Actually, my Courier IS a former highly skilled secret agent from an NCR-like nation out east.
At least on my current playthrough.


Just sayin'

nerevarine ---------------------------------------> lone wanderer------------------------> courier----------->my daggerfall character frank wikkersly.

A game with good difficulty was Far Cry 2. Its easiest difficulty was as easy as very hard New Vegas but it's very hard was pretty [censored] hard. Example: the char dies from one heavy machinegun shot. It wasn't constant save'n'reload but the char simply couldn't assault enemies guns blazing. When there was a big gunfight between two enemy groups it totally did not feel like "hey ill just stick around and kill everyone" but "oh[censored] I gotta get out NOW". The difficulty was optional, so no one had reason to complain about game being too hard or easy.

What comes to new vegas difficulty I'd rather have it so that the courier takes part in decisive incidents and just has to survive through them, not kill everything alone and always make the initiative before something happens. So that he fights alongside with ncr or legion in big battles and his little actions eventually turn the tide. The player has too much control and this makes the rest of the world seem weak and pitiful.
In some cases the game reduce's players control in good way. For example when you try to reach the Boomers there's no option to kill the artillery gunner or try to resist the artillery fire, you just have to make a race to the fence. In that situation game forces the player to go along its rules, the player is not in charge and this makes the him feel humble and not so omnipotent. There's not many situations like that in the game. Another one would be if you come across with BoS for first time while at low level. It's a situation where the npcs totally show that they are not to be messed around.
All I'm asking from the npcs is some show of force.



Because the courier isn't a superhero but a man. In games where the player takes out armies alone his capabilities of the char's badassery are thrown at player's face right away so there's no question what the game is all about. In addition in such games the character is actually given tasks like "Go save the world" while courier has the same capabilities but he gets some errant quests and is threated as some ordinary dude by most npcs.

With exception of some NPCs, most of them have very low health in comparison to player. Depending on some stats, player starts with health 200-300. Most of the NPCs you encounter in game have 20-100. This means you can for example sneak kill most of the bandits with one shot from Varmint rifle.

Game is not very realistic in this aspect, there is no way you can be 3x more durable than any other healthy advlt person in real life. But then, player serves role of super hero who can decide fate of whole wasteland.

It's not matter of hit points but npc dumbness and lack of sight. They have awful long range sight and basically always choose the direct route to the pc, resulting in running straight in front of my gunbarrel.
But even then those 2 reasons wouldn't stop npcs simply overpowering the courier when - for example - trying to mess with camp mccarran. The game could just spawn hundreds of npcs out of nowhere to represent ncr's army size. And if that don't work they could just send a vertibird to drop some mini-nukes, or have a sniper team headshot the player when he tries to exit the camp.
It doesn't matter that the death would be unavoidable, I've played a rpg game where the player received a note "You were overwhelmed and killed by the city guard" when he did something stupid. The developer didn't bother giving the pc even a chance to fool around or to try to create his own totally irrational plotline.



Are you sure he's supposed to be some inhuman super hero? I've thought the reason why the courier is able to change the course of history is that he is independent and very skilled invidual, whose abilities are decisively useful for the big factions.

Fallout: New Vegas isn't FarCry.

Have you played any of the previous titles? You're a super-human in all of them, killing hundreds if not thousands of mutated, radiated creatures and people. It's a video game, not a real life simulator.

It was just an example of succesful difficulty settings for combat. The combat in both games isn't much differend even though NV is a roleplaying game and Far Cry 2 is a shooter.



All of them. In FO1 and FO2 the character was sent alone to accomplish a very hard quest alone so there was no question whether or not he should become a warmachine. Fallout tactics had pretty much the most rational goal because there was a team of soldiers that received better gear and combat experience along with the progress of the game. Hardships endured by fotactics chars were the most credible because they dealt with them as a team.



And video games often have difficulty settings to add up challenge. New vegas doesn't provide much challenge even with the hardest vanilla difficulty.

Yes, petty sure. No matter what player does, it gone have consequences of epic proportions Even if he does anything at all

Maybe is easy for you, but for some of us, raising the dificulty is beyond the impossible to complete the game

If that's the case, there's not much to talk about. Except how do the npcs dare to place conditions when the courier demands something from them ("Okay but first you have to do something for me")? Don't they realize that the courier capable and very likely willing to shoot that npc and everyone around him only for amusemant?

Good example would be the Bright Followers. I see only 2 options in their case: 1. They get out of the facility right now. 2. They all die. No stupid rocket trips or errant quests for fuel.



That's why the harder difficulty levels are optional.

If it's really that much of a problem to you... Don't massacre large quantities of enemies at camps? I don't really know what to tell you. It seems the other alternative to this is not letting players have the option to start slaughtering large settlements at their will, which, in an RPG that stresses character progression, should not be taken way.

Personally, I don't think it would be unreasonable to create an RPG – even a Fallout game! – that makes it essentially impossible to wander into a town and slay everyone single-handedly. I'd actually love to play that RPG. I would be impressed to see how game designers would balance character progression with a sense of reasonable realism. In fact, as frustrating as I found the guards in one particular place in FNV (spoilers withheld), I did like that there was at least one room in New Vegas where you basically had to be invisible and/or run away quickly if you expected to get out alive after initiating combat.

For now, though, you can build a character that makes it much harder – perhaps even prohibitively difficult – to simply wander into a camp and kill everybody without getting a scratch. For instance, don't raise any weapon skill past 50, and/or don't take Agility very high to reduce the temptation to use VATS as a "freeze time and kill everybody" button. If you don't mind restraint for the sake of roleplaying, don't allow yourself to use a Pip-Boy during combat, and don't have more than one two-handed weapon hotkeyed at a time. And so on. I imagine there are mods for this kind of thing...

If its this tha big of a deal to you, Go download a mod, It will solve your godmode.

Huh? Yeah. They don't need to design a game that's more like a book. If you want to feel like a weakling and walk around reading text there are some adventure titles out there like that for example uhhh Siberia, Dreamfall the Longest Journey, Monkey Island etc. They (game devs) usually don't implement much combat if you don't partake in it often in the game, and the game becomes a point 'n click adventure. There's not much point in making a game like Fallout but then making you just as weak as everyone else. If there were, there would be a very popular mod for it at the very least. The idea might sound fun now, but in practice I imagine it's quite boring. It'd be like talking to characters in town would be the main gameplay element. That wouldn't be very fun imo.

If you're going to have combat, it's always more entertaining in large doses. Why go through all the trouble to design cool weapons if you're never going to use them/only going to be fighting once an hour or two?


Realism be damned, sometimes fun is just better.

I agree with you to a point, but I think it can be taken too far. Fallout 3 took it too far, I think. NV strikes a good balance between realism and godly power, I think.

That said, I think a Fallout game with a relatively even playing field would appeal to FPS players, and I would find it interesting, but I do think that it would lose some of its charm in the process. There was a mod for FO3 that did this, and I assume that there is one for NV as well, so PC players have the choice.

The real problem in my view is that enemy ai doesn't use surprise and positioning on the courier.

The cornerstone to modern tactics is the concept of surprise - if you get the drop on an enemy group, and are armed with modern weapons, you will destroy them. You see the same thing in FNV; if you can remain stealthed and silent (e.g. suppressed sniper fire) you can take out entire armies of mobs.

However, try going up against say a stealthed nightkin master (e.g. the IWS mod does this to you a lot in v1) who opens up with a minigun on you from stealth. Now imagine its him and 2 buddies who are flanking you. You'll die quick in such a scenario, even at level 30 with power armor on.

Or suppose it was a death claw that had snuck up on you, and the first you knew about it was when you were reeling from the initial blow, almost all your health gone.

This is how many creatures should be in the wasteland: stealthed to you, unless your perception is high enough to spot them. As for enemies in towns / camps etc, there should be some stealthed around you to represent the fact that you aren't (or shouldn't) be fully aware of enemy placement at all times. Of course, as soon as they open fire they should drop out of stealth (unless they're using silenced weapons lol) but i'm fairly certain that a few stealthed mobs would spoil most couriers' days, unless you'd built an optimal combat machine to handle such things. Even then, it wouldn't be as one-sided as things currently are with the game.

I see that a lot of the people complaining about how easy the game is were not around when a bunch of bank robbers in combat armor and assault rifles shot up LA and were only taken down when they ran out of ammo or their guns jammed...... YOU CAN BE A GOD IN A TOWN IN REAL LIFE! Unless they call the national guard to bring in heavy firepower or they have a well equipped SWAT team anyone can buy body armor for what 100 grand? and a cheap ak 47 and go to town on a...... well, town!

Just saying that, quite often, people do not have a realistic view of real life.

Oh ya, games like STALKER where you can be 1 shot killed at any point tend to become "easy" when you get used to the combat system.... first time through I died a bigillion times and second time I rarely died, even in large scale shootouts. You have to take that into consideration as well.... if a player is very skilled at 1st person shooters or experienced with the game it will be 1000x easier.

The main problem is that the enemy AI, does very little other than standing out in the open shooting at you or running at you.
Having them find some cover when they aren't shooting, using certain troops as distraction and trying to flank you would be a huge improvement over the current and doesn't require enemies with stealth.

EDIT: STALKER is quite a different game. It uses a different gameplay style.

It is kind of ridiculous. I couldn't see my local postman saving the world; he cant even deliver a package correctly. He threw a package of mine at least 8foot over my gate! lucky for him it was some clothes not a computer game or plate.

You must have hated FO3

STALKER has a lot better AI, projectile physics, and is very similar to FO in feel..... I would love if FO had STALKER style combat. It makes me sad that it is easier to miss a target in a 1st person shooter like stalker than FO games with low skill.

Oh ouch. He was 33 years old!




Isn't that the best? I'm playing on normal, with 3 Endurance, small frame and kamikazzee. I'm ignoring all "toughness" type of perks and putting no points into Medicine. (Of course hardcoe mode)

I love playing this on normal because neither the baddies or I are bullet sponges. It's like playing "realism mode". Uh....er....relatively speaking.

I'm just using a mod that lowers base health, increases the effect of Endurance and levels the playing field for NPC's.

I think the removal of VATS would make this game much harder for me, not that i shoot people with VATS often, but because I can very easily use it to spot enemies even if they are hiding


I also use VATS to auto aim, as when you exit VATS your gun is pointed directly at the target