When you shoot them in the face and they casually run around as if nothing happened, while a fountain of (pasty, wrongly colored) blood gushes out of them? Yet they don't even seem to flinch and you have to shoot them in the face, in the freaking face, right betw... err 2 more times and then their head suddenly explodes? The exploding part is good but a tiny bit untimely, don't you think?

Plagued previous fallouts, seems to plague this one too. Do really the pixelized npcs of a game of 2000 (soldier of fortune) have more realistic reactions?

Fallout 3 with the broken steel stuff had it the worst I think ive ever seen. I have a mod running on my game that makes a feral ghoul reaver not take 50x more shots from my laser rifle as a enclave soldier. Works a lot better since I dont really care for that school of thought on difficulty.

The enemies in Fallout 4 seem to be much better, they seem to take far less shots than anything in Fallout 3 or New Vegas did. I hope this translates over into the PC being less bullet spongey aswell, letting the damage go both ways.

Well, what made me post a thread about this is watching a video where exactly the thing I am describing happened. And I was like "god, not again".

I prefer Fallout's approach to the modern FPS approach. I think it's more fitting for an RPG, personally.

Its just gameplay trumping reality there. If I shot a raider square in the head with a 10mm pistol I don't think he'd be getting back up if the Falloutverse was a real place. But because having a one shot kill is incredibly unbalancing to have at level 1 with the pistol you got out of the vault with, and would be incredibly easy. So it'd take a few taps to take him down, atleast im hoping. Once again that Broken Steel stuff just wasn't good at all, and is more what I think of with bullet sponging enemies. A double tap to the brainbox with a gun instead of literally firing that laser rifle into a ghouls head 30 times.

I actually like it. It makes sneaking around and doing all the huge bonus damage actually worth it. If you screw up and get spotted then you gotta pay for it in bullets!

Actually mods like FWE and Nevada have proven that gameplay can be very balanced and even more challenging this way.

As for sneaking, I love sneak characters, I enjoy them but I find it very weird and disturbing that a sneak attack to the leg would kill a human over a shot in the face. Sneaking is still very valuable as there are many, many enemies who could realistically take a shot in the face (mutants, deathclaws (ok overkill) etc)

I understand the sentiment, but if we could easily one-shot everyone, I imagine all the combat encounters would become rather boring. Do you also feel a high level player should be easily one-shotted by low level NPCs?

There is a mod for Skyrim, Deadly Combat, which uses scripting to make enemies jump out of the way or block most of your ranged attacks. Hopefully someone will make a similar mod for FO4.

FEW and Project Nevada for FO3 beg to differ. Look them up on nexus. At least for me, gameplay/combat with these mods was far more exciting.

They surely will but we will have to wait at least 6 months after the new GECK gets released probably.

I use Project Nevada with New Vegas, and even when the player is high level it still seems to take quite a lot of bullets to bring down the tougher enemies. It makes sense, though, as there is a Damage Threshold stat in this game and you must break through their armor.

Definitely, but it adds some realism to the damage enemies and your character does. Humans for example will relatively easily be one-shot (especially when shot right in the face). Mutants and other creatures of the wasteland like deathclaws, which always had a legendary damage resistance, are another story. Not one-shooting them, even when shooting them in the face, is more plausible. In general it makes bullet damage more believable.

Yep. Another reason why I did not like Broken Steel, the shielded aliens of Mothership Zeta, or every enemy in Honest Hearts. The amount of times I ran into one of the bullet sponge enemies and spent a good 30 seconds knocking them around rag dolling with the Gauss Rifle until they died. What a bore.

I understand that something that comes with higher difficulty by default is enemies having more health, but there comes a point when you way over do it and what is supposedly "difficult" turns into running around in circles while shooting the Albino bullet sponge until its dead. I hope they have found a balance in this that modders have so easily achieved over what developers can do.

Assuming the game allows me ways to pick off enemies/avoid them I quite like really heavy damage in games. To a point. I once modded archery in Skyrim but I was using so many mods something weird happened which really pushed up the damage arrows did and I would often die from one shot, it was surprisingly fun because I actually had to stop and take note of whether or not there were archers in the vicinity and kill them first. But there was also the fight with Alduin on the mountain with Deadly Dragons which was [censored] awful, it's a really good thing I was playing my mage with that because there's no way I would've gotten past that with my arrow guy.

Personally, i don't want one shot kill's unless my gun skill's are really high and even after that not all the time, so i don't mind bullet sponge's to an extent, i preferred to play NV on very hard, but too much of a sponge wouldn't be good either.

It's more of an Action RPG, like Deus Ex, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Dark Souls and so on, are. Ergo, you need to to make sure not only the story and the character development is good, but also the gameplay itself. And to be honest, it's a perfect way to give the player a sense of progressing in the game world and getting better at what he's doing.

Take a guy who really knows his guns, another one for some martial arts/knife/ fighting, some Bear Grylls type of a dude and learn from all of them how a newbie will behave at the start of his adventure and how he should do down the line. For instance, he's having trouble holding the gun right, but later on he figures out some new grips for the gun or he learns them from characters spread throughout the world, stuff that may be useful in CQC battles, other that is useful for medium to long range engagements, etc.

Use pixel perfect, subpixel perfect or whatever you need precision in order to have the armor/clothes/skin/fur covering the body act properly depending on where you shoot or hit your target. Take some clues from ArmA's ballistics, from Sniper Elite's anatomy (which should go in and act accordingly to real life for those hardcoe players), from ArmA's stances, some weapon rest, etc. Take a sneak peak at what Thief did right back in the day, Splinter Cell and other that took the stealth system one step forward, like multiple solutions and non lethal approaches. Look how Dark Messiah combined the environment with the fighting and magic system to give a really good, immersive experience. Basically look around at other games, see what they did good and apply that to yours. And that can be done for Fallout and TES as fell.

Give some love to the AI so that they act like humans will do in certain situations or animals would. Make them smarter, make them in greater number, use AI on the GPU since AMD demo it like 6 or 8 years ago on a HD4850 with thousands of individuals doing their tasks while it also performed real time 3D graphics. Throw some nice physics if you're at it, make it look and feel real!

Yes, it takes time, but Bethesda is no indi developer, they have the resources to pull this off. If you want to do an action RPG then do it properly, if not, stick to clicking on enemies and wait for the statistics to play the part. I for one, would like more control, would like my actions to count, to feel how I'm learning something and how the story develops with my help, because I chose to do that. Time has passed, we have the technology, we only need the will.

FWE still had bullet sponges, high end enemies were even more of a bullet sponge due to increased DR.

Stuff like this is why I typically play lower difficulty and just wear very little armour. I want each shot I take and deal to both mean something. None of this 'ten shots to concuss' nonsense.

High difficulty in most games means that enemies become tougher and tougher.. I've never liked this form of difficulty. In my opinion, it should simply make you weaker and weaker against the same enemies. In the beginnings of an rpg like game, on hardest difficulty.. enemies should be able to one shot you. You'd still have the same chance of killing them as you did on any other difficulty. For Fallout all they'd really need to do is drastically lower your starting hp's and hp gain.. So on the hardest difficulty you'd start of with maybe 5 hp's and gain 2 hp's per level.. something like that.

Like most Bethesda games.. making your character overpowered has never been a problem. Keeping your character underpowered has. While some of us might try to do this, It seems like a difficult thing for many people to self monitor their characters and create their own balance within the game.

Another approach that is a pretty fun way to increase the difficulty is using mods that boost the number of enemy spawns. You can end up getting into some tough and epic battles, often running away to try to survive.

Has there been a description for the new difficulty level?

The new legendary enemies will probably be bullet sponges. Sigh.

The type of combat that I like in all video games that have firearms that you shoot is when you shoot the NPC's or real players in multiplayer one shot from a gun with a high caliber bullet or lasers or plasma to the head you die.

One shot to the heart you die.

I hate it when I shoot a NPC('s) 2 times in the head with a .50 cal and then they only die instead of one time.

No, you are wrong. I've played with FWE for over 300 hours - these are not bullet sponges you are talking about. These enemies you are talking about can "realistically" take that many bullets.

For example a half-naked raider would never be a bullet sponge. Human skin is fragile. Whereas an enclave soldier with a power armor would take even more hits than vanilla to bring down because the power armor should deflect most of the bullets. Same applies to your armor/lack of it and damage you receive. FWE took the armor materials and natural DR of enemies into account - that is what made it amazing.