Honest Hearts

Honest Hearts is the second add-on for Fallout: New Vegas, developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks.

Release and availability
Honest Hearts was released on May 17, 2011 for Xbox Live and May 18, 2011 for PC and later on June 2, 2011 for PlayStation Store due to the store being hacked in May. It costs $9.99.

Like all add-ons, Honest Hearts is included in the Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition, released on February 7, 2012 for all platforms.

Overview
Honest Hearts takes you on an expedition to the unspoiled wilderness of Utah's Zion National Park. Things go horribly wrong when your caravan is ambushed by a tribal raiding band. As you try to find a way back to the Mojave, you become embroiled in a war between tribes and a conflict between a New Canaanite missionary and the mysterious Burned Man. The decisions you make will determine the fate of Zion National Park itself.

Zion National Park is an expansive and diverse natural area filled with slot canyons cut by rivers and tributaries as well as numerous caves that dot the hillsides. As wild plants and animals (and a couple mutated ones, as well) thrive in the park, so too does the Courier with dozens of new crafting recipes, including new edibles, medicines and even new armors that can be created from searching the park for ingredients.

Ammunition

 * .45 Auto

Behind the scenes
"Religion is a topic, I think, that often gets not a great treatment in video games. It was important for me for a long time to try and see religion portrayed (specifically, Christianity) in a realistic and interesting way in a setting. In Fallout I got a chance to do it with Honest Hearts. I'm not religious, I believe that there aren't any gods, but that doesn't really matter. The point is that the topic I thought was interesting, I thought it was worth exploring, and I had a fair amount of knowledge of Christianity from college, from studying it on my own, talking to people about it, debating the topic with people.

And then Mormonism. I learned a lot more about from studying its history and talking with Mormons to get a more in-depth understanding of it. Before I did Honest Hearts I went out into Zion and I read the Pearl of Great Price by Joseph Smith. It was all just to get a good understanding of it, just to present something that made some sense. I didn't get everything right and, you know, you can never get everything absolutely right (or it would be very hard to). The point is, you try to approach it seriously and take it seriously. And if you're going to break rules about something, you kind of have to know what these rules are before you can really break them in a way that's interesting or justifiable, otherwise you're just kind of making stuff up. Which, you know, you can make stuff up, but I think that if you try to deal with a real world subject, you should probably know something about it."

- J.E. Sawyer on Real World Knowledge and Game Design


 * Honest Hearts was first hinted at via in-game graffiti, sparking speculation that it would be the next add-on. This speculation was seemingly confirmed when ZeniMax registered "Honest Hearts" as a trademark. The graffiti hinting at Honest Hearts refers to Joshua Graham, and New Canaan, which were originally to appear in Van Buren, Black Isle's canceled Fallout 3 project.


 * Honest Hearts was again hinted at in the game files of the Dead Money add-on, with the inclusion of an unused snowglobe for Zion National Park, and further suggesting it would be the next DLC in line for release after Dead Money.
 * J.E. Sawyer has indicated that the title of this add-on is a reference to Brigham Young's aphorism, "Honest hearts produce honest actions".
 * J.E. Sawyer also revealed that the story of Honest Hearts drew inspiration from the Utah War and Mountain Meadows Massacre.
 * All titles for Honest Hearts achievements/trophies are taken from Psalm 126 and Psalm 137 in the Bible.
 * Honest Hearts had the shortest development cycle of all New Vegas DLCs (sans Gun Runner's Arsenal and Courier's Stash).

"Dead Money had a deferred PS3/PC release, so yes. HH having the cycle it did relative to DM and (especially) OWB and LR was not engineered that way from the start. After HH finished testing, there were overall F:NV game stability issues that needed to be fixed via patch, which is why HH was pushed, and OWB and LR with it. When the push happened, HH was already out of testing, but work/testing on OWB and LR continued."

- J.E. Sawyer

Bugs

 * If you have not found all of the locations in Zion Canyon and leave, the tick marks on your compass indicating undiscovered locations may disappear when you move close to them upon returning to Zion. You can still discover these locations, however tick marks on your compass for these locations will not be visible even after discovering them.
 * Saving inside Zion National Park, quitting the game and trying to reload from that save will cause the game to get stuck at the loading screen. Loading a save from before you entered Zion and then loading the save from within Zion will allow you to bypass this problem.
 * When returning to Zion National Park after traveling back to the Mojave Wasteland, the game will become stuck in a permanent loading screen, leaving the previous autosave glitched.
 * Honest Hearts does not show in the starting screen menu. The radio signal does not come up either and the Northern Passage is still blocked. The game may not be recognizing that the add-on was installed. This could be caused by file corruption from PSN outages.
 * The bonus pack add-ons disrupt the installation. Uninstall the Classic Pack and download/reinstall the Canadian version (which says French but is actually in English). The file is called "Fallout: New Vegas - (CA)". Honest Hearts will appear as well as everything else that may have disappeared (i.e. Dead Money).
 * After installing Honest Hearts, the radio signal for Northern Passage may not appear if "ED-E My Love" has not been completed. The only fix is reverting to a previous save file.
 * If you are playing through Dead Money when you download and install Honest Hearts, you will not hear that radio transmission during Dead Money, or after you finish Dead Money and are back in the wasteland. Basically the game will not at all recognize that Honest Hearts has been installed.
 * Some cliffs in Zion may not be properly structured, causing the player to fall through and render the player's movement to a standstill. A possible location is the yao guai cave. To the right of the entrance, a small cliff overlooks the canyon (confirmed once on the PS3).
 * Sometimes after completing the Honest Hearts main quest and returning to the Wasteland, your Honest Hearts DLC will fail to load, causing you to have to reinstall the add-on, resulting in loss of all items, quest progression in Zion National Park and perks you may have obtained that became available in Honest Hearts. The only thing you do not lose is the extra 5 levels you gained from originally installing Honest Hearts.