Does anyone actually play this way? Sawyer’s mod reduces your carry weight, but I don’t think it prevents you from stockpiling. After looking over the details, I’m a little dubious about the mod, since he not only reduces the carry weight, he nerfs the perks that help you with carry weight. I thought maybe he was going the other direction, making carry weight more variable so strength and inventory perks were more valuable.
Logically, if food is really scarce, Survivalism should be more valuable since it’s mostly a way of making food. Right now it’s mostly not worth it, because there are so many other ways of healing, food’s kind of heavy for the healing it gives, and there’s lots of food around. Not to mention the stupid “find a campfire” UI. There’s a mod for that (portable campfire), which helps that part at least.
HRose
4742
If seen as an hassle it will always suck.
Survivalism shouldn’t be just an hassle, but the thing your game is designed around. The purpose is not as much immersion, but “living in the world”. So objects that would normally be junk become important, managing inventory and stocking essential items become the game you play. The water stations becomes central to your journeys and you have to plan ahead.
For example in Arwen’s mod if you sit down you regain fatigue faster and the frying pan used for cooking. Otherwise sitting is merely an animation and the frying pan a junk object.
My problem is that there’s no mod that gets this right. Arwen mod is brilliant but it’s really impossible to play. You get crippling fatigue after two minutes running around, if you lose 5 HP you end up with a wound that bleeds, needs to be bandaged and then healed over time, slowly. If you don’t bandage quickly enough you need blood transfusions, antibiotics and so on.
All this would be really fun but it kind of goes too overboard. Otherwise the Sawyer mod is still more just an hassle and doesn’t have enough depth to make it worth it.
Somehow I think this is true to the real life experience of people in the market for “realistic” FONV mods.
That’s why I was asking, Paul_cze and others have talked like they play that way.
Logically, if food is really scarce, Survivalism should be more valuable since it’s mostly a way of making food. Right now it’s mostly not worth it, because there are so many other ways of healing, food’s kind of heavy for the healing it gives, and there’s lots of food around. Not to mention the stupid “find a campfire” UI. There’s a mod for that (portable campfire), which helps that part at least.
Sure, but if you can’t stockpile anything than the manufacturing skills become useless; there’s rarely enough items in one location to do much interesting.
Aeon221
4745
Nothing at all. Muds had that sort of gameplay and it was an obnoxious pain in the dick. Your character would get hungry and thirsty at regular intervals, and you’d have to get the shit out of your pack and eat it. No food? Well tough shit now your moves don’t regenerate, you are mega fucked. The very first third party clients allowed you to script away the need to do anything other than make sure you had what you needed on you – the only interesting part. Chasing down someone who is hungry, can’t find food and eventually haggs out? That’s good gameplay. Having to type eat fruit a dozen times a play session? NOT GOOD GAMEPLAY.
Same with no stockpile Muds. Within a few years, they all added some form of storage. Why? It got really fucking tedious having to check the spawns of items you needed regularly. Like, say, the ingredients of a potion that removes blindness (a critical item in one mud). If you use that shit all the time and you need it for the fun parts of the game, you do not want to spend an hour tracking down the components before you get to your activity.
I’d imagine it being even more tedious in a game that’s not designed around the idea of limited eatsing and low inventory. But in the interest of pissing myself off (and insomnia) I’ll look into it.
A Neophytes thoughts on New Vegas
(I didn’t play F3)
Sweet jesus? This a gui? Are you joking?
Who the hell schemed up this pipboy interface?
Summary executions are in order, stat.
…
Animations are terrible, as ever. It’s almost comforting. Almost.
ShivaX
4747
You just have to be a little more careful with what you carry. Most crafted stuff isn’t extremely heavy, but I’m not sure Sawyer’s patch thing is good or not. I don’t own all the DLC and don’t see myself buying it just to check his patch out.
Why Bethesda of course. It’s the same as Fallout 3.
HRose
4749
With only a couple of hours in the game I have no idea how it balances out, but it is much more fun with all these mechanics than Fallout 3 ever was.
I don’t understand much the problem of the limited inventory as it seems to carry more than enough. What it probably prevents you is to carry around an arsenal of weapons, armor and ammo. Just drop something and there will be plenty of space for food and water.
Restrictions make you do things differently, this is why it can be fun. You get tired, need to sleep. It means that exploration needs to be carried in different ways. You can’t just go and run in a random direction, and you’ll likely instead travel between places you know already, jumping between these “oasis”. That’s already enough to make the world like something that matters. Otherwise it’s just a shooter with a plot.
Arwen mod, imho, improved things a lot by adding some “detail”. For example your need for water increases 50% if you are outside under the sun, but it grows less during the night or in interiors. It still increases while you’re sleeping but with a -50%. If you are too tired you can’t fast travel. But you also can’t sleep if you’re too hurt and bleeding.
But then you can also carry around empty bottles and refill them, so you always have a “source” for both water and food, as long you’re around a campfire or a water tank.
If you drink too much surface water your bacteria level goes up and you end up going sick. This gets solved over time as the body metabolizes the problem. If you eat raw meat also bacteria increases, so better to cook it. If you eat when you don’t need food, you get sick. The bigger you are (STR+END) the more you need to eat.
Aeon221
4750
I played up to about level ten on hardcore mode. It’s interesting but nothing to write home about. Didn’t actually impact my play in any noticeable way.
I like Hardcore, mainly for the changes to healing. Doctor’s bags and the like are of no real value outside of Hardcore, because you can heal crippled limbs just by sleeping. That healing takes place over time rather than instantly means you can’t just stimpack your way through a fight, which I did a couple of times in Fallout 3.
Food and water requirements seemed largely unimportant, even when I played with a mod that boosted those a great deal. There’s plenty of both in the Mojave, much more so than in DC, since there are several sources of clean water.
Ammunition weight did affect my play. Energy weapons generally have ammo that’s remarkably heavy, and the heavy weapons (notably the missile launcher) are worse. Overall, I think ammunition weight is a net negative, but not enough for me to turn off Hardcore.
Aeon221
4752
I gave my character a strength of 3 and have had no weight issues. Travel light!
I’m not sure the game was built to work that way. I put up with “realistic” carry weights in STALKER because it fits the theme. It also means adventures far from the hub require serious planning, as they should.
But even STALKER forces you into silly situations, like having to take a gun used by enemies in that zone so you can scrounge their compatible ammo. That’s due to game design quirks – Rambo player characters that dump hundreds of rounds into bullet sponges. I think the recent Fallout games have even more problems with resource management like that. You’ll have fast travel to resupply, but that’s going to be tedious.
Speaking of fast travel, this mod is like forcing yourself not to do that in Skyrim. It was awesome in Nehrim because quests were regional or infrequent. The quests in Skyrim are scattered haphazardly because they expect you to zoom around.
So the idea behind it is nice, but it doesn’t always work within the games as they’re designed.
Gah. I must have a golf bag full of weapons at me at all times. Who knows when I might need a silenced SMG, even though I normally prefer sniping?
Also, brooms.
One of the things that Sawyer did in his personal mod was acknowledging something (with the stimpacks) that I’ve harped on since day 1 of FNV … Fallout isn’t post-apocalyptic wasteland any more. It’s a Western filled with bizarrely-intact, centuries-old relics that should have been been located and used up many decades ago.
If I had the time and talent, I would love the use the CS and the resources provided by FNV to build my own vision of the Fallout universe – not a bunch of NMA fan service wankery, but something a little tougher and a little more Twilight 2000-ish, set closer to the time of the original opening of the vaults. Or maybe something that takes place entirely within a vault, in the days just after the bombs fell. Or something.
This is very true. The superabundance of ammunition really threw me in Fallout 3. I was expecting The Road Warrior, where a handgun with a dozen rounds of carefully hoarded ammunition was a big deal. In such a background, the Fallout 3 crafted weapons (railway gun, rock-it launcher, etc.) would have made sense, since anything that could use scavenged materials for ammunition would be a big advantage. Of course, in practice, most of those items were badly outclassed by the firearms and plentiful ammunition.
You and Obsidian both!
They wanted to set New Vegas EARLIER in the timeline. Bethesda said No.
HRose
4758
Well, the mods I discussed above do some of this sort of thing.
What misses is the fact that all rules only apply to the player character. What would be interesting would be to see the same needs applied to NPCs and within small communities, so that they also would be more “lived in” the environment.
Sarkus
4759
Exactly.
But that decision also makes sense if you think about it from Bethesda’s point of view. If Fallout 3 was set earlier, then they would have had to remove a bunch of things that people expect the series to have. Things like super mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel, for example, which the earlier games define as being from the west coast. And thats just the start of the issue, because you also have to make sure you don’t contradict earlier story points. So by going with the later date for Fallout 3 they avoid all of that and only have to stretch things a bit in terms of explaining why DC hasn’t recovered much (and there are hints of a backstory there for that). New Vegas, on the other hand, has no choice but to embrace its post-post nuke status.
ShivaX
4760
Obsidian did a good job of avoiding referencing the time gap as much as they could, I thought.
I just pretend it happened 20-30 years after Fallout 2, which actually makes sense in a lot of ways when you get to various stories and the like. I like that they also pretended Van Buren actually happened and even reference things from it occasionally.
