I started with Fallout 3 and since then I've fallen in love with the Fallout series, I played 1 and 2 after that and later on New Vegas came out. So far I haven't been disappointed. Only one real way to find out is to play and see for yourself.
Maybe you can play it a local game store or at a friends place before you get it? Or just wait for the reviews.

The only thing I'm not really hyped of, is if much of the game is dedicated to oppressed androids of whateverthehell place it is as was hinted in FO3. And the possibility of losing iron sights because that was from obsidian not bethesda.

Basically, I like fallouts as long and as far as I get to butcher raiders and other hoodlums.
When it goes to flinging plasma at robots and monsters my interest rate plummets.

And IMO, skulking about in ruins and sniping raiders, is a lot more fun in FO3 and NV than ever in 1,2 or tactics. Plotwise 1 and 2 are still ahead, but NV is right behind.

Having had more time to think about it, the answer is easy: No bethesda game will be worth full price at release. Terrible game design choices to be remedied years later through patches or mods, awful bugs and lack of polish. Leave it in the back burner until the game is fixed post-release and be pleasantly surprised instead of risking heartburn and regret.

Bethesda is the bug king, sure bugs increase with complexity but theirs are disproportional not limited to small things that don't break quests and they've never heard of polish. If it weren't for others fixing their games they would remain a complete mess.

Just take the Skyrim Unofficial Patch as an example, that list doesn't even include the addons.

I waited until last year to play Skyrim, I watched and tracked mods since before the Creation Kit was released and by the time I finally played it last year I had a massive list of mods already downloaded and ready to use. I had a peek at the game a few times before that, such as when I installed it for someone but I have to say, without the mods I couldn't stomach it. The interface alone was enough to put me off and put off others I installed it for to the point they stopped playing (until mods made that better eventually).

If it wasn't for the mods improving, fixing, populating, patching and completing their games, they wouldn't be anything special and wouldn't enjoy either the popularity or long lasting sales they do.

Which is one of the reasons Bethesda trying to make money off the work of modders makes me sick, it's utterly disgusting.

That's one take. Another is how I played Skyrim through right after release, never noticing a single bug.
Well may be I ran into some, but didn't notice and didn't mind.

Later, I've installed a "mark companions as essential", so I don't need to babysit them so much, also tried a few weapons and armor sets, but everything I've tried seemed horribly out of place.

Will make sure to grab the unofficial patch if I install the game again, thanks for that.

True. Very.

Damn straight it's disgusting. If it weren't for the legion of modders out there, most of their games would still be unplayable to this day.
FYI the most complete patch-only mod for F:NV is YUP, available on Nexus. It only fixes things which are either bugs or unintended oversights and doesn't add any new content. I believe it's still being updated, since it seems the amount of bugs in Obsidian games is neverending.

For stuff that's about additions but IMO still perfectly in line with the Fallout universe, I'd check out Project: Nevada. It's completely configurable so you can only install the things you want. It can potentially make the game much more difficult (e.g. no food healing, etc.) but also adds vision modes for power armor.

There's also JE Sawyer's mod (one of the designers of F:NV), which is his own personal unofficial mod which rebalances things. I personally haven't used it since I don't agree with all of the changes, but it's pretty popular.

+ 1 for that, wasn't aware. I'm likely to take a new dive into NV sooner or later, so much appreciated.

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Ok, I thought I'd skip the bug debate for various reasons, but now that I answered anyway, here's how I see it.

- No, I don't know the actual number of bugs in any bethesda game, or any game of any other maker for that matter. I don't have hard facts, I just have the feel of the thing. The amount of noticed bugs on popular games is always larger than the amount in obscure games anyway, and the amount of complaints for the popular games is likewise greater.

- The raw number of bugs is unimportant. What's important is how critical the bugs are and what's the content/bug ratio, ie, a game with one short quest that can't be passed because of one bug is buggier than a game with 10 quests of which 3 can't be passed, despite the latter game having 3 times a many bugs. Because the first game is 100% bugged and the latter only 30%. Skyrim has a crapload of stuff in it, also a load of bugs, but for the most players the main questline is relatively smooth sailing, some sidequests can go belly up, but it's no game over, unimportant.

- A few games (I love and have played a lot of) and feel were (or still are) far buggier on release than Skyrim or Fallout 3:
Fallout 2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Neverwinter nights 1 and 2, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Medieval 2: Total War.
Of these, Neverwinter Nights 1 received patches for about 10 yrs. but is still very unstable on modern computers, my hat's off for Bioware for the effort anyway. The rest were rather much saved by the fans.

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Oh, another thing. Letting modders sell their mods would have been an excellent thing.
There's a load of NWN and NWN2 mods/new adventures I'd have happily payed for (assuming a free first episode to get the feel of the thing and a low enough price). Say a campaign in 5 parts, $1 per part.
I also played quite a few damn fine campaigns the author then didn't finish because life and other interests got into the way. I bet a potential for 20K in cash would have made finishing the campaign a more of a priority.

Bugs and lack of polish on a 60+ USD game changes the situation for many people. One should expect a great day 1 experience with all that marketing and that price tag, but I don't trust Bethesda to ever get that part right.

I've been playing Fallout NV for a while up until a few days ago, taking a break. With mods one likes it's so much better. If you're going to give it a go there's some mods you should look at that aren't a matter of preference.

-Like the "New Vegas Stutter Remover", when I started playing I immediately noticed the game "stuttered" a lot so I gave it a go and was very surprised how much it helped. To get a good idea of the stutter, look slightly down at the ground while you strafe or move forwards+sideways.

-There's also Fallout Anti Crash, I honestly don't know how much if at all it's helping, but excluding crashes due to messing with mods, I think I only had maybe 5 game crashes in 100+ hours of play so it's been pretty stable (far more than last time I played it years ago).

-Then there's the "4GB Fallout New Vegas", a patch which basically makes the game large address aware and lets it access more memory (some games immediately crash when they fill their memory pool). It's unfortunate that it had to be done this way (and can cause problems with some mods).

Though if you don't care about keeping your Fallout NV linked to steam you could "release" it from steam and use anything that will enable large address aware on the game's executable. If going this route just searching online for "large address aware patch" will find at least 1 of the 2 common little programs that will "patch" any .exe to be large address aware. Or if lazy find them here and here.

-Also I tried Mod Organizer for the first time (that I remember), after having tried many others like NMM and don't even remember all the things I've used before that in the past, and would recommend MO without a doubt. This is more of just a preference but it has some big advantages I really like over other mod managers. On the downside it can add a bit more to do such as having to setup FNVedit to run through Mod Organizer (easy), which seems to be due to some of the advantages MO gives.

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As for mods of preference, incase you're looking for mods you might like here's what I was playing with http://pastebin.com/K4QvRnjn

That list is in reverse load order, top loading last, and doesn't list the merge patch I had to make in FNVEdit (eg: without the merge patch the Riot Shotgun wouldn't use all kinds of 12g ammo). In that list RWD=Realistic Weapons Damages. I also set Project Nevada to give 1 perk each level. Some of those mods have resulted in being stronger as a character (like more implants and perks to choose from and a perk every level) yet it's also more dangerous, with fights being short and lethal, as one would expect from bullets/melee combat, and something like a Deathclaw lives up to its name if it catches you.

Some of those mods I would strongly recommend and some are just ok, but if you like having a companion I would absolutely recommend Willow, she's great, has some quests and will chat to Veronica and Boone if they join.

Thanks for the list. I'll probably give willow and maybe some others a try when I next feel like playing.
I do have to go through DA:Inquisition, Shadowrun:Hong Kong and Pillars of Eternity first though, and if FO4 is already out at that point, I'll probably do that too.

no. topic solved!

Thanks.

In this day an age, with so many different hardware, you can't really expect a good day 1 experience anymore, especially for a non-linear RPG. In fact, through gaming history, I don't recall a single high profile RPG that had a good day one experience (Fallout 1 and 2 were so buggy back then that they were borderline unplayable). The closest I can think of was Might and Magic 6 and even that wasn't without problems.

And besides, Bethesda is getting better at delivering stable games. Skyrim was much more stable than Fallout 3 (didn't run into that many problems unless I started modding my game heavily), which was more stable than Oblivion (this one required serious work). In fact, their buggiest game is still Daggerfall (and talk about a bad day 1 experience. You couldn't even complete the main quest when the game first came out. And it costed 80 USD). And unlike their later games, it's still unplayable 19 years later.