It was with great excitement and muted sadness that I purchased Lonesome Road last night, downloaded it, and then loaded up my character Kapture, a creepy man sitting pretty at level 34 that loves his Energy weapons. This hardened weirdo has conquered the Mojave, visited a grand casino, met the Burned Man, and obliterated a bunch of crazy brain-obsessed robots. And now, he has one more adventure, a road, dangerous and unpredictable, riddled with bombs and monsters, and he must walk it alone to find the answers of his past.
I played for about two hours or so last night, and it was a good time. Fun new weapons and the wonderful gift of a newish companion. A little scary, a little too much talking, and a little tough in certain parts. And yes, I also died probably nine or ten times, but that’s not my fault. Nobody told me there would be Deathclaws. Anyways, you get a Pip-Boy message, alerting you that a man named Ulysses is looking for you. Supposedly, this is the courier that was originally meant to deliver the Platinum Chip. Seek him out and discover his reasonings for turning the job down. Once in the Divide, you’ll follow a fairly linear path, all while Ulysses talks to you. And he talks a lot. Unfortunately, while the subject is interesting, listening to him is not; he has this slow, odd way of speaking, drawing every word and phrase out longer than it needs to be. There was a ton of chatter in Old World Blues, but the writing was much more surprising there; here, a lot of Ulysses’ thoughts are easy to guess before even picking the dialogue option, and then waiting for him to finish up his dramatic drawl about homes and roads and Old World blah blah blah is like torture.
But yeah, new locales, new weapons, new perks, new items, new recipes, an increase of +5 to the level cap (now sitting mighty at 50), and new enemy types. It’s what one now expects from a DLC pack for the Fallout franchise, and I’m enjoying it so far. I don’t want to rush through it too fast, seeing as it is the final hurrah until Fallout 4 or Fallout: New Jersey. Granted, I still need to do a Hardcore playthrough…
I didn’t realize I was doing this, just finishing the quest The Launch, but here ya go, the first Achievement unlocked in the Lonesome Road DLC:
Condemned to Repeat It (20G): Decided the fate of all the Divide Dwellers
I also learned from our last story-driven DLC that I was pronouncing ED-E wrong in my head. For some reason, I was calling our little trumpeting eyebot eee-dee-eee, not ed-dee. Like Eddie. Turns out, the dude who made him, well…calls him Eddie. I get that now. However, my brain still refuses to get it right. Oh wells.
And now, some random gameplay tips:
- Make sure your lockpicking skill is decent, at least 50+ with some skill magazines to help from time to time. There’s a lot of lockpicking so far.
- Watch out for glitches where Deathclaws randomly appear inside a ruined trailer and smack the skin off your character. It happened to me, and Tara is a witness. She thought it was a dinosaur at first. I then came up with a new song, which I sang all the way through that Deathclaws-infested stretch of road.
- Pack a lot of Rad-X and/or RadAway. Heck, bring along a Radiation Suit just to be safe. The Divide is not a place one wants to take a deep breath and smell the roses.
- Auto-Inject stimpaks are brilliant; pick up every one you can.
- Don’t stand directly in front of a not-yet-detonated nuke and shoot it. DON’T DO IT.
Good luck, fellow Couriers!
Grinding Down 
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Why not stop and smell the roses? Sure they’re horrifically mutated, and likely radioactive… possibly carnivorous… but, they’re roses!