Fallout New Vegas Might Work Better Now
Obsidian's high-selling (five million in its first month, they say) Fallout 3 expandosequel New Vegas might be somewhat, ah, divisive, but it's certainly got plenty of earnestly enthusiastic fans. And they will certainly be glad to hear that a megapatch landed yesterday, purporting to finally fix up a ton of the RPG's infamous bugs. It doesn't look like this is going to be a KOTOR 2 situation, thankfully - Obsidian/Bethesda seem pretty keen to get this slightly battered watch ticking properly again.
Here's what it does, in detail. I hate posting lists. The code's so fiddly. Can't we just have big, ugly blocks of text, like in the Geocities days? Bah, alright.
- Companions now show up as waypoints on the map
- Companions will always fast travel with you, unless told to wait or sent away
- Fix: DLC error/save corruption
- Fix: Stuttering with water effects
- Fix: Severe performance issues with DirectX.
- Fix: Controls temporarily disabled after reloading Cowboy Repeater while crouched
- Fixed crash using the Euclid C-Finder while having the Heave Ho perk
- Fix: Entering the strip after Debt Collector causes crash and autosave corruption
- Fix: Using Mojave Express dropbox can cause DLC warnings
- Fixed crash when buying duplicate caravan cards from a vendor in a single transaction
- Crafting menu should filter valid (bright) recipes to the top of the list
- Fix: Sitting down while looking down a weapon's ironsights leaves player control locked
- Fix: If a companion is knocked unconscious with broken limbs they stay broken on respawn
- Fix for varmint night scope effect persisting in kill cam
- Fix for giving companions armor that adds STR does not increase their carry weight
- Fix NPC Repair menu displays DAM as DPS
- Having NPC repair service rifle with forged receiver decreases CND
Jolly good. All these things sound important, and their repair should make for a far finer experience. Especially "Severe performance issues with DirectX." Though it sure would be nice if developers fixed major problems before releasing their product to paying customers in future.
To grab this version 1.2.0 patch, let the game update on Steam. Though apparently there's a bug in that too, for some people. If the game doesn't launch after patching, right-click on it in Steam, hit Properties, click the "Local Files" tab, click on "Verify Integrity of Game Cache", wait, try again.
A "comprehensive" patch is still promised in the weeks to come, so if you're still on the rad-scorched fence about this you might want to hold off a bit longer yet. I'll almost certainly go into New Vegas myself at some point, but I'm also waiting for the mod scene to get up a head of steam first. Got any good mod-tips for it, in fact?