Companions will just slow you down.

Completed the companion quests for Lily Bowen and Rose of Sharon Cassidy today, and some where along the way killed the loading time.

Lily Bowen use to be a 75 year old grandmother before he was turned into a crazy nightkin, and her quest was surprisingly easy. Compared to the previous two, where I had to run all over the map to trigger event flags before I could even start their mission, I just had to walk to her location and have 1 conversation with a NPC. Then the quest itself was rather simple, we fast traveled to a nearby cave, fought some wild animals off for a broken stealth-boy, passed a speech check, then passed a science check to finish it. There is also a unlisted side of her quest where you have to convince her to take her medication or not, but it occurring is totally random and I could not get it to happen before moving on to the next companion.

Rose's quest line was a sort of backwards, I had to do several other quests before even being able to recruit her, but then her quest came up automatically. She use to own a caravan but it was attacked and she wanted to check out where it happened, then after fast traveling to the site of several other wrecked caravans she realizes who killed them. Turns out that the large local caravan company was working with a local arms dealer to drive off the competition. Instead of going in guns blazing and killing everyone I used stealth to sneak in and find evidence to incriminate them both, and then handed it into the NCR to finish the quest line.

Somewhere while doing Lily's quest the time it takes to load an area jumped dramatically. I'm not sure what triggered it, maybe keeping track of more than 2 companions, but loads that once took several seconds now take almost a minuet, making getting anywhere much slower. Also the game has gotten much more unstable, with the frame rate drooping way down at points.

With this post Fallout: New Vegas has surpassed Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection as the longest time I have spent on one title, and there is still a week or so of game play left. It's odd how I had heard that New Vegas was smaller than Fallout 3, but I have already spent 2 weeks longer on it than Fallout 3 with all the DLC.