The game was kind of hard for me at first, but at higher levels I wouldn't get hurt much anymore. The hard part was making sure my companions wouldn't die and trying not to get hit at all.

But i only have the super awesome ps3 that has no mods and can't even keep psn a float YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.

Post-patch, you will notice a few things that should make fights against humans seem a bit tougher:

1) The spread of shotguns and SMGs is much lower. Bad guys with these weapons will hit far more often.
2) Service Rifles are probably the most-boosted weapon in the patch, and NCR carries a boatload of them. They fire about twice as fast and are much more accurate.
3) Some raiders (such as Vipers) will carry Grenade Rifles or Grenade Launchers and that will cause big trouble if you don't pick the carrier off quickly.

New Vegas was the first RPG I've ever played, so it was pretty damn difficult. I think it took me around 10 hours to get to the Mojave outpost, and 15 to get from there to Freeside. And I wasn't going in blind. I had spent hours beforehand trying to find good builds and general tips. And it was still difficult as hell.

On subsequent playthroughs it got much easier, however. I'm on my fifth right now and I'm having no trouble at all. But, NV is the only game I have played more than once (except for FO1).

If this game had been even more difficult, I may have stopped playing, and then I would never have played FO3 and FO. I'm not asking for my hand to be held, and I'm not asking for the game to be made easier. Im just showing the huge difficulty gap between seasoned RPG veterans and newbies.

I don't really consider these RPG's but Fable 2 was easy as hell.
Fable 1 also became rather easy.

Other than those then yeah, NV and FO3 ain't got nothing on other RPG's in terms of difficulty.

The SMG thing + explosives is what I'm looking forward to the most in terms of potential enemy npc's. I love it when they lob explosives at me.

I need to buckle down and do an in-depth vanilla solo replay (no companion/low XP mod/any mods) because I really do like the changes made to the weapons/think this is my favorite patch so far. I'm just very distracted right now.

Some games arent Challenge diffiulty, but annoying difficulty,

I bought fo3 read what the stats did for me on the pip boy and went from there. Both games have a hard looking guy on the cover, so l figured things like guns, ew, explosives would be important.

Then as the game went on I said lockpick, science, speech will be important, because I don t want anything to stop me from getting info or items.

My combat tactics and knowing when to use what where come from on line shooters. Human opponents are way harder to figure out than AI.

So I think my on line shooter back ground helped me with fo combat.

On line shooter is not real life, but they will teach you what to do, and what to use when If not you will be slaughtered.

Hmm, humans seem to be as powerful as the creature, if not more powerful... or maybe that's just me.

Alot of the humans have armour with damage threshold. The only creatures that have dt are deathclaws and scorpions Im pretty sure. This is why there are armour piercing bullets in the game. Takes away alot of the dt and gets the metal into the meat.

I sure there are much easier RPGs.

If anything, it is the basic promise of action/shooter-RPG fusion not working great that makes the game unchallenging; I personally think is mostly about the AI.

Thanks for giving the Vipers some teeth so they're not just Bloatflies with guns.

I guess. Then again, I hardly use AP rounds, lol.

We need to bring GOJIRA! back

Too many 1 or 2 shot kills and we will be playing a fps. Rpgs are about stats hp stuff that takes major damage. If you take that away you may as well play SOCOM 4

Well that is why they are harder, because metal isn t meeting meat.

Yes the Great Khans in Bolder City crippled me all up pretty fast with 10mm smgs. They didn t wait around either they all came out spraying. The smg weapon mod really helped, because those guys took very little hp before. This time they crippled my chest fast.

I even had fully repaired reinforced leather armour 10 dt and a 2 dt helmet. Yeah the NPC smgs are way better IMO. Getting hurt makes me happy.

I just wanted to bump this topic back up. With all the patch posts I don t think enough people got a look at this poll before it was 5 pages back. IMO

Once you get a companion your overpowered, once you get the gauss rifle or any other powerful gun, your overpowered. But I like a game I can beat

What I'm wondering about is why Energy weapons were virtually untouched by the patch. At least the availability could have been increased somewhat.