JS: I always thought Nightkin were underutilized in Fallout and seeing the Crimson Dragoons in the Fallout 3 DLC Operation: Anchorage made me think it would be pretty easy to use a similar cloaking effect for the Nightkin. I also wanted to explore the idea that extended Stealth Boy (the technology used for cloaking) use would eventually cause mental instability in the Nightkin after decades of use.

The most obvious enemies we've brought back are Geckos, the giant mutated lizards from Fallout 2. In their basic form, Geckos are small, funny-looking pests that don't pose much challenge for the player. Their larger kin, Golden Geckos and Fire Geckos, are much larger and more dangerous.

• * Full Name: Lillian Marie Bowen
• * Sex: Super Mutant
• * Race: Nightkin Super Mutant
• * Age: 203
• * Ethnicity: African
• * Profession: Farmer, Jacobstown
• * Perk: Stealth Girl – While Lily is a companion, the duration of Stealth Boys is increased by 200% and all Sneak Attack Critical Hits do an additional 10% damage.
• * Description: Though she now lives a peaceful life tending to Bighorners in the community of Jacobstown, Lily was once a Nightkin in The Master’s army. Before that, she was an elderly grandmother enjoying a simple life in Vault 17. Heavily medicated, Lily struggles with her dangerous schizophrenia and distant memories of her old life.

Since I was lucky enough to be asked back to write the official guide for Fallout: New Vegas, I’ve been working constantly since late May, clocking in around 1,200 man-hours, and trying to trim my word count to within the 300,000 range. During the course of these blog posts, I aim to list some of the guide’s most helpful aspects, so you can see the differences this new adventure brings. To begin, here’s an overview of the Training chapter of the guide:

The Training section is familiar to those who have utilized the Fallout 3 official guides. While much of the way you create your character remains the same, a lot has changed, and flagging each instance with an icon for easy reference was important. After an overview of Attributes and Derived Statistics, there’s a section on Skills, including the all-new Survival Skill, and tweaked Guns Skill, which folds much of the Big and Small Guns Skills into one, and provides a Strength rating for each weapon (which, naturally, are given for everything you shoot). Traits are covered, along with advice on picking the ones best-suited to your play style. Then comes the text tsunami known as “Perks”, which lists every single one of them. Although I can’t spoil your anticipation of Perks just yet, there are some memorable, amusing, and astonishing accoutrements you can add to your Wasteland warrior.

One thing I really like about New Vegas is the subtle aesthetic changes. While Fallout 3 went with a grey/green style, New Vegas is very brown and orange. I know that "brown" games are looked down upon this generation, but it's beautiful in a bleak way with New Vegas, and the orange hues make it look a lot more like the original Fallout games than Fallout 3 did.

The point, here, is that I’m absolutely obsessed with the world of Fallout, and so when I picked up New Vegas for the first time and started wandering around, quickly realizing that everything around me is unfamiliar, and when I first met an NPC and realized I had never spoken to this goofy robot before, and when I was playing the game and it felt like Fallout, I knew that Obsidian had delivered something I want.

I don't think there is anything you would call elaborate, there has been a lot of stuff done where the sum total is greater than the parts. On its own, being able to modify weapons is not a huge change, being able to make your own chems and stimpacks, being able to use iron sights, adding the fast replay mechanic to real time combat earned for kill shots and such. None of those things on their own are very dramatic, but put them all together on top of what was already there and then it starts to feel both familiar but very new and different. So I think our focus has been on going through and trying to add and implement changes that make sense. Where all of them combined has had a big impact on how the game feels.

It's not going to feel dramatically different, if you've played Fallout 3 the combat will feel familiar when you play Fallout: New Vegas. But there is a lot of new stuff to uncover and play with like adding new melee attacks for VATS, so that there are special moves you can do with melee weapons to guys that you weren't able to do in Fallout 3. All those things combine adding up to bigger and better changes.