Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition

Well, I am going to keep this short. The Good: The game is a masterpiece through and through. Incredible writing, amazing DLCs, great role-play capabilities. The Bad: The bugs are rage-inducing at times. I know Obsidian only got 18 months to build this game but even after that, it's like they never thought of patching out the bugs before eventually releasing an Ultimate Edition.

Fallout New Vegas, a game which is unfinished (not at Obsidian's fault, bethesda rushed them, look into it if you care) and yet one of the best in the franchise. If it wasn't for mods, this video game by itself would be a 3 or 4 stars but thankfully, Bethesda, despite being a questionable company at times, does believe in modding, and as such the Nexus and a few other websites contain thousands of mods for this game. Want the best fallout experience? I highly recommend to look into Tale of Two Wastelands, which combines Fallout 3 in FNV into one game and further extend your time in the wastes.

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.

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.