Fallout: New Vegas Lonesome Road DLC Developer Diary

To herald the release of Lonesome Road, the always-busy Chris Avellone has penned a new developer diary that talks about the team’s goals for the Fallout: New Vegas DLC and how they went about constructing the narrative for the add-on, while also providing some advice before we head back into the wasteland.

In short, the idea for this last DLC would be the player would be contracted to travel one of the most dangerous roads in the wasteland, the goal a linear one – head for the setting sun, starting at point A, and try to survive to reach point B. In an original draft, we tried to think what payment would work for accepting such a job and what you would carry, when it occurred to us that the player may simply want to satisfy their curiosity about the past and who’s been hunting you all this time. So we left it at that.

As for what that means for the Wasteland afterward? Who knows. While the finale of New Vegas proper ends at the second battle of Hoover Dam, traveling into your character’s history, into the past of the Courier and of the Fallout world, was still a narrative road open to us.

A bit about writing – when doing narrative design, writing is the smallest part of what we do from a storytelling perspective. The rest is getting creative with the time and resources you have. We then use that to flesh out visual storytelling design documents, scripting the begin and end slides, graffiti layouts and placement design, chronologies and timelines, monster ecologies, level design aesthetics and naming of locations, loading screen lore, quest layouts and quest names – even the inventory items are designed to reinforce the theme, whether from mad scientist gear to Sierra Madre chips.

Still, for all that work, the narrative largely comes from you. In fact, most Fallout players have far more interesting stories of their gameplay experiences than we could ever dream up as narrative designers. In my opinion, that’s how it should be.

Me too, Chris.

We’ve mirrored the single piece of new artwork in our image gallery, as well.