After playing a very, very long playthrough of MMM+FWE, wasteland spawn mods and other things I felt would liven up the game and increase the challenge (i.e. challenge meaning sense of vulnerability throughout the entire game, scarcity, stiff penalties for careless behavior - not bullet sponges or one shot kills all the time) I still felt there was room for more to be done. Although using mods like those really are a beyond night and day difference between vanilla, there are some issues I'd like to iron out if I could for a future playthrough:

-SPECIAL stats. FWE boosts SPECIAL stats and makes them important, but building a god character that is balanced between every stat and skill is still possible by level 20. The only current way to bring it down an FNV-style SPECIAL balance seems to be to purposely give yourself a weakness in one area by making something important (i.e. AG, PE, EN, or LK) a dump stat and throwing it all in CH or in a specific field you would decide to be your character's 'strength.' Even so, there are so many ways to increase a SPECIAL stat you really wonder what they were thinking when they added those Broken Steel perks. Is there a mod that brings the SPECIAL economy back under control like it should be in a Fallout game?

-God-mode companions. I had three companions in my playthrough - Jericho, Sydney, and Lucy. Jericho was my Big Guns guy, Sydney another smallgunner (like me) and Lucy had the energy to take out the annoying sentry bots and giant radscorpions. I rolled with 3 because I felt I really needed that vs FWE damage and MMM spawns. At the same time though, anytime I got ambushed and it happened to be them who got shot first, they would fall over KOed for about 60 seconds while I reacted and took out the ambushing enemies - maybe as high as 10-12 of them sometimes, spamming grenades or using a bozar, at places like Dupont Circle or out in the wasteland with the Wasteland Patrols mod. I thought that the fact that you have companions, as necessary as they are for mods that increase the difficulty, was a serious mitigation of risk to your play experience. There aren't even special circumstances, like a Mini Nuke explosion that can punch through essential status. Your only option is to turn that flag off, but then it's only a matter of time until the wasteland claims their life. That would add an element of challenge, immersion, and require you to consider force preservation before acting. It's a huge difference because if YOU die, you're forced to reload a save. Your companions are second in line to that, and if they die then you have to decide whether to take the cheesy route and reload a save or continue on. The problem with this one is that there's only so many companions in the game to being with, and there's 50-60 pages worth of companion files on nexus. Is there a single mod (besides sharing and caring) that adds a number of voiced, immersive, and well-made modded companions that can be downloaded and applied to a game so this aspect of risk can be added to a future playthrough?

-Lack of settlements. Some of the mods that add travelers, patrols etc to the wasteland solve the 'empty space' issue between landmarks, but what ends up happening is you have this huge population of people killing each other out in the wasteland and still, barely any settlements - as if people would prefer to go whack somebody than settle down and try to survive. The only good city mod I managed to find was Outlook Commons, but the structure of that place is a bit hard to get used to. If you decide to take out Paradise Falls for example, it's one less area you can buy stimpaks / sell items to - you've got Megaton if you didn't blow it up, Rivet City, and Tenpenny - nothing else besides the four caravans. This is one area that FNV has that I wish Fallout 3 had before it. It's pretty disappointing, for example, that a 'settlement' in Fallout 3 is Girdershade, a place with 2 buildings, 2 people, and no shops and a lame quest (and creatures and dogs fighting each other outside all the time). The unmarked 'meat vendors' in FNV are more of a settlement than Girdershade.

I'd appreciate any thoughts or ideas on these points. Thanks in advance.

- IIRC, FWE also has a alternate "harsher" special stat distribution option, + no special bonus bobbleheads. Also, in the original FO's there are ways to have a very Gifted character... Sounds like your craving a more role-playing-defined character... there probably is a mod that forces this, but you can always just resolve to limit yourself and actually accept those limitations. However, FO3, unlike the originals, is extremely combat oriented (x100 with FWE + MMM)... so it's so much easier to "role-play" an ugly warrior with virtually no trade-off. I think this will ultimately be up to your own vision and restraint.

- Companions... I love the idea of companions but the actual experience infuriates me: hop on a rock to get a nice view and your fellow traveler runs off into the blue yonder... ugh. Otherwise, I would go with reloading when a friend I care about dies. I don't care about all the available companions though. I played through FO2 more than once with melee Sulik... part of the fun was finding a way through a fight with him surviving!

- I guess you can find some settlements by browsing the Nexus. It is the Wasteland though. In the originals, 90% of the map was barren, though full of encounters. There are also quite a few places where scavengers have set up, such as Lucky's Grocery and various shacks.

Hopefully you'll get more input and specific recommendations.

You know what, you might be right. I think that was one of the options I just glossed over in the module menu when I began. By the way, it's not that much about roleplaying ,its just that I had a really combat-oriented character - small guns, big guns maxed, energy at an acceptable level, even melee (before I knew what a bad idea thatd be with the mods i was using, lol) to a decent level - yet, I had enough to FWE-style 'unlock' computer terminals, locked objects, and acceptable levels of sneak...The only skills that suffered were speech and unarmed, and you can boost your speech check chances so much in this game, default or otherwise that I never ran into a speech check I couldn't pass so long as I was using the right items.



If something like that happens then yeah, a reload is understandable. But a companion is such a huge asset to this game, and being careless should put that asset at risk (just like it would in real life). It would force you to play better because once you lost that asset, you'd never get it back, or at least in the same form. That adds immersion as well. FO2 this wasn't really possible because there were only so many companions, Karma was more of a limiting factor, and like you said the AI was a mess with just about everyone except Cassidy.

My comment re companion ai refers to FO3 and how they often literally run off out of view when you go somewhere (like a rock outcrop) they can't access. :ahhh: The originals definitely had some ai issues as well but not so much with terrain, which after all was completely flat. Maybe it's rose tinted hindsight but I mostly have fond, comical memories of the ai in the originals.

How I hope NPCs can jump in Skyrim!