You probably saw this post coming, didn’t you? Every time I play a Bethesda game I tend to make a post like this. New Vegas is technically a Bethesda game, but it is built around their engine so I guess it still counts. Here is my current list of mods:
- Mikoto’s Beauty Pack
There are actually several face/hair/eye improving mods out there. I picked this one more or less at random. I’m not sure if it is the best one, but it works. It has a decent set of new hair styles and lets you create characters with eye color that actually stands out and is not the usual pale gray shade.
Fun fact: my current FNV character has the same hairstyle as one of my Morrowind characters. I think the Bethesda modders who make all this wonderful content recycle a lot of ideas and designs – which is not a bad thing actually.
- MT UI
You know how modern video games are no longer allowed to have reasonably sized fonts in menus, because that would not work for console-tards and their TV’s? MT UI basically re-scales the fonts used for your pip boy menus, and dialog trees so that you can actually see more than 3 items per screen. Very, very useful.
- Free Play after main quest
I installed this so that if the game ending sneaks up on me, I can still go back and finish up the side quests or hunt for achievements. I mean, yeah – I could potentially just reload earlier save and then put off completing the game, but that’s kinda silly. I mean, when you are in the last act of the game, and you are about to reach the final climactic encounter, you don’t want to put everything on hold just so that you can find that stupid snow globe that is missing from your collection.
- Level Cap at 100
In Fallout 3 I smashed against the level cap about halfway through the game. In fact, I didn’t even start the main mission at that point, which seemed arbitrary to me. So I installed a similar mod back then. By the time I finished the game, I was able to one-shot pretty much anything out there but surprisingly this didn’t really ruin the game for me. I just felt like a bad-ass. So I decided to use one of these for New Vegas as well.
- Further Third Person Camera
This is an interesting mod which increases your field of vision in third person mode by allowing you to zoom out more. It is very useful when you are trying to run away from strong melee opponents like radscorpions with your low level character.
- Faster Running
Games built on Bethesda engines always have this problem. Your default speed is jut to slow for comfort. This speeds you up a bit, making exploration less of a chore.
- Performance Fix
A lot of people swear by this mod so I decided to include it even though it never did anything but crash the game for me. I tried all the different dll’s they offered and every single one would simply crash the game to desktop before even getting to the main menu. Still, check it out – it may improve your performance unless you have a GeForce GTX 285 like me.
If you have favorite, must have New Vegas mods, please post them in the comments. I’m always on the lookout for cool things like that.
I’m at work so I can’t really look them up, but I found them on Fallout Nexus. One of them allowed you to have more than two (1 “human” and 1 non-human) companions. Nothing like running around the Mojave with your own personal army. :)
Also I installed a mod that puts your companions default clothing and weapons into their inventory. That way you can remove them and replace with other clothing. Great way to get rid of Veronica’s stupid hood and in my case make Boone wear a party hat.
I have one k-something beauty pack, MTUI and the performance fix for ATI card that may or may not have improved things, I can’t tell. I also play with my own mod, it’s mostly cosmetic. I’m currently working on some animated hair, I just can’t stand the constant clipping if you don’t stay in a neutral pose.
My first playthrough I played with a True DT mod (removes minimum damage from guns if your DT is higher than the weapon damage), it makes the game much harder at startup but later very easy, so it’s not that great. I have reduced experience gained by 50% in my current game, high level characters in New Vegas are not interesting because they have no flaw : my diplomat had 100 in every non-weapon skill by level 25…
I tried the PDA-like pipboy (Readius 2000 I think), but couldn’t get FOSE to work. It’s a shame since it looks much more usable than the vanilla one, for instance displaying food/thirst/sleep/hp/rad levels in a single status screen. Since you also wanted that functionality, you may want to give it a try.
@ Rob:
Yes, I found that one! Awesome. Thanks for the tip. Now I’m running around with the EyeBot, Boone, and the Spahish Ghoul mechanic from Black Mountain.
@ Zel:
Oh… Now I want to play as a diplomat. My Fallout characters tend to be sneaky, shooty, rogue types but this is an excellent idea. It would be interesting to play a character avoiding putting any points into combat skills.