#far harbor

Minimal spoilers, but there are still at least some minor ones.

Participation Medal: The Workshop DLC + Gun Runners’ Arsenal & Courier’s Stash

I’m grouping these together because while I like what all of these bring to their games, I don’t think it’s fair to compare them to the rest of the DLC in the series.

#12: Mothership Zeta

This one was alright at first, and it’s got some great loot, but the gameplay gets repetitive quick and there’s not a very compelling story to pull me along.

#11: Broken Steel

Broken Steel was pretty mediocre, but it gets a lot of praise for doing a really simple thing the base game should’ve done anyway. There’s a couple spots that offer a fun and challenging fight against the Enclave, but the quest overall is pretty pointless. On the plus side, it does add a few small side quests in the Capital Wasteland, and those ones are actually pretty interesting to play.

#10: Nuka~World

Nuka World is a good concept, fans had been complaining like they usually do, but this time about how you couldn’t really do anything very evil in Fallout 4 that wasn’t random and unprovoked murder/theft, so Bethesda decided to listen and gave us a compelling story with deep moral choices. I’m kidding, they basically gave everyone the finger and a DLC where you couldn’t be good, completely contradicting every decision you can make up to that point. Surprisingly enough, “Should I kill these furries, reskinned Gunners, and bloodthirsty psychopaths or should I allow these innocent slaves to continue being oppressed and abused?” is not as complex of a choice as someone at Bethesda must have thought. Also why the fuck did they make a theme park based on a soda when they have an entire roster of original and colorful comic book characters? Nuka Cola can reasonably have, like, 1 area for JC Bradberton and all that, but an entire park?

#9: Point Lookout

Point Lookout isn’t the worst DLC, but it’s by far the most overrated in the series (in my opinion of course). Apparently it’s like a big love letter to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, but as someone who isn’t very familiar with much of his work, I don’t get many of the references, so all I see is a poorly crafted story centered around two centuries-old enemies that hate each other because… they do? Seriously, what is their motivation? It’s an intriguing rivalry, but without any explanation, they both just look like idiots, which is why I killed them both. Plus, it has an open world, but it only like 3 side quests, and only one of them is actually cool. It gets a couple things right though, the world itself is pretty cool in its design, and the dream sequence was pretty creatively done.

#8: Automatron

Automatron is a fairly simple DLC, with the star pretty clearly being the robot workbench, which is admittedly pretty fun to use. But despite this focus on the new workshop item, Automatron still tells a pretty cool story and introduces some memorable new characters, like Jezebel the back-talking brain, The Mechanist herself, who ends up being tied to the Fallout 3 character in a pretty clever way, and Ada, a robot companion who guides you along the quest. It’s pretty fun, but it’s short, which makes me wish we had a little more time to see the characters develop or at least interact more with each other. Also, the PS4 port of the DLC (where I played Fallout 4 until I switched to PC) was really buggy, with one of the areas having disappearing walls on every playthrough I’ve done, unpatched to this day. I haven’t had this issue on PC though, and I have no idea about Xbox.

#7 Honest Hearts

This one came so close to being awesome. It had so much going for it, notably a blue-eyed burned man with no burns on his face and some of the best voice acting in the entire series, as well as a beautiful new environment, one of my favorites of any open world in Fallout. But it falls kind of flat in its factions, with two tribes that felt almost the same except for their leaders, and the bad guy faction who killed Graham’s family. Joshua Graham is absolutely the saving grace of Honest Hearts, but since he only had a real hand to play at the beginning and the very end, the middle just felt like filler. Also, the first 20 minutes of the DLC can be spent getting to know the caravan that takes you to the Zion, only to find out I wasted my time and they all die immediately. It’s a decent fake-out, but I still spent all that time on the long expository dialogue right at the beginning (a common theme in New Vegas’s DLCs, and in my opinion the greatest flaw in each of them).

#6 Operation: Anchorage

This might be one the more controversial rankings, I know a lot of people don’t like Anchorage that much, but personally, I found it to be a really enjoyable experience. It’s short but sweet, and a beautiful window into pre-war military propaganda. You follow around an action-hero version of an American soldier that can scale mountains like Ethan Hunt and sneak through vents like John McClain. Oh, and the whole thing is really racist toward the Chinese, with offensive comments being thrown left and right by the US army (you know, the good guys!), and a general who can easily be convinced to commit suicide out of “honor”. It’s a really clever glimpse into the mindset of Americans just before the bombs. The Brotherhood Outcasts were pretty pointless, though. They just as easily could have been with the rest of the BoS instead of half-assedly using a faction that was barely developed anyway.

#5. Old World Blues

New Vegas was made by a lot of the same team from Fallout 2, and in no other place is it more obvious than in The Crater, for better or for worse. Old World Blues is filled to the brim with memorable characters, witty dialogue, and, the most Black Isle part of all, pop culture references at every turn. But on the less positive side of classic Fallout parallels, while most of the locations are interesting to explore, the open world that connects them feels empty and repetitive, like it’s only there to pad for time. And the enemies, while visually interesting, serve the same function as basic enemy types from the Mojave. I did think the inclusion of the Mysterious Broadcast acting in the place of an ambient soundtrack was an interesting idea, it definitely added a unique charm to the area, however there aren’t many songs that play, so it gets a little repetitive, and there is no actual ambient soundtrack if you ever do turn off the radio. At that point, you’re left to choose between the same 8 or 9 jazz songs or absolute silence. These low points certainly don’t overshadow the highs, but I definitely feel their presence and the effect they had on my enjoyment at times.

#4. Lonesome Road

Lonesome Road is like the polar opposite of Old World Blues in every way. It tells a dark story in a linear world, and we finally learn about the mysterious other courier we’ve been hearing about.  It’s not a perfectly told story, I think it’s the biggest offender of the “tell don’t show” mentality all of New Vegas’s DLC, as you can’t just get all the droning exposition over with at the beginning, it’s spread throughout the whole campaign in 5-10 minute increments. But it still tells a really intriguing story, and pays off with some of the toughest combat sections in the entire game (notably the Courier’s Mile, I played it at level 49 and still died repeatedly). It was also nice to have more of a look into the backstory of ED-E, who was a lot more animated and human than in the base game, and comes with a really nice eyebot remodel.

#3 Far Harbor

I might be going too easy on Far Harbor, admittedly I’m very forgiving of a lot of Fallout 4′s shortcomings because even though it’s not my favorite, it’s the one that introduced me to the series. But Far Harbor was so many leaps and bounds better than every other DLC in 4, and it’s just such a solid add-on to begin with that I think it deserves a spot in the top three. It has some decent gray morality between each of the three factions, although it’s really more of a “lesser of three evils” situation, because none of the factions are very likable at all by the end. The people of Far Harbor are cruel and judgmental, the Children of Atom are actively trying to kill themselves and everyone on the island in an attempt to grow the power of their deity, Atom, which several of their members don’t even believe in, and Acadia operates in isolation, manipulation, and paranoia, committing murders and replacements of people in power to try and keep the peace, effectively becoming like the Institute they dedicated themselves to escaping from. It certainly makes for more interesting moral decisions than the base game’s factions. The open world is also one of the best of any of the other DLC in this category, my favorite part being the ominous lighting created by the fog, a phenomenon that has come and go over time and allowed for new and dangerous creatures to develop and thrive. Far Harbor delivers a good story in a great open world, a feat Honest Hearts, Point Lookout, Nuka~World, and Old World Blues all managed to fall short of in one category or the other.

#2 The Pitt

For me, this is where Fallout DLC goes from really good to truly exceptional. The Pitt did so much right it’s frankly embarrassing for something like Nuka~World, which borrowed a lot of concepts from this but ended up using them poorly. The Pitt keeps a consistently dark tone, some of the most memorable and well done world design in the series, a truly disturbing new creature type, and for the first time since 1998, there’s a well thought out, morally gray decision to be made in Fallout that isn’t hindered by the karma system telling me if I made the right choice. It really made me wish there was more like this to experience, and although there aren’t many linear DLCs that deliver with this level of quality, there is one that managed to top it.

#1 Dead Money

Dead Money is, in my opinion of course, the absolute peak of Fallout so far. Yes, it has the long exposition dump at the beginning like every other New Vegas DLC, and the world design of the Sierra Madre may not be as breathtaking as The Pitt, but it still manages to outshine it in every other way. Dead Money tells an incredible character-based story with a diverse group that’s been forced together by one man hellbent on finding and obtaining the fabled treasure of the Sierra Madre. Like a lot of New Vegas, this sounds like a dumb idea when I try to describe it, but it really is a fantastic story with a small but memorable cast of strange, flawed, and deeply tragic characters as they either learn to let go of what’s holding them back, or die in their refusal to. At the end of the DLC, even the courier has to face trials to test their own ability to let go of the treasure they’ve been forced into finding for Father Elijah this whole time. On top of this, the two new enemy types are some of the most creative in the series, with the quick and strong Ghost People who finally break the pattern of “you gotta shoot ‘em in the head” to kill everything, and the hologram security who can only be stopped by sneaking to their power source and disabling them. Finally, to neatly tie up all of the themes in Dead Money, and New Vegas as a whole, is the haunting “Begin Again”, one of very few examples of an original song made for the Fallout universe, which just makes it that much more special.

I’m not really sure how to wrap this up, so instead I’ll just link Begin Again because it’s so perfect on so many levels.

wow these robots are in love

Sucker for the mariner huh?

What’s it gonna take?

The missing girl is found but won’t go home.

The synths are happy in their refuge but I’m the Director now and there’s definitely something dodgy about DiMA.

The Children of Asshatdom are brewing up a zealot-flavored radstorm and I have to go drink the crazy-juice to have a hope of digging into the vacuum-tube head’s misplaced memory lane.

What would Jonathan have done?

General ‘Nate’ Woods would probably have marched off the the Spring and ordered a double, that’s what. So that’s what I’m gonna do. Well, just a single shot of irradiated dirty water with undisclosed mixer for me, thanks. Essex (X6) is glaring at me so sharp he’s practically drawing blood.

But if that’s what it’s gonna take…