I just wanna say how disappointing it is to see all of the problems the FNV game seems to have.

I am on my fourth playthough of FO3 and was really looking forward to FNV but after reading about all the problems everyone seems to be having I don't want to drop $50 on a game that doesn't work.

The question I have is WHY are people having so many problems?

Are most of the issues coming from the game itself or is it because of mods?

I have a (barely) Ok system

Pentium dual core 2.60 GHz
4.00 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 4500

Like I said Fo3 works fine but....

Honestly, I'd say an awful lot of it is because Obsidian didn't want to settle.

They could have used the game engine pretty near identical to FO3 and only worried about plots, quests, characters and setting. Instead they decided to add new animations, new mechanics with certain guns (single shell loading of revolvers/rifles), Damage Threshold, disguises, reputation, companion wheel, hardcoe mode, etc.

They were adding features into an existing engine, which is always risky, and they were doing it on a limited timeframe. The majority of the complaints I've seen seem to be based on the new features not working correctly.

The majority of the problems have to do with the sheer amount of quests and dialogue options that were implemented into the game. That and the number of locations, enemies, items, realistic towns outnumber what we saw in FO3 and I'm not sure this engine was up to the task to do all of that. Other than a couple of minor quest issues (the major one being Veronica not responding which I had to read about a way to get her to follow me again) and things stuck in walls, I've had a blast playing over 100 hours on 2 complete playthroughs of the game. I will say this though, after a few hours the game occasionally crashes to desktop. Something that FO3 did as well. Honestly, I would definitely not pass this game up just because of the bugs. I enjoyed it way more than FO3 but then longed for roaming the capital wastes again thinking maybe FO3 was the better game. But after playing FO3 a few hours I went back to NV which is definitely a better game in every way

Its not because of mods - Ive played it through twice and the only mod I used 2nd time was Fellout which changes the lighting a little.
I've seen quests glitch on one playthrough but not the other and when I say glitch I mean having to use the console to cheat in order to fix stuff.

This game simply wasnt properly tested beforehand or else it was and they said 'F*** it, lets get it out before Christmas and fix it later'
- either way Obsidian have done nothing for their already poor reputation.

There's a gunfight that virtually every player will experience in the first hour of play and for everyone it turned into a slideshow.
The community found a fix within a day or two - a replacement dll - and the next driver from Nvidia fixed it too. So why it wasnt spotted
during testing and Nvidia asked to release a beta driver for it is baffling. That tells you a lot about the 'quality' of this product.

I'm glad you took the time to qualify the statement on performance errors - an unnerving number of people don't bother even putting "virtually" in front of "everyone." But yeah the people who experienced unexpectedly poor performance (most often cited reason appears to be nvidia+facegen) seemed at first to be a random assortment of nvidia users with a wide range of system configurations across multiple OS types. What was really confounding was that some ATI/AMD users were experiencing very similar stuttering and NPC slowdown issues (though they are either fewer or at least less loud.)

The D3d9.dll fix, which fixed a large portion of people's problems instantly and without many problems besides potential endgame cutscene crashing, was actually already out well before this game was even entering development. This made it seem like this had to be the same glitch Nvidia (and primarily windows 7 and vist x64 OS) users had seen even in the final patched version of Fallout 3. Were this the case - that would be quite frustrating.

The odd thing about that fix though is that it is a sort of sledgehammer rather than a scalpel - it acts almost like a directx compatability mode by forcing use of DX9 shaders/settings and spoofing (in a very superficial and relatively problem-free way) an older video card. This masked the reality that though the fix was effectively identical, the problem it addressed was not wholly the same as the one with Fallout 3. At first I took that line of thinking as overly optomistic and giving an excessive benefit of the doubt to Obsidian. That was until I found that my my media server (which has almost identical hardware as my main desktop except for the graphics card being a GTX 265 instead of a GTX 485) ran the game as smooth as butter while my primary gaming rig ran it.. well it was more like that crust that builds up in the bottom of a very old tub of "I Can't Beleive It's Not Butter"; at which point the goop inside the container is so noxious that the label becomes ironic.

Anyways this kind of pissed me off so I started comparing DXDIAG outputs for the systems. The only difference, besides the gaming desktop having a superior graphics card and a more-than-decent SSD, was the driver version. My media sever, which had been my gaming rig a while back, had not had the drivers updated for about a year. Upon updating them to the latest drivers (at launch of the game)... BAM stuttering. It seems that there is at least one Nvidia driver release from quite some time ago that is new enough not to CTD as soon as you launch and also did not have the performance issues with the FaceGen rendering.

So... how could they have caught this particular issue? Well it would not have required significantly more time, unlike more thuroughly running through all the quest variations and engine modifications they made, but would have required significantly more hardware. This issue could have been caught by a straight forward, though admittedly expensive, testbed using a representative sampling of likely hardware configurations AND a range of video driver versions. Most notably - some of the driver versions released within 6 months of the game launch date. Still, part of me can sympathize with the logic behind the assumption that newer drivers (and over many revisions) would react so poorly to the render-er choices made by the game and engine. Ah well I guess it should serve as a lesson that not even game developers should assume patches won't break something that had been previously working - whether or not it's actually accurate to say the patch broke anything as opposed to the driver patches exposed an engine flaw that had previously serendipitously not presented itself.

My experience began with a few crashes and movement lagging during and after gunfights. The patch fixed most of it. I get a glitch now and then, but no more crashes. I've played through the game twice and each experience was different and wonderful. So I'm one of those who have very few problems with the game. (Don't like Steam and its ads, though)

So get it, download the patch, and I believe there is a major patch being released on Monday for the PC via Steam. You have to rely on Steam, whether you buy the disc or download.

Post link: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1144183-still-no-patch/page__st__200

Also, it would pay to upgrade your video card and anything else you can afford. Not for performance, although it would help, but for beauty. The game looks great.

Thanks for the replies everyone.
You all gave me something to think about!

That .dll was actually a wrapper somebody made that detoured direct3d and spoofed the settings of a 7900gs so that FO3 could render heads on intel integrated graphics adapters. Fallout 3 never had this problem and that .dll was never intended to fix anything else, it just suprisingly came in handy for the first couple weeks NV was out. The facegen software (which is made by singular inversions and is a 3rd party component of the game engine) refused to run on unrecognized hardware. My guess is that facegen incorrectly identified newer graphics adapters in NV and was probably using software rendering or something but that's just a guess. As to why this was missed before release I'm not sure it was - remember the youtube video of the infamous 'spinning head' on the doctor? This was fixed the day the game launched on steam so only a few users got to experience the bug. I'm going to guess again and say that because this fix involved facegen and was literally last minute (via a new exe on steam the day of release) that's most likely what caused it

Just remember that not all people are experiencing problems, and that many of us do get to play the game as intended and are enjoying it very much.

But it is of course a bet, because you can not be sure if you will have any difficulties running this game.

If you have a "gaming rig" that is truly optimized to play games (ie. no unneccessary programs/codecs etc. installed), then there is a good chance that you will be able to play the game.

If you computer is an "all round rig", where you install a lot of different programs and such, there is a risk that you at the very least need to do some tweaking/uninstalling in order to get the game going.

But as I said, it is a bet (as with every PC game), that only you can determine if you are willing to make.

I have alway been lucky with gamebryo-based games.
FO3 ran nice, except for a few CTD's or lockups, but overall I could play it without much trouble.

FONV is the same for me, so far.
Runs reasonably well, a couple of quest bugs, but nothing game-breaking so far.

However you should be aware that it might be sort of a gamble.
But isn't that what New Vegas is about anyway?

Let's hope the new patch will fix the biggest problems for the people that are affected.