This week brings a wealth of RPGs! We all knew Mass Effect 3 and The Elder Scrolls V were coming someday, but now that they're officially announced we can officially begin the speculation.

Also,  strategist/columnist/podcaster/PhD Troy Goodfellow joins us to give his detailed report on the updates for Civilization V and Elemental, in addition to Call of Duty: Black Ops and Fallout: New Vegas bug fixes.

And in the spirit of getting things done before the year is over, give us a call toll free: 877-404-1337 ext 724 and leave us a question for the next show!

PC Gamer US Podcast - 252 Three Monitors Ahead



Mass Effect 3 trailer

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Trailer

The Humble Indie Bundle 2

MLG's Top 20 StarCraft II replays

Welcome to day two of the Christmas bonanza. We sent some interns into the PC Gamer catacombs to have a rummage through our pile o' loot and, surprisingly, one them came back, clutching a big, boxy, radioactive prize. Today you have a chance to win the Fallout: New Vegas Collector's Edition. It comes with some amazing limited edition box art and a copy of the game's gigantic guide. Read on to find out how to win.

The Fallout: New Vegas Collector's Edition has everything you need to become the ultimate wasteland casino crawler. As well as the game itself you get seven poker chips, one from each of New Vegas' gambling joints. Not even these can stack up to the royal flush of post-apocalyptic poker spoils, the "Lucky 38" platinum poker chip. It's not actually made of platinum, but it is extremely shiny. The box also comes with a deck of cards, a making-of DVD and a hardback graphic novel. We also have a limited edition comic cover, which you can see below. Click on the image to see it full size.



Then there's the Fallout: New Vegas strategy guide, which contains everything you need to know about the wastelands of Fallout: New Vegas. By everything, we really do mean everything. The guide is bigger than War and Peace, and includes information on every single foe you'll face in the game. Every inch of the wasteland is mapped, so you'll never get lost again. It's also hefty enough to double up as an excellent Radroach squasher.

Here in the British Isles we can't really claim to have anything as glitzy or manic as Las Vegas, but we do have Blackpool. Your challenge is to come up with a perk to survive the dangers of a post-apocalyptic Blackpool. Post in the comments below with your idea, and remember that you have to live in the UK to enter. All entries will be fed into the PC Gamer Gigglebot. The entry responsible for the highest giggles per second ratio will win the prize. We'll announce the winner tomorrow at midday.

Come back tomorrow for another giveaway, a massive amount of Gamers Gate games. We'll be holding one every day until Christmas day.

WINNER: Congrats to Flargana, for his Mysterious Donkey perk! We'll be in touch via pm to arrange delivery. Don't forget, we can only accept UK entries. And Irish, to answer JaxDasher's question.

Last week we mentioned that a comprehensive Fallout: New Vegas patch was on the way, promising a huge number of fixes for many of the quests in the game. That patch has finally arrived. Read on for the full list of updates, it's a big one.

The patch will be applied automatically when you restart Steam. Here's the list of fixes.

Top fixes:

Companions now show up as waypoints on the map
Companions will always fast travel with you, unless told to wait or sent away
Fix: DLC error/save corruption
Fix: Entering the strip after Debt Collector causes crash and autosave corruption
Fix: Using Mojave Express dropbox can cause DLC warnings
Crafting menu now filters valid (bright) recipes to the top of the list
Weathered pistol no longer glitches when applying mods

In addition, this patch addresses issues with the following areas:

Pip-Boy Interface
Pre-Order DLC Items
Reputation System
Radio Stations
Companion fixes
Companion Quests
Repair Menu
Caravan
Weapons and Weapon Mods
Hardcore Mode
Perks
Skills
Crafting Recipes
Crafting Menu
Mojave Express
Chems/Addiction
Doctors
Vendors

And fixes for the following quests:

Ain’t That a Kick in the Head
By a Campfire on The Trail
They Went That-a-Way
My Kind of Town
Boulder City Showdown
Ring a Ding Ding!
King’s Gambit
For The Republic, Part 2
Render Unto Caesar
Et Tumor, Brute?
The House Always Wins
Wild Card
Beyond the Beef
GI Blues
How Little We Know
Oh My Papa
Still In The Dark
You’ll Know It When It Happens
Arizona Killer
Eureka!
Veni, Vidi, Vici
All or Nothing
No Gods, No Masters
Birds of a Feather
I Put A Spell On you
Come Fly With Me
That Lucky Old Sun
Don’t Make a Beggar of Me
The White Wash
Ghost Town Gunfight
Restoring Hope
Bleed Me Dry
Aba Daba Honeymoon
Tend To Your Business
Wang Dang Atomic Tango
Flags of Our Foul-Ups
Debt Collector
Talent Pool
Left My Heart
Someone To Watch Over Me
Hard Luck Blues

If you were hesitant about picking up New Vegas because of all the bugs, now might be the time to take another look. For more, take a look at our Fallout: New Vegas review, and our round-up of the 25 best mods. Are you playing Fallout: New Vegas now? Has the patch fixed any problems you've been having?

Obsidian have announced that the massive Fallout: New Vegas patch they've been working on since launch is almost here. There have been a few incremental updates to the game in the last couple of months, but this larger update should squash the remaining bugs and finally bring the game up to par.

Bethesda made the announcement on Facebook, saying: "We’ve wrapped up work on the Fallout: New Vegas patch and submitted it. Will let you know when it’s up on PS3, 360, and Steam."

Previous updates have improved the performance of the game, fixing much of the hitching and stuttering framerates that players experienced after the game's release. The new patch should hopefully clean up the rest of the problems, and bring the game up to the state it should have been in at launch.

If you can't wait for the official patch, check out the list of fan made fixes and improvements in our pick of the top 25 Fallout: New Vegas mods, or if you feel like celebrating, you can go dancing instead.

"Doo-bee-ddooo-gonna-be-okay-just dance."

Dammit, we've got Lady Gaga going round our brains right now. That's thanks to this lovely New Vegas mod and associated music video. The mod adds dozens of  motion-capped dances to Fallout: New Vegas. With a quick console command it's possible to force everyone on-screen to bust a move. The video gives them a soundtrack. Links to both are below.

There's an impressive array of dances contained in the mod. The Ceaser's Legion soldiers in particular can rock the floor. You can download the dance mod from Fallout: New Vegas Nexus. For Fallout: New Vegas modding goodness, check out our pick of the 25 best Fallout: New Vegas mods.

Fallout: New Vegas has just received a massive patch, hopefully fixing many of the problems players have been having with the game since launch. Most notable among the changes are improvements to the game's performance and fixes for save game corruption. Read on for the full patch notes.

The patch notes hit Steam News yesterday. Here they are in full.

Companions now show up as waypoints on the map
Companions will always fast travel with you, unless told to wait or sent away
Fix: DLC error/save corruption
Fix: Stuttering with water effects
Fix: Severe performance issues with DirectX.
Fix: Controls temporarily disabled after reloading Cowboy Repeater while crouched
Fixed crash using the Euclid C-Finder while having the Heave Ho perk
Fix: Entering the strip after Debt Collector causes crash and autosave corruption
Fix: Using Mojave Express dropbox can cause DLC warnings
Fixed crash when buying duplicate caravan cards from a vendor in a single transaction
Crafting menu should filter valid (bright) recipes to the top of the list
Fix: Sitting down while looking down a weapon's ironsights leaves player control locked
Fix: If a companion is knocked unconscious with broken limbs they stay broken on respawn
Fix for varmint night scope effect persisting in kill cam
Fix for giving companions armor that adds STR does not increase their carry weight
Fix NPC Repair menu displays DAM as DPS
Having NPC repair service rifle with forged receiver decreases CND

 
NPC's with broken limbs were respawning with still broken limbs? That sounds like a pretty alarming bug. Aside from the control lock up bugs, the performance and stuttering issues will likely represent the most popular change. The changes should apply the next time you boot up Fallout: New Vegas in Steam.

Fallout: New Vegas is good. Is it perfect? No. In hardcore mode, the rate at which you die from thirst isn't high enough. I demand to die faster! Luckily, there's a mod for that. In fact, there are lots of mods. There are tweaks that alter the weight of scrap metal, there are difficulty mods that turn you into a wimp and jack up your foes until they hit like a sack of broken glass, there are mods that turn this or that female companion into that girl from Code Geass, and there's even a mod that makes stimpaks weigh more than you could possibly carry.

Most of them suck, though. Here are twenty five that don't.

These mods are the best of the bunch. Some are delightful departures from the New Vegas you know, others will become an essential part of your wasteland wandering, and one or two just make it prettier. You can't use them all together, but you can use most. To install them, download the archives and empty them into your Data folder – find it in Steam\Steamapps\common\fallout new vegas\.



1. Centred third person camera
Why did Bethesda give us the weird over-the-shoulder cam in Fallout 3? Why didn't Obsidian get rid of it for New Vegas? We may never know. Probably because they imagined players actually trying to take aim and fire in third person mode, which is insane. Third person is for screenshots and lightsaber fights - we've known that since Jedi Knight 2! Fortunately, every time a developer does this, one of the lovely modder people undoes it.

This mod also lets you zoom all the way out. How far? All of the far, that's how far.





2. Black Company improved perks
A whole slew of balanced, interesting perks. It comes in two flavours – both are available at any level, but require you to meet certain criteria. In the first version, you need to have high abilities – those are the things you pick at the start and can only occasionally increase. The second version is identical, but requires you to meet skill point thresholds instead. They’re all wonderfully inventive and cover a wide range of interests and specialist player archetypes left out in the cold by Obsidian’s vanilla perks.






3. Better tag skills
This tweak doubles the bonus your character gets at the start of the game for tagging his or her three starter skills. These tag skills are intended as a reflection of your character's past experiences and aptitudes before they ended up left for dead in a shallow grave. If you max out Strength and tag Melee Weapons, you'll get a skill of 50. Not bad at all.




4. Kill the karma sounds
Okay, so I killed a guy, and I've spent the last five minutes picking through his belongings. I'm ashamed of myself. I need help. What I don't need is some annoying string section blaring at me every time I happen to put a kitchen knife into a guy's back and strip his body of clothes and valuables and then start chopping bits off of him for fun. This mod gets rid of the noise and text pop-up that annoys you while you're doing these horrible, unspeakable things.

Tricky uninstall alert!
This mod works by overriding the karma noises with empty files. There's no esp file to delete, and instead you'll have to delete the relevant sound files that you've installed. The readme is kind enough to explain which ones. Wouldn't it be nice if they were all zipped up in a bsa file? Wouldn't it just.







5. Bigger barter and dialogue windows
The barter window is an important window. There, you'll discover that you can finally buy a fancy business suit to complete the Agent 47 impression. You'll discover that hollowpoint rounds are so hot right now. You'll discover that you don't have enough caps to buy the bottle of dirty water that'll save you from your imminent death. This mod makes the barter and dialogue windows bigger, so you can spend less time paddling around looking for the stimpaks, and more time despairing because you can only afford two of them.







6. Better Ammo Crafting
There are more realistic ammo overhauls out there, but this one is balanced for fun. It takes a few liberties - for example, you can craft dynamite sticks into gunpowder, which isn’t really how dynamite works in real life. It ends up making life a lot easier for the budding ammo-crafter without stuffing every merchant’s pockets with sacks of lead ingots, though.







7. Improved throwing
Currently, you can throw a spear into the ground and it’ll just embed itself there. You can’t ever get it out, either. Doesn’t matter how strong you are, you’re powerful enough to drive it in, but too weak to pull it out. That’s rubbiiiiiiiiiish. This mod fixes that by removing the embed thing altogether. The downside is that you can’t pin people to walls anymore, but you can keep using the same spear for your entire magical people-skewering journey.

It also adds some handy recipes to the campfire that let you convert your kitchen knives into throwing knives, gather pebbles to bounce futilely off of radscorpion carapaces, and craft your own spears out of pool cues. Thwock! Oh, and it fixes a bug where enemies could target your spears in mid-air, shoot them, and they’d explode like a grenade.





8. Depth of Field
This gorgeous mod comes in two flavours: make everything beautiful, and make everything not-quite-as-beautiful. It blurs up the distance and makes it look like this:



I left this mod on while taking the rest of the screenshots, so you can see it in a few others. Warning: if you don’t like this sort of thing, you won’t like this sort of thing.







9. Plausible starting outfit
“Welcome to New Vegas, stranger! This is a totally different place than the Capital Wasteland. We have cowboy robots, dynamite, and gambling. Watch out for tumbleweeds! Have my old shootin’ iron! Oh, and by the way, here’s a Vault uniform you can wear so you look exactly like you did in the last game.”

No thanks. This changes the starting outfit Doc Mitchell gives you so that he hands over a sort of yokel-flavoured dungaree thing, or a beige dress. That’s more like it. Yee-haw!





10. More Grass
Grass is the coolest. You can crouch down in it. You can walk through it. You can lie in it and watch the clouds. Cows can eat it. Horses eat it. You can eat it too. Without a little grass, cats have difficulty digesting food - it’s their main source of folic acid, after all. Grass is great. Fallout: New Vegas might be set in a horrific future where nearly all life has been exterminated or mutated beyond control, but... very little grass? What?!









11. Goodsprings Shack
This mod adds a shack in Goodsprings that you can call your own. It’s just a fridge, a bed, and some junk, but if you rescue the key from the owner's maggot-ridden corpse, it can be your home for life. Or you could just pile it full of the hi-tech shit you find.





12. Bottle water
No, not bottled water. This lets you bottle the water. You know, at all those handy water sources scattered around the desert. Drinking water will return an empty bottle, and you can fill those at any source you find. If the water is dirty, it’ll replace irradiated water you have on you as well as filling up empty bottles. Find a pure source, and it’ll replace all your dirty water too. The implementation is slick - just sneak up to a water source and activate it.





13. Caps have weight
If you put 17,000 bottle caps in your pocket right now, they’d be heavy. That’s what this does - simply adds a small weight to every bottlecap. When you start getting rich, you should leave some at home, or give a bunch to your pals. NOT FOR KEEPS ED-E.







14. Lethal headshots
Another fantastic mod, this makes headshots deadly. “Headshot” is the medical term for the condition where a bullet breaks open your skull and rattles through your brains, scrambling your grey matter and rocketing out of the other side. So yeah, that should really kill you.

That’s what this mod does, while preserving the shakey-aim of lower Guns skill and thus maintaining game balance. Wear a helmet, people! It also decreases your chance of scoring a headshot in VATS, which is a welcome balance tweak, and the damage buff doesn’t apply to all creatures - Deathclaws are made of sterner stuff, and robots don’t always have brains where you’d expect them to.

I’d also like to give a special mention to the commenter on the Fallout: New Vegas Nexus who suggested that this mod should cause the game to end after the first cinematic (where you get shot in the face).





15. No RPG bullet bending
This has the same goals as the above mod - make the guns work more realistically - but it goes about it in a totally different way. Rather than touch the damage that guns do, this mod makes them super accurate. It’s not for me, personally - I found that with a Guns skill of 20 I could kill anyone from an enormous distance just by waiting for my shot and killing them with a sneak bonus. If you’re not a fan of RPG elements, though, this can help turn Fallout: New Vegas into a pure FPS.









16. Fellout: New Vegas
This gets rid of the orange jam on the lens, adds lovely skies, and injects lots of other pretty into the world. This is the successor to the awesome de-greenification mod for Fallout 3 - the name refers to the assumption that the Fallout from nuclear bombs would have already “fell out”.

It also makes nights a lot darker.





17. Food don’t heal yo’ no mo’
This is probably my favourite mod of the bunch. With this mod in hardcore mode, you can no longer freeze time, open sixteen cans of Pork n’ Beans, guzzle them down, and grow your leg back in half a second. Food doesn’t heal you at all. Not even a little! Now B.J. Blazkowicz is the only man who can wolf down a hot meal in the middle of a fight to close his wounds.

Conflicts: Unfortunately, this mod conflicts with the water bottling mod. So either water heals you and you'll be using it a lot, or water doesn't heal you and you've got some extra in your pack because you aren't chugging it to fight internal haemorrhaging.





18. Companion Sandbox Mode
This mod changes the behaviour of companions told to “wait here.” They chill on chairs, wander around looking at stuff, talk to eachother, fight wandering monsters, and in an early version they’d even raid your fridge for food. Leave tons of followers around your hideout and pretend you’re having an awesome party!





19. ED-E no longer has clumsy, invisible legs
ED-E is a floating robot. It shouldn’t set off mines and bear traps by floating over them. This mod gives your noisy robot chum a perk that prevents that. Hooray!





20a. Timescale adjuster
This does two wonderful things to Fallout: New Vegas. Firstly, it lets you alter the rate at which game time passes in relation to our own time. Currently, a half hour of in-game time passes in about 4 minutes. With this mod, you can change the rate so that it’s much closer to - or even the same as - the passage of time in the real world. You can even have different rates for combat or for interiors, so that time doesn’t march on during a prolonged fight, stays relatively close to real time when you’re indoors, but picks up the pace during long overworld treks.

It also lets you alter the rate at which you get hungry, thirsty, and sleepy, and prevents timing conflicts between these two functions that’d otherwise have your character starving to death in his sleep. The only downside is that it controls this via an item that magically appears in your inventory, and you have to go through some fiddly menus to set it all. I have my interior and combat rates set to 1 and my overworld set to 3.







20b. Harder hardcore rates
If you like the timing just fine and just want more brutal hardcore rates, you don’t need to bother downloading the above mod - just download this easy esp file that doubles your dehydration rates and almost quintuplifies your hunger and tiredness rates. No fiddly menus, just a harder hardcore mode that’ll have you regularly reaching into your pack for a drink in the scorching heat.







21. Automatic skill perks
This mod changes 40 perks to be granted for free when you hit the skill requirements for them. So when you hit 30 Guns skill, you immediately get Rapid Reload. They’ve been taken out of the perk list too. Rather than making the game impossibly harder, this is a mod you can rely on to make things a little easier.

I did notice a bug, though. If you get your skill high enough while in Goodsprings to unlock one of these, and then re-tag your skills as you leave Goodsprings (you have a chance to rebuild your character before you go), you’ll keep the old perks. It’s avoidable if you know about it, but keep an eye on the mod page for a fix.







22. Sandstorms
This adds enormous, screen-filling sandstorms to the Mojave wasteland. Fear them, for they are mighty. Mighty hard to see through, I mean. It’s a nice cosmetic touch.





23. Play after the main quest ends
Didn’t Bethesda eventually put out an official patch for Fallout 3 to let you keep playing after the final cutscene ended? This mod does that too. Come on, developers! Pay attention to your modders!





24. Higher stakes gambling
This greatly increases the maximum bet in casinos, increases the amount of chips you can buy from the cashier, and optionally lets you get rid of the chance a casino will ban you for winning too much. Use this mod if you find yourself amassing great piles of bottle caps in real life, especially if you keep them in a huge room and swim through them regularly.







25. Wasteland Unlocked
This is an esp file packaged with Black Company’s Harder Hardcore pack. It’s a giant set of modular esp files that tweak enormous amounts of entities, so I won’t recommend you just use them all if you’re using some of the mods I’ve recommended so far, for fear of conflicts.

Just use WastelandUnlocked.esp, and if you don’t mind a smarter AI, use SettingsTweaks.esp too. It’ll open up the wasteland like never before, adding monsters and wild animals that you’d normally only find at really high levels, spawning rare high level items (or just trash) in dumpsters, and lowering the level requirements for many recipes that’ll help you cope with the newfound threat. It also removes lots of stimpaks from the world and replaces them with the bits to make new ones.

This week, on a very special episode of the PC Gamer Podcast...Josh returns from BlizzCon to tell us about Diablo III's Demon Hunter class. We share our spoiler-free experiences in Fallout: New Vegas (also, how is Dan already on his third playthrough). Evan tells us why Tribes deserves to be remade, and Logan describes the unique anatomical advantages of a civet vis-à-vis coffee.

Download, and hear us say words about games.

Want to subscribe to us on iTunes? Follow these instructions to add the podcast to iTunes manually:

In iTunes, go to to the advanced menu and select “Subscribe to podcast” and copy and paste this URL into the box: http://www.pcgamer.com/feed/rss2/?cat=29038
Push OK, and that’s it! The podcast will now auto-download whenever an episode is released.

Attention PC gamers! We’ve got a giveaway so momentous that it stands to eclipse epochal moments in history going all the way back to the discovery of fire by an unfortunate troglodyte in a lightning storm about one and a half million years ago. In fact, it’s so spectacularly massive that it may create a singularity unimagined by even Stephen Hawking at his most fanciful after a fifth of bourbon. What could be so huge? How about this: a magical Steam code that will grant you free, permanent access to Valve’s entire catalog—which includes some of the finest PC games ever made—and every game Valve ever will make. That’s right: you can win Portal 2, Dota 2 and even Half-Life 2: Episode 3.* It’s the prize that keeps on giving, year after year!

But wait, that’s not all! Click through to see what else, and how to win it!

Update: Winners have been drawn, and notifications are going out. We'll post the list of winners soon!

Update 2: Winners posted!




We’re also giving away sweet, shrink-wrapped, aromatic Collector’s Editions of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, Fallout: New Vegas, Civilization V, Mafia II and Plants vs Zombies. That’s a total of six fabulous, planet-shattering prizes, all up for grabs. Click here to see them all!

But wait, there’s even more! We’ll pick a seventh lucky dawg who’ll receive a copy of Borderlands Game of the Year Edition! The giving just won’t stop!

So how do you get in on the action? Just “like” us on Facebook, then comment on this post on Facebook (not our comment area below) with a list of the three games you’re most looking forward to in 2011 (in order of preference). That’s all! (If you're already a fan, just comment with your list.)

On Monday, November 1 at 10am Pacific time, we’ll draw seven winners from the comments (with the help of everybody’s random friends at Random.org,) and contact them via Facebook. Winner #1 gets first choice. (We suspect they’ll pick the Valve code.) Winner #2 gets to choose between the remaining prizes, then winner #3 gets to pick, and so on.

This contest is open to US residents only. Sorry, rest of the world! We’d let you enter if The Man would let us.

*Provided the sun doesn’t burn out before it’s released.

Our winners are:
Michael Hudak: Magic Valve code
Craig Fender: StarCraft II Collector's Edition
Phillip Front: Fallout: New Vegas Collector's Edition
Jeremy Sanchez: Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition
Darien Sumner: Civilization V Collector's Edition
Justin Anderson: Mafia II Collector's Edition
Zack Jones: Plants vs Zombies Collector's Edition

Thanks to everyone who entered!

Since Fallout: New Vegas was released in the US on Tuesday, players have been discovering a raft of weird and wonderful bugs. The good news is that the game was patched this morning, and more updates are planned for the near future. Read on for the patch details, and a round up of some of the most freakish bugs.

Today's update, which will apply automatically when you launch the game, is said to fix "quest and scripting issues." There's no mention of fixing "moonwalking dog issues", or "dog eyeball placement issues" just yet, but speaking to Kotaku, Bethesda's marketing man, Peter Hines has said "we are currently working on releasing patches/updates as quickly as possible for Fallout: New Vegas,", so further updates should be coming soon.

For now, people are still finding nightmarish examples of reality gone-wrong. The most remarkable bug was uncovered by Shodan210, and quickly thrown up on Reddit. It's somehow funny and incredibly creepy at the same time. David Lynch would struggle to match the weirdness of this slow talking man's gently rotating noggin. Check it out.