Fallout New Vegas on Linux _ Configuration and Gameplay
**Setting Up *Fallout: New Vegas* on Linux: A Comprehensive Guide**
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### Introduction
In this guide, we will walk through the process of setting up *Fallout: New Vegas* on Linux. While primarily focused on *New Vegas*, the steps outlined here can be applied to other Bethesda games like *Fallout 4*. The video demonstrates that *New Vegas* runs surprisingly well on Linux, often better than it did on Windows, despite being a Windows-exclusive game.
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### Getting Started with Steam and Proton
1. **Launching Through Steam**
To set up *Fallout: New Vegas*, open your Steam library and locate the game. Right-click on the game and select "Properties." From there, navigate to the "Launcher Options" tab. This allows you to customize how the game launches.
2. **Adjusting Proton Settings**
Ensure that Proton is set to the latest version for compatibility reasons. While older versions like 36.4 have worked in the past, newer versions (e.g., 13.1) are more stable and compatible with a wider range of games.
3. **Custom Launch Options**
One key tweak involves modifying the launch options to bypass the game's launcher. This can be done by entering a long string into the "Options" field. While this might seem cumbersome, it simplifies accessing the game directly without unnecessary steps. For detailed instructions, refer to the [launcher settings](#launcher-settings) below.
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### Modding *Fallout: New Vegas* on Linux
1. **Modding Challenges**
Modding Bethesda games on Linux is not as straightforward as on Windows due to compatibility layers like Proton or Wine. Unlike Windows, where mod managers like LOOT or FOMOD work seamlessly, Linux requires additional steps.
2. **Using a Virtual Machine (VM)**
For those serious about modding, the workaround involves:
- Installing a Windows-based VM.
- Launching the game within the VM to access modding tools.
- Copying the modified files from the VM to your local Linux directory.
3. **Accessing Game Files**
The game's configuration and preferences are stored in specific directories under `~/.local/share/Steam/`. These include `FalloutNV.ini` and `FalloutNV.prefs`, which can be edited for further customization.
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### Launcher Settings and Gameplay
1. **Launcher Settings**
- Open the game's launcher and navigate to "Options."
- Adjust the resolution based on your monitor setup. For ultrawide monitors, ensure you select a custom resolution if available.
- Disable bloom or HDR effects to avoid visual glitches.
2. **Graphics and Performance**
Set detail levels to Ultra for an optimal experience. The game runs smoothly even with high settings, making it a great choice for Linux users looking for a visually stunning experience.
3. **Controller Setup**
If you're using a Steam Controller or similar input device, ensure all settings are configured properly. While the controller may feel slightly jerky initially, tweaking in-game settings can improve responsiveness.
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### Gameplay Experience
1. **Loading Saves and Starting Play**
The game seamlessly loads saves from previous Windows installations, allowing you to continue your journey without interruption. Whether exploring the vibrant Strip or venturing into the wasteland, the experience is immersive.
2. **Playing Through the Story**
The video hints at a future live stream where the creator plans to play through the entire story for the first time. This will be an excellent opportunity for viewers to follow along and experience *New Vegas*'s rich narrative.
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### Conclusion
*Fallout: New Vegas* on Linux is a largely plug-and-play experience, with minor tweaks needed for optimal performance. While modding requires additional effort, the stability and compatibility of the game in Linux make it a worthwhile endeavor.
For those interested in diving deeper into modding or exploring other Bethesda titles like *Fallout 4*, stay tuned for future videos that will address these topics in detail.
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This guide provides a detailed walkthrough of setting up *Fallout: New Vegas* on Linux, ensuring you have the tools to enjoy the game smoothly. Whether you're new to gaming on Linux or a seasoned pro, this guide has something for everyone. Happy gaming!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this video I'm going over setting up Fallout New Vegas to work in Linux so this video is mainly geared towards New Vegas but I will touch other Bethesda games in it because they're designed almost the same way so uh in this to get New Vegas working I'm just about to go into that and show you the couple settings tweak but it darn a works out of the box there's some tweaks that you need to do to have a Flawless experience and the one thing I wanted to really touch on here is I find it to be more stable and work a lot better in Linux than it did in Windows which is kind of hilarious because it's pretty much a Windows exclusive game but it's more stable in Linux at least for my my opinion so uh try it out do these settings go ahead and play some games and see what you think of it uh the one thing I will touch on here in pretty much any Bethesda game is the modding Community uh that's a huge thing and when it comes to Linux uh modding it is not as simple as you know install your mod manag or run it that obviously doesn't work when you're using a compatibility layer like proton or wine or any of the like so what you have to do if you're going to really into the modding scene you have to spin up a VM and then do a a copy from that directory into the local files which I'm about about to show and you can do this New Vegas Fallout 4 all those other ones and I'm also going to go on to Fallout 4 in a later video uh I'm hoping that proton bakes in some of these fixes that I'm I'm going over but it's not looking uh like it's going to fix its sound issue anytime soon so I'm probably going to go ahead and make that video later in the week and just kind of make this a Fallout week and uh that way you can actually play Fallout 4 without having the sound cut in and out or it Miss soundtracks but uh anyways this video is about New Vegas so let's get into actually setting it up and making it compatible with your computer okay so as far as setting up Fallout New Vegas we simply launch into our steam launcher there's only really a couple settings that you need to check over all the revisions of proton Fallout New Vegas has actually gotten better with each one so the very first thing we're going to do we're going to click up here and then go down to settings the top left we click steam settings and then we go down to steam player right here so go right here and as you notice this is enabled and this is enabled for all titles and the compatibility tool right now is set to 13.1 16-6 beta however um I know this has worked on prior versions especially like 36-4 however some of the older versions had some issues so uh just make sure that your compatibility tool I like running the latest and greatest as I found it is far more compatible with more games and has less issues uh overall so I set that first and then one other tweak I would make before doing this um you can restart steam if you actually change that I did not so under Fallout New Vegas here let's go ahead and hit properties and the launch op options so this is a little bit of mouthful and uh I'm actually even going to bother zooming in or anything like that because this is a long string and basically what it does is it forces the Launcher not to launch and launch directly and executable so it bypasses the launcher I like doing this instead of actually doing like a copy and paste and drilling down into the actual file explorer and it's just nice to do uh this is one recommended change I I'd like to make now you can mod New Vegas a lot further than just this so if you actually launch from here you'd be able to get in and do it just fine and that's how I play right now however many people like to mod do other things just go to loc local files and browse local files and you actually get put in the New Vegas directory to where you can add and change things directly in here uh the main thing to look at is Fallout defaults and then Fallout preferences so uh the default ion here but the preferences are actually buried a little bit deeper so um to change the those you need to go back into your steam Library steam apps compat data and 22 380 and then go to the C drive users steam user uh my documents and then my games Fallout NV and now you see the actual inii so I'll also put this P path into description so when you need to change your Fallout preferences. or the Fallout ini you'd come in here to do those changes um you can also create a custom inii as well however for this video I'm not going to do any of that I just wanted to show this as just an option as uh when you're doing these things it's there's a lot of things you can do customizations and tweaks uh and mods that you can do but I didn't really touch any of this as out of the box it just worked very very well and I was very impressed by how well this did work so with that done uh I'm going to launch into Fallout New Vegas and do some gameplay okay so let's go ahead and launch out into our Fallout New Vegas again I'm on an ultrawide so this may look a little different for you uh you might see the black lines on the top and bottom just knowe this is full screen for me uh I did not change any settings in I eyes and this is just what I'm saying so with that we're going to just do I'm I've already loaded up up it actually pulled in all my save games from the my when I was playing it on Windows and I can actually load into those as well so that's pretty cool so these are the basic deal and um just third person and I can scroll out and in um you know what I have a steam controller as well so I'm going to play on that and I just turn that on and as you see I still have capabilities that's pretty sweet oh it's a little jerky though so I don't think it quite got all my settings but go ahead and go to the strip here huh I've got you now come on heam oh game over man game over well let's just go ahead and quit out here I just wanted to show a little sample gameplay there I am going to do a a speedrun live stream on New Vegas just because the speed runs are pretty fast so as far as the launcher is concerned let's go ahead I'm going to remove this custom setting so I can go ahead and show you guys the actual launcher so I'm going to go ahead and clear that out and we're going to launch directly into it just to see what we get because there are some settings I'd like to show you in this actual setting so uh the very first let go to options and then resolution I go ahead and you can set this to whatever you have I set it to my ultra wide that's why it looks the way it does I'd click Ultra and then I went ahead and turned off screen effects right here so when you you're looking at this make sure bloom or HDR is not selected none that's the big thing you can do detail level at any level you wanted I went ahead and did Ultra with everything maxed and it runed beautifully so or it ran beautifully so this is about it for Launcher settings and the only thing you can actually still launch in the game with these enabled but there's a lot of popping in and out and uh just mudding of just a whole bunch of bad stuff from what I read on the Forum so I did even try it I just put none on this and that's that's really it so I'm going to go ahead and exit this and I'm going to go ahead and put that back into the actual Launcher settings here so set launch options and we're going to put this into here and that's all I did for actually setting up the launcher um now if you do have a custom resolution like me just remember those inii file settings go into Fallout prefs and go ahead and set your X and Y AIS directly in that ini I if you have an ultra wide however it has the stard resolutions already baked into the launcher so 90 something per of you guys will probably just be able to select the drop down and hit okay and go but for the few that do that are like me and have a weird setup uh just know you'd fix that in the inii settings and if you're an ultra wide gamer uh you're probably already used to this so now you've got it working everything's good to go you can take these settings and apply them and just remember many of this works with Fallout 4 however you will have audio issues which I will go into in detail in that video uh as far as modding goes I touched on this a little bit as far as where the local files are uh when I say launch into a VM at the very beginning I I don't think I completely flush that out in this video and what that is is installing a local copy on a Windows VM uh launching into it and then installing that mod manager on it uh obviously with the VM you don't really want to game inside of VM um you're just doing that installing there and then having to cop it off horrible solution but it is a solution or a workaround for now until we get some more people in here working on installing a mod manager for a Linux based system so we can actually do this um I'm going to work more on this too because I really do love a lot of Bethesda games as far as Fallout series uh the Skyrim series they just uh or Elder Scrolls not Skyrim series but uh these these just are great uh systems and they are made so much better by mod so I'm going to see if I I do and and maybe look out later on for a separate video specifically over modding Bethesda games uh but this video should at very least get you into Fallout New Vegas and be able to play and uh do everything you want to do you know as far as getting it working on your Linux system I find it just a great experience and I've had a wonderful time so be looking for a live stream from me I'm going to be doing a speed run in New Vegas during that live stream so uh check it out and you should see a good hourong or more playr of New Vegas and I will be going through dialogue in there so you can actually follow the whole storyline if you don't want to pick up New Vegas and you kind of want to see the whole story I'm going to go ahead and play all that out because I have never experienced the entirety or the entire story start to finish so uh that should be a fun playthrough and I'm looking forward to that live stream but that's it for today guys and I'll see you in the next videoin this video I'm going over setting up Fallout New Vegas to work in Linux so this video is mainly geared towards New Vegas but I will touch other Bethesda games in it because they're designed almost the same way so uh in this to get New Vegas working I'm just about to go into that and show you the couple settings tweak but it darn a works out of the box there's some tweaks that you need to do to have a Flawless experience and the one thing I wanted to really touch on here is I find it to be more stable and work a lot better in Linux than it did in Windows which is kind of hilarious because it's pretty much a Windows exclusive game but it's more stable in Linux at least for my my opinion so uh try it out do these settings go ahead and play some games and see what you think of it uh the one thing I will touch on here in pretty much any Bethesda game is the modding Community uh that's a huge thing and when it comes to Linux uh modding it is not as simple as you know install your mod manag or run it that obviously doesn't work when you're using a compatibility layer like proton or wine or any of the like so what you have to do if you're going to really into the modding scene you have to spin up a VM and then do a a copy from that directory into the local files which I'm about about to show and you can do this New Vegas Fallout 4 all those other ones and I'm also going to go on to Fallout 4 in a later video uh I'm hoping that proton bakes in some of these fixes that I'm I'm going over but it's not looking uh like it's going to fix its sound issue anytime soon so I'm probably going to go ahead and make that video later in the week and just kind of make this a Fallout week and uh that way you can actually play Fallout 4 without having the sound cut in and out or it Miss soundtracks but uh anyways this video is about New Vegas so let's get into actually setting it up and making it compatible with your computer okay so as far as setting up Fallout New Vegas we simply launch into our steam launcher there's only really a couple settings that you need to check over all the revisions of proton Fallout New Vegas has actually gotten better with each one so the very first thing we're going to do we're going to click up here and then go down to settings the top left we click steam settings and then we go down to steam player right here so go right here and as you notice this is enabled and this is enabled for all titles and the compatibility tool right now is set to 13.1 16-6 beta however um I know this has worked on prior versions especially like 36-4 however some of the older versions had some issues so uh just make sure that your compatibility tool I like running the latest and greatest as I found it is far more compatible with more games and has less issues uh overall so I set that first and then one other tweak I would make before doing this um you can restart steam if you actually change that I did not so under Fallout New Vegas here let's go ahead and hit properties and the launch op options so this is a little bit of mouthful and uh I'm actually even going to bother zooming in or anything like that because this is a long string and basically what it does is it forces the Launcher not to launch and launch directly and executable so it bypasses the launcher I like doing this instead of actually doing like a copy and paste and drilling down into the actual file explorer and it's just nice to do uh this is one recommended change I I'd like to make now you can mod New Vegas a lot further than just this so if you actually launch from here you'd be able to get in and do it just fine and that's how I play right now however many people like to mod do other things just go to loc local files and browse local files and you actually get put in the New Vegas directory to where you can add and change things directly in here uh the main thing to look at is Fallout defaults and then Fallout preferences so uh the default ion here but the preferences are actually buried a little bit deeper so um to change the those you need to go back into your steam Library steam apps compat data and 22 380 and then go to the C drive users steam user uh my documents and then my games Fallout NV and now you see the actual inii so I'll also put this P path into description so when you need to change your Fallout preferences. or the Fallout ini you'd come in here to do those changes um you can also create a custom inii as well however for this video I'm not going to do any of that I just wanted to show this as just an option as uh when you're doing these things it's there's a lot of things you can do customizations and tweaks uh and mods that you can do but I didn't really touch any of this as out of the box it just worked very very well and I was very impressed by how well this did work so with that done uh I'm going to launch into Fallout New Vegas and do some gameplay okay so let's go ahead and launch out into our Fallout New Vegas again I'm on an ultrawide so this may look a little different for you uh you might see the black lines on the top and bottom just knowe this is full screen for me uh I did not change any settings in I eyes and this is just what I'm saying so with that we're going to just do I'm I've already loaded up up it actually pulled in all my save games from the my when I was playing it on Windows and I can actually load into those as well so that's pretty cool so these are the basic deal and um just third person and I can scroll out and in um you know what I have a steam controller as well so I'm going to play on that and I just turn that on and as you see I still have capabilities that's pretty sweet oh it's a little jerky though so I don't think it quite got all my settings but go ahead and go to the strip here huh I've got you now come on heam oh game over man game over well let's just go ahead and quit out here I just wanted to show a little sample gameplay there I am going to do a a speedrun live stream on New Vegas just because the speed runs are pretty fast so as far as the launcher is concerned let's go ahead I'm going to remove this custom setting so I can go ahead and show you guys the actual launcher so I'm going to go ahead and clear that out and we're going to launch directly into it just to see what we get because there are some settings I'd like to show you in this actual setting so uh the very first let go to options and then resolution I go ahead and you can set this to whatever you have I set it to my ultra wide that's why it looks the way it does I'd click Ultra and then I went ahead and turned off screen effects right here so when you you're looking at this make sure bloom or HDR is not selected none that's the big thing you can do detail level at any level you wanted I went ahead and did Ultra with everything maxed and it runed beautifully so or it ran beautifully so this is about it for Launcher settings and the only thing you can actually still launch in the game with these enabled but there's a lot of popping in and out and uh just mudding of just a whole bunch of bad stuff from what I read on the Forum so I did even try it I just put none on this and that's that's really it so I'm going to go ahead and exit this and I'm going to go ahead and put that back into the actual Launcher settings here so set launch options and we're going to put this into here and that's all I did for actually setting up the launcher um now if you do have a custom resolution like me just remember those inii file settings go into Fallout prefs and go ahead and set your X and Y AIS directly in that ini I if you have an ultra wide however it has the stard resolutions already baked into the launcher so 90 something per of you guys will probably just be able to select the drop down and hit okay and go but for the few that do that are like me and have a weird setup uh just know you'd fix that in the inii settings and if you're an ultra wide gamer uh you're probably already used to this so now you've got it working everything's good to go you can take these settings and apply them and just remember many of this works with Fallout 4 however you will have audio issues which I will go into in detail in that video uh as far as modding goes I touched on this a little bit as far as where the local files are uh when I say launch into a VM at the very beginning I I don't think I completely flush that out in this video and what that is is installing a local copy on a Windows VM uh launching into it and then installing that mod manager on it uh obviously with the VM you don't really want to game inside of VM um you're just doing that installing there and then having to cop it off horrible solution but it is a solution or a workaround for now until we get some more people in here working on installing a mod manager for a Linux based system so we can actually do this um I'm going to work more on this too because I really do love a lot of Bethesda games as far as Fallout series uh the Skyrim series they just uh or Elder Scrolls not Skyrim series but uh these these just are great uh systems and they are made so much better by mod so I'm going to see if I I do and and maybe look out later on for a separate video specifically over modding Bethesda games uh but this video should at very least get you into Fallout New Vegas and be able to play and uh do everything you want to do you know as far as getting it working on your Linux system I find it just a great experience and I've had a wonderful time so be looking for a live stream from me I'm going to be doing a speed run in New Vegas during that live stream so uh check it out and you should see a good hourong or more playr of New Vegas and I will be going through dialogue in there so you can actually follow the whole storyline if you don't want to pick up New Vegas and you kind of want to see the whole story I'm going to go ahead and play all that out because I have never experienced the entirety or the entire story start to finish so uh that should be a fun playthrough and I'm looking forward to that live stream but that's it for today guys and I'll see you in the next video\n"