Just How Broken Was Fallout: New Vegas? 

It warms my heart to see some of these old bugs brought back so newer generations can enjoy them in Fallout 76.

I remember laughing so hard I cried because one time starting FNV, Doc Mitchell's head was rotating like a clock when you first wake up. He tilts his head, but the tilt went all the way. The perfect glitch for just waking up from brain surgery.

This is why you should always wait a while to get a new game. Also, the Creation Engine is highly moddable but mostly held together with duct tape and shoe strings.

I’m pretty sure the only real reason NV didn’t get a great Metacritic score was all of the bugs at launch, if Obsidian had a little more time to fix things up before release it would’ve been great

I remember playing up to level 30 with the launch retail version on ps3 because i didn't hook it up to the internet. Watching this video made me feel like I was playing bingo.

Damn, this was a blast from the past. My favorite pre-patch glitch was how my screen turned completely purple every time I faced directly north. It made the trip to Vegas memorable, since I remember it clearly almost 11 years later. Went from Novac to the 188 and then on to Freeside walking at an angle. I was all over the Bethesda Fallout Forums for years, rip.

One bug that I love that apparently still works is that if you "change your mind" and respec your character at the start, you keep the bonus skill points from your chosen proficiencies if you choose the same ones and then get the bonus AGAIN after the respec. You can even do it once more when you do old world blues since it has a one off respec as well. So thats a total of three times you get a bump to a couple of your skills and saves a TON of points for other things.

The only thing that’s broken is my heart from not getting the NV we could have gotten.

22:18 I love it how you said "unfortunately" instead of fortunately because is Oliver Swanick

Gamebryo engine sure is magical

having replayed it a few times in 2021 (on the 360), it runs really well with all the patches.

I remember losing Rex in Vault 22. I eventually decided to load an old save and then venture through it alone to escape the bug.

I remember a bug that would permanently set your relationship with factions to neutral if you put on their armor and took it off on PS3. Then there was a bug I got with Benny where I could loop his dialogue if I caught him running away in time, thus getting shitloads of gambling chips for the Tops casino as well as caps and XP.

Goddamn, I remember the game before the patches started rolling in throughout 2011. It was unplayable in some areas like the NCR questline is broken because of Ranger Grant just standing there looking pissed off lol. It was very broken, crashes were more common, the loading between loading zones was unbearable and some areas in the game just crashed the game. New Vegas today is still buggy in areas, but it's at least playable and accessible for new players to play.

I remember when cazador poison couldn't be cured and it lasted a lot longer than it does now. So if you were stung, you might as well reload your save, because all you could do at that point was watch your health fall until you died.

But this is what made fallout fun. One of my favorites was the multiple 1+agility pre war hats you could wear from dead money machine. Gun holstered so fast it would spin on your back lol

Lets be perfectly clear, caravan is still broken af. The rules dont seem to matter. You can spend the entire game building the perfect deck, meet the win conditions and the game just decides "no, you lose".

Fallout New Vegas triumphed because the game design inside it burned brighter than the bugs around it

All hail the Son of Mars for Yukichigai's Unofficial Patch!

Very good to see someone actually acknowledge FNV's fiasco of a launch. As much grief as 76 and Cyberpunk get, FNV isn't really that less guilty. 18 months or not, glitches are glitches, and Feargus Urquhart even admitted Obsidian "bit off more than they could chew."

This made me realise that many of the things that made me play the game a certain way have since been fixed (energy weapons, explosives, etc.), but I didn't find out until now because I never gave them a second look and just "knew" they were bad. Also, a lot of stuff being cut explains why I could SWEAR the game used to be different, but I just thought my memory was being fuzzy.

A bug that still works that I always love messing around with is aiming with a weapon with no scope in 3rd person then switching weapons with hotkeys to a weapon with a scope, snipers guass rifles etc. And watching as I see the weapon in front of me whilst aiming down the scope at the same time

1:21 "Oh crap, the bullets keep falling out! Maybe if I keep putting them back in they'll might stay in!"

The lovecraft style of ncp death happened to me in dead money with a ghost person . His armed reached towards me as he died and grew giant before he flung around into the sky. I was so scared I was afraid to continue for like a couple days lol

Victor has ascended and become a god.

Fastest infinite xp glitch in my experience was the looping dialogue for Aurelius of Pheonix which can be done as soon as you get there from goodsprings, used to use in unmodded to get to 14 for jury rigging perk for each character...

Played it day one on the 360, it was glorious! Feels like a completely different game now : ]

I waited to play New Vegas and enjoyed it but I don't remember the hustle and bustle about it being 'broken' being as loud as the one surrounding Cyberpunk 2077.

I remember so many of these since a long time ago I pirated the game and it was before the first day patch...

I remember trying to take the black mountain shortcut at level 1 and in one of the checkpoints a deathclaw spawned right Infront of me...twice

It froze literally 50 to 100 times on my first full playthrough BUT the rest of the game was gold. There's never been any other game I would play after about 5 to 10 hard crashes. Even after the crashes, I still wanted to see what was next. I even played many parts over and over again and did 2 or 3 playthroughs.

I wanted to look cool with sunglasses, but there's some weird visual bug if you have rough nite as a hairstyle, one of the lens become entirely invisible.

I remember painstakingly planning everything out to get all skills up to 100 by Lv. 20 then they proceeded to raise to level cap making it a trivial task.

Incendiary ammo activating on a vats target without actually firing (or even targeting at all in the case of Corporal Sterling) will alway be my favorite bug, I would make a save and just walk through an area just rapid vats-ing everything to death. My favorite round of that is definitely the 2nd run of Camp Golf, by the time half of the camp was dead they just started shooting each other (rangers vs soldiers) because something was causing them damage and it very clearly wasn't me and their faction settings weren't set up correctly. (Though my terrible luck ment that Hanlon blew my head off trying to shoot Poindexter)

0:43 I used to have that happen ALL THE TIME at Poseidon Energy

You still cant play FNV without adding the Yukichigai Unofficial Patch/FNV 4GB Patcher/New Vegas Stutter Remover and NVAC - New Vegas Anti Crash....

sometimes I think there’s no way the bugs could’ve been worse then I remember this video 😭

I think at one point, I set a timer for five minutes on repeat to remind myself to save multiple times.

Damn I forgot about a lot of this stuff, I got the game day one and yeah it was a broken fucking mess on console, still slightly is. But I forgot about a bunch of little things you mentioned in this. Man that was a decade ago now lol thanks for the nostalgia man haha

I had a bug where every companion I recruited when they would join my one man party their heads would dissappear but keep their hats/Boones beret on. And you could only see their eyeballs and lips and it looked like blackface.

I remember going inside the aBOS, I didn't have internet for years when I was younger which meant I played this game for like 3 years without a single patch rofl

@2:50 that shit still happens to this day. I played this game after launch on the 360 and goddamn I got to a point where I would save every time before I'd go into building. EVERY. TIME. Sometimes it would crash while I was trying to save in case it crashed. Sometimes it would crash after I'd "safety saved" while I was trying to go back to the game. While in quarry junction I had a deathclaw run up the top of large center structure and then just stop all animation and float off into the sky like a big deadly balloon. Still, after Oblivion I began to love Bethesda bugs (some sort of stockholm syndrome, I guess) and I still thoroughly enjoyed it. Played it again in 2014 and been playing it on almost a yearly basis ever since. Never be another game quite like this. It's a real Gem.

From randomly exploding head to underground deathclaws... I wouldn't have it any other way

Remember the longer you played, the longer the loading times got until the game just finally crashed.

During my first playthrough my save file corrupted after 60 hours in. I was devastated, but I still went back and played through it all and it's still one of my favorite games to this day.

When the models just fly around everywhere and stretch, they look like the Slender goat from Goat Simulator

My favorite glitch was incendiary rounds for anti-materiel rifle. If you vats someone and queued up a shot then left VATs they would just light on fire. The game wouldn't register it as you killing them so you could murder everything with no penalties. It got patched shortly after release but I burnt my way through Camp Golf on my first playthrough for all the sweet ranger armor.

I remember if you had the paralyzing palm strike perk, if you paralyzed a npc in vats their bodies would melt and go all over the place

1:13 That's how strong the Legate is, hit him so hard he went back into the loading zone

In a parrallel universe, we had obsidian getting more time on fnv and getting the spin off series they wanted

As someone who wasn’t into video games at the time to experience these og bugs, hearing about them now is so amusing.

my best one was entering one of the buildings in Prim to only Autosave and place me in a room with no floor and "ERROR" in place of objects.... that was one of many restarts

The dialogue loop glitch is still present in old world blues

Fun Fact: That spot in Black Mountain is the Mojave Wasteland's Center on Cell.

I had nick doing the swimming motion instead of walking during far harbor

I went to the midnight release, and let me tell you how upset I was because I hit a game breaking bug

Fallout 3, new Vegas and Skyrim were the kings of "I'll get it in 6 months when it works"

The kid power sliding while eating the rat happened to me yesterday and I was nowhere near as phased as I should have been. God I love this game😂

FNV was, and is, a buggy rushed mess of a game that should never have been released in the state it was in. But it is still one of my favorite games of all time purely because you can feel the genuine soul that Obsidian put into this game.

Only bugs I’ve had now is the lever action guns breaking the game in vats, and not being able to change my mind and properly help Ringo after talking to Cobb.

The dead burned bodies north of good springs attacked me once. Best glitch I've ever come across.

I had a legion hit squad spawn in the strip and attack me. In doing so Boone which had an automatic weapon began to spray rounds and hit not only a securitron but also an NCR MP. I finished the fight for fun and was vilified by all 3 factions at the end. Thanks Boone. I had a save to load up after and luckily it never reoccurred

I got lucky when I first played NV, it crashed sometimes but not nearly as often as I’ve heard, and the glitches were minimal and largely unobtrusive. And I was playing it on a 2008 MacBook Pro at the time!

My game used to crash a fair amount but I never got some of the weirder issues

i remember paying it on Xbox 360 and randomly seeing dead creature fly across the map when exploring

7:23 trippy transition. I love it.

My bark scorpions still stretch a good 4 miles on PS3 ultimate

I still can hear my PS3 starting to take off from the shelf when the fan kicks in

If you go to the wrangler and you pay Fisto for his services once and then you keep talking to him and back out before paying him you can get infinite caps, 10 caps at a time

Total PTSD when the disappearance of companions came up... Veronica used to f--k off to Jacobsville & hide in that irradiated pool that they seemed to remove(unless it's a gd glitch) *& she would never show again *

Gamers have a short memory colored by nostalgia.

The only bug I distinctly remember was from my very first play session back in 2010, and it was a bark scorpion warping across I-15 at light speed into the distance. I had yet to encounter a bark scorpion at that point and had no idea what I was looking at.

The difference between fallout new Vegas and Cyberpunk is that it had 18 months and there was so much effort poured into the worldbuilding, story, and weaponry that they couldn't put as much into the initial bugfixing. Cyberpunk had 8 years and had all its effort in those 8 years put into advertising.

TriangleCity: How broken was F:NV? Also TriangleCity: Yes.

I remember getting FNV for the 360. I didn't have internet, so I had to play it broken. I still loved it, and even beat it multiple times. Shout-out to the sliding kid bug, I remember seeing it everytime I killed that rat

I saw the bug where cheyennes eye is on her side and cried laughing before

In regards to the form ID problem mentioned at around 5:25, this problem also applies to mods if they're "esp-ified". This is a technique that was recently developed to effectively remove the mod limit, but it couldn't be used on mods already loaded into the save, because it would break everything related to it.

The only problem i had with the PS3 version is it would freeze up a lot. But it was still very addictive.

I can’t go 1 minute without corpse launching a person into orbit

I find it so funny that the entrance to dead money locked after going before the dlc was added it makes me think maybe that bug inspired the end of the dlc its so on theme for the dlc almost like they did it on purpose so you'd have to reload a save and let go of thats deans electronic(also kind of funny the name is dean too)

Even then, Gamebryo was long in the tooth. Kind of makes Bethesda pretending the Creation Engine wasn't just further warmed over Gamebryo in the leadup to Skyrim's release more insulting in hindsight.

example of trying to make a good game and not having enough time, Cant blame obsidian too much with all these bugs on release. Bugs and all, still my favorite fallout game.

The difference between Fallout New Vegas and Cyberpunk 2077 is that CD Projekt Red spent the better part of a decade developing their game, all while boasting about how they would only release "when it's done" and smugly ripping on other games for having bugs at launch. Obsidian was given 18 Months. Not only did they go in thinking they had twice that amount of time, but they were forced to use an engine that they didn't create nor knew how to use.

As a child I had no internet connection so I HAD to play the early version of New Vegas until the legendary edition. So I do remember a lot of these bugs

Bug that still exists now: Companions' weapons will not be returned when leaving the Gomorrah and will be lost forever without console commands

big difference with cyberpunk, one was made in a year and a half and had tons of cool content, while the other was made in 5 years and was shit.

(late to the party but:) my most memorable bug was on the road towards the cazadors. every time i hit where the road turned it would freeze and my 360 would power off entirely. i remember getting around it by saving, loading, taking a step and repeating. sometimes in that whole debacle i would load in under the game world and sometimes as soon as i took a step it launched me up into the air. it was wild.

I remember one time old lady gibson and her dogs attacked me outside helios one. I hadnt even talked to her yet and i was forced to kill her. I took her shotgun and i wasnt able to get reys brain for rexs quest, plus no mysterious rich lady merchant anymore.

I was 14 and lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere when the game came out. I still consider many of these things as normal after dealing with them for 1000+ hours. *especially the cazadors. I was the original “7 luck, run north to the casinos” player. The cliffs had so many “glitch” spots…. **melissa was my wife

The bugs I remember having on the Xbox 360 version was just crashing in Hidden Valley Bunker and the Strip

I remember this was my first big game I bought for PC and as a kid I literally would watch the bugs happen and be like "uh okay" XD

I first played Fallout new vegas in 2015 or 2016 ,so I was late for the party I always heard the game was broken but I could never imagine how much Great video

Ah yes, the floating dog eyeballs. This drove me mad

Unlike Cyberpunk 2077, hidden under all that jank there actually is a great RPG and stories to be had with NV, something the former simply really doesn't have, and you can't patch a bad foundation like that...

17:31 I’ve been searching for this background song for a long time but still don’t have the name for it.

Microsoft would refuse to allow DLC to be patched back on the xbox 360, they had a file size limitation that is the real reason why the auto rifle was never patched.

I will never forget the "Box of" bug. If you acquired a Box of anything, powder, primers, cases, ammo it did not add the contents to your inventory properly. Instead you got a Box of in your inventory which was completely unusable. Only fix was to throw all the boxes of stuff on the ground and then pick them back up so the contents of the box would be applied to the inventory properly.

The mini gun sound effect continuing sfter you stop shoting is still a thing

I love the old lady Gibson glitch because it was replayable (it didn't always work, but there was a way to trigger it with fast travel to Helios One) and when you fast traveled to her place she would just be chilling there as if nothing happened. I would often sell her own stuff back to her and even dog meat.

None of my friends remember there being several children in freeside chasing the rat and sometimes powersliding on the pavement. Only me n my brother remembered those details lol. Also bein able to give Rotface a hat too