It would be perfect if difficulty setting affected enemy weapons. Super Mutants should have laser weapons and miniguns instead of hunting rifles anyway.

The way I see it, difficulty shouldn't affect the world as much as it should affect the playercharacter.

I've always thought it looked stupid with them using the hunting rifles in Fallout 3. Their fingers doesn't even fit in the trigger guard!

They should have been using the .32 pistol. :wink_smile:

i don't think so, all the difficulty does in FO3 is make the enemies bullet sponges, its not really more fun, i would much rather a raider or super mutant etc. have a lot more firepower at higher difficulty setting than making them a bigger bullet sponge, it took tons of rounds to kill an albino scorpion or reaver on normal in FO3.

Didn't like the bullet sponge thing either.
But what I meant was this:



Funny thing is that with the metal blaster I didn't have much of a problem with any bullet sponge at all, even without using VATS.
Metal Blaster is OP as hell.

Idc about the difficulty

I would love if the difficulty meant you could die quickly, but so can your enemies. If I can only withstand so many shots, making my enemies equal is alot more fun. Difficulty is boring if your enemies become bullet sponges while you become frail. If it's supposed to be hard, it should make sense.

yeah the metal blaster is pretty awesome, i suppose a person could leave their endurance low in FO3 but with 30 levels its kinda hard to not have an overpowerfull character, i'm pretty sure new veags is gonna be a lot tougher as we level up compared to fallout 3, but i agree we need to have more difficulty options.

this

Actually I think we should be able to pick a bunch of optional weaknesses every 10 levels.
You don't have to pick them but you can if you want to nerf your character.
That way if we feel like not playing on a higher difficulty but want to have less health we could pick that weakness at lvl 1, 10, 20 or 30.
Would work out pretty fine IMO, with that feature you can't over power your character, only nerf it. If you want to.

And if we want a playthrough where we are awful we could pick all the weaknesses and put it on Very Hard hardcoe Mode.
Actually, that could be an achievement right there.

In a way I agree, I am not looking for a "challenge" exactly, but more of a non care-free and immersive gameplay experience. hardcoe gives that to me for the most part, and so does FWE for Fallout 3. But there are things like VATS and backpedaling that should definitely be tweaked either as options or as a set setting in NV.

Be neat (I think) if the game treated every collision while back pedaling, as a potential knock down.

If not that, they should definitely slow it down.

Or... Allow walking backwards, and allow jogging backwards ~but use different percentages for the knockdown (making the walk safer to try).

Ideally (IMO) higher difficulty levels should make the AI "smarter." So, on easy the enemies just kinda run around and shoot you, and at higher difficulty levels they start using cover, flanking, flushing you out of cover with AoE attacks, etc. This is probably too much to ask, though. How about (as someone mentioned before) higher difficulties throwing more enemies at you at a time, and perhaps enemies' character levels are tweaked as well? Personally, I think simply adjusting damage ratios (the way it was done in Fallout 3) feels really artificial and sort of un-fun. :shrug:

exactly nerd, well all the enemies should have decent tactics but i know what you're saying, the AI could always be better, i do want the enemies to have more firepower as we level up, FO3 had too many raiders with chinese pistols and lead pipes, i understand the thinking, but as we level up, the nemies need to have firepower more in line with what we have, some enemies did, like the enclave or the overlords, but the rest of the supermutans were pretty underpowered most of the time, they had machine guns, but i wish they would of had more energy weapons like the overlords had.

I agree to a point, but you have to be careful that difficulty-scaling enemy equipment doesn't start to feel like loot table scaling (one of my most hated "features" of Oblivion). Not only that, but if the player can loot the equipment from enemies the additional difficulty of the better-equipped enemy is at least partially offset by the fact that you get better loot drops from combat.

I'll admit that difficulty is a difficult (*snort*) thing to design and balance, but I also think there are better ways to do it than a fairly linear damage ratio mechanic.

i agree the balance is important, but one way around it i think is to just make the enemies a lot harder as far as their firepower earlier on, i want enemies to be using weapons i'm using in the game, i don't want most raiders running at me with a chinese pistol or lead pipe. :celebration: i agree in oblvion it was messed up because as you leveled your spells and magic weren't usefull, you always needed to buy better and better spells, it seemed like you never got stronger, but i do think the way around it is to just give the enemies more firepower from the get go, and as you level up they will be easier to kill as you get more power but not too easy, its hard to balance i agree, its not easy to balance this because the newbie type player is gonna get tweaked out early in the game really bad, and even an advanced played will find it hard in the beggining, i do think new vegas is gonna be a lot tougher than FO3 was, usually around level 15 in FO3 your character was pretty strong, and the game just got too easy after that.

Heh! Yeah, that was essentially my point when I made the thread. I know I'm just complaining because I don't offer alternatives.

I've always enjoyed mastering a game on it's hardest mode, when the implementation is subtle, you'll have these moments where you figure out a new technique that works, and it's like you cracked the code. That's the rush for me! Demon's Souls was great for that.

But some games just feel cheaper on the hardest setting, there's no secrets to learn, and it forces you to use cheap exploits to get by.
Much as I loved FO3, that's what Very Hard mode felt like to me.

I end up using cheesy tricks instead of tactics, and like somebody said, its [expletive]ing stupid when I unload a whole clip in to someone's face at point blank rage and they keep charging. I can see daylight through the hole I just blew in their head! Come on! :lmao:

What kills bullet-sponges? Mildew? Leave them in the sink with last weeks dishes?

But I don't mind the occasional boss-enemy that just won't die. Those are always fun! :gun:

Anyway, maybe I'll shut up and play hardcoe mode on Hard. What say?

Thanks boss! Game was notorious for the warm-beer-phenomenon. Heard of this? You sit down, open a beer and start to play, and 2 hours later, you notice your untouched warm-beer. If you stopped to drink, you died. You don't even WANT to know about my dreams. :whistling:




Like minds! I always enjoyed those desperate survival moments. When you crawled out of a place, half-dead, out of ammo, covered in the entrails of your enemies. Conan! What is best in Life?!



Yeah, agree with the first part. Second part doesn't seem very likely ...

My way to make the game harder would be to have the enemy strength not determined by your level. Going into an enemy base at low level would be suicidal. Not knowing what area is safe-ish to enter would and tension when exploring.

I think they should keep the increased xp for harder difficulty settings because it causes faster leveling which weakens the player character by causing less loot for the same level. Another way to achieve this same goal would be having enemies drop loot in worse condition when the difficulty is raised.

I didn't enjoy the bullet sponges introduced in Broken Steel. It felt like an arms race. They weren't really trickier so much as forcing me to use heavy weapons or spam stimpacks. The only way to stop an overlord with a tri-beam laser was with high dps, lots of healing, or destroying its weapon quickly. There should have been some vulnerability left for finesse fighters and the "tough" enemies should have had better behavior. The overlords fought exactly like regular super mutants.

Yeah, that seems to be the consensus.

I'm trying to think if we're picking on FO3 unfairly. A lot of games use similar mechanics to increase difficulty.
Maybe I should be more grateful for those rare games where difficulty affects AI :blink:

I understand this,they should have better weapons,but for me enemy AI is number one in my view.
Like i said they should have better weapons,but a good player or sneak/sniper character could pick them of regardless or shoot their arms,so there is a weakness to that idea...but it also has benifits,but overall better AI is the best option. I'm sure people have alot more ideas too. I also ( like i said in an earlier post ) like the idea of more enemies,the harder the difficulty....but this could cause game lag in certain areas.

I've always thought that hardcoe mode should give you and your enemies less Hp.. so while it's easier to kill them .. it would also be much easier to kill you.. making things a little more realistic and difficult.