Food in FO4 is far from useless, cooked the food gives better healing than raw/pre-war packaged food, no rads and also you get xp for cooking it

Problem with the higher difficulties is how they make it harder which is too make everything a massive bullet sponge.

As opposed to making the enemies smarter, higher in number, better equipment earlier, but bullets kill you and THEM fast

Not that hard to make it more difficult on higher settings, there are a lot of ways apart from making monsters eat more bullets.

Some examples in random order:

- hunger/thirst/sleep system could be added

- less carryweight

- weapon/armor degradation

- ammo/cap/stimpack weight added

- less chance on crits

- possibility to be attacked while resting

- addition of gun/melee slots

etcetc

The above all will add an extra layer to the game thus making it more hard, though some will call it more grind or more tedious etc, but that is why the above should be optional. Anyway lots of options though you may not agree with some or any of them.

PS: missed the 'quote' button somehow, but i'm replying to post above me

Ok first off how do you realy make enemy AI smarter? There is only so mutch you can do in that regard even today, because you have to have the AI try to realise why its hits are missing and how best to take advantage of the terrain, and that is not easy. Things a person can eyeball and say I need to go over there, and then adjust on the fly, an AI would have to create an endless stream of three d models to try to find the solution to, add in freinldlys to the AI who are also moving and the AI does not want to hit, and the problem gets worse.

Higher in number? Seriously? What in the real world is the diference between 1 opponent with 1,000,000 hp and 10 opponents with 100,000 hp? After allOh right if 1 opponent needs to do 1000 Dptime interval then 10 need to do 100 Dpti to kill you, but you still need to do 200 Dpti to take them out first.... But

1-once you take out the first one their Dpti drops meaning that as you take them out they turn into less of a threat.... But then your often going up against a group of opponents already so you already know this....

2 just backpedal a bit, and or go around a corner and drop a land mine to takeout multiples of them out with one shot,

3 Make them "smart" so they all don't pile into a single blob? Then you can basicaly create a situation where you can take them out one at a time...

Oh wait.... That already happens in fallout....

Better equipment on them earlier?

Seriously? The bad guys in fallout 4 escalated instantly to a deathclaw as an opener and you got to walk off with a freaking tank and mini gun.

Next time you want them to open with modern power armor and a mini nuke machine gun? Remember in games like this the curren bosses gear is the loot you use vs the next boss and sell off a few acts later.... Exponentially increasing stats just turns everyone into exponential bullet sponges.

And frankly making everything one shot kills just forces everyone into sneaky sniper builds and savescuming

they and obsidian did all of that crap years ago,

They took repair out of the equation and made caps harder to earn, along with the current prices, because now we have WYSIWYG loot.

as for less carryweight? Forget it. If your crafting you need a [censored] ton of mats to do anything, and forcing the player to make trip after trip back to base is bad enough when you already need to cherry pick your loot just to keep moving in a combat zone in this game, especially when some of the quests now have expiration dates on them.

Less chance on crits? Then they lower the health pools on everyone.

Attacks on resting? They did that. People complained and just did not rest, which led to other problems.

actually stimpaks are instant heal and food and drinks are heal over time. If you are in a heavy fire fight you really don't want to use a heal over time. I have had up to 50 or so stimpaks and in one heavy fight dropped down around 20 or so. So I treat stimpaks like a rare commodity.

How much you heal will also depend on your character build and armor/load out.

Agreed. I have a food/drink mod for Skyrim that sets natural Health/Magicka/Stamina to 0 and provides various regen bonuses to food, depending on what it contains (protein for Health, fats for Magicka, and grains for Stamina; mixed dishes like stew give multiple effects). Also sets food duration to several game hours for a full meal, so you end up eating roughly when it makes sense for your character to eat. Does a good job of making food/drink a necessity without making it either a micromanagement nightmare or a completely ignorable (see also: vanilla New Vegas) "You are 13% hungry. -5 maximum Hit Points." system.

FFXI also had excellent food mechanics which, with some forethought, could be adapted to an Elder Scrolls/Bethesda's Fallout-style game. XI's system was more about longer-duration percentage-based buffs, so it'd be more "video gamey" than "realistic", but would still provide incentive to eat and drink without being unplayable and/or toothless.

I wouldn't call food useless. It is handy for roleplaying and the cooked variants of food come with additional effects such as stat boosting and damage resistance, effects that stimpacks don't have.

The cooked food is NOT useless.