Fallout: New Vegas - Lonesome Road Holotape #2

The Bethblog has posted the second Holotape recording for Lonesome Road - here's Chris Avellone's introduction and the link to the .mp3:

A week from release, Chris Avellone returns to discuss the second holotape you’ll discover in Lonesome Road…
The Fallout New Vegas DLCs have been a unique opportunity to do short stories in the Fallout universe, and a rare opportunity to know, for certain, you’re going to be able to do a series of adventures, with a clear ending. As a narrative designer that allows you to do something rare in the game industry – foreshadowing across multiple titles.
As an experiment, we decided to use this opportunity to tell an overarching story in the Fallout universe, and let the player see firsthand the wreckage left behind in the tracks of two couriers, from your Courier, to Elijah, to Christine, to the Sierra Madre, to Graham and the White Legs, to the Old World madness of the Big Empty… and lastly, the road that leads into the heart of the Divide and the player’s past through Ulysses’ eyes.
This is the second holotape your Courier can discover in Lonesome Road, and helps put Ulysses’ journey to Big MT in Old World Blues in perspective. It was another accident sparked by what happened at the Divide, with far-ranging consequences.
Ulysses_BigMT_0002

Click to expand...

More information.

I don't like Ulysses' excessively slow voicework, sounds like a third rate Morgan Freeman on drugs.

How was Honest Hearts part of the overarching Ulysses story? Can one DLC even acknowledge and discuss what you've done in other DLCs to try and make them relevant? The possibility of them forcing amnesia upon your character- whom you've been playing as for dozens of hours- in order to give you a past to make sense out of Ulysses' obsession with you doesn't sound good either.

If they wanted to tell an over-arching story they got the order wrong. Should've been HH first(just a hint of another courier, like the one you got in Primm), then OWB(you find ulysses and christine's and elijah's holotapes) and then DM(where you meet christine+elijah who tell you of the other courier and set you up for the Ulysses showdown in the Divide)

Unpopular opinion but so far I've found the DLCs to be worse than the main game, either through gameplay and setting(DM), story and role-playing(HH) or all-round lack of fun (OWB- one hour of dialog followed by hours of dungeons, way to balance the gaming elements).

I liked it better when Obsidian's experiments got us things like MOTB or SOZ.

So basically a story where your character gets a grey ending no matter what yo do. Yeah great storytelling there.

KapitanUnterhosen said:

I don't like Ulysses' excessively slow voicework, sounds like a third rate Morgan Freeman on drugs.

Click to expand...

I love it.

KapitanUnterhosen said:

How was Honest Hearts part of the overarching Ulysses story?

Click to expand...

Joshua Graham mentions the first courier.

Couchpotato said:

So basically a story where your character gets a grey ending no matter what yo do. Yeah great storytelling there.

Click to expand...

Wait, they're not going to have divergent endings like they have for the other DLC? When did they announce that?

JemyM said:

Joshua Graham mentions the first courier.

Click to expand...

...so you missed the part where I said you got a hint of another courier in HH, much like the one you got in Primm(although even less so)? How does just mentioning another courier make it part of the Ulysses story arch?

Are the events of Honest Hearts suddenly going to become relevant to Lonesome Road or something?

jhwisner said:

Wait, they're not going to have divergent endings like they have for the other DLC? When did they announce that?

Click to expand...

And each one is a grey ending especially for your character. You do all the work and get nothing. Even the independent ending you get nothing. Good writing there right. All that changes is who rules after you do all the work.

Couchpotato said:

And each one is a grey ending especially for your character. You do all the work and get nothing. Even the independent ending you get nothing. Good writing there right. All that changes is who rules after you do all the work.

Click to expand...

Oh you meant from the main quest. Yeah and this is still set before it. Ok yeah - I did find the ending for your character a little meh. The endings for the factions and locations were often more satisfying. That's kind of how I remember it being in fallout 1 and to a lesser extent fallout 2 (you got a good ending, but the ending was still about what happened in your wake than what happened to you.)

Still I do get what you're saying and this last DLC does at least feel like something that could or would happen after the dam rather than before it and maybe they could have done it better if it was structured that way.