Having just finally finished the main quest, it occurs to me that I spent a lot of the time I was playing avoiding said main quest in favour of doing "other things" (strangely reminiscent of what I did on my first play through of Fallout 1 years ago).
The thing is though, I have the nagging feeling that I could have probably finished the game quite quickly if I wanted to only spend a few hours in total:
Spoiler 1. Arrive at New Vegas via the monorail from the NCR Fort, meet Mr. House
2. Buy a concealed weapon from the guy who immediately runs up to you trying to sell you one, kill Benny, get Platinum Chip, meet Yes Man.
3. Travel to The Fort, install Platinum Chip into machine.
4. Kill Mr. House, replace him with Yes Man and, err ... proceed on the fasted possible path to the Hoover Dam battle.
i.e. completely ignore NCR, Legion and "The House Always Wins" 2,3,4, etc...quests, side quests and pretty much all of the really cool content and locations in the game.
I guess the difficulty could be near impossible and I'm possibly missing a few mandatory steps that I thought were optional (if so, well done Obsidian!), but just wondering if anybody's ever tried a speed run and/or what people's thoughts on how fast this could be done?
Step 1 has an issue:
Spoiler NCR guards at the monorail are quite hostile and heavily armed until your rep is high enough, might have to burn a stealth-boy to get through. At this point you to have one you'd have to complete Ghost Town Showdown
Instead I would
Spoiler run as far as Freeside, making sure to tag a fast-travel point south of downtown, Camp McCarren would be ideal, but the factory just south of there would work. Kill a few groups of fiends, 4-5 RCLs should sell for enough money to let you pass the credit check. Leftover money goes to buy stimpacks from Followers, you'll need a fast source of reliable meds so you can tag freeside gates while you're in the area, and use Old Mormon Fort.
What build would you consider using for a speed run? I'm thinking guns or melee weapons would be the best option for weapons: giving you the greatest number of options to immediately gear up and head north. Stealth might be a decent tag skill if your strategy for some areas involves sneaking through without combat to preserve resources. Speech lets you bypass some parts of some quests entirely
To me a good speedrun build would have to:
1) have immediate access to decent weapons
2) be able to survive the run north to Vegas, ideally without fiddly save-and-reload savescumming, which I personally consider cheating because it removes the risk/reward tradeoffs that you take designing a run, in favor of always taking the high risk, high reward option and reloading the save if the enemies spawn unfavorably or a chest spawns loot other than exactly what you wanted.
3) Let you avoid as much content as possible either by bypassing "the long route" through a quest with a skill check, unlocking a door, avoiding fights, ect. or straight-up sequence breaking.
4) Ramp up quickly in power, both gear and skill-wise to be able to defeat combat challenges as quickly as possible with the least expenditure of resources
» Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:33 am 
