Hi all; after a long time away from the wasteland, I picked up the Ultimate Edition with all the DLC. I'm not a noob, but I never got into the expansions much when I had the original. (I got Dead Money and completely hated it due to how restrictive it seemed.)

So at any rate, I'm working my way through Honest Hearts on a House playthrough, and I was wondering is there anything you'd call "cool" or "important" that I might miss if I'm simply following quest lines?

Same question for all of the DLC's, actually. I'd prefer to be kept as spoiler free as possible, but I know that might be impractical or impossible in some cases. Either way, it won't destroy my love of the game; I'm intimately familiar with vanilla FONV, so they don't seem to affect me nearly as severely as they might with another game.

For HH: Survivalists cache's (though personally for me it was following his story through the terminals that was the lure). Also you can find something special..

With DM it's very linear, so unless I'm very much mistaken.. no there isn't anything else there.

OWB I ran through (cause I hated it) and missed all the good side-storys and tidbits of info that make the NV DLC story all the more intriguing. There's a lot of that, but it's all over the place in a hellhole so.. you can also find upgrades for all of the sink which gives you some cool things (for the auto-doc particularly)

LR is also pretty linear, but you can find some recordings of Ulysses that flesh out his character more and also

As you have surmised, each DLC has a Main Quest. If you focus on that, you will miss most of the goodies in these DLCs, like the unique weapons and armor. They will also end rather quickly. What you need to do is explore each DLC fully. You will uncover more content than the Main Quests by doing that, if it's just new places to explore.

So, my advice is, if your walking around a DLC and see a place, go in there even if the game is telling you to go on to another place. Or, make a note of it and come back.

As for order, most say do them in the order of release, although Dead Money makes more sense after you have talked to Veronica. And, it's different enough from the other DLCs that you can do that one in just about any order you want. But, for the others HH, OWB, then LR.

Lonesome Road is the only one you can come back from before you finish, all the others you have to complete once your there. Of course, you can return to any of the DLC areas after you complete the Main Quest for that DLC.

Honest Hearts? Explore thoroughly. There are a lot of hidden gems in Zion. Also be sure to read the entries on computer terminals in caves with booby traps. This is for a very well written side story. For the best "good guy" ending to one branch of the main quest in the DLC you'll want 90 speech.

Old World Blues, make sure you have decent Melee, Unarmed or Energy weapon skills going in. There a few good Gun skill weapons in the big MT but not a lot of ammunition except for .357/.44 Magnum.

Lonesome Road... If you didn't like Dead Money because it was too linear you may not like LR. It's definitely at the first person shooter end of the FPS/RPG scale. Still it has some very nice gear for your trouble and you can back track and leave any time you want if you find you don't like it.

You can't return to the Sierra Madre (Dead Money's area) after completing and leaving the area though.

Thanks, I never actually completed that DLC, I got to the end, dealt with the guy, and then when faced with the events to leave, I said "Really? More of this?" (speaking of the puzzle aspect) and just loaded a save from before I ever went in there. I have played through this game more than a dozen times and have never been back to the Sierra Madre.

That is how much I hate timed events in games.

I absolutely hated the mechanics of DM. I thought everything else was great, but the mechanics made me scream. I played about halfway through before the game threw a game-killer glitch on my roommate's toon. He was so ticked off that he paid me 30 bucks to trade the game in.

Picked the cheap GoTY edition up, because in theory they've solved the bug issues. Plus, my gf wanted it.

/End CSB

So yeah, I haven't decided if I'll slog through DM or not. Probably not on this save, but I have a concept for a new charrie where it would make sense.