How is it a "great move" to not include something that was completely optional when it appeared in New Vegas?

Saves me doing a run to get all achievements.

That's a pretty big plus in my opinion.

It was 99% expected. Which is weird because they added food crafting again, you can also grow your own farm and stuff. What's the point with these other than small buffs? Shame. Would've loved first playthrough with hardcoe mode like in New Vegas.

I agree it wasn't very good, although for some reason I always used it. It really doesn't add to the difficulty, it's just some annoying thing you have to take care of.

In the other hand, I hope they add real difficulty in some aspect (not "25% more damage from enemies"). I mean the kind of difficulty that makes you rethink your strategies in a battle.

I hope so too, no joke. Because Ive never played a actiony-type game on easy/hard because of this. I always go for the normal setting, since just straight up adding or removing numbers goes counter to what I think the intended experience of the game is.

The only game I can think of that doesn't do this is Galactic Civilizations 2. As far as I can tell, the AI doesn't cheat as the difficulty level gets higher. It simply gets a million times smarter, and brings your careful plans to ruin since it is much better at playing the game than you. Its the same idea behind how computers have been able to beat humans at chest for years now, computers can think millions of moves ahead in mere seconds, allowing for sheer thinking power to beat us.

I think strategy is the only genre where you can make a hard opponent that doesn't cheat. When it comes to Fallout 4 with stuff like increasing HP, increasing damage, or straight up giving those supermutants a aimbot, those things are all the game playing by different rules than you. More HP, more damage, and more anything else than your PC could possibly muster.

Maybe one day we'll figure it out, and we can have some soldier enemies in a game that bring you down in record time on a higher difficulty setting using advanced tactics. But even in pure FPS games Ive never seen a game that is able to make the action harder in a realistic way.

+1

I like higher difficulty settings where instead of just tacking on HPs, enemies gain either shields or armor and are presented with a bar above them. Reducing those so that then you are able to kill them off is a great way to handle difficulty. Of course, giving the player additional tools to do that (AP ammo, etc) is what makes it even more interesting. Upping the ante of enemy AI to make them more aggressive and more agile to try and always flank you or get behind you is even better.

On topic: I want a hardcoe mode, but will evidently have to wait for the inevitable mod to show up. Its not a deal breaker because the mod community is deep in talent...but I will have to wait. Regarding cooking, I have this feeling its going to be more like Skyrim (virtually useless except for roleplaying) as oppose to New Vegas where you could craft some fantastic healing items and buffs or use ingredients to stave off sleep with caffeine or tobacco. Ammo having weight made Reloading very useful. It all fit perfectly with hardcoe. This doesn't seem too popular now with modern gamers who view such things as cumbersome or superfluous. You guys win. Congrats. I, for one, will miss it.

Food can be "useful" without having a "you must feed yourself every X hours" rule. It can provide healing, it can provide buffs. Now, in vanilla Fallout 3, it only healed 5hp. So yeah, it was useless in that game. In my modded FO3, where it does all sorts of things: from various levels of heals over time (anything from 10 to 100+, depending on food quality), to Brahmin milk reducing radiation, to Yao Guai and Dealthclaw meat giving combat bonuses... food is very useful, without being reduced to a simplistic "eat food. because we said so."

I have no idea yet if food will be "useful" in FO4. Depends on what kind of effects it has.

I'm certain that someone will create a HC mod. I personally want to create some food recipes that will provide temporary buffs. It may even come out as a patch later or as part of a DLC. The main reason I wanted to create a food mod was that I felt food was very under utilised in previous games. Maybe it was just me not utilising it.

It's a lot easier said than done in an FPS, tack on open world and rpg elements like different enemy types, archetypes within those types, the same enemies using wildly different guns, etc.

Difficult AI is the type of thing you build your game around; it's a gimmick like complety destructible environments. You certainly don't spend all those man-hours and dollars on AI, only for this specific intelligence to be used in X difficulty mode only.

I don't think there has been a title that does interesting things with AI, save maybe sports games and some fringe titles, but for the most part adding modifies to the enemy is the most efficient way to handle it.

Asking for more is unreasonable until technology gets better or you want to see decade long development cycles.

Probably "hardcoe mode svcks in Fallout: New Vegas. What were they thinking?!"

It did svck. I did enjoy the fact ammo had weight, the rest of it was annoyingly out-of-touch with the game, an obvious last minute micro-management system which took nothing into consideration, such as time of day.

Glad it's gone. If it can't be done right, don't do it at all.

man i was hoping for a hardcoe mode on the ps4. that is one thing i loved from new vegas, but hopefully they do add it soon. or at least make another difficutly for hardcoe players like a very very hard. lol instead of just Very hard.

Really disappointed in this news. Hopefully they made up for it in some way to show the fact you live in a wasteland where things are scarce, but my biggest problem is why did they feel the need to withhold this information for such a long time. Seems like they might have been nervous about the backlash from the community. Really disappointed in that most of all. Anyway, still getting the game and once a hardcoe mode has been released and refined I will be getting it.

Didn't know that about GCII, I only played it in normal, good game that one.

Indeed, tbh I'd prefer this kind of "difficulty" to be the "normal" tier, but these days they want to use "normal" for easy. I was thinking not only in a more reactive IA, but also an emphasis on the strengths and weakness of every creature. Like when in Baldur's Gate you really need a spell to reflect magic against Beholders or you are dead in 4 secs, but no one ever tells you that, those bastards . When you come back with a new strategy (not talking about higher level) and you win a battle that was impossible before, you feel you cracked a puzzle, well that's what I love.

The fact I was penalized if I didn't use my supplies like food and water, and occasionally had to side track from whatever objective I was trying to get to in order to hunt for food, or water resources even if it was irradiated was one of the primo things about New Vegas that made me fall in love with the game all over again. Getting to play it and have to do the same thing again was the feature I was probably most looking forward to.

Finding out that once again food and water are in the category of "crap you carry till you find someone to sell it to" was a deal breaker for me and I canceled the pre-order bundle I had on order.

Maybe someday I'll pick up a copy of the game out of the second hand game bin where it probably belongs now since if they messed That up lord only knows what else they dropped the ball on.

After finding it out I now completely understand why they were so closed mouthed about the features of the game, they didn't want to admit they blew off player expectations and kill their sales.

Well, that's basically the very definition of immersion. Enjoy the things you play. You never had the feeling you were ripped out of a dream when suddenly someone steps into your room and disturbs your gameplay session? That's immersion. You never played a game through the whole night, figuring the next morning it already is morning? That's immersion. You found it bothersome to rise from your stair because of trivial things like eating and toileting? That's immersion. Though I agree the term is used in abundance and without a sensitive idea to the meaning of the word. Some call it realism, others call it immersion, and others plainly ignore that it's there. Games need to be a convenient immersion^^

No, gods, no. There's another word for that errr... enjoyment/entertainment?

Everyone giving it a different meaning has created these misunderstandings in the first place and none knows what the other is talking about, which is ridiculous.

Words serve to define things in the world. Immersion has a clear meaning in the lexicon. Deep mental involvement. While your examples are correct it is a completely different thing from enjoyment.

You could argue that deep mental involvement might mean taking drugs, getting high and sitting in front of the screen watching in awe. "These drugs help with my immurshin". But then you could also immerse yourself to a wall so obviously that isn't the case... Wikipedia also clarifies that immersion in virtual reality - any virtual reality - which includes video games means feeling that you feel you live in the virtual world yourself.

So quit giving it 99999 different meaning already... Besides making it useless as a word, you create misunderstandings those who use the word for what it is can't understand you and you can't understand them which is somewhat silly, don't you think?

ofcours not! You expected Bethesda to make true hard core mature game without compromise?? they are mainstream , and that means they product-Fallout4 in this case has to be playable/easy enough for majority of population and give em Rambo style game,simplified RPG elements so they can play brainless shooter.Anything worth thinking or hardcoe survival would be too difficult for them , and they dont want to loose large pool of those ,afterall money comes first quality second unfortunatly

Add to this that Bethesda never made New vegas, so why the frak do people expect bethesda to copy Obsidian?

"I love Corvettes, and I've been looking forward to getting the new one for years. But I just found out the stereo doesn't have a jack for my Microsoft Zune, so I'm not going to get it."

You know that's what you sound like, right? A really minor feature, that most people were pretty certain wasn't going to be included, is a reason for you to no longer want to experience any parts of the game. Really?

Considering how popular these modes are as mods I don't think "unpopular" is correct.

I don't care if there are mods of this, it's not the point. The point is that Bethesda never bothers to make things more challenging.

If this is real, then I'm really pissed.

The good news is that the explanation for hardcoe mode's absence is that Bethesda had better things to do with their time. I'm looking forward to the better things.

Translation: "I'm entitled and got upset when they didn't cater to my specific wants."

Don't let the door hit you on the way out. I'm sure you'll have fun playing Day Z instead.