For those of you who are complaining about "Game Balance," I have a question...

First, though, I should say that I think that balance is super important in some RPG's. I agree that Fallout has set the player up to be a god.

With that out of the way, I have been reading these conversations a lot on this board.
Are you all playing on Hard Core and saying the game is a breeze? I feel like you can't complain if you aren't, so I'm just wondering.

I am playing hardcoe. Nothing much hardcoe about it. Just carry some food and water on you. It's abundant in both. I'm contemplating on jacking the difficulty ever since I got my high-power weapons since everything dies with a few hits now

Ive played on hardcoe since it came out and played on hard or very hard difficulty. 97% of the game any where you go is super easy.

Unless you nerf yourself and play really dumb.

It more about players should be able to pick a reasonable way to play and not being jeeped. Thus those "balance" issue are between weapons and craft-able items.

I totally agree with this. The game in itself is easy, but you are playing it properly and intelligently so you won't have any problems. As in, you're not running around trying to kill Legionaries with rusty cleavers for example. Unless you deliberately do stupid things to make the game harder for yourself, then it likely won't challenge you all that much.

In terms of balance, I knew from the first hour or so of gameplay that sniping was the way forward. Unbeatable at long range, ideal at medium distances and against multiple enemies, and easy (with the use of VATS) at CQC.

I'm playing on Very Hard hardcoe Mode and it's 'meh' about 40% of the time, lolcat cakewalk 50% of the time and 'well this was slightly challenging' 10% of the time.
So combat balance is completely shot out the window.
And thanks to the +5 caps from the DLC's the character specialization balance is also shot out the window.

I know I can gimp myself.
But I shouldn't have to do so for combat balance when I'm playing on the highest difficulty.
And why do I have to make every character an idiot with 1NT just so I can have character specialization balance?

Anyway, the fact that the highest difficulty is called Very Hard hardcoe Mode and that I can pimpslap just about anything in the Mojave with ease I'd say that balance is something Obsidian completely failed to achieve with New Vegas.

On that note: Yes, I'm gimping myself to get a sense of balance. But I still should not have to do so.

hardcoe Mode though should have been called Survival Mode because there's nothing "hardcoe" about it.
Just adds some realism tweaks.

I've never tried the game without it; and don't plan to.

well talking balance u must take into consideration that the game is made to be played in different ways : melee , energy weapons , explosives . Obviously if some dude charges u with a big hammer and u have a pistol and empty a clip on him it will finish him before he reaches you so then it's basicly bye bye melee weapons ,

nobody saw laser weapons in reality so u don't know how a laser affects u , and by the time that laser hurts someone u already shot the laser wielder in the head and he's soon dead

explosives : face it alot of them require time to reach it's target and it can be avoided ... better then u can avoid a bullet

obviously most of us started the game on very easy and after played it 20 times ( cuz it's a nice game ) we know where we need to find everything we need .... comparing to someone who is maybe playing it the second time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awsQs4ct0c4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn0WqJL6GCI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqLkpcHavZE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG63Bsb5Hqs

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Not hand held ~yet, but it gives us an idea of what we may see in future laser weapons.

A laser with a combat-output causes immediate, explosive vaporization of the tissue it hits, and tends to be noisy and flashy as it's output does the same to the air it passes through. It's less 'kid with a magnifying glass' and more like getting hit with a blowtorch. We can build them, but we don't have powersources miniaturized enough to make them personnel weapons...yet.

Play it like me in VATS and 3 person view only. Makes it feel like an RPG where stats, perks and numbers count. Leave the CoD first person view game play away. No matter how hard devs try they can't make enemies as good as some shooters.

Choose weapons and armour more for the looks instead of stats.

Don't snipe all the time and run around in power armour.

The game is not very hard but it doesn't force you to use "the best" items and builds either. At least for me this is more important than anything else.

Unfortunately, even without the sniping and PA combat is still fairly easy, since the AI's vocabulary does not include the word 'tactics'. A well-armored lemming is still a lemming, after all.

For at least some of us, the balance discussion is not so much about combat in particular (although we do think it needs improvement), but rather about how the game system said combat is part of makes it (too) easy to become excessively powerful compared to even the toughest opposition. I don't play on VH because I loathe 'bullet sink' foes, but given that it's not hard to amass thousands of any one caliber of ammo I'm sure it wouldn't be any more difficult than the Normal I always play at, and that's a real problem IMO.

One of our main complaints is how the 'difficulty slider' fails spectacularly at its job as we see it- rather than making ever-hardier foes it should be regulating supplies, altering the difficulty levels of skill checks, altering SP per level, and so on. If it worked this way then the 'Hard' part of Very Hard would actually mean something, and currently it really doesn't.

There's also the fact that the increasingly high level cap means characters will become less and less diverse as more and more skills get capped out, which we feel heavily diminishes the 'Role' part of Role Playing Game. To us, a major part of our play comes from building our characters according to what we want them to be, such as a Cowboy or Scientist, with the attendant perks and skill choices; the ability to max 8-11 skills by level 35 without really trying means that instead of one or the other you have both, which kills character diversity. Granted you have to be a bit more careful with perk selection in F:NV, however at L50 you'll have 25 picks and will likely be taking 'filler' rather than continuing to build up the character.

Basically: we want our choices in character building and difficulty selection to be meaningful, and currently they really aren't.

hardcoe mode is just annoying. There's a difference between a game being too hard and being no fun, or being too hard, but still fun, making you learn the game's ins and outs.

Very Hard, No Fun = Battletoads
Very Hard, Very Fun. = S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

STALKER is great shooter because it has bullet physics are at least somewhat realistic and variable recoil instead of automatic spread on every shot (accuracy should be different from recoil spread) . It does not have skills to balance, drugs, weapon mods only effect recoil, range, accuracy, and noise suppression. That allowed them to balance armor and a lot easier. Although, I agree that the highest difficulties on every game should force you to play intelligently and then still even have some trouble. In skyrim they are getting rid of back pedaling and being invincible against melee critters by climbing on rocks, and I hope those changes make it into FO 4 (those changes alone would make the game a lot harder).

So in Skyrim we wont be able to climb rocks or creatures will be able to climb them too?

creatures can climb them too...

i knew lasers melt if they are fixated on target and seem good weapons for shooting down a rocket but even if they manage to make a portable laser weapon vs an assault rifle it's no match


i guess they can make enemys shoot u're legs if u're a malee and kite u around and then sneak and mine all the exits of a building dunno how fun will that be

Phew! Thanks for the info and sorry for the offtopic.

See this vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGaO9YwMqBU

The effects of an experimental navy laser melting through a boat motor and disabling a boat. At first glance, you think "whoop de do, they have to focus it in one spot for a certain amount of time, in order to melt thru the motor casing and catch it on fire." But stop to think for a moment, if that intense beam were focused for only a second or two on human flesh, clothing, eyes, etc... you get the wrong impression from 'laser guns' in games and movies- it would take a truly incredible amount of energy tightly focused, in order to instantly burn a hole through someone or something like the affect of a bullet... but why bother? If you hit your enemy for just a second and fry his face/eyes off, or light him on fire to where he's running screaming across the battlefield like a roasting chicken... well, you don't need to put a hole through them to kill or majorly incapacitate someone. Combat lasers of the future will be more of a 'fry your enemy' weapon, than a 'punch a hole through them' weapon. And the kind of heavy, hot thermal body and head armor it would take to defend against a weapon like that... would be a major undertaking and severely degrade a soldier's combat mobility and endurance (unlikely most guerilla fighters would have any defense against it).

But of course the navy wasn't about to show any live tests of what their laser can do directly to people... you have to infer that yourself. And again, experimental... early times. Give 'em a few years to master the tech and more miniaturization... look out. They'll get 'em to where you could mount them on top of a humvee, like a machine gun or grenade launcher- and eventually, squad-level weaponry. You watch.

Ok
#1 dont group "most of us" with yourself. I have never in 24 years of playing video games lowered the difficulty level......... EVER.

I raised nv to hard before I ever started. I play most games on the second to the highest difficulty. I took HC mode an never shut it off.

Saying people played on very easy is an insult. Even if you didn t intend it to be.

There are laser weapons in development that burn through really thick metal pretty fast. Problem right now is it takes so much to power them, and they are so huge that they are not useful in the theater of war yet.

wait...so we cant back pedal anymore like actual human beings? O_o?

ok maybe they are a bit further ahead than I thought they would be.

Laser weapns look like they would burn your skin. lol

The biggest thing with Fallout Tech is the miniature, safe nuclear reactors. Using them and an electric drive system made those cars we see everywhere in game. From what I can tell, the civilian world had abandoned oil...didn't need it anymore. So the Great War was even more horrible, because they were fighting over something they could do without easily.

Batteries that are actually little short-run fusion reactors...batteries that are actually little tiny fission reactors...the tiny super-shielding to make them safe enough for general populace use in electronic gizmos without sterilizing everyone...

Weapons that generate hyper-excited plasmatic matter, and then encase it in a temporary magnetic bubble and hurl it at something with weapons-grade accuracy. Lasers in the 'vaporize' output range. The YK-series pulse guns that just outright hit you directly with a MFCs worth of pure electricity. All possible because of the advanced, miniaturized nuclear power systems.

The whole plot... ~the reason for the great war was over that last remaining oil and uranium. It was both.

hardcoe isn't difficult it's just tedious, one of the reasons why I didn't play in that mode. I do agree that Fallout's balance is absolutely ridiculous and I hope that's changed in Fallout 4.