My apologies if this has been raised before, but.....

The first two DLC for New Vegas seem clearly to have been organized on a sort of World Religions theme. The first, Dead Money, is very, very Buddhist. It's almost like a video game introduction to Buddhism's Four Noble Truths: life entails suffering; suffering is caused by clinging to/obsession with the world; suffering can be ended; and the end of suffering comes about through seeing things as they are and behaving appropriately (the Eightfold Path). Clinging to worldly things is destructive because the world is not real (in Buddhism, "real" = "eternally unchanging") and change never stops: you cannot freeze anything in time, in the shape you may love, but have to endure it changing into something else (in living beings, the most obvious of these changes is death).

Obsession and craving are the hallmarks of the Dead Money characters (I am assuming "best" endings and the survival of all allied NPCs below). Dean is obsessed with a meaningless revenge against Sinclair, who is two hundred years dead, and can only move on (literally) when he lets that go, with the feeling of sadness that he will never understand. He ends not enlightened but at least shaken up enough to shift his obsessions to something with a bit more of a future. Sinclair himself was obsessed with revenge against Dean, and in the process inadvertently turned the Sierra Madre into a deathtrap for Vera. Father Elijah is obsessed with control all his life, leading him to sacrifice a great part of the Brotherhood's strength in defending Helios One, and then to adopt any means whatsoever and ignore all ethical boundaries in a race against time and his own death, as God points out. He is obsessed with the Sierra Madre as a tool to create his insane Nirvana, a Mojave and New Vegas cleaned of all living things by the Cloud in an attempt to freeze change and stop decay, and this obsession leads him to imprisonment at the heart of his own objective and a futile death. Christine is obsessed with justice/revenge against Father Elijah, to the point where she repeatedly falls into traps such as the one that ends with Dean's replacement of her voice. She does not reach her own peace until she gives this quest up and exchanges the role of an avenger for that of a caretaker, accepting the Sierra Madre as it is and not trying to make it, or herself, anything else. In the tradition of Uncle Leo in Fallout 3 and his Zen stories, Dog/God is the clearest case of all: hunger and control obsessed with each other and endlessly causing each other to suffer, only ending when the player manages to get them to see themselves as they really are (Right View leading to Right Mindfulness, in the terms of the Eightfold Path), at which point the two obsessed personalities dissolve into one that can scarcely remember what all the fuss was about. And the player of course: brought before the greatest concentration of treasure in the entire game, the player must abandon nearly all of it to escape with his or her life.

Oh, "I figured out a way to get all the gold bars!" The game and Siddhartha Gautama have the last laugh, I think. The efforts that some players put into bending the rules at the end are an ironic commentary on the strength of obsession, of illusion. Though I myself would have been a bit less subtle and would have made the gold both radioactive and an undroppable quest object, to slowly kill anyone who left with more than a bar or two.

With Honest Hearts, we switch from Buddhism to Christianity: the setup is less elaborate but equally clear. In this corner, for the Old Testament, is "take their little ones and smash them against the rocks" Joshua Graham, the "right hand of the Lord and the instrument of His vengeance," who does not delight in killing but certainly doesn't feel any imperative to avoid it. The Lord's enemies have it coming to them, he thinks. He resembles no one so much as the abolitionist John Brown of Harper's Ferry fame, and like John Brown, you can imagine him if defeated blaming his loss on spilling too little blood, not too much. And in this corner, for the New Testament, we have Daniel, whose overriding concern is to preserve the innocence of the Sorrows tribe and who will run rather than fight. Not quite turning the other cheek, but as close as one can get in practical politics.

I doubt if this Religions 101 theme will be maintained, but it was interesting while it lasted.

I didn't really link the storylines with religion, but that's an interesting way to look at it. All I know is, in Dead Money the main problems was getting each character to "Let Go" of their obsessions. I didn't really get the theme in Honest Hearts though. It was too many colliding themes, Joshua's was religion, meanwhile everything else was about war. It wasn't even war in the name of religion, is was just a war for land.

I feel like all of the DLC revolves around letting go. DM, obviously. HH because Graham can let go of his anger. He states that he wishes his vengeance to be God's anger. He tries to justify his own inner fire with the fact that God wishes it.

All speculation, but in OWB, the think-tanks are holding onto the past and can't let go. So the DLC might revolve around them reminiscing on their past, trying to "make the mojave a better place. Much like Elijah wanted.
LR deals in revenge for whatever either courier did to eachother and help let go. Or exact revenge like in every DLC where you have the option to be undone by not letting go.

TROLLOLOLOL


That's to jolipinator btw

TL;dr but I have a feeling this is gonna get ugly pretty quick and probably get locked.

Get out of here with this [censored] :swear:

That was seriously an awesome relation to Buddhism. Maybe OWB will be about Humanism? You know, obsessing over old-world technology to get eternal life (or for the purposes of the game, power or something?)

I can see it. But then I can also see a bunch of other things you can speculate meaning of new vegas with. political parties/governments, religion, morality, folklore, psychology, philosophy, sociology, history, etc...

Though HH has obvious religious tones, I believe the Buddhist/Dead Money relationship could be coincidental at best, though you do make some interesting points.

But isn't that what many wars are fought over? Tracts of land. Gaza strip, Jerusalem. These are two regions where the fighting is done over some patch of sand and not only that but both have heavy religious undertones.

sounds like you put a lot more thought into it than the developers did

Even though I doubt any mainstream religion would survive intact (as in HH), it was interesting to consider that even in the midst of world-wide chaos and its aftermath - some people would STILL be trying to convert people to their faith.

However, both Daniel and Joshua Graham were just using religion to further their own ends, so I never felt like I was sitting through some religious dissertation. It was more like two guys trying to convince themselves of something, and whatever the "fallout" of that might be would come much later.

onlly the dev can tell if this is rigth or not but i think it's coincidentalat least in DM, HH is more ambigous but in my opinion it revolves arround human emotions and the impact that does emotions can have on our sorroundings it's a perssonal opinion corse