This probably won't mean much to people who really liked Lonesome road -- I was one who didn't really care for it personally.
In light of DLC mods like Dead Money Horror Overhaul and Honest Hearts Reborn, it got me thinking about Lonesome road.  How could it have been written to be more interesting?
No doubt, spoilers are going to follow, for people who somehow haven't played it yet.


I felt that it was a bad design idea to suddenly start dictating to my character about who he was, at the last DLC (I played it not long before I ended the game.)  
I honestly thought at first that Ulysses was some pretend-philosopher trying and failing to be deep, rambling idiot who had me mistaken for someone else -- it seemed like he was talking about someone else.  Bull indeed.  I wasn't interested in humoring him, at all.  There was nothing in the divide as far as impressive apocalyptic visuals as far as I could see -- no towns worth saving, etc. Combined with the power of the Tunnelers that I wasn't expecting, I felt no urge to keep going through this madman's gauntlet.  I think I turned back eventually, and never finished.  Not sure if that was a mistake or not, but I wasn't interested in playing with his toy nukes.  I may replay someday, but backing down and going "nah, this is silly, I have a war to fight" was probably not hte response the developers wanted.
Maybe if I had known EDE instead of leaving him as scrap in Primm, it would have had more meaning?  I don't know.  But I'll be replaying again soon.

So yeah, anyone disgruntled with Lonesome Road?  There's gotta be at least one person.  What would you have changed?

Idk man i liked Lonesome Road, the challenge and that kind of apocaliptic vibe and ambient that New Vegas lacked of (like the city and buildings in ruins, yes i know that in vanilla we have all freeside and New Vegas in general, but what we see the most is the desert) i liked ED-E's background story, a shame that the vanilla one feels more like a floating toaster than what we see in LR(nothing that a mod can't solve), and i don't mind that Ulysses states some things about my character, is not that bad imo. Also i liked the lore that the dialogue with Ulysses added. An Epic DLC, challenging, good RPG, great armors(<3 Elite Riot Gear)

Anyway you should understand that obsidian didn't had too much money at that point, being the last DLC, you know, after things like Old World Blues and Dead Money.

Oh, I didn't hate it, but it wasn't what I would have created for the game at that point. People's praise for it tends to match their praise for fallout 3 -- the apocalyptic vibe, for instance, which was indeed cool. I'm a New Vegas guy though, I like the politics, communicating npcs, different ways to handle a problem, various factions, etc. Lonesome road wasn't mean to be that, I get it. It did the apocalypse and the good fights well, yeah.
I just wish that it hadn't been pretty much all enemies. I'd probably have had some of the ghoul survivors not be hostile marked men. Or even make the tunnelers more complicated than kill-bots -- though they were good at being kill bots, I admit.

Exactly! i thought the same about the non hostile marked men, or even a group of survivors from hopeville, but that would had been more complicated, and they didn't have the time nor the money to do so.

I would love if they expanded on the Marked Men(maybe make them less hostile/or divide them into factions). It would be interesting to talk to some of them to find out more how they survived the Divide and how the relationship between the NCR and Legion there looks like.

Yeah, I agree. A peaceful faction or two struggling to survive in the apocalypse of the divide would have added some depth. People survived the original apocalypse without all going crazy, so some marked men probably should have been a little saner. The lucky thing is that modders could do that (relatively) easily.
No one expects Tunnelers to be intelligent; We know them now as killbots, but at the time they were a brand-new species so they could have been, well, anything the developers wanted. Like the aliens on Zeta, they could have been more than target practice, there was more potential for story there.
I am not suggesting removing LR great violence or apocalyptic vibe, but just a brief reprieve like that could have been welcome.

Personally I liked Lonesome Road. It wasn't the strongest DLC, but it was alright. With that said. I probably would have shown what the Courier did instead of going by Ulysses's word. Heck. Maybe a flashback type of thing. Like in that one Daedric quest in Skyrim. Flash back to Ulysses's time before the bombs went off and then show our Courier deliver the package and what follows.

When you just have Ulysses's word and no proof. Then it comes off as either he's crazy or confused us with someone else. There is the old saying after all. Show don't tell.

@TheThompsonBoss From what I understand, it is ultimately up to the player to agree or deny that they actually did it. You can deny what Ulysses says and call him a crazy maniac. I believe it was the writer's intentions to give more "light" background on the Courier, but it is up to the player to agree or deny the accusation even if there's evidence.

Yeah, you can decide he's crazy, which was my first thought without a doubt. But then I thought "Why am I here? Why continue on through this gauntlet?" The only answer I had was "Because I want to see the dlc in full, it's visually interesting."
It was quite a thing to learn about this whole place that was very important to the courier and maybe beyond, yet I'd never seen it or heard about it.
I wonder if the game could have shown it, intact, in the beginning of the game, and then at some point destroyed? I wouldn't mind a pre-destroyed Hopeville existing at the beginning of the game. An intact version of the divide would be a huge job, but I've learned that some modders do truly incredible things so who knows...

I don't think there's any way to know for sure which package destroyed the city unless you're the one who made it and ordered it sent personally.

Sirdanest wrote:

Yeah, I agree.  A peaceful faction or two struggling to survive in the apocalypse of the divide would have added some depth.  People survived the original apocalypse without all going crazy, so some marked men probably should have been a little saner.  The lucky thing is that modders could do that (relatively) easily.  
No one expects Tunnelers to be intelligent; We know them now as killbots, but at the time they were a brand-new species so they could have been, well, anything the developers wanted.  Like the aliens on Zeta, they could have been more than target practice, there was more potential for story there.  
I am not suggesting removing LR great violence or apocalyptic vibe, but just a brief reprieve like that could have been welcome.  

You know what would be interesting? A story where Marked Men factions isolated to their own missile silo trying to survive continuous tunneler raids and the Divide ala Metro/Stalker. Maybe have them have a really inconvenient mode of transportation like an armored truck on a railway or a subway network between silos.

Yeah, something like that.  

I can't help but feel that if there had been any ghouls or supermutants or robots in the divide, maybe some of them could have been survived and trying to hold out/survive.  It seems like several (at least) major cities had survivors from the nukes in the first war.  It wouldn't have hurt to have a few holdouts left in the divide who wanted more than endless killing.
Giving the tunnelers some depth today would seem un-lorefriendly, but at the time, the devs really could have chosen to do that, which is a shame.  They're visually interesting and probably going to cause problems for the wasteland in the future.  Being more than identical kill-bots would have added something to them.  They look (to me) like they could have potentially had some kind of alien intelligence.


Edit: It looks like someone had started work on such a project years ago. It's a patch to a lonesome road expansion expansion. Sadly the patch appears to exist but not the required expansion. https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/46513