As promised, I spent my vacation playing Fallout: New Vegas and, as promised, I made it further than I ever have before. While in previous attempts, I stalled out in Goodsprings — the game's introductory location — this time I've ventured out into the Wasteland, and have seen some interesting things. A T-Rex sniper tower? Check. A simple "go there, kill the monsters" quest that morphed into a Ghoul's mission to lead his cultist followers into space? Check. Dudes getting crucified by a guy who dresses like a Roman legionnaire? Check. The Wasteland has so many interesting sights to show me that it's a shame I’ve spent most of my playtime staring at my laptop wallpaper.

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14 Years Later And Fallout: New Vegas Is Still A Buggy Mess

But I still can't help but love it...

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Fallout: New Vegas Still Crashes All The Time

It's 2024, 14 years after the game first launched, and my Steam copy of New Vegas is crashing every half hour or so. That wasn't the first major issue I had with this playthrough, either. My problems started when I hit an infinite load glitch that prevented me from starting the game at all. I looked around online and found an easy fix for that. Instead of hitting continue, you load the second most recent save instead. Provided you save often, this isn't a big deal and, given that the game frequently autosaves, you may not lose any progress at all. If you ignore the autosave, you're good to go. If the issue is especially bad, you can start a new game, then reload your most recent save as soon as you get control of your character. Annoying, yes, but easy enough to deal with since you only need to go through the process at the beginning of a play session.

But then the bugs got truly annoying. After I had figured out how to deal with the infinite load, I encountered the game’s far more irritating tendency to constantly crash. Now, the game crashes to the desktop roughly every 30 minutes. There's no rhyme or reason to what causes it — though a few crashes have happened upon entering a room — but it has been persistent enough to drive me online looking for mods.

I’m also having a bizarre issue with mods as I attempt to fix this. Instead of downloading as zip files, the necessary mods are downloading as media files — no clue how to fix this.

Obsidian And Bethesda Could Have Fixed This

There's absolutely no reason I should need to look for stability mods for a 14-year-old game made by a studio that is still very much around. When I played Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines for the first time back in 2020, I was more sympathetic. The team at Troika had been rushed to hit the release date, Day One patches didn't exist yet, and the studio was shut down a few months after launch. That combination of factors makes fan-made patches a more reasonable necessity.

But Fallout: New Vegas was made by Obsidian in collaboration with Bethesda — important studios at the time and two of the biggest names in RPG development today. Fallout is an incredibly important IP for Microsoft and New Vegas is frequently touted as one of the best games in the series. Why is no one officially fixing this? Why is the onus on me, a player, to make the game I paid for function correctly? I’m still planning to finish the game — I’m having a good time outside of the technical issues and a promise is a promise — but I wish the only bugs I had to worry about were Radroaches and Bloatflies.

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I'm Ready For Starfield: New Vegas

A Starfield spin-off with the Obsidian touch would get me invested in Bethesda's sci-fi world.

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