I know a lot of you guys play on the harder difficulties and I have no desire to convince anyone one way or another. Really, I just wanted to put down what I have observed and to the extent that can: a. inform others or b. lead to interesting discussions about how the "difficulty" could be made more satisfactory to a variety of users by modding, then I will consider this thread a success.

First, I have a toon I've played up to level 78 on Normal, and despite not making it very far in any given quest line, I've got a bit lukewarm on continuing to play her. I may go back to playing it, and will definitely keep the saves so I have a high level character to test with once GECK is released and modding ensues. But after about level 50 on "Normal" difficulty, everything just gets easier and easier.

I have also turned up the difficulty to survival on this toon for a while (level 73 to 76 or so) and observed that it was still a lot "easier" even than "Normal" for a level <=10 toon. Yes, the "yield" from drugs and food is less, yes mobs do a bit more damage, but when your main weapon does 505 damage, and you have ~650 HP and enough AP to down 5 or 6 enemies in one round of VATS (not to mention scores of hits of Ultra Jet, Psycho, Overdrive, etc.) the difference between Normal and Very Hard/Survival seems negligible.

I would like to mod the game to achieve a satisfactory difficulty process and I have ideas, but would welcome discussion.

When the game was first released I played around a bit with difficulty and reached some conclusions that normal was plenty of challenge (at least at the start) and that "Very Hard" was just stupid. ~10 head shots with a 10mm pistol at point blank range (level 2 or 3) to take down a mongrel!? Puleezz . . .

So here is the test I recently did with a new toon to confirm to myself that I "do not like the feeling of 'survival' difficulty"

I was playing the guy as a nasty, killing anyone and stealing everything, Cait was to be his girlfriend . . . I was at maybe level 4, still milling around the Concord area, when I come upon this group of people standing around a grave. There is a preacher, a woman with no armor, a man in a patched suit, and a ghoul fellow in a "cage armor." I'm robbing them and testing how dififculty effects things became my goal.

I played, died, and reloaded several times and here is what I observed.

1. On Survival Very Hard, and my toon at level ~4 with no perks that would impact pistol use, I could shoot the preacher (no armor) in the head at point-blank range and it did not kill him. In fact it took another 7 or 8 shots to kill him.

2. Even on Normal, it took two headshots.

3. It was quite obvious that NPCs get buffs to damage if not to hit chances on hard/very hard/survival. Without excessive use of tactics, there was no way I was going to take out all of those mostly unarmored and lightly armed civilians. Their shots hit unerringly and they did large chunks of damage compared to mine.

So any ideas on how to change game dynamics so that we do not have to swallow this PC-nerfed NPC-buffed imbalance, while also making the game reasonably challenging at all levels?

I think it's too easy once you break the lvl 25 threshold. It svcks because I'll be fighting a Deathclaw or Behemoth or something and Dominant Species starts playing and I can't even hear a quarter of it before completely owning my enemy. On my first playthrough I took Bloody Mess on top of my weapon perks. Never again. Too easy. I don't want to tear my hair out, but I want to get punished for not treating combat as a life/death situation.


Truth is, difficulty comes from enemy AI. Buffs and debuffs aren't cutting it. Healing delay was a solid step in the right direction.

Than play on normal.... why do you care what people think of you? Are you really that vain? Also Survival just takes a really long time to heal from Stimpacks for realism.

Sometimes I play on hard but usually go back to normal in certain areas. I played on easy for the first 15 levels because I didn't know what to expect. I won't go above hard though. I want my game to be fun.

This has always been a problem with unmodded games.

The best difficulty mod I ever played was SCS for Baldur's Gate, no idea if something similar for Fallout is even possible.

Just imagine enemies using stimpaks, drugs and other tactics the same way a regular human would.

They just need to remove HP per level.


A lvl 100 raider has better stats, damage perks and better gear and possibly damage resist perks but doesn't need 500 more HP compared to a lvl 1 raider. It just turns enemies and the player into late game bullet sponges.


This makes the damage resist and extra HP perks more beneficial and relative damage isn't decreased by level so drastically unless the player is actively selecting perks to improve their damage mitigation.

That is an interesting idea and it occurred to me as well.

Lets assume we go with the "Normal" difficulty settings as the starting point, so player and NPCs are on more or less even footing, but with higher-tier mobs being inherently more challenging, and all the mobs having their existing strengths and weaknesses. What if we tried the following:

1. Multiply _all_ (maybe not "all" but nearly all?) base weapon damages by 10. Instead of a typical "pipe pistol" in the hands of a novice player doing 13 damage per shot, it would do a base of 130 per shot.

2. Reduce player HP gain per level to 1, and leave all "baseline" mob hit points where they are, but divide higher tier versions of mobs (scum, scavver, veteran, etc.) by the appropriate amount so that they only have +1 HP by approximate "level" past 1.

3. Leave all Legendaries exactly as they are.

What do you guys think of that?

So is that all that mod did? Enable NPCs and mobs using healing? Or was it more than that? I didn't play BG enough to get to high level imbalances but found the game generally pretty challenging at low levels.

Well, honestly I'm not too concerned what other players think of "me" and the difficulty I play at. I didn't start this thread for affirmation or even argumentation really.

I liked "Normal" difficulty plenty fine up through level 40 . . . well maybe as FortifyShouts said, level 25-ish and upwards . . . But it gets way too easy past that.

I think the balance is okay for Normal at lower levels really, and I think that the bullet sponge dynamics are (to my tastes) lame and annoying at any level.

So I wanted to express these points, but mainly as a way to get a discussion going about "what would an ideal difficulty mod for FO4 look like?"

There were plenty of mods that did a good job of making the game hard. For me, Fallout 3's "fallout wanderers edition" comes to mind as my personal favorite. I know many didn't like FOWE, but I did wonders firms to make the game great.


It made the game harder in two key ways-


First reason is realistic dmg- rather than have the player nerfed and enemies become bullet sponges (what the difficulty does in vanilla), it made it to where both the player and enemies dealt extremely high amounts of dmg.


This made the game very hard for me, and more fun. I had to be extremely tactical, taking advantage of cover, trying to shoot distant foes without getting hit, while watching for raiders or super mutants that rush my cover. It made me very careful.


More importantly, it made me feel like I was actually using guns. It made gunplay actually fun. It always felt stupid to me how even on normal in FO3 (and this game), I could shoot a raider multiple times in the face with a 10mm and have them not even flinch. This makes it more realistic. Guns feel like actual guns. Both when you use them on NPC's, and when NPC's use them on you.


Second reason- supplies were completely revamped. In both vanilla FO3 and 4, it was WAY too easy to collect drugs, caps, and ammo in a post nuclear world that should have been looted 10 times over. In 4, I already have well over 170 stimpacks, I have never run out. Other chems and ammunition/ caps/ bobipens are also too frequent and easy to find.


This fixes that. Everything is far more scarce, forcing you to really take advantage of all resources, and forcing you to make tactical choices in their use. I never use chems in vanilla, but did with this mod- anything to keep myself alive, and reserve those golden, ultra rare stimpacks for the absolute direst of situations.


Ammo is always in short supply (as it would be in real life). Every shot MUST count. You have to use other weapons that you may not have considered viable at one time.


All supplies cost way more at stores. Barter actually plays a better part in trying to keep yourself stocked. Really, all skills actually became unique and important- you couldn't be a jack of all trades.


You're able to build up good stocks of supplies as you play, but only if you play smart, and it takes way way longer to accumulate them. For comparison, level 30 character vanilla in FO3 ended with about 100 stimpacks in reserve, my lvl 30 character with FOWE had about 45. That's a lot with this mod installed.


This may not be everyone's ideal version of "hard", but I loved it. The best part about it is that it was 100% customizable, everything from dmg to loot rarity, to game/ skill mechanics.


Any overhaul mods (especially one released by the team that made FO3 FOWE and it's NV equivalent Project Nevada) that make the game like this, you can bet I'll be one of the first downloads.


Edit: sorry for grammatical errors- I typed this wall of text while splitting my attention with a bowl game. WDE

Ah yes! I played FOWE a LOT myself and loved it. Memory was bit fuzzy on how it all worked exactly, so thanks for confirming that Cow500!

I wonder if the folks who made FOWE are still active in the community? If so, and they intend to make a FO4WE I'd love to help them out!

No, and not exactly what I wrote.

The game I was talking about had a huge arsenal of spells.

In simplified speaking the mod made the npcs use their spells intelligently.

There is much more to the mod, but hard to explain if you haven't played the game.

I played on survival for a LONG time, my character is level 170+ and about half of that was survival. my problem with it is that it just forces you to use the best weapons and armor, period, end of story.

I didn't like that, I want to use pipe weapons and pistols and lead pipes and wrenches, etc. not ONLY the gauss rifle and super sledge, or whatever.

I would prefer it if instead of the generic difficulty slider it was separated into multiple sliders covering different aspects of the game.

damage done: 1/4 to x2

damage received: 1/4 to x2

legendary enemies: low chance to high.

random encounters: low chance to high.

amount of baddies: low to high.

healing speed: slow to fast.

radiation damage: minute to extreme.

etc.

Holy CRAP 170!?

My highest toon is 78 and I am feeling Godlike at that level. I cannot even imagine what more than DOUBLE that much would feel like!

You make great points, and it is an issue I hadn't considered: "high difficulty" being equivalent to "enemy bullet sponges" DOES canolize playstyle into a more narrow range of variability.

Slightly OT, but one thing I find somewhat frustrating about the game . . . there are SO MANY Perks, and I'd like to experience playing with more of them (and more permutations of them), but getting only one per level honestly makes it so slow. My toon is level 78 and there must be at least 8 or 10 perk groups I have been "wanting" to try out from the beginning but they just kept getting pushed on the back burner.

Maybe a reasonable balance for a "FOWE-style" difficulty overhaul would be: in addition to the various things Cow500 listed, give the player two starting perks and then an additional perk every 6th level after that?? (maybe that is too much), so something like this:

Exactly, and tweaking enemy ai is a much more involved process unfortunately than simply raising resists and damage. Another issue is that the player character no matter what, even on survival ends up becoming exponentially too strong. Much like the original poster pointed out above, in the beginning levels of the game, without any perks, you end up having to approach situations a bit differently than running in guns blazing or you die.Third, support items are entirely too plentiful in a game where scraping and scrounging for everything you have is a way of life. Stimpacks, chems, even ammo is much too plentiful.

Since extensively altering the enemy ai is probably not an option, we have to use the dirty nerf word. Pretty much slashing the effectiveness of player perks by a sizable percentage to bring them in line and keep things feeling challenging, 50 percent or so. Increase the detrimental effects of long term chem use, I mean heck Cait laments that her years of using chems will likely kill her, same with Mama Murphy and her chem addiction, so why can the pc chain pop chems like they're packs of skittles? The chem resistant perk should work on a lower percentage but never allow complete immunity. Crashing from a drug (when it's effects wear off) should get progressively worse the more you use it. It should be a tactical decision when to pop these buffs. These are just rough ideas anyway that need to be fleshed out. Getting into firefights should have you constantly concerned about running out of ammo and it shouldn't be as easy to replace as camping shops or digging in a filing cabinet. I'd even like to see the system from Metro used here where prewar ammo is extremely scarce but more powerful than the "junk" ammo made currently. The latter can wear your gun down over time making it less powerful and accurate with extensive use. Prewar ammo would mostly be found where it makes sense, scattered in military areas, police stations etc but never in large amounts.

I like the idea of Tier 2 Chem Resistant only given 60% "immunity, and maybe Tier 1 gives 35%?

Also like the idea of reducing the amount of loot . . . well, actually I have mixed feelings about that for the simple reason: many things respawn. Without making things respawn more slowly simply reducing the abundance in any given spawn wouldn't seem to be very effective.

Ok, what's a toon?

It all comes down to how much of a gamer you are when it comes to difficulty level on any game. hardcoe gamers might play on hard, and crave more of a challenge as a result, despite struggling and getting frustrated during their first play-through,. Casual gamer just get frustrated and instead of wanting to improve and learn from their play-through, quit, and demand the game be made easier. With that said, if you don't like how hard the game is on a certain difficulty, turn it to a difficulty that makes you feel like you don't svck, or stick to $5 side scroller casual games.

One thing to note.

If you finish the main story line then there are still places on the map that you can visit that offer quite a challenge.

With supermutants one example would be Big John's salvage.

At survival difficulty level the game throws up some worthy opponents and it can be a good workout if you use appropriate weapons.

I like to slow the mutant foes down with a shotgun and finish them with a machete.

There are also some locations that respawn worthy gunner opponents.

Plenty of places that spawn big Wasteland creatures in numbers.

Not so sure about the Raiders rabble at the quarry, though, as they are a bit weak.

Try playing on normal but never using VATS. Supermutant suiciders for instance become much more interesting when you can't kill them by hitting the Q key. No using VATS to find enemies either.

Survival mode is just Fallout 4 Sadistic Edition.

When I get my "Normal But Harder than Hardest Mod" all put together in which nerfing player compared to mobs is not used as the mechanism to modulate difficulty, get back to me when you play it and see if you still dismiss me in the same way

I hope you can still play on Survival on that mod.

My kind of gameplay is do the most, be the best. I want to create the best possible build (don't care about multiple playthroughs and characters) and I want the game to challenge me in doing so. The survival difficulty was pretty easy from level 70 on and now I can withstand mini nukes w/o power armor! (albeit, other peoples, my own with a 1400 damage rating can obliterate me)

The problem is that they have a limited series of level based enemies. Instead of character levels directly effecting the enemies along with multipliers from the varous difficulties, the levels just unlock new tiers of enemies (deathskull radscorpions and super mutant warlords etc). The problem is that the last tier unlocks around level 70-80, so when you have gone beyond 100 there is not much of a challenge. You can take on a Mirelurk Queen in close range at your ease. I think they should add additional tiers of enemies, at least every 30 levels for up to like 200 levels. Tiers are best in my opinion, because they give you a sense of progress, of new, plus they are adjusted to greater xp yield.

Firstly, I agree with the general premiss here. That said:


"First, I have a toon I've played up to level 78 on Normal, and despite not making it very far in any given quest line, I've got a bit lukewarm on continuing to play her. I may go back to playing it, and will definitely keep the saves so I have a high level character to test with once GECK is released and modding ensues. But after about level 50 on "Normal" difficulty, everything just gets easier and easier".


I think this is largely a matter of play style. Some builds and/or items are far more combat efficient than others. A properly modded power armour suit by all accounts lets you trade punches with deathclaws. Likewise, a lot of people have remarked on how an explosive shotgun is a game breaker.


I'm playing level 70 right now. My toon is a lucky VATS monster using Deliverer and the Tinker Tom Special, with a decent gauss rifle as backup for when I need a lot of damage fast. Character is (by design) a bit of a glass cannon, intended to rely on stealth rather than just taking damage. Because he's supposed to be stealthy, I don't use PA except where radiation requires its use.


With that build, I'm not finding the game getting easier at all. I just came back Big John's Salvage where I got swarmed by a wave of Super Mutant Primus, Warlord and Overlord types, all needing multiple head crits to drop them. Just about everyone had a skull next to their name in VATS. That's not a complaint: it was a challenging and enjoyable fight. In F3 I was King Of The Wasteland at level 10 armed only with a hunting rifle. This is different, and that's a good thing.


Character build aside, the other thing is that apparently, the encounter level of a cell is set when you first visit. So if you explore aggressively at a low level, then there won't be many late-game challenges. If I go back to some of the super mutant lairs I first found it's headshots-by-the-numbers. But I've not been particularly exploration based, preferring to wait until a quest directed me to a location or I stumbled across one by accident. So there are still a lot of places out there that I'm finding rather challenging.


"I have also turned up the difficulty to survival on this toon for a while (level 73 to 76 or so) and observed that it was still a lot "easier" even than "Normal" for a level <=10 toon. Yes, the "yield" from drugs and food is less, yes mobs do a bit more damage, but when your main weapon does 505 damage, and you have ~650 HP and enough AP to down 5 or 6 enemies in one round of VATS (not to mention scores of hits of Ultra Jet, Psycho, Overdrive, etc.) the difference between Normal and Very Hard/Survival seems negligible."


I do agree that the main problem with survival isn't so much that the game needs more skill; it's just that you need to be able to stay alive longer so you can pump bullets into the bad guys. And there are limited options for doing that in a skilful way. Certainly you can snipe and run, but it's not always an option, and in general you need a tough build. And that's where I think the flaw lies in survival. It pretty much forces you to build combat monsters, and probably tanks. There's no more skill involved in shooting them, just in designing a toon that can live long enough to fire all the needed shots.


Now obviously if you like playing tanks, this isn't a drawback at all, and you probably need survival mode to make the game interesting. But I agree: it would be nice to have a difficulty system that tested the player's skill rather than design technique and patience.


I'm not sure what the fix is though. Getting rid of hp/level turns everyone into glass cannons (welcome to my world, tank-boy!) but is a bit unfair on the players who like tanking things. You could reduce accuracy which would upset the iron sight gun and run fiends and make everyone rely on VATS; (it's a valid build, but this would make it compulsory for many players, and that would be a bad thing). Upping the damage taken by the player puts us in glass cannon mode again, but at leas you have the chance to drop them first. I'd probably favour this over the other options, but again, it spoils it for the tank players. Even just playing at normal doesn't much help the problem if you're lvl70 and finding no challenge at survival.


I'm really not sure if there is a solution that works for everyone here.

[ *sigh* quote two passages and clodflare needs a catchpa to prove I'm human. Put them in quote-and-bold and clearly no robot would consider doing that... ]

I generally just leave the harder difficulties alone as I don't like how they adjust the game. To make things harder I just change up my role-play.

For example my next character will only use raider and metal armor and pipe guns. He'll also only use healing items he makes himself. He's my survivalist. Just doing this alone ups the difficulty plenty and gives an interesting role-play also.

I've played the game on Hard/Very Hard with a sniper with 2 Endurance to start and a Damage Resist that averaged around 110.

You can survive a couple glancing blows, but melee is murderous, and large explosions hurt like crazy.

On the other hand... when specializing your character and focusing on making yourself strong in one way, when you are success doing things your way, it's very rewarding.

I was a Perception/Agility sniper. Mediocre luck, but heavily invested into Sniper, Mr Sandman, Stealth, etc. I was lucky and found an Instigating Hunting Rifle off a raider and never looked back. That same rifle was my .50 Cal Sniper Rifle by end game. By around level 30ish, I was able to be a quiet death sentence. I killed every super mutant in Big John's Salvage from a rock next to the Red Rocket outside, then looted at my leisure. I wiped out every Gunner from the middle deck of the highway above it, Clint never knowing I was there until I shot him in the face, and then proceeded to snipe every Gunner in the town below (aside from Tessa inside the PD and the one inside the church). Tessa and the LT in the church took Overseer's Guardian rounds to the back of the head and that was that.

Yeah, occasionally I'd have to reload from a ridiculous death, but that was my punishment for failure. Succeeding meant I typically took zero damage at all the entire combat.

For situations where I couldn't snipe from downtown, I had Overseer's Guardian modded like a silenced HK MP5. Semi-Auto, short barreled, recoil stock, reflex sight, and a suppressor. I used Deliverer until I could get Gun Nut high enough for that.

Shadowed (not Muffled), ultra light armor, stealth boys, and suppressors are your friend. With x6.3 damage on the high end, Supermutants have to be bullet spongy to have any chance of requiring a second shot to kill.

I only ended up using Power Armor 3 times that playthrough. Once, scripted, in Concord with the Minutemen, once to enter and explore the Glowing Sea for Virgil, and then at the final battle as an Institute agent to destroy the Prydwen.

What I'm getting at is that it can be a challenge for a player who wants that challenge to play a more fragile character in the harder difficulties. The risk is much greater, but so is the satisfaction of succeeding (and the rewards from the enemies are better).