To be honest, I abuse power armor in the older Fallouts, and in Fallout 3, I LOVE combat armor, I dont know why, but it really makes my character look like a Wastelander whos tough but gentle, not to mention the armor looks pretty amazing

I too felt the game was too easy. I am excited for hardcoe mode. I'm hoping the AI is harder in addition to the other things that will make it challenging. To make the game more challenging, on my 6th character, I only wore the sixy sleepwear (was a chic) and only saved with the autosave feature. I would not fast travel unless I was in a major hub such as megaton or rivet city. I would not sleep anywhere except a major hub as well. So if I died while trying to get somewhere new, I had to do the whole thing over again (unless I'd gone in some place and it autosaved). Def made it much more challenging!

Different people having different opinions about the level of challenge a game provides doesn't seem like "crappy game design". Yes, an improved difficulty system (where "Hard" and "Very Hard" actually meant something) would have been better game design.


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This whole "selfgimping" debate again. All I'll say is that many people throughout time, in many games (regardless of their difficulty; but tending towards good games because bad games... no one cares about), have "self-gimped" themselves for additional challenge. Between "speed runs" of platform games, to "chainsaw only" games of Doom, to "naked" Diablo - there will always be players that are so skilled/hardcoe/masochistic that they'll find the provided difficulty inadequate and feel the need to somehow add more.

Just a fact of life.

(And then there's the people who go out of their way to overpower themselves... getting the good armor or turboplasma - I forget which - right away in FO1, or running immediately to Rivit City and getting the unique plasma gun.... and then come on the forums to complain about how easy the game is. Game designers really can't win against the wide range of odd behavior you'll find in any large enough group of gamers.)

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Re: economic issues. Nearly every single-player game, especially "free roam" ones that provide lots of extra combats/loot/etc (versus on-rails games that never let you do anything off the plot), you'll hit a point where you're getting more loot than you need. It happens. To not do that, the game would either need a complex economic sim (too much dev time for too little payoff) or would need the computer to be a cheating bastard (all prices rise as you get more cash, for example. "Oh, you've got 10000 caps? That box of Sugar Bombs'll cost you 1000 caps, rich guy").

Personally, I'm fine with eventually getting stronger and richer than the enemies and NPCs around me - that's called "success".
(And is one of the things people didn't like about the 100% auto-leveling thing Oblivion had going - you never reached a point where you could go back to a "starting area" and one shot the weak dudes you had trouble with at the start. So people never felt like they were getting more powerful.)

The challenge issue with Fallout 3 has been more universal than just few picky people in the forums, so that it (imo) warrants the criticism and the want for something better in the future. But that's just my observation.



That's true.

And through that the devs can affect to even the wider range of odd behavior up to a degree at least. Making sure that at certain setting, you just can not become too powerful for your own good yet without losing the usefulness and effect of the powerful items. And the economysystem also has it's ways to become... "balanced" without losing the 'freeroam' aspect. Spacelimited inventory, much heavier use of the barter skill, picky vendors etc. I'm not a game dev, but to me those would seem like pretty simple solutions.

Ehm, if a game gets overeasy because your character gets overpowered it gets dull fast.
I agree with the OP in that respect.

But ... sadly it's a common downside of open roaming games. Let's hope it's not to bad in FO:NV. And if so you can always cranck up the difficulty and/or ban yourself from the best items :-/

Seriously? There is no way you can struggle to get money in FO3. Plus, you were invincible before power aromor the game was way to easy. This one will be better. Power armor will help you more but you might not even get any till your third character.

'People around here seem to take offense if you dont play at least 500 hours.' I'm sorry but I don't take offence to 50 hours, I take offence to shrug comments such as this.

We dun' take to kindly ta people who use reason and logic on these here ferums. So why duhntch GIT OUTTA HERE.

(Sorry, had to make a silly comment on this. :laugh: )

Sure you are not confusing Power Armor with Ranger Battle Armor? Power Armor kinda svcked in F03 with max DR caped at 85. Hell, you could hit that hardcap with just Talon Combat Armor in the stock game without using any DLC content.

Now something I hope New Vegas doesn't do that FO3 did. Killing 99.99% of the enemies you face with a single sneak attack with a shotgun for up to 1,680 points of damage. In fact I hope they just deleted the entire sneak attack mechanic. It was hilariously overpowered with all weapons and not just with the shotguns.

i want the game to be as easy as fall out 3 was and i think that with the new mods and that short of stuff u will all be challenged like u want to be but i should be Abel to play it easily and not be challenged at all i went threw fall out 3 and never was challenged never ran out of caps it was fun because it was so ease just turn on some of the mods and stay at a high difficulty their problem solved

PS Ive played fall out 3 for over 1000 hourers one of my favorite games and yes my spelling svcks thats the best i can do with spell check

but even on the hardest difficulty i was still one shotting stuff in the head im just saying

yes but this is obsidian they will do a better job + the realism mode and all the other stuff that will make it hard if u turn it on will fix that

nm

It seems to me that if you need to intentionally limit yourself to fairly low level equipment in an RPG to keep it challenging, there's a problem.



hardcoe mode isn't going to effect combat (aside from ammunition having weight and stimpaks healing over time.), you might argue that this will make combat harder, but the former won't make much difference if ammunition is so plentiful that you can readily find more of it when you need it. There would be a limit to how much you can carry at one time, yes, but that won't make much difference if you can replenish your limited supply of ammunition whenever you need it. And while stimpaks healing over time would, I suppose, make combat harder, in theory, in practice, that will only happen if you actually NEED them. As far as I know, hardcoe mode does not effect how much loot you find, so you're still going to end up finding lots of good loot later on, provided Obsidian has not rebalanced the stribution of loot, and even if it DOES fix the problem, I should not need to play the game in hardcoe mode for it to be challenging. It's the difficulty setting that's supposed to be used to make th game hard, hardcoe mode is supposed to be a choice available for players who want more focus on the wasteland survival experience.

But yes, Fallout 3 can be easy in the late game, however, this doesn't seem to be a new occurance in Bethesda's games, just look at Morrowind, and when Bethesda tried to fix that problem, we got Oblivion's level scaling, so I think the conclusion I can reach from this is that as much as I like Bethesda's games, there are some things they jus don't do so well, balancing the game appears to be one of them, But maybe in Obsidian's hands, New Vegas can be better in this regard, I don't know, since I don't have enough experience with Obsidian games to judge how competent they are at balancing their games.

I'm a masochist, so for me it needs to torture me and call me bad words and piss on me so I cry for it to be fun.
Can't help it.
I want a challenge.
Fallout 3 gave none.
Boredom was imminent.

NO ALIENS !.
They were fun once in MZ but I wouldnt want them to become a feature part of the game.

Yeah, and when i re-started with the dlc's i'd rush and complete operation anchorage, then boom! at level 6 i'm pretty much unstoppable on very hard.

Ammo having weight matters - you're arguing that you can always go back to your supply and get more, but that will cost you time. You also need to eat and drink in hardcoe, so time costs money and/or rads. Therefore, you have a constant pressure being exerted against you to perform efficiently in combat (similar to an old-style survival-horror game) because poor performance will eventually deplete your resources to the point where you cannot survive (or you'll have to turn off hardcoe and lose the achievement, anyway). An individual combat may not be more difficult per se, but the aggregate experience of combat will be much more taxing.

Stimpacks healing over time is a huge difference in combat - FO3 your healthbar was basically as long as your number of stimpacks. Further, in hardcoe you can't heal crippled limbs with a Stimpack, you need a Doctor's bag (costs more than a stimpack) or to visit a doc (money and/or time, again). So... yeah, that will make combat much harder, when you can't pause-instaheal and are flopping around on a pair of broken legs you can't fix cause you got hit by a stick of dynamite. Even if you survive, it's gonna be a rough trip back to town on those...

my suggestion? quit playing on very easy. pump the difficulty up, and dont wear power armor.

FO3?
Played on Very Hard and only had regular Combat Armor and nerfed my characters END stat and perks and didn't use VATS.
Was still too easy.

this isn't a new occurance for rpgs in general. start off weak, gain power as you progress and become mighty. this one of the essences of an rpg, and naturally this translates into a decreasing curve of difficulty.
that practically is the opposite of what happens in most shooters, which usually start at a lower difficulty and become harder as the game progresses.
since fallout with its fps perspective attracts a lot a people from the classical shooter crowd, it's these guys who feel certain irritations.
it's the same with the classic complaint "the system is broken. even if i aim exactly for the head, i get misses. wth?" if you're telling them "look, this is an rpg. if your small guns skill is at 50, your pc isn't just good enough to act as sniper beast. once your skill reached 100, however, you'll be getting exactly what you were going for." the usual answer you get is like "nah, it just doesn't feel right".
the sad thing is, that obsidian felt the need to "fix" this by removing dice rolls for combat, and replacing it by deus ex like sway system, from what i've heard. i really hope this doesn't become too obvious when playing the game, because i'd be pretty disappointed if so.

Hopefully Obsidian didn't pander to them like Bioware did with ME2.

No, it's nothing new, but it's also nothing new to provide late-game challenges befitting the prowess of the player characters, either. I've played plenty of RPGs that were able to do this. Like I said, I can understand being able to wipe the floor with raiders, radscorpions, molerats, etc. in the late-game, but the Enclave soldiers in areas like Raven Rock should have been powerful enough to give a level 17 character a run for their money.

i didn't find them to be that weak. getting plasma rifle fire from different directions surely eats up some stims. due to the abundance of health items you're just not aware of it
but this will be addressed with the hardcoe mode, where quick heal is no longer an option

I hope so. I honestly don't remember how often I was using stimpaks at that point, but I don't remember being too worried about dying. In a late-game area like that I'd expect to die if I just ran in with guns blazin' and no strategy...especially in an RPG.