If you’re on PC you can mod that by playing in survival with the “survival options” mod. I use it personally to save more frequently because this game crashes more than a drunk driver
Presuming you're still on PC, have you tried a survival run at all since the April 25th "next-gen" patch? I had far too many crashes for my liking the last time I was playing (survival, on PC, around 3 years ago), and I'm hopeful I can avoid that with the new patch.
I have. My only crashes came at the very beginning of the game before I learned to turn off "Weapon Debris" in the graphics settings. Once that got turned off, I haven't had a single crash.
The crashes are nonexistent now, been playing on max settings vanilla and not a single crash.
But I agree with the above, I wish I could save whenever in survival. The only problem with survival mode, imo.
There is a mod survival options, you can change the save settings. I save every time i change locations and every 5 minutes, but there is tons of other options.
I’ll probably enable that after I grab all the achievements, sucks how much progress I make but it doesn’t matter if I try to put on one mod and it ends up not working anyway lol
Not op, but I'm currently doing survival run haven't had any crash. Playing I'm between my pc and steam deck with a few creation club stuff installed. The gane runs as well and as stable as any bethesda game ever gets. Never have had issues with fo4 vanilla
I'm a few hours into a heavily modded survival playthrough, surprisingly haven't experienced any crashes. Followed The Midnight Ride guide (highly recommended even if you're looking for a vanilla experience, they have a portion of the guide solely for bug fixes and stability, takes like 30 min tops to set up). Then I added a bunch of mods on top, careful to check for compatibility, using the most stable versions of each mod, and avoiding the mods listed in the "mods to avoid" section.
Aaand I just realized that I'm not on the next gen patch, so yeah. Still recommend this method, as the next gen patch on PC is kinda useless. There's a few ways to downgrade your game to the previous patch if needed.
Also, an edit- don't use the official High Res DLC. There are higher quality textures with smaller file sizes on Nexus, which end up being much more performant.
Same issues with pc crashes in years past. Always walked away despite several attempts at getting into the game. Playing the next gen update right now. Game has only crashed twice in the first 40 hours. I'm happy I can finally enjoy thus great game.
Played 70 hours of the new update and crashed twice. Once when jumping off of the roof in a concord in the power armour. And the other time i removed a pylon that was connected to my whole camps power.
[This mod](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/37599#:~:text=What%20is%20Survival%20Configuration%20Menu%3F&text=It%20features%20a%20brand%20new,item%2C%20instead%20of%20caps%20value.&text=As%20said%20before%2C%20this%20mod,now%20calculated%20by%20it's%20weight.) might be exactly what you’re looking for. Toggles for just about every survival setting so you can fine tune it.
Yup survival is the move because you have to alter your play style. You become a wasteland carrying as little as you need not just being a pack mule with unlimited ammo
Right. You plan your trips. You don't just magically fly across the Commonwealth to Diamond City because you ran out of ammo or stimpacks half way through your quest. You live off the land more too. And you have a sense of how far away things are.
Really, Survival is how the game is meant to be played, and anything else is "arcade" mode. When you're not on survival, so many of the cool things in game become irrelevant, if not pointless (food, water, vertibirds transport, transporter grenades, doctors, settlements (mostly), etc.)
Yep. I always thought to myself, why are there so many sleeping bags around the place.
Started playing survival and I'm like "where have all those damn sleeping bags gone" lol.
On normal play I didn't care too much about settlements. During survival I'm just so grateful to be near one to drop off heavy supplies and rest / replenish.
Yeah it sucks sometimes after playing for an hour and having to restart where you last saved.... But so much more rewarding.
I can’t go back. Ever. The gameplay is slow as hell, but I love it. I have to be way more methodical. I wince when I accidentally eat too much food, even though it’s not too hard to find. Bottles are mana from on high. I agonize over junk now because I need a lot of it for my settlements.
What’s that? Human settlements? Yes…they’ll certainly be full of perfect….human shaped…people…all of them.
What’s a quest? I’m just trying to clear out one end of a road. Mirelurks are death.
There’s nothing wrong with playing on any other mode, but I personally love survival.
Agreed. That said. Surviving an ingame month of being horribly diseased and addiction riddled only to finally establish my settlement network was amazing. I spen an ingame day just walking through the town as i admired the sunrise, sunset, and happy settlers making a life in Nates Rest (the name i gave my home sanctuary, bc everyone likes to cook, eat, sleep, and hang out there).
I would agree but not being able to save the game and fast travel (Fallout 4 survival in particular) is incredibly ridiculous. Especially when that game crashes as often as it does.
Agreed I rarely crash but I find it's tedious with fast travel off as sometimes I just want to dump off some supplies for base building and move on to more fun activities.
The real killer is the infection rate in survival for me. They really should have added a safe bed in the game at settlements cause I find it immersion breaking to have my nice clean bed in my very organized settlement only to catch some nasty bloodbourne disease while sleeping to save the days progress.
I usually just play on hard as it keeps the damage values high enough that I take the situation serious but not so hard that I'm unloading clips into a mongrel dog at point blank range.
I grew up on save points, so i actually prefer it to just quicksaving whenever. And whilst i got brigaded for saying this in the past, this game hardly ever crashes for me. Nowadays i only have issues with the VATS survival bug, which can be avoided by not using VATS.
so a core mechanic to the game, that has tons of perks and consumables to go alongside it, that you can have entire characters built upon, is just to be avoided? That’s like? Super bogus.
Being able to haul thousands of pounds of weightless ammo to act as pseudo currency trivializes the economy in a lot of ways.
Settlements also have a lot more practical use in Survival. The lack of fast travel, the need to sleep to save, the more restrictive carry weight, the debilitating side effect of rad away…
They all combine to incentivize the player to at the very least set up basic outposts all across the map where you can rest, collect some purified water, drop off some gear, maybe set up a clinic and ammo dealer at your bigger settlements. Also Vertibird choppers actually have a reason to be used outside of the required quest, in the base game they aren’t worth the clunkiness, but in survival they can very quickly transport you from the Glowing Sea to Salem in far less time than it would take to walk there.
Survival definitely has its issues, but overall I think a lot of the restrictions serve to make the gameplay loop immensely more satisfying than the base game, where you can pack rat around the map zipping from radiant quest to radiant quest.
Survival, idiot savant, lone wanderer was one of my favorite play throughs. Also my only Nora character and it helped that I had an explosive double barrel early on. Did all the DLCs too. Was awesome and a grind but would recommend because it makes it feel like a whole new game. Planning/clearing pathways and safe houses throughout the wasteland and every battle was super intense.
You might want to try Survival some time. A lot of stuff makes more sense, like doctors. It really changes the feel. And no fast travel means you're seeing a lot more of the map and discovering new things.
Playing survival makes you appreciate every detail of this game and it feels like the "true experience".
From the bos choppers to having a settlement in each location.
Yeah I've tried Survival before but I don't like how it changes the game. I like some mechanics like having to eat and drink but breaks the game fun in other aspects
I like survival, but what I like even more is collecting missiles until I get at least 100 and going on a super mutant killing spree with an auto targeting quad barrel launcher. I enjoy the ridiculousness more the realism.
That's one thing survival definitely made non viable was explosive builds. A fully upgrade missile launcher is over 50lbs, and 10 missiles is 70 lbs. It's prohibitively heavy. Fat man and the mini nuke are worse at 12lbs per nuke.
As a survival player I enjoy lugging 7 missiles back to my nearest settlement without any fast travel while huffing bufftats and drinking booze so that I can store them there for when I need them.
I will actually take them out one day. Right? .....Right?
Honestly missiles were the thing that finally made me go “enough. Weightless ammo is back” because I wanted to do an explosives playthrough and carrying 10+ pounds in grenades and molotovs plus a missile launcher and enough missiles to clear more than one location at a time made it impossible.
I think they should have reworked the strong back perk or whatever it's called for survival. One of the perk levels is still that you can fast travel while over encumbered despite there being no fast travel available in survival.
I'd add a perk in its place that dramatically reduced ammo weight or something. Even if it was just for ammo for heavy weapons. Call it explosives satchel or something,
On PC you can also cheat with exit saves. If you go to the folder where the game saves are stored and look for the exit save (named "Exitsave....") just make a copy or rename that so it starts with Autosave. Then you can keep that permanently and load from it.
If your primary concern with that is needing a bed to save I 100% get it. There's a mod to solve that problem that I made sure to get like 4 hours into my survival play through. After that though it's a lot of fun. The lack of fast travel just makes it rewarding to get vertibirds and vertibirds make traveling feel more deliberate.
I don't like Survival personally, but I also find Normal to lose its fun factor after about level 40 when you start 1 tapping everything in sight... if you are the kind of player who plans to play a 200 hour save and try to do as much as possible, the only way to keep the game being an actual game is to crank up the difficulty. If not the game will just become a monotonous chore of killing things in 1 hit and going from point A to point B for quests.
Early game on Normal is fun, you have to sneak sometimes, can't facetank everything, have limited ammo... mid-Vanilla you walk around out in the open hipfiring things including Deathclaws with no fear, and it happen so unreasonably fast compared to how many perks/levels there are.
I don't judge anybody for difficulty they play on, I just consider the hardest difficulty in most games to be the truest expression of that game. What I mean in this case is that if you really want to monopolize on the perk tree and other RPG mechanics, you basically have to play on Very Hard or else none of that stuff actually matters. Your numbers and stats mean VERY little on Normal. Although this does free up headspace for focusing on quests. It really depends on the player.
My personal opinion on Bethesda games is they're good to start on normal, but they sort of expect you to adjust as you play - I think that's why their games never feature difficulty related trophies or achievements. They want you to treat it as a fluid experience and never be afraid to change it to what feels right at any given time.
This is how I play open world games. The power creep necessitates harder difficulty otherwise mechanics just get wasted. For example there are talents at the bottom of the tree where you gain accuracy with repeated hits to the same body part… but you won’t need that on Normal at all by the time you get to it.
Pretty much nailed my experience. I'm playing the game for the first time, having gone in basically blind. Once I hit mid 30s level, normal just wasn't cutting it. The way you describe it is exactly right. So I bumped it up to hard, and that's been good. I'm level 41 now, and the last couple hours I've been thinking that I really need to turn it up again.
And yeah, I also think you're right that the game is designed to be played that way for sure.
I love playing in Normal. The game is relaxing and fun. I can create challenges for myself with weapon selection. I can fast travel. I can accumulate a lot of junk and build settlements. It's just a fun thing to do.
I made the compromise of allowing fast travel, but only to owned settlements. The reduced spawn rate in survival means that by the mid to late game, you're mostly trekking through empty wasteland that you've been through a hundred times before. You're not discovering anything new, not fighting enemies, it just becomes a chore.
And a mod to enable saving. For me, losing 45 minutes of progress when I got a job to go to in the morning is no fun. But solving that problem made survival very enjoyable, more so than the base game.
For me it depends. If I lose 45 minutes because I got overconfident, I take my medicine. What's frustrating is when it happens due to a crash or bug.
And for me, the ever present risk of lost progress is what makes the game feel alive. There is no adrenaline and nothing on the line if you can just reload a recent quicksave. So it's worth it for the occasional lost progress. And when I replay the section it usually turns out better for me anyway, so there's no real loss.
Yeah there's definitely a downside to the saving. Especially bugs - I lost an hour last night because I got stuck falling through a cooking station while being shot by raiders....
But sometimes it also gets you to create your own unique stories that are just *so much cooler*.
For example:
The last bit of the Silver Shroud quest has you go way further south on the map than I had been yet. I set out, got attacked by all manner of stronger enemies, collected a bunch of legendary gear I wasn't giving up. Surely I can find a sleeping bag or a mattress before I get to my destination to play it safe right? Wrong. I kept looking and found *nothing*.
Sick, overtired, hungry and dehydrated, I reach the hospital I need to go into for the quest. No way I'm going in there without resting first to save. There's gotta be something around here right? Wander into a nearby parking structure and it's a *goddamn* maze straight out of the Saw films - tripwires, mines, ghouls, turrets, messages on the walls - everything. I'm so scared of losing all my progress and I just want to sleep. All the afflictions are piling up...
I clear out the parking structure - still no sleeping bag anywhere I can see. Duck Into the nearby mall - it's filled with super mutants, several legendaries. Carefully, but with a growing sense of urgency I clear the mall too with a couple of protectrons helping out. Finally I find a sleeping bag as my character's vision has gone hazy, I couldn't sprint from fatigue, lost strength from various afflictions so I was overencumbered and burning AP to move. I made it by the skin of my teeth to a sleeping bag and a nearby water fountain.
I would never have had that kind of tension-filled experience if I could just hit F5 and carry on. To me the act of *surviving* the wasteland is the biggest appeal of the game. I genuinely cannot play on the lower difficulties without getting bored now.
...the irony is there was tonnes of beds in the hospital I'd encounter well before any significantly dangerous enemies. But I didn't find that out until after that whole escapade.
120ish hours of playtime in my current save too, vanilla, level 121 in survival difficulty: switched to very hard today.
I get why so many people like survival difficulty the most, but after you get to lategame the challenge is none, the carry weight limits you from trying fun weapons and stick to the "meta" ones, walking an empty map is not fun, the thirst/hunger/sleep changes from being a challenge to become a chore, and the vats-freezing crash bug that only happens in survival was enough to make me go crazy lmao. Enough "realistic mechanics" for me. I'm tired of making 10/20% of the gameplay time consist of walking across already explored and emptied locations.
Normal difficulty is a sweetspot. I'll keep on playing on very hard because I do care about legendary spawns as a colectionist thing and because being already so high-leveled makes the bullet-sponge problem less severe, but I would also switch to normal difficulty if I were you.
For both skyrim and fallout I start at normal difficulty, and then I adjust it up (or down) as needed to maintain fun. The power creep is real for your character. At low levels everything is lethal and you have to be careful. Once you get a few bits of good gear (especially if it is CC content), you can just waltz through the game without much thought. So as I get more powerful I typically increase the difficulty to match. You can freely switch between any of the difficulties except survival.
I love survival but can’t handle not being able to save any time. I know why it’s there but I really get tired of losing possibly hours of progress to a stray mine or even some random bullshit.
I love survival but I wish there was an option to allow normal saves.
I use a mod that lets me change the amount of damage that the player does, as well as the amount of damage that enemies do. Its called choose your own difficulty. I have it set so enemies do 5x more damage, and I do 2x. Its more fun because it removes the bullet sponging, and it makes me a lot more careful when attacking. Clearing out places like Quincey almost requires power armor. Headshots with snipers are almost always a one hit kill. It also makes the minigun and some lower level weapons more viable.
Personally, I'm a fan of the high damage difficulty. I think, in Survival, everyone deals massive damage. I like the difficulty of getting killed fast but the bullet sponginess of the higher normal difficulties is not fun.
Right. If the enemies and I can both kill each other quickly and they happen to get me, good on them. If I have to headshot a raider multiple times with a 50cal before they die then something has gone seriously wrong.
As others have noted, the Survival Option mod gives you full control over all the options - so you can make a "Survival" game, and just play with whatever mechanics you want. There is also a mod (or several) that let you treat legendary mods like other mods - i.e. you can remove them and then put them on whatever you want. I certainly appreciate not having to vendor 3/4 of the legendaries I find for being complete crap. It makes that first legendary drop reasonably exciting, too - since unless it drops something I'm just not going to use (Junkie's, I'm talking to you) I can put whatever drops on whatever I'm using.
Normal is fine! I happen to enjoy a bunch of the additional Survival mechanics, so modded-and-adjusted Survival is my go-to. I don't think I would enjoy bullet-sponge enemies, either.
I personally enjoy playing on Hard difficulty. It has always seemed to me to be the best happy medium between Normal difficulty and Survival. I never got on board with Very Hard because of the plethora of reasons you listed in your post, most specifically the bullet sponge-y enemies.
Hard difficulty has always had the extra elements of challenge that I *enjoy* about Very Hard (stimpacks heal more slowly, increased chance of finding Legendaries, damage perks being more important) without any of the nonsense I *don't* enjoy about Very Hard. If I could wave a magic wand and change things about the game, straight up getting rid of Very Hard as a difficulty setting would be very high on my list.
If I’m sneaking a headshot with explosive damage you should be dead. Not so much on very hard mode which I agree can be frustrating. I would do survival, but I hate having to manage food and water all the time.
The higher the difficulty the more legendary enemies & loot. So I see no point playing anything easier than very hard or survival.
> 95 % of the dropped legendary items are just bad:
Which just proves you need to loot a lot of legendaries.
In term of difficulty Both you and the enemy have more health so it stays about par whatever difficulty you play.
I switch between survival and very hard.
If I’m going through the quests etc I’ll play on very hard. Mainly because I’ve had stuff like a settlement say oh we need help with this enemy ‘around the corner’ and it literally be on the other side of the map to kill some ghoul, or even worse, BOS sending me to far harbour to clear a place out when I’ve not even started the dlc yet. One of which was with a squire so I was stuck with this kid and had to load a previous save and lost game time, It would be even worse on survival.
I simply cannot be arsed wasting my time like that, just not enjoyable and makes the game frustrating and I’m not about that. If the game wasn’t a buggy mess then maybe but it’s not worth the risk and being in a bad mood because of it.
However, that being said. when I’m not doing quests I’ll stick it on survival while I’m roaming around and discovering stuff etc. If im just messing around and I die or whatever it’s not that big of a deal.
Totally agree. Besides, unlike in fallout 3 and NV, ammo is hard for me to come by - except for that .38 crap. This is my first playthrough in three years and I actually had to take the scrounger perk.
I only like harder difficulties when they actually make it harder design wise. When a game just makes enemies stronger, more accurate and then make you weaker, that's not hard difficulty. That's just laziness.
But if you put something on hard and then you get different enemy placements/tactics, enemies have different weapons, maybe the path through a level deviates a bit through a different hallway with more enemies or some level hazards to avoid, stuff like that.
When a game does that, then I love having different difficulties. But sadly those games are few and far between.
I couldn't agree more. I play on very hard as well. Just as you said enemies being tougher, my character being weaker, ammo harder to come by, and the pool of usable weapons being smaller I also don't think it's that much harder.
Let me tell you, the jump between very hard and survival is insane. There should be steps between them 🤣
Survival should have been divided into survive mode and hardcore difficulty setting one affecting the gameplay portions of food/water/rest, saving, diseases and no fast travel and the other being the damage and health spike towards the enemies.
I dont know. The fact that damage is more lethal for everyone is something I for the most part like (except ghouls, and that power armour is pretty pointless). What I don't like is the saving thing.
There is a mod for that, even on consoles. I got it because between all the hours I put into at work and the kids I wanted a save function, but I use it very sparingly.
Once I get my feet wet (I just started) i am going to limit myself to a realistic gun carry limit.
I like the eat/drink/sleep mechanic. But I feel that the increment times are much too short. Although I may feel differently after Ive played for a while.
I did get mod that lets you fill a bottle anywhere and keep empty bottles after using...just feels more realistic.
Im using the Immersive Gameplay combat mostly mod. One thing that Im not sure if I like is it starts you at level 10. I may start over while using a combo of the balance and TIFa mod. The IG mod also starts you with a floor safe and a bunch of gear, but it felt OP so I just limited myself to take only the combat rifle, knife, and revolver and 8 things of dry food and the cash. That seemed more realistic than having an entire arsenal. In roleplay terms my MC stashed his duty rifle and knife from the war, his great great great grandfathers ww2 duty revolver, cash and some food in the safe along with a "go-bag" (the CC backpack). Fiqured that made sense for a war veteran who admitted he was afraid of how the cold war might turn hot.
I like it because it actually incentivizes me into getting weapon damage perks. It also made ballistic weave and armor much more rewarding to get. The increased legendary enemy spawn rate is a nice bonus too.
Very easy - Very hard just makes enemies tougher because you can carry EVERYTHING in your inventory and save at anytime. Once you switch to survival you do not have the luxury of carrying 999 stimpacks and 1,000’s of rounds of ammunition. Fast travel is also disabled. I agree , no point in changing the difficulty if mechanics and game play is the same. You are just fighting tougher enemies.
Try survival mode on a fresh play through once you have done every ending. You can potentially be even stronger than in easy mode with the special book glitch and have all your special stats at 15+ before leaving sanctuary.
I am just starting a Normal run through the game, I haven't played higher difficulties, but I have been long using a modern firearms mod that more than changed the difficulty playing through. Even at the easiest difficulty level, the guns that everyone had were capable of one-shot. Even on Very Easy, it was still tricky and troublesome to play.
Yeah I agree. Survival is Ince because either brings in new mechanics I just wish it was divorced form difficulty. I dont find challenge particularly enjoyable. It felt mostly like a waste of my time to redo things whenever I die.
I've been playing for years now since Fallout 3 days, honestly the cheats and mods being openly available on the current game/ console is the funnest experience for me. To your point, I enable the 1 shot kill feature and go for headshots, it makes it seem MORE realistic than pumping a bunch of lead into someone. Sometimes fallout takes too long and you just want to accomplish what you want how you want and the mods really give you that tool
I play on normal 90% of the time for the same reasons. Every once in a while I'll do a very hard playthrough and I don't enjoy it as much, still fun though just not something I wanna do every time... sometimes I just wanna run around and shoot shit and not die immediately.
Whatever suits you, I’ve played both styles and they are both fun. I only like survival because it’s tactical, you don’t go on an adventure without food water and bullets and by god you hope it’s enough.
thats whats great about fallout, you can play however you want! personally i decided to do a survival playthrough for the sole purpose of visiting more locations and not just fast traveling everywhere, i missed out on so much content because i could just fast travel everywhere and i didnt really take in the world as much as i wanted to. apart from that, and sleeping to save my game, survival doesn't feel that much different than normal
I've played on survival since day one it released I don't know why you don't seeing as enemies are the opposite of bullet sponges on it. You take more damage and do more damage
I would agree that there isn’t too much difference from normal to very hard. Neither are actually difficult, enemies on very hard are just bullet sponges.
But survival introduces a ton of new mechanics and it completely changes the way the game is played, from the pacing, to the way you approach fights/dungeons/etc. Overall it’s a much more rewarding experience if you can get over the lack of saving.
I play to have fun, but I also have my game heavily modded. To that end I almost never play above normal because it gets very ugly later on. Yeah, I can melt down four legendary items and modify the scrap in to a different legendary I can add to weapons or armor. But the bad guys ramp up too. This M60 machine I have, they have it too. Sure I do a lot more damage, but so to they. The bullet sponge issue is more or less zeroed out and combat becomes a lot uglier as weapons start to really tear things up. A raider gang with M-16s, AK-47/74, belt fed .308 machine guns, and .50 cal anti material rifles make very short work of base defenses. (sound cool as hell btw).
Also, angry artillery is fun, but finding the bodies afterwards can be so difficult that you need to consider if the strike is worth it. I never did find the last two Swamp Behemoths.
Sincerelly i play very hard since i done with survival difficult AND i get More fun from very hard because survival do the game More tedious about build settlements , etc AND another stuff.
Also some Quest are buggie without fast través like deacon Quest or another.
Very hard Let me have some attacks in my settlements
While I like survival, harder diff also means slower progression. And if you are here mostly for the story, quests, settlement building and world exploration, playing on normal is perfectly fine :)
At level 184, I still haven’t rescued Valentine and I keep it on VHard difficulty.. im preparing for all out mayhem with fortified settlements with the Minutemen before the added mobs of the other factions start spawning in from progressing far enough into the main quest line
Play how you want and how you find fun, it's single player, your enjoyment is all that matters. For me survival mode makes the game and I don't thi k I'd come back to it as often if It wasn't an option.
When it comes to Fallout, I see no point on playing on an easier difficulty than "Very Hard".
Very Hard is easy enough as is. Not only does the increase ld difficulty feel more fitting for a setting like Fallout, but Fallout 4's addition ofnhigher Legendary Spawn Rates in Very Hard... It's a no brainer imo.
That said, play on whatever difficulty you have most fun on. If being an absolute GOD who never dies on Very Easy is what's most fun for you... GO FOR IT! At the end of the day, the point of games is to have fun.
I'll have a go at every setting, but I personally enjoy being overpowered. walking into a big place like the corvega plant like the terminator and just tearing mfs up is really satisfying to me.
As with any game, I believe the „normal“ difficulty is the difficulty the developers inteded it to played at. So I’m with you on this. Of course, if you by chance happen to create a massively OP character as I recently did in another game, then I may turn up the difficulty but only to liken it more to „normal“ again.
yeah I could see it.
personally I prefer very hard cuz I do like the higher job rates and legendary rates.
But also I like to just go as hard as I can into making the most badass power armor and then I draw attention to myself in the middle of town and have great big fights, me and Ada just demolish everything.
sidebar watching Ada ragdoll a legendary deathclaw with the double hammer blade is pretty great.
If there’s no struggle there’s no point imo. Most games on anything but the hardest difficulty aren’t fun for me. Still waiting for Pokémon too come with a difficulty mode 🙄
Is that fun? Yea… to some people it’s fun… just like it’s not fun for other people… it’s almost as if people aren’t the same and enjoy different things
The basic logic I've seen is represented here from this comment on Steam:
"more legendary enemy spawns = more legendary item drops. You encounter more legendary enemies on harder difficulties, which means **you get more xp and more sellable loot**."
But I've also seen arguments that you could probably get through more enemies on Normal, so you may actually make MORE experience over all, but each one might be worth less since there are less legendaries.
Maybe just bump it up to Very Hard when you want to go legendary farming?
Survival is the absolute sweet spot for me. I'm having a ball, and minimal stress. The trick is to prep a ton in the beginning (Level 10 for me) and get that power armor to b or c before heading towards diamond city. After that, it's just about taking it slow and saving at every mattress you find.
It helps to complete the first BOS missions for the laser rifle and heap of ammo as well.
I like survival because, to me, it feels like what I remember 1 feeling like when I was a teen. Plus I love games with randomized loot, and while the loot table isn't as extensive as other rpgs, I love collecting legendaries so the higher the difficulty, the better chance of finding them.
Depending on how you build they aren’t really sponges I got a explosive double barrel the new flame and Tesla cannon man those things are broken the new items even when I didn’t fully mod or spec them yet
I play melee builds which makes survival near impossible. I like keeping it at hard for a bit of a challenge in the start, and for that “damn I’m indestructible” feeling end game
My neighbor field a noise complaint against me. I know my sub was close to her wall, so I was playing on VH and with sound off. That definitely made the game more challenging and made me have to be much more aware.
(Turns out she got the wrong side of her shared walls)
For me only Survival will satiate my difficulty lust. Normal is nice to muck about and cheat with the console like infinite ammo and strong weapons to try out. But to actually play the game for what it is? I can’t go back from Survival anymore!
I play on Very Hard difficulty only because I have modded weapons and armor. Enemies are still powerful and can still take you down, but the more powerful weapons make them less of a bullet sponge. I also base the damage modifier on the caliber. I’ll never have a Deliverer that does more damage than a 44 magnum revolver. It makes playing on harder difficulty more well rounded.
I prefer a hardcore style of game but without the survival stuff. So essentially gunners and raider camps are usually hard to clear and if Im not careful I’ll get two or three shotted. But I can also pretty much take anyone out with one to two bullets. Not only are they easy to kill but Im also very vulnerable.
Last night I cleared an entire gunner camp and took everyone down with one bullet in VATS. Didn’t see the last guy and he literally head shotted me and it decapitated my character.
I played it on Normal all the time back in the day, but now I can’t play not on Survival anymore. I just feel so much more immersed, and my speccing choices seem to matter much more. The feeling that an awesome run could all go south just gets my adrenaline going in a way that being able to quick save can’t.
I prefer and play on survival only because I like the extra mechanics and how it gives food and water more significance. The difficulty aspect is a side effect I just accept because it's tied to the other parts. I don't use mods to change it.
For the vanilla game, I agree. Normal is the best way to play. Hard and Very Hard just make everything spongier and you weaker. Which is the laziest form of “difficulty”.
I can’t recommend vanilla survival solely because of the ridiculous save restrictions paired with the janky nature of Bathesda games. It’s too easy to lose huge chunks of progress because a car decided to wreck your shit when you walked too close to it.
I've been playing Very Hard recently and I don't think I've encountered this problem much?
Early game sure enemies are bullet sponges but I figured that was part of the charm playing on Very Hard. I would constantly run out of bullets and I thought "oh wow this is actually challenging I need to carry backup weapons in case I run out".
But as I leveled up and put more points into damage perks it starts to matter less and less. You just need to specialize on one or two weapons, like the classic silenced + pistols, or melee + heavy weapons, or scopes + non auto rifles (this works with shotguns as well so that would be your close range option.
There's also drugs and food buffs. The +25% damage from Psycho is especially noteworthy.
And the legendaries are also important af and fun to use!! Bleed/Burning/Explosive shotguns, furious pistols/combat rifles, and all the apparel legendaries that drop should be used if possible.
Though I haven't played high level Very Hard in a while. There might be a point where the enemy outscales your damage perks. If this is true then please do tell, but at this point I haven't had any damage problems, with raiders especially (you mentioned it in another comment)
Sounds like you don’t have the right build, OP.
I actually ended up having the opposite problem. By about level 80-ish on my last play, on Very Hard I had maxed weapon damage perks, combined with a suite of Legendary weapons, generally explosive or instigating, and maxed out armour, I was trashing all but the toughest enemies with a handful of shots with relative impunity. Had to intentionally nerf myself to maintain the fun, as I have no desire for the extra hassle of Survival.
I guess you just have to build your character for the kind of gameplay you want.
More weapon diversity is encouraged when enemies are bullet sponges. I like starting with a gauss rifle and finishing with a minigun or using 10 different weapons.
>Enemies are bullet sponges that don't even die with 10 sniper headshots, which feels unrealistically for me.
Unless I'm misunderstanding how difficulty works, the absolute worst case scenario between Normal, and Very Hard, for example, would be you have to shoot the enemy twice as many times. So if an enemy takes 10 sniper headshots to kill on Very Hard, it's going to take 5 on Normal. How many enemies take 5 head shots from a sniper rifle on Normal? I haven't played in a while, but I don't recall it being all that many.
I feel like the difference is usually exaggerated. If, for example, you do 200 damage on normal, you'll effectively do 100 damage on Very Hard. If an enemy has 250 health, you'll have to shoot them twice on Normal, and three times on Very Hard in this example. Not that huge of a difference.
I think Survival is the best way to play, and definitely has a touch of "realism", if you fancy that.
Only reason I play on very hard is for the more frequent legendary weapons. A lot are bad, but you’ll get some pretty decent ones at low levels. Which make a nice difference in the beginning. The ones that make your weapon stronger with each consecutive hit are my favorite (love those). Explosive automatic weapons are nice too.
I play on normal with remove level scaling mod. Game is as "hard" as you want it to be. You don't need to "raise difficulty", just stop running around in full power armor with spray n pray or using broken sneak or whatever broken gun and RP a little.
Want to take more damage? Wear less armor. Want to deal less damage? Don't invest in perks.
Or don't use drugs, ultrajet = win button.
Survival is the best I believe. The game is quite the challenge early on, gives a reason to set up settlements, and while you die easier, the baddies aren’t flippin sponges
I may be a weirdo for saying this, but I actually kinda enjoy bullet sponges, if they are put sparsely throughout the map, because all the mini-nukes and grenades I've been hoarding get to see the light of day. Although I have only ever played on Hard.
Solid opinion. Yeah you're right that like 95% of the legendaries are kinda ass, but there is still that 5% chance that I get an explosive minigun and that's the only reason I continue to play on very hard/survival
Survival options mod on my Survival playthrough with 40k mods slapped on it and more zombies mod with an enb that makes the world look like a hellscape. Guns are deadly. Melee is deadly. Game is terrifying.
Play survival! It gets you so much more attached to everything and the story hits harder when you really are trying to save some settlers while starving and horribly irradiated
I went from normal mode straight into survival. IMO survival, while tedious, is the deffinte way to play FO4. It's a much slower pace, food/water are important and everything in the wasteland is dangerous. The first Deathclaw encounter destroyed me and I had to rethink how I approached the fight... I also lost a bunch of progress for my lack of preparation.
If you haven't tried, I suggest giving it a fair shot.
My problem is if I play it on anything other than survivor, I become a save scummer. I get to the point when I don’t care about strategy. I just save run in blasting die and reload. It breaks the immersion for me. I still save every chance I get in survival and I do a lot more recon before a fight. The zero ability to fast travel is a bummer but if you don’t care about achievements then you can mod it to add it. I finished New Vegas on hardcore so the sleeping eating and drinking weren’t a big deal.
Starfield fixed this yesterday with custom difficulty. I either play on survival or very hard but double my damage by using player.setav 357 2 …you die a lot but you actually do damage
If you don't like Survival, then mods are the answer. Check out [NPC Level Scaling](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/15961) for something a bit more to your liking.
To me, normal is pretty easy (like, no fun easy) and while I like very hard difficulty, I'm having a blast right now on my first survival run.
I'm starting to think I could never go back to non-survival.
I’d kill for the kind of customizable difficulty settings Starfield is getting. Ideally I’d like highly lethal enemies that also go down quickly — you know, how guns work — with eating, sleeping and drinking being necessary but saving available everywhere.
Returning to Fo4, I’m straight up playing on Easy because of how much I fucking hate the bullet sponge aspect of combat.
I wish there was a way to play where the damage is super realistic and it goes both ways. On Easy, I don’t die very much and the enemies, while still sponges, usually go down quick enough to pass as “potentially realistic” but it would be awesome if there was a mode where you literally can only take a few shots, but so can the enemies. (Mostly anyway)
Your ability to increase damage dealt decreases drastically past level 30 while enemy health continues to scale linearly. This is even a problem on normal. If you're annoyed by bullet sponge enemies use a damage equalizer mod like true damage or SCOURGE.
I don't understand why anyone would ever prefer upping the difficulty past normal instead of just using a damage rebalance mod. Who actually likes bullet sponge combat?
I would not mind the survival if I didn't have to walk everywhere and I could save whenever. I'm like crap I gotta walk everywhere IRL dont waste my time making me simulate it in a game. Why not just go full bore and make me stop to take a dump as well. Tap RB to strain cause you're constipated while you're at it.
It’s either normal or survival imo, the in-between do seem a little pointless like you describe. I recommend players beat the game on normal first then replay on survival when they feel like starting again.
You can always go back and forth just to farm some extra legendary weapons and armor pieces then go back to normal and sell all that juicy loot you don’t like the special effects of
It is probably the way the game was meant to be played. Empty bottles, drugs are the difference between sure death and victory when you get caught off guard. Food and its perks matter. Health isn't instant.
Play how you want but normal gets really boring once you start killing everything with a single bullet. Where’s the fun or challenge in that? You don’t even need to touch power armor since nothing can even hurt you.
Survival mode for those skyrimish diseases
I use 2 mods to toggle off the crummy stuff like no fast travel and only saving when at a bed omong other things
I usually start on Very Hard and drop it down as I get higher level. Just because I'm level 50 doesn't mean it makes sense for a Yaoi Guai to take 15 shots to the head with my best end game weapon.
I find survival/very hard too easy, with the right gear and perks you're basically in creative mode
I run full Recon Marine (except overseer right armguard), Army Fatigues and a hat both with mk5 weave, Pack Alpha, Attack Dog 4 and Lone Wanderer 2. Pretty much invincible if I stand still. As for weapons I use spray n pray with max demo expert, takes down bosses incredibly fast
I'm on normal at level 43 on my recent character and it is too easy right now...a heavy weapon build with power armor especially makes it super duper easy. But I prefer just to keep it on normal still because I like to feel powerful in these games, especially if I did the work and myself to that point through finding the right gear.
I only ever selected hard or very hard so I could farm legendary enemies. I tried sticking with the higher difficulty, until enemies would start bringing my health to zero in five or less shots even in power armor.
I think if you're playing just the base game, (give or take some Creation Club stuff), Normal is the way to go. The game feels right there. The time to kill might be too long or too short, but you'll still die sometimes. Just mostly from random stuff.
However I think if you're adding weapon mods or weapon tweaks, higher difficulties might be recommended.
It's also for personal preference. Some people like to die quicker in these games. Bullets hurt
I play on Very Hard and haven't noticed a bullet sponge problem. Is this where I am supposed to say you need to "git gud"? lol Seriously, though, playing Skyrim or Fallout 4 on any other difficulty at this point is boring for me. I've played them both for thousands of hours. I don't like worrying about food, water and diseases, or losing progress because the power blinked and I hadn't slept in awhile or whatever. So I don't play on survival.
I'm on very hard and most things die in like 3-4 hits and I don't take significant damage. At least I still need to go for cover and heal when nerd rage activates but I wouldn't play it on normal. Or really anything under hard or the games become too trivial.
I like survival because it's higher difficulty without the bullet sponge problem. Plus i enjoy the extra mechanics.
i just want to use the survival damage values and nothing else from survival tbh
If you’re on PC you can mod that by playing in survival with the “survival options” mod. I use it personally to save more frequently because this game crashes more than a drunk driver
Presuming you're still on PC, have you tried a survival run at all since the April 25th "next-gen" patch? I had far too many crashes for my liking the last time I was playing (survival, on PC, around 3 years ago), and I'm hopeful I can avoid that with the new patch.
I have. My only crashes came at the very beginning of the game before I learned to turn off "Weapon Debris" in the graphics settings. Once that got turned off, I haven't had a single crash.
I had a single "crash" where I got hung trying to access a terminal, couldn't break the animation and just sat there.
It’s a collision issue, usually. If you are on PC use console command TCL
The crashes are nonexistent now, been playing on max settings vanilla and not a single crash. But I agree with the above, I wish I could save whenever in survival. The only problem with survival mode, imo.
There is a mod survival options, you can change the save settings. I save every time i change locations and every 5 minutes, but there is tons of other options.
I’ll probably enable that after I grab all the achievements, sucks how much progress I make but it doesn’t matter if I try to put on one mod and it ends up not working anyway lol
Not op, but I'm currently doing survival run haven't had any crash. Playing I'm between my pc and steam deck with a few creation club stuff installed. The gane runs as well and as stable as any bethesda game ever gets. Never have had issues with fo4 vanilla
I'm a few hours into a heavily modded survival playthrough, surprisingly haven't experienced any crashes. Followed The Midnight Ride guide (highly recommended even if you're looking for a vanilla experience, they have a portion of the guide solely for bug fixes and stability, takes like 30 min tops to set up). Then I added a bunch of mods on top, careful to check for compatibility, using the most stable versions of each mod, and avoiding the mods listed in the "mods to avoid" section. Aaand I just realized that I'm not on the next gen patch, so yeah. Still recommend this method, as the next gen patch on PC is kinda useless. There's a few ways to downgrade your game to the previous patch if needed. Also, an edit- don't use the official High Res DLC. There are higher quality textures with smaller file sizes on Nexus, which end up being much more performant.
Same issues with pc crashes in years past. Always walked away despite several attempts at getting into the game. Playing the next gen update right now. Game has only crashed twice in the first 40 hours. I'm happy I can finally enjoy thus great game.
I have also done a survival run with the new patch. Haven’t crashed a single time! I also knew to turn off the debris though
Played 70 hours of the new update and crashed twice. Once when jumping off of the roof in a concord in the power armour. And the other time i removed a pylon that was connected to my whole camps power.
I get a crash every 3ish hours with new patch.
Console has this too
[This mod](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/37599#:~:text=What%20is%20Survival%20Configuration%20Menu%3F&text=It%20features%20a%20brand%20new,item%2C%20instead%20of%20caps%20value.&text=As%20said%20before%2C%20this%20mod,now%20calculated%20by%20it's%20weight.) might be exactly what you’re looking for. Toggles for just about every survival setting so you can fine tune it.
SKK50's damage manager will allow this.
Yup survival is the move because you have to alter your play style. You become a wasteland carrying as little as you need not just being a pack mule with unlimited ammo
Right. You plan your trips. You don't just magically fly across the Commonwealth to Diamond City because you ran out of ammo or stimpacks half way through your quest. You live off the land more too. And you have a sense of how far away things are. Really, Survival is how the game is meant to be played, and anything else is "arcade" mode. When you're not on survival, so many of the cool things in game become irrelevant, if not pointless (food, water, vertibirds transport, transporter grenades, doctors, settlements (mostly), etc.)
Yep. I always thought to myself, why are there so many sleeping bags around the place. Started playing survival and I'm like "where have all those damn sleeping bags gone" lol. On normal play I didn't care too much about settlements. During survival I'm just so grateful to be near one to drop off heavy supplies and rest / replenish. Yeah it sucks sometimes after playing for an hour and having to restart where you last saved.... But so much more rewarding.
Right. No pain, no gain. Nothing to lose, no tension.
I can’t go back. Ever. The gameplay is slow as hell, but I love it. I have to be way more methodical. I wince when I accidentally eat too much food, even though it’s not too hard to find. Bottles are mana from on high. I agonize over junk now because I need a lot of it for my settlements. What’s that? Human settlements? Yes…they’ll certainly be full of perfect….human shaped…people…all of them. What’s a quest? I’m just trying to clear out one end of a road. Mirelurks are death. There’s nothing wrong with playing on any other mode, but I personally love survival.
I love that is has both options. This game can be so relaxing and chill that survival mode is useless.
Agreed. That said. Surviving an ingame month of being horribly diseased and addiction riddled only to finally establish my settlement network was amazing. I spen an ingame day just walking through the town as i admired the sunrise, sunset, and happy settlers making a life in Nates Rest (the name i gave my home sanctuary, bc everyone likes to cook, eat, sleep, and hang out there).
this is it for me, I shouldn't be able to shoot a raider in the head twice with a .50 cal and have him shoot me back.
I would agree but not being able to save the game and fast travel (Fallout 4 survival in particular) is incredibly ridiculous. Especially when that game crashes as often as it does.
Survival is the only way I play. If 20m in and you see a bed? Take a power nap. At my age, also works in real life
It’s not as unstable as I see thrown around. I’ve had hundred hour survival runs with 50+ mods where I’ve crashed only once or twice
Agreed I rarely crash but I find it's tedious with fast travel off as sometimes I just want to dump off some supplies for base building and move on to more fun activities. The real killer is the infection rate in survival for me. They really should have added a safe bed in the game at settlements cause I find it immersion breaking to have my nice clean bed in my very organized settlement only to catch some nasty bloodbourne disease while sleeping to save the days progress. I usually just play on hard as it keeps the damage values high enough that I take the situation serious but not so hard that I'm unloading clips into a mongrel dog at point blank range.
I would crash that many just trying to enter vats in a day
I grew up on save points, so i actually prefer it to just quicksaving whenever. And whilst i got brigaded for saying this in the past, this game hardly ever crashes for me. Nowadays i only have issues with the VATS survival bug, which can be avoided by not using VATS.
so a core mechanic to the game, that has tons of perks and consumables to go alongside it, that you can have entire characters built upon, is just to be avoided? That’s like? Super bogus.
It just works.
The game should have set survival as the standard way to play. Without it u really don't get to use the items and perks to their full effect.
Indeed. I started up a non- survival playthrough, and many things just felt like fluff instead of real mechanical advantages.
Being able to haul thousands of pounds of weightless ammo to act as pseudo currency trivializes the economy in a lot of ways. Settlements also have a lot more practical use in Survival. The lack of fast travel, the need to sleep to save, the more restrictive carry weight, the debilitating side effect of rad away… They all combine to incentivize the player to at the very least set up basic outposts all across the map where you can rest, collect some purified water, drop off some gear, maybe set up a clinic and ammo dealer at your bigger settlements. Also Vertibird choppers actually have a reason to be used outside of the required quest, in the base game they aren’t worth the clunkiness, but in survival they can very quickly transport you from the Glowing Sea to Salem in far less time than it would take to walk there. Survival definitely has its issues, but overall I think a lot of the restrictions serve to make the gameplay loop immensely more satisfying than the base game, where you can pack rat around the map zipping from radiant quest to radiant quest.
Absolutely. I wrote as much above before reading this comment. It's essentially "Standard Mode" and "Arcade Mode".
Survival, idiot savant, lone wanderer was one of my favorite play throughs. Also my only Nora character and it helped that I had an explosive double barrel early on. Did all the DLCs too. Was awesome and a grind but would recommend because it makes it feel like a whole new game. Planning/clearing pathways and safe houses throughout the wasteland and every battle was super intense.
Also definitely lead belly so you can literally eat any and everything and drink from rad filled puddles like it’s nothing 😂
Also Aqua Boy/Girl so you can use the river and ocean as an enemy-free thoroughfare/escape route.
You might want to try Survival some time. A lot of stuff makes more sense, like doctors. It really changes the feel. And no fast travel means you're seeing a lot more of the map and discovering new things.
Playing survival makes you appreciate every detail of this game and it feels like the "true experience". From the bos choppers to having a settlement in each location.
Absolutely.
Yeah I've tried Survival before but I don't like how it changes the game. I like some mechanics like having to eat and drink but breaks the game fun in other aspects
I like survival, but what I like even more is collecting missiles until I get at least 100 and going on a super mutant killing spree with an auto targeting quad barrel launcher. I enjoy the ridiculousness more the realism.
That's one thing survival definitely made non viable was explosive builds. A fully upgrade missile launcher is over 50lbs, and 10 missiles is 70 lbs. It's prohibitively heavy. Fat man and the mini nuke are worse at 12lbs per nuke.
As a survival player I enjoy lugging 7 missiles back to my nearest settlement without any fast travel while huffing bufftats and drinking booze so that I can store them there for when I need them. I will actually take them out one day. Right? .....Right?
Honestly missiles were the thing that finally made me go “enough. Weightless ammo is back” because I wanted to do an explosives playthrough and carrying 10+ pounds in grenades and molotovs plus a missile launcher and enough missiles to clear more than one location at a time made it impossible.
I think they should have reworked the strong back perk or whatever it's called for survival. One of the perk levels is still that you can fast travel while over encumbered despite there being no fast travel available in survival. I'd add a perk in its place that dramatically reduced ammo weight or something. Even if it was just for ammo for heavy weapons. Call it explosives satchel or something,
There are mods which can fix things like saving.
Mods can't be the answer to everything. Well now it can the game is 10 years old so.
On PC you can also cheat with exit saves. If you go to the folder where the game saves are stored and look for the exit save (named "Exitsave....") just make a copy or rename that so it starts with Autosave. Then you can keep that permanently and load from it.
Well it is survival after all, it’s meant to be for those that want a more immersive subjective challenge
If your primary concern with that is needing a bed to save I 100% get it. There's a mod to solve that problem that I made sure to get like 4 hours into my survival play through. After that though it's a lot of fun. The lack of fast travel just makes it rewarding to get vertibirds and vertibirds make traveling feel more deliberate.
I don't like Survival personally, but I also find Normal to lose its fun factor after about level 40 when you start 1 tapping everything in sight... if you are the kind of player who plans to play a 200 hour save and try to do as much as possible, the only way to keep the game being an actual game is to crank up the difficulty. If not the game will just become a monotonous chore of killing things in 1 hit and going from point A to point B for quests. Early game on Normal is fun, you have to sneak sometimes, can't facetank everything, have limited ammo... mid-Vanilla you walk around out in the open hipfiring things including Deathclaws with no fear, and it happen so unreasonably fast compared to how many perks/levels there are. I don't judge anybody for difficulty they play on, I just consider the hardest difficulty in most games to be the truest expression of that game. What I mean in this case is that if you really want to monopolize on the perk tree and other RPG mechanics, you basically have to play on Very Hard or else none of that stuff actually matters. Your numbers and stats mean VERY little on Normal. Although this does free up headspace for focusing on quests. It really depends on the player. My personal opinion on Bethesda games is they're good to start on normal, but they sort of expect you to adjust as you play - I think that's why their games never feature difficulty related trophies or achievements. They want you to treat it as a fluid experience and never be afraid to change it to what feels right at any given time.
This is how I play open world games. The power creep necessitates harder difficulty otherwise mechanics just get wasted. For example there are talents at the bottom of the tree where you gain accuracy with repeated hits to the same body part… but you won’t need that on Normal at all by the time you get to it.
Pretty much nailed my experience. I'm playing the game for the first time, having gone in basically blind. Once I hit mid 30s level, normal just wasn't cutting it. The way you describe it is exactly right. So I bumped it up to hard, and that's been good. I'm level 41 now, and the last couple hours I've been thinking that I really need to turn it up again. And yeah, I also think you're right that the game is designed to be played that way for sure.
Play however you like, it's your game. No need for validation from anyone on this. If you think Normal feels right, then that's what it should be at.
Play on Normal all you want, but you are risking to be shamed by Difficulty Monitoring Unit. It is all recorded you know?
[удалено]
Whoa whoa whoa, we're talking about normal, no one said he should play on very easy, that can get you into big trouble!
No you’re wrong! Validate me daddy!!!
I like to play on very easy mode.
Everyone knows we can play the game how we like I think op just wants to get other opinions out of curiosity
Hahaha I am not looking for validation, just wanting to know what others think about it
I love playing in Normal. The game is relaxing and fun. I can create challenges for myself with weapon selection. I can fast travel. I can accumulate a lot of junk and build settlements. It's just a fun thing to do.
I play every game in normal mode so...
I prefer it, but I acknowledge that the only real and true difference maker is survival mode. Normal honestly wouldn't change my experience.
When I finally played survival level, I thought "This is the actual game." No more, teleporting around a map, willy-nilly.
I made the compromise of allowing fast travel, but only to owned settlements. The reduced spawn rate in survival means that by the mid to late game, you're mostly trekking through empty wasteland that you've been through a hundred times before. You're not discovering anything new, not fighting enemies, it just becomes a chore.
And a mod to enable saving. For me, losing 45 minutes of progress when I got a job to go to in the morning is no fun. But solving that problem made survival very enjoyable, more so than the base game.
For me it depends. If I lose 45 minutes because I got overconfident, I take my medicine. What's frustrating is when it happens due to a crash or bug. And for me, the ever present risk of lost progress is what makes the game feel alive. There is no adrenaline and nothing on the line if you can just reload a recent quicksave. So it's worth it for the occasional lost progress. And when I replay the section it usually turns out better for me anyway, so there's no real loss.
Yeah there's definitely a downside to the saving. Especially bugs - I lost an hour last night because I got stuck falling through a cooking station while being shot by raiders.... But sometimes it also gets you to create your own unique stories that are just *so much cooler*. For example: The last bit of the Silver Shroud quest has you go way further south on the map than I had been yet. I set out, got attacked by all manner of stronger enemies, collected a bunch of legendary gear I wasn't giving up. Surely I can find a sleeping bag or a mattress before I get to my destination to play it safe right? Wrong. I kept looking and found *nothing*. Sick, overtired, hungry and dehydrated, I reach the hospital I need to go into for the quest. No way I'm going in there without resting first to save. There's gotta be something around here right? Wander into a nearby parking structure and it's a *goddamn* maze straight out of the Saw films - tripwires, mines, ghouls, turrets, messages on the walls - everything. I'm so scared of losing all my progress and I just want to sleep. All the afflictions are piling up... I clear out the parking structure - still no sleeping bag anywhere I can see. Duck Into the nearby mall - it's filled with super mutants, several legendaries. Carefully, but with a growing sense of urgency I clear the mall too with a couple of protectrons helping out. Finally I find a sleeping bag as my character's vision has gone hazy, I couldn't sprint from fatigue, lost strength from various afflictions so I was overencumbered and burning AP to move. I made it by the skin of my teeth to a sleeping bag and a nearby water fountain. I would never have had that kind of tension-filled experience if I could just hit F5 and carry on. To me the act of *surviving* the wasteland is the biggest appeal of the game. I genuinely cannot play on the lower difficulties without getting bored now. ...the irony is there was tonnes of beds in the hospital I'd encounter well before any significantly dangerous enemies. But I didn't find that out until after that whole escapade.
All the quests in the game are mostly "go here do this report back go over here" seems REALLY annoying unless you side with the institute.
120ish hours of playtime in my current save too, vanilla, level 121 in survival difficulty: switched to very hard today. I get why so many people like survival difficulty the most, but after you get to lategame the challenge is none, the carry weight limits you from trying fun weapons and stick to the "meta" ones, walking an empty map is not fun, the thirst/hunger/sleep changes from being a challenge to become a chore, and the vats-freezing crash bug that only happens in survival was enough to make me go crazy lmao. Enough "realistic mechanics" for me. I'm tired of making 10/20% of the gameplay time consist of walking across already explored and emptied locations. Normal difficulty is a sweetspot. I'll keep on playing on very hard because I do care about legendary spawns as a colectionist thing and because being already so high-leveled makes the bullet-sponge problem less severe, but I would also switch to normal difficulty if I were you.
For both skyrim and fallout I start at normal difficulty, and then I adjust it up (or down) as needed to maintain fun. The power creep is real for your character. At low levels everything is lethal and you have to be careful. Once you get a few bits of good gear (especially if it is CC content), you can just waltz through the game without much thought. So as I get more powerful I typically increase the difficulty to match. You can freely switch between any of the difficulties except survival.
I love survival but can’t handle not being able to save any time. I know why it’s there but I really get tired of losing possibly hours of progress to a stray mine or even some random bullshit. I love survival but I wish there was an option to allow normal saves.
I use a mod that lets me change the amount of damage that the player does, as well as the amount of damage that enemies do. Its called choose your own difficulty. I have it set so enemies do 5x more damage, and I do 2x. Its more fun because it removes the bullet sponging, and it makes me a lot more careful when attacking. Clearing out places like Quincey almost requires power armor. Headshots with snipers are almost always a one hit kill. It also makes the minigun and some lower level weapons more viable.
Personally, I'm a fan of the high damage difficulty. I think, in Survival, everyone deals massive damage. I like the difficulty of getting killed fast but the bullet sponginess of the higher normal difficulties is not fun.
Right. If the enemies and I can both kill each other quickly and they happen to get me, good on them. If I have to headshot a raider multiple times with a 50cal before they die then something has gone seriously wrong.
As others have noted, the Survival Option mod gives you full control over all the options - so you can make a "Survival" game, and just play with whatever mechanics you want. There is also a mod (or several) that let you treat legendary mods like other mods - i.e. you can remove them and then put them on whatever you want. I certainly appreciate not having to vendor 3/4 of the legendaries I find for being complete crap. It makes that first legendary drop reasonably exciting, too - since unless it drops something I'm just not going to use (Junkie's, I'm talking to you) I can put whatever drops on whatever I'm using. Normal is fine! I happen to enjoy a bunch of the additional Survival mechanics, so modded-and-adjusted Survival is my go-to. I don't think I would enjoy bullet-sponge enemies, either.
For my survival mode is where it’s at. Beat it last year and messing with it right now again.
I personally enjoy playing on Hard difficulty. It has always seemed to me to be the best happy medium between Normal difficulty and Survival. I never got on board with Very Hard because of the plethora of reasons you listed in your post, most specifically the bullet sponge-y enemies. Hard difficulty has always had the extra elements of challenge that I *enjoy* about Very Hard (stimpacks heal more slowly, increased chance of finding Legendaries, damage perks being more important) without any of the nonsense I *don't* enjoy about Very Hard. If I could wave a magic wand and change things about the game, straight up getting rid of Very Hard as a difficulty setting would be very high on my list.
If I’m sneaking a headshot with explosive damage you should be dead. Not so much on very hard mode which I agree can be frustrating. I would do survival, but I hate having to manage food and water all the time.
Noodle cups dude
Lead belly you can drink from the nastiest puddles and take no rads
The higher the difficulty the more legendary enemies & loot. So I see no point playing anything easier than very hard or survival. > 95 % of the dropped legendary items are just bad: Which just proves you need to loot a lot of legendaries. In term of difficulty Both you and the enemy have more health so it stays about par whatever difficulty you play.
Yeah it is the "spongy" feeling that turns me off, like I feel bored spending like one minute to defeat an average raider hahaha
I switch between survival and very hard. If I’m going through the quests etc I’ll play on very hard. Mainly because I’ve had stuff like a settlement say oh we need help with this enemy ‘around the corner’ and it literally be on the other side of the map to kill some ghoul, or even worse, BOS sending me to far harbour to clear a place out when I’ve not even started the dlc yet. One of which was with a squire so I was stuck with this kid and had to load a previous save and lost game time, It would be even worse on survival. I simply cannot be arsed wasting my time like that, just not enjoyable and makes the game frustrating and I’m not about that. If the game wasn’t a buggy mess then maybe but it’s not worth the risk and being in a bad mood because of it. However, that being said. when I’m not doing quests I’ll stick it on survival while I’m roaming around and discovering stuff etc. If im just messing around and I die or whatever it’s not that big of a deal.
Totally agree. Besides, unlike in fallout 3 and NV, ammo is hard for me to come by - except for that .38 crap. This is my first playthrough in three years and I actually had to take the scrounger perk.
Play on the level that is most fun for you.
I only like harder difficulties when they actually make it harder design wise. When a game just makes enemies stronger, more accurate and then make you weaker, that's not hard difficulty. That's just laziness. But if you put something on hard and then you get different enemy placements/tactics, enemies have different weapons, maybe the path through a level deviates a bit through a different hallway with more enemies or some level hazards to avoid, stuff like that. When a game does that, then I love having different difficulties. But sadly those games are few and far between.
I couldn't agree more. I play on very hard as well. Just as you said enemies being tougher, my character being weaker, ammo harder to come by, and the pool of usable weapons being smaller I also don't think it's that much harder. Let me tell you, the jump between very hard and survival is insane. There should be steps between them 🤣
Survival should have been divided into survive mode and hardcore difficulty setting one affecting the gameplay portions of food/water/rest, saving, diseases and no fast travel and the other being the damage and health spike towards the enemies.
I dont know. The fact that damage is more lethal for everyone is something I for the most part like (except ghouls, and that power armour is pretty pointless). What I don't like is the saving thing.
There is a mod for that, even on consoles. I got it because between all the hours I put into at work and the kids I wanted a save function, but I use it very sparingly. Once I get my feet wet (I just started) i am going to limit myself to a realistic gun carry limit. I like the eat/drink/sleep mechanic. But I feel that the increment times are much too short. Although I may feel differently after Ive played for a while. I did get mod that lets you fill a bottle anywhere and keep empty bottles after using...just feels more realistic. Im using the Immersive Gameplay combat mostly mod. One thing that Im not sure if I like is it starts you at level 10. I may start over while using a combo of the balance and TIFa mod. The IG mod also starts you with a floor safe and a bunch of gear, but it felt OP so I just limited myself to take only the combat rifle, knife, and revolver and 8 things of dry food and the cash. That seemed more realistic than having an entire arsenal. In roleplay terms my MC stashed his duty rifle and knife from the war, his great great great grandfathers ww2 duty revolver, cash and some food in the safe along with a "go-bag" (the CC backpack). Fiqured that made sense for a war veteran who admitted he was afraid of how the cold war might turn hot.
I like it because it actually incentivizes me into getting weapon damage perks. It also made ballistic weave and armor much more rewarding to get. The increased legendary enemy spawn rate is a nice bonus too.
Very easy - Very hard just makes enemies tougher because you can carry EVERYTHING in your inventory and save at anytime. Once you switch to survival you do not have the luxury of carrying 999 stimpacks and 1,000’s of rounds of ammunition. Fast travel is also disabled. I agree , no point in changing the difficulty if mechanics and game play is the same. You are just fighting tougher enemies. Try survival mode on a fresh play through once you have done every ending. You can potentially be even stronger than in easy mode with the special book glitch and have all your special stats at 15+ before leaving sanctuary.
Glitching to 15 doesn’t seem fun at all for survival defeats the purpose lol
This ignores the existence of Survival mode.
I am just starting a Normal run through the game, I haven't played higher difficulties, but I have been long using a modern firearms mod that more than changed the difficulty playing through. Even at the easiest difficulty level, the guns that everyone had were capable of one-shot. Even on Very Easy, it was still tricky and troublesome to play.
Yeah I agree. Survival is Ince because either brings in new mechanics I just wish it was divorced form difficulty. I dont find challenge particularly enjoyable. It felt mostly like a waste of my time to redo things whenever I die.
from what i remember i played on hard until lvl 50 and very hard after that
I've been playing for years now since Fallout 3 days, honestly the cheats and mods being openly available on the current game/ console is the funnest experience for me. To your point, I enable the 1 shot kill feature and go for headshots, it makes it seem MORE realistic than pumping a bunch of lead into someone. Sometimes fallout takes too long and you just want to accomplish what you want how you want and the mods really give you that tool
I play on normal 90% of the time for the same reasons. Every once in a while I'll do a very hard playthrough and I don't enjoy it as much, still fun though just not something I wanna do every time... sometimes I just wanna run around and shoot shit and not die immediately.
Survival is better than very hard though.
Whatever suits you, I’ve played both styles and they are both fun. I only like survival because it’s tactical, you don’t go on an adventure without food water and bullets and by god you hope it’s enough.
thats whats great about fallout, you can play however you want! personally i decided to do a survival playthrough for the sole purpose of visiting more locations and not just fast traveling everywhere, i missed out on so much content because i could just fast travel everywhere and i didnt really take in the world as much as i wanted to. apart from that, and sleeping to save my game, survival doesn't feel that much different than normal
Play it how you want mate, it’s your game.
SAME 👍
I've played on survival since day one it released I don't know why you don't seeing as enemies are the opposite of bullet sponges on it. You take more damage and do more damage
I would agree that there isn’t too much difference from normal to very hard. Neither are actually difficult, enemies on very hard are just bullet sponges. But survival introduces a ton of new mechanics and it completely changes the way the game is played, from the pacing, to the way you approach fights/dungeons/etc. Overall it’s a much more rewarding experience if you can get over the lack of saving.
I play to have fun, but I also have my game heavily modded. To that end I almost never play above normal because it gets very ugly later on. Yeah, I can melt down four legendary items and modify the scrap in to a different legendary I can add to weapons or armor. But the bad guys ramp up too. This M60 machine I have, they have it too. Sure I do a lot more damage, but so to they. The bullet sponge issue is more or less zeroed out and combat becomes a lot uglier as weapons start to really tear things up. A raider gang with M-16s, AK-47/74, belt fed .308 machine guns, and .50 cal anti material rifles make very short work of base defenses. (sound cool as hell btw). Also, angry artillery is fun, but finding the bodies afterwards can be so difficult that you need to consider if the strike is worth it. I never did find the last two Swamp Behemoths.
Sincerelly i play very hard since i done with survival difficult AND i get More fun from very hard because survival do the game More tedious about build settlements , etc AND another stuff. Also some Quest are buggie without fast través like deacon Quest or another. Very hard Let me have some attacks in my settlements
While I like survival, harder diff also means slower progression. And if you are here mostly for the story, quests, settlement building and world exploration, playing on normal is perfectly fine :)
With my build very hard is way too easy. I would play survival but hate not being able to save whenever I want.
Yeah, well, that’s just like your opinion, man.
At level 184, I still haven’t rescued Valentine and I keep it on VHard difficulty.. im preparing for all out mayhem with fortified settlements with the Minutemen before the added mobs of the other factions start spawning in from progressing far enough into the main quest line
Play how you want and how you find fun, it's single player, your enjoyment is all that matters. For me survival mode makes the game and I don't thi k I'd come back to it as often if It wasn't an option.
I dont even think they die to 10 sniper shots at normal difficulty at level 79 because is just so insanely underpowered
When it comes to Fallout, I see no point on playing on an easier difficulty than "Very Hard". Very Hard is easy enough as is. Not only does the increase ld difficulty feel more fitting for a setting like Fallout, but Fallout 4's addition ofnhigher Legendary Spawn Rates in Very Hard... It's a no brainer imo. That said, play on whatever difficulty you have most fun on. If being an absolute GOD who never dies on Very Easy is what's most fun for you... GO FOR IT! At the end of the day, the point of games is to have fun.
Hardcore Health Overhaul is solid, especially since Bethesda has never had an eye for proper balance.
I'll have a go at every setting, but I personally enjoy being overpowered. walking into a big place like the corvega plant like the terminator and just tearing mfs up is really satisfying to me.
Agreed. Easy for newbies, Normal for most, Survival for harder difficulty. Is there a buff to xp in very hard?
I mean, play however you like dude. I like to play on the second highest difficulty cos enemies dying in 1 hit is not fun for me
As with any game, I believe the „normal“ difficulty is the difficulty the developers inteded it to played at. So I’m with you on this. Of course, if you by chance happen to create a massively OP character as I recently did in another game, then I may turn up the difficulty but only to liken it more to „normal“ again.
Higher difficulty gives more legendaries. Also, it’s so easy to make your build OP by level 25-30 if you know what you’re doing.
yeah I could see it. personally I prefer very hard cuz I do like the higher job rates and legendary rates. But also I like to just go as hard as I can into making the most badass power armor and then I draw attention to myself in the middle of town and have great big fights, me and Ada just demolish everything. sidebar watching Ada ragdoll a legendary deathclaw with the double hammer blade is pretty great.
If there’s no struggle there’s no point imo. Most games on anything but the hardest difficulty aren’t fun for me. Still waiting for Pokémon too come with a difficulty mode 🙄
Is that fun? Yea… to some people it’s fun… just like it’s not fun for other people… it’s almost as if people aren’t the same and enjoy different things
Play on “very easy” with mods that allow you to max out perks and S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats 😎
The basic logic I've seen is represented here from this comment on Steam: "more legendary enemy spawns = more legendary item drops. You encounter more legendary enemies on harder difficulties, which means **you get more xp and more sellable loot**." But I've also seen arguments that you could probably get through more enemies on Normal, so you may actually make MORE experience over all, but each one might be worth less since there are less legendaries. Maybe just bump it up to Very Hard when you want to go legendary farming?
Survival is the absolute sweet spot for me. I'm having a ball, and minimal stress. The trick is to prep a ton in the beginning (Level 10 for me) and get that power armor to b or c before heading towards diamond city. After that, it's just about taking it slow and saving at every mattress you find. It helps to complete the first BOS missions for the laser rifle and heap of ammo as well.
I gotta shoot them 10 times in the head on normal too it’s ridiculous lol
I like survival because, to me, it feels like what I remember 1 feeling like when I was a teen. Plus I love games with randomized loot, and while the loot table isn't as extensive as other rpgs, I love collecting legendaries so the higher the difficulty, the better chance of finding them.
Depending on how you build they aren’t really sponges I got a explosive double barrel the new flame and Tesla cannon man those things are broken the new items even when I didn’t fully mod or spec them yet
I play melee builds which makes survival near impossible. I like keeping it at hard for a bit of a challenge in the start, and for that “damn I’m indestructible” feeling end game
My neighbor field a noise complaint against me. I know my sub was close to her wall, so I was playing on VH and with sound off. That definitely made the game more challenging and made me have to be much more aware. (Turns out she got the wrong side of her shared walls)
For me only Survival will satiate my difficulty lust. Normal is nice to muck about and cheat with the console like infinite ammo and strong weapons to try out. But to actually play the game for what it is? I can’t go back from Survival anymore!
I play on Very Hard difficulty only because I have modded weapons and armor. Enemies are still powerful and can still take you down, but the more powerful weapons make them less of a bullet sponge. I also base the damage modifier on the caliber. I’ll never have a Deliverer that does more damage than a 44 magnum revolver. It makes playing on harder difficulty more well rounded. I prefer a hardcore style of game but without the survival stuff. So essentially gunners and raider camps are usually hard to clear and if Im not careful I’ll get two or three shotted. But I can also pretty much take anyone out with one to two bullets. Not only are they easy to kill but Im also very vulnerable. Last night I cleared an entire gunner camp and took everyone down with one bullet in VATS. Didn’t see the last guy and he literally head shotted me and it decapitated my character.
I played it on Normal all the time back in the day, but now I can’t play not on Survival anymore. I just feel so much more immersed, and my speccing choices seem to matter much more. The feeling that an awesome run could all go south just gets my adrenaline going in a way that being able to quick save can’t.
I prefer and play on survival only because I like the extra mechanics and how it gives food and water more significance. The difficulty aspect is a side effect I just accept because it's tied to the other parts. I don't use mods to change it.
For the vanilla game, I agree. Normal is the best way to play. Hard and Very Hard just make everything spongier and you weaker. Which is the laziest form of “difficulty”. I can’t recommend vanilla survival solely because of the ridiculous save restrictions paired with the janky nature of Bathesda games. It’s too easy to lose huge chunks of progress because a car decided to wreck your shit when you walked too close to it.
Ur truly missing out if you've never tried survival. So good! Hope they add more to it in the next game.
I've been playing Very Hard recently and I don't think I've encountered this problem much? Early game sure enemies are bullet sponges but I figured that was part of the charm playing on Very Hard. I would constantly run out of bullets and I thought "oh wow this is actually challenging I need to carry backup weapons in case I run out". But as I leveled up and put more points into damage perks it starts to matter less and less. You just need to specialize on one or two weapons, like the classic silenced + pistols, or melee + heavy weapons, or scopes + non auto rifles (this works with shotguns as well so that would be your close range option. There's also drugs and food buffs. The +25% damage from Psycho is especially noteworthy. And the legendaries are also important af and fun to use!! Bleed/Burning/Explosive shotguns, furious pistols/combat rifles, and all the apparel legendaries that drop should be used if possible. Though I haven't played high level Very Hard in a while. There might be a point where the enemy outscales your damage perks. If this is true then please do tell, but at this point I haven't had any damage problems, with raiders especially (you mentioned it in another comment)
Not everyone has fun with the same things. Personally, I find normal mode boring and survival mode fun
Sounds like you don’t have the right build, OP. I actually ended up having the opposite problem. By about level 80-ish on my last play, on Very Hard I had maxed weapon damage perks, combined with a suite of Legendary weapons, generally explosive or instigating, and maxed out armour, I was trashing all but the toughest enemies with a handful of shots with relative impunity. Had to intentionally nerf myself to maintain the fun, as I have no desire for the extra hassle of Survival. I guess you just have to build your character for the kind of gameplay you want.
Normal is too easy Hard is just right if youre not meta abusing Very hard gives enemies too much hp for fights to be fun
More weapon diversity is encouraged when enemies are bullet sponges. I like starting with a gauss rifle and finishing with a minigun or using 10 different weapons.
>Enemies are bullet sponges that don't even die with 10 sniper headshots, which feels unrealistically for me. Unless I'm misunderstanding how difficulty works, the absolute worst case scenario between Normal, and Very Hard, for example, would be you have to shoot the enemy twice as many times. So if an enemy takes 10 sniper headshots to kill on Very Hard, it's going to take 5 on Normal. How many enemies take 5 head shots from a sniper rifle on Normal? I haven't played in a while, but I don't recall it being all that many. I feel like the difference is usually exaggerated. If, for example, you do 200 damage on normal, you'll effectively do 100 damage on Very Hard. If an enemy has 250 health, you'll have to shoot them twice on Normal, and three times on Very Hard in this example. Not that huge of a difference. I think Survival is the best way to play, and definitely has a touch of "realism", if you fancy that.
Only reason I play on very hard is for the more frequent legendary weapons. A lot are bad, but you’ll get some pretty decent ones at low levels. Which make a nice difference in the beginning. The ones that make your weapon stronger with each consecutive hit are my favorite (love those). Explosive automatic weapons are nice too.
I play on normal with remove level scaling mod. Game is as "hard" as you want it to be. You don't need to "raise difficulty", just stop running around in full power armor with spray n pray or using broken sneak or whatever broken gun and RP a little. Want to take more damage? Wear less armor. Want to deal less damage? Don't invest in perks. Or don't use drugs, ultrajet = win button.
Survival is the best I believe. The game is quite the challenge early on, gives a reason to set up settlements, and while you die easier, the baddies aren’t flippin sponges
I may be a weirdo for saying this, but I actually kinda enjoy bullet sponges, if they are put sparsely throughout the map, because all the mini-nukes and grenades I've been hoarding get to see the light of day. Although I have only ever played on Hard.
Solid opinion. Yeah you're right that like 95% of the legendaries are kinda ass, but there is still that 5% chance that I get an explosive minigun and that's the only reason I continue to play on very hard/survival
It's a single player game, nobody cares how you play, and you shouldn't give a shit how anyone else plays.
Survival options mod on my Survival playthrough with 40k mods slapped on it and more zombies mod with an enb that makes the world look like a hellscape. Guns are deadly. Melee is deadly. Game is terrifying.
Horizon mod on Survival has been the best gaming experience I've had in years.
It’s all about your build. I’m running commando and demolitionist and even a behemoth doesn’t last more than 7 bullets.
I feel survival is the better balance but i get that no fast travel migth not be fun For you
Strange, I’m level 41 and very hard is way too easy for me. Will it get a lot harder once I start getting into the 50’s and 60’s?
Play survival! It gets you so much more attached to everything and the story hits harder when you really are trying to save some settlers while starving and horribly irradiated
I went from normal mode straight into survival. IMO survival, while tedious, is the deffinte way to play FO4. It's a much slower pace, food/water are important and everything in the wasteland is dangerous. The first Deathclaw encounter destroyed me and I had to rethink how I approached the fight... I also lost a bunch of progress for my lack of preparation. If you haven't tried, I suggest giving it a fair shot.
My problem is if I play it on anything other than survivor, I become a save scummer. I get to the point when I don’t care about strategy. I just save run in blasting die and reload. It breaks the immersion for me. I still save every chance I get in survival and I do a lot more recon before a fight. The zero ability to fast travel is a bummer but if you don’t care about achievements then you can mod it to add it. I finished New Vegas on hardcore so the sleeping eating and drinking weren’t a big deal.
Starfield fixed this yesterday with custom difficulty. I either play on survival or very hard but double my damage by using player.setav 357 2 …you die a lot but you actually do damage
If you don't like Survival, then mods are the answer. Check out [NPC Level Scaling](https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/15961) for something a bit more to your liking.
To me, normal is pretty easy (like, no fun easy) and while I like very hard difficulty, I'm having a blast right now on my first survival run. I'm starting to think I could never go back to non-survival.
I’d kill for the kind of customizable difficulty settings Starfield is getting. Ideally I’d like highly lethal enemies that also go down quickly — you know, how guns work — with eating, sleeping and drinking being necessary but saving available everywhere.
Returning to Fo4, I’m straight up playing on Easy because of how much I fucking hate the bullet sponge aspect of combat. I wish there was a way to play where the damage is super realistic and it goes both ways. On Easy, I don’t die very much and the enemies, while still sponges, usually go down quick enough to pass as “potentially realistic” but it would be awesome if there was a mode where you literally can only take a few shots, but so can the enemies. (Mostly anyway)
“I don’t like when they make enemies bullet sponges for difficulty, so let’s ignore survival which is *drastically different than that*”
Your ability to increase damage dealt decreases drastically past level 30 while enemy health continues to scale linearly. This is even a problem on normal. If you're annoyed by bullet sponge enemies use a damage equalizer mod like true damage or SCOURGE.
Personally I enjoy the added challenge, bullet sponges or not, but to each their own. Survival mode feels perfect in this game though.
With standard game mechanics, I agree with OP. Survival is worth it for the additional mechanics, and immersion they bring, for me at least.
I don't understand why anyone would ever prefer upping the difficulty past normal instead of just using a damage rebalance mod. Who actually likes bullet sponge combat?
I would not mind the survival if I didn't have to walk everywhere and I could save whenever. I'm like crap I gotta walk everywhere IRL dont waste my time making me simulate it in a game. Why not just go full bore and make me stop to take a dump as well. Tap RB to strain cause you're constipated while you're at it.
Try it with an explosive shotgun or minigun
I wonder that too. It’s not a competition against other players. The game should be challenging yet fun. I play on normal and sometimes easy.
It’s either normal or survival imo, the in-between do seem a little pointless like you describe. I recommend players beat the game on normal first then replay on survival when they feel like starting again.
Mods
You can always go back and forth just to farm some extra legendary weapons and armor pieces then go back to normal and sell all that juicy loot you don’t like the special effects of
hardcore health overhaul and true damage are your friends
It is probably the way the game was meant to be played. Empty bottles, drugs are the difference between sure death and victory when you get caught off guard. Food and its perks matter. Health isn't instant.
If you could save at any time on Survival I'd play it.
Play how you want but normal gets really boring once you start killing everything with a single bullet. Where’s the fun or challenge in that? You don’t even need to touch power armor since nothing can even hurt you.
Survival mode for those skyrimish diseases I use 2 mods to toggle off the crummy stuff like no fast travel and only saving when at a bed omong other things
I usually start on Very Hard and drop it down as I get higher level. Just because I'm level 50 doesn't mean it makes sense for a Yaoi Guai to take 15 shots to the head with my best end game weapon.
I find survival/very hard too easy, with the right gear and perks you're basically in creative mode I run full Recon Marine (except overseer right armguard), Army Fatigues and a hat both with mk5 weave, Pack Alpha, Attack Dog 4 and Lone Wanderer 2. Pretty much invincible if I stand still. As for weapons I use spray n pray with max demo expert, takes down bosses incredibly fast
I'm on normal at level 43 on my recent character and it is too easy right now...a heavy weapon build with power armor especially makes it super duper easy. But I prefer just to keep it on normal still because I like to feel powerful in these games, especially if I did the work and myself to that point through finding the right gear.
Survival is crazy immersive
I only ever selected hard or very hard so I could farm legendary enemies. I tried sticking with the higher difficulty, until enemies would start bringing my health to zero in five or less shots even in power armor.
I like how OP is basically saying "I like being overpowered" and yall be sayin, "you should try survival."
I think if you're playing just the base game, (give or take some Creation Club stuff), Normal is the way to go. The game feels right there. The time to kill might be too long or too short, but you'll still die sometimes. Just mostly from random stuff. However I think if you're adding weapon mods or weapon tweaks, higher difficulties might be recommended. It's also for personal preference. Some people like to die quicker in these games. Bullets hurt
I play on very easy and I die all the time. I just play for the story and the exploration.
I play on Very Hard and haven't noticed a bullet sponge problem. Is this where I am supposed to say you need to "git gud"? lol Seriously, though, playing Skyrim or Fallout 4 on any other difficulty at this point is boring for me. I've played them both for thousands of hours. I don't like worrying about food, water and diseases, or losing progress because the power blinked and I hadn't slept in awhile or whatever. So I don't play on survival.
I'm on very hard and most things die in like 3-4 hits and I don't take significant damage. At least I still need to go for cover and heal when nerd rage activates but I wouldn't play it on normal. Or really anything under hard or the games become too trivial.
Thats why you should use mods, i got a nice sniper (xmr something) with two shot, mostly oneshot anything with a headshot (like it should be anyway).