FO3/NV way too easy?

Since the difficulty is adjustable I don't have a problem with it.

What bugs me a lot is that even with Small Guns 100 the Sniper Perk and Perception 8, the sniper rifle gets good to-hit chances in V.A.T.S. when you'd normally consider using a shotgun.

I don't ask for the Fallout 1 & 2 calculations, where you could shoot across a whole map and still hit the eye with surgical precision, but the way it is now in NV is unrealistic as well.

I'd wish for Fallout 4 to find a middle ground on this.
 
Even though the difficulty is adjustable, it's still WAY too damn easy. FONV falls into the category of game which has no real challenge, save for players without any fucking clue, but provides so many different choices and options for players that they can impose their own level of challenge into the game. For example, "I'm gonna treat encumbrance like I can't move", or "I'll never use VATS", or "There's no such thing as quicksave", or many others. Also this:
Walpknut said:
Going into the Sierra Madre with the Hoarder Trait is an insane self imposed challenge.
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Hadn't thought of that. But in essence, FONV allows you to MAKE it tougher (Not by increasing the Difficulty, however. That's laughable.) but by default it's an appallingly easy game.

As far as I'm concerned, games need to be challenging by default. It shouldn't be restricted to self-imposed player decisions, otherwise putting down our controllers (or stepping away from our keyboards) and saying "Damn, I died. This is hard!" would be just as valid. Granted, HAVING the option is way better than a game that's just plain easy no matter what you try. Take for example my single-handed, bare hands, naked slaughter of Megaton at level 2 in FO3 (I reached 3 or 4 after all my killing) which I detailed in my ancient FO3 revirew. I TRIED to make that game harder, but it was still zero challenge no matter how you sliced it. FONV was better in the difficulty department, but not remarkably so. Dead Space had default settings that made it challenging. Dead Space 2 had default settings that were INCREDIBLY challenging. You could still apply self-imposed challenges to either of these titles if the default difficulties offered still didn't satisfy. Stuff like that is great, as far as I'm concerned. Even the Art Game Flower is pretty tough, and YOU CAN'T DIE in it!!!

Give a game difficulty levels, if you must.
Allow it to be both hardcore and casual, if you will.
But for fuck's sake, make the challenges it offers CHALLENGING!!!
 
> Go Hard or Very Hard Difficulty
> Go Hardcore
> Install J.E Sawyer's Mod
> Prepare your anus...

Well, sort of. The battle of Hoover Dam is still a cake walk, and the LAER is so powerful its not even funny.
There is still a considerable increase in difficulty though, and I died a lot during my play-though with that combination.
 
I'm currently on my first NV playthrough (just got to the mountain with the supermuties :mrgreen:) and I agree with the OP - it's embarassingly easy even on very hard and HC.

Honestly, I find all the Beth games i've played are really all about the landscapes, environments and atmosphere - they do this REALLY well, and some extra in NV.

As an RPG I think it's weak compared to FO1 & 2.

- In FO1/2 if you say something evil to an NPC you better get ready to take the consequences.

- In NV if you say something evil to an NPC often their response will be the same as if you'd said the 'good' thing! There's very little opportunity to give your character some .... character.

Stats - yeah, they seem barely relevant so far. When i take drugs they change my stats and i hardly notice.
In FO2 drugs made you into a raving super soldier - and then you woke up the next day and could hardly move - let alone fight.

I'm not suprised to find the game so easy - console rot set into the PC game industry years ago and now i presume all games will be way too easy. Sometimes i even install difficulty mods to boost it up before i've even played the vanilla! (the men of war series did go against this - because it was never intended for mindless console gamers)

Overall i'm having fun playing NV. In some ways, i don't even think of it as a 'game' - it's 'game' mechanics are so weak. To me it's a simulation: simulating the experience of exploring a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and I have to say i'm enjoying the experience.
 
Well, it is hard to balance the amount of drugs you can find in this type of game. Loot is random in a lot places, so you might end up with a truckton of drugs- and if they then are turning you into "a raving super soldier" ... the game will be too easy again.

The npc-thing is actually positive, imo. Besides, even in Fo1/2 saying something evil to an npc wasn't *that* final. It's not like a whole town was going rampage on you when saying the wrong word.
 
No.... Balancing buffs in DotA2 is hard, because they've got to work with a constantly evolving state of strategic battle formation, where players can't be TOO much better than the AI creeps, yet they can't be TOO overpowered by them, either. But balancing chems in FONV? That's EASY. You can make them as amazing as you'd please, and there are plenty of options to go with (of which the game really only explores very few), and simply slap on a 100% debilitating de-buff that appropriately reflects the benefits you receive. For example, double or even triple the duration of Turbo, add in some screen tone (so it feels like a "roid rage" couple of seconds) and cause your character to lose consciousness once its effects elapse. See? You've got a damn useful chem that you do NOT wanna abuse, because the drawbacks can severely cripple you, yet you might capitalize strongly from the benefits regardless. There's no multiplayer, so it's not like the chems need to follow a precariously precise avenue of balance; they just need to possess a tangible CONSEQUENCE, which they currently lack. There's consequences to everything in the game, sure, but you just don't feel them. They don't matter as much as they should.
 
Lexx said:
Well, it is hard to balance the amount of drugs you can find in this type of game. Loot is random in a lot places, so you might end up with a truckton of drugs- and if they then are turning you into "a raving super soldier" ... the game will be too easy again.

The npc-thing is actually positive, imo. Besides, even in Fo1/2 saying something evil to an npc wasn't *that* final. It's not like a whole town was going rampage on you when saying the wrong word.
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Not with Project Nevada it ain't. You can adjust all of that stuff.
 
Lexx said:
Well, it is hard to balance the amount of drugs you can find in this type of game. Loot is random in a lot places, so you might end up with a truckton of drugs- and if they then are turning you into "a raving super soldier" ... the game will be too easy again.

The npc-thing is actually positive, imo. Besides, even in Fo1/2 saying something evil to an npc wasn't *that* final. It's not like a whole town was going rampage on you when saying the wrong word.
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Lexx!! I'm suprised. As you are a veteran of the old-skool Fallouts I thought you would be one of the first to acknowledge how appallingly shallow the effects of player choice are in NV! In Fo1/2 you could easily turn the whole town against you with one badly chosen line, or get yourself banned from Vault City for example. You had to pay close attention to what you 'said' and the NPC response.

NV has some good writing, and i enjoy some of the characters stories, but overall it's 'blah click blah click accept quest goodbye'. I have to confess i've got to the point when if a character gives me a generic statement i feel a tiny bit of relief that i don't have to 'talk' to them and repeat the above blah click blah!

I'm not saying I don't enjoy the game - it's a fantastic experience and probably the natural evolution of the Fallout series, but lets be honest - there's only an illusion of character build and player choice. Fo1/2 character build and SPECIAL was critical to your playthrough, deciding which quests your path would follow. I seem to be able to use any weapon regardless of my skill in NV. Other skills do seem much more significant, however.

In Fo1/2 my first consideration is shall i be an evil bastard or a good guy. Maybe a wasted junkie who's coming down from drugs most of the time. In NV it seems the choice is between a bland mostly helpful generic hero or ... well, a bland mostly helpful generic hero.

On the drugs thing SnapSlav took the words right outta my mouth. It's easy to balance drugs - but it's easier to make them do basicly nothing and only give the illusion they do something. But i'm still figuring out the wide variety of chems so i could be wrong - maybe there's more powerful ones that actually do something further on my quest - and get me really f***ed up!
 
In Fo1/2 you could easily turn the whole town against you with one badly chosen line
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I am not a fan of that, never really was. Besides, you can still be "a bad guy" and kill everyone in your way, making the town hate you. No need to trigger this with one line of dialog.
 
I actually think those "choices" in dialogue are the shallow ones, they are there just to basically get a gameover or to make you go into a rather tedious fight against a bunch of NPCs with no real reason to do so. You didn't have to be careful of what you said, you just needed to avoid the obvious asshole taunting dialogue option. Same thing with those infamous Instant death traps in old CRPGs.
 
Yet what's the point of them? To reinforce that your choices matter. And while some were done quite poorly, at least in the old Fallout games they had depth. Was walking up to Bishop with nothing but bravado and getting gunned down because he's an ultra-paranoid psycho shallow? Was it a cheap "game over"? Not at all. It made you think about your actions, and facing that consequence (as well as many others) led players to approach every NPC with proper caution, because you never know who WANTS to let you talk to them, and who would rather their privacy be respected with the business end of a firearm.

Another difference I noted was, in the older games, every NPC had a hidden "like or dislike" meter running when you talked to them, and that's just absolutely absent in the modern games. NPCs or entire factions going hostile on you are scripted, and getting it to happen is very specific. You don't get towns to turn on you by having been too much of an asshole too many times, unlike the older gamers, you can be a real jerk repeatedly, as much as you want, and suffer no consequences of that, as long as you avoid the ONE specific trigger that will actually set the NPCs off. I miss having to be wary of what NPCs thought of me, and it's the total lack of that system that makes me raise an eyebrow in confusion when I see the CCO mod re-implement the "Presence" Perk... The game has no mechanic for that Perk to work off of!

Josan12 said:
On the drugs thing SnapSlav took the words right outta my mouth. It's easy to balance drugs - but it's easier to make them do basicly nothing and only give the illusion they do something. But i'm still figuring out the wide variety of chems so i could be wrong - maybe there's more powerful ones that actually do something further on my quest - and get me really f***ed up!
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Alas, no. All the chems in the game really just increase a stat, and nothing more. About two of them actually cause any sort of what I'd called a genuine "effect", and they're Weapon Binding Ritual and Turbo, and those just add a little bit of screen distortion, and slow motion, respectively. All the rest are just varying levels of more of this or that. Some of the drugs you can craft benefit solely from provided MORE of the same thing, but that you can stack them. So, yay, you can get MORE than just the base 50% DR from Med-X and 25% damage boost from Psycho if you were to take Med-X and Psycho with the craftable chem, Slasher. It's just more of the same stat. Nothing really makes you feel GENUINELY pumped up, and nothing really makes you feel like you're going to die once the effects wear off. Even addiction is passable inconvenience, since you can pay a couple caps to ANY Wasteland doc, and have it washed away without any worries... And that's assuming you don't have any Fixer on you. Imagine that, a chem with the SOLE purpose of removing Addiction from chems, and it's not even rare!!!
 
That like or dislike meter is still present Snap. I've looked in the GECK. Still there, just not as easy to notice.
 
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