‘Tis a bright and new year and what better way to start if off than with the age old tradition of retreading the works and achievements of yesteryear! Why, I couldn’t possibly imagine a better method of looking bright-eyed into our glorious horizon than staring straight behind at the road we just tread. Come with me on this fantastic journey as I go over the entertainment which I explored in glorious 2014 but had not got around to discussing.
I had, on a previous entry, espoused my love for Fallout: New Vegas and explained in subtle, vague terms how it was so much better than that derivative drivel Fallout 3. I looked at its first two DLC–Dead Money and Honest Hearts respectively–with a lick and a promise that I would cover the final two when I got around to them. Good new! I finished! Bad news. You get to hear about it.
Old World Blues was the third DLC released and is generally considered the best of the bunch. I can not refute this statement. In my prior post, I detailed how I enjoyed the ideas behind Honest Hearts and Dead Money even if the execution left a little something to be desired. They were, at the end of the day, an interesting look at the world going to hell. Dead Money revolved around the obsessive need of a billionaire eccentric desperate to keep himself and his little piece of earth from the consuming fires and destruction of nuclear devastation. He had, unfortunately, latched his sail to a sinking ship and when he discovered that the woman whom he would craft an entire world for meant to betray him, he turned his marvelous bomb shelter into an inescapable tomb. There was a very obvious and pulsing vein of greed running the entire course of the DLC and the little addition of personal player greed was a neat touch on an otherwise clunky and straightforward corridor experience. Honest Hearts, however, revolved around a dead and broken man’s devotion to redemption. Joshua Graham hoped to expunge the sins he committed in designing and raising the murderous Caesar’s Legion with the small defence and rescue of the Sorrows tribe from the villainous White Legs. The current running beneath the petty tribal dispute and the one between the last Mormons on Earth was the story of the Survivor and how his personal struggle following the fall of the nuclear bombs had irrevocably changed him as it had the world around him. He, too, hoped to keep the woman of his life alive through his recordings and memories, ultimately falling in the final years of his life with only the scattered memoirs to be unearthed by the player in the most remote caverns dotting the Grand Canyon.
Old World Blues is about talking robots.
Old World Blues and Fallout belongs to Obsidian Entertainment and Bethesda Studios in various legal ways beyond mortal ken. They are not mine.
Franchises are a curious thing. They, more often than not, live long past their creators and what they come to mean is often quite different than what was previously intended. Ask ten fans what Fallout is and you’re apt to get ten different answers. The first two DLC explore some rather personal and grim outcomes of total nuclear devastation. However, Fallout has never been entirely dark and emotional. There’s a bold splash of zany anachronism and otherness. It is slapped right on the front of the cover as a cheerful cartoon of Vault Boy often stands smiling and winking over a blazing mushroom cloud. It is the lingering fifties Americana wrapped about golden age science fiction devices which work through vacuum tubes and prayer than honest science. Turn on the radio and you won’t hear some futuristic sounds befitting a world struggling to rebuild in the year 2281 but the glorious melodies of Roy Brown, Danny Kaye with the Andrews Sisters, The Ink Spots and the Kay Kyser Orchestra. Mad Max-esque punk raiders and cannibalistic tribes are just as much Fallout as brains in a jar and red rocket laser weaponry.
Old World Blues is devouted to that last aspect. Once installed, the player is enticed to head towards Nipton’s Drive-In Theatre to enjoy the Midnight Feature which turns out to be a rather perplexed eye dancing across a faded screen projected from a fallen satellite. Whereas Dead Money you’re lured by the sultry tones of Vera Keyes, inquisitiveness is the only trait which gets the player to touch the satellite before they’re whisked away to the reclusive and secretive Big Mountain research centre. Here, the scientists of bygone America were sequestered in order to develop and prototype weapons necessary to win the war against filthy, Communist China. Part of their development included a holographic fence which served as a shield to shelter from radiation and bombs. Of course, the one thing the scientists didn’t develop against was the simple passage of time and the player is greeted by five floating tri-monitors eerily displaying a pair of eyes and an unmoving mouth as though that were all which is necessary to interface with biological specimens. The Think Tank of Big Mountain conquered death by simply shoving their brains in jars and hoping for the best. While they live on–in a sense–they lost any sort of connection to their humanity or sanity and devoted themselves to the noble and pure pursuit of science for science!
Part of that involved an experiment which destroyed most of Big Mountain and no one ever feels the need to expand further on that incident.
To Old World Blues credits, the Think Tank and their villainous colleague Mobius are well written. You get a sense of their character from their mad ramblings–a brief window into the peoples lives before time and science! stole any shred of individuality away from them. Ostensibly, you are left in Big Mountain to solve the puzzling puzzle of your brain being absent from your body (along with your heart and spine) as per regulation for all guests to Big Mountain. You are outfitted with cybernetic replacements, as are all lobotomites, but you exhibit the curious propensity for speech and thought despite lacking the traditionally required elements for such behaviour. As such, the Think Tank see as a sort of saviour–or at the very least a useful anomaly–capable of aiding their otherwise unarmed and unhelpful robotic forms against the unending tide of robo-scorpions Mobius unleashes on his erstwhile coworkers.
Of course, in order to properly assault Mobius in his ruined bunker to the north you must gather the three great MacGuffins scattered throughout the complex. It’s a rudimentary plot device meant to encourage the player out of the Dome and into the various laboratories around spacious Big Mountain. Old World Blues is less on linear narrative and more on Valve’s environmental telling. Most of the player’s understanding and learning of the complexes history is discovered from poking in every nook and cranny of the crumbling place. Here, too, is the ever persistent allusions to Ulysses and ‘the Grand Plan’ to be revealed in Lonesome Road but they are more in vein with Honest Hearts where it’s a rudimentary connection at best. There’s a bit more explanation for Christine Royce and what actually happened here to cause Dead Money to transpire but nothing of true note is discovered other than Ulysses supposedly learning something “important” from the Think Tank which they can’t remember or can’t be bothered to remember. For the most part, the narrative is well executed in this manner. It pulls on the sense of discovery and exploration which I enjoyed in Honest Hearts and some of the revelations tie back to the New Vegas proper like the origins of the dreaded Cazadores.
My biggest issue with Old World Blues, however, is that it is safe. There’s really nothing deeper beneath it. When you confront Mobius, the floating brain isn’t some madman with some gloriously thematic reasons for his nefarious actions. He’s just a rambling old brain addicted to Mentats and barely keeping his thoughts together. He realized that after their “immortality” the Think Tank lost all sense of their humanity and, should they ever get the motivation to expand beyond their protective bubble, they would turn into tyrannical science! tyrants far too willing to enslave and destroy the wider world outside to keep bodies fueling their ever more demented experiments. Thus, he reasoned that if there were a persistent threat upon their lives they would be more than happy to squirrel up in the basement of the Dome. Mobius didn’t so much steal your brain as rescue it from the plumbing and is more than happy to give it back–assuming you can convince your brain to come back with you.
Old World Blues most interesting moment is a dialogue challenge to convince your brain to join you on your grand, stupid adventures. It’s an interesting climax for a story, especially given how reactive it is to some of your prior exploits. It also is the perfect highlight of the absurd experience of Big Mountain though there is a cursory confrontation with the Think Tank where you can convince them to be good people if you’ve fulfilled the prerequisite Sunday Morning Special morality lessons for each of them. Or you can shoot them in the face. They really don’t have much in the way of defences even on very hard. And you’re apt to be armed to the teeth with barking mini-guns or singing sonic emitters.
Which I applaud the design for Big Mountain in that one regard. Unlike the past two DLC, Old World Blues is more amicable to wider character builds. There are energy guns, conventional weaponry and melee items with which to defend yourself. It’s–ultimately–the inverse of the prior DLC. The execution and design is top notch but the themes and motifs underlying it are rather shallow and uninteresting. Its light-hearted (to Fallout’s degree) and the characters are entertaining so the writing remains consistent. I couldn’t help but shake that I was treading through cut content, however. There was a feeling that Big Mountain was more a museum than a laboratory which preserved all the ideas and locations which simply couldn’t make it to the final release. It doesn’t help that loading up New Vegas’ map shows a conspicuous large ‘crater’ in the northern corner which could very easily once hold the saucer remains of Big Mountain. And much like Dead Money, there’s an alternative ending depending on potential decisions to make in this space. It’s impossible to go through the area and not think “what if this were part of the original experience and it was integrated into the final act.” If, much like Dead Money, you could participate in the battle for Hoover Dam with crazed robots and lobotomites along with hologram fighters and a rust death cloud, I feel like the “gather your allies” story of New Vegas would have been all the richer.
As such, Old World Blues exists in the New Vegas world much as it does here: an optional place plucked from time and sheltered in its own little sphere waiting to be poked, prodded, probed and ultimately abandoned.