The Epic Games Store has another big game to give away for the second week of its ongoing Mega Sale. Last week was Death Stranding and this week it's Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition, the much-loved first-person RPG from Obsidian Entertainment.
Fallout: New Vegas is an older RPG to be sure—it came out in 2010—but it's also really good. It combines "the best of Fallout 3’s 3D open world with the nuanced roleplaying of the original two isometric games," we said in our guide to running the game on current PCs, which makes it "one of those classic PC RPGs that must be played."
This is the full Fallout: New Vegas package, by the way: The Ultimate Edition includes the base game plus the Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road expansions, and the Gunrunner's Arsenal and Courier's Stash content packs. It's a whole lot of post-nuclear roleplaying.
13 years is an eon in PC gaming terms, and while New Vegas will run as-is, it's worth putting a little effort into it ahead of time. The details are linked above but the short version is that you'll want to install and run the game once to create all the directories, INI files, and other such stuff, then exit and pop around to Nexus Mods to pick up a few things to help ensure a smoother, more stable experience.
Update: It turns out that there may be some issues with modding the Epic Games Store edition of Fallout: New Vegas. The website for the big, do-it-all Viva New Vegas mod states that it is not compatible with the EGS release because it's missing the Honest Hearts expansion; however, the Epic Games Store page says Honest Hearts is included with the Ultimate Edition. Bethesda's support site also says mods aren't "officially" supported by the Epic Store release, but indicates that at least some of them can be manually installed.
Some people on Reddit say the real problem is that the Epic release uses an optimized .EXE, which makes it incompatible with many mods. NexusMods lists an Epic Games Patcher for Fallout: New Vegas that may address that issue, but it's currently set to private because of "possible permissions issues," possibly because of a sudden influx of people trying to use it. I'll update if and when the mod is made public again.
From a grave in Goodsprings to the @EpicGames Store; #Fallout: New Vegas is now available for free through June 1st! pic.twitter.com/xgIhTyEbhtMay 25, 2023
According to our running list of every free game on the Epic Store, this is the first time Fallout: New Vegas has gone on the giveaway block, so if you don't already have it, don't miss it. It's up for grabs until June 1—after that, yet another mystery game will take its place.
