2901

Gosh, should have added “I know” in between there somewhere.

For me it increases immersion, even if it mostly is just more inventory management. Also, noninstantaneous stimpack healing is pretty big change, as are limbs healable only by doctors/bags/hydras, all of which is much rared than stims.Not to mention killable companions.

But yeah, it is not really that much more hardcore, it just adds that flavour, as I said. There are already mods that make it much more hardcore for those that want it (arwen’s). I want to play mostly vanilla first, and for me it is more fun with hardcore then it would be without it.

2902

I have been killing some deathclaws with one companion at level 16. That Khans quest led me there too, and I have decided to wait on finishing it for now. With a Trail Carbine and a companion functioning as a sort of tank/suicide tank (slightly cheesy to do this outside of hardcore, but oh well). I don’t have perks to increase accuracy, and I only have about 70 guns skill, from memory, so I can’t really snipe them in VATS very well. I basically have them aggro onto my companion, and then use VATS to get 3 or 4 headshots in hopefully before my companion goes down.

The problem with trying to do the quest is that you have to go deep into deathclaw territory, and my companion seems to like to aggro a handful of them sometimes, which is just too much.

I’ll keep an eye out for AP .44 ammo, too. Deathclaws have loads of DT. DT is a very good addition, it really makes the tough enemies feel tough, and the badass armor feel badass.

2903

I like hardcore mode. It’s a fairly thin extra layer, but it’s nice. Also, you can turn it off any time you want, so there’s really no reason to not try it out.

2904

I don’t play hardcore because I already spend enough time fiddling with the damned pipboy. More is not necessary, thanks!

2905

I would have called Hardcore mode as they have it now “Realism Mode.”

The food, water and sleep requirements aren’t as dire to warrant the label of “Hardcore.”

Maybe if they made food and clean water scarce, and upped the rad level in the vast majority of water sources by an order of magnitude, and lack of sleep inflicted a heavy debuff on all your skills, maybe then only only then would it be worthy of hardcore!

2906

I think hardcore would be misused in that context as well. To me, hardcore has been recently well applied in multiplayer FPS titles, where they get rid of health bars, death cams, or some other game-y conventions and make the primary mechanic of the game (shooting people) work in a manner that is significantly different in order to create a very different kind of experience from vanilla encounters.

In contrast, I don’t think Vegas has the necessary focus in its design to make a hardcore mode all that meaningful if when it comes to stat maintenance via more Farmville tasks. That part of the game is an occasionally intriguing mess that only works because it’s nested in so many other brilliant things. If one were to make a hardcore mode to target it at people like me with this game (all one of us), it would need to focus on the decisionmaking aspect, although I’m sure that existing conversational and situational cues would have to be revamped in order to make it workable. Modifying the way you interact with the stories in the game would be a much more significant type of commitment, especially some kind of roguelike approach to conversations or something like that. Alpha Protocol represented some experiments in that direction (with the admittedly uninspired timer, for instance) that I’d like to see more of.

What I like most about vanilla FO3/NV is that they recreate the illusion of exploring a dangerous world similar to STALKER, with little of the associated difficulty and a comparatively tiny learning curve. It’s an illusion that holds together best when you don’t strain the seams, which was my impression of my time in hardcore.

YMMV, etc.

2907

I’m playing on Hardcore because I think it’s a nice touch to add to the game. I really don’t see how it makes things much harder, and I don’t think that’s the point. Aside from carrying around a few bottles of water in my backpack I haven’t noticed a whole lot of additional busywork or found it to be particularly time consuming or anything on that I would compare to Farmville busywork. Maybe Pipboy fiddling is more annoying on console? I do find the inventory controls to be annoying at times, and that’s even with scrolling through the list with a mouse.

2908

Playing hardcore/ small frame is a useful credit sink. Jonesing for doctors’ bags.

I like the “heal over time” change. Water/food/sleep - meh

2909

Making ammo have weight would increase my inventory management woes dramatically. I already regularly have to rifle through my stuff looking for heavy things I can safely dump.

2910

My problem is hardcore mode isn’t “HARD” at all. It’s misleading

If leaving civilization with no food supples meant starving to death in the middle of the desert…thinking how the Ultima games handled food: If you ran out in the middle of one of those deep dungeons, you were in big trouble. In NV you can fast travel from one side of the map to the other and be fine. You might be hungry and thirsty and sleepy when you reach your destination but you’re life is far from threated. It’s more or less a kin to The Sims, catering to a hunger meter, energy meter…

They could have done something completely different sure. Like a time limit and “schedule of events” like Fallout 1: I.E. Mutants invade Necropolis on this date. Mutants find Vault 13 on this date (if they haven’t already been wiped out by the PC) Game over!

2911

I didn’t say it made anything exceptionally harder, and again, that’s not necessarily the most important part of a hardcore mode. I said that it didn’t change any variables in the game that I saw as significant, and actually strained some of the weakest parts of the gameplay. What you’re writing here really doesn’t do much to contradict that.

It’s consequence free resource management that requires a little more Tamagotchi in your Fallout than it’s designed to handle, and I don’t see the point in it. Not that I want it taken away from anyone else, I just don’t think much of it. But as extrabags says, you can toggle it on and off, so I guess there’s no reason not to give it a shot.

2912

But you won`t get the achievement if you ever turn it off!!!

Anyways, I make house rules for myself which has made hardcore a bit more meaningful…

  1. Don`t access inventory in combat
  2. No more than 3 stimpacks in combat

This + companion death means that combat tends to be riskier and hectic with a duck-and-cover shootout vibe by necessity. All I need now is a mod to decrease latency/increase penalties associated with food/thirst/rads, and I will have the authentic e-peen Wasteland Experience.

2913

Oh man, the addition of companion death in a game like this. How could I forget that gem?

2914

I think the hardcore aspects of combat are great - even companion death would be ok if they didn’t run off into suicidal engagements on me.

What weakens it for me is the food/water aspect. They added this great new skill, survival, allowing you to find/make all this great stuff from the environment. And this requirement for food/water every so often. Yet it’s not needed. There’s plenty of food/water to be found in abandoned and not so abandoned homes or on the bodies of enemies. You just don’t need it. That’s where it fails. It’s a start but to make it worthwhile they need to cut back on what you can find on your own.

2915

Would be cool to have a conversational HC ala Alpha Protocol. That game has some really tight ‘live with it’ feel. even in HC FNV you can still do a quickload with NPC’S… in AP, to do that you would have to replay whole missions… which actually enhances ‘roleplaying’ … don’t think many games have done AP’s HC dialogue trees as well.

2916

Trouble is, Alpha Protocol achieves this by having very discrete chunks of gameplay that they can snip off as you complete them. It’s tougher to implement that sort of control in a free-roaming game like New Vegas.

2917

Yeah it would be more difficult, and it would require very good writing as well (people are willing to live with roleplaying choices if they make sense and are believable). As is, I think the faction system in FNV has enough detail that there really isn’t a need for complex dialogue wheel choices. but it is something to hope for in the future! anyway, FNV has so many aspects that make it one of my most favoritest games ever! never been so enthusiastic about a crpg in years. YEARS!

2918

Yeah, especially compared to its inspiration, it doesn’t ramp up the difficulty much. I don’t know if you’re playing on the PC, but I figure mods will eventually come around making it more difficult as well as better balanced.

2919

Yeah, “hardcore” is just a label, maybe not the best one for that mode. It only increases slightly the difficulty, and the survival bit is more a flavor than a real problem.

The thing these type of survival modes need to really work is a time limit in the game. Hard and annoying by themselves, i know, but it’s still the truth. Having to sleep, search food & water, having to go to a doctor to heal a limb, none of that is a problem because you have infinite time to complete the game. If you would have a timed objective like in Fallout 1, then things like chems that permit you sleep less, or having a doctor’s bag in hand instead of using fast travel to heal you would be really useful and you would have to make choices: do i want to return to my house just to replenish ammo and switch weapons, or should i advance because i can’t waste time?
I.e. in Fallout 1 i remeber hvaing to chooose between sleeping in a paid motel to recover my health (cheap, but wastes hours of time) or using a pair of stimpacks (rare, expensive, but instantaneous).

And well, in general because the game is so big, with so many places, each place with rooms, each room with some containers, each container with 0-4 items, in the end the game if chock full of resources. Weapons, ammo, health items, drugs, etc. It’s something more or less needed to make exploration engaging, but it fucks up the difficulty. It’s the same problem that in Fallout 3.

I wanted to comment another aspect of the game, this time positive, the combat and the guns. We all know how in lots of hybrid action/rpgs games the developers make the mistake of having crap shooting with weapons of incredible poor accuracy, part because the weapons are too tied to the characters stats, part because starting weapons are very different to the highend weapons. or perhaps because they don’t want to go too far away from the RPG roots. It’s not the case here, weapons have nice animations, nice sounds, nice feedback when you kill something, and good accuracy since the beginning. They also evade making monsters with a very high amount of health (well, mostly) which are not fun to fight.
The ironsights, weapon mods and sheer variety of weapons finish the job.
Great job by Obsidian here.

2920

Ok, so I decided to try hardcore, and so far (not even to Primm) it seems ok. As mentioned plenty of times above, it’s not really “hard” more like “fiddly.” I can already tell it’ll be a pain to have to keep referencing all the tabs in the Pipboy, so I’m probably going to install the Darnified UI, since I think that’s the one that puts all the indicators on one screen.

Another question: I know how the different difficulty levels change damage output of both you and the mobs. But do different difficulty levels change anything else? I just started playing on Hard, and have seen different numbers of mobs around (i.e., a larger pack of mobs in a certain early game area). Granted, it’s a somewhat random world, and mobs wander, but I was wondering if what I saw was just a random thing or not.