Basically its a simple question and a blind hope against what it sounds like its going to be like.

Will New Vegas NEED Steam in order to run or will it just be required for patching and one of a couple options for online activation.

Or to put it in other words, Will you need to live in a country with affordable High-Speed Broadband in order to play New Vegas or will people who dont live in europe or north america be able to play it as well?

Yes, New Vegas will NEED Steam. Not something I agree with, but you won't use the connection much. Install the game from disc, verify it on Steam and then put Steam in offline mode so it won't go online anymore.

In my understanding it has been confirmed that Steam is required whether you buy it on disc or not. Having a disc install needs to have Steam online during install, and usually Steam patches the game after installing it. After that you can switch Steam to offline mode. The final Fallout 3 patch was about 50MB in size, so if New Vegas's patches are about the same size they could just about be bearable even with a dial-up.

Some Steam games do download a part of the game from Steam servers during install (they are not too common though), no clue if New Vegas will.

Will the disc actually contain all the New Vegas data so you can install it from the disc or is it just used to register it to your Steam account, so you then have to download the whole thing? I assume the first...

Latest Steam game i bought on disc was technically speaking a Steam backup, majority of the game data was on the disc, Steam dowloaded a little something afterwards. When i restore my Fallout 3 backup Steam has to download about 300MB, for Oblivion it's nearly 800MB.

Thanks for the information and quick too
although i think sadly it means i wont be able to buy to game being in a pay by the gig part of the country. but thanks for answers anyway, its good to know it.

Wait, so a someone who wants to play on pc, but lacks an internet connection is just screwed? That's wrong. If a game is bought on disk, it should require nothing but the disk to play.

I totaly agree, its not really fair for people without internet. It basicaly forces us into using steam and it is the only thing I have heard about NV that I have not liked

Nowadays most people with PCs have them connected to the internet. I don't disagree that it'd be ideal if you didn't require an internet connection to activate the product, but at this point when you look at the standard set up for most PC Gamers, they almost always have some kind of internet access. Hopefully those without consistent access can at least get their PCs online to install/activate the product, as I'm fairly certain afterward you can play it offline.

I agree. Unfortunately the number of people who play modern pc games and don't have any internet connection, is probably considered quite low. Personally, I'd prefer steam, with a cd check and serial code printed on the box/manual as an alternative. I know from my dawn of war games, that that system is pretty damn secure. If you lose a manual or disk, you buy a new game.

I like steam a lot and use it regularly, so it's not a problem for me

But you only need to be online for the initial activation. After that, you can run Steam in offline mode.

Lets take this discussion to the official thread

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1098592-steam-and-fallout-new-vegas/