I started writing this in the Fallout 4 modding thread but then I figured I’d better not hijack it.
I’ve been watching the Fallout show with my wife, and answering various background questions has gotten me thinking about the one time I’ve played through Fallout New Vegas, which was probably a decade plus ago. The show is very faithful to the game and has a bunch of little references, and those two things have put me in the mood for another Fallout New Vegas run, especially since I’ve never done any of the DLC quests.
I downloaded the Viva New Vegas mod pack to start with and I can definitely say it makes New Vegas much less clunky than I remember it being, in terms of movement and such. But I’m wondering if there’s any other must have mods I should pick up before I get too deep into this playthrough.
I’m more hesitant with FNV mods than F4 mods, because NV, despite stability and bug fix mods, seems less stable - more crashes, especially the spinning roulette wheel of death, but, I still love the story and more challenging difficulty curve in regards to making money/keeping yourself repaired until level 14 (Jury Rigging FTW). Viva New Vegas will probably help with most things, so mention if there’s anything you’re specifically looking for!
Otherwise, again, most of the stuff I would add especially fixes all seem to be in the mega pack you already have.
(checks nexus mods)
A little janky, but I loved Weapon Mods Extended - why can’t I put a scope on a .357 Carbine? I mean, there’s one in the game! So on and so forth, makes purchasable or craftable mods available for a wider range of items, including uniques. Helps keep your favorite options useable later.
I just wrapped up a pretty exhaustive (every quest, every companion, a couple of different endings) playthrough of FNV this weekend. I did so on a Windows 11 machine with a processor no one could have dreamed of when the game was released (12th-gen Intel I7, 12 cores plus 8 hyperthreads) and a lot of other system hardware way out of what the game was designed for, so I definitely needed a lot of stability and compatibility patching before I installed any gameplay mods.
Yeah, I agree with all this, something about New Vegas just feels right.
By the way, speaking of feeling, the show absolutely nails the feeling of blowing up hordes of enemies in slow motion while jaunty tunes from the 40s and 50s play.
So far I haven’t felt like I was missing anything so maybe you’re right. The only mod I added was a way to fill empty water bottles at water sources, as in FO4.
Oooh, seems fun, I love FO4’s crafting so I’ll have to see about adding this one, thank you!
You can definitely tell the difference on a modern machine, I’m on an ultra wide monitor with all ultra settings and I’m both having amazing performance and basically instant load screens.
Yes, I’m using that overhaul pack, with Wabbajack it was very easy to install.
I’ve been avoiding season 2 of the Fallout show since I know it leans heavily on FNV lore. I have FNV, but I never really got into it (I think partly since I had already been playing a lot of FO4 and I had Fallout burnout). But I’ve heard so much about how it’s the best Fallout, with the best story line, it’s the most RPG-like, yadda yadda, that I guess I should give it another shot.
At some point I’ll probably download that Viva New Vegas mod pack, check this thread for tips and tricks, and do a FNV replay. Thanks for starting the thread!
I do like it a lot, I love Caesar’s Legion as antagonists. And FNV does a great job of tying little plot lines together. Like, near the beginning there’s a prison some NCR chain gang prisoners broke out from and took over, and the gang they formed is a minor faction you have to deal with across multiple early game towns.
That said…
If part of what made you bounce off it is that the game feels dated, the mod pack helps a lot (especially with movement) but you can still tell that it’s an old game. Yesterday I went in a cave I’ve never been in on prior playthroughs and I swore I was in Oblivion.
If you can get past that, it’s a great game and you’ll be immersed. But if that’s why you bounced off, it’s still a bit like that.
No, I’ve played a few pretty old games fairly recently and didn’t have a problem with datedness. I mean, FNV did feel a little dated and janky after just having played FO4, but that’s not why I gave up on FNV. And with the mod pack helping relieve the datedness, I think I’ll be fine.
Agreed, and if you didn’t see the holiday musical medley “The Ghoul Log” you should. I’ve watched all of season 1, and will be doing all of Season 2 in daily evening watches shortly.
Be warned, the weapons mod extended will make you start hunting or hoarding random crap so you can make stuff later (also like F4!), and I really would love if they updated it and cleaned it up.
It’s not my personal favourite, but it’s fine and worth playing. As a bonus: if you like having 8,329 different types of ammo in your inventory, you’re in luck!
The argument about “best” fallout game is a thing of countless web-wars, and not a few threads here.
IMHO Fallout NV has the most open story for actual Role-Playing. Who the character was is almost completely up to you. Sure there’s hints and insinuations about a couple of things, but other than being a courier, it’s all up to you.
The factions run from serious to silly, or both, simultaneously, and the quest is a lot more accessible: revenge! Or revenge with a side of helping/hurting everyone around you.
No “Chosen one”, no missing family to chase, just find who did you wrong. So if you’re a fan of “Man with no name” westerns, it’ll hit you right in the sweet spot.
But, the 12 cores are eight main cores (the stuff you want for gaming) and four efficiency cores (weaker and less oomph than the P cores…meant to deal with things like background processes).
That is totally fine and the new normal these days.
But yeah…modern PCs can handle some pretty great mods for FNV fer sure. Almost a whole new experience. If you (general “you”) played it ten years ago and think “been there, done that” try it again with modern mods. It’s pretty great.
ETA: FWIW my CPU has 8 cores and 16 hyperthreads but what it lacks in cores/threads is made up with outstanding L1 & L2 cache. Not better, just different. Each has their strong points and both are very good.
The only mod I remember using for it was to remove most of the invisible walls. I hated scaling some mountain just to go donk against dev fiat.
It’s a good game and worth playing. I feel like it’s a little over-praised but that’s not the fault of the game. Some stuff felt tacked on or poorly implemented. I played an Evil guy once and karma was completely pointless. I murdered and ate basically every person I came across and had tanked my karma but it made no actual difference. Losing faction certainly mattered towards making people hostile but losing karma was just cosmetic.
So I’m a good chunk into the game. I’m taking it much slower than I must have last time around, because I don’t remember many of these side quests even though I know I finished the game before. I got to Fort McCarran and have basically been doing every quest for them, which has been fun and taken me to a number of vaults so far.
I still haven’t gone into Freeside, I’ve been too busy helping the NCR. I want to go in to confront Benny soon but on the other hand I really want to check out the Great Khan camp. I negotiated a ceasefire between some Khans and the NCR and got invited to check out their main camp; I’ve never gone there in prior playthroughs, so I kinda want to check it out before I go too much further with the story.
I have Boone with me and he’s probably pretty frustrated that we haven’t done much Legion hunting yet. I was kinda thinking of staying neutral to start so I can experience some Legion content, but I honestly forgot how downright evil they are in person in the time since I’ve last played this game, so I don’t know if I can stomach it. I might just go and make Boone happy soon instead.
Legion hunting early on means facing grotesquely powerful legion death squads, so no problems delaying it a bit, but later on those same squads = huge tasty chunks of caps because their weapons are so powerful/pricey.
And if you use the Desert Armor from Honest Hearts or the Riot Armor from Lonesome Road, it’s a ready source of medium armor to do repairs that would otherwise get really expensive (thank you Jury Rigging!).
I just looted a vault with an armory full of military grade weaponry. I’m at about double my encumbrance and slowly marching back to the Gun Runners because this loot was too delicious to leave behind. I’m gonna sell much of it but some is going to become my new main weaponry (marksman’s carbine… My precious!).
I’ll probably leave Boone at home for a bit and at least see if Caesar has any quests that target clearly bad guys like raiders or something, or if you’re hurting the NCR right away in which case I’ll just tell him to piss off.
Many Legion quests are parallel to the NCR quests - so you go some of the same places, but to keep stuff out of NCR hands, or to use those things against the NCR. Or gain the allegiance of various FNV factions (like the Great Khans you mention) for the Legion. Otherwise, you’re most killing NCR, killing anti-Legion individuals, not much honestly to do for them that isn’t going to badly hurt your NCR faction.
I’m starting to see the need for this perk as I start to use more advanced and rare weapons. I haven’t seen anything I can use to repair my Marksman Carbine or my Riot Shotgun (both courtesy of the that vault I looted) and have never seen either weapon before in this run, not even at the Gun Runners.
I just picked up 70 barter and the Pack Rat perk (which is super nice on Survival, halfs the weight of water, most food, and ammo!). Before that, I got to 70 lockpick so I can put on a +5 lockpick vault suit and open hard locks. I am thinking Repair will be next. Although jury rigging takes 90 so it will be a while.
The one thing you need to keep in mind above all else is that FNV is a 32 bit game. That means by default that it can only access 2GB of RAM. It doesn’t matter if your PC has 32 GB of RAM, the game can’t use it. There’s a 4 GB patch that you can use to double the RAM to 4 GB instead of 2, but that’s as far as you can take it (2 to the 32nd power is 4 GB, so that’s a hard limit that you just can’t get past).
I avoid high res texture mods like the plague, because they’ll crash your system faster than anything else. This is especially true since FNV’s game engine leaks memory out of its texture caching system. This is the main reason that the game gets more and more likely to crash the longer you play it.
I keep my graphics settings on medium quality, and I have a few stability patches, and my FNV rarely crashes, even if I play it for hours. And I have a lot of mods.
