![]() ![]() There are no side quests, no supporting characters, few secrets and no sense that this is a real place you've been brought to. Each area is considered a quest, and reaching the next one is the only goal you need to worry about. Progress is always in one direction as Ulysses tugs you through seven standalone areas, the arrow on your compass providing more motivation than the wisp-thin plot. ![]() There are virtually no open areas, or at least none that take more than 30 seconds to traverse. Arriving hot on the heels of the excellent Old World Blues, with its richly populated pocket universe of side quests, substantial secret areas and funny characters, Lonesome Road feels more like a trial run for a rather drab Fallout first-person shooter than the climactic chapter of a massive RPG. It's not as if the journey to reach Ulysses is terribly memorable either. He talks in the sort of elusive quasi-mythical twaddle that made the later seasons of Lost such a chore to get through, and long before you actually meet him face-to-face, you'll be wondering if all that purple prose is being used to cover up the fact that the story isn't particularly compelling.ĭeathclaws. Ulysses pops up periodically, speaking via ED-E, and dribbles mouthfuls of mushy exposition into your lap. He'll activate commissary machines for your trading needs, unlock vital quest areas and also spin a rather sad little tale as you go along.īut it's the big story we're interested in, and it's here that Lonesome Road suffers. That's because Lonesome Road gives you a new companion - one essential to its completion - in the shape of ED-E, or at least another robot from the same batch. It's a journey that allows you to keep all your current equipment, but as the title suggests, companions must be left in the Mojave. Ulysses insists you meet with him in The Divide, a desolate new area plagued by earthquakes and populated by the feral Marked Men gang. He's the guy who passed on the platinum chip delivery job that kick-started the main game and led to you being shot in the face and left for dead by Chandler from Friends. Lonesome Road has you contacted, out of the blue, by Courier 6, aka Ulysses. The fact that the intricacies of the story still remain vague doesn't speak very highly of Lonesome Road's success as the de facto conclusion to Bethesda's epic post-apocalyptic adventure. This is a problem, as I've played it through twice, paying attention to the dialogue. What I'm still unclear on are the less tangible, but no less important, questions of who and why. I mean, I know what happens in the nuts-and-bolts sense of what is actually on the screen. I'm feeding the pencils and clipboards into that one machine just so I can get more crafting mats.I don't really know what happens at the end of Lonesome Road, the final add-on instalment for Fallout New Vegas. Small surprise that I liked OWB more the first time through. I have thousands of Sierra Madre chips and I'll still try and lug that scrap metal away with me so I can theoretically build a few more Repair Kits that I'll never use. ![]() ![]() It does not matter that I have running water from every base location and safehouse or a few dozen RadAways. Do I have 30 Purified Waters? Man I am taking that shit with me out of Dead Money. Compound this with the fact that I always play hardcore and inventory management really does matter. But as a well-conditioned gamer, I'm a kleptomaniacal completionist that has to loot everything even vaguely useful. I take perverse pleasure in the crafting content OWB offers, but paradoxically, I hate micromanaging my inventory, especially through all the damn menus of the Pipboy. The speakers were not that frustrating to me except in "final dungeon" leading up to the gold vault and even that was not a dealbreaker. Part of it is that I was much less of a Hoardy MacHoarderson and just kept my baggage light. Some of it, I think, is that I was rushing through the content a bit much to really just enjoy it. I admit that I've enjoyed Dead Money more on a repeat playthrough. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |