Honest Hearts
The followup to Dead Money is Honest Hearts. This takes you out to the north of the Mojave on a caravan trip through Zion Canyon in Zion National Park in an attempt to link up with New Canaan, a city founded by Mormon missionaries. The first thing that happens in the DLC quest is that your caravan party is ambushed by the tribal inhabitants of the Canyon, killing everyone you're with. This is a great set-piece and introduction to the quest. Unfortunately, it's also the high point, and for me the story falls out steeply from here on out.
I don't have much to say about Honest Hearts because I don't think there was much to it. The main quest is a series of fetch quests, and there's not much in the wide of side-quests to distract from it. The story of the DLC is also told via a few massive textdumps in dialogue with the main characters. I am not averse to a little reading in a game, but long periods of walking to locations to pick up items interspersed with long passages of text is not good storytelling in-game, and was outdated even at the time Honest Hearts was released.
On the positive side, the environments of the Zion National Park are very scenic, and a pleasant contrast with the Mojave Wasteland. The colouring is far more vibrant and the canyon setting allows a verticality which is not possible in the desert of the main game.
Overall, Honest Hearts is just about worth checking out once, and at the very least didn't make me want to stop playing like Dead Money did, but overall it was a bland and forgettable experience.
Old World Blues
Unlike Dead Money and Honest Hearts, I had no idea what the story was before I started Old World Blues. The DLC is initiated by finding a crashed satellite projecting something onto an abandoned drivethrough cinema screen, and this fairly bizarre set up is carried through into Old World Blues itself.
The quest starts by yourself waking up in a lab in the Big Mountain (Big MT for short, or Big Empty as many of the characters call it) to be informed by a bunch of Think Tanks - floating brains in jars with faces on attached monitors - that your brain, heart and spine have been amputated and replaced with cybernetics. And they've lost your real brain.
As you can probably tell, Old World Blues has far more of a sense of humour about itself than the rest of New Vegas and the DLCs. I think this could be a bit hit or miss for some people, but I enjoyed it. The story is almost reminiscent of a Saturday morning cartoon - the Think Tanks are constantly taunted by one of their former colleagues, Dr Mobius, from his fortress styled The Forbidden Zone, guarded by an army of roboscorpions. The main story involves you confronting Dr Mobius to retrieve your brain, which will let you leave. You don't have to take your brain with you.
I enjoyed most of Old World Blues, but it is not without its issues. The main one is that the enemies, most of all the roboscorpions but many others to some extent, have huge amounts of health and armour. More than once I was confronted with packs of roboscorpions which I had no hope of killing before they killed me, simply because they take so long to die. This made for some frustrating encounters that were re-loaded again and again, and at one point I had to resort to console commands just so that I could progress.
That aside, Old World Blues is a good experience. The setting is clever, and plays into Fallout's strengths as 50s throw-back sci-fi. I found the writing enjoyably silly, and was sufficiently drawn in to the area to seek out and complete several of the sidequests, which I didn't have the patience for in either Dead Money or Honest Hearts. I would recommend Old World Blues with the caveat that it can feel like running into a brick wall in places due to the bullet-sponge enemies.
Lonesome Road
All of the previous DLC missions are building to some degree or another to this one. Lonesome Road tells some of the backstory of the player character through interactions with another Courier, called Ulysses. There are references to Ulysses throughout the previous DLCs, and even in the main game, although they can be well hidden or oblique, and unfortunately I think the developers fell a little flat in their aim of building up a desire in the player to hunt Ulysses down. I was vaguely aware of him being someone I should look for, but I wasn't entirely sure why.
This is made abundantly clear in Lonesome Road, however. This takes place in a place called the Divide, an area plagued by earthquakes and radiation, the main features of this are military bases. As you progress through the area, Ulysses contacts you at various points using your ED-E robot companion to accuse you of causing the devastation all around. Apparently the Divide was a thriving community until the player character brought something there at some point in the past, which caused all the nuclear warheads hidden in the military bases to detonate.
This area is one of the most striking in the game, full of buildings tilting at bizarre angles, the ground ruptured and cracked, and progress blocked by rockfalls which require you to blow up small warheads to remove. This more than any other part of the game helps to progress the story through environment, using the juxtaposition of Ulysses's descriptions of how it used to be with its current state to create a real sense that something terrible has happened here.
I was also a big fan of Ulysses's characterisation. His dialogue was a bit rambling at times, and his motivations were a bit unclear - from what he tells you it becomes apparent that the destruction caused by the player character is hardly their fault, as it seems they were tricked into carrying whatever device set off the warheads and had no idea that that would be the result, and yet he holds the character responsible. However, I found the dichotomy between him extolling "old world" (i.e. pre-war) values whilst sneering at those who want to use the old world technology fascinating. He wants to recapture the essence of America, to the point of wearing its flag on his back, without any of the baggage that goes alongside it.
I very much enjoyed Lonesome Road and I would rate it easily the best of the four DLC missions. I do wish there had been a little more of the build up to make the final confrontation with Ulysses more dramatic, but this is a minor flaw. If you only play one of the DLC stories, make it this one.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I think I may have been a little uncharitable to Fallout: New Vegas the first time I played through, and I think this is greatly attributable to the very slow start. Once you do get into the game and are able to explore the world a little more, there is a lot to offer, and the branching storyline where you decide who to back at the final battle is neat, if falling a bit flat in execution.
I think overall the DLCs are not something I would return to - whilst they did for the most part have interesting storylines, the gameplay was somewhat lacking. The theme of the characters looking to the old world for inspiration - Elijah to harness its weaponry, the tribals of Zion Valley fearing it and declaring it taboo, the tunnel vision of the Think Tanks refusing to accept anything outside their old world labs, and Ulysses idolising the old world values - did makes for a satisfying thread to follow.
I think the final question is whether New Vegas measures up to, or surpasses, Fallout 3. I would have said no at the beginning of the playthrough, but now I am not so sure, and I think another play of Fallout 3 may be on the horizon...
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