How To Track Playtime With Tale of Two Wastelands

Tale of Two Wastelands lets you experience both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas together. But it only tracks playtime for New Vegas! This is terrible! Well, what if I told you there's a very simple fix?

Introduction

Tale of Two Wastelands is a wonderful thing isn't it? It lets you experience both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas together. But this comes with a catch. Steam will only show you playing New Vegas, so that little playtime counter for Fallout 3 will always be stuck at 0. While this isn't a big deal to most, some weirdos like me will feel disingenuous and dismayed by this outcome. Steam numbers will be skewed as everyone playing Fallout 3 will mostly be using TTW, but we only see people playing New Vegas!

Well what if I told you there was a better way? What if I told you I have found a way to make steam track both games at once?! The truth can finally be revealed! Show the world you are actually playing both games!

Now let's get down to business. Here's what you'll need:

• Fallout 3 will need to be installed (however you can probably get away with deleting the files in your steam directory after we do this fix)
  
• Tale of Two Wastelands (obviously)
  
• Mod Organizer 2 (preferably)
  
• Steam Detour (not necessary, but still works)

Steam Detour is no longer necessary for this to work, but I'm leaving this section in because it does still work as intended.
Now, what is Steam Detour? Well it's the bread and butter of this little fix. It's a simple little tool made for the original Fallout to allow you to load up Et Tu. But that's not important for us right now. The important thing is it works for pretty much anything. Go ahead and grab it here:
https://www.nma-fallout.com/threads/steamdetour-run-fallout-mods-from-steam.220425/


Hopefully you already know how to install Tale of Two Wastelands. This isn't a guide for that. The important thing is you will need to make a shortcut for it. This can be on your desktop or wherever, it doesn't matter.

For MO2 creating a shortcut is super easy:

Where The Magic Happens

Alrighty now you have everything you need. I promise you this part is going to be stupidly easy.

So hop on over to your steam library. Right click Fallout 3 and click on Properties...

You'll then be presented with this.

Now, this box right here is the most important part. Go ahead and add something like this:

If you're using Steam Detour:
"C:\Users\moonv\Downloads\SteamDetour\SteamDetour.exe" "C:\Users\moonv\OneDrive\Desktop\Tale of Two Wastelands.lnk" %command%

Without Steam Detour:
"C:\Users\moonv\OneDrive\Desktop\Tale of Two Wastelands.lnk" %command%

Now let me be clear, this specific string is for my computer. Don't use the exact one obviously, it won't do anything for you. The first part between the "" is where you have Steam Detour. It can be anywhere on your computer. The second part is your shortcut for TTW that you made earlier. Make sure you have the exact location and the exact name of your shortcut. .lnk is the file extension for shortcuts.

Closing Thoughts

And that's it! Simple as that. Now whenever you launch Fallout 3 it will launch TTW and Steam will show you running both games!


(ignore the fact I need to update my mods ;-;)


I hope this helps! Stay safe out there!

[iv^josh]

Oh that worked! And pretty sure the other way would have worked as well lol. I was using the shortcut on my desktop instead of launching fallout 3 through steam to get to TTW. Whoops and thank you!

[Mooncubus]

I've actually found out that Steam Detour is a completely unnecessary step. So you can try just having:
"C:\Users\joshu\OneDrive\Desktop\Tale of Two Wastelands.lnk" %command%

I'll update the guide when I get home.

What exactly is happening when you hit Play?

[iv^josh]

Hmm can't get it working. This is my steam launch option:

"C:\Users\joshu\Downloads\SteamDetour\SteamDetour.exe" "C:\Users\joshu\OneDrive\Desktop\Tale of Two Wastelands.lnk" %command%

Not sure what I am doing wrong here :(

[Silver Knight]

oh well, not the end of the world, thx for this guide tho

[Mooncubus]

@Silver Knight
The only way I can think of doing that would be to use a non-steam version of FNV for TTW.

[Silver Knight]

would it be possible to configure it in a way that it ONLY tracks Fallout3? i wanna play just that trough TTW and id like to get an accurate playtime for that and not inflate my NV playtime