2013: I finish New Vegas and start playing the DLC content. I leave Honest Hearts for last. As soon as I load into Zion the ending cutscene plays and I get a black screen. I have to load an old save and this bug occurs every time I try to enter Zion.

2015: I get a new laptop for university and replay New Vegas from the beginning. I decide to try Honest Hearts. My game crashes when I enter the Northern passage. I disable all of my mods. The same bug occurs. I do a clean install of the game and Windows. My game still crashes when I enter the Northern passage.

2017: Our apartment in Paris is robbed, including my laptop. With the insurance money received I build a new desktop. I install New Vegas on it. I decide to replay Old World Blues and Lonesome Road. They both work fine. I decide to try Honest Hearts. I am able to load into Zion. All of the NPCs in the initial firefight die except one White Legs ambusher. The quest does not progress to the 'Move into Zion Valley' stage. No NPC will talk to me. No NPC is hostile to me. I TCL throughout Zion and nothing progresses no matter what. I disable all mods, do a clean install of the game, and try a new save entirely. This still occurs upon entering Zion.

2018: I replay New Vegas. This time as soon as I leave Doc's house I beeline my way to Northern passage. I pick up nothing. I speak to no one. I fight no beast. I take a sip from my trusty Vault 13 canteen. I do not wish to let my save be altered in the slightest way lest I be denied the forbidden fruit I have gone without for over half a decade. I enter the Northern passage. I complete 'Happy Trails Expedition.' I begin 'Arrival at Zion.' I load into Zion. My heart beats faster and faster. My palms sweat. The firefight begins. The caravan is dropping like flies. I know now this is supposed to happen. in VATS I plug the White Legs full of lead. One remains. I cross the bridge to progress the quest. My lip quivers. Follows-Chalk approaches me. He stares at me. I take a sip from my trust Vault 13 canteen. I interact with Follows-Chalk. I am greeted with "Hoi! White Legs don't leave survivors often. You're some kind of lucky, let me tell you." But this is not in a dialogue box. Though the subtitles emblazon the bottom of my screen, I am given no opportunity here to press further. My quest draws to an end before it can even begin. I set flags to different states in the console to no avail. I TCL around only to have NPCs regard me with passive dialogue. My actions have no bearing on this godforsaken land. I am but an observer for a world I cannot, will not ever know. I have no mouth, and I must scream.

2022: In an envious last-ditch effort, I reinstall New Vegas with the Viva New Vegas modpack. In this instance, I figure I should not let the vanilla game hemorrhage and hope to progress before it crumbles under its own weight. Fallout: New Vegas will be wrapped in as many bandaid fixes as Joshua Graham. If it has allowed the Burned Man to survive in the face of certain death, perhaps I will be granted the Lord's blessing as well. I create a new character and help the people of Goodsprings against the Powder Gangers to refamiliarise myself with the wasteland. When the dust settles, I beeline it to New Vegas. Not for revenge, but for salvation. Warnings of deathclaws and radscorpions fall upon deaf ears. I kill a deathclaw caught between a chair and a wall to reach level 2. As with my previous attempts, I ultimately seek to reach Zion with minimal influence exerted on the land, lest some quest flag, some quirk of the game engine deny me the promised land. I come across Sloan, an outpost I had never known about, an outpost I will never know about as I must press onward. A Stealth Boy grants me passage beyond a final pack of deathclaws. I am proud of myself for making it through. I recall that Honest Hearts requires a low carry weight to begin, so I make a stop at the Crimson Caravan Company and nearby clinic to offload my wares. I have made a miscalculation.

Being only level 3 upon my arrival at the Northern passage I cannot meet the Speech check to get the others in the caravan to bear my burden. My Survival too is below par. Still, that I have made it this far is promising. I am insistent on bringing as many items into Zion as I can, so it's off to Freeside to do some short quests. I enter the Atomic Wrangler ready to collect some debts and hire some escorts when the one-armed bandit lures me closer with its siren song. My scant few caps become chips which become devastating loss. With only 7 Luck I am statistically likely to break even at Blackjack, so perhaps I can recuperate my funds in short order. Liquidating the rest of my inventory does not have the desired effect as my losses are doubled. Another level would grant me a perk, a chance to increase my Luck one point further. Mick and Ralph's nearby has the lustful Naughty Nightwear which will also increase my Luck. Or, penniless and with only my pistol at my side, I could leave for Zion at once.

I was never one to let bygones be bygones. With any number of options for earning coin in Freeside, my sloth gets the better of me and I recall that The Silver Rush across the street is comically easy to steal from. The plethora of guards watched me drag plasma rifles into the bathroom only to waddle out over-encumbered. With a fat pocket of caps, I purchase the Nightwear. Having veered so far from my intended path, I wrathfully murder Dixon and some Freeside addicts to level up. With 9 Luck, I cannot lose. In no time at all I clean out the Atomic Wrangler. The Strip calls.

I should have known my greed would lead me down this path, but no matter. I excuse my behaviour as a need to purchase a high-quality firearm from the Gun Runners, even if I know it to be a falsehood. In no time at all I am barred from Gomorrah, The Tops, and even the Ultra Luxe. When I had crossed paths with Benny in The Tops I paid him no mind, so absolute was my drive to reach Honest Hearts. By this point my pack was as full as my purse, bursting at the seams with drink and food. Why let it go to waste? Imbibing all I had won in an act of unbridled gluttony, I develop an alcohol addiction and make my way to the clinic outside of Freeside. All patched up and level 7, carrying few enough goods to meet the post-Survival check weight limit, I return to the Northern passage.

As my eyes adjust to the beauty of Zion, I hold my breath. I dare not do anything I am not expected to, lest I be cast from this proverbial Eden for my arrogance. The caravan is wiped out in the White Legs ambush. The corpses will have to remain untouched for now. I cross the bridge in anticipation. Follows-Chalk approaches. He speaks to me. I receive the next part of the quest. I make it to the Dead Horses camp. I speak to Joshua Graham. He and I are not so different. He and I do not belong here.

I do not belong here.

way less of a white savior narrative than i was expecting; it's just self-aware and candid about the fact that the conflict was birthed by joshua and daniel's presence enough to avoid veering off into complete cartoonishness. even so, the dlc is way too brief to really do most of its ideas any real justice or feel completely level-headed about the topics it intends to dissect - a shame since you'd expect joshua in particular to get more screentime and focus considering what a titan he is in new vegas' lore.

that said i'd still become a good mormon housewife for him

I just completed the second New Vegas DLC, Honest Hearts. While I still like Dead Money more, Honest Hearts was still great. It provided a new and open area to explore with plenty of new quests. It's a lot more open compared to Dead Money and exploring the mountains of Utah was really cool. It's also interesting to explore and learn about the tribes which inhabit the area being the Dead Horses, Sorrows, and White Legs.

The DLC also had one of the best characters in the entire game, Joshua Graham. He's literally the face of the DLC and his story of being Caesar's former right hand man made his views and talks with him all the more philosophical and interesting. He understands the flaws of both Caesar's Legion and the NCR. While this DLC didn't blow me away like Dead Money did, it was still really fun to play through and provided more lore and expanded on the world of Fallout: New Vegas. 8/10.

While I did enjoy this DLC more than the previous Dead Money, I still think it falters in a few areas. While I love the characters in this DLC, I think the overall story isn’t as strong as dead money. Where I think it improves over the previous dlc is in its world design. Gone are the cramped and desolate villas and casino and in its place is a massive new river area for your to explore, which I think fits the New Vegas loop much better. Even though the story could’ve been better, it’s a still a great lil dlc to revisit.

I really like the way this DLC handles faith in general. It's something messy, conflicting, deeply related to the people interpreting it, and yet it's still treated with sincerity and is shown to be a legitimately redemptive force just as much as it allows unearned clemency and hides developmental backslides. It works nicely with the themes of forgiveness and lost innocence.

It is annoying that it entirely secularizes the faith of the natives, though. I'd much have preferred a wider cosmology (especially because syncretization is such a major emphasis of their culture), but this DLC's scope of writing is pretty tight and I understand the mindset that led them to have everything tie back to the relationships between Canaanites and the people who are inexorably affected by their tendrils of imperialism. That's also why I always get a little annoyed at it being boiled down to "lol white savior" when the entire point is more about how it is impossible to take back that first contact - Joshua Graham is unambiguously, textually, the worst thing that ever happened to the Dead Legs or the Sorrows. The petty feud of a Hegelian LARPer causes real, appreciable harm that is delegated into comforting obscurity, and this largely-pointless conflict harms people well outside its scope. Daniel and Joshua can never actually find the peace they crave, only shades of it that still haunt their dreams. Every action they take here is a supplicative effort to spare their egos from fully reckoning with the ruin they singlehandedly brought these people.

The problem is that this DLC does not give remotely enough voices to the natives because of its tight deadlines scope and that because it's a Choices Matter Roleplaying Game the PC has more sway than any individual voice, and this taints a good deal of its genuinely deep worldbuilding, character writing, and thematics. They have no real agency in the plot and the entire "innocence lost" angle mostly serves to infantilize. I don't think it's ill-intended, inasmuch as it's a victim of just being a DLC and thusly lacking the scope needed to tackle it three-dimensionally and being trapped in the structure of the base game, and I'll fully admit a good deal of this is cope when I know that Josh Sawyer has politics that are resoundly anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonialist.

As much as it complicates its main narrative, the DLC's tight focus works to its benefit gameplay-wise. It does not overstay its welcome and is a pure, concentrated hit of Bethesda Dopamine that I sorely desired after Starfield's fast travel-heavy UX nightmare left me in the cold. There's always something cool to look at and something useful to find (if you're in hardcore mode, at least), and the Survivalist's logs is a very large part of why I love this genre. The .45 pistols are so fucking cool (and kinda so fucking busted) that they singlehandedly justify the DLC's existence.

At one point Daniel tells the player off: "Throughout our history, we have called many places Zion. This valley is full of God's beauty, but it's just a place. Zion is more than this."
I grew up in this part of the country. I used to believe what the Caananites believed. I can't ever go back there, even though those red rocks and blue skies are so comforting to me that these crude Gamebryo replications make me long so much that I ache. I can't ever commit to what guides these men, knowing what it's done to my family.

Even if he's allowed to stick to his morals, though, he can't help it. Even as he builds new lives for himself and those he loves, this place'll haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. Turning your back on Zion always leaves you emptier.

This DLC brings you to a beautiful change of scenery. That's pretty much all that's going for this place though. It's filled with locations, but they are pretty much all useless to me anyways. If you just like looking at stuff its fine, but this place has no loot whatsoever, so I find very little care about.

That is except for The Survivalist's loot. The best part of the DLC by far is his short story. It's harrowing, personal, deep, and beautiful. Just a wonderfully written biography of a man trying to survive and do right by the sins he places upon himself.

Much like Joshua, the other highlight of the DLC. Not as good as The Survivalist mind you, but still a strong character.

This DLC is also fucking brutal on melee players. The wild animals here will fucking shred you so having to get in close to melee them hurts a lot.

Dull DLC saved by Joshua Graham and his infinite wisdom about life experiences. Most characters are very underdeveloped from Dead Horses to the White Legs. Even the map Zion Canyon, isn't that interesting at all to explore.

Basically you will be from point A to point B constantly in a long mostly empty linear map.

But it connects to the main lore perfectly. So, points for that.

It lacks a lot of what makes me fall head over heals for the base game, but it’s worth a visit or two for sure. The map design makes for some interesting combat potential, although NV’s clunky gameplay doesn’t fully utilize it. The quests are bland, mostly just a series of fetch quests, but the story itself is what really matters here. Graham is interesting, iconic, and most importantly, well written. It feels good to be able to talk him down, and unlike someone like Lanius, it feels completely believable instead of a little far fetched.

Also I’m not quite sure how to feel about the way tribals are depicted.

Three extremely cool characters and 10,000 geckos. Genuinely do not know how to feel about this one- almost every "tribal" character is flat and feels vaguely not okay, and the world can feel a lot more barren and dull than a lot of New Vegas's normal locales; the story it tells is definitely compelling, but, to me, feels less personal and affecting than Dead Money. In a lot of ways this holds the appeal of FO3 or Skyrim, where it's a largely empty open world that's also very pretty to gallivant through and is filled with things to shoot/experience points to rack up. Outside of its scenery and the writing of a few characters it's not very memorable but it's clean honest fun!

A pretty excellent DLC mostly carried by Joshua Graham being one of the most interesting characters in the series.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of the tribal politics this spends its time exploring. My knee-jerk reaction was a bit of suspicion, as it really seems to lean into the idea of noble savagery, where the tribes are good and innocent, only pushed to violence when they get caught up in the conflicts of "civilized" empires. They seem to have little agency, and even with the player's intervention there (as far as I know) isn't a way to defer to what they want to do. It's "which New Canaanite do you think is right?" With the companions asking naive questions about the Mojave, it really does seem like the game's pushing childlike innocence upon these groups, falling into line with a lot of the American mythmaking that came in the era of the "vanishing Indian".

However, because this is New Vegas I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, as I can hardly think of a game more solidly and thoughtfully anti-imperialist. My guess is that they really wanted to address the far-reaching effects of imperial squabbling and how it manages to influence and destabilize communities entirely disconnected from the core conflict. That stuff is all great, and every mention of the Legion in this expansion had me glued to the dialogue. The thing is, with this being an intimate first person game that places you with these tribes and emphasizes player choice, it makes an easy mistake. You're with these people, but never get the sense they see the full picture or get to make choices for themselves. These people are being jerked around in the wake of a struggle between much stronger empires and are ultimately at their mercy, but that doesn't mean the final say in their struggle had to come from a courier who stumbled in on a caravan one day.

I sided with Graham in the end, as relocating an entire people as an outsider didn't sit right with me. Without much to work with, I figured standing their ground would be a truer response to what they'd actually want. I got Graham to calm down at the very end not because I thought the leader deserved to live (they were trying to join literal fascists, after all), but because I was afraid of him acting as a military leader beyond what was necessary to end this conflict. I worried that he'd fly off the handle and hurt more people.

Played through Proton on Linux. I'm going to start putting this message on things unless/until an option is added to Backloggd.

Hm. I think this was okay? On one hand, a 2.5/5 feels like it undersells the cool stuff about this DLC, but on the other hand, a 3/5 feels a little generous given how dull a lot of the quests are. I think FNV is a banger game with some very involved and very interesting quests, but Honest Hearts does not live up to that legacy on quests alone. A lot of the missions are either short, mindless fetch quests or brief fights against enemies with SMGs that felt just a little too overpowered to be fair. And the final mission, which is supposed to be the climactic battle against the White Legs, feels empty and devoid of tension, like the game forgot to program in a few more enemies or setpieces by accident.

I'm also not entirely sold on the politics of this thing? Honest Hearts does weave together a compelling backstory & conflict for the tribes in this DLC and does a pretty good job at fleshing out the tribes' histories and cultures, but there's also hints of noble savagery and white saviorism going on with the tribes, Daniel, and Joshua. I find it odd that Daniel and Joshua, two Mormon outsiders, are the ones currently leading the tribes. Daniel even calls the tribals somewhat ignorant, and the game never really challenges him about this. I find it even more suspicious that Joshua - again, a Mormon, white outsider - was the one that taught them how to fight and hunt more effectively. Given FNV's overall anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, and all-in-all based politics, I'm willing to give Honest Hearts the benefit of the doubt and say the noble savagery & white saviorism was unintentional, but even so, the fact remains that a lot of these tribes seem reliant on Outsiders to lead, save, and educate them (though at least it makes sense for the player - not giving you any agency in the conflict would be bad game design).

Still, there's some really good stuff here. Joshua Graham is a legitimately great character. He carries a lot of this DLC with his quiet, dark personality, emotionally resonant backstory, and his multifaceted view of the world, the man subtly flip-flopping between brutality and calm religious faith so naturally that you don't even notice he's a man of two extremes, he just is. The story of Randall Clark / The Survivalist is also storytelling mastercraft, the devs going above and beyond in crafting this sad, heart-wrenching yet hopeful story about isolation, tragedy, and finding peace and learning to live for others again. Randall Clark's life is a straight up well-crafted and fully-realized piece of fiction, and the neatest thing is that it's totally optional. You have to stumble into finding the journal entries & documents of The Survivalist to even know they exist, and this makes the process of uncovering more & more of his story a genuine treat.

(Also, Zion has rain! Actual rain! More weather variations in Fallout, please? Do this again more often.)

It's a shame I wasn't really taken by anything else. The writing and worldbuilding of Honest Hearts is solid, but the actual quests themselves are boring, linear, and uninvolved. Your time with HH will be spent fetching items & getting into quick spats before being asked to make a binary choice at the very end (which, by the way, Joshua's path of blood is the way to go, relocating entire cultures of people just because another tribe's acting mean is the cringe and bluepilled way to go about this conflict, sorry Daniel). In essence, your time will be spent not having a lot of fun and raising your brow a bit at the well-meaning but somewhat clumsy tribal politics. It's fine at the end of the day, but it's missing a certain kind of magic, and that cheapens the overall experience. 2.7/5? 2.8?