- 2 weeks ago
Viva New Vegas modpack - https://vivanewvegas.moddinglinked.com/
VerylastKiss's NEW NEW VEGAS MOD COLLECTION - https://www.nexusmods.com/games/newvegas/collections/jscbqj/mods
Nova Arizona mod - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/85915
Fallout: The Frontier - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/68009
Fallout: New California - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/45138
VerylastKiss's NEW NEW VEGAS MOD COLLECTION - https://www.nexusmods.com/games/newvegas/collections/jscbqj/mods
Nova Arizona mod - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/85915
Fallout: The Frontier - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/68009
Fallout: New California - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/45138
Category
🎮️
GamingTranscript
00:00Now, as much as we appreciate Obsidian's work, there's no denying that Fallout New
00:06Vegas was, and in many ways still is, kind of a mess, technically, visually.
00:11I'm Doc Mitchell. Welcome to Goodsprings.
00:15So much about it looks and feels kind of like a mod of Fallout 3 rather than a full-fledged
00:20sequel, which makes sense given how little time they were actually given to make the
00:25game. The entire game was made in just 18 months.
00:29That is an absolutely insane turnaround for what is often thought of as the best, or at
00:35least one of the best games in the entire franchise. How they made Fallout New Vegas in that short
00:41of a time and made it this good is a miracle.
00:44I mean, there are games that have been cooking for almost a decade which end up nowhere near
00:48as good as New Vegas, even at launch. Well, look, we all know how buggy the game was on
00:52day one, but even back then, the crazy ambition and just exhilarating RPG freedom of the game
00:59design shone through. After a few years, most of the more glaring bugs got cleared up, but
01:05New Vegas was a game that deserved so much more time in the oven than it actually got.
01:10And when Obsidian moved on to other projects, the fan and the modding community moved in
01:16and staked their claim. And what we have is so much better. Bethesda games are known for
01:21their active and dedicating modding scenes. Skyrim alone has over 70,000 mods on Nexus,
01:28and is easily one of the most popular modding platforms of all time, if not the most popular.
01:32But Fallout New Vegas is not far behind. It may not be quite as popular as the monolithic Skyrim,
01:40but the difference is that Fallout New Vegas fans are, like, they're really dedicated, man.
01:45What's interesting about New Vegas is just how many mods that are, like, less about completely
01:50upending the experience and rebuilding everything, and are more just about making what's already in
01:56the game better. Strengthening things. Because the core is so special, you know? There are plenty of
02:02ambitious total conversions in there, but where Skyrim gets ones that, like, transform the game into
02:07entirely new things. Fallout New Vegas total conversions try to just expand the world of
02:13Fallout as we know it. Like, these guys aren't trying to reinvent the wheel. Like, they don't
02:17want something else that gives them a similar vibe. They just want more New Vegas. Because, arguably,
02:23there's nothing else in the series that has really created such an open yet compelling and cool world
02:29to live in. It's the strength of that world that really keeps people coming back, I think,
02:34despite the game's flaws. The shooting, though improved from Fallout 3, still feels kind of anemic
02:39in the base game.
02:48The world often feels a little flat, character models look rough, certain questlines and factions can feel
02:55undercooked and incomplete, and visually, the game just overall doesn't look that good from a technical
03:00standpoint, even compared to Fallout 3. It's just a rough experience saved by the quality of the
03:06writing, the fantastic atmosphere, the brilliant world building, and the open-ended nature of the
03:11world and those RPG elements that hits the perfect balance between making it feel like a journey while,
03:17you know, still giving you a lot of room to just go and do whatever you want. That's what people love.
03:23They love this stuff, and the many, many mods for the game are mostly about just expanding all that and,
03:30you know, making it better. Now, at first, of course, this meant, like, a lot of necessary,
03:33needed fixes that untangled weird shit, like the faction system or repairs for quests that often got
03:40broken. But slowly but surely, you know, the depth of the available mods on offer really expanded. It blew
03:46out. And as the mods increased, the amount of improvements brought into the game by the community
03:51expanded. The game just got better and better. I mean, like, it's at that point now where it's
03:56honestly hard to imagine playing the game without mods if you're a PC player. And I say this as someone
04:02who's often kind of agnostic about modding. I'll take it or leave it. Sometimes it's awesome. Usually,
04:06I'm fine just playing the original experience, even in games where it's often considered kind of
04:11inferior. But Fallout New Vegas is different, not just because the mods for it are really good,
04:16which they are, but because the community has just done such a good job curating the available mods
04:22that it's relatively easy to get some massive mod packs working that make the game just significantly
04:28better to play while also managing to feel like perfectly natural extensions of the original game.
04:34Maybe it's because New Vegas already kind of felt like a really ambitious mod, like I said, I don't know,
04:39but the game just feels right when it's modded up the ass to hell and back. And the improvements
04:45are substantial, too. Like, they don't have the drawbacks you usually expect from this sort of
04:50thing. You download the most ambitious new graphics mod for GTA 5 or something, and it looks good
04:56some of the time, but not really. Or it just melts your computer. Many mod additions in other games
05:02stick out like a sore thumb, and that always kind of bugs me. But with New Vegas,
05:07it just seems perfectly balanced for most of them. Like, they just make it work. These things
05:12just look better, they play better, and they made the game more fun and like a more satisfying
05:17experience, especially as someone who's already played the game to death over the last decade.
05:22In this video, we're mostly covering two major mod packs with a few digressions along the way. The
05:28essential Viva New Vegas and the ridiculous New New Vegas mod pack, both of which are pretty simple to
05:35install, by modern standards at least, and offer a wide variety of improvements to the base experience.
05:42Of course, there's much more to explore beyond just improving the game, which we'll get into a
05:47little bit more later. But for now, let's just talk about the mod packs. All this stuff, if you want to
05:50check it out and do your research, shout out to the modders. It's all linked below. You know,
05:55mess around and install at your own risk, of course. But yeah, let's get into it. Now for the novice,
06:00these curated compilations of mods take so much of the confusion out of modding the game because
06:06at this point, it could be pretty daunting with all of them. It's just the nature of like a
06:10decentralized project like Fallout New Vegas modding community, like the things are gonna get messy.
06:16There are so many overlapping engine fixes and background tools and like upgrades and all these
06:21little things that need to be applied that you either need to be deeply invested in the modding scene
06:26and the game and that world to understand any of it, or you need to follow a very thorough guide to
06:32properly mod the game. And that's what Viva New Vegas is. It's like a prepackaged set of a whopping
06:38114 good mods for New Vegas that are meant to improve the baseline experience. Like this is supposed to
06:46be an enhanced version of New Vegas that mostly sticks to that quote, original vision without making
06:52any massive wild changes to the core gameplay. If you all you want to do is just like play a better
06:57New Vegas that fixes a lot of the bugs and returns cut content like the water spouts at the Hoover Dam and
07:10it just generally smooths out a lot of the game's rough edges, then yes,
07:14Viva New Vegas is perfect for you. It's still not the easier thing to get working. You still have to
07:19sort through three separate mod loaders to get everything in proper working order if you want
07:24that full experience. But like, look, as long as you just follow the instructions, which are pretty
07:29clear and concise about what you actually got to do, like, then you'll be good. Just be sure to start
07:34from a clean slate. And in Viva New Vegas's case, do not install Fallout New Vegas in a protected folder
07:39like program files. It interferes with some of the steps. Anyway, the entire Viva New Vegas mod pack is not
07:46tiny, too. Like it's going to take up around 19 gigs of additional hard drive space, which in 2025 is
07:52relatively not that bad, but it is more than double what the original New Vegas install size is. So
07:58just keep that in mind. Know that going in. Now, if you want to get nuts, which of course is what we
08:02wanted to do here, because you're going to talk about game altering mods and you might as well go
08:06big or go home. We did try out the new New Vegas mod collection available on Nexus mods. And folks,
08:13this is crazy, okay? 823 mods. This single pack has 823 individual mods and over 100 gigabytes of
08:24files when it's all unpacked. Where Viva New Vegas sets out to improve what's already there and retain
08:30the original experience to a certain degree, new New Vegas completely like revitalizes, revamps it.
08:36It's so transformative that it practically feels like a remaster or a total remake. Not graphically,
08:43because while the mod does make the game look a lot better, you're not really going to notice it
08:47as much as you've already spent a ton of time in the Mojave Wasteland.
09:01To anyone coming in for the first time, it just looks like Fallout New Vegas, but really good. Like
09:06you just forget how rough that original game looked. But it's really all the other stuff it brings.
09:10Now, getting new New Vegas installed is shockingly, for as massive this thing is,
09:16actually pretty painless. As long as you have a premium account in the Nexus. If you don't,
09:22then there's going to be a lot of clicking to install new mods. But if you have a premium account,
09:27then the mod collection basically installs itself for you. Just download Vortex, the Nexus mod loader,
09:33and you're mostly good to go. It's essential with stuff like this to start from a clean slate. Again,
09:39a fresh Fallout install with all your old mods purged, that could cause conflicts with the new
09:44ones. You don't want these things to get all confused. At least for us, there were a few issues
09:49that needed to get resolved, which were pretty easy to deal with here. So click through the notifications
09:53that pop up and go with the default options as the collection is already pre-configured, and then
09:58you should be good to go. Now, with all of those, again, 823 mods, they're all essential,
10:05but a small amount of them are considered optional and can be ignored if you want. But either way,
10:10it's going to take a while to get all this stuff installed and properly working, even though it is
10:15mostly automated. And if you don't want the collection this massive, then there are alternative
10:21versions of the mod, which are more condensed. Oh, yeah, and don't worry about the adult tag on
10:27this thing. It's not some porn mod or anything, at least from what we can see. Most of the added
10:33adult content is just enhancing or modifying some of the gore and the blood effects. There's one or two
10:39vaguely risque things attached that can't be disabled if you want, but they're really no worse
10:44than what was already present in the game. Now, unlike Viva New Vegas, which is perfectly fine to
10:49jump into with an unmodified save, New New Vegas needs you to start a new game. And right from the
10:55start, things feel different. There's the usual character creation enhancements and one pretty ugly
11:02UI enhancement that you have to fix if you want to play this thing. The quest tracker that covers half
11:08the screen is not good. Get rid of that right away by opening the pause menu and then pressing select
11:13to go into the new UI options and then disable the quest tracker. This is really the only major thing
11:19I feel like you really have to adjust at the start. Everything else in the game feels just fine.
11:23And again, it's all a matter of opinion. But with this whole super enhancement mod,
11:28things might not feel all that different, but just give it time. There's a lot of relatively subtle
11:33improvements that make the game feel better, like the more responsive Pip-Boy that actually shakes when
11:39you press the button and even gives you a little controller rumble when you switch the screens.
11:44The third person camera is so much better now. Your character moves far more realistically,
11:50and with the added sprint and massive improvements to the game's shooting mechanics, playing third
11:55person actually feels viable now. I love the way your character interacts with the world in this
12:01collection. You actually reach out to pick up items and open doors, you skin animals to collect hides,
12:07and when you pick up key items and new guns, they play a little animation where your character inspects
12:13the weapon or turns the item around in their hand. It's cool. It feels like a big modern game.
12:18When you use Stimpaks, there's actually an animation of injecting it into your arm.
12:22These things might be minor in the grand scheme of things, but again, they make the experience feel a lot
12:28more interactive, a lot bigger. Being able to aim down sights on all weapons is great. The new feedback
12:34effects on shooting make firefights feel a bit more visceral and more exciting. Out of everything new
12:40added here, the shooting and gunplay I think is the real standout. The new weapons are just awesome.
12:45The new gun effects and the more responsive aiming just makes every shootout feel more dangerous and
12:52more upfront. It's really going to be hard to go back to the original game's sluggish old chunky
12:57shootouts after this. Now, while graphically it might not look all that different from the base
13:03game, there's only so much you can do with this aging engine at this point. There are some cool new
13:10visual flourishes, you know, making a lot more moving things in the environment like swaying trees,
13:17flags that actually blow in the wind, and flashing neon signs that actually make the new Vegas strip
13:22look like the flashy slice of old world excess that it was supposed to be. Almost everything
13:28across the board has been improved upon with this mod. And while it brings in a lot of new stuff like
13:34guns and backpacks, it all feels fairly natural. I know you can argue it's not quote the original
13:40vision, but it doesn't strike me as out of place. There's not a bunch of stuff in here that feels like
13:45it's obviously modded in. It's smooth. Most of the improvements, as wide ranging as they can be,
13:51feel pretty natural. Aside from certain stuff like the new character models, which just sit there
13:56alongside the old ones in the character creation menu. Look, even modded to hell and back, New Vegas
14:01isn't going to blow away anyone with its graphical fidelity. Like if you only like games from 2025,
14:08you're still gonna think this looks old. But these compilations just do a lot to improve the overall
14:14look of the game and enhance the performance too. Even massive new additions to the game like the Nova
14:20Arizona mod, which like kind of expands the original landmass of the original game further
14:26into the east, into the area controlled by Caesar's Legion. All that here, it's still like it runs
14:31perfectly and it looks great. The Nova Arizona mod is actually really impressive. It's not just like
14:37a lot of new land to look at. It actually adds a ton of new quests with towns and dungeons to explore.
14:44The only thing limiting is that there's no actual voice acting yet. All the dialogue is just flat text,
14:49but the ambition here is it's here, man. Like the new locations look great. You know, when you weigh
14:56them on the New Vegas scale, they feel like a natural extension of what's already there. Now,
15:01Nova Arizona isn't quite done yet. They do intend to bring in actual voice acting once all the quests
15:06are fully implemented. So that mod is still a work in progress in this whole chunk, but it just goes to
15:12show how New Vegas' mod scene is still very active, like to this day. It's not even the only massive
15:20new expansion coming out for New Vegas in 2025. Another one that just released, seriously, it came
15:25out like December 12th. If you're watching this, it's the Long 15, which does for the NCR what Nova
15:33Arizona did for the Legion. It expands the game map into New California Republic territory, and it is an
15:40incredibly impressive achievement that just looks incredible. A common theme of Fallout New Vegas
15:46modding isn't that it's just ambitious. It's also very professional with like surprisingly well-written
15:52dialogue. They often even go into the trouble of like bringing in voice actors who sound a lot better
15:57than the voice acting in a mod should be. I remember when I was a kid and all mods, like if they did have
16:03voice acting, it sounded like a another 13 year old kid mumbling into a computer mic. Sometimes they'd
16:08put in extra effort trying to pitch shift down squeaky voices, but usually that was the best we got.
16:13Now, where all this stuff we're getting like these entirely free fan created expansions for games with
16:19full seemingly professional voice acting. Little me, like my kid mind, would have been blown away seeing
16:26something like the Long 15 here. And look, there's so many more amazing mod projects to dig into,
16:32be they good or good in big quotation marks. One of the most impressive, but also one of the most
16:38absolutely insane is the Frontier. This mod is fairly infamous among Fallout New Vegas fans for how
16:45over the top stupid it is and how little it actually resembles the world of Fallout. It's more like a
16:50post-apocalyptic Call of Duty campaign built in that existing engine. Still, they did some incredible
16:56stuff like have actual drivable vehicles in a Fallout game. And it's also like audacious that I can't help
17:04but be amused by the whole thing. But yeah, like it's not like good in the traditional sense. That's
17:08that's for the crazy people to apply. It's maybe the closest thing we'll get to is so bad it's good in
17:13New Vegas. Another somewhat divisive one is Fallout New California. This is another mod set in the NCR.
17:20And one that doesn't feel consistent with what the original game tells us. But hey, it's still pretty
17:25intriguing nonetheless. It's not as insane as the Frontier, but it is no less of an ambitious,
17:31wild project with a full story and a new map to explore. We can't talk about modding New Vegas in 2025
17:38without also at least mentioning A Tale of Two Wastelands. The mod that combines New Vegas and Fallout 3
17:46into one super huge game. It is pretty amazing how we've come full circle. The first Fallout New
17:52Vegas and basically a huge mod of Fallout 3, albeit, you know, an official one. Now because
17:59New Vegas is the more popular and stable game on PC, Fallout 3 is like a mod for New Vegas. 15 years
18:08after the game originally came out and New Vegas modding is as popular and vital as ever. Some of
18:15the biggest and like the best mods the game has ever seen have come out recently. And in 2025,
18:22we finally got the most necessary mod of all time. Someone finally fixed the unification monument at the
18:29Mojave Outpost. Just look at the majesty here. How is New Vegas somehow bigger now than it ever was?
18:36The Fallout TV show is going all in on New Vegas in its second season. The modding scene is somehow
18:42more prolific than ever, putting out some of the best stuff they've ever done in like the last year.
18:48And after all this time, the core game, what Obsidian originally built, still holds up, man. It may be
18:55practically an entirely new game in 2025 if you go especially nuts with all the crazy modding.
19:02But the core experience is still there and it's still got that special something that just just
19:08makes the game stand out. There's just a special sauce to Fallout New Vegas that keeps it relevant
19:13as a story and as a game. There's just nothing else quite like it. And the modding scene just keeps
19:18making it better and better. That's all we wanted to do today. We wanted to talk about New Vegas.
19:22It's one of our favorites and it's a cool way to experience it. Modding can be a little
19:27frustrating sometimes, but a lot of fun. And there's a great community to guide you along.
19:31So let us know in the comments if you've ever dipped your toes into modding New Vegas.
19:35Or maybe you've never played New Vegas at all. Maybe you just watched a Fallout TV show.
19:39Maybe this will help you out. Either way, let's talk Fallout New Vegas. Hit us up in those comments.
19:44And look, if you like this video and you like talking games with us, clicking the like button helps us out.
19:48We appreciate it. But we put out videos every single day, so I'll see you in the next one.
Be the first to comment