So I wait in line for the midnight launch. I get my Collects Edition and head home. I then open my box. No DVD case inside. No game. No code. All CE bonuses are accounted for. Have to call my local store they said they would be there for 15 more minutes. I shove everything back in my CE box and rush down to the store for a replacement.

I then get back home DVD and key accounted for. I run the setup from the disc and input my code everything goes off without a hitch. I will be playing New Vegas soon.

I start up the game and get through character customization. Get outside the doc's door and the game makes it's first autosave. This is the only autosave that I will have, at that point I don't know that yet.

Explore around Goodsprings for awhile. Noticing erratic frame rates and white flashes everywhere. I save and go back to the launcher repeatedly, dropping my settings further and further each time. Even though I can play fallout 3 on ultra and sometimes wish there were higher settings I could switch on.

The only setting that made any kind of a impact was disabling water effects. All my graphic settings set to low (crap) I start playing the game again framerate barely improved. I get to a point where there is a fight with 3 or 4 NPCs and I against 4 or 5 enemies I'm not sure how many there were because at this point i'm getting about 1 frame per second. About 5 frames later, there are bodies on the ground and I guess people walked off and it allowed the game to be semiplayble again.

I decide that this won't do and hit the forums. It's always fun to be in the forums instead of playing the game you just dropped $70 dollars on. Find out that I can use either AA or HDR, I can't have both. Unless I don't mind the white flashes. I decide to keep the white flashes and pretend they are mini-nukes going off in the distance. But I can't find a lie to tell myself when the framerate drops around NPCs. Brain damage? Anxiety disorder?

Find a dll that tells the game I'm using some ancient relic of a videocard, plop that in my falloutNV directory and feel the joy of playable frame rates. I even crank it up to ultra, I play for hours, happiness ensues!

Start it back up the next day. I'm right outside of Doc Mitchell's. wth? Little more testing, in and out of NV, making new autosaves, deleting save files from my documents, even while the game is running. Turning off steam cloud, playing in offline mode. Nothing helps. Back to the forums!

Find out it's a major goof and to lock the game out of a obscurely named and placed directory so my system would let it do what it was programed to do. Fixed! I can now use autosaves!

Play for many more hours over a few days happy as happy can be. Hear about new nvidia drivers download them and install them. First try murdered my soundcard, had something to do with selecting only the graphics driver to be installed while selecting clean install under custom. Don't do this btw. Had to do a system restore. Try the 260.99 drivers again, they install fine I start playing again white specks gone. Fast forward to late last night. FIRST NEW VEGAS CRASH EVER continuing on until today. Crashes left and right.

So now I'm rolling back my my nvidia drivers hoping I get my mini-nuke explosions in the distance back. But also no crashing. I hope it goes well.

I only really want three things. A decent framerate, the ability to autosave and no crashes. Is that too much to ask? Apparently in the first week..... yes, yes it is.

Oh make that four, I need the game or at least the code in the first place.

I don't even have time to think about all the expected bugs and glitches that any reasonable person might expect in a game. And there are plenty of those to be sure. I'm too busy fighting for fundamentals.

To my fellow waste landers, my heart goes out to ya. I know you love this franchise as much as I do and this has been a headache that has no true relief. Just wanted to share my story.

But don' t worry. Patches are coming that will make everything perfect soon and I'm sure we can all look forward to some free DLC, right Obsidian?

Win7 64bit gtx460

update before posting: Then I finish typing out all this and hit post. I get error 500- Internal Server Error. The circle of fundamental fail is complete.

New Nvidia drivers? Do they fix the NPC framerate drop? Are the crashes even GPU driver related?
I wish there was more of a gamesas presence in these forums...

i dont get it anymore, every effin port of this game was bugged, ps3 xbox and pc. i mean i know nobody is perfect but serioulsy, not everyone is a [censored] up like this launch

The 260.99 Nvidia drivres only fix the white flashes. The NPC slowdown is still there. You must use the fixed dll floating around in the forums for decent framerates still.

On that note then, they need to just fix that in an official capacity. It's been a week since launch, it took how long for the community to get a fix? What is it they are doing with their time? Scripting malfunctions? : /

I have seen one reply by Bethesda in the last week and it was some PR guy giving fluff about how much they care. I'm with the guy that said they're just on vacation and waiting for the fans to troubleshoot and come up with fixes for the problems themselves. I know that's what's going on so far

I'm a long-term Bethesda fan and owner of all of their major titles and I'm done with this company. The fact that I've had so many problems that render this game actually unable to start that I can't list them all in a forum concerns me.