I brought something like this up in another topic and I couldn't find anywhere this was asked before. Will the patch allow me to continue playing my 13+ hours of gameplay that I have already accumulated? Or will it only cover saves made after the patch has been installed?

I don't imagine you'll need to start over.

I'd be surprized if you couldn't. That's a hallmark of bad game design, unless said patch is an extreme overhaul that remakes the game... and even then, restarting is usually recommended rather than required.

Why do people keep posting this question? I've seen it asked any time a patch is released for a game...

Sorry dude, but none of your saves will be repaired and you will need to start from scratch. This has been covered in some other posts in more detail.

You won't have to restart the game.

If you have a save that works I'm pretty sure you'll be able to use it after the patch. There was a while there where patches sometimes did require that you start over but this seems pretty rare today (and FO3 never had this problem with its patches).

If you have a save the game reads as corrupted then chances are it's a problem with the save file itself rather than the game so it's unlikely it can be recovered.

"gstaff wrote on November 9th, 2010

@Hamburglar Time — if you’re getting the message that your save is corrupt due to missing DLC, those saves should work once the update is out. Some corrupted saves (for other reasons), may not work."

- http://bethblog.com/index.php/2010/11/05/more-news-on-new-vegas-updates/

So I'm assuming that there is a difference between actual corrupt save files and just save files that got bugged because of the game. From my understanding if it was truly corrupted that would be a fault with the hard drive just how data gets corrupted with an immense cyclical or standard sector degradation "corrupt sectors" on a hard drive. I would think that if your save files on your hard drive were actually corrupt you might have noticed it with other bits of data on the hard drive. Other games would be effected if that were the case. At least that's the way it would be from a hard ware perspective. With all that said I think chances are that you should be able to play those save files again. At least that's what I'm somewhat expecting given the case.

yea, in other words the DLC issue is an error with the way the game tries to load saves, rather than the save data itself.