Fallout: New Vegas – Enter the Anthill

By Shamus Posted Thursday Nov 4, 2010

Filed under: Game Reviews 277 comments

I began taking note of the bugs in Fallout: New Vegas as I encountered them. For the first few days of New Vegas I was in Vent with Mumbles and Josh, and we sort of acted like we were all playing on different shards of an MMO. We swapped gameplay tips (Josh has once again broken the game over his knee with melee) humorous anecdotes, and bug reports.

Goodsprings: I can use the awesome Desperado Cowboy hat to repair any of the other cowboy hats, but not the other way around. And shopkeepers no longer repair stuff. There is literally no way to repair this hat.

Jean Sky Diving: Maybe not a bug, but it seems really, really screwy to give me bad karma for “stealing” from the powder gangers who are ALL DEAD, because they tried to murder me without provocation and I killed them in self-defense.

Primm: Deputy Beagle has the voice of a middle-aged man in dialog, but greets you with a teen voice when you're just passing by him.

Goodsprings: I’ve got average strength, an agility of 9, and a high perception. I’ve got my guns skill over 50 and my melee skill is in the teens. I’ve got a perfect condition sidearm and a half-broken sledgehammer. Yet I’m finding that I’m slaughtering people with the hammer and I’m getting slaughtered when using guns. Is this a bug, or just really wonky game balance? (This applies both in and out of VATS, although the effect seems to be more extreme outside of VATS.)

Novac: Traveling merchant, the game insta-crashed when I completed the transaction.

Novac: (From Mumbles) Hey, Victor didn't appear in Novac. Going back to Goodspings, you run into Victor there, and he starts talking as if the two of you are standing in Novac.

Novac: Doing a quest in an industrial building near Novac. Guy asks me to find his girlfriend. I agree. Conversation ends, and he's suddenly hostile. I re-load the game to try again and it crashes.

Gibson Scrapyard: No enemies around, yet I'm still “in combat”. Companion Veronica won't revive and the game is acting like enemies are attacking. Ah. Found it. A couple of Geckos buried in the level geometry so that just the tops of their heads are visible. They can't move or attack. I can't end combat or fast travel away.

Boulder City: Where the heck did Veronica go? She was right with me a second ago? Backtracking… Ah. There she is. Stuck right in a wall last time I went through a door. using the door again fixed it.

Grab & Gulp Rest Stop: Crashed attempting to trade with traveling merchant. Seems like same one. I see. I guess I just can't deal with her ever again.

Wasteland: Have to keep throwing away hats. The system for figuring out which hats can and cannot be repaired by which other hats is nonsensical. I'm still wearing the same armor I had at the start of the game, but I've changed cowboy hats a half dozen times because they keep “breaking”. Are they made of clay?

Gun Runners: Got trapped in a bit of scenery. An opening leading to a dead end. You can go through the opening one way, but it's a wall going the other direction. Can't get out. Have to cheat (which will disable achievements) or re-load the game. I think achievements give XP, so re-load it is.

Freeside, Mick & Ralphs: Mick is standing in a corner, facing the wall? Always?

Freeside, Atomic Wrangler: Won $16,000 at the slot machine and the game insta-crashed.

Freeside, Atomic Wrangler: I got the debt collection quest when I spoke to one of the *targets*, even though they never brought it up and I'd never met Ms. Garret before. Then I spoke to her and I could suddenly turn in the quest. I did so, thinking I'd get some XP. Instead, she took 388 caps and then *described* the job to me. Unh? Looks like now I can't do the quest at all. Or recover my 388 caps.

Freeside, Atomic Wrangler: Playing slots and stepping away from the machine, suddenly greeted by a secruitron demanding to see a passport. (You don't need a passport here, it's OUTSIDE the strip! He shouldn't even be in this building!)

Freeside, Atomic Wrangler: The NPC's talk as if there were prostitutes here. One of them even tells me to go talk to the girls. There's sound effects as if there were girls “working” here. But there are none anywhere in the building. Ever. You can do a quest to recruit three “more” prostitutes for them: A man, a robot, and a female ghoul. But the owner keeps talking about her “girls”.

Main Menu: I’m using the manual save option to get around the save-game bug, but even that is wonky. I have three save games claiming to be “Save #2”. And two saves for Slot #4. A full house! Remember back when you could name your own saves the way you liked? Stupid consoles. Damn kids.

Ultra-Luxe: Sneaking around in the basement doing a quest, when a guy runs right up and speaks to me even though I'm sneaking and [HIDDEN]. I pass a speech check, and when the conversation ends he attacks me anyway.

Lucky 38: (From Josh) Doing a quest for a woman who wants you to bug the Lucky 38, since you are “the only person who can get in”. After giving the quest, she follows the player into their suite at the Lucky 38 and asks them if they've managed to get inside the Lucky 38 yet.

Vegas Strip: (From Josh) After talking to Mr. House, a Legion guy ambushes you as you leave the building. “Ceaser is waiting!” he shouts, out-of-context. The Conversation ends, then he grabs you again, says the same thing again. Stuck in a loop. Can't escape the conversation and have to re-load. He does it again. The trick is to bring up the pip-boy the instant you exit and fast-travel away before he ambushes you.

Legion Camp: (From Josh) The guy running the boat to take you to Ceaser's camp didn't spawn. Can't progress on the main quest without him? Leaving to another area and waiting 3 days doesn’t cause him to appear. Hm. Time to re-load and old save. Luckily Josh had a semi-recent one, but this could have been disastrous.

Wasteland: Quest to deliver a package for the energy weapons dealers is bugged. The quest marker points at the middle of nowhere – a long hike to an empty patch of wilderness. The marker doesn't point to a specific spot, either. You can stand here, spin in circles, and the compass always tells you that the point is just to your right a bit, no matter which way you're facing. Wandered around for quite a while. Turns out the actual target is a guy near the Gun Runners, just outside of town.

This is where I stopped playing. I gather this is about halfway through the game, maybe a third? I was enjoying the game enough that I was willing to set it aside and let them fix the bugs rather then allow this nonsense to wreck the experience. A couple of quick patches have addressed the most egregious failures, but I’m hoping we’ll get at least one more official patch out of them.

Note that I didn't list all of my aggravations with the game here. There are some vague quests descriptions and counter-intuitive quests that managed to waste a bunch of my time, but I didn't put them in the list above because they fell more under “poor quest design” than “bugs”. I also left out the problems with preferences reverting, the numerous graphical glitches, and the vulgar language I shouted over the save game bug. And I didn’t bother to record every single crash.

I like New Vegas so much more than Fallout 3. The game really puts the entire story, premise, and setting of Fallout 3 to eternal shame. But the bugs are a pervasive annoyance.

A damn shame.

 


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277 thoughts on “Fallout: New Vegas – Enter the Anthill

  1. somebodys_kid says:

    I haven’t picked this game up yet…I suppose I’ll wait until all the DLCs are released and the numerous patches necessary to clean the game up are released. I think the universal opinion (that I’ve heard) is that this is superior to Fallout 3. You’re getting better, Obsidian…keep trying.

    1. Valaqil says:

      From all the good I’ve heard about it, I _don’t_ want to wait to play this game. On the other hand, waiting for a “GOTY” edition to include DLC and patches would be nice. I’m leaning more towards that lately. (I bought Dragon Age: Origins ~3 weeks before the Ultimate Edition appeared. *facepalm*)

      1. Raygereio says:

        “I bought Dragon Age: Origins ~3 weeks before the Ultimate Edition appeared.”
        Ouch. I believe the Ultimate Edition was a pretty good deal money-wise.

  2. krellen says:

    Major Knight at the NCR Mojave Outpost (way in the southwest corner of the map) sells repair services. He has a skill of 100.

    I ran into someone else that sold repair services, but I don’t recall where.

    There do indeed appear to be no actual prostitutes in the Free Wrangler. But besides that and the Deputy Beagle voice bug (I’ve encountered a few other instances of “walk-by” voices not being the same as dialogue voices as well), I’ve not seen any of these bugs. I’m not sure why – most of these shouldn’t be effected by different hardware.

    I did purchase it only this weekend, though. Maybe some source files have been modified but not directly changed with a patch for first-day purchasers?

    (EDIT: Also, the Jury-Rig perk (which unfortunately requires a repair of 90 and, I believe, level 14) vastly simplifies the “repairing things yourself” system.)

    1. Shamus says:

      I was so excited when I found the repair guy. And so crashed when he couldn’t repair my black desperado hat.

      1. krellen says:

        I’ve never seen a black desperado hat. Where’d you find it?

        On the subject of karma, I’m not sure karma matters in New Vegas – just faction fame/infamy. I’m not 100% on that, but it certainly seems to be the case.

        Also, Mr. New Vegas is a way better DJ than Three Dog, and his news reports don’t seem to judge you.

        1. Keeshhound says:

          Karma only seems to affect your title. Beyond that, the karma shift for “stealing” is incredibly minor, although it still raises questions.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Wait,you mean karma isnt faction specific?It is general after all?I was so excited when I saw that new vegas is again going the faction route,and if it turns out Ill get bad carma for stealing from dead gangs Im in war with,Ill be seriously pissed.

            1. krellen says:

              Karma isn’t faction specific, and no one cares what your karma is, so how is this bad?

              1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                Because I dont want my end game to say how I was a thieving bastard when Im playing a good guy.

                1. krellen says:

                  What makes you think it will?

                2. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  Ive heard that the ending depends a lot on your actions.And my actions towards those that shoot on sight is to loot everything,and then drop the surplus later,meaning Im losing a lot more karma than Im gaining.So if it is tracking karma,Ill be in the negative,even though I didnt play a bad character this time.Still,I hope its not so.The reputation system has raised my hopes.

                3. Someone says:

                  The karma seems to be absolutely irrelevant this time around. There are no perks with karma requirements, no karma specific DJ introductions.

                  In my 30+ hour run I have encountered precisely ONE karma-specific dialog option, in the endgame sequence, during your very last dialogue. I could say it had pivotal importance but there was a non-karma dialogue option beside it, which said pretty much the same thing and had the exact same speech requirement. I picked the karma one so maybe the other one wouldn’t work as well, but otherwise it might as well not be there (and, looking through the game files there appears to be different combat music for good and bad karma, but I digress).
                  The ending certainly did not seem to depend on karma in any way, all of the outcomes I was presented with appeared to be wholly based on my actions during quests, there definitely was none of that “virtues and values” crap.

                  The Reputation system is there, and it delivers as was promised. You build up your reputation with different groups in the game and get different treatment and some small perks (as in benefits, not ingame perks), like local shopkeepers giving you discounts, bandits not attacking, NCR helping out in combat or just some friendly generic dialogue from NPC’s. It really helps in quests too, I was in good standing with the NCR throught the game, so they pretty much let me walk around all of their “off limits” areas, shared sensitive military information, sold me supplies and so forth.

                  So yeah, as far as I can tell the karma stuff is as wonky as it used to be in FO3, if not more so (you get good reputation for killing feral ghouls? As opposed to letting them chew on your face, which is a totally evil thing to do?) but you may as well just ignore it entirely, just like the game does.

                4. acronix says:

                  For what I´ve seen, the Karma only affects your title, and nothing more. Not the endings, not the faction reactions. Nothing. It´s like they forgot to take it away from Fallout 3, really.

                5. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  There are so many weird trackers.For example,why is there a “failed speech” tracker in your stats?You already know if youll fail a check because it glows red,so whats the point?And its not like you cannot exist the dialogue,then return later when you buff yourself.Its like they forgot to drop some stuff from fallout 3,and decided to keep them later just because its easier.

                6. Greg says:

                  If your targets are evil(powder gangers, legion), then you gain a lot more karma from killing them than you lose by looting their containers. Note that it’s only containers – looting bodies has never counted as stealing yet that I’ve seen.

                7. Someone says:

                  @Daemian

                  I think it’s one of those little “challenges”, fail 5/10/15 speech checks and gain some xp.

            2. Jeff says:

              Karma and Reputation are independent of each other.

        2. Jep jep says:

          Three Dog had a better voice.

          1. krellen says:

            I disagree.

          2. Jeff says:

            Pfft, Mister Las Vegas is a perfect fit for Mister New Vegas.

            1. Daemian Lucifer says:

              I prefer the mutant guys.

              1. swimon says:

                yeah it’s a shame that their broadcast range is so limited.

                EDIT: Also they have like 3 comments that they repeat over and over again :/

                1. Michael says:

                  Yeah, I do wish there was more there, that said it’s (practically) the voice of Starscream? What’s not to love?

              2. M says:

                Mr. New Vegas once checked his charisma on a Vito-Matic vigor testor. The machine burst into flames.

        3. Raygereio says:

          “I've never seen a black desperado hat. Where'd you find it?”
          Of the Fallout Wiki:
          If you decide to help Ringo fight the Powder Gangers in Goodsprings one of the attacking powder gangers is wearing a desperado cowboy hat which can be taken from him when he is killed.

          I don’t remember finding one there though, so take that with a grain of salt.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            I think Ive used that one to repair something else.Whoops.

          2. Shamus says:

            I found 3 desperado hats so far. Ringo’s quest yields the first one. Can’t remember where the other two come from.

            1. Keeshhound says:

              Any idea why they can’t be repaired by NPCs?

              1. evileeyore says:

                It’s because they’re flagged that way. There are a handful of items improperly flagged…

                You can fix it using the GECK, if you know how.

                1. Galad says:

                  is it just me, having never played the game, or does it sound ridiculous even by videogame standards to repair something with a *Hat*??

                2. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  It makes sense in a way that you need parts(cloth,springs,ets)from something else in order to repair the item.It doesnt make sense in a way that you can get parts for a hat only from another hat.

        4. Karma probably has a an effect on the companions.

          1. acronix says:

            I think Arcade Gannon won´t join an “evil” person. I was evil when I tried to recruit him. However, the Followers also thought I was a jerk, so that may be it, too.

            1. Michael says:

              Cass won’t join an evil character. I’m not sure about Arcade, but if your legion rep is above a certain threshold he either won’t join or won’t give you his quest (I’m not sure which).

              1. Someone says:

                I think it has to be lower than “Neutral”.

      2. Alphadrop says:

        You can repair the Desperado hat with pre war hats. I was pretty bummed about the lack of repairing cowboy hats as well before I found this out.

    2. Samkathran says:

      I just got New Vegas over the weekend too, as a gift. I only had a chance to start playing yesterday because I was given the XBox version, and I went to exchange it for the PC version so I could get the awesome mods and unofficial fixes that are sure to come out.

      Now thanks to Shamus, I’m not sure if I even want to keep playing right away! It certainly looks like a lot of fun, but I’ve also read that quite a few bad bugs are still out there. Holding out for one more patch to get a better first experience doesn’t sound like a bad idea… guess I’ll see what I can find to distract myself with for now *coughminecraftcough*

      1. krellen says:

        A tip: disable the Steam cloud before you ever start playing. I think without that particular bug, Shamus’s experience would be much more positive, but he was burned early on by that and it’s flavouring his impressions.

        1. Jarenth says:

          Wait, Steam cloud?

          And you’re playing it?

          My worldview, she is collapsing

          1. krellen says:

            After telling Shamus he was a big mean hater-face and championing Obsidian, I decided it would be unprincipled not to purchase the game. Please see the comment thread on the last post about Fallout: New Vegas.

            1. Shamus says:

              It is such a mess trying to stick to one’s principles is These Internet Times. It has made a complete hash out of what should be a simple economic transaction.

              1. krellen says:

                One simply must decide what principles are the most important. I’m still not buying Civilization 5, even though I have now caved to having Steam so I can support Obsidian.

                1. Irridium says:

                  Your test of faith will come during the coming Christmas sale, when everything is $10 and below.

                  Literally, everything is $10 and below during the Christmas sales. Well individual games at least, the big packs like the THQ pack manages to break $20.

                2. Samkathran says:

                  Thanks for the tip, Krellen!

                  In yet another strange similarity, I too avoided Steam until this game came out, although that was mostly due to me not knowing it required steam ahead of time (not sure how that one slipped by me). I’m not sure I’ll be able to muster the willpower to boycott Civilization 5 any longer though, I’m already playing the demo and the changes seem really nice so far.

                  And as Irridium pointed out: the sales, oh dear the sales are getting to me already. So many games for so little. So very tempting, they’re literally going to steal my money right out of my wallet… with insanely good deals! Curse you Valve and your evil consumer-friendly business practices!

                  Must… remain… strong…! *cry*

                3. Jarenth says:

                  Yeah, ok, must’ve missed that in the previous thread then. There’s regularly over a hundred comments here now and I’m véry absent-minded.

                  So it’s less a case of you having caved to Steam and more a case of you having made a deal with the devil to support something you believe in.

                4. krellen says:

                  Precisely that, Jarenth. Of course, the devil being the devil, I now must resist constant temptation of further deals.

                5. Jarenth says:

                  If anyone can do it, it’ll be you. So this’ll be a nice test for Valve: if they can crack you, they’re done.

                6. acronix says:

                  They forced him to side with them to support his beliefs. They`re already done!.

                  No one´s safe. Not anymore.

                7. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  You will succumb to steam mr. krellen.It is inevitable.

                8. Gandaug says:

                  They got me with HL2. I didn’t even know what Steam was back then. Slowly over time they improved Steam. Now it’s the first place I look for games. I have 65 games on Steam now. A large majority of which were bought during a sale. They’re definitely good at what they do. I just can’t shake this feeling like I’m reaching my hand into an alligator’s mouth to retrieve what I want. Someday that mouth will close. I’ll be injured and stuck forever. Perhaps that’s already happened and I’m simply floating in some pre-death euphoric fugue state and just don’t know it.

                  1. Shamus says:

                    This is my feeling and experience exactly. It began with unwittingly getting Steam with HL2. Then rejection. Then sulking. Then grudging acceptance.

                    Steam did improve, but the other thing that happened was that everyone else got so much worse. Steam’s setup looked like a raw deal to me in 2004, but after six years of GFWL, Ubisoft, Online-Activating SecuROM, and whatever that DRM was they put in Spore, Steam practically looks like open source.

                9. Someone says:

                  Same story here. Sure, they may have incredible deals availible on a regular basis, and actually offer something in return for the DRM inconveniences, but feeding a monopoly is not a good idea in the long run, no matter how benevolent it appears to be. And with Valve the warning lights are already starting to go off: First the L4D2 debacle, now the Mann-conomy and the DotA scandal…

                10. krellen says:

                  One difference here is that I knew what I was getting – getting Steam wasn’t an accident. Avoiding temptation is as easy as not looking at the Steam store (having an MMO I play does a lot to save me from having to constantly find a new game to play.)

                  Oh, and I play Half-Life on my XBox, so when Ep 3 comes out, I can still keep playing it Steam-free.

                  I will, of course, buy any future Obsidian-made Fallout titles that are Steam-exclusive. That ship’s already sailed.

                11. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  Wait,youre playing half life on xbox?Then why didnt you buy new vegas for xbox as well?

                12. krellen says:

                  Because shooters aren’t RPGs. RPGs belong on PCs.

                13. Alan De Smet says:

                  “Because shooters aren't RPGs. RPGs belong on PCs.”

                  The irony. Lots of FPS fans (including myself) bemoan what consoles have done to FPS games. FPSers aren’t RPGs, FPSers belong on PCs.

                  I hope we can both agree, consoles screw everything good up. :-)

                14. krellen says:

                  I played Doom when Doom was new, and was the champion “keyboard only” Descent player on my campus, but I’ve never been a fan of shooters. Never really got the hang of using a mouse to aim; controller sticks seem more like keyboard-based controls, I guess.

    3. Zukhramm says:

      I think I did not repair a single item myself my first time through the game, I just didn’t know how. I didn’t pick up weapons I already had, so “repair” was always greyed out, I thought repair used scrap metal or some other type of junk laying around and that my skill was just too low.

      Maybe I should have read the pop ups in the beginning explaining things…

      1. Gale says:

        You didn’t pick up weapons if you already had one of them in your inventory? But whatever did you sell?

        1. Zukhramm says:

          Weapons and armor that were worse than what I had. I didn’t sell that much actually. Not much strength, and with ammo weight and food and water from hardcore mode, plusthe fact that I’m trying to force myself not to act like a cleptomaniac, I didn’t have things to sell a lot of the time.

          Short answer: Nothing.

    4. acronix says:

      The reason you had not experienced most of this bugs is because you got it after the patching, I think. We have to admit that they did fix a lot of the quest stuff very, very quickly. Before the patches it was pretty much a roulette.

    5. acronix says:

      The other person that can repair is a lady in the Junkyard between Novac and the Helios powerplant. I don´t know what skill she has, though, but I saw the option. I always keep repair very high, so I never had to go there. And since repair now makes your stuff deteriorate slower (but not sure how much slower) I rarely repair anything.

      EDIT: Oops! Didn´t notice I had alredy responded to this comment. Sorry for the “doublepost”!

      1. krellen says:

        IIRC, it’s 73.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Its 65.

  3. zob says:

    2nd and 3rd bugs happened to me in original Fallout 3. I’ll probably wait a year or so, before playing New Vegas.

    1. MrWhales says:

      I waited, i didn’t plan this, about a year after Fallout3 came out to buy it (I’m bad with dates, it was in 2008? if it was 07, then i waited 2 years)

      So i will probably wait a while before getting New Vegas, although i’m sure by then there will be a new Fallout on it’s way, and I’ll reread all this old stuff and laugh

  4. IncredibleGeek says:

    I’m sad that this game is so bug-ridden, because it sounds like exactly what I need to wash the taste of FO3 out of my mouth. So much of FO3 was just plain wasted potential, and New Vegas seems like it addresses a lot of the sillyness/stupidness of its predecessor.

    Guess I’ll just wait a couple of years, just like every other Bethesda game.

    1. krellen says:

      I and another friend have both tracked our bugs as well, and seen next-to-no (a few random CTD, which don’t seem to be related to any particular activity (nor seem, at least to me, atypical for any game I’ve ever played in Windows; random CTDs just seem to happen for most new, high-graphic, 3d games)) bugs. Shamus’s reports are his personal experiences, but based on other comments and reviews, do not seem to be the case for all users (I’m not sure I could make any statistical guess vis-a-vis “most”, but I can certainly claim “not everyone has seen the same, or as many, problems as Shamus has.”)

      1. Ian says:

        It all depends on how you play, really.

        With Oblivion, I always wondered why I ran into every other quest bug in the game while my friends played through it flawlessly. Most of the problem is that they did the quests in the a different order than I did or made no attempt to be “clever” with the in-game mechanics.

        1. IncredibleGeek says:

          I have a feeling I could figure out how to break it pretty quickly. Half the fun of open-world RPGs is finding out just how out-of-order you can do everything and still win.
          (I somehow beat Morrowind without starting the main quest-line, and never catching corpus.)

          1. Scott says:

            You can also beat Morrowind in less than 5 minutes if you try hard enough: http://speeddemosarchive.com/demo.pl?Morrowind_SS_419

            1. MintSkittle says:

              Or Oblivion in a little over 11 minutes,

              http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfmdl9-tnSU

              Behold the magical levitating pants!

              1. Varil says:

                I accidentally found Dad in FO3. Just wandering around and “Hey, let’s check out THAT building! Whoa, a vault? That’s weird.”

                I was thoroughly confused, especially since all the dialogue assumed I already KNEW why I was there. I hadn’t even been to Three-Dog’s yet.

                1. Nidokoenig says:

                  The speedruns for Fallout 3 use a Havok physics exploit to jump up and into the Citadel and cut straight to retrieving the GECK, leaving the old git to rot. Well, if he can’t work out how to purify water in a world filled with energy weapons that can completely boil away the water content of a supermutant’s body several times on one energy cell and still calls himself a scientist, he deserves whatever he gets.

                2. acronix says:

                  I personally think dying of his own stupidity is enough punishment. But not half as fun as doing so yourself, by action or omision.

      2. Zukhramm says:

        I seem to have hit very few bugs aswell, but with the European release being a few days later they might have patched the worst out, or I’m just lucky.

      3. IncredibleGeek says:

        I had quite a few problems with FO3, so I imagine I’d run into quite a few in New Vegas as well. Better safe than sorry, really.

    2. Ian says:

      I’d wait more than a couple of years. New Vegas was done by Obsidian, so the total bug count in New Vegas alone is probably equal to all of Bethesda’s games at launch combined. That said, I haven’t played it, so take what I say with a bucket of salt. I’m mostly going based on what I’ve seen and heard about their other titles. I’m thinking that the fact that New Vegas is based on the “remarkably stable” Fallout 3 probably isn’t doing anyone any favors.

      Another option is to wait until the community fixes the game (if the game is moddable, and if not I’m sure they’ll find a way). I can’t imagine playing Oblivion without the Unofficial Oblivion Patch and BTMod.

      1. Raygereio says:

        “if the game is moddable, and if not I'm sure they'll find a way”
        It’s just as moddable as Fallout 3. An updated GECK was released at the same time as the game itself.
        I wouldn’t expect big mods like unofficial patches or major overhauls for a while, though.

        1. Ian says:

          Yeah, I can’t imagine seeing any unofficial bugfix packs until after Obsidian drops support for the game. If I remember correctly, the Unofficial Oblivion Patch didn’t really get momentum until Bethesda stopped releasing patches.

        2. acronix says:

          I´m sure the modding community will keep fixing anything the developers won´t, if it´s possible.

          There´s a “fix” for framerate, right now, that consists of a modified .dll.
          Well, actually, quite a bit of fixes, for different cards (ATI and Nvidia). Before downloading them, my fps would drop randomly at 10. Now they are mostly at 30.

    3. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Actually,you wont have to wait long.It seems the worst bugs have been taken care of.Give it a month or two,and it will be ok.Which is quite surprising,considering its obsidian/bethesda combo.

  5. Psivamp says:

    Note on the traveling salesman crash: I had that happen four times consecutively when purchasing Caravan playing cards that were already in my inventory. Any other transaction wouldn’t result in a crash.
    And, apparently, the cards appearing in your inventory is a bug in and of itself.

    Just started my second run through the game as a melee character and at level 10 do more damage with the Machete Gladius than I was doing with pistols at the endgame during my first run.

  6. Jep jep says:

    I hope they come up with some patch(es) soon. I only got to play on Monday, thanks to a delay in the mail and having been gone on the weekend.. Didn’t have much trouble (not counting the occasional companion/enemy stuck in level geometry) until after I finished the Vault 22 quest and when Veronica’s companion quest came up. As it stands, I managed to save the Vault data on my Pip-Boy, turned it in, then a bit later the new quest comes up. Now, if I choose the “farming” option, the quest, instead of the logical thing of giving her the info on the Pip-Boy, updates to go back to Vault 22 to dig up some info from the now defunct database. Even if I go to the terminal, it gives nothing and the quest still won’t update.

    Not game-breaking, but annoying as hell.

    Luckily I had a save before initiating that part of the quest so I just reverted that one and kept playing. Won’t be continuing that one until a fix comes by.

    1. Someone says:

      Maybe its because of the quest itself, if you downloaded the files in tandem with the ghoul lady she should have corrupted them in some way, and destroyed the original records. I remember her having a special dialogue option when I did that quest with Veronica and went after the farming data. Still, it should let you tell Veronica that the farming thing is a no go, at least it did with the Helios thing.

      1. Jep jep says:

        Well, there’s no option to tell her no, not even after the latest patch. It’s still the same. It’s more the weird when she talks about how the NCR found something out and that we should go check the OSI, but it automatically updates it as completed when the dialogue ends and then gives the part to go to the Vault. I also can’t engage in any further dialogue with the ghoul lady (before or after using the terminal), she just comments that she’s finishing things up and packing.

        If that’s not a bug, I don’t know what is.

  7. Gahazakul says:

    The ghoul in the Novac industrial area that wants you to find his friend becomes hostile if you enter too far into the room. This is because you are supposed to have talked to the Nightkin in the office really close by and he wants you to go in that room. You get to choose the violent or non violent path here. The ghoul is trading entrance into the room for finding his friend. So the correct procedure here is to walk in far enough to initiate the conversation with him then turn around and leave to help him or just shoot him.

    It’s not a bug, just poorly worded details.

    1. Mormegil says:

      I also found that finishing his quest and then saving and exiting before the ghouls left always led to a corrupt save game (found a few forums where other people have had the same issue). Problem solved by shooting him in the face before he even talked.

    2. Kolobus says:

      I’ve had a similar experience with the ghoul in the industrial area. Although I was able to explore and loot the entire room without him going hostile as long as I didn’t go up the stairs to be on the same level as him. I had also found the Nightkin and spoken to him first, not sure if that played a part in it.

      1. Someone says:

        The “proper” procedure is for him to grab your camera and initiate conversation from the catwalk above, the moment you enter the room and activate the script trigger there. I had that happen and I didnt talk with the supermute beforehand. He still went hostile if I tried to go upstairs though.

        1. acronix says:

          Hilariously I avoided it. I got in, got the forced dialogue, then left. It never occurred to me to go upstairs, but that was because I thought he was in an unreacheable place.

          1. Someone says:

            I went upstairs after I talked to him and was confused when he attacked. He very very vaguely hints that he will not let you through until you do him a favor, without ever actually spelling it out.

            1. Sigilis says:

              I figured I’d get shot so, not wanting to fight this guy, I just helped him out. Though it must be a bug that you can kill the jailer without triggering the wrath of Antler.

  8. Hitch says:

    I waited a bit before getting the game. The early patches seem to have saved me from the frustration of a lot of the bugs.

    I think I have a nice bug in my game, though. After finishing Boone’s quest, he took his hat back, but it stayed in my inventory. It’s got nice bonuses, so I’ve been wearing it every since — and it never takes damage.

    Oh, and I agree. New Vegas makes so much more sense when it comes to the story and the world you’re in than Fallout 3.

    1. Someone says:

      I don’t think its a bug, I’ve had it happen too and the hat changed name from “Boone’s beret” to “Ranger beret” or something, with the same bonuses. I guess its a quest reward that isn’t mentioned in the dialogue.

      1. Keeshhound says:

        You get it when you complete Boone’s recruitment quest to his satisfaction.

        1. Gandaug says:

          You can even get another if you kill Manny Vargas.

  9. Integer Man says:

    The anthill is also surrounded by a flaming moat of insta-crashes and a wall of atrocious customer support.

    But hey, ants are nice.

  10. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Im glad that Ive waited a bit,so I didnt see the worst of the bugs.Still,Im quite annoyed by random crashes(repair and armor,and crash,then reload and crash again,then reload and repair in another sequence,and continue,grrrr).Glitches dont bother me that much,but are hilarious.Still,the game managed to suck me in,which fallout 3 didnt,so its a plus.Though it seems weapons are poorly balanced(melee+a couple of explosives here and there,and the game becomes just too easy,even though I am playing hardcore).And that doesnt even seem to be because Ive focused on a melee character.I put all my points nto melee weapons,yet am using unarmed(with just 15)glove(heh),and still insta killing critters that require at least 3 shots from my plasma rifle(not counting criticals).And energy weapons is my second combat skill.I feel like Ive wasted points on it.

    I like how merchants become poor quite fast,so you cannot haul everything.Unless you wait for them to replenish their funds(which I dont want to).Skills also seem to be fixed(a bit),as well as perks.

    Overall,its a good game,but again drowned by awful obsidian quality control.Less than in previous obsidian games though,which is progress.

    Oh,and Im typing this because the game crashed,and I needed to cool of a bit before restarting it.

    1. Jeff says:

      The poor merchants are really conflicting with my obsessive cleaning up. When I’m through, there’ll be no litter in the streets!

      1. krellen says:

        That’s what all the dumpsters are for.

        1. Jeff says:

          Hey hey, I ain’t working as a janitor for free, bub!

    2. Someone says:

      Judging by my experience, the amount of caps merchants have depends on your level. The dinobite guy, for example, had about 600 caps when I visited him around level 6 but when I returned at levels ~20 and ~30 he had 3000 and 6000 respectively. Its still a bit annoying but you generally have a place to dump all of your crap in later levels.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Meh,Ive ended up picking up only ammo,food and water now,and sometimes a thing or two to repair my stuff with.Caravan is a much more efficient way of making money anyway.

  11. Valaqil says:

    Ah, the travelling salesman problem. Shamus, this should not be a surprise. I expect _any_ program to crash when faced with that problem.

    (It’s a little late, perhaps, but I’ll throw it in the ring anyway.)

    EDIT: Re-phrased slightly.

    1. Mrs. Peel says:

      heh, I see what you did there.

      1. droid says:

        That’s why they should switch to a digital distribution platform.

  12. Matt K says:

    The worst for me is the Cowboy Repeater randomly disabling all of the other buttons after use (randomly). You can still walk but cannot attack, open the inventory or even the escape menu.

    1. Gandaug says:

      That’s not just the cowboy repeater. I first noticed it with Lucky and then with shotguns. When I’ve noticed it happen is when enemies are very close. Melee range close.

      1. Mormegil says:

        Okay, so I’m not the only one who finds himself hammering the mouse button after reloading a shotgun wondering why everybody refuses to die.

        1. Jeff says:

          All of the “reload one round at a time” weapons have an animation bug which locks your character model in place (and thus unable to do anything other than move) for a few seconds if you move while finishing the reloading animation.

  13. Dovius says:

    I guess I’m really lucky, since the only bug I ever had was the ambassador guy at the NCR Embassy on the strip who kept typing constantly while floating 3 feet off the ground.

  14. LB says:

    Oh dear. I just accepted the bizarre hat repair system without questioning it. That is not a good sign.

    The missing prostitutes of the Atomic Wrangler confused me too. I thought maybe they were hiding them out back like in Gomorrah, but nope.

    Also if I can just be permitted a shameless plug – I wrote about some of the bugs I encountered on the Playstation 3 version of the game (including gender confusion and an inter-dimensional minigun vortex) here:
    http://grimlyenthusiastic.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/my-mojave-wasteland-journal-fallout-new-vegas/

    1. Scott says:

      This is excellent!

    2. X2-Eliah says:

      Regarding day 187:

      Or, you could walk into the guy’s room (the first guy you need the info from), access his unprotected computer and view the only entry that is there. That’ll tell you where to go next.

  15. Cezar says:

    I might be a bit biased but honestly…I didn’t encounter bugs so game-braking in FO3…not many crashes (though there were crashes).

    From your day one play experience (as I got mine far later) what do you think? From a gameplay perspective only, which one is buggyer, FO3 or FO3:NV?

    1. MrWhales says:

      I have yet to get a big bug in FO3, i take alot of time with RPGs, but aside from a corrupt save a couple times, and getting stuck in a peice of scenery, no bugs. I very much like it, the game that is. Although I’d love a more Fallout-humored world.

  16. Cloverhook says:

    I have to say, though… Despite all the bugs, I’m finding New Vegas to be a much more authentic Fallout experience than Fallout 3 was. I’ve found a ton of references to Fallout 1 and 2, probably thanks to Chris Avellone’s involvement… And there seems to be just a general push away from Bethesda’s random lore changes.

    It’s a bit of a tease, though, really… I read somewhere that Bethesda has bought the licensing for Fallout, and intends to continue making Fallout games just like they’ve continued to make Oblivion games. They “don’t want Fallout 3 to be [their] only Fallout title.” (Badly butchered quote, probably… quoting from memory here.) So we get this brief return to the real Fallout lore, only to be followed by, I assume, Bethesda randomly changing things again in future games. I hope I’m wrong, but… Bethesda.

    1. krellen says:

      New Vegas is technically another “Bethesda” game, so they’ve already accomplished having Fallout 3 not be their only Fallout title.

      It’s possible, if this game is received well and better than Fallout 3 was, that Obsidian will be tasked with creating future Fallout titles, allowing Bethesda’s team to work on other projects.

      1. Someone says:

        I really hope that would be the case, but Obsidian never actually made any sequels to their own products. As opposed to Bethesda which made, what, 6 TES titles?

        The possibility of Bethesda just teasing the Old Fallout fans before screwing us over again can’t be ignored too.

        1. krellen says:

          All the more reason to try to make sure New Vegas gets better reviews and better sales than FO3, so Bethesda gets the message “these guys are better for us”.

          1. Irridium says:

            And who knows, after making many Fallout titles using the same tools, Obsidian will finally figure out how to release a game with less bugs.

            Yes I like to dream big.

          2. Someone says:

            There are is one very grating trend I have noticed in the reviews I have seen so far.

            What most of the reviewers appear to say is: “Its a FO3 expansion pack, more of the same”. Apparently the reviewers see the same graphics engine, art style and reused art assets and just automatically write it off as “the same game, nothing new”, despite the two games following entirely different gameplay philosophies, namely TES philosophy and Fallout philosophy. Its really quite jarring.

            What really kills me about it is that since “they did the same thing” a lot of people can just say that Obsidian developers were just following the high standards Bethesda set in FO3, effectively giving Bethesda all the credit for New Vegas’ success with Obsidian doing strictly mercenary work of “adding more stuff”.

            1. acronix says:

              Indeed, it´s a shame that there´s so many idiots who can´t notice the differences between the two. Idiots, or they didn´t play far enough (as in, 15 minutes after the tutorial), which converts them into liars.

              1. Someone says:

                I am just wondering if this is the “average gamer” in them speaking.

                What if our little story cult really is irrelevant and if the majority of modern gamers can’t even notice the difference between a well written and thought out game and an incoherent mess, content to play as long as there is enough explosions per hour of playtime?

                1. Soylent Dave says:

                  I think what you need to remember is that Fallout 3 actually had a lot more story than most high profile games. The plot holes in the story – while present – were less egregious than is usual for a videogame.

                  In fact, when you’re complaining that ‘the story is not quite consistent enough’ you’re already effectively saying that the story stands head and shoulders above nearly every other major release (and a lot of minor ones).

                  Not to mention of course that plot holes are often only as big as the observer makes them (so plenty of people don’t notice them, or forgive what you might regard as a ‘massive immersion-breaking hole’).

                  So, from that perspective, New Vegas and Fallout 3 aren’t that different – they both look very similar, play very similar and have much more in-depth stories than most games that a reviewer (or a gamer) is asked to play. The fact that New Vegas’ story may be more coherent might not be immediately or clearly apparent (if ever).

                  So people are looking at Obsidian and thinking “they’ve basically made Fallout 3, but with a different story”. Because that’s what they’ve done.

                  The story and structure of New Vegas may encourage and enable different and more involved play – but it’s not a million miles removed from Fallout 3. It’s not even a hundred miles removed.

                  Add to that the fact that the bugs in New Vegas are obvious to even the most casual observer, and they do seem to be more prevalent in New Vegas than in 3 (based purely on anecdotal evidence and personal experience) – I can definitely see why people aren’t queueing up to bow down before Obsidian.

                  Personally, I’m enjoying the game so far.

                  I’d be enjoying it more if it wasn’t for the immersion-breaking bugs (enemies stuck in terrain or stretching out across the screen and the bulk ammo and the playing cards not working properly (you have to drop them and pick them up again for some reason…)), and one which required me to restart the game entirely (thankfully after I’d only just started – the population of Goodsprings went homicidal because I exited the shop in an unseemly fashion (although they were still ‘Neutral’ according to the map) – perhaps my positive karma and generally nice demeanour was just too irritating for them to put up with…).

                  …but I am enjoying it so far.

                  Edit : wow. That wall of text crept up on me. Sorry about that

                2. krellen says:

                  Well, my anecdotal evidence is that New Vegas is substantially less buggy than FO3. I haven’t had to fiddle with .inis or .dlls to get the game to launch, which was not the case for FO3.

                3. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  “So people are looking at Obsidian and thinking “they've basically made Fallout 3, but with a different story”. Because that's what they've done.”

                  No.Just no.Even in the first hour or so you can see that new vegas is nothing like fallout 3.Disregard the story,and just focus on ow npcs behave and converse with you.Its completely different.I simply couldnt bear to play fallout 3 past megaton because it was so stupid.Here,you have a small town with people living in it.Growing crops,herding bighorns,etc.

                  Which is why the worst thing in the review that I hate is when they say “If you liked fallout 3,youll like this one.If you didnt,you wont like this one.”I hated fallout 3.It was so stupid that I couldnt play it past the beginning,and when I saw the rest of the game,I hated it even more.New vegas sucked me in,and if it werent for the bugs,I wouldnt even be here writing about it.

                4. Someone says:

                  Eh, whatever, I’ve seen bigger. Heck, I wrote bigger.

                  When I mentioned the games having very different design philosophies, I didn’t just mean the approach to world building, storytelling, etc.

                  Let’s disregard all of that and think about the gameplay.

                  You spend the majority of FO3 running around the game world, exploring, diving into various “dungeons” and killing everything there. The main focus of the game is combat, mixed with some exploration (finding bobbleheads, unique weapons), inventory management and an occasional quest. It’s very similar to Morrowind and, especially, to Oblivion, which really started veering into this “sandbox diablo” territory.

                  In New Vegas, on the other hand, you spend most of your time in various towns, camps and villages, talking to people, taking quests and solving everyone’s problems. It’s just like Fallout 1&2, you can play it just like Fallout 1&2, fast traveling between towns and pretending the fully rendered Mojave Desert surrounding them is just a bunch of squares on the world map. The amount of combat in your game also heavily depends on your character, you can avoid a good deal of it if you are a smoothtalker. I will not go so far as to say the combat is not an important gameplay element in NV, but, unlike in FO3, it doesn’t overshadow dialogue, roleplaying, applying your skills and solving various quests. In my opinion it is what Fallout is all about.

                  Think about it. Oblivion and FO3 were brimming with “dungeons”, the majority of which were just there for the sake of looting and leveling, had no connection to the rest of the game, no backstory and were generally pretty interchangeble. Fallout 1&2, on the other hand, never really had “dungeons for the sake of dungeons”, unless you specifically went out of your way to “catch” random encounters on the world map, pretty much all the fighting you ever did and all the combat locations you explored, you did for solving specific quests. New Vegas is very similar in that regard, exploration and random combat have been greatly scaled back, making way for lots of quests and dialogue. The amount of random dungeons per world tile has been reduced, now if you find some sprawling industrial complex full of enemies, you can be pretty sure it’s part of some quest you have not encountered yet. But you won’t have to fill your game with aimless dungeon crawling because there is always a ton of quests and things to do. There is almost never a situation when you run out of quests and go “well, there is nothing else to do, might as well go exploring”, you always have 2-4 quests you need to tend to.

                  This is much closer to Fallout than to TES, so us Old Fallout fans are rejoicing, but some of the apparent TES fans are noticing that this isn’t the TES game they expected to play, even going so far as to commit the Unthinkable Crime and compare it to FO3 in favor of the latter! Their problem being that it’s actually a different sort of game.

                5. Gandaug says:

                  A toast to Someone!

                6. Soylent Dave says:

                  @krellen – I’m playing on an xbox, which might have something to do with my bug experiences.

                  @Daemian – Saying that New Vegas is “nothing like Fallout 3” is probably a bit strong. It is quite a lot like FO3.

                  While Goodsprings has more verisimilitude than, say, Megaton it’s not exactly immersive (it exists for a starting PC and has everything a starting PC needs, like a training mission, a couple of shops (medicine, weapons and food) and a quest that introduces the faction system.

                  It’s probably more comparable to Vault 101 in FO3 than megaton – it’s conveniently got clean water (so the player doesn’t have to worry about that at first), it has a few characters but only a couple of relevant ones, it’s fairly sandboxey (lots of unpickable locked doors) – and once you’re done with it, the game world opens up.

                  It is a bit less contained than 101 – but I’m not sure it has any less stupid stuff or immersion-breaking stuff in (I mean, a guy who I’ve just told has a price on his head probably shouldn’t be willing to sit down for a nice game of cards when I’m meant to be organising the town to save his arse) – there’s still a lot of ‘game logic’ in there, basically.

                  Whether the world as a whole is less ridiculous… I can’t comment yet. I really haven’t played it enough. I’ve had some relatively ridiculous bits (see above, and also when disguised as a powder ganger – getting attacked on sight by some while their friends 10 feet away looked on in peaceful ambivalence), and there’s some detail stuff (which is much, much easier to overlook, of course) – like the cattle being penned in tiny enclosures. In a desert.

                  I’ve also encountered lots of cool, immersive bits. And I’m loving the hardcore mode, which is (almost) everything I hoped it would be.

                  I’m still early on, so there’s definitely room for me to get blown away by the game.

                  @Someone – A significant bit of my (not much) playtime in New Vegas has been combat-related (despite a fair bit of investing in non-combat skills and perks), but I do get what you’re talking about – most of that combat has been in the wilderness en route to places of interest.

                  And I have been in some dungeons (which, as you say, might end up being part of a quest I haven’t hit yet) – but only a couple. The wasteland itself is a bit of a big dungeon, I suppose – but it doesn’t really feel like one (and, so far, the ‘wandering monsters’ have made sense and either kept me out of certain areas by being much scarier than I am or made crossing the desert a bit more interesting, so I’m not complaining).

                  For the record, I find Oblivion far too tedious to play (because every single quest is exactly the same, and there’s so much dungeoneering). Didn’t stop me trying to enjoy it, mind, because it was quite pretty and I’m clearly a bit of a masochist.

                  But I do really like FO3, even if it’s not as complex as it might be (and the dungeoneering bits do grate if I end up doing too many in a row (i.e. metro tunnels)).

                  So if New Vegas really has minimised the bits of the game I didn’t like so much as well as expanded the roleplaying & story opportunities – brilliant!

                  (and at some point I’ll even get around to playing Fallout 1 & 2, seeing as they’re sitting next to my PC waiting for me to do just that)

                7. Jarenth says:

                  Damnit you guys, I don’t have time to get into another big playing experience like this right now.

                  Stop telling me how awesome it is.

                8. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  krellen has it,so what more incentive do you need?And he likes it,so any other “it awesome” comment would be redundant.

                  Joking aside,you really should get it somewhere after new years.I think it will be patched enough then.

                  @Soylent Dave
                  True,its a starting area,but it still is less forced than many others,especially less forced than fallout 3.Plus you get a way better hook for the main quest than the search for idiot dad.

                  The only problem I have with it is instability of the game.But that one is still improving,so Im good.

                9. Someone says:

                  @Soylent Dave

                  Yes, the first few levels of the game can have a lot of combat as you have yet to discover many locations you would otherwise fast travel to, and a lot of the introductory quests are pretty simple “go kill a bunch of guys” affairs.

                  You can even say the tutorial doesn’t
                  stop until you reach Novac, as the path from Goodsprings to Novac is fairly linear (although I think it’s possible to go from Doc Mitchell’s straight to New Vegas, through Great Khan territory north).

                  The reason FO3 is such a step up from Oblivion is due to the XP system, which provides an immediate, tangible reward every time you kill a monster, along with various skills and perks, and yes, I have to admit, the quests, while few and far between, are somewhat nonlinear and interesting. Of cource, the main story buries all that underneath it’s foul, rotten corpse, but I digress.

                  I suppose one might say that New Vegas is the “best of both worlds”, but that really depends on what you consider “best”.

                10. krellen says:

                  Just a note to Dave and anyone else: water isn’t really an issue in New Vegas. There’s no ridiculous rule that all the water is tainted and irradiated. For the most part, water is clean where there’s an actual water ecosystem (and there is, in fact, a water ecosystem) and irradiated where it is standing stagnant pools around toxic waste dumps. So Goodsprings’s clean water isn’t a tutorial artefact, but a fact of life in the Mojave that does away with the water nonsense created in Fallout 3.

                  One of the crafting recipes is a pretty simple recipe (using boiling, condensing, and a little anti-radiation medicine) for purifying mass quantities of “dirty” water. You know – SCIENCE.

                11. Someone says:

                  Indeed, this is why the town is called Goodsprings. I think Dave was referring to the fact that the Courier wounding up in the only town around with fresh water is a bit contrived.

                  While the Mojave wasteland is located in a desert and should have a water problem on the scale of FO3, Lake Mead near Hoover Dam is a large source of fresh, clean water used by the occupying NCR to provide irrigation to the sharecroppers near New Vegas (using pumps they built), supply their troops and trade with the locals.

                12. Soylent Dave says:

                  @Daemian
                  Aye, it’s definitely less confining. I’m not sure that the plot hook is any better (I’m not feeling any more inclined to follow it than I was inclined to look for my Dad in FO3 (which I think I remembered to start doing 50 hours in) – especially as I’m pretty sure I know who the not-at-all-mystery villain is (unless the obvious bad guy is too obvious. Obviously.).

                  On the other hand, FO3 seemed to want me to care about the Dad quest a lot more (without ever actually making me give a toss), whereas NV doesn’t – so it definitely wins that one.

                  @Someone
                  I think the other problem with Oblivion was that every character eventually became brilliant at everything. Unless you put blinkers on and tried really hard, even your axe-wielding barbarian would end up flinging some fireballs about and picking locks.

                  I know there are still plenty of ways to make your character awesome at everything in FO3 (especially after Broken Steel brought another 10 levels of skill points), but I managed to do 3 characters who did things differently and (more importantly) felt different – I’ve never been able to do that in Oblivion. FO3’s main levelling curse being that certain skills weren’t as important as others.

                  New Vegas certainly seems more promising in that regard (and less perks will – I think – mean a more specialised character, as well as making your SPECIAL more important (I’m assuming that’s what they were going for – I know it’s ‘a bit more like Fallout 2’ as well, but I’m also assuming there’s a reason behind the decision other than nostalgia). Traits are fun, too.

                  And yes, I was saying that was a wee bit convenient that you end up in (what I thought was) the only town with reliable clean water.

                  On the other hand, of course, if there’s a clean water supply in an irradiated wasteland, someone is definitely going to build a settlement on top of it, so it’s not exactly Infinite Improbability Drive levels of plot convenience (and player characters are PCs because they’re important, and in the right place at the right time, so you have to forgive a lot of “Oh, I turned up just before the assassins did? Again?” or the game would be a bit disappointing)

                  And of course, if clean water isn’t even rare (as krellen has pointed out as well) then it’s not all that convenient anyway (but boo to that because I was looking forward to forcing myself to drink irradiated slurry in order to avoid dehydration at some point…)

                  I will point out to krellen that boiling water (i.e. what is probably Tritium) in a pressure cooker to make it not radioactive any more, makes my inner chemist wince a bit (it seems to assume that RadAway is powered by magic) – but it is still pretty cool. It’d be cooler if you created some radioactive waste in the process, though…

                13. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  Radiation is not that present in new vegas.But then again,its been 200+ years since the war,so it shouldnt really be.Its still present in mutated animals and food from the old days though.Also,doctors can heal you from radiation pretty cheap.So food,water and sleep are more of a danger than radiation.At least in hardcore mode.

                  And Im assuming that that radioactive goop gets stuck in the pressure cooker,which you throw away then(never made it,but with everything else you spend all the ingredients,so same here probably).

                14. Someone says:

                  @ Dave

                  Well, Goodsprings is also a logical place for your assailants to stay, waiting to get a drop on you. It also has a conveniently close cemetery.

                  Never actually had a feeling that my FO3 characters were all that different, you can basically use any weapon from the get go, regardless of your actual skill level or SPECIAL (explosives are especially guilty of this, they do so much damage that once you gain the schematics for bottlecap mines you are pretty much set for anything the game throws at you), have a decent accuracy with all weapons, enough health to bumrush most enemies, enough action points to make at least two shots with any weapon… you get the idea. If you didn’t get lots of speech, repair and science/lockpicking you were essentialy gimping yourself, since you never really hurt for skillpoints and the alternatives were pretty inferior anyway.

                  New Vegas introduced the old STR requirements and new skill requirements for the weapons, which addmitedly don’t always work, but generally force you to keep to your area of expertise when it comes to weapons, skillchecks are abundant (now barter is practically a substitute for speech for people who like compromises) giving you lots of ways to approach a situation, there is this whole crafting system and the amount of skillpoints and skillbooks has been greatly reduced (I don’t think I ever found more than 4). Really, it’s a much more well designed and thought out game than FO3, and while it does occasionally fall short, it doesn’t let you get everything you will ever need at level 3.

                  Funny thing about protagonist motivation, FO3 gave a (flimsy) motivation to “Good” characters, while NV gives a (somewhat less flimsy) motivation for Evil (REVENGGGGEEE!) and Neutral (Money) types, but no real reason to pursue the chip for the good guys, if you don’t count “it belongs to someone else, I have to return it” or “overpowering professional obligations”. Also the “man-in-a-checkered-coat” isn’t really the main villain, there are none in this game, which makes the story infinitely more appealing than “The good Paladins versus them evil Enclaves”, at least for me. Not to mention that there are a lot less rails and some more opportunities to get creative (no plot armor! that took balls). So yeah, the story in New Vegas is like Fallout 3, except good.

                  Look at me, going into another wall of text rave… maybe I should take up game reviewing, at least get paid for this stuff.

                15. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  “but no real reason to pursue the chip for the good guys, if you don't count “it belongs to someone else, I have to return it” or “overpowering professional obligations”.”

                  You cant say “if you dont count professional obligations”.You agreed to do a job,it even says so in one of the notes that youll be considered responsible if the package doesnt reach its destination.Plus,are you really going to leave some guy to get away with attempted murder and robbery?

                  Also,there is the element of mystery.Why is that chip so important that people are willing to kill for it?

                16. Someone says:

                  After getting shot in the head, a more levelheaded person would probably be content to just lay low for a while instead of chasing a band of murderers to get shot in the head some more. Granted, these kinds of people don’t make for very good protagonists but still.

                  I don’t think the contract actually says anything about your responsibility in case of a force majeure. Even if it does, it’s not like the Mojave Express has a black ops team it’s going to send after you, you just don’t get paid (and probably won’t get any more courier work, not that you’d want to).

                  And, for all you know, you will be risking your ass to return a useless shiny bauble to an overly sentimental prick with too much money on his hands.

                17. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  Maybe someone working as a doctor,or a teacher,or a baker wouldnt do it,but what if a policeman or someone from the army got shot in the head?I doubt theyd just back off.And thats basically what you are:A sort of an army scout.It is the world you were born in,so basically everyone can be considered as part of an army.It is a much harsher world than our own.

                  And why wouldnt you want to do your job anyore?Cops and soldiers get shot all the time,and they return to work when they recover.Firemen get burned and injured all the time,and when they recover,they come back to work.Sure,someone that doesnt have a life threatening job thinks no one sane would go back to such a line of work.But those that do life threatening jobs think differently.

                18. Someone says:

                  Again, you will be risking your neck for a shiny bauble. Cops and firemen save lives, you put your ass on the line to get a casino chip. It makes sense for Evil and Neutral aligned characters, but a Good character would probably forget about it and go rescue some orphan kittens or something, unless he is of the “Lawful Good Knight Templar” variety, and that attitude tends to rake in bad karma points in this particular universe.

                19. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  Not all cops are saving lives.Detectives working in robberies are doing their jobs for some shiny bauble,yet they too get shot.I know one cop who was severely beaten while taking away illegally parked cars.And when he recovered,he went back to being a cop.

                  Soldiers arent saving lives(except in rare cases),yet they are still risking their lives,usually for some shiny bauble(metaphorically speaking).

                20. Someone says:

                  Yet they are still doing good, or at least most of them believe they are doing good. They believe they are risking their life and wellbeing for a noble cause. A policeman upholds the law and prevents anarchy, property has to stay with the person it belongs to and cars have to be parked in an orderly fashion, lest chaos will befall mankind. A soldier protects his country and people.

                  A courier delivers packages. It’s useful but it’s not something heroic or noble, it’s just a job, that’s all.

                  Getting back that chip will probably not do any good or help anyone, it’s not a prototype vaccine against nightkin madness or ghoulitis, trying to get it back is a sign of stubbornness, not altruism.

                21. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  “Getting back that chip will probably not do any good or help anyone, it's not a prototype vaccine against nightkin madness or ghoulitis, trying to get it back is a sign of stubbornness, not altruism.”

                  And how do you know that?What if that chip has a microfilm with some important schematics on it?Or if its a key to some pre war tech?Or made from some platinum-like rare element?All you know is that that chip is worth so much that someone is willing to kill for it.

                  Also,why wouldnt a courier think their job is just as important for society as regulating parking is?Especially if said courier lives in a postapocalyptic world filled with mutated animals and gangsters,where merely going to the neighbouring town means risking your life.

                22. Someone says:

                  Now you are just being meta. As a player you know it obviously can’t be a simple chip as it is a Macguffin central to the plot. An ingame character has no reason to imagine anything beyond “its platinum so it costs a lot/ New Vegas cats have lots of money/ must be somebody’s lucky chip or something”, nobody, except maybe No-bark, will think of some grand conspiracy behind it.

                  Besides, even in a post-apoc world of Fallout lone couriers deliver letters, small packages and other small time stuff. If one wants to transport something really important, something worth dying over, one hires a caravan and some mercenaries to guard it.

                23. Zukhramm says:

                  I think revenge can work as motivation for a good character, and if not, there’s always trying to stop the Legion.

                24. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  Im not being meta.You get paid big money to transport something trivial.Ok,a bit odd,but people do such things.But then someone else tries to kill you for that thing?Yeah,I doubt youd think its just a trinket after that.

                  For your second point,you dont always hire an armed escort for something important.Sometimes not drawing suspicion is the key.

                25. krellen says:

                  Stop giving away the plot, Daemian.

                  Speaking as a real-life paladin, however, I will say that “finishing the job I was hired to complete” is, in fact, a good “Good” motivation. I don’t like leaving things half-assed, and if I was the sort of person that had the balls to deliver packages in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I don’t think getting shot in the head by some punk who claimed it was “just business” would stop me from finishing the job.

                  If for no other reason than I really really hate the idea of “just business” type people winning.

                26. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  I didnt realize I was giving anything away,since its what you learn from the first cutscene(ok,and maybe something you read when you get the pipboy,some 5 minutes in).

  17. Scourge says:

    There is already a fallout file hoster for the various mods. http://www.newvegasnexus.com/

    One of them makes repairing far easier by allowing a wider range, and letting you use wonderglue to fix hats.

  18. Kolobus says:

    Man, reading this makes me feel quite lucky! I’m playing the pc version (on a mac) and I’ve gotten to about the same place where Shamus gave up. I’ve only experienced one difficult bug when I was dealing with the White Glove society.

    At the end of the quest line Veronica kept switching to attack mode. I solved it by backtracking and leaving her in the main area of the casino, then going back and completing the last step of the quest.

    Beyond that I haven’t had a single issue or crash. Of course, by saying this I’ve doomed myself to encounter a massive, save corrupting bug the next time I play!

  19. Allan says:

    Aside from the screwy hats(Thank god for mods) I haven’t had nearly as much trouble as you Shamus, maybe you have a 3 or 4 for your luck value? :)

    One thing though that is driving me up the wall. Steam. I can always easily alt-tab out of the game to the desktop (say to look up something on the wiki) and I can easily go back into the game just alt-tabing back in or clicking on the thing in task bar. HOWEVER, if Steam ever pops up a single notice, about anything at all. That’s it. Game has crashed. Not just a crash to the desktop, but a total complete and utter system lockup crash. EFF YOU STEAM!

    This doesn’t even mention the time I wanted to play last night when my internet connection went down. And steam decided it would like to update(How does it know there’s an update if my connection is down and it can’t reach the servers!?), and then just hung there completely unresponsive for HALF AN HOUR before I end-tasked it and ripped out my ethernet cable. After doing and trying again so steam instantly offered me offline mode and after selecting “start in offline mode” it told me it couldn’t do that in offline mode. WHAT THE EFFING EFF STEAM!?

  20. pneuma08 says:

    Playing the Xbox version here.

    Shamus, what sidearm and what sledgehammer? It could be wonky game balance – I know that the early guns (especially the sidearms – .22 and 9mm) are peashooters, especially with the way armor works. And since weapons only degrade in quality below 75% now, I wouldn’t be surprised if the sledge outdamages the guns before armor and rate of fire. Worth looking into – I think I’ll make my next char melee-oriented and see what happens.

    Other than that, I got the debt collection quest bug (where talking to a guy added the quest to my log as “hand in”) and a subsequent bug after that; after handing in that quest I got an immediate quest to go kill a guy who had “run off to the strip” – turned out he was still sitting across the room and the guards in the bar shot him dead. I looted his body and got the reward right there, quickest quest ever. I also had the Ultra-luxe quest break with a bit out-of-order completions (I tend to sneak about in suspicious areas); I got a guy to give me a quest after I had already foiled his plans. If I hadn’t accepted out of pure curiosity, I would not be able to complete that quest.

    Oh, and somehow after blaming the whole child-abduction thing on the entire faction, I managed to get Idolized with them after convincing the guy not to boycott the entire strip. I don’t know if it’s weird backwards logic or (more likely) a bug.

    I met the Legion guy but I didn’t have any problems with him. I was very negative rep with them though so meh. I’m curious as to what is going to happen because the last time I was at their rendezvous point I murderized their guys. I suspect I may not be able to do that part of the quest but by all accounts it’s not a railroad (although I may be wrong).

    Oh, and there ought to be an item that you can use to repair clothing, like you can with weapons.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Melee trumps all ranged weapons,it seems(not counting explosives though).I can one hit kill things that require bunch of laser shots or a few plasma shots at my current level(10).Plus you dont need amo,and they are quite easy,and usually cheap to repair.

      1. X2-Eliah says:

        By the way, lasers are the absolute weakest weapons in game, plasma comes straight after. Next is tied with guns/meelee, and unarmed takes the cake (with power fist/displacer glove/ballistic fist).

        Well, except for the Anti-materiel rifle, that is just amazing.

        1. krellen says:

          Well, each round does weigh half a pound. At that size, you’re basically carting around artillery on your shoulder.

          1. Gandaug says:

            What’s weird is my .50cal weighs .25 pounds. I remember it weighing .5 pounds though. I do not have the Pack Rat perk. Looking up the round on The Vault wiki says .50cal weighs .25 pounds also.

            Odd.

            1. Daemian Lucifer says:

              Maybe theyve changed it with a patch.

            2. krellen says:

              Maybe it’s the AP rounds that weigh .5

              1. Gandaug says:

                Just looked. All my .50cal is .25 pounds.

                I’m wondering now if it’s one of the mods I installed. Which would be odd. The majority of the mods I installed are bug fixes and cosmetic. Zero of them have anything at all to do with .50cal ammo. I installed the SVD sniper rifle but it uses .308, and it has the exact same stats as the standard sniper. I just hate the sniper rifle’s model. I really can’t think of any of the mods that would’ve changed .50cal weight. Every other round is the same as it’s always been. I also have enough installed that I’m not going to bother trouble shooting it for a round that I only ever use when I want to go Deathclaw hunting.

                1. krellen says:

                  I could be misremembering, getting the .5 of the “.50 cal” mixed up with the “.25” for weight. I do make mistakes, occasionally (though, as a rule, I don’t make a habit of it.)

        2. acronix says:

          The problem with laser and plasma is that they are very weak and have no Damage Threshold reduction. Guns have Armor Piercing ammo, so you can get away with them. Melee is decent, but not awesome. An untrained character with an unarmed weapon just kills everything. I killed the “final bosses” using that, having just 20 points in unarmed.

        3. Irridium says:

          Thats why I’m hoping that the EVE mod ported from Fallout 3 to New Vegas will correct these issues.

          Hell it made me use energy weapons in Fallout 3.

          1. acronix says:

            There´s a cheap mod that adds a bit to AP to energy munnition, something like -3 or so. It´s actually not enough to hit the most dangerous enemies.

            I don´t know why they nerfed energy weapons, though. It´s not like you can get them early in the game like in Fallout 3. You can´t get any plasma until you get to around The Strip in a normal playtrough.

            1. Someone says:

              I think there are actually more mods for energy weapons then there are mods for guns. I may be wrong though.

              Remember that you can make Overcharged ammo for the Energy weapons at the crafting bench, I don’t know if it’s good enough to make them worth using though, haven’t tried an energy build yet. There are also some specialty weapons in Energy department, like the Incinerator (for some ungodly reason), Tesla Cannon and the Tesla-Beaton prototype (haven’t really tried it but it looks pretty deadly).

              1. acronix says:

                I suck at crafting forever. I´ll try to use that ammo with my energy test character, once I stop killing everyone and their cats with my melee monster.

                The Tesla prototype is quite useful, actually. It uses a mountain of ammo per shot, but it´s accurate and powerful enough even with puny energy skills. I cleared Caesar´s praetorians with that thing. Needed to kite them for a while, though.

              2. Irridium says:

                I don’t know if there’s more energy weapon mods then normal gun mods. If we’re talking about gameplay tweaks then probably. If we’re talking about weapons added then there’s no way.

                Either way, I’d say that the lightsaber mod falls into the energy weapon category, meaning energy weapons wins for me :D

            2. Daemian Lucifer says:

              I got a plasma pistol in the correctional facility,and plasma rifle shortly after it,at level 6 or so.I even got a laser pistol early on,and I did one short start with energy weapons,where doc gave me a laser pistol at the very beginning.But then again,I did choose that last perk about weird wasteland,so it could be me seeing the effect of that.

              1. acronix says:

                Do you remember where in the correctional, exactly? I may have missed them for some reason.

                The Wild Wasteland perk theretically only affects a bunch of stuff, but not anything else. At least, I haven´t noticed any major changes except for a very silly random encounter with killer grandmas.

                1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  I found indiana jones with it(well,a skeleton with a hat in a fridge).

                  As for where I got the plasma pistol,I think one of the named guys had it.

                2. Someone says:

                  The leader of the convicts has a plasma pistol, it’s in very lousy condition though.

                3. acronix says:

                  Oh, that skeleton is part of the Wild Wasteland trait.

    2. Jeff says:

      The reputation change there isn’t inaccurate, I think. You basically talked the guy into making his prices competitive for the strip, and since they know (presumably) you know, the fact that you didn’t screw them over due to it makes them like you.

  21. Nyaz says:

    Freeside, Atomic Wrangler: The NPC's talk as if there were prostitutes here. One of them even tells me to go talk to the girls. There's sound effects as if there were girls “working” here. But there are none anywhere in the building. Ever. You can do a quest to recruit three “more” prostitutes for them: A man, a robot, and a female ghoul. But the owner keeps talking about her “girls”.

    I noticed this one, too! (Xbox360 version)
    By mistake I strolled into the Atomic Wrangler, and suddenly I get to ask about “having a little R&R”, and the manager mentions that the hookers at the Wrangler are people, not slaves. Okay, I thought and tried to push the point… only to have it disappear completely? Also, there are no women in the entire damn place. I only have a guy with a moustache and a spiked collar asking me if I want to… do stuff… guh…

    1. acronix says:

      Wait until you see the robot asking you to do stuff!

      1. Gandaug says:

        The quest to get that robot had me actually laughing. Even the name of the robot. Oh, god, the name.

  22. Macil says:

    Hey Shamus,

    Sorry to hear you guys are having so much trouble. I’ve been having a blast with this game — and I thought Fallout 3 was “okay”, while I hold Fallout 1 and 2 as two of the best (if not the best) computer RPGs to date.

    I experience some crashes from time to time and a few odd bugs, but nothing show-stopping. I’ve been using this third party fix, which corrected a frame-rate issue for me, but may correct other issues, as well:

    http://newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34778

    There’s a lot of praise for it. You may give it a try if you haven’t yet.

  23. Zombie Pete says:

    I don’t know if it’s a bug, but the NRC hostages in the Boulder City ruins attacked me when I freed them. I wasn’t disguised as a Great Khan or anything. I killed them, of course, but now I’m working my ass off to get NRC fame back. Did this happen to anyone else?

    1. acronix says:

      You may have hit them accidentaly. In this game, the only accident that is forgiven by NPCs is stealing or trying to put a live grenade on someones pants.

      1. Someone says:

        I don’t know, I have accidentally hit my NCR allies plenty of times, and they never turned hostile. However, this may be because of my high reputation with the NCR or because it was always in combat, out of combat they might follow different rules.

        Whatever happened to the “surrender” ability, it was quite handy in Oblivion.

        1. acronix says:

          I think the surrender option is still there. You have to sheate your weapon, and they may leave you be. Haven´t tried it yet, but I saw the tip popping up a couple of times in the loading screens.

          1. Shamus says:

            Still works. I was gunning down some Legion idiots and accidentally tagged a trader’s escort. They forgave me once I put my weapon away.

            1. acronix says:

              Good to know! Not like I´ll use ever use it. I kill anything that dares to look at me funny. Even when I know it´s my fault.

              Since we are at it, did you tagged them in VATS, or down the ironsights or gunning and running without VATS? I have the suspicious that NPCs forgive you if you hit them in VATS or while gunning and running, but not if you hit them when looking through the ironsights.

              1. Someone says:

                I almost never used VATS, but I think I’ve had friendly fire accidents when I was firing from the hip and through a scope. Maybe the scope is the reason, you can get a friendly NPC to react if you aim at their face through an iron sight but I am not sure if they react to a scope.

            2. Someone says:

              Did you have a companion at the time? I tried that, even ran up to the wronged people and mashed the action button, which I think was how you did it in Oblivion, to no avail. Maybe Veronica just automatically engaged them preventing surrender.

            3. Irridium says:

              I remember in Fallout 3 it never worked for me. Ever.

              And I was friendly to everyone.

  24. I suspect that most of these bugs are due to the game engine being crappy,
    I’m sure the devs at Obsidian lost half their hair developing this.
    Unreal, idTech, Cryengine, and FEAR engines would have made it really easy for them as those engines are pretty solid.

    Oh and don’t be afraid folks at fully exploring the wasteland before heading into New Vegas.
    Although it is possible to race ahead in some quests, usually when that happens and you trigger the quest your character will say “Oh, do you mean these supplies I found?” or “Oh, those are already dead.”

    So Obsidian did put some effort into allowing you to play as you see fit.
    The game will warn you when you reach the main quest’s point of no return even, so exploring the wasteland, maybe starting in the lower left of the map and then exploring from south west to north east and skipping around New Vegas might be wise just so you can fast travel to all the future areas.

    Fallout New Vegas has twice as many locations and 50% more quests than Fallout 3.
    And there are a lot of criss-crossing back and forth, which is kinda nice as begin to more easily navigate by landmarks before long.

    I’m not sure if the Fallout: New Vega map is smaller than Fallout 3 or not, but it does seem better utilized. It’s also more populated. (or seems that way at least).

    I’m pretty sure the Fallout: New Vegas wiki is swelling daily with secrets, game/movie references, easter eggs and whatnot daily.
    Fallout: New Vegas is what Fallout 3 should have been. (minus the rotten game engine that is hardware temperamental obviously)

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Hehe,I love it when someone is asking you to do a dangerous mission,and then you go “Oh that,yeah I did that a while back”,and their enthusiasm goes down,but they still cough up the reward.

  25. LadyTL says:

    I’ve encountered a few bugs myself on my 360, mostly the one where your character’s arms pop up above their head. I heard rumors about the guns and armor that they underpowered them on purpose since people said they were overpowered in Fallout 3. Don’t know if it true or not but it sure feels that way. The best gun I have found so far though is the gauss rifle. It killed a deathclaw in two shots and the deathclaw mother in 5 even with low energy weapons skill. I really miss percentage skill checks though. I hate going blind into a conversation and finding out I’m a couple points short of the skill check but it’s auto-fail if you don’t have the exact amount.

    1. krellen says:

      I can one-shot deathclaws with a sniper rifle armed with JSP ammo (custom made ammo that gives a 50% damage bonus). I’m not sure that’s an underpowered gun.

      1. Someone says:

        Yeah, the sniper rifle is awesome. Everyone says AMR is the best gun but the sniper rifle has a much higher rate of fire and still enough damage to penetrate deathclaw armor. Oh, and a silencer.

        What’s JSP ammo? Can you find it somewhere in the game or its something you made in the GECK?

        1. krellen says:

          It’s ammo that requires a Perk to make. The Hand Loader perk, to be exact.

          Once I saw it, I broke down all my ammo and remade it as JSP.

          1. acronix says:

            Wish I knew that when I visited that deathclaw nest…

            At least they are fearsome again, and not some pansy overgrown monster. I´m also glad the sniper rifle is once again a good weapon.

            1. Someone says:

              Yeah, you can no longer defeat The Terror Of The Wastes with 2 cheapo bottlecap mines or a toy little dartgun.

              1. Gandaug says:

                Sneak attack critical with the AMR and match .50cal or AP .50cal will do it in one hit to the head though. With 100 Guns that is. I think a standard sniper rifle can do it too.

                1. Adam says:

                  As of the final official console version of the game, a HUNTING RIFLE with .308 JSP rounds can do that. Guns no longer come up quite so short against boxing gloves now! (All kidding aside, half the game is hunting deathclaws for me now.)

    2. Nidokoenig says:

      I remember reading an interview with someone about the Van Buren project(The original Fallout 3 project that was started shortly after Fallout Tactics), and one of the designers was saying he wanted to move away from random checks, simply because it hands victory to the person who doesn’t mind quickloading a dozen times.
      As a bit of a munchkin myself, I do find it a little immersion breaking to have a “press here to break game” button, which is what random checks look like. I’ll do my evil business in the stat screens, let me play the rest of the game without flagrant temptation. Might have been a nice compromise to have random checks for regular play and pass/fail for hardcore.

    3. Khizan says:

      I can’t stand the percentage success checks because it doesn’t actually force you to spend skill points to pass Speech checks. In New Vegas, it forces you to actually get good at Speech. If you want the benefits, you need to pay the price for them.

      There was nothing good about spamming quickload until I hit the 2% success chance required to finish the quest. It took no thought, it took no resources other than my playing time, and it essentially made Speech entirely useless. It was one of the LAST skills I took in FO3 because it was so worthless.

      In New Vegas, it was the first to 90, because I actually NEEDED the skill to get things.

      I found guns to be fairly useful, and beat most of the game with a 9mm for trash, and the AMR for serious threats. I approached most of the “hard” areas as a sniper, though. Sniping almost breaks the game because of pathing issues and aggro issues. I killed half of Camp Cottonwood with the silenced varmint rifle, and it took something like 30 shots for the Centurion and maybe a dozen for all the others, but none of them even came close to reaching me.

      1. LadyTL says:

        I had a hard time throughout the entire game with all the regular guns and I was playing on easy. I kept them repaired up and all but it seemed like none of them were doing any substantial amount of damage.

        As for the percentage checks, I never tried to spam loads just to pass a 2% check. I’m just more irritated that they throw checks in almost every conversation randomly and you can’t talk to them again with a higher skill to get that check again. I just wish I had them back for when I am just those 1 or 2 point short of a pass.

        Also what quest in fallout 3 did you have to pass a check to get? I don’t remember any quest checks that weren’t optional or just gave you an extra reward.

        Of course in fallout 3 I put point in speech right away so maybe I didn’t have to choose to reload a bunch of times.

  26. gilorian says:

    Couldn’t read the complete list. (was afraid of spoilers)
    But I have a theory on your hat problem.

    It’s something I noticed in FO3 as well.
    This is not based on facts, so someone who’s messed with the stats will probably confirm or deny it quite easily.

    My theory was that the game treats all headwear as armour. But some items aren’t meant to be armour and break very easily when you’re hit. So the motorcycle helmet for example has a nice DT and looks like a great replacement for a real helmet (it’s much lighter). Until you get hit a couple of times and it’s worthless.

  27. Hugo Sanchez says:

    Shamus, you have the WORST luck.

    I’ve had some problems with the game for sure, but nowhere near as many as that. The biggest bug I encountered was with the quest at Camp Mcarren where you have to stop the Monorail form exploding. More specifically, the Monorail ALWAYS explodes.

    I found a way around, but that was the only bug that limited progression for me in anyway.

    Aside from a crash every 4-5 hours, I experienced no real bugs of note.

    1. Someone says:

      I had a fun glitch with the monorail, when I saved it I was still standing inside the train car and was literally carried away into the New Vegas Strip, way before I was supposed to get there. Soldiers guarding the platform let me out, but wouldnt let me back in before I got higher reputation.

  28. Someone says:

    I’ve had very few of those bugs myself, just completed the game a few days ago and started a new one.

    A few pointers on avoiding/recovering from bugs:

    1. Hats.

    From what I gathered you can repair the hats you have on with the ones you don’t but NOT VISE VERSA (I don’t remember if it applies to weapons and armor as well)so if you unequip your broken hat you are screwed. I suppose it was done to prevent people from repairing away the stuff they were using, but it’s still confusing.

    2. Getting stuck.

    A fun way to get out of the level geometry without using cheats is to melee attack your companion in VATS. It should teleport you out of the level geometry and near the companion.

    3. Jean Sky Diving.

    Not actually a bug, just weird property tags.
    The shack appears to be owned by bandits, but if you do the NCRCF quests the real owner, a merchant, shows up. If you dont do it though, he is nowhere to be seen.

    The melee does seem overpowered. I played the first game as a sniper and the low to mid level guns absolutely sucked. The high powered late game weaponry was devastating though, once I found the All American and sniper rifle I was set for the rest of the game.

    Playing the second character as a melee/explosives/survival beefcake, melee is a bit overpowered. I can take out any legionaries or bandits the game throws at me. The giant radscorpions still give me hell though, they have a DT of about 20 so they are a threat even in the later levels.

    Interesting thing to note is that Stimpacks are almost completely worthless without a good medicine skill, with my high survival the crafted food entirely replaced them.

    1. Gandaug says:

      I think it’s the regular radscorpions that have have a DT of 20. The giants have a DT of 36. Highest DT I’ve seen in the game on an enemy. Even Deathclaws and Super Mutants have 30 DT.

      1. Someone says:

        Kind of a sudden transition, really. Giant radscorps weren’t all that dangerous in the original Fallout (drink!) games, and they were slightly stronger than molerats in FO3

        1. Gandaug says:

          You’re right. I like the change though.

        2. acronix says:

          Radscorpions aren´t dangerous. At least not in open spaces. You can kite them even with melee/unarmed thanks to their attack animation being slow. It gives you time to hit them and then stepback a bit. Rinse and repeat. You can even do that with a bunch of them following you as long as you have enough space to go in circles.

          1. Someone says:

            If you play on Hardcore and have a companion with you, they will gang up on him and kill him.

            I hilarious bug occured when I was playing yesterday, I managed to throw a grenade underneath a gian radscorpion, and when it blew up, the monster flew 4 meters up into the sky (in VATS slo-mo, no less!), fell down and died from fall damage.

          2. Gandaug says:

            That’s funny. When I first started playing and they were a threat they were faster than me. Even in light armor. If I didn’t kill them before they reached me I was dead. Which is hard to do with a 9mm and 10mm pistol. This being the giant radscorpions anyway.

            1. Someone says:

              *cough*easymode*cough*

              1. Gandaug says:

                Edit: nvm

                Didn’t understand at first. Now I do.

  29. Warden says:

    Have you gotten locked out of the Strip yet?
    That’s a fun one to fix, going through camp McCarren, sneaking into the monorail and finaly getting back inside, only to find out a different bug had closed off “Ring-a-Ding-Ding”, “House always wins, I” and turned every secruitron hostile.

    Anyway I’m surprised you like the Setting of NV more than F:3, it’s the only part I miss. Well I also miss being able to use bottlecap mines and the tesla cannon.

    1. acronix says:

      Oh, that´s a fun bug. I don´t know what activated it. I was working for the Legion when that happened. I can´t get into the monorail, though, since I blew it up…

  30. andy_k says:

    Awesome catalogue! I have beeen playing PC and have been VERY LUCKY not to have encountered major issues, or at least the issues I have encountered haven’t broken immersion – so I haven’t noticed them. The only one that has caught me is Veronica has disappeared whilst I was running around Freeside in my last play; I guess she is stuck in a door somewhere but I haven’t tried to find her yet, if I can’t find her I will have to lose an hour of gameplay to go back to an old save :(

    Although… Thinking back on it, I am not sure what she was doing while I was taking the black widow option with Benny. I guess she was there with us? She was certainly there afterwards. Hmmm. Creepy.

    Certainly enjoying the game in terms of story etc, my character is intelligent, charismatic and lucky, with terrible perception, agility, strength and endurance, so I have been successful in the casinos playing the slots, and avoiding the wastelands as they are too dangerous. Might chnage now I can buy speccy gear.

    1. Someone says:

      You can actually buy stat implants at the New Vegas clinic, just outside of the Crimson Caravan compound. The price is pretty steep (4000-6000 caps per implant) and the maximum amount apparently depends on your endurance, but I had 4 END and could tough out 3 implants.

      1. acronix says:

        It´s not like caps are worth using on anything except stimpacks, repair gear or AP bullets anyway. I got to 20 thousand caps fairly quickly with my Gunslinger character. The only thing I bought that was as pricey as the implants was the Not-Brotherhood Power Armor and a gauss rifle*.

        *That sucks.

        1. Someone says:

          Strange. I was actually struggling with caps throught the whole game, so I thought the economy wasn’t broken after level 10, for once. Maybe it had something to do with my playstyle, seeing how I spent all my stimpacks on Veronica during some of the tougher fights so I had to constantly stock up on them which reliably drained most of my accumulated caps (low barter didn’t help things). I also had low repair skill and had to pay lots of caps to keep my stuff in working condition. There is also some very good non-power armor availible in shops in the midgame (kind of a fallout tradition). And the implants are probably the biggest money sink, though the cheapen the stat choices somewhat.

          Also the Gauss Rifle does not suck, I briefly tried it at the BoS firing range and found that it reliably hits the target precisely where it was aimed, even though I had Energy Weapons skill of about 15. Had to crouch though.

          1. acronix says:

            It is accurate, yes, but I don´t find it useful. It wastes 5 microfusion cells per shot and I never could manage to deal as much damage as two or three shots the sniper or the antimateriel rifle (had them at around 50/50 in that character). I ended waiting for the enemy to come, hiding around corners, then punching them to death with a couple of punches from my power fist. Except when they were common mooks who died in one shot from almost anything.

            Addendum: I never bother with healing my companions. I guess you played on Hardcore?

            1. Someone says:

              Yep. Real men heal over time!

              The deal with Veronica might have been that she was affected by the “no leveling” bug, so she became inadequate in the mid to late game. That was likely the case because while Rex had ~500 HP when I was killing Caesar she only had ~200. Even my weak sniper character had more HP than she did at some point.

              What might have fixed the economy is the return of oldskool stimpack prices of ~200 caps. They did it with armor and weapons, why not do it with meds?

              1. acronix says:

                I guess real girls heal instantly, then?

                If your barter is low, some of the middle-level armor and weapons are quite expensive. However, I never had any reason to buy any of the expensive things (except for a metal and then a combat armor later, which were around 3000 by the time I got them), so it that may be it. But again, except for that, stims and AP ammo, I never bought anything.
                Though there aren´t many enemies with combat armor, so fixing it would be difficult. Good thing I got the power armor quickly*.

                *The fact that I accidentaly killed a Brotherhood patrol certainly helped my finances, now that I think of it. And with “I killed” I really mean Boone did it.

                1. Someone says:

                  Where did you find a brotherhood patrol?

                  I know you can get power armor very early if you find one of their dead patrols, you can loot 2-3 T51-b suits from. I made one well repaired out of them and handed it to Veronica since I didn’t have the training to use it.

                  Instead I bought the Advanced Combat Armor mkII for, like, 10000 caps at McCarran. Only used it for 3-4 levels though, got T45 power armor and the awesome Enclave armor after that.

                2. acronix says:

                  I found them at the Hidden Valley, at night. During day, they are not there. I was following one of the fences (the western one, I think) and walked into them. I think they were 3 or 4 men, so I got that many copies of the brotherhood armor. Took me a long while to get the training, though, even when I was rushing through the BoS quests to get it as soon as possible. Kept a couple for future repairs and sold the other ones for some nice profit, even with sucky barter (25 or so at the time).

                  Once you hit level 14 (or something), NCR rangers with riot armor start to appear around. I found a truckload of them inside the building in Camp Golf. Being sided with the Legion, my natural reaction was to put a stealthboy and kill a couple of them. It has 20 DT, needs no training and has no disadvantages. The problem is that to kill the wearer you need some big firepower, even with sneak criticals. I had to use the supersledge. And I say “the” supersledge because I couldn´t find any other anywhere…good weapons are much rarer in New Vegas.
                  Except for the power fist.

                3. Someone says:

                  I wonder if you can find Elite Ranger corpses if you check out Station Charlie in the late game. That would help people sided with the NCR to get their hands on it, seeing how they (strangely) don’t hand it out to their devoted lackeys. Isn’t it Faction armor though?

                  The Super Sledges are common on the Legion Praetorians, at least in the endgame. Tha game also has (annoying) randomized leveled shopping lists, so you can probably find some for sale at the Brotherhood or even in the general stores at later levels.

                4. acronix says:

                  Yes, it´s faction armor. I forgot about that. It´s nice to have if you are not sided with the NCR, since it will make them stop shooting at you or threating you like crap in dialogue. But the Brotherhood and the Legion will shoot your head off even when you are super friendly with them, so you need a second suit, and you won´t be able to use it in the very ending, I guess. But besides that, it´s quite nice.

                  It also has some clipping issues when you holster rifles.

                5. Gandaug says:

                  Combat armor MkII works just as well. Doesn’t look nearly as cool though.

                  I had to find a mod to give it better textures. Vanilla it’s pretty damn ugly.

                6. Someone says:

                  Yeah, it should look cool but… there is just something wrong about it, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, which makes it lame.

          2. Gandaug says:

            I broke the economy completely. I currently have over 300,000 caps. The only reason I don’t have more is I simply stopped selling things. It’s the way I play though. I explore and pick up everything of value.

            1. Someone says:

              By the way, I was playing on Very Hard in Hardcore mode, so I may have been spending more cash on supplies.

              1. Gandaug says:

                As am I. It really is my fault. I’m not exaggerating when I say I pick up everything of value. I explore every inch of ground inside and out. I pick up everything of any value and store it. If I have to leave and come back to the same location several times to haul everything out then so be it. The problem became worse when I realized how many things could be used in crafting. I had the same problem in FO3 and Oblivion. Even Morrowind. I’m a completionist. I want to see everything there is to see. I’ll easily double or more the intended play time length of a game.

                I’m having to put serious restrictions on myself just to keep any sort of challenge in the game.

                I mod the game heavily. It’s always been bug fixes and cosmetic stuff. I need to start finding difficulty increasers. I miss the days of Baldur’s Gate and getting destroyed by a wolf at level 1.

                I’m trying hard to not sound conceited or something. Please don’t take any of this as bragging. It’s simple truth that I’ll break any sort of free form sandbox-y game like this. I’m just glad I don’t let it get in the way of enjoying the story.

                1. Macil says:

                  I do the same thing, but to a slightly lesser degree, Gandaug. Also playing on Very Hard/Hardcore.

                  I generally only load up to max weight on myself and my two companions the first time through an area. And I repair all the stuff I find to maximum condition before I sell or stockpile (which also helps with weight).

                  Last time I checked, I’ve bartered around 100K caps. I’m sure that number has changed by now to like 150 or 200K.

                  I spend the money all the time, just stockpiling ammo or doing silly things like putting all my companions in 100% condition power armor. Funny watching them in the Lucky 38. I’ve never had a money problem, though.

                  As far as challenge, I have a maxed guns, high luck/crit-related perk character, who walks around in a formal dress, 1 or 2 hitting everything with a sniper rifle. Challenging? No. Fun? Yes!

                  Ironically, I’m a very diplomatic-minded player, with high charisma/speech and good karma. :)

                2. acronix says:

                  I´m baffled. How can youplay on Very Hard? I keep it on Easy because dying is too much of an immersion breaker for me. Though shotgunning someone´s head at point-blank and have them surviving is probably what really offends me.

                  What´s your secret?

                3. Macil says:

                  That just depends. Some of it will be skill-related, some of it is related to a good character build.

                  I focus on perks that give me advantages that I can’t otherwise obtain or workaround (like bigger crits, or stat increases). I started with a high intelligence for lots of skill points, with Repair, Guns and Speech as tags. My final stats, near the end of the game, are (agil might be off 1): (S6 /w pa, P7, E5, C7, I10, A7, L10).

                  The lower levels are more challenging than the later levels — you’ll have to be craftier in your combat interactions. Here are some tips, but these will become less important as your progress in gear/skill/level/etc:

                  – don’t rely on VATs/save it for shots that need to count
                  – don’t stop moving in a fire-fight/use cover
                  – don’t get caught in the open/have as few guys attacking you as possible
                  – attempt to lure enemies into choke-points (bonus points for putting mines into chokes)
                  – if you have to engage multiple enemies, take as few as possible at a time
                  – use area transitions to your advantage
                  – use companions as meatshields (and give them stims or stim them yourself)
                  – keep weapons in good condition
                  – exploit geometry/terrain to delay or obstruct enemies
                  – crouch for accuracy/sneak attacks
                  – stock up on sunset sarsaparilla as a substitute for stims (it has great hp regen)
                  – loot everything, haul everything, sell/store/repair everything (I used a house in Goodsprings for half the game to collect like 2500wg of loot)

                4. Gandaug says:

                  Pretty much what Macil said.

                  -Don’t go into a situation not knowing what you’re getting into.
                  -Craft. Hand Loader along with high Repair, Survival, and Medicine will keep you stocked with everything you could possibly want. Vigilant Recycler if you went energy weapons instead of Guns.
                  -Stockpile everything. Only sell something that is truly useless to you. I use the dumpsters outside of the Goodsprings General Store for my stockpiling. A couple things in the mailbox close to them also. If you are truly short on caps and need something from a store you can barter your stockpiled equipment.

              2. Someone says:

                Leetle leetle man!

                Dying isn’t an immersion breaker for us, at least for me. And really, the game turns into a cakewalk after about level 10, the combat becomes really easy, with a few satisfyingly difficult exceptions.

                EDIT: Yeah, that was supposed to be an answer to acronix

      2. Warden says:

        Odd. I had an Endurance of 5 and could get 5 implants.
        *looks at wiki*
        Seems you lost out on one implant, or you originally had 3 endurance and boosted it in some other method.

        Anyway those implants (the stat boosters, not the useless health regen) and the Intense Training Perk were helpful in moving my character from energy to standard guns. I never realised how much I relied on Bobbleheads.

        1. Someone says:

          Yeah, I got the third one just before the endgame and didn’t bother to check if I could get another one. Apparently the number of implants you can get decked out with is equal to your END, which is ridiculous. They should have at least made it END/2, maybe END/3.

          1. acronix says:

            I agree. It´s still less stupid than bobbleheads, though…

      3. andy_k says:

        Woot! Thanks for the heads up :)

  31. somecrazyfan says:

    You should be payed for all your trouble, finding those bugs and glitches.Ant btw, what is “goty”?

    1. acronix says:

      Game Of The Year, I think.

    2. Someone says:

      Game Of The Year edition, which is a ridiculously self-indulgent name for a “game+all the addons/DLC” pack.

      1. Robyrt says:

        No more self-indulgent than labeling your movie “Best Picture Edition,” although generally movies get enough free publicity they don’t need to do that. Fallout actually did win Game of the Year somewhere, I’m sure – the Oblivion/Bioshock double pack has 81 Game of the Year awards between them.

        1. Someone says:

          Maybe it did, but I think the “Full DLC pack” of any game gets labeled “GOTY edition”, regardless of its actual status these days. I might be wrong though.

          1. Allan says:

            Nah, they’re usually called something like “Ultimate Edition” or “[PRECIOUS METAL] Edition”, sometimes even “[PRECIOUS STONE] Edition”. I haven’t actually seen many GOTYs.

            1. X2-Eliah says:

              I’d love to see Fallout: New Vegas Obsidian Edition.

  32. Kuyo says:

    I think the delivery for the gun runners is actually supposed to be out in the middle of nowhere.

    Most of the problems I had were with physics problems like rocks coming to a point leaving a hole that reveals the rock is actually hollow, also the invisible walls whenever I went mountain climbing.

    I like the faction affinity thing its got, so distinct morality is just nowhere to be found. If only they had committed instead of having Sharon Cassidy bitch at me about a morality meter I can’t even see that’s only low because I play a klepto who steals all the caps and cigarettes from McCarran because I don’t consider it their property if they never get around to picking it off the ground.

  33. Gandaug says:

    I can comment more later, but I’m tired now.

    ********Somewhat Spoiler-ish********
    The only real bug I’ve run into was with the “I Put a Spell on You” quest in Camp McCarran. The spy wouldn’t say his lines when you enter the tower to investigate. At that point your only choice to continue the quest is to kill the spy. If you kill the spy there is zero chance of saving the monorail. Even if you disarm the bomb before it leaves it will blow up. I reloaded an previous save and found the way to avoid that bug. You absolutely can not be spotted while you are waiting to watch the spy enter the tower. If you are he confronts you about why you’re out at that hour. Avoiding that is what fixed the quest for me. It turns out it didn’t really matter if I saved the monorail or not. I’ve not used it even once.
    *******End Spoilers********

    The only other bugs I’ve run into is random freezes. I keep up on my saves though so it has only once managed to knock me back by more than 10 minutes.

  34. qwksndmonster says:

    My computer was chugging whenever I was near around 5 or more NPCs. I learned from somebody on the Twenty Sided Minecraft Server Of Awesomeness (TM) that this is a common problem caused by facial animations overusing the processor. I got a fix for it online, and now I only suffer from SOME bugs.

  35. Daemian Lucifer says:

    What I find interesting is how people are saying “I had my share of crashes,but no major bugs”.When did a crash become a minor bug?I remember when minor bugs were graphical glitches,text and sound problems and such,and crashes were considered major.Whenever your game crashed because of the same reason twice,it was considered something extremely bad,but now people seem to be just shrugging it and finding ways around it.It makes me really sad.

    I didnt have anything but crashes as a problem with new vegas(well,a few minor things like enemies falling in the geometry),and I still am pissed,and glad I didnt pay full price for the game.

    1. krellen says:

      Crashes became minor bugs when Windows stopped having crash = blue screen. So around Windows NT/2000.

    2. Zukhramm says:

      If having crashes is major, all games I’ve played in reasent time have been unplayable bug filled games. Three crasher over my so far 40 hours in New Vegas is minor in my mind.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        “If having crashes is major, all games I've played in reasent time have been unplayable bug filled games.”

        And who says they arent?Really,compare recent games to those of old and youll see that newer titles(aside from some indie games)are bugfest.

        1. Gandaug says:

          You’re right about that. I think the problem has multiple sources.

  36. brainbosh says:

    I just finished the game, and I have to say that I enjoyed the story a lot more than Fallout 3’s. However, I encountered a LOT of bugs playing through, especially towards endgame.

    It seemed like almost all of the companion quests were bugged or poorly designed, requiring them to be with you during certain events in order to advance their quest, even when in normal play you would not have encountered them yet. Raul’s quest requires that you talk to Ranger Andy in Novac, but only works right if it is the FIRST time you’ve talked to Andy.

    I ended up with metaquests: the quest to figure out how to get the quest to work.

    Strange that I have not seen anyone comment on one of the most annoying bugs, in the crafting screens. Every time I open one, and move the mouse over to the ingredient window, unless I do it EXACTLY right, a horrendous buzzing occurs where it replays the menu click sound a dozen times a second. Then, after looking at the ingredients for that recipe, you cannot look at any other recipe in the menu without closing it and opening it again. Not a game-breaking bug, but really annoying when I first found it.

    I really want to love this game.

    1. Mormegil says:

      I restarted for this reason – another example is you need Boone to enter Nipton with you to kill the Legion there despite that if you’re just following the normal quest line there’s no way you’d have met him by then.

      Of course on my new game I’ve now got quests breaking that worked fine before (the nightkin killing the brahmin in Novac – I can kill him but never get the dialogue from the farmer to say I’ve fixed his problem).

      1. Gandaug says:

        Nipton can help you with Boone’s quests but it’s not necessary.

        http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/I_Forgot_to_Remember_to_Forget

  37. Solid Jake says:

    “Have to cheat (which will disable achievements) or re-load the game. I think achievements give XP, so re-load it is.”

    Actually Shamus, it only disables Achievements for that session. So you can turn on noclip to unstick yourself (or use any other cheat for that matter), save and exit, restart New Vegas and load your game and still acquire Achievements normally.

    Also, it’s the in-game “Challenges” that award XP, not the Steam “Achievements.” There is some overlap between the two which often makes it seem as if the Achievements are awarding XP. I know using the console temporarily disables getting Achievements, but I don’t know if it does the same to Challenges. I don’t believe it does though.

    1. Gandaug says:

      Console definitely does not disable Challenges.

      I couldn’t care less about achievements so I’ve used console here and there for many reasons. I dread the day they actually assign points to achievements like Gamer Points on the Xbox and GFWL.

      1. Will says:

        Console doesn’t disable Steam Achievements either; i figured it would and fully expected it to do so, but noticed to my surprise that i was still racking up achievements on Steam even after i got bored and decided to run around on god mode with the orbital cannon as my only weapon.

  38. PurePareidolia says:

    Best I can tell there’s no reason to bring guns above 25 – the highest firearms check I found was 45 and I had a Milsurp review magazine. I’m playing mainly a melee character but I’ve found little to no difference between how easy it was to shoot people with me melee or my guns character. I can snipe people and gun them down with impunity, it’s really easy. on the other hand, I have nearly 100 on my melee skill which lets me absolutely tear people apart who get remotely close to me.

    Science, speech and lockpick are still essential to max out, repair is fairly useless over 50, sneak is kind of pointless, medicine is actually pretty useful now, survival is alright, barter is more useful but not that useful and energy weapons/explosives look useful but I’ve yet to play with those builds.

    As for bugs, I encountered the Victor Novac one, the somewhat odd hart repair logic (I find you have to unequip certain things to use them for repairs). I wish I could name savegames, but that would mean opening the console which invalidates achievements (or something), but I named them all the time in fallout 3. hitting the console and just going “save abouttokilleveryone” was almost as easy as quicksaving.

    Still thoroughly enjoying myself though.

    1. poiumty says:

      Repair useless over 50? Maybe if you’re a melee character, but the Hand Loader and Jury Rigging perks are a godsend on a guns-using char.

      Funny how i found very few bugs. Sure, a couple of crashes here and there (the game specifically seems to shoot itself in the foot around the roulette) and there’s this really weird sound problem that started popping up recently where the game adds a loud and ear-wrecking sound effect every minute or so that lasts for 10ish seconds. Still haven’t figured out how to stop it.

      But believe it or not, this is a huge improvement over Fallout 3 for me. Damn game crashed every 20 minutes.

    2. Gandaug says:

      Truthfully all the weapon skills drop off in usefulness after 50 unless you want a perk related to them.

      Even so they still increase your damage, handling, and accuracy in and out of VATS.

    3. Decius says:

      I’m not sure if it is a bug or not, but I used tcl several times for things like looting a corpse that fell through the floor, or talking to a NPC who was far inside a rock. I was not awarded some achievements, but later was awarded others. I thought at the time it was a connection issue, since later on I got others. My second character used ‘traitmenu’ first thing in order to get four traits. I just confirmed that he has unlocked at least one. Maybe its a flag that gets set for that session?

      Also, having a hat with 0 condition only removed its armor value for me, not the appearance or +1 PER.

  39. (LK) says:

    I still cannot exit the game without it hanging and having to be closed manually (not “New Vegas has stopped working” closed manually… I mean control-alt-delete manually, otherwise my computer will sit there for an hour unresponsive). The sad part is, this being Gamebryo, I know this is probably the condition that the game will remain in, forever.

    1. Gandaug says:

      If you’re willing to use console commands then “qqq” should exit you right to desktop.

      1. (LK) says:

        Thanks, I’ll try that.

        Though if I remember right the crash (this happened with Oblivion and Fallout 3 as well) has something to do with the game doing something wrong when it lets go of the memory it had set aside for itself, so any means by which the program exits might be affected.

        For anyone else afflicted: settings are lost because the game writes them to the config file upon exit and the crash stops it from reaching that point. Editing your config file manually should keep settings the way you want them permanently.

  40. Bruno says:

    “Freeside, Mick & Ralphs: Mick is standing in a corner, facing the wall? Always?”

    It’s neither a bug or a glitch. Just talk to him and ask for the “special stuff” and you’ll see why he is there.

    My luck must be 10 because I had only one or two bugs on the Xbox. Guess I’m part of a lucky few.

  41. Drejer says:

    (Josh has once again broken the game over his knee with melee)
    I laughed, can’t wait for the Fallout: New vegas let’s play and the journeys of Reginald Cuffburt

  42. Death Row says:

    Interesting, I wonder why the game has only given me an occasional crash. This old broken down piece of junk computer must be very good at handling buggy software… Actually that would explain a lot.

    Once I fell into the floor however, (forget where) Fortunately there’s a fail-safe that teleported me back to the areas entrance. Every game should have that fail-safe.

  43. krellen says:

    I just finished the game, and I must say that the game is every single bit the masterpiece I thought it would be. Because war … war never changes.

  44. seraphim says:

    You know like most people I had been getting annoyed with the bugs, crashes and general unfinished/unpolished feel of the game. Then after acompanying Boone an the wholesale slaughter of the legion at Cottonwood Cove, ‘Romanes Eunt Domus’ appears grafittid on the wall of the headquarters and all is instantly forgiven :D

  45. Sozac says:

    That sucks bugs don’t seem that bad on the console version. They patched the only gamebreaking old cowboy hat one.

  46. BenD says:

    With many of the glitches fixed (and many more yet to go) and so much variety of scenery, crafting and other goodies that make FNV appeal to me more than F3, I found myself drifting from FNV’s storyline, feeling detached and… well, it just wasn’t as GOOD as F3, and I didn’t know why.

    Until wandering around the Escapist I encountered this.

    Ah ha! That’s it.

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