FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS

Mods to remaster the Mojave in 2021.

Lauren Morton

Ever since Microsoft announced its Bethesda acquisition, Fallout: New Vegas has been on my mind. With Obsidian and Bethesda now sharing the Microsoft umbrella, speculation about a sequel or remaster to the western apocalypse are both rampant. I highly doubt we’ll see either of those two things happen. Not soon, in any case.

Although an official remaster would be nice, Fallout: New Vegas has recently passed its tenth anniversary, meaning it has a decade of mods accumulated for making your own remastered version. Ten years of mods is quite a pile to sift through though. Some have been abandoned, and others are redundant. Some are shiny and new, but less developed than other old faithful options.

In honor of its big birthday, I’m setting out to find the most faithful and reliable collection of mods for a homebrew Fallout: New Vegas remaster. Although there are a ton of great quest mods and gameplay changes out there, I’ve stuck to mods that keep the original experience of New Vegas intact as much as possible while making it crash less, look better, and take advantage of the modern tech we’re running it on.

FOUNDATION FIRST

As other Creation Engine games do, New Vegas has a reputation for being somewhat less than stable. Crashing is a common occurrence even in an un-modded playthrough. Fortunately, there are some foundational mods that help reduce crashes rather than exacerbate them.

The first thing you’ll need is a mod whose equivalent you’ve likely used if you’ve ever dipped into modding Fallout or Elder Scrolls games previously. New Vegas Script Extender is the foundation that many other mods build on. You can find it at nvse.silverlock.org where you’ll download the latest stable version which supports both the Steam and GOG releases. Your second manual installation is going to be the FNV 4GB Patcher, a utility that patches and replaces your FalloutNV.exe with a version that’s capable of using 4GB of RAM. In 2021, you almost certainly have at least double that. You’re looking for the 4GB patcher version on Nexus mods created by Roy Batty and LuthienAnarion. Follow the installation instructions and voila, a new FalloutNV.exe. Not to worry, the original is preserved as FalloutNV_ backup.exe should you ever need to manually revert.

That’s it for manual installation, so feel free to boot up your mod manager of choice at this point. To finish out the steady base that the rest of our beautification mods will rest on, you’ll want to grab a few more essentials. The JIP LN NVSE Plugin adds more functions to the main NVSE. NVTF, the New Vegas Tick Fix, is one of the latest mods for increasing the game’s stability. Lastly, The Mod Configuration Menu isn’t a necessity, but it adds a menu that allows you to change the settings of certain mods while you’re playing as you would any other game setting. Not every mod utilizes it, but it’s a time-saver while you’re tinkering.

USABLE INTERFACE