Every run of Fallout: New Vegas starts the same way: a man named Benny drags you to a cemetery outside Goodsprings and shoots you in the head. What happens next is up to you. Obsidian Entertainment’s open-world RPG — released in October 2010, and still fully playable on Steam and Xbox — lets you decide who your Courier is and how they move through the wasteland.
Will you be a hat-wearing cowboy or a corpse-eating vampire? A pacifist or a pickpocket with live grenades? The rules are yours to set, too: play dumb, make enemies on purpose, or travel only at night, and you can trip skill checks, faction grudges, and dialogue options you might never have otherwise encountered.
Lock in your house rules and head back to the Mojave for a misadventure that feels brand new. House rules: Ammo has weight (sorry), you do get thirsty, and stimpaks won’t save you in one click Right after you finish character creation in New Vegas, the game offers you the chance to try Hardcore, an optional play mode that ups the difficulty considerably. Every bullet, shell, and energy cell now has physical weight.
You do in fact need food, water, and sleep, or your dehydration, starvation, and sleep deprivation meters will max out and you’ll die. Healing items like RadAway and stimpaks work gradually, instead of instantaneously. Fast travel comes at a cost, and your companions can die — permanently.
While there’s some debate over how difficult this mode really is, it might help to know that you don’t really need to commit for an entire playthrough: You can turn Hardcore mode on or off at any time in the settings menu. (You will get a unique achievement if you stick with it through the full game, though.) House rules: Choose a faction, wear its colors, and treat the other factions accordingly There are four major factions in New Vegas — the Free Economic Zone of New Vegas (or Mr. House’s regime), Yes Man slash Independent New Vegas, Caesar’s Legion, and the New California Republic. Side with one of these, or one of the game’s many smaller sparring groups, and that comes with perks.
If you don the armor of a specific faction, for example, that can work as a disguise, allowing you to work for a bit with a faction that otherwise despises you — but only sometimes, as some characters can see right through it. This cuts the other way, too, unfortunately: Wear Legion armor in front of NCR soldiers, for example, and they could open fire. In a one-faction run, that’s just a risk you’re going to have to take.
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