In my opinion:
Point Lookout for Fallout 3;
Old World Blues for FNV and best overall;
Far Harbor for Fallout 4.
OWB is ridiculously good, the writing, the atmosphere, the music - everything. It's peak Fallout and I'm so sad you can really experience it for the first time once...

OWB was the closest to fallout 2 that I can think of. Might have even exceeded it, been more Fallout-y than Fallout 2. Not always, but often -- Bethesda is more serious than Fallout 2's zany apocalypse.

Broken Steel. It's not the most ambitious neither is the most content filled expansion pack to grace Fallout, but it's simple, necessary and fitting. Broken Steel shouldn't be downloadable content, it should be mandatory to install alongside Fallout 3.

Other than that, I'd likely say Dead Money. It's grown on me a lot since I first played it many years ago. It's often one of the reasons I look forward to a new playthrough of New Vegas. The Sierra Madre is a perfect mixture of a rich atmospheric environment combined with storytelling that is arguably the most important part of New Vegas's DLC narrative.

Dead Money or Old World Blues - FNV

Point Lookout - Fallout 3

Dead Money for New Vegas
Far Habor for Fallout 4 (I wish they did a much better job with Nuka World- I like that map and side content more but the main content was poor)
The Pitt for Fallout 3 (Point Lookout was great but I liked the idea of other 'thriving' cities in the Eastern Coast. Plus they mention Toronto.)

well my opinion is that Far Harbor from F4 is best DLC, see you get good story/s, a good number of hours to play said story/s, cool companion, nice number of new weapons and best of all I just like to help small Bertha, F3 and FNV had good DLC's but F4 has the best one

Old World Blues is my personal favorite. Its goofy, silly, funny, and a whole lot of wacky and wied fun.

People who say Old World Blues is people I don't understand. I HATE that DLC so much.

Dead Money to me is the best. It's fantastic all around. The color palette, the ambiance, how they actually got the scarcity right, so you're never swimming in ammo...

I tend to dislike modern horror because it's cheap. It relies on gore and jumpscares as a substitute for crafting a properly tense situation for the viewer. Dead Money is the opposite. It's classic horror. The environment, with its infernal, blood-red color, is as eerie, menacing and dangerous as the ghost people are. Colors create moods, so the light blue glow of the machines and holograms is reassuring, the way security and supplies should feel. The workers, silent and trapped in those hazmat suits, with the glowing eyes, are an excellent design. They're creepy but not because they're deformed, or mutilated or some sort of over the top gimmick. It's because they're silent, and simple, but you can't help but think what hides behind those walking prisons that keep them alive after all that time.

It's a shame that's so linear (you play it once or twice and you pretty much see everything) but even then it's so good I don't mind.

Some of the newer generation of players probably don't realize how insanely wacky the older fallout was.
Skynet, Star Trek, Dr. who. Lots of talking animals, even a talking plant I think. Like Camelot, it was a very silly place, AND had king arthur and a holy hand grenade.
People say they're easter eggs, but no, they're part of the game. You don't have to do anything weird or secret to see these things. They make a big difference on the game. Skynet was a major character. The star trek weapon was incredibly strong, as a phas(z)er should be strong compared to a laser. The holy hand grenade was nasty. They weren't just jokes, they were things that impacted the game and were found via normal gameplay.

Fallout was a very silly place.

So where I"m going with this is that Old World Blues was the truest evolution of the old fallout2 style and that's why I loved it. It let me return to the game franchise I loved.
It's the difference between Mad Max and most other apocalypses, vs Fallout; Fallout has robots that talk about penises and talking molerat gods and king arthur and the holy hand grenade. Mad Max, as far as I know, does not and never will.

Pshhhhh, a fight between Lonesome Road and the Pitt for me.

@Sirdanest Fair enough. It's nostalgia then. But if OWB is the most faithful to the originals that just makes me wonder how the originals even became a thing. Oh well... to each their own I guess...

@Sirdanest Modern games have a tendency to be much more serious in tone. While back then you could hold the suspension of disbelief while also being as wacky and zany as possible, today you just can't get away with as much. I attribute it to how gaming has become so mainstream.

I first spotted this in MGS V. It was clear that the game tried to take itself much more seriously than previous Metal Gears, especially with the Hayter-Sutherland substitution. Modern Fallout is very similar. There's not as much spontaneity and silliness. This change in style is also present within other games. I've seen it in Wolfenstein, Grand Theft Auto, even Doom.

Let's be honest though, that's not too bad. A game taking itself more seriously allows a much greater sense of immersion. If modern games had as much humor and cliches as older games, they likely wouldn't be hailed as good games.

A perfect example of this is Saints Row. The first and second games were already quite silly in tone, but every game after that doubled the previous game's insanity and over-the-top humour. Most fans of the series didn't like the rapid change the series had went through for obvious reasons. It went from a game about conquering territories with a street gang to beating up giant aliens with sex toys.

Either way, I'm just saying it comes down to personal preference and changing demographics. The new generation of gamers don't like the odd and niche humor of classic games. They prefer realism, immersion and seriousness. Obsidian probably realised this and added Wild Wasteland as an optional trait, just so it wouldn't alienate those who want an experience not filled with unfunny jokes and pop culture references.

The "Mini" DLC's from the Creation Club or the Workshop add ons for me.

Greetings.

I have to say I am surprised Old World Blues is so popular, personally I wasn't to keen on it. I liked the writing but that was about it.

My favorite has to be The Pitt, I loved the urban, run down look and I also felt the new items where really nice, Asher's armor and the new silenced weapon (I can't remember the name) they soon became my favorite look so much so I have it in FO4. Its just a shame the area we got was so small to explore.

More DLC like this please!

gavin gold wrote:

@Sirdanest Fair enough. It's nostalgia then. But if OWB is the most faithful to the originals that just makes me wonder how the originals even became a thing. Oh well... to each their own I guess...

It wasn't really just nostalgia, it was "getting the franchise right" again. Doing what is unique to fallout over the other apocalypses in fiction. You've got Rage or Mad Max if you want serious apocalypse shooters and probably a million more that I'm not thinking of right now. The mad scientist robots really were completely unfunny to you?

The people (like me) who love Saints Row 3 and 4 probably adore its craziness as well, although it's much, much crazier than Fallout. I really love those two games for their insanity. I never played 1 and 2 (At the time I saw them as just trying to compete with GTA and ending up a budget alternative)
I'm sure I'd go "Wtf" if Saints Row 5 took itself completely seriously, and be overjoyed if it course corrected with a dlc that went crazy again.

@Sirdanest I like dark humor and clever humor. Ridiculous doesn't connect with me.

Now, the scientists are more than just unfunny. They're creeps, and losers, and completely absurd. How would things that incompetent and clueless would manage to survive for 200 years? They can't figure out how to distinguish a 0 and an O! But it's more than just the scientists.

It's how ridiculous the technology looks. I would love to use some of the technological marvels they have but they look like something an 8 year old might come up with.

It's the animal abuse these assholes are perpetrating (and I'm not like an animal right hippy, but come on). And I mean the dogs, not the commies, just so we are clear.

It's how it is so constant and in your face. There's never a break, or a change. Even when you play Wild Wasteland, there might be some ridiculousness, but its not ever-present. There's never a moment that makes you care about what's going on or the history or anything. The scientists aren't characters, they're jokes. it's just one massive, over the top, unfunny joke, like an Adam Sandler movie.

It's how it breaks the pace of the rest of the game. Because it is somehow connected to the Sierra Madre and the Divide but the tone couldn't be more different. Does Christine, or Elijah or Ulysses fit there in your opinion? The stories about the mad former leader of a military organization, the special agent that is hunting him, or a man consumed by hatred and revenge, tracing your steps to make you pay for supposedly destroying a community he believed in, do they make sense with that freak show as the background?

It's just so... awful, as a whole. I'm not saying Fallout should be Mad Max or COD, but yeah, I do appreciate a more serious, epic kind of tone. That kind of tone is just not for me.

Dead Money hands down.
loved how dark and grim it is

Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta and Point Lookout
Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money and Old World Blues
Fallout 4: Far Harbor and Nuka World

This discussion comes up inevitably every couple of years in the Fallout community. DLC is a quintessential part of the Bethesda game experience. Their games by default offer dozens of hours of content even on the lower end of their respective franchises, so any more replayability we can get from our favorite series is icing on the cake.

I'm instead going to talk about my favorite DLC for each fallout. I feel that while they are all very similar games, there is enough of a distinction between the games to warrant separate opinions.

Fallout 3: Favorite DLC hands down is Point Lookout. I love the atmosphere of the Pitt and the story arch of the slaves versus their opressors is always a compelling story to tell, but it was far too short and there simply was not enough world building done to develop Pittsburgh as its own unique wasteland. Broken Steel should have been a default part of the game. It was made as a response to the overwhelming backlash of the hard ending to the game and added some amazing missions, but was far too combat focused to be narratively interesting. Mothership zeta and anchorage were fun levels, but left a lot to be desired for characters and overall impact to the character's adventures in the wasteland. Point Lookout is stylistically different from the base game in its color pallet, its architecture for the pier amusement area, as well as its adding onto the more noir/horror elements of the Dunwich storyline. Plus who doesn't love mowing down some mutated inbred hillbillies in the bogs of the wasteland?

Fallout New Vegas: Dead money was always my least favorite for its necessity to follow a more stealthy and restrictive playthrough, but I truly came to appreciate it for its horror and suspense elements after I grew up. Being forced to be without your god-tier gear and having to traverse an overbearing, hostile environment with limited resources or friendly companions to aid you it truly forces you to reevaluate the way you do even simple tasks, such as walking down a narrow hallway only to be stopped by a toxic cloud or beeping intercom system. It definitely forces you out of your comfort zone and I would say it is possibly my favorite DLC for simply how much it makes you think about every action and the consequences of making the wrong choice.

Fallout 4: I personally was very disappointed in FO4's DLC overall. I wasn't sad that a lot of effort went towards Workshop content as I love the settlement building system and still play FO4 to this day simply to design and engineer new settlements. Automatron was a disaster not only in story writing but simply shows an overall lack of effort. It's obvious that it was filler to hold the audience over until the Far Harbor DLC came out given all the press put behind its release. While I didn't hate Far Harbor it's world often felt hollow and did not give me that feeling of mystery and suspense that Point Lookout did in FO3. It might be my nostalgia glasses but far Harbor feels like a poor copy of Point lookout with a new coat of paint, and it could have been so much more. I suppose the odd man out is Nuka World, which I enjoyed much more than the previous two. I adored the set designs and the storytelling that went into this DLC. You can tell the writers truly flexed their writing muscles in the terminal entries and holotapes you find about the pre-war park. That extra layer of world building is important to help draw the player in. It also helped that the map is the Fallout universe verison of post apocalyptic Disneyworld, which is always a hilarious idea. I was dissapointed in the lack of creativity in the raider gangs. It seemed like the team designing the gangs picked the three most common stereotypes for raiders and threw them into the oven to bake overnight. So I suppose the victor is Nuka World, even with the lack of Depth.

TL;DR
Fo3 --- Point Lookout
FNV --- Dead Money
FO4 --- Nuka World

gavin gold wrote:

@Sirdanest I like dark humor and clever humor. Ridiculous doesn't connect with me.

Now, the scientists are more than just unfunny. They're creeps, and losers, and completely absurd. How would things that incompetent and clueless would manage to survive for 200 years? They can't figure out how to distinguish a 0 and an O! But it's more than just the scientists.

It's how ridiculous the technology looks. I would love to use some of the technological marvels they have but they look like something an 8 year old might come up with.

It's the animal abuse these assholes are perpetrating (and I'm not like an animal right hippy, but come on). And I mean the dogs, not the commies, just so we are clear.

It's how it is so constant and in your face. There's never a break, or a change. Even when you play Wild Wasteland, there might be some ridiculousness, but its not ever-present. There's never a moment that makes you care about what's going on or the history or anything. The scientists aren't characters, they're jokes. it's just one massive, over the top, unfunny joke, like an Adam Sandler movie.  

It's how it breaks the pace of the rest of the game. Because it is somehow connected to the Sierra Madre and the Divide but the tone couldn't be more different. Does Christine, or Elijah or Ulysses fit there in your opinion? The stories about the mad former leader of a military organization, the special agent that is hunting him, or a man consumed by hatred and revenge, tracing your steps to make you pay for supposedly destroying a community he believed in, do they make sense with that freak show as the background?

It's just so... awful, as a whole. I'm not saying Fallout should be Mad Max or COD, but yeah, I do appreciate a more serious, epic kind of tone. That kind of tone is just not for me.

I can understand some of what you are saying, but perhaps if you reevaluate the reason the scientists act the way they do, everything else will fall into place.

The reason the scientists are able to nearly dissect the player with ease yet struggle with simple concepts as the difference between an O and 0 is because of the limits forced on their brains in their robotic form. They are prisoners of the Big MT as much as any of the Lobotomites are. They are unable to handle these concepts because at one point they realized the outside world was not only a dangerous testing ground for new forms of science, but it was also the most likely source of their own demise. So they realized they needed to protect themselves from each other's own ambitions, and thus put in mental blocks to prevent even remembering the world outside of Big MT. Any time they reach a point where they might be able to reason there is an outside world they go haywire, such as when the player comes to the think tank at the beginning of the DLC. They simply have no idea how to process the idea of an outside influencer because of their mental blocks.

Thats why all of their names were changed from their real life names. Dr Klien, 0, 8, Mobius, all examples of infinite loops or objects that have no end. Their lunacy and wacky outbursts is simply a symptom of a brain in a cage, wanting desperately to be released from their own personal hell.

As to the Goofy weapons and technology, sometimes you just gotta let Mystery Science Theater 2077 edition take its place in the story.

As