and walk them to an autodoc. Now they’ve gone haywire and are forcing the putrefying corpses inside them to attack anyone who wanders through, creating a whole new type of zombie. From a programmable sound gun to an upgradeable player base crammed with distinct robotic personalities, every minute of the game is designed to tickle your brain, if not elicit an audible chuckle. All the while, terminals and random snippets of Mobius dialog pumped over the loudspeakers fill in bonus lore, like the fact that many of the wasteland’s mutant animal hybrids were originally designed by and deployed from the Big Empty.
The fact that the dialog is actually funny is something to celebrate, too. Mixing science fiction with humor can be a tricky proposition, and video games trying to be funny have a mixed track record. Anchored by the constant bickering between the floating scientist brains – the Think Tank – the script often hits on genuinely laugh-out-loud moments, like when they mistake your toes for a bunch of wriggling feet-penises, and Dr. O says “I don’t remember penises ever being that large.” It helps that they’re voiced by old hands like Jim Ward (The Fairly OddParents, Ratchet & Clank) and actual television comedian James Urbaniak, the voice behind Dr. Venture from The Venture Bros. Another highlight gag is the conscious biological research station that’s always ready to “receive your seed” and “clone the shit out of it.” And let’s not forget Muggy, the Yes-Man-shaped Roomba obsessed with collecting every coffee cup it can get its grubby little pincers on.
Throw in a scientist who talks like a sports announcer, one who speaks only in sound effects, and a sexually liberated lady-scientist who calls you a “lobotomite” and “skinvelope” and treats you like a teddy bear she’s physically attracted to, and there’s plenty of interplay to keep scenes fresh and, hopefully, make you want to murder these “people” by the end of this thing. Speaking of the ending, Old World Blues features probably the most thorough closing narration in Fallout history, hilariously wrapping up the stories of each and every robo-personality in your base, the Sink. The fascist book chute chokes on a paperclip, the toaster with a thirst for world conquest goes on an appliance-wrecking rampage – everyone and everything gets an ending. As for the Courier, they watch over the place, and raid its supertech for tools to help those in the Mojave. In the midst of a scientific sepulcher where people “stare into the what-was, eyes like pilot lights, guttering and spent,” your role is to look to the future, and make of it what you can. As a final beat, it’s a grand reaffirmation of what Fallout is all about: exploration and survival.
Lonesome Road
“Walk into the sun. Keep walking until it dies. There, I’ll be waiting.” It’s with these portentous words that Ulysses welcomes you to the Divide, where Fallout: New Vegas’ true ending is about to play out. Yes, the Battle of Hoover Dam will provide more fireworks and dictate the fate of the Mojave as a whole, but Lonesome Road is where the Courier’s personal journey reaches its conclusion, and for a game you can play through in a couple hours it’s a hell of a finisher. Coming right off of Old World Blues, players might well be on the verge of banter fatigue, or done with “the lighter side” of the Fallout universe. Good. Lonesome Road presents you with a grim, sorrowful tone and only one other living character, a shadow-version of yourself – the original Courier Six.
The symbolism in Lonesome Road is so on-point it’s almost painful. There’s Ulysses himself, named after the Civil War general who fought to reunite a divided nation. There’s your only companion, ED-E the eyebot, separated from his home by hundreds of miles and programmed to return at all costs. There are the disparate factions of NCR and Legion troops, trapped together in the sandstorms of the Divide and melded into a single force, the Marked Men, whose flesh has literally been flayed from their bodies. There’s the Hoover Dam itself, described by Ulysses as “a wall that bridges two sides,” the epitome of the paradox of connection and separation. Finally, there’s the nukes scattered everywhere, devices designed to keep nations separate but which ultimately united the world in ruin. It feels like the final chapter in the saga, in a way that the main game can’t because it ultimately wants to dump you back into the sandbox to keep over-leveling. After all, the Divide is literally a giant crack in the ground funneling you in one direction: toward your destiny.
And, like a great ending to any epic, Lonesome Road finally reveals the player’s true identity and origins, in a way that weaves through and reflects upon the primary themes of the series – war, nuclear weapons, and those who carry on in the aftermath. Ulysses is a disillusioned Legionary and the lone survivor of a cataclysm you caused, however inadvertently, and he’s also the reason you ended up carrying the platinum chip to Vegas in the first place, and subsequently getting shot in the head and buried alive. It’s a full-circle ending that wraps up not only the add-ons, but the entire New Vegas experience with a story that feels satisfying and meaningful. In his quest to “remind you why you wander,” Ulysses underscores one of the most striking things about stories, games, and life itself – “All roads lead back to one’s home. Not your birthplace maybe, but home.”
“If war doesn’t change then men must, and so must their symbols. You can’t walk the Long 15 and not have a nation’s shadow fall on you.” His words are an exhortation on the power of choice, the need to pick something to believe in and fight for it until you see things through to the bloody end. If that’s not Fallout, we don’t know what is.
