Serious, unknown and potentially game-breaking bug

[gabrielrock19]

Hey! Some very, very odd things began to happen in my game, akin to save corruption. I'll briefly list them.

• Graphical interface began to fail. When speaking to an NPC, his name would not be displayed (only the action button). NPC dialogue would not be displayed.
• NPCs began to randomly teleport. Maybe the game had trouble updating their position? Maybe.
• Dialogue interface would cease to function.
• Sometimes gameplay looks normal and either none of the issues occur or only some of them do.
• Sometimes taking certain actions (loading cells, speaking to an NPC) would cause the game to freeze. The freeze could resolve itself after a while or lead to a CTD.
• Save file is over 16MB.

This reminds me of the old "abomb" bug in oblivion. If the play time clock exceeded a certain limit, the engine would start throwing errors in the game. This lead to weird, chaotic and unpredictable events.

This glitch happened to me once. After I played the game for a long while, getting far in the quests and far in the levels, the same events would begin to happen. The only solution I found at the time was to revert to an older save or restart my playthough.

Now I've managed to install every patch under the sun and reach maximum stability under a modded game, thanks to Viva New Vega's Guide "Mods to Avoid". I carefully read and applied the guide and even installed TTW. A modded Fallout New Vegas + TTW ran like clockwork - perfect stability. Until a few days ago. No new mods were added.

If this is due to save bloating or a weird "abomb-like" glitch, is there a way to solve it? The game runs on the same engine as Oblivion, so maybe it also shares the solution?

[JimboUK]

This will get your save size down, although I doubt that's the problem. 

New Vegas does tend to fall apart over time, people tend to blame NVAC but it did that long before NVAC came out,  I've had 600+ hour saves that worked fine and other sub 300 hour ones that have turned into a mess, although none of things you describe happened. 

Have you tried starting a new game just to see if the issues are still present? that at least would rule out your load order. 

If I remember rightly the abomb glitch in Oblivion was related to animations and don't think that's a thing in New Vegas.