Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I bought Fallout: New Vegas ages ago but have only gotten around to playing it recently. Because I loved Fallout 3 so much, I decided to play this game the right way. This means turning Hardcore mode on. This means using the jsawyer mod. This means going through the content of all of the DLCs in the intended order. This means I’m going to need to spend a very, very long time on it.

Rather than wait for the whole month of so that it would likely take me to complete this epic playthough, I think I’ll write a short write-up after going through each of the DLCs. This one covers Dead Money, the first of the DLCs, set in the dead casino of the Sierra Madre.

• A lot of people hate this DLC. They hate it so much that there are mods out there which does nothing but disable the key features of Dead Money. This because all of the exterior areas, but some of the interior areas as well, in this DLC is covered by this evil cloud that drastically cuts down on visibility, makes everything look a dusty, dull red. It also constantly drains your health at a slow rate though it won’t actually kill you. Concentrations of the cloud is key areas can and will kill you however.
• You only really fight one type of enemy in this adventure: the ghost people. They are supposedly difficult to kill as they are simply knocked unconscious unless you manage to disintegrate them or sever a limb (taking a page out of Dead Space here I see). They also drop no loot of any significance so it’s more efficient resource-wise to simply avoid them. That matters because this is one of those DLCs that take away all of your stuff at the beginning. You only get them back after you finish the DLC so the only items you can use are what you find here.
• The other main enemy type are the solid holograms who are completely invulnerable to damage but can deal plenty of damage to you. Some of them can be disabled through computer terminals and destroyed by locating and shooting at the holographic emitters. In any case, this means lots of sneaking around.
• To make matters worse, an explosive collar is strapped onto you at the start. This collar goes off if you stay within range of a speaker for long enough. Some speakers can be destroyed or turned off. Others can’t so you’re forced to move fast.
• One thing about this setup is that it is pleasantly reminiscent of Bioshock. No doubt it was an inspiration as the vendor terminals, fueled using the casino chips, here are just too similar. The ghost people are direct analogues of the splicers too. The focus is about surviving a hostile environment rather than beating enemies. I enjoyed the feeling of desperation, for food, for ammunition, for water, while being constantly whittled down by the cloud.
• I didn’t like the story. It’s so contrived and implausible within the context of the larger Fallout setting. Actually entering the Sierra Madre Casino after all the setup felt like a letdown too. It didn’t feel grand enough and all of the interior elements feel no different from the rest of the larger game’s content.
• Overall I’d only give this a middling score. They had good design goals but were too restricted in what they could do by this just being a DLC.