NEW VEGAS was originally released in a somewhat glitchy state, although this was down to Obsidian having to use Bethesda's infamously awful Gamebryo/Creation engine and Bethesda themselves not being particularly helpful on overcoming bugs and problems (even ones that had cropped up and then been solved on FALLOUT 3). NEW VEGAS wasn't in too bad a state on release, probably on a par with FALLOUT 3's state (though I never had a crash to desktop with NEW VEGAS, unlike FO3), and likwise fixed up in post-release patches. The GOTY edition is very stable and mostly bug-free.

In terms of actual game quality, NEW VEGAS blows FALLOUT 3 so far out of the water it's hard to believe they're games set in the same universe and using the same engine. Obsidian are of course the successor company to Black Isle, who created the FALLOUT franchise in the first place, so there were people working on NEW VEGAS who'd worked on both FALLOUT and FALLOUT 2. The result was a game far closer and more integral to the established FALLOUT lore than FALLOUT 3, which was, at best, a semi-related Washington D.C.-set spin-off. In fact NEW VEGAS continues storylines from FO and FO2 and features some recurring characters (like the Super-Mutant leader voiced by Michael Dorn), hence why FALLOUT fans often call it 'the real FALLOUT 3' (presumably to Bethesda's irritation). It is all done in a way that is approachable to newcomers, however.

The principal reason why NEW VEGAS is so much better than FO3 is that it gives weight and consequence to every decision you make. There are no protected NPCs: if you want to blow the head off the general giving you military missions, you can if you want to, at the cost of not receiving any more missions from that faction and annoying everyone in it. The game also features a storyline that responds to such actions. The game has four factions (two inside the city of New Vegas and two outside of it) and you can do missions for all of them, but at some point you have to choose sides and forego doing the missions for the other side (compared to FO3, which let you pretty much work for everyone regardless of if it made any sense). Even better, if you want to you can give everyone the bird and go off and conquer the entire region yourself and take over as a psychopathic or benevolent dictator, which is both awesome and hilarious.

Then there's the narratively ambitious (if not always well-implemented in game terms) DLC, which asks the rather left-field question of what if you were an NPC in someone else's epic story of which they were the star? You find out that something your character did years ago that they can barely remember had massive consequences on a whole group of people you barely knew existed, and somone is really not happy about it. A slightly weird idea, but one that works really well. Plus OLD WORLD BLUES is possibly the most hilarious expansion to a game I've ever seen, with the Cyberdog-gun (a weapon controlled by the detached brain of a cybernetic dog) being one of the finest weapons I've ever seen in a game.

In summary, NEW VEGAS is easily one of the best RPGs of the last ten years and probably the best RPG ever released by Bethesda (including SKYRIM), even though it wasn't made by them