How on earth am I supposed to understand Lonesome Road

[JoeLuck]

I think the point is that you dont understand Lonesome Road. But thats becuase it isnt your journey, its Ulysses's. 

[Runnerblank]

I agree with both of you,

[watercrown]

Lonesome Road was my least favoite DLC for a while. The story between the MC and Ulysses felt a bit forced despite it being there in vanilla NV and expanded upon in the other DLCs. I like the role-playing potential in NV and adding a kind of backstory just kind if irked me.

Later on what they did kind of grew on me. It's not suppose to something that has significance to you. Think about all the mundane things you do in your every day life. If someone was to tell you a bus full of people crashed because of one of those actions would you have a slight clue as to which caused it?

Looking forward to running the DLC again. My current playthrough has like a +250% EXP requirement so I most likely won't get to it any time soon since I remember this DLC being really hard.

[Decker]

While not my favorite NV DLC, I always liked Lonesome Road for it's atmosphere and the cool dialogues with Ulysses.

I think an important point here is that the Main Character (the Courier) is not even supposed to understand right away what is going on with the Divide. (Also, getting shot in the head may indeed cause some long lasting memory loss.)

In the context of TTW, events leading to the Lonesome Road occurred during the '9 Years Later' screen - Lone Wanderer became the Courier and propably travelled a lot in a wide area and carried many messages and parcels to many places. It would be very difficult for the protagonist to remember enough to correctly connect all of the relevant dots before going very deep into the Lonesome Road DLC. A character low in speech and other skills of interest may even be unable to ask the right questions to make much sense of the situation, and the choices for DLC end resolution may be limited.

To make most of this DLC, your character propably should be high level and competent in speech and host of other skills besides just being able to shoot 'em up.

I've always liked to do the NV DLC in the order they were initially published - Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues(my personal favorite) and finally the Lonesome Road.

 

[jlf65]

Lonesome Road was FUN! I had a good-old time blasting bad guys and setting off nukes... Story? There's a story in there somewhere? Bah! We don't need no stickin' story!

You mainly need very high combat skills, a powerful gun, and loads of ammo. Then it's good clean fun. If you care at all about story, you want decently high speech as Decker says. The biggest problem with trying to follow the story is that by the time you start LR, many of your choices are now gone based on how you played the rest of the game. You become stuck in a particular role with little or no chance to change it... so I just simply kill 'em all and let God sort it out.

 

[samoja]

I have a theory, well just a thought experiment to be able to fit TTW into regular storyline. what if, bear with me, what if Ulysses is insane, what if it was in fact Ulysses that delivered the detonator to the divide, and he was so shattered with the result that he repressed the whole thing. What if Ulysses was going by the same call sign/serial number/name as you (i doubt Ulysses is his real name) and when he saw your name it jogged his memory, but it was fractured, he  knew that the Courier by this name destroyed the only place he called home, but he did not remember that he was that Courier, instead blaming it on you. Would explain why you don´t know anything about the Divide.

[Decker]

Blaming Ulysses for FNV main protagonists past accidental mistakes (before the events of FNV) may seem like the easy way out for some players, but the in-game evidence does not support this, IMHO. Ulysses obviously has his share of mental problems from all the messed up stuff he has experienced as a (former) Legion frumentarii, but severe memory loss, false memories, or delusional hallucinations are not among them. Ulysses seems like a very strong willed person, potentially ready to kill an entire nation or two for a chance to bring about a better world - Courier can meet this challenge in a variety of different ways, try to rope Ulysses back into sanity with words, or put him out of his misery with bullets; Also it is possible to nuke one of, both or neither of NCR and Caesars Legion. During this confrontation of two couriers at the end of the Divide, the fate of entire nations hangs in the balance, the very defining moment of the entire DLC - As significant event in the overall story arc, or even more significant, than the Second Battle of Hoover Dam.

Also consider that Ulysses did not get a 9mm parabellum bullet through his brain, he did not receive unhygienic amateur brain surgery in a maryland swamp, nope, did not get his brain scooped out and stuffed back into the cranium by a bunch of mad scientists - If anything, the Lone Wanderer/Courier seems like an extremely more likely candidate for memory loss and any other brain trauma related mental problems (take your pick).