I don't think saying I don't understand the reasons is the right word. And sheesh, that's pretty harsh.

I'm not mentally slow you know.

I created this thread to finally figure out once at for all, the big deal about realism mods, and I have learned enough to understand. However, yes, I will never play the mods, because they as I should say, break the forth, or maybe the fifth? wall for me in a way that I can't stand. They break the wall completely. They break my immersion in the game worse than any other case. I'm sorry, but that's just the way I am. I cannot stand that much of a break in the barrier between reality and fantasy.

Goethe, games exist to make you escape from reality though. So, I don't understand why you're saying you don't play a game to escape from reality. The entire reason games exist is to help you escape from reality. Unless it's a flight sim. Games as I know them wouldn't exist if they weren't designed to help you escape from reality.
Who wants reality? It's a bad place.

Or, do I just have the words all mangled in my rotting brain?

People say the same thing about movies, and I don't that it's true there, either. Not universally true, in any case.

Some movies and games do aim to help you escape into a fantasy. And some people seek out exactly that aspect.

However, it's possible (and, in my experience, rewarding) to engage movies and games in a different way. For instance, a really good movie in my opinion leaves me with new insights or new questions about human nature, about the way society works, about how humans and god interact, etc., etc. So, when I watch a movie, I find it most rewarding to actively engage with it as it is going on - questioning, probing, thinking. And then, continue my thinking afterward, hopefully among discussion with good friends.

Games are different than movies but I engage them similarly. What I find most fascinating about games is the overall balance. How do you keep such an enormous amount of variables going at once and not have everything fall apart? More fascinating - how do you put it together in such a way that the game continues to be challenging, fun and playable?

True story: My favorite game of all time is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick. The character creation and advancement system is endlessly fascinating to me. A limited amount of points to distribute and striking consequences as a result of different builds. Essentially, this is math, and math is one way to come to understand the world we live in better.

More fun is playing a game that I love and then talking about with other people who love it. Far from being an escape from reality, it becomes an avenue for more reality.

gothemasticator

Escaping from reality can be many things and adding realism mods are not done to get closer to reality. It is done to make the game more believeable and to add to the difficulty. If you add weight to ammo you can't carry as much and thus the game gets harder. If you need to eat/drink/sleep, the game gets harder as you will get penalties if you do not. FO3 is a RPG and RPG's it about playing a role. Some people that play tabletop games go into details when it comes to food and encumbrance and others do not.

So it boils down to taste. Do you want your game to get harder? Do you want to feel the game is more "real" and suffer if you do not eat/drink? If you say no to these questions, then add other mods that better fit your needs. There are mods out there that will add powerful weapons and armor right away to your character. I would never use them as I want my game to be hard. But the mods are there for a reason, because other people like them. Do I understand why people use them? Of course, they want something else from the game that I want. Will I use them? No because it doesn't fit my taste. Clear enough for you? And sorry if you find my words harsh, but sometimes I'm a bit of a stinker

Yup, you made that abundantly clear, multiple times.

It has also been made extremely clear that many other people feel differently - just as it has been said repeatedly that you realize people have different tastes, and that how one plays the game comes down to a matter of personal choice. Yet your posts come across as if they are one arguement after another about why the point of view other than yours, is flat out wrong - even if it is only in your opinion.

Even if you don't intend it to be, that does come across as insulting --- much like repeated statements of, "If you want {insert type of gameplay}, then go play {insert some other game}" - seemingly suggesting that people are in the wrong by modding their own FO3 to be more to their liking, rather than going and playing some other game that (in your opinion) would be better suited to their wants and desires.

That having been said, your apology is noted, and accepted. Please take the above as an observation of how insult that you never intended, was taken from your words - for the sake of hopefully improving communication here in general... rather than as a slight or accusation against you.



As to the actual topic at hand, I will say this much:


I agree that, sometimes, I play games to escape from reality - though that is not necessarily the main goal. The main goal for me is always "to have fun". Sometimes that is accomplished by escaping reality. But I also enjoy chess - and I cannot say that I have ever garnered any enjoyment from chess due to its ability to help me "escape from reality". The enjoyment there is purely in the thrill of a challenge - and possibly (hopefully) - overcoming that challenge.

I disagree however, that playing Fallout3 with realism changes like the need to eat/sleep/drink, means I am not escaping from reality -- or that my in-game experience comes anywhere close to "suffering from the petty problems of Real Life".

The petty problems of Real Life for me, have nothing to do with the need to eat/sleep/drink. No, the petty problems of my life are dealing with the dramatic personalities that I have to, in order to collect on money that my business is owed. Or hand-holding my boss at my day-job, through obvious things that he can't understand no matter how hard he tries. Or worrying about my girlfriend's continued unemployment, or my not having enough money right now to get the new computer I want, a 50" plasma TV, and a new couch all at the same time. Those are the things I play games to escape from.

My reality does not include shooting super mutants, looting raiders, wandering a wasteland looking for things to scavange, or sneaking around ruined buildings hoping not to get ambushed. Entering a world where all of those things are part of "daily life", makes for pretty substantial escapism for me.

Where do I find the enjoyment in that? More than anything else, in the challenge, and the feeling of accomplishment and pride in overcoming said challenge. That is why I am always finding myself wanting to play the game with more and more difficult settings. Does the need to eat/sleep/drink add much to the difficulty? No hugely. But it does add another aspect of peril in some cases - especially if you add it to NoFastTravel. If I get bogged down fighting a huge lengthy battle that I can't break away from for a while? Suddenly I find my performance degraded by lack of sleep. Sooner or later, I'll find I'm hungry/thirsty and have run out of things to eat/drink. So now the challenge becomes to either fight through several more super mutants in order to get into the abandoned grocery store behind them, or duck down into a nearby metro station and deal with ghouls or raiders standing between me and an old abandoned water fountain - hoping I grab some food from a fallen enemy along the way.

Why is this fun for me? Because it is the challenge and sense of accomplishment that I find fun. Not the challenge and accomplishment of killing things - if that was all I wanted, I'd go play a real FPS. No, it is the challenge and accomplishment of surviving in an otherwise inhospitable wasteland - in enforcing my will, and making a change in my surroundings - in besting what is thrown at me.

Why do I play Fallout 3 (an incredibly easy game, out of the box) instead of something more difficult then? Largely because I adore the genre - it is something my imagination can reall "sink its teeth into". But my imagination is always focused on the complex challenge of surviving and thriving in a harsh wasteland - not in a single-minded focus on combat, or tactics, or any other single task - most of which I have other games that focus on those individual areas.

...and for me at least, having no fear of being spotted by a sniper first, because that critical head-shot means nothing more than a stimpack to me, is the opposite of challenging and enjoyable. Having there be no cost to using the "wait" command repeatedly so that I can hit up my favorite vendors every respawn-cycle, until I've purchased everything that my heart desires... isn't fun for me.

Okay. I understand now. Since it's apparent I lack a speech skill greater than 2, I'll just go away from this topic.

After all, I've learned now the problems I've caused, and let's face it, I do learn from my mistakes. Usually over a period of centuries, but still.

Any further communication with me should be done by PM. I'm off of this topic.

What a great description!

True story: I modded Oblivion with FCOM to increase the challenge. But it wasn't enough, so I ended up installing some realism mods that added hunger, thirst, the need for sleep and sever fatigue penalties from physical activites. At lower levels, my character would actually faint from two jumps!

I had great fun for a couple months there. But my life circumstances have change, and I don't have the gaming time I used to. So, I began finding my progress painfully slow during the shorter and less-frequent gaming sessions. As a result, I have remodded the game with Oblivion XP, which changes the leveling system to something much more like FO3's. Gain experience points for doing things. I also removed all the realism mods. Now, I have a less challenging game, but I have loaded it with quest mods. So, progress is faster. I progress further during each gaming session. And, instead of the challenge of survival, I'm getting my enjoyment out of playing through the quest-creations of some very creative people.

Just changing my world to suit my current needs.

gothemasticator

Which, IMO, is what modding is really all about.

I know for myself, what mods or combinations of mods makes for a more enjoyable game, changes at any given time. Probably the most obvious example being fast travel --- when I have enough time in my day to day life to really sit down and play, I'll turn it off (not really - I just don't allow myself to use it at all - on a character by character basis). When my two jobs (day job + run my own company) take up so much of my time that the remaining scraps get fought over by my desire to game and my desire to spend time with my girlfriend... then I'll play a character where I use fast travel - so that I'm not frustrated by "What did I do with this gaming session? I walked back to Megaton from Minefield."

I like it when I don't have to empty 23.34 clips into some dude.

He aint superman. The cake is a lie.

Perhaps the radiation caused the bullets to become spongy.

"We've secretly replaced the lone wanderer's ammo supply with bullets made from wadded up toilet paper painted to look metallic. Let's watch as he approaches a raider stronghold, and see if he notices..."

Same reason I like them in Oblivion, and other games: they heighten immediacy, immersion, attachment, excitement, tension, danger, challenges... you get the drift.

I played on the hardest setting first of all, but that wasn't enough. So I sought out mods, as I am wont to do anyway, to fix it (for me) - and lo and behold, it was how it should be (for me)... in time, much experimentation and tweaking later of course.

But I don't care how other people play their games - that's their business. Matter of fact, I'm more than willing to try to help them with their playstyle goals, no matter how different those might be. And, well, now I'm confused, wondering why some people apparently don't feel the same way...

(sigh)

I don't really get the point of this thread. While it's an interesting discussion, it ended up fairly soon with the author just stating he can't 'accept' this or that. Basically killing the discussion.
You rightly stated that it ends up with the question what's being fun for people. Well, it always boils down to that question, right? I was talking to friends some time ago about RTS. I loved WC3, one said he didn't like it. Because he doesn't like playing aggressive from the begin and rather builds up slowly, clashing his high tier army with the opponent. I'm totally different to that, I love aggressive playstyle. The second guy was more in between, depending on the game. On the other hand I personally am a builder when playing turn based strategy.
And I don't like FPS. Really don't. It's no fun. But I play FO3 from first person.

Regarding FO3 mods, I can't even say what's great about necessity mods. Maybe nothing, at least for me. It's the first time I use one with FO3, never did before because it annoyed me. Now it actually was fun in the beginning of the game. Having to drink, getting lots of rads, not really having the money to constantly seeing the doctor and not finding enought RadAway. By now it's virtually non-existant. I loot some places, head back to my house, drop stuff, sleep a bit, drink, eat, use infirmary.
But the reason I activated is actually just because it's implemented in FWE (I think). It's there anyways, why not run it? So I did.

Regarding that, I'm not much of a realism player. But I am when it comes to the game world.
Why is there food to be found everywhere? It's 200 years after a war! Even if the food was still digestible (I doubt that) those places should've been looted clean long ago! Why do Raiders live like that, litter and corpses everywhere, but hardly anything else, apart from beds? It's not like all of them can be so nuts that they like living among corpses, limbs and filth. But it's actually the vast majority. And why are all settlements spread out like that, each one autonomous? One should think that people flock to places like Megaton or Rivet City and that those places in turn control the surrounding countryside, establishing some kind of government.
The way the game worlds looks it's not 200 years after the war, but rather 15 or so.
So these are actually things that bug me and where I'm all for 'realism'. Most people probably never even notice these things.

Hard not to notice when one of the first things you're asked to do (if you choose to accept the mission) is to check a nearby major supermarket for remaining food, "200 years" after the bombs fell.

For a book that is to be distributed to the (remaining) general public as if there's a possibility that there's so much food there, even 200 years later, even with a major city just over the hill (which you would have expected to have cleaned out the supermarket all by itself in the first 3 years), that Joe Random Wanderer could read said book and think "Hallelujah! I am set for life, because I now know about the Nirvana of the Super Duper Mart, where there's food a-poppin'!"

The funniest part is, you do the quest, and (if you find the Raider's collected stash) tell Moira you found food, she prints that there is food in the S-D M, even though there is in fact not (all that's on the shelves in the main store is cleaning supplies, pretty much).

I mean, sure, it's fun the first time, given that it's your first major encounter with multiple enemies, to sort of waltz in there and blow all the punks away with relative ease, then return "home" in triumph, but the whole thing is so totally illogical that it's really hard for me to suspend sufficient disbelief to "just have fun". Certainly it's an impossible task on subsequent playthroughs, since, again, if I wanted to just mindlessly shoot stuff, I'd be playing Crysis or something.

Now, naturally such mad inconsistencies are not balanced by the addition of realism mods, because it's not possible to balance such mad inconsistencies at all, but the area of realism that does make food worth eating both necessary and hard to find, that makes radiation so poisonous that clean water becomes precious (thereby making the MQ actuallya worthy and substative goal), and that makes wounds actually injurious so that finding medicine-- or a somewhat trained medical professional, of which there are not many, given that the med schools are not accepting students-- do help somewhat to bring the world into some kind of stark contrast, which it is supposed to have from the git-go.

After all, you're a Vault Dweller your whole life up to now. Your father went on and on about how, despite the "problems" (problems? the Overseer is a madman!) you were "safe" in the Vault, and you should stay there, no matter what. You would think that, when you were forced to leave, that you would be struck by the harshness of the outside world, that you would be something at a loss (find food and water? kill for food and water?), and that you would be a bit tortured by "moral" ambiguity, insofar as your father had kind of a point about there being some benefit to staying in the Vault at all costs.

But the outside world is not harsh at all; there's food you don't need to eat and medicine you don't need to use all over the place. You're not at a loss, because apparently your sporadic and secret training with your BB gun (and its apparently unlimited BB's since you clearly could practice enough to get a bit good at it) was good enough to be going on with. And the only reference to any ambiguous feelings you might have about your lost life is a mention that you can make when first introduced to Moira (about how this "outside" room is so big you can't see the ceiling) which is taken as a joke, and thereafter abandoned.

Realism mods don't completely resolve this, because the world of this action-"RPG" is constantly revealed as too shallow to hold to its convictions (how can you exit the Vault with any skill in Big Guns, for example? I don't care what you said on your G.O.A.T. exam!), but they do help to minimize the shock somewhat, if one cares about such things .

I already apologized for that. So, let us never discuss it again as long as we live.
It was not my intention to sound so arrogant and unchanging.

I wanted to end the topic, but there are still a few things left to be said.

At no point was my posts supposed to be taken as a "David's word is law, dare not challenge him."

Sometimes I am bad at coming across the right way.

But what remains, is that I'm sorry to say this, it's like I can never voice my opinion.
My entire thing about making this post was to get my point across that I couldn't understand why people play with realism mods.

I finally understood. For that I thank some people. However, this topic rapidly became hostile to me.
So, if anyone wants to continue this thread, please PM me. I am going to get a Moderator to lock this topic.

Closed by OP Request