Hey there.

I was wondering, now with all you US guys getting the game and putting a few hours into it, how is the levelling pace?

I found F3 to be incredibly fast in terms of levelling your character. And you were easilly max level and beyond before you got close to the "ending".
How is it in Fallout: New Vegas?


I'm personally gonna start out on hardcoe mode @ hardest settings, simply because i hope that will cut down on the levelling pace. I just find that an RPG loses abit of it's drive if your character reaches his max potential too fast,

I think it was spedifically said that you need to work for getting to level 30. But yes, Fallout 3's level cap was reached way too quickly, and then came Broken Steel... :facepalm:

Playing on hard with hardcoe on and yes I feel that I'm leveling too fast. I'm thinking about not playing till an XP mod comes out that cuts way down on the xp you get (like I've done for every bethesda game since Oblivion). Also I don't think difficulty limits XP (I wish it did).

I used slower leveling mods for my main playthrough of FO3 and ended up hitting lvl 30 at about 80 hours as a result. It felt much better than shooting up through the ranks like i would have otherwise.

i understand the pace has been brought down in New Vegas and i hope this is the case. Otherwise yes, an xp reducer will be required.

It's fast, and frankly I'm starting to get worried. I'm playing on default difficulty, in normal mode, and after 5 hours of exploring I'm already level 8. I suppose it's lucky that the level cap is 30 this time...

Nice to see i'm not the only one enjoying a relatively slow levelling process.

I'm really sad to hear the levelling pace is still too fast. Is there anything specifically that gives you way too much XP? Like F3 hacking and lockpicking gave you and absurd amount, so I just didn't do that (since there was also an absurd mount of loot it didn't bother me in that regard). Should I adopt the same policy do you think?

In Fallout 3 the higher the difficulty the faster you gain experience, is it still the same in New Vegas?

Nope, it's the same each difficulty. I was playing on easy for awhile and decided to test it, when I killed a ghoul on easy I got ten exp, changed it to normal and it was the same.

Leveling felt too fast at first but I think where I am now (level 7) it's slowing down a bit. Plus I'm avoiding some encounters if I can help it, wasteland's more dangerous this time around.

Thanks. That's good to know.

Glad to hear it. The wasteland needed a lethality boost.

The lethality boost is no joke either. There i was minding my own business killing convicts gangsters and bighorns when I round the bend of a rock and came upon a pair of master supermutants. Thinking to myself that all big and bad with maxed gun skill I whip out my trusty cowboy rifle and *blame*. Unfortunately I then learned two things 1) that supermutants take alot more to kill in NV than in FO3, & 2) that incinerators are both incredibly powerful and obscenely long ranged. My charred and beaten corpse is now added part of the mojave landscape.


Also friendly fire is hilarious. Seeing one supermutant set another on fire while trying to shoot me = priceless

Well I don't think it will slow down the pace at all. Well the only reason it will be slower is because it will take twice as long to kill an enemy now that is all. You still end up killing the same things, so you still get the same experiance, so I can't see increasing the difficulty will slow down the level up, unless you do alot of running away and not end up killing the enemies then. I do not think XP scales with difficulty but I can be wrong there.

I don't increase the difficulty most times, because I do not find it fun trying to shoot bullet sponges at all.

Similar thing happened to me in Fallout 3 yesterday. I exited RobCo factory, and straight around the corner charges a Deathclaw Matriarch :blink: Took a few reloads and mini-nukes before i survived that ambush :cold: Good to hear NV offers such thrills without excessive modding :nod:

lol its fun but makes you want to explore more , im level 6 and i can safely say that if ur playing hc a pack of night stalkers=death all the time, and right after i figure out i cant get past that encounter i walk say 100 yards away BOOM 5 deathclaws + deathclaw mother :sadvaultboy: am having alot of fun though

the one thing im kinda bummed about is the lockpicking/hacking right now i can hardly pick some stuff i dont like passing up locked rooms feels like im missing uniques or something else really useful... should give option to break lock with tnt..

Well no. Experience won't go down.
But instead of walking over every encounter without a scratch, you have to take care, use cover and perhaps even utilize VATS.
All takes time.