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That was my problem with most DLC’s. Playing them too early sometimes leads to frustration, and might also enable the player with some powerful gear making the rest of the game a bit of a breeze. Mothership Zeta comes to mind from Fallout 3. I left that place with some uber energy weapons.

4282

While skimming these DLC impressions and reading the mixed response, I realized I wasn’t that thrilled by the FO3 DLC. A couple of them were “good” but I could certainly live without them. It’s almost like people try too hard to like these modules.

Maybe I’ll skip the New Vegas DLC.

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Significant rewards, once you finished each of the expansions:

Old World Blues:

  • A scoped, very high DPS, high DAM weapon that’s reasonable accurate out to most normal engagement ranges if you fire it manually. Its accuracy is poor beyond short range in VATS, but that’s true of many weapons.

  • The ability to turn many junk objects (i.e. clipboards) into useful materials, often ones that are otherwise in short supply (i.e. duct tape).

  • The ability to transform most harvestable plants into any other plant on the same list. Again, gives you easy access to stuff that can be difficult to collect.

  • +1 permanently to a few stats.

  • Several implants, most roughly on par with the average perk, though not quite on the level of the top-tier perks like Educated.

Dead Money:

  • Essentially unlimited supplies of weapon repair kits, which can be otherwise difficult to make due to shortages of duct tape, and to some extent scrap electronics. Old World Blues eliminates those shortages.

  • Similar supplies of .357 and .308, unless you screw up, like I did. .357 is of course common, but .308 can be harder to find early in the game. Eventually the vendors have lots of it.

  • Extensive supplies of a non-addictive night vision chem.

  • A base with the campfire / workbench / reloading bench better laid out than Novac, though not quite as good as the Old World Blues base.

  • A less-accurate version of the LMG chambered in .308 with higher per-shot DAM but about the same DPS due to its low fire rate.

  • A perk that gives you +150% critical damage for melee weapons.

Honest Hearts:

  • Medium armor that’s 10% better than the best (Mk II) combat armor, and a helmet with the same 5 DT as high-tier helmets though 2.5-3lbs lighter. Mostly significant I guess because you might be able to get it earlier than equivalent armors.

  • The .45 pistol and SMG, which are decent early game weapons, but eventually outclassed by heavier weapons from the basic game such as the hunting revolver and 12.7mm SMG.

So, I’d say that only Old World Blues really has a huge impact on the remainder of your game, though Honest Hearts could be a big boost if you played it early enough for its mild upgrades to give you stuff normally not available at your level.

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I wouldn’t skip Old World Blues. It’s weird, and it can be pretty tough, but there’s a lot there and it’s interesting.

The other two are more skippable. Honest Hearts is mostly More of the Same, essentially giving you some alternate things to do for a level 10-15ish character, with some decent writing. Dead Money is just painful, even if I did like figuring out the puzzle aspects. I paid $2.50 each for them in the Steam Summer Sale, and I feel they were good purchases at that price. Old World Blues, on the other hand, is definitely worth the full $10.

4285

Right, but wouldn’t you say the same about Point Lookout? Because looking back I realize I don’t care about any of the FO3 DLC in the end. Maybe I’m hitting that fatigue point I was worried about.

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No, not at all. I hated Point Lookout. The difficulty in Point Lookout is amped up artificially, and the stuff you do isn’t really all that interesting. OK, there’s one regard in which Point Lookout and Old World Blues are similar: there are hostiles that will kill you fairly quickly with pistols and Caravan Shotguns if you don’t kill them first, where in the main game, hostiles with similar weapons aren’t really a threat unless you’re at close quarters. It’s not so much that they’re doing a lot of damage per shot, it’s that they hit a lot more often than your average Jackal Gunslinger. That pissed me off a lot at level 16, mainly (again) because it reminded me of Point Lookout, but I ended up moving past that. The actual content is night-and-day better than Point Lookout.

On the other hand, there’s matters of taste. I really rather liked The Pitt. Old World Blues is better, but the I played through The Pitt a couple of times and liked it both times.

4287

Yeah, you could use The Pitt in my sentence there. Anyway, I can’t put my finger on why this DLC suddenly bothers me. People seem to overanalyze it or complain about things like difficulty or making the main game too easy. But then I step back and realize I just didn’t care about any of the adventures themselves.

You’ve almost convinced me to give Old World Blues a chance. I should probably hedge my bets in case I really like something this time around.

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Well, personally I haven’t said too much about what you do in Old World Blues because I don’t want to spoil it. Mentioning the K9000 isn’t really a spoiler because you can get it in the initial conversation if you pass a dialog check for high Guns skill. My single biggest caveat is that the expansion is goofy. FO3 and New Vegas have their background jokes, but generally they’re kind of grim and “realistic,” well “realistic” to the extent possible in Fallout’s retro-future background. Old World Blues has some grim stuff, but mostly it’s very silly. Like an entire map dedicated to material with the same tone as the AntAgonizer and the Machinist.

I understand about fatigue. After building up my character in the main game to 20ish (I think I mis-remembered when I said 16 earlier) and playing all 3 expansions, I had some 90 hours on the game clock. I have zero desire at this point to go back to the main game and complete it. Of course, part of that is that I’ve already completed the main game twice, once with NCR and once with Yes Man, and the game’s significantly less interesting as your resources expand at level 30+, regardless of whether you’ve played any DLC or not.

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The one nice thing they’re doing with New Vegas is tying all the DLC’s together with a unifying story arc. Characters that were alluded/mentioned in the main game actually show up in these DLC’s, and there is one arc that is mentioned in all 3 of the so far released ones that should get resolved in the last one.

I didn’t enjoy the gameplay of Dead Money, but the story elements and characters in it were really cool.

4290

I can’t wait to get back from travel. I’m missing my NV fix this week. Speaking of the DLC’s though, any news on the newly announced one, Lonesome Road?

4291

There’s no release date, if that is what you are asking. Originally it was supposed to have been released in July, but the long delay for OWB means we are hopefully going to see it in August and not later.

There are a few screenshots floating around and, more importantly, it appears they snuck a map of the area into OWB.

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Is Lonesome Road going to be an area as large as NWB? I’m finding NWB to be a real pain in the ass to play with my level 22 guy (this is a very good thing, by the way. F3 was just too easy). I played on Hardcore mode with the difficulty on Hard up to this point, never using VATS, and it was a pretty tough ride. In NWB, I’m actually forced to use VATS to pass some of these encounters.

I really wish DLC for RPGs was always post-game content. I hate this “scaling” play-anywhere shit that everyone is putting out. It’s especially confusing when there is no indication of what level you’re supposed to be before you buy it. In NWB, it told me I should be at least level 15 when I started the DLC. No where in the DLC product page/description for it did it say this.

Ugh.

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I’m not sure why this should matter - why would you buy DLC if you didn’t get all that far in the game? Most people are in the 20s level-wise when they finish, and its easy enough to just load whatever older save you want to use to play the DLC. And making DLC post-conclusion content wouldn’t help people with lower level characters to begin with.

I personally prefer DLC that takes place before the ending of the game. Mainly because in an RPG your character is already so powerful by the end that subsequent adventures are pretty ridiculous just to be challenging. See all the complaints about Dead Money, for example. They have to resort to “tricks” just to keep you from rolling through.

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flyingj I would counter that the ones that actually scale seem to be the tougher and more fun encounters. I remember the huge blowup about this with Oblivion, but to be honest, I like a little bit of a mix, which would include scaling. Obviously Deathclaws and the like should be tough, and no where near possible for a new player. But it’s nice when some things are always tough, even when you think you’re a badass (with the perks to prove it.)

I do like your idea of the publishers putting minimum recommended levels in the ads for the DLC’s though.

4295

You don’t need autoleveling for that. You need to design the game with enemies tougher than the max level of the player.

4296

So, is the overall consensus that Dead Money is pretty crap then? How about Honest Hearts? Thinking of picking up one or the other now that they are on sale.

What are the recommended level reqs for both of those?

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Dead Money is tedious and annoying from a gameplay standpoint for the first half if you specialized in long range/stealth kills, and slightly less so if you specialized in close range/melee kills The second half mostly gets rid of the mechanics that occur in the first half, and the story line/characters throughout are great and tie back into one of your party members. I’d suggest getting it just becuase it ties into the last DLC.

Honest Hearts is more like the normal game, and introduces a character that gets talked about a lot by one of the factions from the normal game. It’s kind of short, but I enjoyed it.

Dead Money is high 20’s or 30+. Honest Hearts I believe is 20+

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I really didn’t like most of Dead Money, but opinions seem very divided on that one. It’s very much a change in tone from the rest of F:NV, playing more like a survival horror game. On the plus side, the characters are interesting and the dialogue is what you’d expect from Oblivion, but certain gameplay mechanics seem to be of the “love 'em or hate 'em” variety.

Also, all your equipment is stripped at the start of the DLC (you don’t get it back until you return to the Mojave Wasteland at the end). Some people like this because it forces you to once again adopt the “scrounger” playstyle that was essential early in the main game but less important after you’ve amassed a stockpile of stuff at higher levels. Others found it annoying.

Honest Hearts was ok but didn’t really add anything new, IMO. I just followed the quests and didn’t really head too far away from the beaten path, but I’ve heard it’s more enjoyable if you like exploring and reading computer logs to learn more of the backstory.

A note about Honest Hearts: it’s very easy to accidentally kill a story-essential NPC (Follows-Chalk) very early without even realizing you’ve done anything wrong. If you get a quest called “Chaos in Zion”, load an earlier save.

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All the New Vegas DLC is on sale at 50% off on Steam.

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25%, not 50%