Arwen's New Vegas Realism Tweaks:

My Fallout New Vegas Gameplay Overhaul, focused on making the New Vegas Wasteland a much harsher place, where your stats and skills are MUCH more important.

Current Version1.1 (October 24, 2010). This is the second release of the New Vegas version of my Fallout Realism Tweaks

Here are the major changes in v.1.1:
- Fixed the bug that was killing off some of the low level NPS (most notably, the Powder Gangers).
- Rebalanced the HPs for both the player and the NPCs. PC: 50 HP base + 25 for every point of Endurance; NPC: 70 HP base + 15 for every point of Endurance + 4 points for each Level above Level 1.
- Added my Localized Damage changes to all the default body types. Increased health damage for Head and Torso injuries; and decreased health damage for limb injuries.
- Reduced the chance of the player character getting shot in the head (the default odds were a bit too high).
- Decreased my Skill-Based Weapon Damage multiplier, but still 25% to 100% more damage than default. Now balanced for Armor DT and Localized Damage changes.

The Modules (esps):
(The full details on all my changes are listed in the Realism Tweaks section my http://amito.freehostia.com/FalloutNV/FNV-mods04.htm) Major changes from the default game:

1.) Realism Core (Arwen_Realism_Core.esp):

• Required Core Module - Global tweaks that affect PC, NPCs, and Creatures. For more immersive and better balanced game play, with improved role-playing aspects.
  
• "Arwen's Option Menu" is added to your inventory, (located in PipBoy, under "Aid"). This is where you can easily change your Timescale and your Reduced XPR Multiplier.
  
• You can safely change the Timescale, even if you are using the hardcoe mode, without the die-in-your-sleep bug, since I wrote a Sleep Quest script that automatically reverts your Timscale back to 30 whenever you are sleeping or waiting, and then sets it back when you wake up. (Once NVSE is released I'll be adding a script that adjusts the three Need Rates, based on your Timescale).
  
• My Global XPR Multiplier slows down how fast you level up by reducing ALL experience points rewards. Your current total XPR will NOT be reduced . . . just the amount of points you receive from this point forward. The XPR Multiplier is initially set to 25% (it will take you 4 times as long to gain the points you need to level up). The multiplier can be changed at any time in my Options Menu (from 5% to 100%).
  
• Carrying Capacity: Strength is now a much larger factor in carrying capacity: Base Weight Capacity was reduce to 50 pounds (from 150), but with each STR point now adds 20 pounds (default was 10); so the range (STR 1-10) is now much greater [default =160 to 250 lbs (1.6X); Realism Core=70 to 250 lbs (3.6X)].
  
• Fewer HPs for PC, with stats now a much greater factor. The player character's Base Health was reduced by 50%, but the Endurance multiplier was increased by 25%; which makes the END stat a much greater factor.
  
• And HPs were increased for NPCs and most creatures (by ~ 21% for Level 1; which is still ~30% less than the PC). But the Player Character no longer receives additional HP just for leveling up, while the NPCs/Creatures still receive HPs bonuses at higher levels. NPC still start out with less HPs, but now only the NPCs gain HPs per level (+4 HP/level). The net result is that with 5 END, the PC and the average NPCs will have roughly equal HPs by level 9; and at level 20, NPCs have ~26% more HPs than PC (in the default game, the PC always had 30 to 45% more HPs). This should make higher levels much more challenging.
  
• Increased Holstered Weapon Speed Bonus (from 10 to 20%). Walking is now 9% faster (than default) when your weapon is holstered. Think of your this as a sprint toggle . . . as long as you remember to holster your weapon, you should now be able to outrun most enemy NPCs.
  
• RunBack effect slows down your speed when running backward (since you should not be able to run as fast backward as forward). Backward speed is determined by your Agility level, which I carefully balanced with my movement speed changes, to increase immersion, without being overly restrictive. Even with the maximum speed penalty (at AGL=1), you will still be able to run backward 50% faster than you can walk backward. With an AGL of 10, there is only a 10% speed penalty.
  
• Modified Crippled Speed Penalties: now 40% slower walking/running with one crippled leg and 60% slower with both legs crippled.
  
• Pain now has greater effect on player - you will now feel like you're actually in pain.
  
• Radiation Exposure is now 4 times more deadly (but no radiation increase for consumption of food and water).
  
• More immersive and more balanced VATS. Much quicker VATS playback speed, so you have a bit more time to make defensive moves. You'll now receive normal damage receive while using VATS. Weapons deteriorate twice as fast in VATS as they do in normal combat.
  
• New Action Points formula: Your agility level is a much greater factor in determining your total number of Action Points, with a MUCH greater range in points. Range [AG:1-10] = 36-90 points (default was only 66-85). And Action Points take 4 times longer to recharge (now you'll actually have to keep an eye on your APs.
  
• NPCs will be a bit more alert to your presence, will stay alert longer, will spend more time looking for you, and will search a much greater area for you (up to 4 times further than in the default game). NPCs will detect you if they get close.
  
• Smarter AI: combat with NPCs is now much more challenging, and sneaking is now much more realistic. I have spent a great deal of time trying to balance out all the Combat AI and Stealth settings to mesh together with all my other changes. The end result is a unique set of tweaks that totally changes the way NPCs react during combat. If you are used to the default combat, it will actually feel like the NPCs have suddenly become much smarter. Combat will now be MUCH tougher.
  
• Weapon damage has been increased through weapon skills calculations (which affect all weapons globally, including weapons that are added through other mods). But I did this in a way that makes the damage increase with higher weapon skills a bonus, instead of making lower skills a penalty. Even with a Small Gun Skill of only 10, DAM is 25% higher than in the default game at this level . . . and this is before factoring my other DAM increases.
  
• Increased Damage Skill Bonus Multiplier (applies to all weapons): Skill now has much more impact on how much damage an actor can do with any weapon.
  
• Localized Damage improvements were made to all the default body types. Greater health damage from Head and Torso injuries; and much less health damage from limb injuries.
  
• The condition of the gun has less effect on how much damage it does, but Damaged Guns are a bit less accurate (more spread when damaged).
  
• Damaged Guns will not fire as fast, are less accurate (more spread when damaged), and have a greater chance of jamming after reloading. And Automatic Weapons now take 5 seconds to cool down (default was just 1 sec).
  
• Reduced shooting accuracy when walking or running (there was no penalty for either in the default game). But added a 10% increase in crouch bonus (over default bonus), which results in 50% less spread when firing a weapon from the crouched (sneak) position.
  
• Improved Grenade physics . . . much less bounce and will now longer slide like on ice (increased friction). I'm now able to throw a grenade much more accurately . . . without it bouncing and sliding like crazy.
  
• More realistic Death Force physics - this was impossible for me to get exactly right, since different bodies react very differently . . . but most bodies should now fly much less unrealistically through the air upon death (this was needed so I could bring my next actor effects into the game, and have semi-realistic results).
  
• Immersive visual changes: Increased Impact Shader Maximum Distance by 4 times the default distance (from ~234 to ~937 feet), so you will now see bullet damage effects much further away. Spent shells from bullets now last 4 hours before they begin to disappear (instead of only a few seconds).
  
• Improvements were made to NPC's armor and weapons . . . across all levels . . . many of your opponents should a be quite a bit more challenging. But the NPC's armor (and sometimes their weapon) is now damaged upon their death.
  
• More Caps for Merchants - all merchants now have twice as many caps (Wasteland currency).

Credits:

• Bethesda and Obsidian for making Fallout New Vegas and releasing the GECK, so that we can mod the game.

Download link: http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34759

thank you. as much as im loving the game i forgot how all fights turn into bullet sponge battles of epic scale on hard. i had to turn it down to normal so that it "only" takes 4 shots to the head to kill someone. the game is more balanced than FO3 in that im not finding oodles of ammo and stimpacks but it could be a touch more scarce. one thing i did notice and im not sure if its because i changed the timescale to 5 right away but the sleep, eat, drink penalties could probably be a bit higher. cant wait since i used FWE and you mod was heavily incorporated into it.

If you don't change the timescale you only have to eat/drink or sleep every few days ...

I probably won't make any changes to Needs until I add my Med-Tec module, which will also expand the effects of injuries. I'm hoping to add both my Med-Tec and Encumbrance module by v.2.0.

What I really need to hear about right now is how players are finding the combat, stuff like damage inflicted (at normal difficulty setting), and how well the NPCs do (is the AI any smarter than FO3?) . . . my own feeling are that both need a LOT of work (and the values I'm seeing in the GECK confirm my initial feelings). If both seem to be about the same as in default FO3, then I should be able to fix it pretty fast.
My Realism Core will also change the balance between the NPCs and the player (removing most of the player advantage that the default game gives you).

And what about leveling up speeds . . . should I add my Reduced XPR multipliers?

My Hard-Core module will reduce the amount of loot . . . and your Luck stat will have a major impact on how much loot you will find. It will also reduce the amount of point you initially get to use for SPECIALS (from 40 to 35), and it will reduce the amount of skill points you initially receive, and how many additional points you get while leveling up.

Nice! :celebration:

I had quick look at a short gameplay video and it's really going to take some adapting, being used to modded FO3. The UI/HUD looks way too big....
Couldn't they give DarN an early copy of the game?

Also from what I've seen the player moves ridiculously fast.Or maybe I'm just too used to FallART 3... Still, I played a FO3 character with an agility of 7 so he wasn't exactly slow. Any idea if running speed is influenced by agility in New Vegas?

(Of course, this time your character is a Courier and not a Vault kid so maybe he developed his running skills by doing his delivery jobs )


For sure! I thought this relied on FOSE scripting, I guess I was wrong.

good to hear that you are already working on NV, as I found the hardcoe mode a bit on the easy side too

hope to see your realism mod ported over soon :goodjob:

I think you should probably play through the game before messing around with Reduced XP multipliers - from what I heard, it shouldn't be as easy to max out your level in this game as it was in F3.

One thing I've noticed about combat - the player has a *lot* more health than his enemies at low level. My character is level 3 and has over 270 HP already. That should probably be toned down a bit.

If I add my multipliers, they will be configurable in my in-game Options Menu, just like they were in my FO3 mod.

I'm currently balancing out the HPs (and tweaking a LOT of the settings).

Hey Arwen! Good to see you getting to work on this right away. I'm waiting for ART:NV before actually getting the game since reverting to vanilla after ART FO3 doesnt appeal to me either.

Will you consider allowing the option of having weapon skill affect accuracy and gun spread instead of damage this time around? so that the better i am at a gun, the better i can hit what i aim at and not the more damage i can inflict.

Hey Norbingel, I didn't plan on starting this quite so soon, but once I fired up FO:NV I knew that I had to get to work on this.

I got a LOT of criticism about the way that my mod adjusted damage, based on your weapons skill. Many complained that is just wasn't realistic, but I disagree. The thing is, if you are more skilled with a weapon, you'll be able to do more damage with it. Whether you are using swords, arrows, or guns, this is an essential element of any role playing game. The concept is based on the idea that a person with low weapon skills would not be very effective with weapons. For instance, a bullet in the torso could hit the heart, just as easily as it could hit the shoulder . . . both are torso hits . . . and this is as specific as the game targets damage. Don't you think that a person with high weapon skills should have a much greater chance hitting the heart?

Accuracy already improves considerably as weapon skills increase (that's part of the default game). The range is 45% more spread at 10 SG; to 0% more at 100 SG. If you increase the range, you (and the NPCs that level up with you) will not be able to hit anything. So what do you do, make 0% happen sooner, likes at 70 SG? If you do that, you remove any reason to increase your skill beyond that skill level. Plus my mod will increase accuracy when you are crouching, and it will add a damage bonus for when your weapon's condition is 85% or higher (these are the exact same things that I did in my FO3 Tweaks).

Making weapon damage the same for all skills would really weaken the rpg aspects of the game, because there just isn't enough range to do all this with just weapon accuracy. Either you make everyone a really bad shot at lower skill levels, or you make everyone an expert before reaching 100 Skill.

I am so glad you're already looking into NV, Arwen! I'm really excited to play the game but probably won't start until versions of ART and DarnUI are out. Which is probably for the better since there's quite a bit of real-life stuff to do at the moment. And for what it's worth, I was a bit skeptical of the weapon skill-based damage you put into ART, but I think it works out very well. It adds the sense of character progression that I love about RPGs and that vanilla FO3 certainly lacked.

It'd make more sense if weapon skill increased critical hit chance rather than just increased damage. Damage should be constant - hitting someone in a place that hurts a ton would be a good example of a critical hit, however. Don't know if you can do that without FOSE or something like it, though.

I really, really don't think you should make it so there's a damage bonus if your weapon's condition is greater than 75% (higher than the Maintenance range). The whole Maintenance angle is a great idea of Obsidian's and I don't think you should just remove it.

And yes, making people with low skill levels a really, really bad shot is perfectly acceptable. As-is, I've got 20 Guns skill and it feels like no weapons have any spread effect at all - she's got near-perfect accuracy.

I haven't done anything yet with weapon accuracy or damage. But I do not believe that damage should remain the same, regardless of your skill level . . . that philosophy may be fine for a FPs, but not for a RPG. At the very most, I'll consider doing a combination of increased damage and accuracy as your skills improve . . . that is what I originally attempted to do in FO3, but there just wasn't enough range to make enough of a change in accuracy. It will depend on how accuracy is currently factored in. It was NOT perfectly acceptable to make the NPCs all really bad shots, as it totally ruined the immersion . . . when I could just stand that and only 1 in 10 shots hit me.

Apparently Perception increases accuracy in NV. Now it's actually useful!

Oh, I should probably note that I took the Trigger Discipline trait, so accuracy with Guns 20 might not actually be as badly accurate as I thought.

Yes! I really like that . . . and it makes penalties to Perception actually a decent penalty. (I can do a LOT with this.) Thank Povuholo!



That does indeed make a difference! If your accuracy goes up 20%, that means that at 20 SG, you're accuracy is now 80% instead of the 60% it would be (without factoring in perception . . . I'll have to figure out exactly how that factors in.)

From what I can see, the values for fGunSpreadSkillBase and fGunSpreadSkillMult are exactly the same as they were for FO3, which means that at 10 SG your accuracy is reduced by 45%, and that should be a pretty noticeable increase in spread.

And I do plan on overhauling the Perks in my Hard-Core module, as many seem to give you too much of a skill boost (but I do like that you also get reductions in other skills).

i understand all that. ive been following ART awhile now after all :goodjob: its just that i tried tweaking ART in FO3 by making skill affect dmg and i found it more fun and realistic.

Normally, the only useful weapons are the ones you have a high skill with because the others give very little damage. So when i had a big guns (flamer!) character the more i levelled, the more useless small guns became for me because they did less and less relative damage to enemies. also, with ART, fuel was quite scarce (as it should be) so i had to choose which enemies to use the flamer on. when i tried having skill affect accuracy not dmg, small guns suddenly became useful as backup. It wasnt unbalanced because i could only use small guns when the enemy was right in my face since at a distance it was very hard to hit them. A shot gun to the face hurt the same no matter the skill of the person using it.

As for your example, while indeed higher skilled individuals might be more likely to hit the heart when shooting the torso, this could perhaps be reflected in critical hit chance rather than base damage itself. After all, i believe that's what criticals represent in the game: a hit on a particularly vulnerable body part. So even if accuracy maxes out at 70 SG, there would be incentive for increasing beyond that if critical hit chance gets increased as well. Also, with injuries being much more likely in ART, i found that i had more than enough incentive to raise my accuracy as much as i could since the next injury could very well bring that down.

Edit: in FPS, accuracy remains constant and entirely dependent on the player, just like it would in FO if skill affected dmg and not accuracy.

However, as ive said, i totally understand your position on this and will still use ART, no question there. In no way should this be taken as a criticism. I simply asked on the off chance you'd agree to place the option to play that way for those who might prefer it.

I think you should stick with increasing damage by skill level. A person with really high skill in a weapon is always going to be able to hit a critical area so if they are aiming for the torso they would pretty much hit the heart every time unless their hand slips or something. (which would be a critical failure) A critical hit would be if you shoot the torso and the bullet hits something in the body and ends up causing more damage through the ricochet effect.

Arwen .... do your thing ... your mods are great

This is great news! :foodndrink:



You too, huh? Felt like "super easy" mode or something, with a few FWE elements tacked on, or whatever.


I've already experimented with simply reducing HP all 'round, and yes, that does help. But wow, is there more to do. I'm confident you'll do this one justice, as you have FO3.

Thanks! I'm glad that I'm not the only one who feels this way. If you're going to role-play, it really helps if you have some imagination to draw upon. This is a fantasy world, yet too many players want it too be too much like real life. My Realism Tweaks are NOT about making the game into a combat simulator . . . this is my attempt to make the game into a better RPG.


Thanks! I do want feedback, but in the end I have to rely on my own instincts as to all the specific changes . . . as that's the only way I know how to do this. I have to do what feels right to me.


I'm glad you're looking forward to the release of version 1.0. I wish that I could whip this thing out, so that I can play the game I want . . . but I need to make a TON of changes to fix what I feel needs fixing. By the time I release version 2.0 Hard-Core should become much more challenging.


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Update on today's progress: So far I've only worked on my Realism Core module, but all the Game Settings are now done, and I just completed the Level List edits (which took several hours, since I made improvements to the condition of nearly ALL the NPCs weapons and armor . . . and there is a LOT of this stuff). Other than porting over my scripts, the bulk of what I have left to do in this module are all my changes to the default weapons and clothing. Then I'll begin work on the Hard-Core module. So it's still going to be at least a few days. But I did a LOT today, so I'm pretty happy with the progress so far.

I managed to get a few of my scripts working, and now have my in-game Options Menu working. :celebration:

I still need FOSE (or rather NVSE) before I can get all my scripts running. So none of my weapon effects will be enabled, but you can change the timescale and you can select which Reduced XPR multiplier you want to use (and change these at any time).

I'm going to try (note the word "TRY") to release something late tomorrow, even if it is just a beta version of my NV Realism Core module.

I figure that a later goal of balancing the economy is going to be quite tough with the casinos and all that. :dance:

one thing i noticed in NV compared to FO3 is that scary enemies............are actually scary now. the deathclaws are fast and deadly and difficult to kill (unless you cheat and use VATS) and the big bug things teh cazadores or whatever are a real pain in the ass. i would suggest that if you do a global reduction in health that you bump up the health of the deathclaws etc to keep them scary and lethal. i actually cringe and back up immediatly and hope they dont spot me unlike in FO3 where i could just one shot them with a hunting rifle.

A lot of mods have been released in the last few days that are just ports of FO3 mods. I'm not doing that.

The changes that I'm making are being done specifically for THIS game, which is indeed a bit different in many ways from FO3. So I'm going to have to redo a LOT of stuff from scratch (which is why this is taking me a while).

I'm currently working on balancing out the enchantments that are attached to armor, and the values of much of the armor has changed quite a bit in FO:NV. I still need to figure out some stuff, and balance out some more things, but I spent a couple of hours late last night play testing what I have done so far, and the big bugs are still very lethal and scary. Don't worry . . . overall, my Tweaks will make the game more difficult, not easier. Weapons will do more damage, but your character will also be more vulnerable (and more balanced with the NPCs and creatures' stats). My play testing ended last night after I was killed when 3 geckos ganged up on me.

Once I add my Hard-Core, Encumbrance, and Med-Tec modules, this game should actully feel hard core, when you're playing it in 'hard core' mode.