This is meant for the game devs and folks working to try and get this game right:

I have played through once on hardcoe mode, and am now starting a second game and have noticed the following:

1) Before I started my first game, I immediately set the difficulty to Very Hard from the settings menu. I then started the game and upon leaving Docs house, I enabled hardcoe mode.
2) A couple hours into the game, I started running into enemies that were so difficult to take down, that I would run completely through all of my ammo and aid just to get them. So I changed the difficulty to Very Easy just to see what the difference might be. However, there was no difference at all, turns out no matter which difficulty I chose, the enemy stayed equally as powerful and deadly. There were enemy that would take me down from a distance so far that I couldnt get even a 1% chance to hit them with my most skilled and long distanced weapons.
3) Directly adjacent to me, my brother was also playing the game, with the settings on Very Easy and hardcoe Enabled. We were racing head to head to be the first to complete on hardcoe. His game play was so easy that he couldn't understand why I was having so much trouble. We compared the exact same gameplay locations and it was unbelievable the difference.
4) I chose the independent route and ended up fighting Legate at the end. The game was so difficult, that I couldn't make a dent in him, at best took down two red bars with guns, 5 with my powerfist before being overwhelmed by his pals.
5) To be clear what I mean by difficult, Geckos were taking 8 or 9 hits with a CND 100 Plasma Rifle. Even the most basic enemies would outrun me, and drop me with just a few hits, even when wearing high class armor and high HP.

Before you start picking me apart, pls note that I am well aware of ammo types, skill levels, armor, etc. I am also an experienced game tester (but don't know it all of course). We tested for many hours the variance in gameplay on two xboxes. To further test, I also deleted the game off my Xbox hard drive, cleared the system cache, removed all my save files and auto save file to an offline usb drive, and reloaded the game. The first thing I noticed is that all my game settings were exactly the same, which leads me to believe that they are stored in my profile. I then inserted the usb and reloaded my save game, there was no difference. I attempted to change the difficulty setting and move through autosave locations. I deleted the autosave file and disabled autosave (using the save device trick), etc.

My only conclusion is that when you enable hardcoe mode, that the game locks in the difficulty you had selected at that time, and even if you attempt to change it, it will not actually change it. I do not believe that hardcoe mode forces you to play on Very Hard, it just prevents you from actually changing the difficulty (even though the menu appears that you have changed it).

After spending four hours trying to take down Legate, I loaded an old save and redid a couple levels to get my speech high enough to just talk him down. If that is what Very Hard is supposed to be, then it is compeletly beyond plausible and certainly beyond fun. Getting sniped with a Head Crit from a guy you cannot even see (due to the poor distance drawing on the consoles) gets very old. I spent most of the game walking around with Crit Limbs and a major hobble... which just got funnier because laughing eeps you sane at times like these.

ALSO please note that when using VATS and selecting a body part (lets say the head), I would line up four shots, near point blank, unarmored enemy head, riot shotgun. You know how every AP shot shows the enemy health bar reducing a bit, which is an indication of how much damage the enemy may lose... Well that portion would work correctly. I would line up four shots, the bar would indicate that if successful, the enemy would be more than toast... However when you actually fire the weapon, the enemy wouldn't take more than say 1 or 2 bars worth of damage. Somehting genuinely screwed up here, as if the enemies had thousands of HP, but the game didn't know it.

NOW, moving on to game two.

1) I deleted all save games and auto save from first play.
2) I set game settings to Very Easy before starting the game.
3) I immediately noticed how different the game was, pretty much everything would drop with one shot even with a poor CND weapon at long distances. I also noticed that the XP rewards seemed to be much lower.
4) I moved through the first quests and out into th wasteland to find creatures that werent giveaway kills. They too were easy to take down.
5) So I decided to change the game to Very Hard to see the difference... well the game didnt change at all... at first. I even replayed the same areas by reloading saves and confirming that it was set to very hard, and nothing changed. The creatures weren't more powerful at all... Human or Animal.
6) But then I noticed somethign strange happening... in large battles with multiple creatures, as I took them out one by one, they slowly and surely, got more difficult, not only more difficult, but they would also give me more XP when I dropped them.
7) By the time I finished off a group of 4 or 5, the last person would be so difficult that I felt like I was on Very Hard, and the XP would be 4 to 5 times higher than the first. It didn't matter which order I dropped the enemy (multiple tests), they just got more difficult.
8) Once the battle was over and the fast paced combat music stopped, everything would revert, and the next battle would roll the same way, from easy to hard.

This makes me believe that the game might have an auto adjust, where the game gets more difficult if you play well... or some worse bug where it doesn't even know how to store and keep a difficulty setting properly. Either way, I hope I haven't screwed up my second game by changing the setting.

I have searched for this topic on four forums, and I am only starting to see a few comments trickle in. One guy was so frustrated that people were ignoring him and blaming him that he put a video on youtube... I hope others may start noticing this crazy potential bug.


Other comments:

We have experienced the black monitor bug where the blank computer screen appears when trying to pick doors and locks. We temporarily corrected this by deleting the game off the xbox disc and clearing system cache. We then played only from the disc which seems to work. We believe that this may be caused by the running the game and downloading the patch BEFORE installing the game to the hard drive, but we cannot be sure and it quite frankly doesnt make much sense as I understand game updates are stored in system cache on the Xbox. It should also be noted that we have only experienced this bug on Xbox 360s models (the new ones). Neither of the people (me being one) who are playing on the older models (One gen 3 and One gen 2) have experienced this bug. Again, I think this is not likely related, but thought it was peculiar enough to mention.