Well I started the game on normal and blew over 30 hours into it and then I choose to start all over cause it was way to easy. Plus when i reached a certain point in the story i didnt feel invested enough to make any choice that felt as meaningful as it should. Thus, I started fresh on survival and gameplay is now so much fun and the game is going by at a much slower pace. All this is obvious I know but even though we dont need to worry about eatting, drinking, sleeping and weapon repairs it still feels like a survival game. I just got done clearing what was a simple quest for settlements on normal at the national guard depo but on hard and i used up every kind of my mines and gernades to clear it. Plus when i got to the boss i died like 10 times so i had to sit there and look at what i had left as well as devise gameplans on each attempt. All of which i never had to do on normal. It makes every engadement a possible life and death ordeal. Nevermind the naysayers that only focus on the fact some enemies are bullet sponges. That is nearly a means to an end. If you are well prepared and like trail and error you can overcome. After playing both on normal and survival, it feels like this game was designed to play on survival. Anyone feel the same?

I'm gonna be doing it on my next playthrough sounds fun cx

i thought about doing that too but i wanted to save some story for my survival run. Kind of like a carrot daggling to keep me going lol Well good luck on your second play through.

The only thing I don't like about the harder difficulties is a majority of the enemies just become bullet sponges.

That said, my next playthrough will be on Survival. I plan on taking the game slow and actually developing a settlement, even though it goes against my nomadic lifestyle in these games.

Actually the survival mode just makes me want the geck more. I like the health regen changes, and rad storms seem far more lethal. What I *hate* is the bullet sponge enemies.

Yeah started this game on survival as well. Makes you think about all your engagements, and also not afraid to turn tail and run. When you are a level 4 or 5 on survival, no way that you are taking on 4 Ferals. Sometimes if my friendly NPCs are nearby, I just fall back to those areas and get some assistance in killing the enemies, especially if they are Ferals.

Whenever I see movement in the FAR distance, I crouch, take out my pipe sniper rifle (luckily if found it VERY early in the game), scan/assess the area, and plan my attack very carefully.

LOTS of FUN on survival.

I will wait for modders to make a real hardcoe mode. Making someting take longer to kill doesnt make it funner to me.

Very True! Six 10mm shots into the abdomen of a Bloodsquitoe and that is only half damage to it!!! I try to avoid those.

Well i think it makes for intresting fights. We have so much at our disposal in this game and you have to bring it all to bear to survive. In normal mode i have around 30 bottlecap mines 7 mini nukes etc. What i hate even more than bullet sponges is having all this firepower that sits and collects dust casue the game is so easy you dont need it. Anyhow when mods come out youll have your sweet spot but as it is now: Survival>Normal

I dont get the how some people miss this in there gamplay . I guess they want a halo type shooter where you just blast through it all. In the context of this game, an open world, wasteland RPG, Having to pick your fights and develop on the fly solutions as well as sneaking around or evading some fights all together for tatical reasons fits this game. Although it is a sand box game so if you want to be master chief of the wasteland its your toys. However its short sighted a narrow thinking people who say Survival just has bullet sponges and thats that. They are missing the bigger picture, the quality of gameplay increases 10 fold. Also there are some boss mechanics i didnt notice on normal, like the ghoul who revives dead ghouls, on survival that fight is crazy fun lol

I enjoyed survival until i leveled melee perk to 5/5, and its bugged and i do damage like i dont have any perks at all, cant even 1 shot radroaches now lol. Lvl 45 btw, pretty ez, only challenge was mirelurk queen who is pretty freakin op, but you can just hide in rooms while npcs take care of her

ive been putting off that fight to save more fire power cause even on normal she was hard to kill, only one btw. If all my preps fail i might cheese it and try that. thank for heads up on melee will go 4/5 till patched.

Survival should also disable game saves except when sleeping. Increased health for enemies is absolutely fine, I don't think it should be ridiculously over the top though, but it should be there. I am considering playing on survival although I am still enjoying my original first set up. Disable saves completely (except on sleeping), difficulty is set to hard. At level 19 right now fights are becoming easier due to gear and perks, there are still some tough encounters but I'm really considering starting another play through on survival. Having no game saves makes you really think twice about what you do, trust me. I also wish Bethesda had put a trophy/achievement in the game for playing on survival without changing the difficulty.

I think Hard is a solid difficulty level, at least so far I do - The enemies are not bullet sponges but they will easily surround and drop you if you are not careful -

Does difficulty affect ammo scarcity in any way?

i dont think so but it does get pretty scare cause you need more to kill things, you get into less fights so you loot less so inadvertly it does. Its like im living pay check to pay check for ammo.

Started my first game on survival and will stick to it. Enemioes are only bullet sponges if you use something like pipe weapons, laser muskets are super crazy and melt evrything, I killed so many legendary raiders I lost count and I'm only level 20.

I don't know what people are talking about with bullet sponges....I kill almost everything in 1-3 shots. That being said i do have great weapons and have a lot of damage buffs with rifleman, ninja, and bloody mess. I found a legendary rifle with a perk that makes it fire 2 bullets. Modded it with everything I could at Gun Nut rank 3. Suppressor and advanced scope and has a base damage of 160. Things a beast.

One thing to remember is you can switch difficulty levels at any time in game. No need to start a new game. I switch to survival about 15 hours in when I found out about legendary opponents dropping special items. I just haven't switch back because I've enjoyed the challenge.

In some ways the bullet sponge issue is annoying, but it is the only way to make recources remotely scarce. I still have a ton of ammo, food and meds. But now I'm actually using stuff like medx and psycho in heavy fights.

Unfortunately, I take me switching to survival mode as a bad sign, balance wise. I almost never play games on the hardest difficulty level. I'm usually just not that good. So does this mean that people who usually do are going to get bored quickly? It'll be a whille before modders can adjust difficulty levels.

Played survival from the off and loving it. It's great knowing that anything in the wilderness can kill you, it makes you tense and your progress is slow, carefull and calculated. About 15 hours in now and cleared a few places in the north-west of the map and did a trip to Diamond City but came back to carry on exploring closer to 'home'.

Survival since the begging for me and the first 15 levels have been really rough but my character is just now starting to get quite powerful but i still avoid large numbers of super mutants as my weapons just are not strong enough to deal with them en masse yet. It's great feeling vulnerable for once in a fallout game even if sometimes enemies can be overlybullet spongy and lack of ammo, especially for energy weapons, is a real problem.

Lack of ammo for energy weapons is good - Otherwise they could easily be abused.

I'm now seriously debating starting a new Survival game, haha

This is a beth game we're talking about here. No way should the save system be disabled. Too prone to corrupt save files, freezes and crashes. If we were talking about a game engine that was relatively stable in that respect, then aye, I'd say it would add to the tension. But we all know how Beth games usually pan out, especially when save files get larger and the world becomes more cluttered.

Being [censored] over by an enemy and being [censored] over by the actual game are 2 completely different things. I suspect a lot of people would bin the game if they lost a lot of progress through no fault of their own.