FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS
Mods to remaster the Mojave in 2021.
Ever since Microsoft announced its Bethesda acquisition, Fallout: New Vegas has been on my mind. With Obsidian and Bethesda now sharing the Microsoft umbrella, speculation about a sequel or remaster to the western apocalypse are both rampant. I highly doubt we’ll see either of those two things happen. Not soon, in any case.
Although an official remaster would be nice, Fallout: New Vegas has recently passed its tenth anniversary, meaning it has a decade of mods accumulated for making your own remastered version. Ten years of mods is quite a pile to sift through though. Some have been abandoned, and others are redundant. Some are shiny and new, but less developed than other old faithful options.
In honor of its big birthday, I’m setting out to find the most faithful and reliable collection of mods for a homebrew Fallout: New Vegas remaster. Although there are a ton of great quest mods and gameplay changes out there, I’ve stuck to mods that keep the original experience of New Vegas intact as much as possible while making it crash less, look better, and take advantage of the modern tech we’re running it on.
FOUNDATION FIRST
As other Creation Engine games do, New Vegas has a reputation for being somewhat less than stable. Crashing is a common occurrence even in an un-modded playthrough. Fortunately, there are some foundational mods that help reduce crashes rather than exacerbate them.
The first thing you’ll need is a mod whose equivalent you’ve likely used if you’ve ever dipped into modding Fallout or Elder Scrolls games previously. New Vegas Script Extender is the foundation that many other mods build on. You can find it at nvse.silverlock.org where you’ll download the latest stable version which supports both the Steam and GOG releases. Your second manual installation is going to be the FNV 4GB Patcher, a utility that patches and replaces your FalloutNV.exe with a version that’s capable of using 4GB of RAM. In 2021, you almost certainly have at least double that. You’re looking for the 4GB patcher version on Nexus mods created by Roy Batty and LuthienAnarion. Follow the installation instructions and voila, a new FalloutNV.exe. Not to worry, the original is preserved as FalloutNV_ backup.exe should you ever need to manually revert.
That’s it for manual installation, so feel free to boot up your mod
I’VE STUCK TO MODS THAT KEEP THE ORIGINAL EXPERIENCE OF NEW VEGAS INTACT
TEN YEARS ON, A NEW TEXTURE PACK CAN ADD GRITTIER GRIT, HOLIER HOLES AND MORE
manager of choice at this point. To finish out the steady base that the rest of our beautification mods will rest on, you’ll want to grab a few more essentials. The JIP LN NVSE Plugin adds more functions to the main NVSE. NVTF, the New Vegas Tick Fix, is one of the latest mods for increasing the game’s stability. Lastly, The Mod Configuration Menu isn’t a necessity, but it adds a menu that allows you to change the settings of certain mods while you’re playing as you would any other game setting. Not every mod utilizes it, but it’s a time-saver while you’re tinkering.
USABLE INTERFACE
On that note, let’s get to another important factor in any true remaster: An improved UI. Fallout: New Vegas, like Fallout 3 before it, has an interface that would look more at home on an ancient CRT TV. As a modern PC player with way more screen space to make use of than the ones Fallout’s menus were designed for, you can get a much handier interface with just a handful of mods.
Start off with the User Interface Organizer, a plugin that helps all other interface mods play nicely together. Vanilla HUD Remastered cleans up and sharpens the elements of your heads up display for higher resolutions. It’s a small change, even when I compared screenshots side by side, but contributes to a sharper look for our unofficial remaster. oHUD is a collection of several other mods under one name that, thanks to the Mod Configuration Menu above, you can use to move HUD elements around or remove entirely.
My own must-have is Just Loot Menu— not to be confused with plain Loot Menu which is also nice but is my second favorite of the two. It’s a mod that adds a Fallout 4- style menu for looting containers that allows you to take items without loading a separate menu. Compared with Loot Menu, Just Loot Menu has more configurable options in the Mod Configuration Menu, and has a smaller font and better spacing.
Last up on the UI list is MTUI, a mod that improves and resizes the PipBoy menus, shop menus, and dialogue. It does add a new texture in the background of dialogue selection that may or may not be to your taste. The mod’s page gives a quick explanation on how to revert back to the original black background for dialogue if it’s not your style.
BEAUTIFICATION
That brings us to the biggest matters of taste: Beautifying New Vegas with bigger, newer textures and lighting. Once again, it’s easiest to start with a foundational layer and build from there. When we’re talking textures, that means roads, walls, concrete, and other environment pieces. Ten years on, New Vegas’ default textures are a little muddy, and a new texture pack can add grittier grit, holier holes, and more. Two big texture overhauls have become staples for Fallout: New Vegas modding. NMC’s Texture Pack and Ojo Bueno. Both are great, so a choice between the two comes down to preference and how much storage space you’re willing to throw at it.
NMC’s largest set of textures comes as a set of three downloads totalling just over 3GB for those new 2048x2048 textures. OJB, on the other hand, is a single mod file with textures the creator says go up to
(but not always) 4096x4096 for the ‘Ultra’ version. That will set you back about 1.5GB. Both NMC and OJB have versions with smaller textures and therefore smaller file sizes. NMC is the more comprehensive option with more textures replaced, but OJB has a distinct flair. If you’re feeling frisky, you can install both, determining which should be dominant in situations where both have retextured an object by swapping their load order.
For retexturing other objects, you’ll want to grab MG’s Neat Clutter Retextures, which handles smaller objects that NMC and OJB pass over. The Wasteland Flora Overhaul gives a nice spit-shine to all the wasteland’s plant life. The Weapon Retexture project may not update every weapon, but it does hit popular staples. It requires the Weapon Mesh Improvements mod as a prerequisite. For lighting and effects, use Interior Lighting Project for indoor areas.
Most important to Fallout, though, are the people. It’s time to slap a lot more pores on these poor desert dwellers, because we all know that more pores means more pixels, right? At present, Fallout Character Overhaul 3.0 is the vanilla-friendly overhaul for NPCs that requires the least amount of fuss. On the other end you have New Vegas Redesigned, which is a thoughtful reimagining of NPCs that’s faithful to the original game, but requires an older version of Character Overhaul to be installed with other updates of its own, making it more of a chore to try out.
There’s also the new Brave New World mod, which recasts the voices of 140 NPCs, led by the same creator as NV Redesign. It’s not exactly New Vegas Redesigned 4, but does update the faces of every NPC who’s scored a new voice. For now, I opted to install the voices only version of
Brave New World and stick with visuals from Character Overhaul 3.0.
As a last shout, two mods that add more content to the Wasteland without being obtrusive are
Populated Casinos and the NV Interiors Project. The former adds more humans milling about in the gambling rooms of the strip, a breath of fresh air that made more of a difference to me than I’d have expected. The latter adds interior areas to formerly inaccessible buildings. New Vegas Interiors may cross the line between remaster and remake, but the lore-friendly additions are worth the weight.
Fallout: New Vegas is getting on in years, but it’s not yet immune to a good refresh via mods. After all was said and done, I ended up with a mods list of about 20 choices, which is many fewer than I feared going in. Let’s just hope we have another Fallout game to play before Fallout 4 hits the ten-year mark, shall we?