After leaving Honest Hearts, I puttered around the wastelands of New Vegas for a while before randomly choosing a new DLC to take on. The radio transmission from the "original courier six" Ulysses was next in line, so I headed for the Divide.
The pop-up recommends that players not attempt this content until they are a minimum of level 25, but it has a unique feature for the DLC--if you enter and find it too difficult, you can travel back to the Mohave at any point with no consequence. In all other downloadable content, your character is stuck in the other world until you complete the main quest line; Lonesome Road is very unusual in its allowance in this regard.
Another way Lonesome Road is different is that there is no opening cut-scene, which was a bit refreshing after sitting through so many. At least for me, I go into new content ready for action and everything that keeps me from that makes me antsy and distractable, missing pertinent information in the process.
As with Old World Blues and Honest Hearts, you cannot take any companions in with you or take any you find back out.
My impressions: this content made me realize why I love this game so much. I will tell you, I went in with a great deal of over-confidence. At level 45 entering and with nearly all my skills completely leveled up, I was strutting around like the cock on the walk. Even this did not keep me from struggling--and dying--a lot. Practically every minute, I was loving it as the enigmatic Ulysses taunted me along and I ran into some familiar faces, both friendly and unfriendly. Along the way, you learn more about an old pal and question your alliances, making choices that will influence the rest of the game outside the Divide.
New Weapons
There were several new weapons when you enter this world, but to be honest none of them grabbed me enough to stick with them for long. It's not that they were not really neat, it was that after 40 some-odd levels of gameplay, you get a feel for your character and they develop their own style of fighting and favorite weapons. Forty-five might not seem that old, but in New Vegas it is practically geriatric and my Calley had all ready lived (and died) and loved--I had infused so much life and personality into her that it felt irreverent to change it.
Enough of me being a fuddy-duddy though--the guns!
The arc welder is likely the first, and one of the most plentiful, gun you will run into. It uses electron charge pack ammunition and shoots what is essentially a steady stream of lightening at enemies.
The Blade of the West is similar to the Bumper Sword we are used to from the core game. It is modeled after Legate Lanius's Blade of the East, but is not quite as powerful.
I wished someone had told me this before I had gotten the Flash Bang grenade--stand the fuck back before you throw them. Traditionally, you toss a grenade and it may land a bit too close, but it is really not that big of a deal; takes a bit of your health, you heal up and move on. Flash Bangs do damage as well...and damage your fatigue....and damage your damned weapon skills. So you toss it too close to yourself, you are essentially screwing yourself against any enemy the bomb didn't kill. If you are too, too close it will render you combat- (and hearing-) impaired until it wears off.
All that being said, it is a sweet weapon if you wield it effectively and can be life-savers against some of the scarier enemies in the Divide.
Red Glare makes you feel you more badass than any other weapon in this game. First of all, it is just huge. I mean, take-up-half-your-screen huge. It is fully automatic, able to empty its magazine (13 rounds) in a matter of seconds, its splash radius is 500 units, and it can be modded so that the magnification is x4.35, the highest in the game.
Of course, that is all information gleamed from the Wiki vault. What I know is that Red Glare makes big goddamn boom.
The last weapon of note is the Laser Detonator. There are thirty nuclear warheads casually hanging out across the landscape that can block your path onward or just conceal a hidden cache. One of your first goals upon entering is to retrieve this gun that requires no ammunition. It does absolutely zero damage versus any enemy unless the poor shmuck happens to be standing near the warhead you're about to blow, but it is good for mass devastation if you use it properly. You do have to note that any bomb you explode is going to --shock--leave behind areas of high radiation, so be sure to carry a lot of RadAway.
New Enemies
I am going to leave this area to your imagination, save to tell you this:
After going underground, your typically fearless companion begins to whimper in fear. You see something dart around corners ahead of you, never letting you get a good view. Sneaking along, you stumble across a Deathclaw, one of the most fierce opponents you face in the core game...and he has been torn to shreds.
Fallout really gets back to it's roots of suspense and helpless fright with their new creations, and it feels good to feel the thrill of exhilaration and fear again.
That aside, the ending boss fight in Lonesome Road is the most engaging I have had yet in this series. Much of my "fights" are done verbally, as I pass nearly every speech check I encounter (I actually leveled up once on a single speech alone). This one has more of a traditional feel to other action games as opposed to RPG bosses, and it was a fun way to end the plotline.
Other new features include the commissary--in lieu of merchants and vendors, there are mechanical commissaries liberally dispersed across the world. Let me tell you, if you play your cards right, it is very easy to get rich off of these machines, though they carry a mere 6000 caps starting budget apiece.
The way I played it--I traded for their 6000 caps, then utilized their repair feature to restock their money so I could continue to sell. NOTE: do not repair your gear all at once, as the commissary can only hold 6000 caps at a time, which means that if you repair 14000 worth of equipment, you just lost 8000 that you will have to earn back some other way.
It is also very easy to stock up on things that are extremely difficult to sell because of the sheer worth of them. You could take a financial hit for it or simply wait until you are back in the wasteland and find a vendor with deep pockets, but the sheer amount of valuable loot is surprising.
In every DLC I have chosen certain skills to focus on--in Old World Blues, it was Repair and Melee. In Honest Hearts, it was Survival. In Lonesome Road, I put my points into Explosives, Energy Weapons, and Barter. As far as strategic moves, this one did not seem to benefit me at all as my favored weapon was the riot shotgun, a weapon with satisfying force but annoyingly scarce ammo.
There were a few annoyances. I got frustrated at one point and genuinely considered leaving, though that was just homesickness for the missions and people and gameplay that I was so very familiar with and frustration that here, in this place, I was not the idolized Messiah that everyone had heard of and admired. I was a nobody, the sole target moving across the world alone.
As I said in the beginning--absolutely worth a play through. It was by far the most fun DLC I have played so far for either Fallout game, and that is saying something because all of them are quite enjoyable.
Now all that remains is the rather daunting Dead Money. Let's see how my young Calley fairs!
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