New Vegas Character Creation Guide

Fallout New Vegas is an amazing and expansive game that, like it's predecessor, has more options, avenues, nooks, and crannies than most people can keep track of. However, as incredible and vast as the Mojave wasteland is, what defines and drives your game play experience the most is how you build your character. As an RPG everything that happens in New Vegas is first governed by statics like your special qualities, skill levels, and damage threshold. Because Fallout New Vegas more so plays by the rules of an RPG than a first person shooter, properly building your character is the first and most critical thing you do in the game. The main idea of this guide is to inform you of some of the most advantageous ways to build your character, and be as powerful as possible by the time you reach the maximum level of thirty. From the very beginning Fallout New Vegas handles character creation and statistics very differently from Fallout 3. Instead of allowing you to become a pseudo god by the end game, New Vegas focuses on creating a character with a specific play style in mind. Even through meticulous maximizing, and searching for items, the best character build possible in the base game has around six or seven of the thirteen skill sets not maxed. This means if you don't have a good idea of what you want your avatar to be from the beginning, you'll end up with some lack luster results. During character creation the first thing you have to decide on is how to distribute your special attributes (AT-rib-you-t). These seven governing elements affect your character's skills, the perks you can choose at level up, and various other abilities. In order to build a powerful character the best idea is to take the five special points you are given and put them all into intelligence. Doing this means by level 30 you'll have spent 487 skill points instead of 363. That's a difference of 72 additional skill points, which is noting to sneeze at. After distributing your Special points, Doc Mitchel will ask you a series of questions to help you choose your tag skills. There are thirteen skill sets in the game, and they all fall under three category's; Primary, Support, and Secondary. Even though you can choose any combination of skills, it's in your best interests to choose one out of each category. The skills in the primary category are all combat oriented, consisting of Guns, Energy Weapons, Unarmed, Melee, and Explosives. Unarmed and melee may seem like good ideas, but they aren't' worth much unless you intend on explicitly avoiding trigger action. By all means choose them if your role playing, but otherwise they would be best to overlook. There's also explosives, which can work well, but it's more of a forethought to combat. It's unlikely you'll find yourself relying on explosives as your primary means of attack. While explosives can be very useful, it's really something to focus on more if you intend to kill people by setting traps, and scoring preemptive strikes, or maybe planting live grenades on people. The second of your two best primary skill choices is energy weapons. Laser, plasma, and flame based weapons are all powerful options, but you have to keep in mind that finding batteries and fuel for these weapons can be difficult. There's also the additional fact that it's easy to burn through batteries VERY fast. If you decided to rely on energy weapons, just remember that accuracy matters more than shot count. Finally there's the guns skill which is really your best choice. The majority of the armaments you find in the game are governed by the guns skill, and there's also ample supply of bullets for the weapons. As a result you'll never have much trouble finding ammo to shoot traditional guns. Next up are the Support skills which are all about somehow aiding your combat effort, and consist of medicine, survival, sneak, and repair. Medicine increases the potency of stim-packs which are how you heal yourself when you really need it. Survival, while being almost necessary in hardcore mode, is just like medicine; but instead it increases the healing potency of food items you consume instead of stim-packs. Then there's, sneak which helps you in combat by helping you stay out of combat. When sneaking, if you're undetected, you can land critical sneak attacks to score devastating and often fatal damage. This effectively allows you to end battles before they even begin. Repair is the last support skill, and truthfully the most useful. The weapons in fallout break down over time, so you have to maintain them by pulling parts off other guns of the same model. What the repair skill determines is weather you'll salvage enough parts to repair a lot of degradation, or just a little. The third category Secondary consists of Barter, speech, lockpick, and science. All these skills function completely independent of combat, and focus on attaining things when talking with a gun muzzle doesn't work. Barter should be self explanatory, the higher your barter skill the less items cost when you buy them, and the more you can sell items for. It's not a bad choice, but with how much you'll likely pick up and sell in the game it may not be worth your time. The real reason this skill would be worth it is is how it's the second most seen option when you can talk your way out of things. Speech trumps barter for being used in getting what you want easy, which is all good and well, but some people prefer to negotiate with shrapnel over words. The last two skills are Lockpick and Science, which are similar to each other. Lockpick simply allows you to pick the lock of any door or container with a chunk of metal that has an attached tumbler set in your way; while science, allows you to hack into computers to do things from turning on or off turrets, to retrieving sensitive files. Both useful skills that only have noticeable bonuses when you reach proficiency of 25, 50, 75, and 100. When choosing between the two though keep mind you'll run into more troublesome locks in your travels than you will problematic computers. With your special points distributed and your preferred skills tagged doc Mitchel will ask for one last thing before seeing you out, which is to choose up to two traits. Traits are character elements that return from the original Fallout games which give you a powerful game play bonus at a penalty. You can choose to omit traits from your character build altogether, but honestly they should always be considered. All the traits are self explanatory, but three stand out for certain reasons. First is "Built to Destroy" this trait give you a 3% boot to your critical chance, but at the cost of a 15% faster wear rate on weapons. That may seem like a bad trade, but if you recruit the companion Raul the ghoul who has a perk called "Regular Maintenance" your weapons will degrade 50% slower. Also if you pick up the perk Jury-rigging at level 14, which allows you to repair items with relatively similar models, you can easily counter the negative effects without Raul. The second trait is "Four Eyes" which essentially makes any glasses you wear give you +2 perception, and you can find a pair of glasses on the desk behind doc Mitchel when you wake up. The down side is how this trait actually damages your perception by -1 which bars you from grabbing some of the better perks in the game. Herein lies the largest problem with the trait. You can cancel out the negative effects though by first setting your charisma to 4 and perception to 6 during character creation. Then purchase an implant from the new Vegas clinic later which increase your perception by one point. Doing this means you nullify the negative effect, and can grab the possible perks that need high perception, while also reaping the rewards of having higher perception from glasses. The third trait is "Small Frame" which grants a bonus of +1 agility, but at the penalty of being 25% more likely to be crippled. This can be countered by choosing the “Adamantium Skeleton” perk as early as level 14. Just keep in mind that if your playing in hardcore mode this trait makes the game much harder until you can counteract it. Special points distributed, Three skills tagged, and two or less traits chosen you’ve built your character, and are ready to step out into the wasteland for an incredible adventure. There are only a few things left to mention when making your character, the first and most important is to take the educated perk when you reach level four. If you take this perk you gain two extra skill points to distribute upon level up, and if you take it at level four then you'll have distributed 52 more points by level 30. Then there's the Comprehension perk which should be taken after educated, preferably at level six. This perk increases the number of permanent skill points you gain from skill books. Doing this is a bit debatable though, because it involves tracking down all 52 of the skill books in the game. The end benefit is 208 more skill points distributed evenly on your character build, but you have to decided if you want to go through the trouble of tracking down all the reading materiel. Simply put if you're a perfectionist take the comprehension perk and track down the books, if you just want to play the game you should probably skip this perk. Now there's only one final caveat to talk about which consists of some of the finer points for creating the most powerful character possible. As stated your special points determine a lot of things about your character. The trouble is once you’ve set your specials that’s it, you can’t change them. There is one single way to improve your persona specials though. Far to the north not far from new Vegas there’s a medical clinic where you can purchase implants that, among other things, augment your special attributes. These upgrades increase how hard you hit, how much damage you can take, and increase your special points. The implants aren’t cheep though ranging from 4,000 to 8,000 caps, but they’re well worth it. You can purchase as many implants as you have base endurance, caping out at nine. To clarify boosting your endurance with things like chems or clothing will not increase the number of times you can go under the knife. If you want the most implants possible while also utilizing the advice in this guide use the intense training perk at level two to increase your endurance to 6. Additionally I should mention that buying the endurance implant does not increase the number of surgeries you can undergo. Ok, so by now a LOT of information has been covered. Here's a condensed review to clarify. When distributing your special points place your intelligence at ten. If you decided to take the four eyes trait lower charisma to four, and raise perception to six. When choosing which skills to tag take one from each of the three categories Primary, Support, and Secondary. Primary consisting of Guns, Energy Weapons, Unarmed, Melee, and Explosives; with the guns skill being the best choice. Support consists of Medicine, Survival, Repair, and Sneak; where repair is the best option, but survival is the best choice if your playing on hardcore mode. Secondary is made of of the skills Barter, Speech, Lockpick, and Science; lockpick being your best choice. When choosing traits the three best options are Four Eyes, Built to Destroy, and Small frame. Keeping in mind each trait has negative effects that need to be countered, and the methods of doing so were covered in detail earlier. Once you start playing the game take the intense training perk at level 2 to raise your endurance, so you can buy more implants at the New Vegas clinic. At Level 4 take the Educated perk to increase the number of skill points you can earn. And Finally Take the comprehension perk at level 6 if you intend to track down the 52 skill books in the game. Which is advisable, but entirely up to you. Ultimately how you build your character entirely falls to personal discretion, but the advice given in this guide can help you to create a much more powerful avatar. In the end if you follow the advice given here by raising your intelligence to 10, taking the educated perk, the comprehension perk, and tracking down all of the skill books; You'll have increased your skills by 332 more points than if you hadn't followed the advice in this guide at all. Even though creating a powerful character isn't easy in Fallout New Vegas, it doesn't mean you can't excel at how you like to play the game.