I've been replaying FoNV for 25 hours now and it's been bothering me. I did my first playtrough on Normal difficulty, hardcoe mode on.
Some parts were pretty hard, and overall difficulty felt pretty good to me. I love games that are challenging. When I replay a game, I usually change the difficulty
to change things a bit. So with NV i changed it to Hard. To my surprise, it wasn't harder hell, the game felt WAY easier. Spots where I died a few times in normal mode
were easy like hell now.

I decided to switch the game to very hard. Maybe I was just use to the game and I was just getting better (Which I don't think is the case since I've been playing FO3 for a while)
Result? Very hard difficulty was no different than hard, or normal. Now I'm asking myself is it is a bug, some kind of problem with the game or, maybe
patch 1.02 changed the game's difficulty setting, making it WAAAAAY easier for some unknown reason.

I know there are some bigger problems out there. Still has anyone had the same problem? Post or after the patch. Honestly I just hate playing easy games. It pisses me off and I usually
never make it to the end. Sadly most of today's games are easy, especially american games.

So let me know if anyone as encountered some kind of an issue on the difficulty settings.

Try killing the Geckos for that Barton guy, near Goodsprings at lvl 1 with your initial 9mm or half broken Varmint rifle on Very Hard. You'll notice the difference then. Or should.

But yeah, it doesn't make the game much harder overall. Difficulty setting decreases your damage output (weapons still list the normal damage but it is decreased) and increase enemies etc, but when you're familiar with the game+the fact the weapons are (imo) too strong to begin with/easy to get at low lvls + it's not hard to avoid being hit by most enemies (if you're not melee), the setting doesn't make a whole lot of difference past a certain character and equipment level.

I'm still half-convinced companions must get some kind of hidden DR boost for the harder difficulties to enable them to survive the harder hits (keeping the same health loss per dmg ratio) as well, since their hitpoint value doesn't seem to go up with difficulty, but have no proof of this.

I asked the same thing long ago. I played the game on normal for a lot of hours then switched to very hard and couldn't believe how easy it was. I know the more you play a game the easier it should get but not from one minute to the next. I still think somehow the levels are mixed up. Maybe I should try very easy and see if that is super hard.

Well like in most games, if you change the difficulty mid-game, I don't think it takes noticeable effect until you load a new area/enemies, or perhaps save then reload so it can reprocess the spawns.

It's definitely harder, but having them have some more hitpoints and do more damage to you doesn't do a lot if they never reach you. Difficulty should have other combat parameters beyond that (not talking about the hardcoe reality stuff...)

I have started many new games and it just seems the level of difficulty is unpredictable. I also don't know about some of the enemy spawns. The Come Fly With Me quest... I have done that about 6 or 7 times so far and sometimes the road leading there is filled with ghouls and sometimes it's not. Is this normal because it seems like there were meant to be ghouls there. When there are ghouls there you can also find some dead nightkin around. Yet other times the road is completely empty with just an ash pile half way up.

Enemy numbers do seem to be somewhat random for many areas, as well as maybe being affected by certain clvl points. For instance the bandit camp near Novac almost always has fire geckos attacking it after certain clvl, for me at least, but whether it's one, or two, or three is somewhat random. Same thing with the bandit area near the Legendary Deathclaw cave entrance.

There are some such occurrences that are obviously scripted to have certain numbers, but I think many of them are meant to be random-ish.
I've had live Nightkin show up near the overpass bridge on the way to the Repcon/fly with me, for instance, instead of only finding corpses, but usually not.

I remember a particular place where I couldn't cross a hallway without dying on normal difficulty. Tried it again on Very hard and I barely got a scratch, my companion were getting blown to pieces
and now they don't even loose HP. So I guess they get boosted in harder modes. It may be a bit harder to kill a bad guy for me but I just need to hide behind my companion and I get trough anything easily.
Maybe I should just get rid of them... But a like having a mule with me.