Hey folks, just picked up a copy of New Vegas and was trying to figure out how I want to play it after reading about all the settings. Hoping someone can jump in with suggestions, and I apologize if it’s been addressed earlier (haven’t been through the entire thread just yet).
I like the idea of hardcore, requiring food and sleep to make the experience a little more authentic, but I am not a big fan of bullet-sponge enemies. So my inclination is to go with hardcore active, but cranking the game difficulty down, possibly even to gasp! easy, to reduce the tedium of endless combat encounters. I must admit that, much as I liked Fallout 3, I was pretty tired of shooting my way through scorpions and robots by the time I got through the whole game plus DLC.
So just curious what you guys chose for settings. I see Adam above went with very hard/hardcore on and didn’t seem satisfied with his experience. Anyone else want to share, find a good sweet spot on the difficulty settings? Much obliged for any feedback.
Are there any in-depth notes for the new patch? I’d like to see if they fixed the bug in vault 11 that ruins your standing with Mr. House.
I think this right here is the crux of the problem. You are expecting dedicated shooter levels of gunplay depth in a game that is not a pure shooter.
In a shooter, the gunplay is the whole meal, whereas in modern RPGS with shooting mechanics it is a means to an end, not the end itself. It is a fundamentally different design philosophy and for a good reason.
Do you know why pure shooters have such a higher attention to detail in level design and cover? Because that’s all they do. Can you imagine the manhours it would take to put that level of attention to detail and timing into every single encounter in a game the size and scale of FO:NV? It would have easily surpassed GTA4 in budget! It just is not feasible. Demanding that a 70 hour game have the same density of adrenaline and careful balance as a 5 hour game is just craziness.
In the final assessment, you are simply not the target audience for RPGs.
HRose
3444
I like the latest progresses in patching versions:
Fallout: New Vegas patch 1.2.0 was released on November 10, 2010
Fallout: New Vegas patch 1.02 was released on December 9, 2010
So 02 > 2
Every day you learn something new.
From what I’ve read Hardcore adds little but some extra tedium in terms of inventory management, so I intend to keep it turned off and otherwise play on Medium.
Good to know. I was hoping it added some ‘reality’, whatever that’s worth. I know in Fallout 3 I always carried every piece of ammunition I owned, since it had no weight, except for missiles maybe. Always struck me as kind of cheating, though of course that didn’t stop me from exploiting it.
Bullets do have weight in Hardcore mode. Besides the Food and Drink requirements and of course the crippled Limbs issues. So in that sense Hardcore does add some “reality”.
Kalil
3449
I went with Hard/Hardcore.The difficulty wasn’t hard as such and I soon learnt not to explore into areas that were populated with mobs of a higher level than I could cope; deathclaws, cazadores and the like.
Hardcore I decided to try since you can at any time choose to drop the mode, I believe you can also turn it back on but you will not receive the achievement if that matters to you. I didnt find the fulfilling of dehydration, hunger or sleep needs too much of a chore and it did add something to the game, not much and in somewhat trivial manner but it did add something more.
I didnt find the inventory management too much of a chore but neither an aid to immersion given that I had taken to using companions as mobile suitcases but then that is a choice I made. I would say give hardcore a go since you can turn it off, try it with Solar’s Bottle Mod. I did and just enjoyed filling up bottles with water for some reason. I think going hard or very hard isn’t to much of an issue as the difficulty of mobs is based on the area they are in rather than your own level, YMMV.
Teiman
3450
The menu system of Fallout is awnfull. Most pages are one dimensional, you can scroll down and up, maybe is not apparent for everyone, but the screen is bidimensional, so a different design could have made rows and columns of items, so more are seen on the screen at the same time. And the font size, It feels like 32px height. The area for the menus are limited to the already small pipboy window. It feels like using a Mac II Classic, trought vpn, from a iPhone. I don’t opose text, I like text for the sake of text, I am a text fanatic, but I think the pipboy relie way too much in text where single icons would be more infirmative. And a interface with mouse support, rightclick, drag and drop, tooltips on mouse over. I am playing a browser game, die2nite, and It have all this features on the bank. A damn indie browser game have better interface than a AAA fullscreen action-rpg 3D game. One can argue that the bad menu is part of the flavour of playing fallout, but I think the game would have been even better with a better menu. The 50% of the time playing fallout seems fighting with the menu.
Doesn’t it also make Stimpacks heal-over-time? I’m not positive since I only played hardcore.
Yep, Balasarius. One of the most important changes, not only the effect is not inmediate, also you can’t use 4 stimpacks at the same time (or better said, you can, but the over-time healing effect doesn’t stack)
ZekeDMS
3453
Yeah, no more instant healing. And bullets were old-school heavy, F1/2’s biggest inventory challenges were ammo weight.
Naeblis, you sure about that? It seemed to work that way for me to pop four or five at once if I was in an emergency for a much faster heal, or a “oh god don’t die” heal. Sunset Sasparillas were an economical longterm heal, but high HP/low duration healing items really became important to keep around. Steak could save your life.
Mmm… i think you could use various healing items. A sunset sarsaparilla, a steak, and a stimpack. And all the effects stack up. But not the stimpacks. If you use 3, you only recieve the effect of 1.
I think… now you are making me doubt. I don’t have the game installed anymore, or i would check it in a moment.
ShivaX
3455
You could pop multiple stims at once and they’d stack.
Thing is they wouldn’t work fast enough to save you if things were really bad, but post combat I’d often pop 2 or 3 at once to heal up and it would work just fine.
If it was an “oh shit” kind of moment, super stimpaks were really the only thing that healed fast enough to save your butt.
HRose
3456
That pages doesn’t exist and only redirects to an old page.
flyinj
3457
The thing is, this patch fixes the microstutter completely on my Win7 64 5770 box:
Unfortunately, when using it, in 1 out of 4 conversations the lip-synching is off… which is maddening in and of itself.
So there is a way to fix it… it’s just that guy stopped updating that particular hack and never resolved the lip sync issue…
Apropos of nothing, I strongly believe that the One True Soundtrack for an evil playthrough must include Murder By Death - Rumbrave. Likewise, Theme (for Ennio Morricone) has become my all purpose hype music for any shootout scenario with a touch of Western flavour.
Miramon
3459
Obviously for the western bits you also want some Good, Bad, and Ugly theme. Whistly-whistly-whistle: Wah-wah-waaaah…
Does anyone know if there’s an issue with the Walker of the Mojave achievement on PC? I’ve uncovered 55 locations according to the stats screen, but it hasn’t unlocked for me.
