So... I just finished my first playthrough of Lonesome Road. And... I have some conflicting feelings on it that I'd like to sort out.

Now, I love most of the DLC, as it had quite a lot of awesome environments and imagery that I've always wanted to see out of Fallout. Tangles of half-collapsed skyscraqers stretching as far as the eye can see. Cities half-buried in dust and rubble. Twisting and crumbling highway interchanges. Huge caverns made up entirely of the rubble of buildings. City blocks that look like they've been through the spin cycle of the tumble-dryer. All awesome. And while some might dislike the more linear nature of it, I quite liked the whole post-apocalyptic roadtrip feel. I've always liked the part in certain movies, where the hero has to make a lonely journey across hostile terrain, pressing ever forward, barely even knowing what they're looking for, and I feel like this DLC captured that feeling perfectly in interactive form.

But... The story does a thing. And I'm not sure how I feel about it.

So, first, some background. I had a lot of trouble getting into NV. I played F3 first, and that game really struck a chord in me. I thoroughly enjoyed its atmosphere, and I thought that its storyline hook, growing up in a vault, and then having to search for your missing father, was the perfect way to draw me into the story and give me a personal stake in pursuing it without having to stoop to the vastly more common and incredibly cheap angle of threatening to end the world. (I guess when the world's already ended, you have to find something else to motivate people.) Just a person trying to find their father, and as a result stumbling ass-first into greater things I felt was the perfect compromise between story urgency and player agency, and having your character go from vault-dwelling noob to wasteland badass lends itself to a sort of natural character arc. So when I finally decided to play NV, I was a little lost. I was given no character background, other than that I was 'a courier.' I was shot in the head and survived, sure, but I always felt that should have been a much more intriguing story hook than it actually was. Then after stumbling out of Doc Mitchell's house, I found myself at a horrible loss at what to do. The game seemed to think I would be impatient to start going out and exploring this world, without actually giving me much storyline to go on. All of the agency to continue, it seemed, was on me. As someone who loves to roleplay a character, I had a hard time coming up for a credible reason to do so. The main plot of the game, when I eventually found it, seemed to be concerned with finding the guy that shot me. For me, I figured that was a stupid thing to do. He already outclassed me once, and now I was weak, addled, and minus most of my former skills. It took me a long time, but I finally managed to come up with a character that I would have fun playing, and who was (in my mind) crazy enough to pursue the man who shot her. Thus, Talia Sedova was born.

Since the game doesn't give you one, I assumed it was on me to create a backstory. So taking from an old Morrowind character of mine, I made Talia a sort of undercover secret agent for the NCR, a person they send into dangerous or delicate situations, so that they can integrate themselves, assume a cover identity, and eventually solve problems in such a way that the NCR can't be held responsible if things go wrong. They operate outside of the normal chain of command, and almost no local NCR officials even know of their existence. Talia then was born and raised in the NCR, trained in secret by the top instructors, and experienced success in several missions before being sent into the Mojave to investigate and eventually deal with the whole Mr. House situation. Admirably, the game allowed me to do this. By not providing me with (and seeming to actively avoid providing me with) a framework for my character's backstory and motivations, I was forced to create my own. Most people would call this blank-slate approach to player-characters as 'freedom of choice', and there is definitely a case to be made there. Once I had made that adjustment from F3, I found myself enjoying the game a lot more. It gave my choices context, and meaning beyond 'that's what I felt like doing.'

Now, I detail all of this to give context for what happened next; the Lonesome Road DLC. Now, I played LR last out of all DLC, so I caught all of the dark hints going on, and how all the others seemed to be leading up to The Divide as some kind of personal end-game. All of this also set up Ulysses as some shadowy nemesis from my past, which is cool, in theory. But in order to accomplish this... they end up giving your character a backstory. Here, near the end of the game's content, for me over 190 hours in, they finally give the character a backstory. Apparently, the Courier was among the first to explore the Divide, and in doing so, they were at least partially responsible for creating a colony there, and that they ran back and forth from that place for some time. And then, apparently, they ended up delivering a package for the NCR that resulted in the underground detonations of many of the Divide's nuclear warheads, creating the canyon and ruins known today. And the Courier presumably has no memory of this incident, likely after being shot in the head. Now, it's a good story. I quite liked Ulysses as a character. Which is why I'm rather conflicted in my feelings toward this choice.

On the one hand, I'm not against having a set backstory for an RPG character that is not made clear to the player from the start. KotOR 2, one of my absolute favorite games of all time, did this. The significant background details of the Jedi Exile is slowly revealed to the player piece by piece throughout the game, very often through your own dialogue choices. It took some getting used to, having my character know things that I didn't (and vice-versa, turned out), but it resulted in me really connecting to my character, their pain, hopes, and struggles. On the other hand, however, one critical difference I feel is that in KotOR 2, it's made immediately clear that your character is a Jedi, and anyone who is at all familiar with Star Wars lore will know what that means; you were taken from your family as a child, raised in a temple, trained by instructors and then apprenticed by a Master. The details of that backstory is of course up to you, but the framework of a Jedi background already exists. It is similar to the way F3 gives you your vault-dweller background. A few key things are set in stone, but the vast majority of the details are left blank for you to fill in by yourself, and has allowed me to roleplay both a strong, self-sacrificing warrior (trained as a vault security officer), and a timid computer scientist with equal validity.

NV has no such framework. All the intro tells you is that 'you are a courier for the Mojave Express.' That's it. No details, no explanation as to what the Mojave Express even is. And I was disappointed to find that the game seemed to actively avoid explaining the structure of the Mojave Express and its employees, except for a couple lines of dialogue with Johnson Nash. And even then, as far as the game's plot was concerned, the profession of a courier was functionally indistinguishable from the actions of someone who wanders around rescuing hostages, carrying out third-party military interventions, handling pest-control, retrieving old-world gadgets, and just generally running people's non-message related errands for money or karma. And then, after I had finally come up with a satisfactory explanation to all of this from a roleplaying perspective, and played it for almost two-hundred hours... the game decides to reveal that my character actually does have something of a set-in-stone backstory, and I would need to find some way of reconciling or combining the two.

Now, I was at least fairly lucky in this. For my original backstory, Talia had held many different covers, and her presence in the Mojave was a courier was merely the latest in the long line. But it is not outside the realm of possibility that she had taken up the profession of courier as a cover many years before, and kept it for a long time. Nor is it outside the realm of possibility that the NCR assigned her to discreetly scout the Divide, as an advance for their main force. But it still doesn't fit perfectly. I envisioned Talia as more of a social character, more adapt at personal manipulation than brute force, and much more at home in a town or settlement than the wilderness. Her lack of Survival skills would make her less than ideal as a scout for an environment as hostile as the Divide, especially when her charisma and Speech would be useless. But it doesn't derail too much. But I imagine for a lot of roleplayers, it could have been much worse. Especially those people out there who like to roleplay that their Courier is in fact their Lone Wanderer, something that I was originally thinking I might do.

Now, it is entirely possible that I'm missing some critical piece of information here, or I'm thinking about this in completely the wrong way. Part of NV that I find both interesting and frustrating is that it seemed to leave a lot open for interpretation. So I'm curious, what does the Fallout community think of this creative choice on the part Obsidian? I would love to hear what you thought when you played Lonesome Road, and how it may affect future playthroughs and characters.