With Chris Avellone back in the writer’s chair, it was pretty much expected that the brand-new Fallout: New Vegas DLC, Old World Blues, would sport a more adventurous design than Honest Hearts, and perhaps even the survival-horror experiment that was Dead Money. The end result, though, is perhaps even a little overboard for what most fans of the series could have expected – it’s equal parts Planescape: Torment in terms of morbid absurdity, and 1950s cheeseball sci-fi film. Despite the odd combination, though, Old World Blues is the strongest DLC for New Vegas yet. The real question isn’t so much “should you get it”, but what it represents for the Fallout franchise, and for its fans.
Like all previous DLCs, Old World Blues begins with the Courier receiving a radio invitation, this time to a midnight screening of an old film, drive-in style. Upon arriving for the event, however, it’s pretty clear that things aren’t all they seem, with a crashed satellite projecting a strange image on-screen. Like clockwork, the Courier loses consciousness, and, after the opening title crawl, finds him or herself clad in a hospital gown, surgical scars still healing, overlooking an unfamiliar industrial wasteland from above. That wasteland, the Big Empty, or more correctly, Big Mountain, is an ancient pre-War science complex, home to all sorts of lost technology, housed in forgotten laboratories.
It doesn’t take long for the residents of Big Mountain, old scientists whose brains have been preserved in robotic exoskeletons, to make themselves known. Housed in the Think Tank, a massive dome structure at the centre of the Big Empty, the unsettling brain-bots, led by one Dr. Klein, are tenuous allies, making it clear that, in a world ruled by the fleshless, a mere human has little status. To add injury to insult, the Courier’s brain, heart and spine have been removed, replaced with a set of mechanical replacements. The Think Tank use these brainless human shells as caretakers and guardians, but it seems that the Courier is the first one who has maintained any sort of intelligence post-surgery. During introductions, Dr. Mobius, a rogue brain-bot who has sealed himself away from the others, interrupts and begins taunting the Think Tank, setting up the villain for the majority of the story.
What begins as scientific fascination for the brain-bots slowly turns into partnership, as they need help in gathering blueprints and schematics from many of the outlying facilities, and the Courier, well… needing one’s brain back is as good a motive as any. From here, the Big Empty opens up for free exploration, with a number of additional side-quests becoming apparent upon speaking to several of the Think Tank’s curious inhabitants. It’s all standard New Vegas fare – travel here, collect this, kill that, but it’s all handled with a degree of freshness, creativity and design focus that makes for a more entertaining experience than it sounds, helping to dress up what are ultimately fairly standard quests. The structure is altogether predictable, with the three main quests eventually converging into a finale, but it all works well given Old World Blues‘ gameplay, which goes back to open-world exploration and dungeon-delving.
Of course, the usual set of features is offered up, which seem targeted more towards high-level characters. There’s the expected level cap increase and new perks to be had, both gained through gameplay and through leveling up, but an assortment of new weaponry ensure that Couriers devoted to Energy Weapons especially will have some exciting new toys to play with. Some of these are just incidental to the environment: Proton Axes provide melee characters an anti-robot option, for instance. Others, like the Sonic Emitter (a gun that weaponises soundwaves), are used to advance the plot and open up new areas to explore. These touches help flesh out the world and give a bit more meaning to the new gear, ensuring you use it even if it’s not necessarily as powerful as some of the rest you might have. Meanwhile, the new Robo-Scorpions are about as ludicrous and ineffective in combat as they sound, but some of the other enemies, including ancient, skeletal corpses trapped in automated “trauma suits”, put up a fairly serious fight.
The Courier’s time at the Big Empty also sees him or her set up with some interesting accommodations. The Sink, a guest room on top of the Think Tank itself, can be spruced up by installing computerised personalities into many of the appliances scattered about, providing both gameplay functions (smelting down coffee mugs into spare parts) as well as a few additional quests. I’m not the type of role-playing fan who feels the need to own a house, but even I felt compelled to finish everything simply because there’s both good loot and some entertaining dialogue attached to it. The simple fact is that this wasn’t a necessary thing to include in Old World Blues – it’s not integral to my enjoyment, and Obsidian could have done well enough without including that bizarre cast of eclectic appliances, but it’s yet another extra touch that helps to make Old World Blues feel like more than just another run-of-the-mill, “three bullet points” DLC. Even the lengthy dialogue sequences with frequent skill checks (which can bring up new quests in some cases), additional locations, the tie-ins to the franchise history and lore, all go beyond what might be expected.
There is a unique wrinkle in
Old World Blues, however, and it’s something I absolutely need to bring up, something which goes beyond the focus of this review, and concerns the
Fallout franchise as a whole. Going back to
Fallout 2, there’s been a division in the series’ fanbase over what tone is best suited to the games. Many maintain that the original
Fallout‘s self-seriousness, commitment to canon, and consistent atmosphere marks it as the better game, while plenty others enjoy
Fallout 2‘s tendency towards absurdity, humour, pop-culture tie-ins, and generally more upbeat attitude. Personally, I’m a little bit on the fence –
Fallout 2‘s humour and inconsistency got on my nerves, but I do prefer its more diverse and significantly larger world, not to mention plenty of other gameplay improvements. I fully understand both perspectives on the matter, and why it has to some degree split the fanbase in two.
Why do I bring this up? Well, one of New Vegas‘ most-praised points by the original fanbase was the return to the franchise’s roots, casting off much of the absurdity that crept into Fallout 2 and more so into Fallout 3. With that in mind, it’s worth saying it straight out: Old World Blues is just plain ridiculous. It’s silly, it’s hilarious, and often winks at the fourth wall. It grabs hold of those 1950s underpinnings the original series had, and inflates them to the point where Old World Blues feels about as tongue-in-cheek as a game can be. And this, really, is the deciding point on whether you should pick up Old World Blues, because right from the moment you start it, it doesn’t let up. As good as it is, I have no problem telling some players that they simply might not like it, because of how close to heart they hold Fallout and how strongly-conceived a vision they may have of it.
At the same time, all the absurdity is handled with a certain amount of class, a degree of intelligence – for every unexpected joke about “hand penises”, there’s another five or ten obscure references, innuendos, wordplays, etc., and it’s all brilliantly well-implemented, tying in with the main characters in a way which brings them well beyond mere comic relief. Upon first visiting the Big Empty, I was a little bewildered at just how off-kilter it all was… but after spending a little longer, I began to realise what a finely-crafted world it really was, the underlying logic behind all the absurdity. By the end, the silliness gave way to a degree of poignancy and reflection, just tragic enough, and it made me appreciate the characters on a level above what I initially took them for. Funny though it may be, Old World Blues‘ biggest success isn’t that it got me to laugh more than any other game in a long time, but that it did so without undermining its own integrity, and did so in a way that was respectful both to me, as a player, and to itself.
Of course, this is the part where I have to say that Old World Blues, despite its strong successes in creating a highly unique piece of the Fallout world, still has some flaws. The balance in combat is, for lack of a better term, iffy, with certain enemies proving to be extremely challenging, others the exact opposite, many of them boasting inflated hit-point bars, and so on. The DLC is recommended for characters of level 15+, and I went in as a level 39 Energy Weapons specialist, so perhaps much of that depends on how the level scaling treats each individual character, but I simply can’t say that Old World Blues has been perfectly tuned. Moreover, while the dialogue itself is fantastic and delivered courtesy of some fantastic voice talent, much of that dialogue is loaded at the beginning and ending of the story, meaning that players with little patience for talk will still find themselves sucked into 20-plus-minute conversations. And as great as the dialogue and characters are, they don’t quite leave the same lasting, more personal impressions as those in Dead Money, nor does the story have the same careful pacing, sense of mystery, or slow build-up to a strong conclusion.
Still, these are fairly minor complaints. Examined as a DLC expansion for Fallout: New Vegas, Old World Blues has a lot to offer, from a detailed and well-crafted world to explore, to new items, perks, enemies, and quests, to some of the most bizarre characters and entertaining dialogue to appear in a videogame in a good long time. For fans of classic Fallout, it provides a look into the past, at ideas which were left on the cutting room floor of previous games, such as Lobotomites, and the Environmental Protection Agency. For fans of the newer games, it offers up a lot of tie-ins to New Vegas and its lore, handled with thought rather than a hand-wave. There’s really no question whether Old World Blues is “good” or not.
What does need to be considered, though, and what will undoubtedly be the significant factor determining one’s enjoyment of Old World Blues, is its relationship to the other Fallout games, and the long-standing conventions of the series. It represents not so much a step forward as it does a complete sidestep in tone and attitude. This is going to be a sore spot for many players, and while I can heartily endorse Old World Blues as something most fans should experience, I, personally, don’t want this to set the new standard for Fallout, for the next game in the franchise to abandon the seriousness in favour of laughs, even if they’re good ones. It’s a welcome break from tradition, and I’d love to see the ideas here expressed elsewhere, but it was a very good idea to keep them confined to a DLC, since, as a self-contained episode, Old World Blues is easily skipped for those who may not want it. This isn’t the Fallout most older fans remember, and sometimes, experiments are best kept as such.
