I was hoping the last patch would have fixed most problems, so, I decided to start over. I erased my saves, reinstalled the game on the hard drive, erased my cache and started playing again. And yet things seem to have gotten worse, at least in the first few hours I played.

Bark scorpions near the Ivanpah Dry Lake now consistently spawn in some sort of pseudo-death state (they don't move, but you don't get the regular "A) Search Bark Scorpion" command), below the ground, or both. The last case can actually be pretty funny the first time you see it, as the first thing you see is a jumbled yellow mess jumping around beneath the ground which then forcefully launches through the air. But when this keeps happening, it stops being funny. This happens pretty much every single time I traveled between Mojave Outpost and Primm.

On another note, NPCs seem to have gotten a liking to food. A travelling merchant was completely bugged and kept walking up against a truck. I went to look what was inside the truck and found a Fresh Potato, so I picked it up, which fixed the travelling merchant. He was trying to reach it but he couldn't, since he didn't know how to jump. I see the same thing in places like the barracks at the Mojave Outpost. If I would just wait around for a little while, the NCR troopers walking around would take everything that's edible from the shelves and eat it until nothing's left.

Anyone else notice these problems before?

I've never seen those problems.

But last night, I wanted to wrap up the final piece of Fallout 3 DLC I had never played, Mothership Zeta. So I fired up Fallout 3, and was reminded of how nice it was to 'live' in a wasteland that actually felt like a hostile, desolate place.

Also, I got through the entire DLC and my traveling to and from Megaton w/o a single glitch, slowdown or X-Box crash...AMAZING! All the enemies I killed were actually trying to kill me, and the Drones I befriended followed me around, attacked my enemies and never ran off inexplicably and/or turned on my fellow humans.

How could they go from something relatively polished to something that is practically broken?

I'm at the point with my New Vegas where I think it CAN'T be patched. This game needs to be re-built and re-issued to the people who bought it. Any patches will only inadvertently cause unforeseen problems in other areas.

My thoughts exactly. I have been doing two runs with NV. First one around 100 hours + and nothing major or game breaking. Just some typical gamebryo stuff. Tho i admit i avoided all vaults like plague to avoid the dreaded "DLC bug" After the patch i thought what the heck, i erase all and start new game with new char to really play it properly all patched up. And what happened, nothing but freeze-fiesta, horrible slowdowns and more glitches i ever saw on my first run with game. Very very disapointing.

So if another patch comes, what breaks then? Just pffff.

I'm starting to think that too, that the cluster-[censored] that we have before us is as good as it's ever going to get, which is depressing. I mean, there hasn't been a peep out of the developers regarding another patch (despite the fact that it SOOOOO needs a couple more).