You explored different themes with each DLC. What themes would you say were the most important in these add-ons, and do you feel that Fallout's story traditions suit focusing on such themes?

Lonesome Road was purposely built around the final image at the end of Fallout 1 - the Vault Dweller walking off into a lonely future. The idea of a protagonist whose home is lost to him, walking off into the wilderness after helping to nurture and protect a place that ultimately exiles him (or where he simply no longer belongs) is one of the hallmarks of Fallout. The sense of abandonment and the lone wanderer connection was important in Lonesome Road, except you're not walking into a lonely future, you're walking into your character's past and seeing what it's done in the present. Ulysses hints that it's possible the player left the West and left NCR because he didn't belong, and that's why he walked the road to the Mojave - but that's Ulysses' perspective, and the motivations for your character are your own.

I think Old World Blues and Lonesome Road had two themes that strongly hooked into Fallout, and have always been there. The theme of Old World Blues was always "the optimistic atomic future of what might have been," and the idea that all of these technological marvels could have saved the world if they had simply had a better guiding hand - it's not the technology to blame, it's the thought behind it.

Dead Money was more of a survivalist horror experience, and the theme of greed and human nature was an experiment that I felt fit with the adventure arc, so I went with it. I did feel that Fallout could use some more struggle-for-survival elements, and that was part of it as well - in short, I wanted miracle items like Stimpaks to feel amazing again rather than cause players to shrug.

Lonesome Road hits the player with major consequences to choices that the player never actually participated in prior to the DLC's beginning. Do you think this would have worked better if the player had actually partaken in the events that he or she is being held accountable for, even if only in a tutorial?

There were a lot of ways we could have structured the DLC, granted. We certainly did have the resources to represent the NCR and the West (DLC4 was limited to 3 voice actors), and while I wouldn't have done a tutorial that physically put the player in the past, there might have been other hooks we could have done with more resources. Still, I'm satisfied with what we did construct, and it hit the goals we set out to do.

You've mentioned Zelazny's Damnation Alley as a source of inspiration for Lonesome Road. That story took place decades after the apocalypse, and indeed Lonesome Road is the most recently apocalyptic area ever seen in a Fallout game. Was this intentional after the post-post-apocalyptic atmosphere of New Vegas? Is this a direction you've been wanting to take for some time?

My only intention was I wanted the player to feel like they were traveling the road to The End. The proper "The End" feel for any Fallout game lies in seeing the wreckage of the world before, all its architecture twisted and cracked and flooded with invisible fires, radiation, and seeing the grave of the world that was. Your road started here, it leads back there, and at the end, you get to see what your journey meant to someone else - and hopefully, decide what it means to you. There are countless ripples that stem from the Divide. Without it, you never would have found the Sierra Madre, encountered Christine, Elijah, and Ulysses, seen Big MT, and more. From one simple act, countless others were born.

Lastly, I wanted to nuke the Fallout world to reset things. NCR's getting a bit big, and it's making things too civilized. Lonesome Road was a way of resetting the culture clock.