I used to play Fallout New Vegas so much back in the day but it's kinda weird that despite being made in 18 months a whopping 14 years ago, there still hasn't been an open world first-person RPG that tops the freedom and quest content of this game. That being said, every several years whenever I get the urge to go through a fresh playthrough, I feel that the graphics and some aspects of game design feel a bit dated by modern standards. To remedy this I've installed a list of mods that enhance the gameplay without detracting from the original vision too much. All the mods I used are from Nexus Mods and I used Vortex, an open-source mod manager to install them.

Textures

• Ojo Bueno Texture Pack: Targets a ton of items like cars, vending machines, securitrons etc.
• Weapon Retexture Project: Self explanatory, higher detail for the weapons that sit in your screen the entire game.
• NMCs texture large: For roads, trees, landscapes, interiors etc.
• Landscape Texture Improvements: Fixes seams in landscape textures.
• High resolution screens: For clearer Pip boys and terminals screens.

Lighting and Shaders

• Interior Lighting Overhaul: Gives a more eerie look overall as well as various lighting fixes like lights that protrude walls and lights in areas that should be dark like caves.
• Realistic wasteland lighting: A weather overhaul that fixes the infamous desaturated yellow filter that plagues the entire game. You can actually see nice saturated colors under a blue sky outside.
• Desert natural weathers: Adds a load of variation in outdoor weather like rain, thunderstorms, snow and sunsets, making the outdoor travel more interesting.
• Reshade: Reshade is a post-processing injector for games in general, it's a fancy piece of software that customizes effects like anti-aliasing, color correction and depth of field. There are convenient presets that people have uploaded as mods and I've chosen one that increases the saturation to the amount you see in the screen shots.

Gameplay QOL

• lStewieAl's Tweaks and Engine Fixes: A long list of QOL tweaks that include things like keeping the bobby pin angle when it breaks, preventing radiation when wearing power armor and much, much more. A lot of them are opinionated so you get to pick and choose which to turn on.
• The Living Desert: As the official pages states, "adds hundreds of NPCs throughout the Mojave in order to better simulate the world as described by the lore, making it feel alive and dynamic".
• Sprint Mod: This mods is mandatory to me now, traveling the wasteland is way less stressful and it's also vanilla friendly since sprinting uses action points.
• More Perks: Perks are like the entire point of levelling your character; Now you can grow a tree on your head that drops apples.
• Functional Post Game Ending: Not only does this allow you to continue playing after beating the game but it adds lore-conscious consequences from various factions depending on the choices you've previously made.
• Simple open Freeside/Strip: The casino regions are sectioned into several areas probably due to technical reasons, these mods connect them into one.
• Casino Crowds: Casinos are really bare in the base game in contrast to their in-game reputation, especially the Strip. This mod cranks the population up in a natural way.
• Wasteland Flora and Terrain Overhaul: Gives more variation to the outdoor scenery with custom vegetation.
• Uncut Wasteland: A lot of objects and sceneries were cut in the base game to account for console performance, this restores them.
• B42 Inertia: A small modification that makes it so weapons sway when turning instead of being a static prop in the middle of your screen.
• Smooth True Ironsights: Smooths the transition when aiming down sights in first person.
• Faster Start Menu
• Immersive Recoil

Fixes

• Yukichigai Unofficial Patch: Everyone knows that Bethesda RPG's are riddled with bugs, this mod is a huge compilation of fixes that aims to patch them.
• Weapon Mesh Improvement Mod

Scripts

A variety of scripts and dependencies for other mods in this list,

• New Vegas Script Extender
• Johnny Guitar NVSE
• JIP LN NVSE plugin
• NV Compatibility Skeleton
• UIO User Interface Organizer