Fallout: New Vegas has been around for 12 years. Need help crossing the Mojave Wasteland? Here are 5 Fallout New Vegas tips to get you through and become a successful courier.
Character Creation
Before leaving the doctor’s home in New Vegas. You need to figure out what character you want to play. To be successful in the wasteland, you need a weapon skill and an infiltration skill. Without you, you’ll be easy pickings for the waste’s bandits. Or you won’t be able to get any decent loot. Here are the offensive skills:
I would recommend choosing Energy weapons or guns. Energy weapons are rare at the beginning of the game. But as you progress, they become as plentiful as conventional weapons.
Explosives cover any weapon that results in an explosion. Such as mines, grenades, and missile launchers. These are best used from long range, so at short range you will become a sitting duck.
Apart from Guns, Melee Weapons are the most plentiful weapons you will find out in the wasteland. They can damage enemies greatly. The other bonus is that most are silent. So, they can kill multiple enemies quickly without detection.
Finally Unarmed, this skill doesn’t just limit you to your bare hands. But a huge number of glove weapons that are just as powerful as most melee weapons. There are several locations where you cannot equip any weapons but need to defend yourself. Which is where this skill comes in handy.
Next is the infiltration skills. These aren’t strictly limited to being sneaky. But are used to sneak through areas you shouldn’t be in. These areas have better loot, which you can either use or sell. Here is the list of infiltration skills:
Lockpick is a straightforward skill. It allows the user to unlock doors, chests, and other storage containers. Some of the best loot is locked behind doors. They can even provide a shortcut to bypass groups of enemies.
Science is a strange name for what it does. It allows the user to hack computers and other systems. Just like Lockpick, it allows you to go through locked doors and unlock containers that are connected to terminals. Though not every locked door or container is connected to a terminal, So, it is a bit more limited compared to the Lockpick skill. But unlike lockpick, it can pass dialog checks.
The speech skill allows you to convince NPCs to do your bidding. It won’t always lead to better loot or opening locked containers or doors. But it can be useful in avoiding conflict or convincing NPCs to attack each other. It’s saved my skin more than once.
After skills, you get to choose up to 2 traits. Each trait comes with a benefit and a penalty. You can disregard traits if you don’t like any of the benefits or can’t manage the penalty. However, certain builds may benefit from them.
Level Up Tips
When levelling up, you can increase skills by several points. I would recommend focusing on your offensive skill and infiltration skills. For Science and Lock-picking, each 25 points enables you to unlock a more difficult terminal or container. So, it’s worth using points to hit each marker. There is no benefit to having any points between these values except that you will need fewer points for the next milestone.
Every two levels you get to choose a perk. The perk you should select depends on your build. However, there are a few must haves:
- Black Widow/ Lady Killer
- Cherchez La Femme/ Confirmed Bachelor
- Educated
The first two skills allow you to do more damage to either gender. It also provides dialog options when interacting with specific characters. Which can be useful if you haven’t put points into the speech skill.
Educated provides 2 extra skill points when your character levels up. After many levels, totals to a huge amount of free skill points to build your character.
Use VATs
VATS or Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System stops time and gives your character free actions depending on their AP pool and the actions they take. Unlike Fallout 4, the gunplay isn’t as accurate outside of VATs. So, it is almost necessary to survive out in the wastelands.
Each body part of an enemy has a percentage value against it. The higher the percentage, the more likely you will hit the target. These percentages are governed by the Agility stat and perks. Such as Gunslinger, Commando, Sniper, and Concentrated Fire.
Other useful perks for VATS include Miss Fortune and Mysterious Stranger. There is a 10% chance that a Miss Fortune or Stranger will kill a target. This can even the odds when severely outnumbered by enemies, especially in The Fort.
Quick Save Often
You can quickly save the game using F5 on Steam. Do this before any dialog check or battle. With dialog checks, there is always a chance that you will succeed, even if your skills are low. By reloading the save using F9, you can make sure that you eventually get a successful check. On consoles, you’ll have to rely on the manual save.
It can also be helpful to quick save whenever you are going into a new area. Save when you know you are safe, then progress through the area. This has saved me lots of time when I’ve been outnumbered and outgunned. If you end up in a battle, you can then try different methods to take them down. Before deciding to bypass the area.
Companions Make Great Targets
There are several NPCs that you can use as companions throughout the game. Each brings with them special abilities that can help you with progressing with the story. You can have one human and one non-humanoid companion at a time. Here is a list of the followers:
Humanoid
| Name | Location |
|---|---|
| Arcade Israel Gannon | Old Mormon Fort |
| Craig Boon | Novac |
| Lily Bowen | Jacobstown |
| Raul Alfonso Tejada | Black Mountain |
| Rose of Sharon Cassidy | Mojave Outpost |
| Veronica Santangelo | 188 Trading Post |
Non-Humanoid
| Name | Location |
|---|---|
| ED-E | Primm |
| Rex | Freeside |
Having two companions should make surviving shootouts a lot easier. If they draw aggro from enemies, you can either recoup and fire or runaway to survive another day. Just be careful not to gun your companions down. As you can kill your companions.
Please note that there are additional companions in 2 of the DLCs, but these are non-permanent and are not kept when you go back to the wasteland. But they work just as well as the permanent companions.
5 Fallout New Vegas Tips
Hopefully, these tips have been helpful. Do you have any new tips that you would add to the list? Send your replied to the below twitter post:
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