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Freeside is supposed to be verging on civil war due to the tension between the huge numbers of NCR squatters that have settled in the area and worried locals. These characters were either removed, or had their dialogue conditions completely botched. These are restored, along with dialogue for drunks, squatters, gossipers, and pickpockets. All the lines of dialogue for locals were broken due to missing faction conditions. With the increased danger of thugs in this mod they may also be a viable option for low level players. They will hawk their services to passing Gamblers and the player. Now the Gamblers are restored these characters actually make sense again. They are of course easy picking for thugs or even the player, so some have hired bodyguards to protect them. Restored: Gamblers will now constantly stream into Freeside on their way to the Strip and its casinos (some will also stop off at the Atomic Wrangler) as they were always meant to. NPCs can now go everywhere in the city with obvious dramatic improvements to gameplay/immersion. Freeside is now one coherent world space. These enhancements come at a cost - this mod is vastly more demanding than the neutered vanilla version of the area, but I feel the possible instability is more than balanced out by a hugely more interesting and invigorated area. It also extensively overhauls the area, readding the significant cut content, fixing many of the glaring bugs in the area, and adding new original elements to make the town more interesting. This mod, heavily based on Razorwire's excellent modders resource Open Freeside ( ) merges the two different worldspaces back into one single worldspace, and also makes the Mormon fort part of the same persistant area as was originally intended. Couple this with having to work on increasingly dated game console hardware, and there was no way what was planned was going to be feasible. A fully populated Freeside will cause even mid range PCs to struggle at times, and the extra strain on the notoriously unstable Gamebryo engine increases the likelihood of crashes. The reason for the drastic downsizing of Freeside and the curbing of ambition of what would occur there is simple - technical difficulties. It's clear from even a cursory look at the game's files that the Freeside worldspace(s) in the shipped game is nowhere near as interesting as the original plan for the area, with huge amounts of content culled, and numerous bugs and oversights meaning large parts of content that did ship and were enabled simply don't work. DO NOT USE THIS MOD WITHOUT READING THE SECTION MARKED "IMPORTANT" FIRSTįreeside Open is an attempt to overhaul and restore the Freeside worldspace in Fallout: New Vegas to what was the developer's original intent a sprawling, densely populated area full of danger and unexpected events.
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