HOW DID YOU TAKE LONESOME ROAD AT LEVEL TWO?!
Ah, there’s that bewilderment and outrage I was talking about.
Let me regale you with the tale of Kari Essex, who is less of a human than an invisible tank on legs.
The first thing you need to know about New Vegas in contrast to KotOR is that stealth, called “sneak” here, is totally overpowered. Max it out, and you’re practically undetectable while crouching unless you go up and touch someone, your attacks when you’re hidden are automatic critical hits, and several perks can increase the damage output even further. At the start, with my well-educated, maxed-out intelligence courier, I put all available skill points into sneak, then busted into an abandoned schoolhouse, and stole the stealth boy (cloaking device if you’re not familiar with Fallout). I headed towards Sloan, the place overrun with deathclaws, one of the nastiest enemies in the game. Once there, I injected myself with a ton of drugs to get the Day Tripper perk, which makes stealth boys last slightly long, and headed through.
Keeping crouched and with my back to the rock wall, I made it as far as possible until one of the twenty nearby deathclaws sensed something was amiss. I turned on the stealth boy, got through unmurdered, and headed for the Gun Runners. Then, since the weapons I needed were way out of my price range, I fast traveled back to the starting point. Now with the Gun Runners marked on my map for fast traveling, I could bypass most of the map to come and go as needed, and made for the Canyon Wreckage protected by my pathetic armored vault suit and a 10 mm pistol, ready to take on what’s supposed to be the final DLC. If I wasn’t supposed to do this, they shouldn’t have put the entrance so close to the starting town.
The first area of Lonesome Road is mostly deserted, with a bunch of corpses and some defense robots. My solution for said robots was to let my own robotic companion, ED-E, take care of them while I cowered in a corner behind some boxes, hoping my sneak skill would protect me. This worked out, because sneak is broken. Also Lonesome Road’s attempt at setting a dismal, isolated tone fails completely thanks to ED-E. Because when I hear the words “lonesome road” the first thing I imagine is having a companion constantly following me everywhere whom I can talk to whenever I want.
With the robots taken care of, I got to looting them and the bodies of the Marked Men, the most common enemies in the DLC. Then I went right back to the Gun Runners and sold it all for my anti-materiel rifle with a ton of explosive rounds.
The game was basically over at that point, nothing could stop me anymore. Everything after me getting that gun and that ammo was a formality. There might be weapons that technically do more damage, but I haven’t found any other with the same combination of range, accuracy, and destructive power. The base damage is 110, plus that same amount for a critical hit, plus 80 points from the explosive blast which affects nearby enemies, then double that because all my hits were sneak attacks. Standard Marked Men have <300 hit points. With the scope and my sneak skill, everything in my way would inevitably explode before it could fight back.
I went back to the Divide and emerged from the initial silo area to hear Ulysses, everyone’s second-favorite Chris Avellone avatar, start talking to me, except in this run he was confused because I was still level 2 and had no faction allegiance for him to insult me over. He insulted me anyway, and I headed down into the ruined landscape, squatting low to the ground, looking for elevated positions from which I proceeded to kill everything in my way with no effort. Then I looted everything, cashed in as much as possible at the local terminals, and lugged everything else back to the Mojave again to sell, this time upgrading my rifle and getting more explosive rounds.
Back to the Divide, I proceeded to the next area, got the laser detonator so I could get those damn warheads out of my way, continued to slaughter the Marked Men, looted their bodies because every one of them is worth like 1000 caps, and went back to the Mojave. This time, since I was full up on ammo, I began buying implants from Dr. Kusanagi at the New Vegas clinic, beginning my transformation into an unstoppable cyborg badass with the health regeneration implant and the subdermal armor. Combined with the riot gear I found, I was well-protected and could slowly regenerate any minor damage without needing stimpaks.
Then in the underpass, I had my first encounter with the Tunnelers, the supposedly implacable threat even Ulysses fears as if they’re anywhere close to the same threat as Cazadores. The Tunnelers emerged from their burrows, then looked around confusedly because although the game had told them I was present and they should come out and kill me, they could not tell where I was, even though I was close enough to start laying down frag mines everywhere. After slaughtering them all with my shiny new 12.7mm SMG, I headed up to the High Road.
Once there, I found another cluster of walking money sacks for me to kill, made another trip back to cash it all in, and moved on towards the deathclaw-infested road. The deathclaws proved to be the most difficult obstacle so far, required two or dare I say three shots to kill, with a couple even managing to get as close as fifty yards away from me. At the Crow’s Nest, I found upgraded armor to make myself even harder to kill even though I was still probably around Level 5 or so, I don’t remember, and used the elevated position to clear out most of the deathclaws in my path.
Then I moved forward and went inside the trailer. You know the one. The one where you go in and a deathclaw spawns right on top of you. By all rights this should have actually been my first death, but luckily ED-E was outside and drew its attention away long enough (about four seconds, RIP ED-E) for me to get out and shuffle far enough away for it to lose track of me, then I killed it just like every single other enemy in my way.
Then I reloaded the game and placed frag mines everywhere to hurt it when it spawned and took it out head-to-head with my SMG to prove I could. Because if the game wants to pull cheap bullshit, I’ll pull cheap bullshit right back.
One more Marked Man Massacre and three cybernetic enhancements later, I launched a nuke, listened to Chris Avellone Ulysses get mad at me for launching a nuke even though Chris Avellone the many talented, hardworking, totally-not-pretentious people who made this DLC didn’t include any other option to progress, and moved on to the next stretch.
You know the pattern by now. I got to the next location, killed everything, looted bodies, bought upgrades. The Cave of the Abaddon presented my second instance of panic, though this one was my fault as I forgot to keep squatting while moving forward so the horde of Tunnelers inside spotted and swarmed at me, forcing me to kite them back the way I came. I collected Seymour the dog, and headed up to the last stretch of the Divide.
The Marked Men continued to die easily to me in the next area. Then I went to track down Rawr, the most dangerous deathclaw in the area, killed him in two shots, and took his talon as a trophy. In the next area, I encountered a few Marked Men with their own stealth boys. I killed them, took their stealth boys, used the stealth boys to maneuver and get above their friends. It was over once I had the high ground, and I rained explosive death upon anything and everything that wasn’t already in pieces by this point. I’d finally reached Ulysses’s Temple. Then I turned around and walked away because I had a ton of loot I needed to sell.
I entered Ulysses’s little base, sprung a captured ED-E, then went down to face the devious villain, who was standing at the far end of the silo room facing away from me. I shot him in the back of the head, then a few more times to finished him off, looted his body, fought off a swarm of Marked Men, sacrificed ED-E to stop the nukes from launching, and left.
I went back to the Courier’s Mile, retrieved Blood-Nap, my favorite Bowie knife, and approached the area the same way I did everything else. I ended up taking exactly one hit point of damage from a stray bullet throughout the entire area.
That’s it, that’s how I approached Lonesome Road. I originally found it to be an obnoxiously stupid and boring conclusion to the DLC storyline, so I chose to exploit it to rapidly gain money, experience, and equipment while participating as little in the story as possible. Also, I got the Legion version of the Courier Duster at the end and I have no idea how or why.
