Makes me wonder what food's other effects are. Imagine if radiation worked like that in Fallout 3; the food would be even more useless than it already is in that game.

Funny, I'd almost propose the opposite for healing on hardcoe:

-Stimpacks are battlefield meds. They give a quick and quite large boost, that wears off over time.
-Food and sleep is needed to fully repair your body permanently.
-Crippled limbs can be patched up to some extent with crutches or doctors bag, but need a doctor or sleep to fully heal.

As we can see from this thread, many people prefer different specific aspects of the "hardcoe" modes - some adding difficulty, some adding simulation/"realism" aspects, etc. Very much a case of not being able to please everyone.... which makes it seem like mods are probably the answer, since they allow much more customization & options.

I suspect when he says "sleeping doesn't heal you", it's a comment against the silly "sleep for 1 hr, insta-perfect-heal!" thing that some people take advantage of in Beth games. Whereas your ideas about needing sleep to heal are probably more demanding than that.

Pretty much, yeah. I'm fine with sleep offering healing; the old Fallouts (and well, a lot of older RPGs in general) had a "Rest Until Healed" option, so I think it's appropriate. But I also see the value of limiting how you heal, so I figure it's a good enough thing to separate by difficulty. And sleeping just shouldn't heal crippled limbs, regardless of "Rest Until Healed".

As for Stimpaks, I can see them as battlefield meds but I don't think it's necessary to make their health temporary. I do want to see them used as emergency/combat meds more than just "gee, my health is low and I'm just safely hanging out, might as well inject 7 of my 64 Stimpaks to bump it back up". I mean, I'd want Stimpaks to be almost as rare as Doctor's Bags were in New Vegas.

While I don't object to so called 'hard core' options, I would rather they be selectable individually than grouped together into some sort of all or nothing 'mode'. Just because I'd prefer Stimpaks to heal over time and ammo to have weight doesn't mean I want my companions killable, for example.

I most likely wouldn't use it for every build, but hardcoe mode should definitely be in for those who would use it.
I wish the options menu was a bit more like the originals, where you had knobs, toggles and check boxes for particular attributes associated with game modes.

Yeah I've been stumping for that for awhile, now. If Stimpaks were more for quick in-battle healing and food was better suited for "topping off" your HP in your downtime that'd be a neat shift I think. (That's kind of how I already play it anyway.)

That said, I understand balancing scarcity of items in a game like this is... tricky at best. You could certainly tweak loot tables so that you're less likely to find Stims once you've acquired so many, etc. And make them relatively expensive too.

But it'd certainly be difficult to balance in a way everyone would be happy with.

Every Fallout game ever, you tend to hit a point mid-game where you're swimming in caps, ammo, and Stims - not sure what the real "fix" would be, other than saying I'd like to see it tightened up some.

Yeah, I've been doing it that way the last few characters in FO3, but that's because one of the mods I use made food actually useful (as opposed to "+5 hp"). But the foods also heal over time, so they're more useful for healing during downtime rather than during combat (smaller snack foods might heal 10-30hp over 15 to 30 seconds; sturdier foods restore up to 60-80, over 10-20 seconds.) Of course, I could have just stimmed my way through the game - by lv28 or so, my latest char had hundreds of the things stashed in the Megaton house's first aid box.

In FONV ammo had a weight in hardcoe mode, so you cant carry all ammo you can find. Caps however would have a weight in the real world too ...

On the other hand I don't think the "swimming in caps" problem would be that big in FO4. When you can build settlements and have to supply them, you have something you can spend a lot of money for

Yeah, the only issue with the economy itself in Bethesda games is that by the time you amass a boatload of caps, there's really nothing left to spend it on. I never actually had that problem in Fallout 3; but then I've never actually amassed more than maybe a few thousand caps in 3 at any given time. New Vegas was a lot worse.

I don't know about how they can balance stims and ammo, though. I think Fallout 3 just gave you too much too often, where you'd collect Stimpaks faster than you'd consume them. Same for ammo, but I think it's a bit more okay to reach a point where you don't have to worry about ammo any more. Giving ammo weight doesn't really solve the problem of ammo being too common in the first place.

Ammo weight - in New Vegas I didn't feel like ammo weight had all that much of an effect, gameplay-wise. One of those things where it sounds like one thing on paper but in practice it has a different effect. I found that instead of carrying all of my ammo with me like I did in Fallout 3, I was simply stockpiling them at my home base in New Vegas. To some degree this meant a bit more fore-thought on my part, I suppose (since I had to decide what types of ammo to carry with me,) but it didn't have that big of an impact on my gameplay approach, and certainly wasn't limiting how much ammo I had available overall.

For Fallout 4 I'm probably ambivalent about it - I don't see it being a big deal either way.

As far as the mid-game resource "plateau," I'm stil not sure that's not such a bad thing even. Even Fallout 1 and 2 had this. One of my more memorable times in Fallout 2 was my trip from the Den to Modoc. I spent a lot of time in the Den preparing for my journey and doing as many quests as I could to stock up on everything I would need, and it still took me a dozen reloads to make that trip in one piece. Later on in the game, it was almost cathartic to be hitting those same random encounters and instead of rushing to the end of the map as fast as I could every time, being able to decimate my enemies with near impunity.

Like has been said, I think the new settlement-building mechanic will potentially go a long way towards giving us something to invest all those extra caps and resources in. What I'm going to be curious to see if there's any kind of feedback loop involved - where resources invested in building up a settlement net us other gains, or if investing in building up a place really just opens up more avenues toward expanding those settlements. (ie, whether or not building up a settlement and attracting settlers and caravans will give us access to any neat items, perks, or mechanics.) They've said it's a completely optional gameplay element - but I'd like to see there being some benefit for investing time in it, as well.

Basically, more than a Hard-core mode, I think there's a lot to be gained from just providing bonuses and gameplay incentives for activities that players are likely to "roleplay" anyway. Like the Well Rested Perk, or opportunity costs between using Stims versus food, etc. One thing I've always thought would be neat to see would be some unique animations and interactions for bars and taverns and the like. In Skyrim if I went to an inn a server would come up to me and ask me to take a seat, and if I did so they'd come by and open up a dialog window and I could buy some food.

And that was neat, but I'd like it even better if instead of dropping an item into my inventory, the interaction was accompanied by an animation of my character eating that meal or having that drink - and maybe even gaining a Well Fed Perk or something of the sort. This would also be a good time to overhear other NPCs in the place and give time for some exposition. These are activities that a lot of us are likely partaking in to begin with - so ideally I'd like to see that sort of thing encouraged through in-game incentives rather than managing meters for the same net effect. (Heck, maybe even giving weapons a Well Maintained status buff if you spend some time with them at a work-bench...)

One of the first mods I learned how to make was a very simple gameplay tweak that increased all the merchant prices by a multiplier and reduced the amount vendors would pay for loot you bring them. Not the best solution, but it helped.

That's the main issue with hardcoe mode, it's pretty much impossible to balance. I tend to play hoarder characters which means I gather as much material as possible for later use leaving no stone unturned and try to be as efficient as possible with resource usage (be it food, water, ammo, stims, etc.). So all hardcoe mode really did for me was forcing me to be more mindful of when I pop stimpacks and try not to get my limbs crippled too much (hydra is of great help though). I also couldn't hard around all the ammo I find. These things I really liked about hardcoe mode. But I never really had issues with sleep, food or water.

On the flip side if you have someone who doesn't look under every rock hardcoe needs probably have a bigger impact on how they play the game.

So honestly I'd only have hardcoe mode in the game if food and water was harder to come by. Otherwise it's a few nice changes I like (stimpacks and doctor bags) with minor annoyances attached (food, water and sleep).

Yes to a hardcoe mode, although it needs to be better implemented than New Vegas. The food/water/sleep bars didn't enhance my feelings of scraping by for survival, they were just one more thing to micromanage. The stimpak/doctor bag changes were much more effective along those lines. Weighted ammo was nice in theory but in practice it just made me stop more frequently to ditch things over my weight limit. And it ruined the practicality of some energy weapons since microfusion cells are so heavy. Overall I liked it though, I used it on every playthrough.

For as many hours as I sunk into New Vegas, being without the hardcoe Mode would seem...weird. Not a step back per se, but it would feel weird.

Some times, food and water would be a pain to come by, or rads would get out of hand and I wouldn't have the scratch for treatment. Sure I would stockpile food at my home base, but I would only take some food with me on outings. Because inventory space. Enough for maybe two, three days before needing to return to drop off important loot and barter the junk and resupply.

There was always this stress of having enough supplies to push onward without having to turn back.

I'm not sure if I will miss it or not.

Fallout 4 would be incomplete without it. Bring it back, redone and expanded.

FO3 didn't have a Wild Wasteland trait / option. Are you just talking about random encounters?

Yeah Wild Wasteland was a Trait, which was absent from Fallout 3 (I love you FO3, but come on Traits are awesome).

I always used hardcoe mode in New Vegas. I never played without it. The reason had nothing to do with the need to eat, sleep and drink. Those features don't generally interest me. Most implementations of them that I've seen amount to little more than "press (X) every (y) minutes or you die. All you have to do is clutter up your inventory with the plentiful food and water and it becomes a non-issue, just a matter of hitting a button for maintenance. New Vegas did it that way as well as every single MOD I've looked at for Skyrim.

So you might be wondering why I always used it. That's easy. I used it because it made stimpacks unspammable, because you needed doctor's bags to heal crippled limbs and because ammo had weight. If Fallout 4 does those things natively, I'd have no need for a hardcoe mode.

Nope, realism mode

I suppose I'd be for it. Lets just factor out food/drink/sleep though. They were only annoyances that added no depth, just tedium. Did anyone ever actually die to any of this? Or was it oh jeez, I played for 5 minutes, and now I need to drink again?

The things I liked:

Bullet weight - made me choose which weapons to carry, and how much ammo and of what type to bring (which lead to hard choices in weapon load-outs)

Medical - Stim packs healing over time, broken limbs needing special attention... added incentive to not go charging into every situation because you had a 100 stim packs sticking out of you like a mutated porcupine.

Oh yes please. What with the storms and radiation this will be awesome.

I don't want a hardcoe mode. If players have to go into an options menu to turn hardcoe elements on or off, then the hardcoe stuff doesn't belong in the game. If hardcoe elements are designed to be fun in the same manner that combat, settlement building, and dialogue are fun, then I would like to see them.

Basic needs - I don't care for that part, but all the rest I liked - ammo weight, time-based healing, limb cripple mechanics, etc. Followers need to stay protected or essential for me, though. It would be cool to have these itemized in the game options.

Definitely want a lot of survival stuff included, as long as it's all fleshed out.