I started the You'll Know it When It Happens Quest from Yes Man.

I talked to the Colonel or whoever. Then a few strange things began happening.

I decided I wanted to do something else. So I tried to Fast Travel somewhere. A notification popped up telling me that I could not fast travel from the location (I was not in a building or anything). So I started walking, thinking I maybe had to leave the area and after walking not very far I FAILED the quest.

WTF?! So, I reloaded.

I then decided I'd complete the mission. I opted to search the areas for clues. I wandered around for a bit with no problems. I walked into Intake tower 1, there was no problem.

I then walked into intake tower 2... and this happened:

- The game automatically saved when I entered the building.

- The Quest Failed....

I don't have any recent manual saves, and am now afraid I'm screwed. WTF. Is there a solution to this, is this supposed to happen, has this happened to anyone else?

I'm pretty frustrated at this point.

First thing, turn off the Autosave features so the game can't save you into a corner.

Also, in the End Game Phase, you will get failed quest messages left and right as you close off alternate paths depending on who you side with. You will also fail quests that you never received when these alternate paths are closed off. As you sure it's the quest your on that failed and not some other quest that you never received?

You can't play the game without having some Quest Failed messages. It's designed in such a way that you need to make choices, and those choices make it impossible to complete all the quests in one play through. If you side with one faction, the quests given out by another faction become closed off. And as CCNA mentioned, you can even fail quests that you've never even received yet, depending on the choices you make. So you're not screwed, you've only locked yourself into a certain path and other options have been closed off to you. That doesn't mean you can't complete the game though. In order to succeed in the quests that failed this time around, you're going to need to play a new game where you make different choices.

Don't rely on quicksave and autosave. Make a new manual save every once in awhile (perhaps every 10 minutes). This will help protect against corrupt saves as well.

Theres a save manager on the nexus if you don't want to manual save so often. CASM: http://newvegas.nexusmods.com/mods/36730/?

Which of course is only useful if you're playing the game on a PC. It works very well though.

I probably shouldn't be so lazy and manually save more frequently.

However this instance seems more like a glitch or a bug to me. I was wondering if anyone else had encountered it and had a potential solution. As this mission was already in progress and there was some weird activity.

I know I can still complete the game. I'm just frustrated that this was a quest I wanted to play out and now can't without backtracking quite a bit.

FYI, I do play on my PC using Steam.

You arent allowed to leave the dam area after you start the quest. It will fail.

You don't need to go in the intake towers. That probably counted as leaving the area.

You can try a quicksave or auto save backup. Saves: C:\Users\\Documents\My Games\FalloutNV

Backup the saves folder first (copy it somewhere). Then delete the quicksave.fos and autosave.fos.

Rename the quicksave and autosave .fos.bak by removing the .bak portion. You should be left with quicksave.fos and autosave.fos

Load the game and try the saves. If they are not early enough then there might be some console stuff you can do.

Again you need to make manual saves. Can't rely on quick and auto alone.

I don't understand the rave about this mod? What exactly does it do that I cannot do myself with a combination of Quicksave, regular saves and the Autosaves the game makes on it own?

First, don't use the Autosaves, too many problems and they slow down cell loads.

Second, CASM does not do anything for you that you can't do on your own, other than it does it for you. So, if you save all the time in manual slots, then this is not needed. The rest of us, forget to save as we play.

Now, CASM caused my game to crash, so I removed it, but that could have been something else.

I provide it as a potential alternative to doing the manual saves yourself since people may forget or because manual saves are less convenient than quicksave.

Mkay...I'm just gonna keep'on savin'