Overall I didn't care for this DLC much. I didn't like that I was forced into doing one specific thing, I didn't like the things they failed to show us, I didn't like the ending, and I didn't like Ulysses. Here's some issues I had in no particular order.

1.) We're not in Kansas anymore. In fact I have no idea where the hell we are. You leave the Mojave basin on the west side, and show up on the east end of the Divide. Logical. Then you go through the Hopeville silo and now you're on the west end of the Divide. Longest air-duct ever constructed? Old-world teleporter cleverly disguised as a door? Additionally, Ulysses seems to think that the Divide is strategically important to both the NCR and the Legion, and that it lies somewhere between the east and the west. ... No? The Legion is coming from completely the other side of the Mojave, or they would be if Ranger snipers didn't keep stomping on their attempts to get across the river. And the NCR doesn't seem to be adversely affected by it at all since they have the 15 which bypasses it to the south. Nobody ever mentions the 15 as being a rough or inadequate supply route, a poor second choice to the Divide which is now unavailable. In fact NCR citizens show up in New Vegas in droves to vacation.

2.) I made a town? Cool! Where is it? Supposedly the entire basis of this DLC is that the PC is a bumbling idiot who wipes out a settlement that s/he helped create when they mess around with old tech which they don't understand. And then you get Ulysses who is very upset about this and embarks on his evil genius plan to hold a protest rally of nuclear missiles. Except where is this town we made? The only things in the Divide itself are reduced to rubble by the subterranean explosions. We never see anything that looks like a ruined settlement existing prosperously in the wreckage of what was pre-divided Hopeville. The player has absolutely zero emotional attachment to anything they might have done because apparently we have amnesia and any physical evidence of what we forgot has been atomized.

3.) What's with the Marked Men? No, really. They have armor patchworked together out of road signs, while carrying functional anti-material rifles, miniguns, and energy weapons. They are intelligent enough to set ambushes and maintain and use weapons, yet, they live in absolute squalor in huts made made of rubble. They've seemingly made no attempt to get out of the Divide and return to civilization (such as it is) and instead choose to eat raw meat and live in their concrete rubble huts while not busy teleporting around the area. It's not evident what they are about. They're too smart and well equipped to be feral ghouls while simultaneously living like animals. You aren't even given the chance to talk to them, not even so far as being told why they are trying to murder you at every opportunity.

4.) Speaking of teleportation. The Marked Men get around without needing to blow up stuff. So does Ulysses. Why is it that the player has to cause these enormous explosions and collateral damage and other badness just to get over a mound of cars while it's patently obvious that nobody else does.

5.) My, that's a pretty looking suit you've got there. Deathclaws ignore armor. So do Tunnelers. They have hundreds of hitpoints and can kill a high level character in just a few hits. Shouldn't armor, y'know, protect me??? My DT is so high that the Burned Men have trouble causing injury with most of their weapons while the local fauna makes me look like a level 1 scrub. I also got a nasty surprise when it turned out that EMP grenades do basically nothing to Divide-built sentry bots, and I ended up throwing a whole bunch of regular frags instead. I don't even know if this was a bug or a result of scaled enemies having so many hitpoints that it made the EMP effect pointless. It is an extremely uneven gameplay experience. Oh, and satchel charges. They blend in wonderfully with the dirt on the ground, and even with 100 skill in explosives the fuse delay is so short that I can't get out of the blast radius. It's a good thing this DLC likes to give us doctor's bags.

6.) Ulysses is a monologing evil genius with a generous helping of insanity. His ramblings make sense in places, but his fixation with symbols and the power of symbols comes across as some kind of mental disorder. And like most evil geniuses his plan is overly complex and has way too many frills. Why does he need the player to bring him ED-E? He could have backtracked to the missile silo and gotten the silly thing at any time (see: teleportation), launching his nuclear enema on the wasteland with no warning whatsoever. I don't identify with his goals, and as previously stated our amnesiac main character doesn't even know what he's reacting to. For all we know Ulysses is delusional from using too much Jet, and just made up the entire story.

7.) The end battle. Hm. First, Ulysses didn't even ask me what I believed. He just assumed since I'd been helping the NCR a lot lately (how does he even know about that? Wouldn't he be busy readying his master plan and practicing monologing during the whole time the player is doing stuff in the Mojave?) that I believed in them enough to be considered their agent. Apparently he didn't consider the fact that people might help the NCR because they pay well and that they might abandon ship when it's convenient. Secondly, there was no chance to NOT kill him. I actually reloaded the game to more fully explore the dialogue tree, and no, eventually my only choice was to "finish this". Disappointing. I've heard other people mention that they left him alive, so maybe I unwittingly did something wrong at some point. Or the game broke, this is always a possibility. And lastly, why do I have to sacrifice ED-E? I can't abort the missile launch, but I can change the point of impact. So, just program them to splash into the ocean. These are ICBMs, with a range spanning the entire globe, 70% of which is guaranteed uninhabited by merit of being ocean. This was a stupid problem to have. And ultimately a no-brainer choice as well. Pop quiz, which is more important? One robot, or untold thousands of people along with collateral damage to infrastructure and further release of radiation? Hmm, tough.

8.) Tunnelers. Did somebody forget that they wrote the Tunnelers as basically being the end of the world as we know it, who would eventually dig under the entire wasteland and kill everybody from below? Because they just kind of went away at the last minute. You never learn anything about them, what they are, where they live, how they might be communicated with, or how to stop them. They're the bogeyman under your bed (literally) that disappears when the sun comes up.

So yeah. I have to rate this one pretty low. Sorry, Obsidian.

1. The Divide was important to the NCR because it was one of only two places, the other being the long 15, that they could send troops into the Mojave area. All the Legion wanted was to destroy it to delay the NCR and they made that clear in several conversations in this DLC and Honest Hearts. It wasn't important to The Legion beyond getting it destroyed.

2. Like most other post-war communities it was built into the buildings of the pre-war world. You travel through Ashton in the 2nd half of the DLC, which was the community. Nukes usually wipe traces of a ramshackle community out.

3. The radiation in The Divide is the only thing keeping the Marked Men alive, as ghouls they are healed by radiation, and this healing is the only thing keeping them from dieing due to have their skin torn off. They make that, and why they are so angry, clear at the first conversation with Ulysses.

4. Gameplay mechanic, same thing happens in just about every game ever.

5. Tunnelers are weak, and the Deathclaws are stronger because of the irradiated nature of The Divide.

6. The ED-E we get in Lonesome Road only works because it could copy the original ED-E, Ulysses may have gotten ED-E 2 but it would have been worthless to him without ED-E 1. Ulysses states this when he takes ED-E 2 from you.

7. Its easy to not kill him, I did it in over 5 playthroughs. Use speech checks, find all of his logs, hell even without speech checks and without the logs I got him to stand down.

8. It could easily be a setup for Fallout 4.


Maybe if you had listed to Ulysses during the DLC you wouldn't have gotten everything confused.

^----- this is 100% accurate



To OP, did you even pay attention to the plot?