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.

They made a real mistake in giving you (random outsider) so much agency in the setting, the RPG nature of You Must Make The Choice that is expected, I suppose.

Joshua Graham is the carrier. That's all that really needs to be said about him.

The tribal politics and situation... It's weird and murky, the post-apocalyptic tribal concept is something Fallout tries to handle that interests me greatly, but it's really weird here, because of what I said before about the RPG Choice thing. You have all the agency, and the tribes themselves don't really get any kind of say, you're talking to the other two outsiders (to the individual tribes, not outsiders to the whole tribe culture like you) the entire time about decisions they're making for the tribes. It doesn't feel that great. It's not intentionally bad, knowing Obsidian, just... another thing that goes in the pile of shortcomings through circumstances surrounding the development of New Vegas.

Other notes:
They double down on highlighting that the Legion (and its influence) are nothing but evil.
It's pretty, and that's not a joke. It looks relatively pretty, at least in comparison to the Mojave (which is also good looking honestly, just not pretty).
Cazadors unnecessary.

Played on Linux through Proton 6.16-GE-1. Mods in Use: NVSE, NVAC, NV Stutter Remover, 4GB Patch, MTUI.

So far I am loving NV but I don't know if it's just me but I didn't really care all too much for this DLC.
The only part that really stood out to me was, of course, Joshua Graham. Along with the guy who voiced Daniel also did the voice of Vito in Mafia 2.
Outside of those 2 things, everything else just bores me to tears. I don't care about the tribe's power struggle, and the map feels very linear but not in a good way. It feels like the game is just road-blocking you making it force you down this path rather than the other way around. The caves suck, and many of the new weapons just feel kinda lame.
I'm hoping the other DLC's get better but so far it's not looking too good.

so, why's everyone love Joshua Graham so much again? this dlc feels rushed, half hearted and totally unfinished, which is unfortunate. its quests are somehow worse than a typical fo3 quest, where you literally just follow a quest marker to grab a random useless item, and you do that a few times til the storyline is over. it's like they spent too much time making the map and forgot to make any meaningful or interesting quests. whoops.

worth running through if you own the ultimate edition of the game at least. has some cool gear and the survivalist storyline that you piece together through holotapes and terminal entries is by far the best thing here, but nothing that elevates the main game the way the other three dlc packs do.

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.

It seems the New Vegas DLC just can’t balance itself right. First Dead Money was full of cramped environments and brutal difficulty with game designs that worked against the game. Now Honest Hearts has a very open area to explore, but the characters are pretty underwhelming as well as the overall story. You meet some travelers who are part of a caravan trying to get across the Zion National Park and they hire you to protect them. Of course, there’s more than that so when you enter you see three rival tribes fighting against each other. You have the Dead Horses, White Legs, and Sorrows. The White Legs want to prove themselves so they can work for Caesar’s Legion, but the Sorrows want to stay, and the Dead Horses are a rogue “extra” tribe. Of course, know Fallout there’s some sort of third-party hand in the pot and that’s where Daniel and Joshua Graham come in.


Joshua wants to fight the White Legs and Daniel wants to run. Without getting into their backstory too much you help each one out on various missions, but most of them are fetch missions and aren’t very inventive. I was really disappointed with this and kept expecting some more exciting missions. Even Dead Money had some exciting missions despite its major flaws. The characters seem interesting at first, but after the initial dialog stuff when you meet them you never do much more with them. This is due to the DLC’s short length running at about 10-12 hours. There are hardly any side missions, and it feels like the huge area gets wasted since you don’t really get to explore it much.


The area is full of huge canyons and cliffs that surround a lake and a couple of rivers. The area is a pain to navigate because it’s hard to find how to get to high up areas due to all these layered cliffs. Some of the areas are great to see and they really captured the national park feeling with abandoned camps and cars on the road right when the bombs fell. So there is a nice charm about the area and seeing some trees and rivers is a nice change from the dried up Mojave. Other than that the environment is full of vicious animals instead of just people so that’s also a bit different than the Mojave and Dead Money.


Other than that the DLC is worth a purchase, but don’t expect 15+ hours and tons of new weapons or extra stuff. It’s the best New Vegas DLC so far, but it’s also not the best it could be. I hope the third and fourth DLC is a lot better and are finally on par with the excellent Fallout 3 DLC add-ons.