2house2fly said:
Combat progression. For all the problems level scaling has, later on in Fallout 3 you're fighting tough Super Mutants and power-armoured Enclave troopers who pose a challenge. At high levels in New Vegas you're fighting the same Legionaries and Fiends as ever, and the only real challenge past level 20 or so is deathclaws. The only really challenging vault is 34; vault 11 is full of rats and mantises and the enemies in 22 are creepy but not difficult. Broken Steel ruined this with bullet sponge enemies, but then the New Vegas expansions had their problems with this too.
Fallout 3 was also better at portrayals of racial equality; New Vegas is lily white almost all over. .............
I'm not even going to touch the whole racism thing. Suffice it to say, that just reeks of paranoia and crying wolf, from my perspective. Needless to say, the post directly above mine really covered that far better than the topic deserved.
But Combat Progression was done well in FO3? You must be high!
Maybe I'm some sort of anomaly gamer, seeing as I was still voicing the virtues of niche gaming and appealing to a targeted audience and pursuit of "satisfying gratification for defeating a genuine challenge" in games, while games seemed to moved on to "the broader audience" and sacrificed quality and difficulty to provide "quick highs" to anyone and everyone indiscriminately. I once felt like my boast about beating and completing and fully-unlocking EVERY game I'd ever played up until the recent decade (including those quarter-sponge arcade classics, like
Final Fight) was something WORTHY of boasting, but the last decade of games felt more like full-completion handed to me on a silver platter. Just dedicate 20 hours of my time, and that's all that's required. Granted, the proliferance and abundance of guides/walkthroughs certainly contributed to a greater ease of completing games, but I largely found them to be unnecessary, barring rounding up "collectibles", which were more monotony and tedium than they were challenge... I personally don't THINK I'm some kind of special gamer, but maybe I am? You tell me.
That said, my experience with the scaling of combat in FO3 was anything BUT "natural", "seamless", "progressive", or any other adjective you could deem would fit the bull whilst delivering a compliment to the thing. Scaling was absurd, in FO3. The bulk of enemies you faced were ONE of 3 groups: Raiders, Mercs, and Regulators (BOTH of the latter 2 being mutually exclusive, as well). They never got tougher as the game progressed. They were always
some grenades and
some rocket launchers but usually just hunting rifles (seriously, EVERYONE has a hunting rifle!!!), assault rifles, and crowbars. The combat was the same whether you came upon them with your 10mm Pistol that Amata gave you at the beginning of the game, still level 2 and no higher, or whether you came upon them wielding a Fat Man at level 20 (sans Broken Steel). They were a challenge if you were weak and underleveled, and BEYOND pushovers if you'd been playing the game... at all!
Super Mutants began to tip the scales a bit, as they were the first enemy you encountered that ACTUALLY scaled at all, but once again, this was marginal difference. Between the generic and their "Brute" and "Master" counterparts, the only differences was the tendency for Chinese Assasult Rifles to spawn more frequently, and of course the greater abundance of HP to slough through with your own weapon. By the time Enclave Soldiers became a threat (which could have lasted AGES, depending on your prioritization of the Main Quest over side-objectives and "exploring"), any player's character should have already been well-versed in the simple art of shooting the head and watching them fall down. For a group that was SUPPOSED to represent the most dangerous enemy that the
Fallout series had ever encountered (up to this point, chronologically), wielding the allegedly "best tech" weapons and armor, they never really posed any threat at all! Headshot, boom. Even in FO2, it took considerable effort to take down a SINGLE Enclave trooper, with or without headshots, and if you weren't packing THE best heat in the game, you could expect to lose a fair number of your companions very easily, not to mention sizable chunks of your torso, loosely held together by your hasty reliance on Super Stims.
Broken Steel provided NOTICEABLE "improvement" to the enemy level scaling, but naturally it was done to excess and didn't feel at all right or appropriate. Suddenly a Sneak Attack Critical to the face, at point blank, with the Double Barreled Shotgun (my favorite haul from Point Lookout) would serve to mildly irritate, whereas the IMMEDIATE LESSER TIER version of the enemy you were facing would explode violently upon impact. The "scaling" was non-existent! It went from "No Challenge" to "PUNCH THIS BRICK WALL AND ENJOY IT" in one single "transition"! This of course excluded the Tier 4 Enclave Solders (Hellfire), since they still went down equally as easily as their "lesser" counterparts. Yes, it might seem like I overused quotations in this particular paragraph, but I felt it rather poignant and appropriate to do so. Namely, because all of these things claimed to be something, but upon any decent inspection they proved to be nothing of the sort. They were "difficult" in name only.
Long story short, FO3 had TERRIBLE combat progression, and FONV was no worse (though not MUCH better either) about it. It might just seem like it originally had some scaling worth mention, before Broken Steel came along and... well... broke all of that. But really, the absurdly "scaled" enemies of Broken Steel were Bethesda's knee-jerk response to the complaints of a complete LACK of any decent scaling in enemies, not praise that what they provided was any good, but fell off because of the PC's overpowered godliness. No, just a complete lack from the beginning.
