Updated 12/11/10: Live!

The sudden and prolonged explosion of mods that greets a Bethesda RPG is a testament to two things: the familiarity of Emergent’s Gamebryo engine and the consistent behaviour – and often misbehaviour – of the games themselves. Knowing how to add items, quests and powerful script extensions to Oblivion made the jump to Fallout 3 remarkably small, as evidenced by over 10,000 mods available through the Fallout 3 Nexus. Even by that benchmark, the jump to Fallout: New Vegas has been little more than a hop. 2,000 mods and rising is the count, and not all of them are ports.

It’s why you’ll notice no small degree of overlap between this guide, which tackles both Bethesda-published Fallout games at once, and my previous Oblivion guide. Don’t take the similarities for granted, though, as there’s usually a twist to whichever mod or method is being covered. For all they have in common, Cyrodiil and the Wastelands can be violently different places.

For example:

• Oblivion’s world of Cyrodiil is a verdant paradise full of majestic lakes, dense forests and proud cities, bordered by mountains which offer views as spectacular as your computer will allow. Ouch. Fallout 3′s a lot more sympathetic, what with it being a bleached wasteland that makes Mad Max 2 look like Mad Max 3. Or something.
• Fallout New Vegas makes Mad Max 3 look like… Oh, for heaven’s sake. It’s empty, all right? It’s the Wild West and the apocalypse rolled into one, which as you can guess is pretty bleak. Though it does compensate somewhat with epic vistas, there isn’t much in them, in principle making it the least demanding of the three. Generally, though, its more complex settlements probably even things out.
• Fallout 3 and New Vegas both use a particularly unsightly transparent anti-aliasing technique for things like tree branches, electricity pylons and fences. It’s a kind of hatching effect that very efficiently destroys the game’s IQ, though I’ll explain later how you can work around it. Oblivion doesn’t have this.
• There is a nasty bug in Fallout New Vegas that causes mad stutters and crashes (on my hardware, at least) which completely disappear when you disable and turn down all the water reflection/shadow effects in the game’s launcher. I’m sure there are the other bugs waiting on pounce on different hardware, but this was the big ‘un for me.
• New Vegas is new. So are its mods, even the old ones. What I mean is that no one knows entirely what’s been changed by Obsidian under the hood, so the next few months will turn up some issues.
• Fallout 3 makes use of/suffers Microsoft’s Windows Live service, which not only incarcerates your saves in a folder associated with your Live profile, but is incompatible with the Fallout Script Extender. So, if you still enjoy the whole Gamerpoint/Achievement thing, you have a difficult choice to make. My advice: stop enjoying the whole Gamerpoint/Achievement thing. New Vegas uses Valve’s Steamworks service instead, which is compatible with its own New Vegas Script Extender.

Reader ‘Keith’ makes a good point:

“While this is a great guide, it’s a disservice to your readers to conflate Fallout 3 and New Vegas so much – while the games are *very* similar in a lot of ways, if you’re not careful and use tools or mods meant for one with another, you might run into some issues. You’d do better to treat the two separate titles as being a bit more distinct. As with the SteamPlay/G4WL distinction on DRM, some of the differences are substantial.”

It was tough deciding which was worse/better: a combined guide with the above issues, or two separate ones which just exacerbated the sense of repetition between the Fallout and Oblivion guides. I chose the former, obviously, and once the content is more complete I’ll be stressing the differences between Fallout 3 and New Vegas on a mod-to-mod basis.