Jul 24, 2017

One For My Baby: A look back at Fallout: New Vegas's best quest

PC Gamer

If Fallout 3 welcomes you into the post-apocalypse with open arms, Fallout: New Vegas is its sarcastic, passive-aggressive cousin. Everyone in the game has an angle, and the only thing standing in the way of the house winning is your growing series of dubious decisions. This spirit of hard-edged humor and escalating choice is perfectly encapsulated by a single quest.

The setup

Novac, in all its dinosaur-centered glory.

Looking at the giant dinosaur statue named “Dinky,” and the broken No Vacancy sign hanging from the settlement’s single motel, you might assume Novac is a pit stop on your path to New Vegas proper. After going through Primm and Nipton, two towns filled with conflict and moral chaos, you finally have a place to rest. That all changes when you meet Boone.

A former NCR sniper, Boone is a man isolated both literally and figuratively. Every night, he walks up a set of narrow red steps leading to the giant dinosaur’s mouth. Guarding Novac against this somewhat goofy backdrop, he spends his vigil watching the wasteland through Dinky’s faded white teeth—all the while wondering which of his estranged neighbors sold his wife Clara into slavery while he was on patrol.

During the quest One For My Baby, he confides in you—a stranger—and gives you his treasured 1st Recon beret, then provides you with a simple task. Once you find the person responsible for Clara’s kidnapping, lure them in front of Dinky, and put on Boone’s beret. He would take care of the rest.

Boone blows the head off of one of the suspects.

Making it happen

According to One For My Baby’s writer, Eric Fenstermaker, this quest was part of the original proof-of-concept for Fallout: New Vegas shown to Bethesda. It’s such a great, self-contained tone piece because, alongside ghoul-focused quest Come Fly With Me, it was originally meant to demonstrate all that Fallout: New Vegas would eventually become. Allowing the death of every major character in the game meant players could “get any major character in the town shot by Boone, for any reason you could concoct in your own mind,” said Fenstermaker.

Accusing easygoing gift shop owner Cliff Briscoe, luring local crackpot No-Bark Noonan, or murdering Boone’s former BFF Manny Vargas is as easy as picking a dialogue option and putting on a beret. You can feel that power, and it makes taking the easy way out of the quest an extremely conscious act of callousness.

The Bill of Sale legally giving Caesar s Legion the rights to Carla Boone and her unborn child.

However, investigating Novac thoroughly will eventually reveal a bill of sale identifying Jeannie May Crawford, town matriarch, as the culprit. “The Bill of Sale was itself an interesting document,” Fenstermaker told me. “The language of the contract was based on real slavery contracts in the pre-Civil War era. And if players take the time to read it they'll get a piece of information they won't find anywhere else in the game, which is that Boone's wife was pregnant when she was sold.”

This is a melodramatic touch. Fenstermaker says as much. However, he also argues that, “in a totally wild west environment, not only is it a plausible situation, but it's also important to the stakes of the overall game story and to the player's investment in the world to show that extremes of inhumanity and desperation are commonplace here.”

Ranger Andy expresses his opinion of Clara.

“A lot of the power of the Fallout setting comes from the juxtaposition of those elements with a 1950s culture that was purposefully engineered to promote a carefree naivete that would keep people from considering the unthinkable,” Fenstermaker said. “The farther the reality gets from the '50s dream-version of it, the more powerful the impression it creates.”

On choosing Jennie May as the culprit, Fenstermaker stated that “for the quest, figuring out who the culprit should be was a matter of asking, for each townsperson in this ostensibly decent town, what would it take for them to sell a human being—a particular human being—into slavery.” Jeannie May fit this role perfectly, because she allowed Eric to create a villain with a new, disturbing motivation: casual pettiness.

Jeannie May Crawford, one of your many suspects.

“I liked the idea of using a character who at a surface level was friendly and polite but who just beneath was proud and insecure,” said Fenstermaker. “The kind of person who in any other world would handle a detractor with a passive-aggressive anonymous letter or by spitting in her soup, but in a place where you could get away with it, might just sell that detractor to slavers.”

Fallout: New Vegas lures you into a false sense of security with an area starring relaxed, seemingly simple characters. When you’re waiting around a cattle pen to catch a minigun-wielding Nightkin driven mad by the cries of Brahmin in his dreams, it’s easy to believe you have a reasonable idea of what to expect from Novac. This makes unveiling Boone’s tragic story, and the mundane evil lurking beneath Novac’s quiet surface, that much more jarring.

One For My Baby is a quest where the little details build, one upon another, until someone ends up dead. Who that person may be is up to you.

Apr 27, 2017

The future of dialogue in games

PC Gamer

It’s the stuff of a thousand RPGs: you’ve braved the Barren Pass and crossed the Aching Plains and now, hours since you last spoke to a coherent NPC, you’re finally standing before a city teeming with literally tens of characters, each bursting to tell you at length about the history of their people.

Getting to discover the politics and personalities of a new location should feel like a reward, but the same formulaic text dump from city to city can make you feel awfully weary. Being NPCsplained at with screeds of exposition and feeling you’re taking little meaningful part in it all, game dialogue can make you want to run back into the hills.

It’s easy to blame writers for this, but like every other aspect of videogame development, the craft of game writing is more complex than you’d think. As Adam Hines, co-founder of Oxenfree developer Night School Studio, says, "Writing for games and writing for anything else is a totally different job. It’s more like trying to solve a very complex mathematical problem than it is a pure writing exercise."

Writing for games is more like trying to solve a very complex mathematical problem than it is a pure writing exercise.
Adam Hines, Oxenfree

Oxenfree, a modern adventure game built around a group of teens chatting their way through a supernatural mystery, is a prime example of how game dialogue is getting better: more reactive, more natural, more involved, through a combination of game design and writing itself. But that doesn’t mean that game history isn’t already littered with beautifully crafted conversations which succeed at scene-setting, character-introducing, goal-orientating, and instruction-giving. Oh, and also entertaining. Game dialogue needs to do a lot.

The form must be functional

When Chris Avellone—writer and designer of games from Planescape: Torment to Fallout: New Vegas and recent free agent—writes dialogue, he thinks about it performing three fundamental things. First, the conversation needs a purpose. If it’s with a merchant, then they need to provide that service, and quickly.

Second, the dialogue needs to be aware of the narrative happening in the nearby area as well as the overarching story. "If the Enclave is encroaching on a community in Fallout, even a simple merchant can say, 'If you’ve come for supplies, you’d best hurry, won’t be much left after the Enclave arrives.’ That tells the local narrative, and the larger narrative."

And third, dialogue has to be as aware of the player’s actions as possible. "If you’ve just wiped out the Enclave, then you’d script the merchant’s opening node to something else: 'Hey, you’re the one that kicked the Enclave’s ass. Anything I have in stock; for you, half off.’"

For Avellone, the third part is where he finds a lot of the challenge in writing. It’s not just about crafting wonderful words, but making sure they acknowledge the player and react accordingly, and that means a lot of checking and accounting. Has the player already done the quest the NPC talks about? Has the player joined an enemy faction? "I have a checklist I go through for each character to try and make sure I haven’t forgotten anything," Avellone says. "It’s usually a matter of repeating the mantra, 'if-then-else,' again and again."

Those are the basics for dialogue in which you’re rooted to the spot, the typical way games attempt to represent the messy and responsive nature of human conversation. But some games attempt to make it more naturalistic. GTA IV, for instance, has characters who ride with you and deliver story while you’re driving to the next location, and that dialogue changes if you’re restarting a mission.

You don’t get choices, but the experience feels truer to life than a talking head and folds neatly into GTA’s existing gameflow. And in fact, it’s an idea that fits with classic scriptwriting technique.

"Aaron Sorkin said one of his writing tricks was always to have the characters talk about two things at once," says Hines. "Never have them only talking about one subject. In a game design-y way we found that really worked in Oxenfree, where if you’re having a conversation and doing something that isn’t directly tied to that conversation it feels good and like you’re patting your head and rubbing your chest. It just feels very..." He pauses, looking for the right word, but dialogue works so subtly that it’s hard to find one. "...Nice."

Having led writing on The Wolf Among Us and Tales From the Borderlands at Telltale Games, Hines wanted to reflect Sorkin’s trick, making an adventure game in which you can walk and talk at the same time. "It very quickly became apparent why every other adventure game in history is written as: you go up and you click on an interact-able and then you stand there and you have a little scene and then you regain freedom again," he admits.

That’s because players, whether they think they do or not, need dialogue to give them information about what they’re meant be doing, where they’re going, and why. In Oxenfree, you can often interrupt, choose not to respond, or simply not be listening. Part of the solution was to make the player feel like they are Alex, Oxenfree’s main character. "It’s important to us that you don’t have to think about the choices you’re making because they’re your natural responses," says Hines.

And with that comes the challenge of delivering all the exposition required to feel secure in your understanding of Alex’s world, something it solves with the device of having a stepbrother character who Alex hasn’t met before. She can relay to him (and therefore us) information about the island they’re visiting and introduce him to her friends, and it feels natural and part of the plot.

Oxenfree uses the multiple-choice format that most dialogue-based games do: dialogue options that branch off into new areas of a greater tree. Managing these trees, ensuring the player flows through them smoothly and gets the right info and tone of response for their choices, makes writing something of a technical job. "In many respects, it’s just like designing a UI," says Avellone.

Better tools can therefore aid better writing. Avellone had to use a scripter to build conversations from Word into Fallout 2, but now dev tools often allow authoring directly in the game engine, making writing faster and playtesting a whole lot easier. As a measure of how important tools were to Oxenfree, its lead engineer, Bryant Cannon, put nearly eight months of the first year of development into creating the tool in which the dialogue was written. Resembling a flow chart, it connects all the dialogue and animations in a visual way.

Oxenfree's custom dialogue tool. This is how you make natural conversations.

But it’s a creative job as well as a technical one, and tools will only go so far. "The sad thing is that the trick is just to write a shit-ton," says Hines.

And there are practical limits to how complex a conversation can be. "If the designer can’t navigate their own conversation, it’s generally the first sign," says Avellone. "This usually happens when they’ve made the conversation too organic, have too many branches, or they don’t use chokepoints when they should." Chokepoints is the name Avellone gives to major branches in a conversation where you’re given many dialogue options, all of which will return you to that chokepoint so you can explore the rest.

And aside from the creative challenge of constructing a dialogue tree, there’s the cognitive challenge for the player trying to digest it all. "There’s a practical limit to how much text a player should be presented with, and this is even affected by if the conversation is voiced or not, since that has rules as well," Avellone says.

The Witcher 3 set a new bar for engaging dialogue and animation, and was comfortable with long conversations. It'll be hard to top. But what about dialogue out in the open world?

The future of dialogue: more ambient, more reactive

Not all dialogue in games is one-to-one. An increasingly important kind is ambient dialogue, barked by NPCs as you move through the world, giving it a sense of life. One of the ambitions Ubisoft Montreal had for Watch Dogs 2 was "to create a non-player-centric universe," according to game writer Leanne Taylor-Giles. "It naturally feels more realistic since that’s the way we, as humans, largely inhabit the world."

In Watch Dogs 2, civilians notice you running around with a gun out or if you’re doing something weird, like hiding next to a wall in broad daylight. But it’s in the details that the sense that the city is made up of people with their own agendas and problems: "For the example of the player running around with their gun out, things might get more heated if one of the nearby civilians happens to be an NRA member, for example."

The challenge for Taylor-Giles was to identify situations that people would realistically react to, as well as not writing lines for situations that are so specific that most players would never hear them. "Those moments can be great, and they are! But when you’re working with a large number of NPCs any additions become exponential." As ever, cost-versus-impact is what really decides what goes into a game.

These dynamic systems feel like they might be the future of game dialogue. "Personally, I love systems that can chain and which thereby tell a story, regardless of whether the player arrives at the beginning, the middle, or the end," says Taylor-Giles.

I often admire writers who don t use words at all. They just work with the environment artists to build the story in the scene.
Chris Avellone

And dynamic storytelling like this doesn’t even necessarily need to be systems-led, or actually be told through dialogue. "I often admire writers who don’t use words at all. They just work with the environment artists to build the story in the scene," says Avellone. "There’s a lot you can say with just an arrangement of environment props and inventory items."

"But the emphasis also needs to be on readability," says Taylor-Giles. "Whether or not the player knows exactly what’s going on, they should be able to come up with a version of events that seems logical and realistic for the world their character is inhabiting."

In other words, developers still need to be sure that players are absorbing the information they need. But one thing that’s helping is steadily changing player expectations. Not all games give strict stories to follow and goals to accomplish, and players are becoming more comfortable with the idea of open-endedness, in which dialogue can more freely be part of the experience rather than a straightforward means to an end.

"We’re now, just in the last few years, getting out of that box and having games where there isn’t a goal and you’re hanging out and having fun and experiencing the art of them," says Hines.

As you enter that city after your long journey, what if you know that its secrets will organically unfurl as you explore it on your own terms, less being told and more feeling your way through it? Now that’d be a reward.

Feb 20, 2017

The best mods for Fallout: New Vegas

PC Gamer

With fans expressing disappointment in some aspects of 2015's Fallout 4—we considered it a good game but a bad RPG—it's never a bad time to return to the superior Fallout: New Vegas. And, with nearly 18,000 different mods featuring everything from small tweaks to aesthetic changes, added quests and new characters, and massive overhauls of the game's inner workings, there are lots of ways to enhance and extend your New Vegas experience.

Here's our updated list of the best mods for Fallout: New Vegas. If we've missed one of your favorites (we're sure we have) and you want to let us and other readers know about it (we're sure you do), mention it in the comments!

And, if you're new to using mods with Fallout New Vegas, we'll tell you everything you need to know about how to get these mods, and others, installed and running smoothly.

DUST Survival Simulator

Looking for a far more challenging experience in New Vegas? Dust Survival Simulator presumes that after the war there was also a plague that turned the desert into an even less hospitable place filled with cannibals and and tribal warriors. There are no quests: your only mission is to survive as long as you can. Many aspects of the game have been overhauled, combat is much deadlier, food and water are a priority, and you can forget about hauling an arsenal of weapons and gear with your since carryweight has been severely reduced. Only the toughest will survive.

Blackrow - It's a criminal's life

Don't just dress like a gangster: become one. Visit a new town called Blackrow that's controlled by organized crime. There, you'll meet the man in charge and begin working your way to the top of the mob, first by rubbing out some of the competition, then by ambushing convoys and robbing a few banks, and finally, by taking down another major crime boss. There's a good two or three hours of extra fun to be had with this mod, so grab your Tommy Gun and get blasting.

TitanFallout

Power armor is cool, but the power armor from Titanfall is even cooler. The TitanFallout mod lets you summon a massive Titan from the sky, which will plummet to the ground and begin attacking your enemies. Naturally, you can also climb inside and control it directly. If your Titan is destroyed, you'll be able to begin production on a new one and summon it a half-hour later.

King of the Ring

Role-playing is fine, but how about a little boxing? King of the Ring adds a gym and welcomes you to strap on some gloves and trade punches with a series of opponents. While the modder jokingly claims to have added over a million lines of dialogue and 200+ hours of additional gameplay, it's really just an enjoyable way to punch the crap out of someone and get punched yourself.

Weapons of the New Millenia

This mod delivers a whopping pack of weapons into New Vegas, everything from an AK-47 to a Bushmaster M4A1 to a Colt M1911. It's a compilation of Team Millenia's brilliant modern firearms all in one place, and you can choose how you acquire these weapons—either through the use of cheat cabinets which give you everything for free, or by using leveled lists that will require defeating enemies or purchasing them from vendors.

Traffic

Surely, someone would have gotten a few cars and trucks working in the post-apocalypse, right? While you can't drive these vehicles yourself (at least not yet), installing the Traffic mod means you'll spot a working car every now and then trundling around on the shattered streets of New Vegas. It adds a nice touch of immersion to your travels.

Five Nights at Vault 5

Fallout's Vaults weren't designed just to protect people from atomic bombs, but were also devised to perform cruel and unusual experiments on the inhabitants. This one is no exception. Based on the Five Nights at Freddy's horror game series, Five Nights at Vault 5 drops you into an arena, strips you of your gear, and dispatches robots to hunt you down. You'll have to be stealthy and silent to avoid detection, and periodically the arena will fill with radiation, forcing you to find a console to shut it off. Can you survive for five progressively more challenging nights and win your freedom?

New Vegas Bounties

It's just not a true Western without a little bounty hunting, is it? The Bounties mod combines enjoyable writing with excellent custom voice acting while providing a series of increasingly difficult bounty missions that will have you crisscrossing the map to hunt down various outlaws and scoundrels. When you finish rounding up those varmints, there's even a second installment.

Note: both Bounties mods require this third file to run.

Nevada Skies

For an environment as harsh as the desert, and for a setting as unstable as the post-apocalypse, the weather in New Vegas is surprisingly humdrum. Nevada Skies adds a ton of exciting new weather systems to make every journey an adventure. You'll endure crashing thunderstorms, deadly radiation storms, smothering sandstorms, and hell-on-earth firestorms. It also provides other features like darker nights, new high-def sun and moon textures, and better-looking cloud systems.

A new item in your inventory lets you play with the settings until you create the perfect randomized weather system for your adventures, be it by adding a blood red sky, driving rain, or just an occasional gentle snowfall.

MTUI

Play enough FNV and your mouse's scroll wheel will probably wear out and fall off. The interface was designed for console users sitting far from their screens, so the game's fonts are far too big and the display doesn't make the most of your PC monitor's real estate. MTUI fixes this by fitting much more text on your screen, letting you see more and scroll less.

Realistic Headshots

Shooting people in the head should probably kill them, and getting shot in the head should probably kill you. Realistic Headshots makes that happen, upping the damage to catastrophic levels when you score a direct shot the dome. Don't worry, this won't make the game too easy: your chance of a headshot in VATS is greatly reduced, and some monsters and robots will still be able to shrug off the damage. Besides, your own noggin is now far more vulnerable to incoming lead as well, so wearing a helmet is a major priority.

Project Brazil

This ambitious mod represent years of work by several modders and contributors. The Project Brazil mod takes place in California with a whole new Vault society and a massive, dangerous overworld to explore as you partake in a new main quest and side missions. It's still technically in beta, so there may be bugs here and there, but it's absolutely worth checking out if you want an entirely new Fallout experience.

Populated Casinos

Remember the first time you reached New Vegas? Striding excitedly into a casino, turning in your weapons (except perhaps one), stepping onto the gaming floor, and feasting your eyes on... like, two dead-eyed NPCs standing near some slot machines. One big letdown in FNV was that the casinos felt vacant and dull.

Populated Casinos turns the casinos into a more interesting place to visit. Gaming tables are crowded with gamblers, there are people strolling around and chatting, and there's a bigger staff on hand. Vegas finally has some of the liveliness it was lacking.

Centered 3rd Person Camera

I never really minded the over-the-shoulder camera, but after trying out the Centered Camera mod I definitely won't go back. It makes it much easier to check out your character from the front, take good screenshots of yourself without being slid over to one side of the screen, and best of all, it lets you zoom way, way out for a great look at your surroundings.

Roleplayer's Alternative Start

While every game of FNV is different, starting a new game can feel a bit, well, samey . If you're tired of having to sit on Doc Mitchell's couch and answer the same old questions, or weary of starting your game in Goodsprings, or if you're just sick of being the Courier altogether, the Roleplayer's Alternative Start mod will give you a fresh beginning. You'll begin at a randomized spot on the map with only a few belongings, selected for you based on your answers to a couple quick questions. Get out there and discover yourself.

Improved Companion Sandbox

Sometimes it's the little details that make the biggest differences. The Improved Companion Sandbox isn't for you, specifically, but for your companions. Instead of standing around woodenly while you attend to your business, they'll engage in some business of their own, such as sitting down in nearby chairs, leaning against walls, and performing custom idle animations. They'll chill out, in other words, making them feel more like people and less like mindless follow-bots.

Project Nevada

There are tons of gameplay changes in this massive mod, but you don't have to incorporate them all: Project Nevada is handily split into different sections so you can pick what you like and leave out the rest. The core of the mod focuses on adding FPS elements like bullet time, a grenade hotkey, and variable zooms for scoped weapons. Another portion allows you to surgically upgrade your body with cybernetic implants, boosting your vision, strength, speed, and durability. The third module features tons of rebalancing tweaks to make for more frenetic combat and a more challenging survival experience, and the fourth adds a ton of new weapons and gear, including popular items created by other modders.

NMCS Texture Pack

There's a morbid sort of beauty in a decaying landscape, and the NMCS Texture Pack makes New Vegas even more bleakly attractive. Everything from roads, trees, buildings, vehicles, and other objects have been retextured (sky, water, characters, and weapons are untouched). More detail usually means a performance hit, but there are three different levels of quality to choose from if you have issues running the biggest textures.

Alternative Repairing

Your gun is broken, your knife is dull, and your armor is in tatters. How are you going to fix them? Traditionally, by finding identical versions of the broken items and cannibalizing them (or by paying a vendor to fix them for you). With Alternative Repairing, however, you can break down other existing items into base components, then combine those components into replacement parts for your gear. It's a nice balance of giving you more repair options while requiring some extra effort, and most of all, it makes you feel like a real DIY enthusiast.

Jsawyer Mod

If you find New Vegas a little too easy, this mod by Joshua Sawyer (the actual director of the game) is here to help, and that help is gonna hurt. This massive series of tweaks means you'll gain less experience from combat, you'll level far more slowly, you'll be able to carry less, and you'll be far more vulnerable to damage. Eating, drinking, and resting are now a top priority, and ammo and stimpacks—formerly lighter than air—will now weigh you down. There are dozens of changes for a more challenging experience, making FNV a true struggle for survival, just as it was originally envisioned.

Note: This mod requires every last scrap of official DLC to run. The download is on his page in the "Links" section.

NV Interiors Project

Sure, you'd expect to find a bunch of boarded-up buildings around the wasteland, but seeing as how you're a super-powered explorer with an arsenal of explosives, you'd expect to be able to bust your way inside, too. These two mods, one for Wasteland buildings and one for Urban structures let you inside those formerly impenetrable buildings so you can explore, loot, and maybe even find a few secrets.

Monster Mod

New Vegas has its share of nasty creatures, but after a few romps across the map, you'll probably grow bored of fighting the same monsters over and over. This Monster Mod adds a monstrous number of new beasties: some are tougher variations of existing monsters like dogs, scorpions, and ghouls, but many are entirely new, such as giant two-headed axe-wielding zombie mutants. With over a hundred new monsters included, every trip through the desert will provide you with a fresh and terrible surprise.

Essential Visual Enhancements

There are many ways to deal damage in New Vegas. Bullets, energy blasts, grenades, flamethrowers, missiles and more... so don't you want all those things to be as pretty as possible? The EVE mod gussies up the carnage with new effects and textures covering everything from flames and explosions to bullet impacts and critical energy kills.

Run the Lucky 38

You've cut a swath of death and destruction across the desert during your game. Maybe it's time to slow down and build something instead? This mod lets you Run the Lucky 38 casino, turning it from a ruined husk into the jewel of the Mojave. Hire employees, manage your bankroll, upgrade the amenities, improve the furnishings, all in an effort to attract more gamblers and customers to your growing business.

Immersive Karma

Either you're perfectly happy doing terrible things, or you're in a jam and need to commit a tiny little crime to survive. Either way, you're fully aware that you're doing something bad and you certainly don't need the game's sad little electro-trombone telling you it is soooo disappointed in your behavior. This Immersive Karma mod is a must-have, letting you shut off the bad karma notifications that accompany every minor theft or major murder you commit.

Improved Throwing

One place New Vegas severely falters is with its thrown weapons. First, they're very rare, and second, once thrown, they can't be retrieved. The Improved Throwing mod allows you to craft throwing weapons like spears and knives, convert standard weapons into flung missiles, and most importantly, pick up your stuff after you've chucked it someone. You can even throw random debris as a last resort.

Colored Map and Icons

Let's face it, you're gonna be checking your Pipboy's map a lot, and it's not exactly the loveliest bit of tech, is it? The Colored Map and Icons mod lets you choose your resolution levels, add colors, coordinates, and overlay info, and pick from several icon packs. Just because it's the post-apocalypse doesn't mean you can't have a little eye-candy on your wrist.

For the Enclave

The Enclave are among the worst of Fallout's bad guys, sure, but chances are you've exhibited a little questionable behavior yourself from time to time. Now you can join the Enclave and see what makes them tick. A series of quests will deposit you in the ranks of the Enclave, give you access to their massive underground base, and you'll even be able to enjoy the air support their vertibirds provide. You can read our more extensive write-up here.

Goodsprings Shack

When most of the population of the world has died, surely the one thing that won't be in short supply is real estate. So why is it so hard to find a vacant place to lay your head in New Vegas? This mod adds a small, humble Goodsprings Shack, perfect for when you're just starting out and need a quiet place to safely store your spare junk, get a refreshing drink of water, and catch a few winks without having to rent a room.

Food and Drink Health Bonus Remover

Remember in Die Hard when Bruce Willis got shot in the shoulder, so he ducked around the corner, stopped time, and scarfed down insect meat, coyote steaks, and a handful of apples, which completely healed his wounds? Me neither. This mod means food doesn't heal you, and it also raises the cost of stimpacks and bottled water. You'll die a little easier, but it feels a bit more fair.

Imps Timescale Adjuster

Time flies when you're having fun, but now you can determine just how quickly. The Timescale Adjuster lets you configure the passage of time while in the overworld, spending time indoors, or during combat. If the day-night cycle seems too fast, or not fast enough, just consult your Pipboy and change it to your liking.

Character Overhaul

FNV's character creation system is great provided you want to make an ugly, dull-looking, flat-faced character every time. Character Overhaul completely redesigns the character system with new meshes and textures, giving you loads more options during character creation and making the overall look of characters, NPCs included, much more detailed. Unlike many texture mods, this one comes with little in the way of performance hits.

Best of all, you can make your character truly ugly on purpose now, with craggy skin, horrifying scars, and diseased eyes, or you can just straight-up play as a ghoul.

How to install New Vegas mods

Here are the three most useful tools in getting these and other mods installed properly:

The first is the Nexus Mod Manager, which makes downloading, installing, ordering, activating, and deactivating mods much easier than doing it manually. Nicely, it also works for Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout 3. It will also check to see if you've got the most current version of all your activated mods, and let you know if one of them has been updated. Here's a Wiki page explaining how it works. You'll also need an account at nexusmods.com (it's free).

Another important tool is the New Vegas Script Extender. Typically, more complicated mods require this. It's easy to install, and there's a readme contained within the download with full instructions.

Finally, there's the Mod Configuration Menu. This provides a settings menu for certain mods, accessible when you pause the game. Not all mods require this, but it's handy to have to adjust mod setting while in-game.

Finally, before trying to install anything, carefully read the mod description page. It will (usually) tell you how to install it, and (usually) list any other mods or files you'll need to make mods work. Keep in mind, not all mods get along with each other. If you've installed several and you're having issues, try deactivating them and then reactivating them one at a time. It can help you narrow down where the incompatibilities lie.