This isn't my first thread on how easy Fallout 4 is, but I just keep seeing it and I'm shocked it doesn't bother more people...

I just did "Liberty Reprimed" I am told I have to go to an old military nuke storage complex. I'm excited. I imagine Ill have to beat a few Security Bots out front, and contend with turrets and more robots inside. Or maybe Gunners are trying to get the nukes too, and I will have to fight a swarm of them. Or maybe there are smart but hostile Ghouls inside, the old staff of the base and I will have to fight through them. Something challenging to get live nukes right!? NOPE. -You walk in to an UNLOCKED door, walk down the stairs, fight a handful of feral ghouls (really sick of how overused they are) and then meet ONE child of atom, with one weak ass Assautron guard with him. You can either kill them with one grenade or do an easy speech check. This is a late game main story mission to get a bunch of live nukes. Really!?

I got up, and almost quit playing. FYI, I got Skyrim the day it came out, but only beat Skyrim for the first time in May of 2015, because the game was so easy I was having no fun. After bombarding it with mods, Requiem being at the center to make it playable (aka might give a monkey a slight challenge) I was able to play through and beat it. Honestly, the only reason I kept playing FO4 was to know what I need to mod, and what mods I need to request that are beyond my ability.

I watched a friend kill the BoS (he sided with the Minute Men) you do NOTHING. You give the word, they fire arty and the airship blows up. Then, a few vertibirds fly in (which are broken, in their AI, health, and damage output) and men in rags slaughter the BoS. I couldn't believe it... its impossible to lose because most of your npcs are essential. YOU CANT LOSE.

Would it be so much to ask that Preston comes up to you and says "Hey General, we need to take out the BoS, but we cant do it yet." You need to either 1) Go to Diamond City and Goodneighbor and secure help from them to help fight -or- 2) Get a bunch of PA suits for our men and some missile launchers to shoot down the Vertibirds -or- 3) Build enough defense in the Castle to get 100+ defense rating to win the fight. I'd like those -or-'s to be AND, requiring all 3, but I'm asking for the minimum here. But nope, has to be mind numbing easy.

Honestly, this really doesn't bother you guys? It doesn't bug you that you get a suit of T60 PA for doing ONE BoS mission? It doesn't bug you there is nothing tough guarding the Institute? Nothing tough guarding live nukes? The fact that everything is handed to you on a silver platter? NOTHING is earned in this game. Everyone meets you and instantly labels you as hero of the commonwealth, showering you with loot, loyalty and access to whatever you want. Its even worse then the Companions in Skyrim, at least there you had to do 2 or 3 quests, which was insane, but now its 0-1 quest for everything? The only semi challenging fight has been getting the Castle, and only because I was low level.

Well, all those plot and quest spoilers are definitely going to bother some people.

i play with:

survival (ofc)
no VATS (ever)
no perks affecting dam/resis
no crosshair
no sneak perk
demo perk r1 (jus so i can craft explosives)
really no combat perks, just crafting and settlement related perks
i'm still at lvl 20 on this playthrough tho

if you think this is easy then you're going to have to depend on mods to make the game more impossible for you xD

If you want to make it harder, strip down to your underwear and only use a combat knife in survival mode.

The only thing that bothers me is people posting spoilers in a board with a stickey that says DO NOT POST SPOILERS IN THIS BOARD.

It does, yes. I'm hoping that a FWE like survival focused overhaul comes along once the tools are released.
I'm not surprised though, Bethesda doesn't do challenge. Or well thought out quests.

Part of the reason for my avatar is that any and every enemy in F4 is the bunny
But mostly because it's [censored] hilarious

It's a bit better than in Skyrim, though Not much, but a bit

You shouldn't need to cripple yourself to make the game hard. Also, my examples were specific to how in main areas of the story there is nothing or barely anything opposing me. I could get those nukes naked with a 10mm pistol and a rad x. Beating the BoS you could stay inside a room at the castle afk and win. Its insane.

I missed that, my mistake, but 1) I see spoilers non stop on this board and 2) coming to a general discussion and not expecting some spoilers is foolish.

Problem with the game having no level cap. Having a level cap, makes the game much easier to balance. Without level cap, people will out-level the content, and it becomes super-easy. Main problem with balancing, is that Bethesda can't be sure when people are going to encounter things level wise. FO3 and FONV suffered this uncertainty as well, but having no cap, elevates this problem. You could be a demi-god when starting the MQ, and just breeze through.

Edited: Post deleted due to needlessly confrontational tone on my part.

Well, moved or closed, one or the other.
So you find the game unsatisfying. I'm sure there's some game out there to scratch that itch.
We obviously get our kicks from very different places.

You sound extremley anol. Maybe you got to check out what's real and not focus on these details when in reality this is a video game.

The reality is yes very few people are like this. In fact I'd say that thinking like that would be disadvantages to my psychi. Sounds terrible to have such a mindset.

Yeah it's silly that people have to impose handicaps on themselves and basically not use most of the game's available mechanics in order to get a challenge. There are games out there that still offer difficulty without the need for self imposed gimping.

With any half decent build, you can reach this point in your early 30s.

Many of us like Bethesda becuase of the reasons you dislike them.

The game design gives us the freedom to do so much more than any other game out there.

Go where I want, dressed how I want, carrying any type of weapon I want, completing only the quests that I want, picking only the perks I want....or none at all...and still able to be a god....but only if I want to.

My choice.

I've seen elitist bums say the same thing with content that 1% of players couldn't beat. According to the games statistics. No matter how hard you make the content they'll always be a percentage that thinks it's too easy and will be heard.

Fallout is easy but that's not a bad thing. It does start hard as hell on hardest difficulty. Just progesivley gets easier as you perk out your character and guns

If you can't have a conversation without demeaning the other side, then don't make a bum of yourself. What the heck, it's fun though: if you are too much of an idiot not to get shot and slaughtered everywhere you go, get better and stop whining about other people.

I switched on to Survival at about level 5 just to see how it was, but never looked back. In 252 hours I died about a couple of dozen times. It wasn't hard at all, and the extra Legendaries were fun to fight. As a fan of one-shot-one-kill games like the Armas, I see no problem with surviving when I act like one would in the real world: one shot will get you, so don't expose your frail body. The concept of *not* running around and gunning may be strange for a CoD player, but, well, get better at it.

I've finished the MQ at level 79 after 252 hours (with maybe 5 hours exploring two other endings), after seeing what I believe to be most of the map and doing all the quests I could put my hands on. I only used Power Armor in the first BoS quest. No VATS either. After level 5 I played on Survival. Like I said I died a couple dozen times, which is very little considering it was at the highest difficulty the game has. The Martyr enchants and the Nerd Rage later on helped a lot when I was too cocky. In the end I had 300+ stimpacks, 200+ rad-x and radaways, tons of food, without even taking any of the looter perks.

I am not saying that I am freaking fps god, I am most definitely not, I am only trying to be careful. What I am saying is like the OP, I am considering the game to be too easy on the Survival level. Nobody is saying that the game should be super hard for everyone. There should definitely be difficulty levels where everyone feels comfortable, even the demeaning gits who can't shoot straight (I know you see what I did there). But there should be also a level that is actually challenging. The name 'Survival' is scary, but the implementation is not, and in a few hours you won't know what to do with all the legendary loot.

I was expecting to actually be fighting hard to survive in there. Like counting ammo, counting my meds and food, which I expected to be very scarce. At some locations, it is obvious that the map makers wanted us to cheer at some important findings. Like this place with lots of radiation, you find this structure, then unlock something and find a rad-x and a radaway. I am sure I was supposed to go "yay! some cool useful stuff with all the radiation around!", but it went more like "201st of one and 131st of the other, whatever". So the Survival mode should have much less Aid loot so that we actually fight from stimpack to stimpack.

In other places, I am level 50 or 60, and I am fighting level 14 enemies? At 78, during the last phases of the MQ, there were enemies that I had to hit like 10 times with my best weapons. These would never be killed by a level 30, so there is enemy scaling. So why not pimp all of the enemies? Stop sending leather clad low level raiders against me or spawning them at their camps in the world, balance it better level and armor wise, in that optional difficulty level called "Survival".

But why bother since modders will do that job for free, right? Except that most people only play one playthrough (of course you keep hearing here about people on their second and third, but if you think about it, people who play 1 PT then move on don't come and post here anymore), and will keep this bitter taste in their mouths.

Wall of text over.

The basic design behind the game does not allow for any other adjustment of diificulty than buffing enemies with damage output and/or hitpoints/damage resistance. Bullet sponges and instakill enemies doesn't add any new dimensions, you just have to do what you already know how to do for longer. If I were a designer, I'd add a layer of health recovery and resource management. If you can't heal yourself to full health every few seconds and your ammo was a precious resource that you would try not to waste on ferals and lesser enemies, there would be another dimension to difficulty and satisfaction when solving a battle in a smart and innovative way that spares your resources.

Difficulty for me is having layers of things to consider, keeping track of several factors at once and balancing resources, encouraging me to find the optimal solution to every obstacle rather than just shoot at it some more.

A lot of you are missing the point. While I do find the whole game too easy, such as AI being too dumb, there being too many stimpacks and too many low level enemies etc, the point of this thread is how easy things are that should take some effort. There are no guards for the nukes. No effort to earn the factions trust. All the endings are super easy, and like the ending I mentioned, you can actually win while AFK. Isn't that insane to you?

Is it asking so much that as an example, the nukes are guarded by just 1-2 security bot on Very Easy that the casuals could sneak by and by an army on Survival that those of us who want to earn victory had to fight? Could we need more one quest to earn factions trust so we can at least have a semi sense of realism?

This game unlike NV for example has certain creatures, like the mirelurk queen, who can't be considered easy on survival difficulty.

Sure, you can onehit them with maxed out stats out of stealth, but if you meet them level 15ish you need tactics to kill.

The storyquests you mentioned might not have hard enough fights, but there still are hard enemies in the game, which wasn't the case in NV, so that's an improvement.

Generally I can agree with your view, there should be harder fights around every corner lategame, since there is still the difficulty slider for people who don't want it to be hard.

No, it doesn't bother me in the slightest because, point and click-wise, Fallout 4 can be as difficult as you want it to be, just like Skyrim.

Just a little hint, to get the ball rolling before I revolutionise your forum-posting existence by introducing you to the technocgical marvels of spoiler tags:

It's a Role Playing Game, not a shooter. It doesn't lead you like a lamb to the slaughter. In an RPG, part of the challenge is finding the challenge in the first place. Now, here's that example of spoiler tags (as promised):

Having said this, if you hunt bosses, you have to find them first...I mean, it's not like Preston's going to tell you his favourite hunting spots, is it now?

I'm not going to say again that we should not have to ignore good perks and make a weak character to find challenge. That is insane. You should need to make a good character to win.

I'll make an example for you people. Take Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age 3 (2 was horrible) I was able to beat those games without sweating, but at no point playing did I feel it was sooo easy I had to quit, find an editor, and hand edit all the enemies to be tougher. I didn't find any weapons that were utterly under powered. I died on a dragon fight a few times, had to re think it and try again, which is FUN. What is so wrong with that? At no point in F3/NV/4. Have I died and thought "hmm might have to rethink this one" If I died it was because of my own recklessness, not because the enemies were difficult or required strategy.

I'm sorry but, Inquisition? Seriously? I could literally just press random buttons and win every encounter. Corypheus was a joke. I guess this just proves seeing a game as easy or difficult is rather subjective, because I honestly cannot comprehend...

That said, it's like some people in this thread said already - the way Bethesda games are doesn't really allow for 'strategic' gameplay, and it's not meant to. You can add more enemies and/or make them tougher, but the only way that'll make an encounter more difficult is by making it last longer and making you use more bullets and stims. To me, personally, that's not making anything better, just tedious. I also don't agree that you should be forced to make a 'good', as in 'strong', character to win - that's another one of Bethesda staples (that already has some problems with FO4 forcing you to be too combat focused anyway) that you should be allowed to make any character you want, and still be able to win. It was better in previous titles, where you could talk your way out of a final boss fight with high enough speech, etc.

In any case, I like difficulty in shooter-ish games to be more realistic, rather than artificially overinflated. Let any human enemy without headgear die in one headshot from my 10mm, but make sure the same happens to me. But that honestly only works in proper FPSs and would never work in Fallout.

Well in general Inquisiton was harder on max dif setting at low lvls, however it had exactly the same issue as any Bethesda game(OP builds made everything a joke even on max dif, and honestly thats fine its singleplayer game and some people enjoy playing godlike characters, also another same issiue was that you outlvled and outgeared enemy boses-Cory being a prime example of that was meant to be fought at around lvl 20 without the DLC gear, so exactly the same as with any Bethesda game if you are thural with exploring, get the good gear and lvls and dont purposly gimp your build than eventualy everything becomes easy)

Except that's EXACTLY what we're saying. If you want to make it challenging, make it challenging. The only one turning your character into an immortal godlike being is you. Don't pick perks, simple. The game can be as hard or as easy as you make it. If you don't want to do this, then tough luck. Have fun with your demigod character.

Bethesda doesn't spoon feed us a character (the pre-War prologue and the voice aside), they let us build the character we want. That means, yes, we have to restrict ourselves if we don't want our character to do everything. It's called a role-playing game for that reason. You HAVE to hinder yourself to doing only the things your character would do. Maybe he/she only uses energy based weaponry? Maybe you only restrict him/her to certain clothing?

I'm sorry, but this is a roleplaying game. Do you know what that phrase means? Clue #1: It's not a FPS.

Bethesda was never known for its difficulty if you wanna get some sort of challenge out of it then you got to start following your predetermined rules and being your made up rules the game or no one else will hold your hands when it comes to you yourself following them you want to set up a rule were you cant fast teavel? Or carry two guns and thats it? Well thats all up to you if you decide to break that rule or not. If someone told you bethesda made hardcoe difficult games that somebody lied.....(elfen lied )