A good place to begin understanding Fallout: New Vegas is to quite simply delve into the game's statistical background. Like many RPGs, just about everything that happens in Fallout: New Vegas is determined by numerical statistics, behind-the-scenes dice rolling, and how various numbers match up with one another in order to give advantages or disadvantages to just about every person, action and scenario in the entire game.

Near the beginning of the game, you'll be introduced to the outlying, basic statistical system in New Vegas, which is called S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Obviously, S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is an acronym, and it stands for Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. While there are a more complicated and more expansive set of statistics that live within S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (which we will discuss shortly), S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is, for now, what we will concentrate exclusively on. The brief explanations below are ripped from the game itself, allowing you to understand better just what each statistic directly affects. We'll then discuss the skills in more depth, and talk about why or why not a skill may or may not be important for you.

At the heart of your Fallout: New Vegas experience will be open-ended exploration. The fully-realized, extremely expansive Mojave Wasteland is quite literally yours to explore as you'd like, so long as you can survive long enough to do so. As we mentioned earlier, there are main tasks to complete to inch closer to the end of the game, but the real meat of the game rests with everything else. For when we say that Fallout: New Vegas is a game about doing what you want, treating people however you'd like, and making both easy and complicated choices with lasting implications, well... we meant it.

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In Fallout: New Vegas, there are fundamentally two different types of quests. On the one hand, there's main missions that will expand upon the main story, bringing you through the game's string of primary narratives towards it ultimate conclusion. However, on the other hand, you'll run into what really amounts to 95%+ of Fallout: New Vegas' content, and that's side quests. More accurately, however, while there are scores and scores of proper side quests that the game will chronicle for you, there's also a whole lot of other ancillary activity...

Welcome one, welcome all, to the gigantic Basics section to our Fallout: New Vegas strategy guide. Here, you'll learn... well... all of the basics, fundamentals, and things you absolutely must know in order to survive your time in the Mojave Wasteland. Novices and other players new to the Fallout universe will generally want to read this lengthy Basics section from front to back, starting here and working your way sequentially through each Basics section. Intermediates and experts, however, can feel free to jump around at will, as there's no doubt plenty of information here that they already know, sprinkled with plenty of information they don't yet know.

If you're new to Fallout games, Fallout: New Vegas is the second Fallout game of its kind. A direct follow-up to 2008's smash-hit Fallout 3, New Vegas was developed by a different studio, but is essentially Fallout 3's spiritual successor (it's important to note that this isn't Fallout 4, which is upcoming in the next couple of years).