Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition

New Vegas is better written across the board, gives you more choices, factions to choose from, more guns, a challange and makes speach useful again. Don't bother with Fallout 3 This one has a very dedicated modding community and the Ulimate Edition DLC comes with the best written stories in Fallout history

New Vegas is one of if not the best contemporary RPGs. I hesitate to use the term "modern" to describe it since this game is fast approaching ancient, but it's certainly superior to most any RPG that has come since. It is undoubtedly superior to its adjacent entries in the Fallout series. Nobody does writing and scenario design quite like Obsidian... software engineering? Not so much. New Vegas is a SEVERELY unstable program. Bugs and glitches are utterly rampant and crashes are frequent and at times constant. Since I started play I have had a crash approx every nine minutes. Even the monumental work fans have put into patching this dumpster fire of a program hasn't been able to alleviate the stability issues. And mark my words, mod patches are mandatory. New Vegas is utterly ridden. I cannot stress enough just how much trouble you will have getting this thing to run. If you can tolerate the constant hassle you will be witness to one of the finest RPG experiences of the century... provided the frustration doesn't make you wish for a nuclear winter. 5/5 if it weren't for the instability.

As a big fan of Fallout 2 I have to say: this is a good successor! I loved very minute of it and Obsidians writing is fantastic.

One major thing sets this game apart and makes it a masterpiece: player agency. Lots of story-driven RPGs, even great ones like The Witcher, have the player's big choice be taking a side in a larger conflict. New Vegas is freaking brilliant because it knows you're smarter than that. Or more ambitious. You *can* choose from between the major factions vying for power, or you can *BE* one of those factions. And that freedom trickles down to every single side quest. In a genre that can so frequently make you think "Well, I can't do X, but I guess option Y is close enough. Better than Z." New Vegas tries as hard as humanly possible to always have your option X be available, provided your character is up to the task. Top that design philosophy off with a great Western atmosphere, superb writing and... okay, at least a functioning combat system, and you've got a must-play. And the game is infamously buggy, but far from unplayable. I actually turned the biggest glitch I encountered into an interesting story about a temporary NPC ally refusing to leave my side, gaining self-awareness after a horrifying glitch and quick-load, surviving my attempts to shoot them, realizing I was their uncaring god, having an existential crisis, and then being put out of their misery with an assisted suicide via Deathclaw.

As a fan of the series and someone who has played each title(even 4, and I don't even like 4) multiple times, my favorite is by far New Vegas, with 2 close behind and 1 close behind 2. Player choice matters in this game, and it matters a lot. Your choices will affect who you can be companions with, the quests you can do, and more. The writing is astounding, especially in the DLC. Speaking of the DLC, the best in the series can be found here. Personally, Dead Money is my favorite part of the entire series, even above the conversation with the Master in 1. Fallout: New Vegas successfully transfered the values from the originals to the 3D environment, something I cannot say Bethesda has been able to do yet, and likely won't ever. If you have never played this game, and are looking for a true RPG to spend hundreds of hours in, look no further. Finally, the mod scene deserves a bit of a mention, as it can be important in deciding if you want to invest in this already cheap game. It absolutely rocks, with some of the best mods for any game ever. I recommend the someguy2000 series, but only after you have played one or two playthroughs first. Have fun with this game, I know I will only continue to.