Greetings,

Obviously my idea of properly balanced will be different from a lot of people, it's my own view of what the game balance should be like. But when playing Fallout 3, although I love the game, I have to severly gimp myself in order for it to be any challange whatsoever. The problem, in my opinion is the game seems to be aimed at people who do the bare minimum of exploring and scavenging, and who don't really want anything to be difficult or challenging. There's so much loot, so many ways to heal yourself and you get so much XP for things so you level up really quick.

If I impose my own hardcoe mode while playing (for instance no picking locks or hacking terminals to limit loot and XP, and only using stims and doctors to heal) I get a much more challenging and rewarding experience. It feels like a game where survival is important. But after level 15 or so I've got so much money, and thousands of rounds of ammo it takes a whole lot of fun out of the game. I don't plan to play again for a long time to come so I want to explore every inch of the game, but I'm level 20 now and it's just pointless. I'm scouring every box, desk, filing cabinet and ammo case for loot I don't need. I don't need to eat so I don't need to find food and if I did I could just buy it. I'm in no danger of running out of ammo because it's so plentiful and even if I did I could just go buy some.

It's a challenging game from a combat perspective because of the difficulty settings (I can still get killed quite easily if I'm not careful) but from a survival perspective the challenge is non existant.

So, just so I know whether or not to gimp myself when I start my very first game, do you think NV on hardcoe will be different? And what do you base your opinion on? I ask that because the last game I was this excited about, Red Dead Redemption, I read on the forums that ammo was going to be very scarce, survival was to play a large part in the game and hunting would be vital. Of course that couldn't have been more wrong.

My other question, is hardcoe mode linked to combat difficulty? On one of the vids I watched, one of the devs said a guy in the office was playing on hardcoe mode and he died within a couple of minutes of starting the game. So if you put it on hardcoe must you accept a very hard combat difficulty? In my opinion it would be better to keep that seperate, so you could enjoy a hardcoe survival/realism experience but not constantly die in combat.

I'd be interested to hear your opinions. :tops:

The HC mode isn't linked to combat in other ways than stimpaks having a heal overtime effect, cripples needing a doctor or a doctorsbag and ammo having weight. Sleeping also doesn't (iirc) heal you. And HC mode is separate from the difficultysettings, the effects of which we don't fully know yet.

That's good to know. Cheers matey. :clap:

No problem, buddy.

Vaccum cleaners

Well balance has changed significantly because you get a perk every 2 levels instead of every single level.

Remember too that this game was designed for a broad audience. You might have the time and desire to scrounge every bit of loot but not everyone will.

FO3 at higher levels was ridiculous though IMO. The survival aspect goes away completely after about level 15 or so.

Lets just hope Obsidian is smarter with the perks too, Broken Steel perks were all [censored].

Not to sound rude, as this isn't necessarily directed at you specifically, but how is it so many know so little about what is perhaps the most publicized feature of this game? What I'm skimming over because I've read about upwards of thirty times, people are still making accounts to ask questions about. Nature of forums, I guess.

I'm curious about hardcoe Mode too. We know a good bit about it, but that info is scattered all over the place. Is there a FAQ somewhere?

That is true, from what I understand, there will also in general be less skill points, meaning that it will be harder to get all your skills to a high level. So the game balance will certainly be different from Fallout 3. Will it be better? That's really impossible to say until we've actually played the game, because game balance is something you need to experience to really appreciate. Sure, Obsidian can tell us they've made an effort to improve game balance, but without playing the game, how can we know if it worked or not? This is, of course, true for both hardcoe mode and normal mode. Admitably, if you choose to play the game with hardcoe mode, the survival aspect will become more challenging by default since you'll need food and water and sleep, stim packs heal over time, and such. But how challenging will it really be? That waits to be seen. Ammution will have weight, but we don't know how much it will weigh, and limiting the amount of ammunition you can carry is pretty common in games, whether it's an arbitrary limit on how much ammunition of a specific type you can carry (This seems to be the most common way to handle it in shooters.) or just having ammunition have weight or take up space in the inventory, depending on what system the game uses to limit how much you can carry. Yet in many of these games, I still don't find myself having much trouble with running out of ammunition. Often, I think it's because you can loot it from enemies and containers, sure, you might not be able to carry thousands of bullets on you at one time, but that's not going to make much difference when you can readily replenish your supply whenever you need to. So really, I think ammunition weight or not, you're still not going to have any problems in that area of its not harder to get it in the game. The same goes for food and water, in many games where such things are required, it's plentiful enough that you don't really have much of a problem with running short of it. Take S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for example. Eating was a requirement, but food was plentiful enough that it never really seemed to be much of a problem, in fact, it tended to get to the point where I'd have too much food and would need to store all the extra food because it was weighing me down, that was actually a good thing to me as I don't like needing to eat in games, since I never had trouble finding food though it never became anything more than a mildly annoying chore to eat on occassion, thus it never kept me from enjoying the game. But after saying all that, what i really meant to say is that while we have a good idea of what hardcoe mode does, we can't know how effective it will be at turning New Vegas into a challenging survival experience.

I think the person who died within a couple of minutes of starting the game was testing out hunger mechanic or something like that. In normal gameplay, even if you miss a few meals, you probably won't die quickly, you'll likely suffer some penalties and will only actually die from hunger if you go really long without food.

I know what you mean. I'm at level 36 on borderlands and still get low on health fighting enemies and i like that. I have to think before I go into a group of raiders.

:goodjob:

Agreed.

No worries, people from Obsidian have invented this whole Fallout perk stuff

Point lookout was hard unless you were going in there with a level 30 character who was armed to the teeth.
There wasnt much loot either. That was the final DLC ,so they sensed that the rest of the game was abit too comfortable.

Obsidian is making the game, so, yes, it will be balanced.

Wasteland survival was not "Fallout 3's" strong suit. If you played patiently, and looted and repaired everything you could, you were filthy rich by level 12 or so. And the fact that you could max out nearly every skill made combat very unfulfilling. "Fallout: New Vegas" brings back the awesomeness of taking chems or reading books for a temporary stat boost in order to qualify for perks, or to bypass challenges like locks or speech checks.

You make a really good point. You may need food, water and ammo to survive, but if it's really abundant it isn't going to add anything to gameplay or a challenge, it will just be a nuisance. And everyone is different so whatever they did the couldn't make everyone happy, unless they added a control in the Options that you could set resources to be scarce, moderate or plentiful.

Thanks for everyone's response.

You actually could max out every skill in Fallout 3, and pretty easily, too - you could do it by level 10 or something. I wound up running into this problem in one of my playthroughs - I call it a problem because if you maxed out all your skills your game was effectively killed because you were too good; once you got to the level-up screen, you were stuck there and could not continue the game if you had all your skills maxed out.