I'm looking for a recommended route through the early part of the game. I'm lvl 7 and have only leather armor and a service rifle and am getting very frustrated.

In Fallout 3 I felt I had time to explore, take side quests, build my character, and generally play in a style I wanted. Fallout 3:NV feels like a half-assed mod put together by someone who's idea of "challenging" is just to put in a bunch of pointless, hard encounters that require you to blast away and slurp healing. And if I find another locked safe/footlocker/cabinet with nothing in it I'm going to break something. What is the point?

I'm now level 7 and have done the following quests:

Ain't That a Kick in the Head
Back in the Saddle
Ghost Town Gunfight
My Kind of Town
I Fought the Law
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
Cold, Cold Heart
Can You Find it in Your Heart

Now what should I do? I've tried to go to Novac but I can't get past the Blind Deathclaw in Primm Pass or the seemingly random Giant Rad Scorpion spawns or the ever present Powder Gangers. Can't get to Sloan for he same reason and from what I've read it's Deathclaw central anyway. I'm not playing hardcoe and I want a challenging game but there seems to be no sense of scale to this. Why am I running into Giant Rad Scorpions just outside of Goodsprings at lvl 7? Can anyone recommend a route or some quests that I should do next?

The game isn't leveled, bud. Stay on the road and go to Nipton and Novac that way.

Yeah, you need to follow the road at first, until you get stronger.

So, Goodsprings -> Primm -> South then east to Nipton -> east then North to Novac.

You can find a couple sidequests before Nipton by following the road up to the west to an NCR outpost. And then there's plenty of sidequests in Novac. From that point on it opens up a bit more as you head north to Vegas.



Edti: and, yeah... it's kind of annoying if you're into just randomly wandering like you can do in FO3. (I played FO3 that way after my first time - just going off and seeing what interesting thing is over the next hill. But in FO:NV, there's Deathclaws & Cazadors over that hill. Whee!)

Edit2: I don't recall having any empty locked chests, though. That's strange.

That. Just about all NPCs told you to stay on the road, so do it for a little while longer.

Is this a joke? They couldn't have made it easier for you, they TELL you exactly where to go (Primm) and TELL you the north route will chew you up and spit you out. If you want some fire power, go to Primm, and get the 2 cowboy repeaters in the sheriffs shack, they are under the bed and under the tool bench. You can often get another from gang members in the police station on the road between primm and the southern ncr outpost, with good repair skill you now have a well repaired cowboy repeater. If you want something good from lock picking, theres the unique .357 magnum in a hard safe in the primm hotel. There is also a Trail Carbine in Ranger Andys room in a locked container, thats 2 good things with 55 lockpick (75 with magazine)

Thanks all. Will stick to the roads and see if I can make some progress.

And am I the only one who's finding empty locked containers? It's happened at least twice. Maybe it's a bug. I've had some weird inventory behavior.

ETA: the locked footlocker in Ranger Station Charlie (picked it after talking to Eddie so everyone is dead) was empty. No one else is having this problem?

Wow, I must have balls of steel. I ran through scorpion gultch at lvl 3 to get to Novac, there are like the name suggest TONS of scorpions of all types.

You need to learn when to haul [censored] out of a bad situation.

the l-15 has over 6 deathclaws, and go into black mountain and you have around 15 masters (I did anyway).

There are no level scales, so a deathclaw will be just as tough at level 30, as at level 7, but you should have a lot better equipment by then.

It should be mentioned that while exploring in FO3 was a lot of fun, the full-on level scaling was probably the single most immersion-breaking gameplay element. It can feel limiting to stick to safety at first, but if the worst creatures are off the beaten path, then it makes no sense that a level 7 should be almost as able to explore freely as a level 30. The fact that, in NV, you can hear increased sounds of warfare in the distance as you level- as time passes, in other words- and human enemies carry bigger guns is sufficient scaling.

Low levels are the best! Fight for your life.

My suggestion: enjoy it.

Since it sounds like this is your first time thru, take your time! It is a big game so just enjoy exploring and finding stuff. You'll get overpowered soon enough and be saying to yourself, I wish this game was harder.

The NPCs mean it when they say, "stay on the road it is dangerous." If something seems too hard, make note of it and come back later more prepared or at a higher level.

If you go to Hidden Valley there are two holes in the fence on the western side.

If you take the southern most hole it will lead you to Scorpion Gultch.

The gultch is a straight shot so you can't get lost and it comes out north of Helios and is a good way to get to Novac/Vegas.

All you have to do is outrun the scorpions.

If you feel lucky go Sloan, Neil's shack, Scorpion Gorge, Freeside

It can be kind of frustrating, and people who haven't played a pre-Oblivion RPG don't get it. In the past running away from stuff just came with the territory in RPGs. There were monsters that were way beyond your capability, right there! So you just had to accept that fact. And if something got too tough you'd have to be patient and come back later. I for one really like this aspect of the game, it reminds me of playing those old classics like Gothic. Then Oblivion came along and introduced scaling so you'd never run into anything you couldn't handle.

But that said, I find it annoying that all the paths through the mountains are blocked by high end monsters. I mean why do that? Are they trying to compensate for the fact that the map is smaller than advertised so they make you slog all the way around the mountains in the hope that you get the sense that the map is much bigger? I think they'd be better tucked away in remote corners and dungeons than inconveniently blocking important passes.

And if they wanted to prevent the player from getting to Vegas too quickly I think some golden geckos and regular radscorpions would have done just nicely up to level ten. I'm level sixteen and have a companion and I still can't cope with a charging death claw or giant scorpy.

But yeah, just do what the game and the guys here said and stick to the road, and don't be afraid to run away and come back later. I hope you stick with the game. It's great.

Don't forget to pick up some powder gangers armour and wear that when you're in their territory.

I can't comment on the empty locked containers as I avoid lockpicking because it gives you too much XP. Perhaps they're just trying to introduce an element of realism or uncertainty.

Word. This.

The easiest way to Vegas is to follow the main quest, you an do the side quests along the way and should be about level 10 by the time you get there,

There are three routes to Vegas one gets you mauled by cazadors another by deathclaws[and both you'll probably run into Fiends at the end] The third route is to follow the mainquest even just the road is probably safer and quicker then the reloading and hiding you have to do by other routes. Hell if you follow the main quest you run into Victor outside Boulder City and can follow him right to Vegas.

The reason they do this is so you don't accidentally skip major portions of the main quest, that occur before arriving in vegas. But still leaving the option available for experienced characters.

Early on, FO:NV is very linear.

Spend levels 1-3 in Goodsprings (maybe east to the cross that you see in the distance or ducking south to Primm). Your goal should be to get a Varmint Rifle, get it repaired, get a supply of Dynamite, food, water, meds/chems and get your 9mm pistol and maybe a 9mm SMG. There are also other weapons in the town of Goodsprings that you can get.

Then you go south to Primm and deal with that. Make sure you pickup ED-E. South to Mohave Outpost. East to Nipton, where you meet the other major faction for the first time. 'round the bend takes you to Novac where there's more to do (along with a few quests that you probably can't handle yet). At which point you are probably somewhere around level 6-9. High enough that you're starting to feel your oats, but keep in mind that you're still just a babe in the woods.

Around level 6-onward, it's worth going up to New Vegas and look for quests. Walk around the entire outskirts (McCarren, the farms, etc) and pickup quests, then head into Freeside and check that out. Finally, you can head into the strip, where you'll get into the meat of the story. You should be level 10-15 by this point with a few thousand caps to your name.

Caps are power in FO:NV. They let you buy better weapons, which dramatically increases your options and power and ability to get around the map without being smushed. Hunting Rifle, Hunting Shotgun, 10mm SMG, and a few of the other 2000-5000 cap weapons will make an amazing difference to how easy things are.

I find that once I learn to play Caravan, turn in snow globes, or gamble at the casinos - enough to afford better weapons, suddenly the map opens up and I can start exploring and surviving at around level 15-20.

Ditto a lot of the good guides above. Once I got to Vegas - which is very easy from Novac. I left the main quest completely and have randomly wandered since. Now I am level 23 and am thinking about visiting a certain Legion camp. I've found 80 locations and there are a lot more. Also there are a lot of quests in NV - much more than FO3.

I think they wanted to create a sense of urgency in the beginning of the game - you are trying to track who shot you after-all. It's deffo worth putting points in lockpick, after all you do get a great gun in the Bison hotel in Primm and later on there's a certain sniper rifle you must have a high (70's plus buff) lockpick to get.

Found a good few empty locked containers or cupboards, still picked them for the XP anyway. I will hack a computer and then pick the safe it unlocks too, XP whoring FTW



You can get round almost the whole map from the start if you are decent at sneaking and don't engage high power enemies, I have killed a Deathclaw with the 9mm pistol but reloaded my game as the amount of ammo needed was ridiculous against only getting 50XP for killing it. Felt good but wasn't worth the outlay.
Steer clear of Cazadores and the larger Radscorpians until you get an Assault Carbine, tear's them a new ass and the revenge is sweet.

I think I must have gotten lucky my first time trying to get to Vegas at level 1. I played to level 5 and then figured, "okay, I'm sure there is some option to permanently increase my INTELLIGENCE so I better go look that up. Find out its just outside Vegas so I restart and decide to try to make the run (no idea yet where I'll get the caps, but with high luck figured I could gamble my way to wealth... turns out its gravy at a blackjack table). Head towards Sloan past the cross memorial sneaking. See my first Deathclaw, stop, look west (mountains), look east (mountains further off) so go east to try to circle around... end up at Black Mountain and meet Neil. From Neil, I headed north-ish, sneaking the whole way and managed to sneak all the way to the south wall of Vegas without fighting anything. Ran into some raiders which the NCR guards near McCarran helped me dispatch (good loot) and then wandered to the NE to get into Vegas through Freeside.

It really wasn't that bad and it was kinda fun doing it for the first time without really knowing where I was going other than "north."

So basically, if one is really struggling, take this approach, win a bunch of caps at the casinos, buy some uber gear and then go pwn everything if that's what you like. My only issue is that I dinged level 2 before I got my INT implant because I wasn't smart enough to avoid easy fights and discovered way too many things on my way.

night time can be pretty dangerous too, i got my ass handed me by a group of night stalkers on the road to novac, well slightly off the road

Happens to me all the freakin' time. "Oooh, a hard locked footlocker! Wonder what's in here? Ohyousonuva[censored]!

I got hit there too when I was level 3 and specialising in energy weapons (plink, plink) - by about 6 of them - almost died but a NCR patrol finished the last 2. Now I am supporting the NCR!