Video:Survival Guide for Fallout New Vegas

Transcript:Survival Guide for Fallout New Vegas

Hi, I'm Shane Murphy, your video game Guru for About.com

Survival Strategies in Fallout New Vegas

Today we'll look at some of the best available survival strategies in Fallout New Vegas.

Many of same strategies you've learned from playing Fallout 3 still apply in New Vegas, but there are also plenty of tweaks to the system that accompany this new wasteland.

Tips for Fallout New Vegas Survival

Just like before, you should try to build your character to maximize your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses. A little time spent planning your character's skills & perks out in advance will go along way towards making your life easier in the desert.

For example, if you don't have strong speech and barter skills, you could make up for it with points in sneak and lockpick. That way, if you can't talk your way past a guard or afford something at a market, you can just be sneaky and steal.

Keep these decisions in mind when plotting your character's morality, since Karma is back as well. Every faction in the game will have a a default disposition towards you depending on whether you're reviled or revered.

Perks and Abilities in Fallout New Vegas

There are new perks and abilities in the game that you should plan on taking advantage of to maximize your character's chance for survival.

Science is now a must have for characters using energy weapons, since you can use your geek skills to recycle ammo at the new ammo benches. You'll also need a 70 in science in unlock one of the most useful perks in the game: Math Wrath reduces your AP cost for every action by 10%!

Some perks are still universally terrible, and should only be taken for character roleplaying purposes. Even if you specialize in the cumbersome heavy weapons, Quickdraw still doesn't boost your equip speed enough to really matter. Mister Sandman should be skipped too, since you'll easily reach the point where any sneak attack critical against an enemy will kill them anways.

Speech options are now both more robust and tightly regulated. If your intelligence is low, you'll have no choice but to say idiotic things to people.

This Fallout also brings with it the new “Hardcore” mode, an elevation in difficulty that pertains strictly to the realism of the game and has nothing to do with things like enemy health or damage.

When playing under these realistic enviornment rules, you can expect many of the non-sequiters of the game to right themselves. For instance, you must eat regularly or risk starving and dying. Cooking certain foods also greatly raises their benefit for you.

Stimpacks will no longer heal you instantly, so you'll have to play more cautiously. You can also no longer fast travel with broken limbs, which now also occur more frequently and are harder to heal. Simply put, your character is now much more delicately human.

Besides just generally being more careful, you should also heavily invest in the survival skill and bump up your endurance stat. Both will help you get the most out of the food you eat, and unlock pre-requisites for perks that will be inherently more useful to you in Hardcore mode, like “Travel Light”.

Follow these guidelines and you'll have no problem roughing it in the wastes of Fallout New Vegas.

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