AlKim: On the other hand, I spent so much time just trying to get the game behave itself that immersion was an impossibility. If I am presented with objectively undeniable proof that New Vegas is the best overall RPG, I'm going to fucking quit gaming.
Zoltan999: What problems did you have? I had none at all. I did play it on console though, XBox 360.
SPOILERS AHOY! IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED THE NCR CAMPAIGN OF FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS AND WISH TO AVOID SPOILERS, STOP READING NOW!
I've gone through this a few times in different threads, but shortly put, a few minor quests broke and could not be completed. One of them may have been part of a sequence of quests, but I honestly cannot remember and neither do I care any longer. If it was, it put the rest of the questline out of my reach as well, obviously. It turned out that these would become the least of my worries.
There was crashing, freezing, hanging, loading failures and saving failures. These were pretty infrequent at first, but suffice to say that it took me fifteen days to play through the last thirty minutes of the game, which was mostly caused either because I could not access the game at all, could not load my save, or could not save once the game finally allowed me to proceed past the loading screen. Add in a healthy pile of frustration and sliding beyond the point of caring, and there you go.
A friendly NCR trooper shot my dog, which triggered a flag in the game code that told me that the president was dead and that I should probably report this to someone or other. The following time he shot the dog and wounded Cass, and I got the same quest update. I didn't bother talking to him a third time, and the quest proceeded as usual. The moment I took my eyes off the president, though, he died. I don't know if this was supposed to happen, but by that stage I was well beyond caring.
After reporting what had happened, the NCR officer sent me to an adjacent room where the most ridiculous sight waited for me not ten feet from the door: about four NCR soldiers and four Legionnaires occupying the exact same location, with the NCR guys on their knees and pointing their guns 90 degrees upwards, the Legionnaires standing up and pointing their guns right at their feet. There was an identical troupe standing about two feet to the right. Nothing happened for a few very puzzling seconds (I could still move and aim, though), after which the characters models sprung to life and subsequently shot the living shit out of each other from what must be considered even closer than point-blank range. This very thing happened in the following room as well, after only about two days, five crashes, ten failures to load and a single instance of my PC freezing.
Outside, there were three friendly troops that were not NCR. I can't remember the name of the faction, but the guys ran away from the face of danger regardless. I shot the few Legionnaires on the dam, after which the Boomer B-29 arrived and carpet-bombed the dead guys for good measure. Gee, thanks a lot. I feel like those twenty hours I put into recruiting allies made a real difference. Not.
So about a week after that, I finally finished the completely unmodded, fully patched PC version of Fallout: New Vegas. Then I uninstalled it and stashed the piece of shit away in the "Will not play again" folder on Steam.
SPOILERS END AHOY!
Yes, I know that playing on the PC means accepting certain things such as compatibility issues. I'm also an Obsidian fan and think of myself as someone who can forgive them for quite a lot. God knows that I have. Even so, New Vegas ran reasonably fine most of the time, certainly equally or less buggy than what I have come to expect from the developer. The worst of it had been piled right at the very end, and you may think that it's okay if only the last thirty minutes of a 43-hour playthough were terrible, but excuse the hell out of me if I happen to remember those painful last moments of the game and very little else. I seem to remember that I liked (not loved, but liked. That's still pretty good) New Vegas, but I honestly cannot remember why; without any hesitation or shadow of doubt, it's one of the ten worst games that I have ever played. The bugfest clusterfuck at the end really was that bad.