l0ckd0wn said:
*sigh* I think I'm going to have to give NV some more time... I wasn't really impressed with it like I was FO3 after about 6 hours in. I guess I need to trudge a little further, see if I catch the addiction again.
BTW, is going the "hard" mode worth it? Just curious.
captcha: teflon president
Hardcore mode is pretty lackluster, in my opinion. All it really does is four things:
1. Give ammo weight. This is an interesting addition, but really only serves to make the game more tedious. Instead of having as much ammo as you can carry, you basically just need to make more trips back to town to sell all of your loot. You can just throw all the extra stuff on to your companions, but I forget about ammo quite frequently and end up running into a cave with 150/190 weight because of it.
It's an annoyance, but relatively harmless. Just get a base at Novac or in New Vegas and you can keep all your spare ammos there while carrying only what you need for the weapon you have(I use a sniper rifle and a shotgun, usually about 35-50 ammo for sniper, 100 ammo for shotty).
2. Adds sleep, hunger, and thirst bars. They basically act as a new radiation meter, except they're always increasing instead of just in specific areas. This feature is a lot like the ammo one, in that all it really does is increase the weight of what you're carrying.
I rarely ever went into battle with dehydration, sleep deprivation, or hunger. Sometimes it happened when I wasn't paying attention, but the debuffs aren't so bad as to be game changing.
Really, what it means is that you'll be carrying around brahmin/gecko steaks and bottles of dirty/purified water. You'll also have to rarely sleep, but you should be doing that anyway for the exp bonus(which only applies when you own the bed like in Novac or New Vegas).
It would have been made a lot better with an addition to the user interface that showed you(quickly and easily) how thirsty/hungry/tired you are. Instead you have to go to your Pip-boy, look at your status and fool around with it there.
It's an annoyance.
3. Your companions can die. I can see how this would be a problem if the game didn't auto save as frequently as it does or if you didn't know that F5 was quicksave. If you're playing specifically so that once your companions die
they're always dead all this is going to mean is that you're going to be reloading slightly more frequently since the AI of your companions sucks pretty hard.
It's an annoyance.
4. The way healing works. This is really the only change that adds any lasting difficulty to the game. Normally, you use a stimpack and you're given the life instantly. In hardcore, you get life over time, instead of a lump sum. This means you'll be more likely to use stimpacks early and often(even though I still end up with 500 million of the things because I like range and sneaking). It also applies to rad-away, but that's not as important as you should be lowering your radiation faster than you're gaining it anyway.
It changes the way you heal yourself and might actually effect game play.
I've only played New Vegas with hardcore mode enabled, but I don't think it's so big of a deal as to actually matter a whole lot. It adds tedium in forcing you to carry around a bunch of stuff you might need, or might not. It forces you to make more trips to stores, sacrifice time traveling all around, since you'll probably end up going back for the loot anyway.
If it weren't for the additions of a companion wheel interface and the weapon mods, I'd say that Fallout 3 was hands down the better game.
On topic:
I don't mind the idea of making murder matter, but I don't think you're going to have an easy time doing it. I've had psychological barriers placed up against killing certain NPCs(the "good" guys, for example or people that don't automatically try to kill you on sight), but I can get over the killing pretty easily if they make me mad(*cough* Boomers *cough*).
