Fives

So, I wasn't planning to include any of the DLCs in the main story, but my current FNV Speech-focused playthrough completely changed my mind. Kind of a weird change, but after playing through Honest Hearts with a high-Speech build, I decided I want to set that before the main quest really kicks off.

Essentially, in the updated version of the story, Yakko manages to chase Benny to the Strip, where he gets stopped dead by the Securitrons at the gate and takes the job with Happy Trails Caravan to make the rest of the 2000 caps he needs to get in. It all goes off the rails from there.

Why did HH change my mind? Simply put, because it puts the player in a difficult situation that you can't talk your way out of; you have to fight or help everyone flee. Since there are options to resolve things peacefully in most other situations in FNV, this is such a neat oddity in the larger context of the game.

I love the idea of using this as a midway point character development for Yakko; in the updated version of his story, he spends the entire main story until now playing every side of the faction conflict. While he's definitely not siding with the Legion, he is definitely not secretly very scared of telling them that, and he also won't commit to siding with the NCR or House or even Yes-Man. (Everyone thinks he's working for them, but he's really in it for himself at this point.) And he's successfully gotten into the good graces of several towns in the Mojave just by acting charming, so he hasn't really had to fight anyone except the Powder Gangers.

Related to that, it also forces him to decide where he stands on family. I completely scrapped Wakko and Dot's respective stories because it was just too much to handle, and because I think it was too disjointed. Anyway, their new shtick is that they came from the Vault that the kids (I say kids but they're like. 22-26 here.) grew up in back in California, and they've both come to the Mojave to look for Yakko. He left the Vault a long time prior (not by choice... more on that later). When they're finally able to follow him, they track him to Goodsprings and find out about Benny shooting him. They catch up with him eventually, and after being shot and left for dead, he's a little wary about random people showing up and claiming to be family. But he ultimately lets them come along when he finds out that Dot is freakishly strong and Wakko is insanely lucky. For a while, he pretty much lets them exist in a weird limbo where he isn't accepting them as family, but he also isn't driving them off, either. He does care for them and pretty quickly realizes they are actually his family, but they're also very useful to a broke courier with bad luck and little combat skill outside of sharpshooting.

HH changes that. He takes the job on his own and leaves them in Freeside with what he considers busywork; it's actually helping foster peace between the Kings and the NCR, but who's counting? While in Utah, he ends up genuinely connecting with most of the major characters (against his will. he does not want to open his heart to anyone, thanks). Talking to Waking Cloud and being put in the position of telling her that her husband died starts to put things in perspective for him, and it all reaches a breaking point when Joshua Graham exactly calls him on everything he's been doing in the Mojave. To be fair, it's not like his walls are hidden, but no one has ever really had the guts to actually say this to him. Joshua clocking his issues so easily isn't something he takes well initially, but when he gets back to the Mojave, he does finally pick a side—or at least tell Caesar to take a long walk off a short pier.

The thing that really sticks with him, though, is finding all of Randall Clark's hideouts and reading his story in the terminal entries he left behind. Randall's tortured and isolated life serves as a wake-up call for him to be a little less selfish, let people back into his life, and behave a little more nobly. Wakko and Dot are admittedly weirded out when he gradually and somewhat awkwardly starts treating them like family again once he shows back up in Freeside, but they're not complaining. And he absolutely won't tell them what the heck happened in Utah. That's why I have him swap out the gear he starts with for Joshua's pistol and Randall's rifle and armor, since those are the two characters in HH who have the most impact on him.

As for the other DLCs, I would really love to do Old World Blues as a way to explore some unresolved traumas for our boy, and potentially like Dead Money Lite—Yakko would absolutely break the logic of the Sierra Madre, so it doesn't need to be as long as the actual DLC. And Lonesome Road I want to include because it's awesome and would serve as a perfect penultimate story beat right before the battle at Hoover Dam.