I actually liked Honest Hearts. I think what made it suffer the most was that it was a DLC. Zion would make a really interesting setting for a full-size fallout game. Working your way down untouched canyons, waist deep in pristine water, and the old ranger stations and other wooden buildings being spared the war essentially was really neat to me. Zion was a really nice respite from irradiated shitholes.

I also wouldn't call it shallow. It just needs to be looked at differently in my eyes. I mean it's not a literary masterpiece but there is more to it than just good vs evil. It wears its Christian influences on its sleeve, down to using Zion National Park, the name being important to Judaism especially as the promised land. The White Legs represent that which would destroy Zion to both the tribes. Joshua represents the idea of Zion being the Promised Land as a real place of deliverance given by God, such as during the Exodus, with the White Legs being defilers who would destroy this gift and/or enslave the people. To the other guy, can't remember his name, Zion is more of a metaphysical concept of deliverance from the sins of the world and thus the White Legs represent the destruction of the spiritual Zion if his tribe fights them and destroy their own peaceful souls. The two beliefs, the physical and metaphysical Zion cannot coexist anymore than they can coexist with the White Legs. It's really not obvious about it, but there were definite theological undertones to it when I was playing it. The individual elements are basic but fit together in surprisingly interesting ways, even if it probably wasn't entirely intended to reflect an actual theological argument.

>>12566
It's all well and good to have references to your story, but Honest Heart's story itself is bland as hell and the White-Legs exist, still, just to be the bad guys. Well, as you say, it isn't a literary masterpiece.
Dead Money, Old World Blues and Lonesome Road have interwoven stories, each on of those places relates to each other and then to the main New Vegas world (such as the situation in the Sierra Madre being a experiment from Big MT).

Zion itself wasn't much fun to explore, for me. A few caves that didn't exist for any grand reason.
And personally, playing a post post-nuclear holocaust game without irradiated holes is no fun.

I was a bit harsh on Honest Hearts, to be fair, I did enjoy it somewhat, just the negatives outweighed the positives but that doesn't mean the postives don't exist.