I think that hardcoe mode should become standard in Fallout games, considering that many people complain about the difficulty of the newer games, but it's far too limited in its scope in New Vegas to really do the idea of a hardcoe mode justice. I believe that "hardcoe" should not be a mode, but a set of options that you can select to customize your game experience.

I drew this inspiration from a mod for STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl called AMK, which adds a tab to the main menu called "AMK Options". These options allow you to adjust certain HUD effects and the amount of stashes you find in the game.

It could work very much the same way for fallout, you can choose what food/drink/sleep requirements you'd like, ammo weight toggle, increased mutant/faction spawns, and other hardcoe suggestions that give the game more challenge. I also think the HUD overlay and breath effects are cool too. In the mod, if you put on something with a gas mask the outline of the mask is overlaid on your screen and breath effects fog up and then defog the lower areas of the goggles, just like it can in real life. It is optional in STALKER AMK, and it would be optional in Fallout, but it would be nice to see special HUD for Power Armor, for example, which ostensibly does have an augmented reality system in place. I want to know that I'm in power armor, I want to be able to use the power armor's optics for night vision and zoom functions, and I want to hear myself breathing inside my tin suit. Of course, since this would be an option under "hardcoe Options" I can have a feature that I find immersive, and others can discard the feature if they find it is distraction.

One thing I'd also like to be borrowed from STALKER is the stash system, in which you can find information on dead people and from quests about hidden backpacks and chests that contain goodies. In fallout you could call them caches instead. I envision something like killing a raider and reading his holonotes, saying "Knocked over some caravan yesterday, stashed the goods under the old car at the Petro Chico station down the road until it calms down around here", then you have an idea of where to look. You could even toggle whether it should add a map marker or not.

STALKER may not be post-apocalyptic per se, but it definitely has post-apoc elements, and I see no reason why people in the fallout universe wouldn't make caches everywhere. They already do it to some extent, it's just that there is no particular system to direct you to people's caches other than doing a quest and having someone direct you to a static cache that will always be in the game, these caches would be dynamic and constantly being filled and emptied, giving you a sense of a wasteland that is always scavenging and stashing, trying to scraqe by. And of course the caches would be adjustable under the hardcoe Options

I suppose some may say it's not right to rip off STALKER, but it would be no where near the first time a game has ripped features from another game and done them justice, and as long as it's fun and fits in the game, why not?

So what say you guys?

If there was a "hardcoe Options" menu, what would you like on it? What parts of hardcoe mode as it is now would you keep enabled on your menu, and what ones would you disable? What would you add?