Balance in Fallout 4

[ToroMontana]

About a month or two ago I restarted playing Fallout 4 with all DLCs, all Creation Club mods + a few user-made mods like Project Valkyrie and my own mods.

 

Even playing it just on just official content on SURVIVAL (I've been ignoring non-official content for now) the game is very unbalanced. Fun as hell, but not hard, in fact it doesn't even create the illusion of being hard.

 

So I think I will start working a mod that makes things harder but rather than changing the world around the character, I'd rather change (or at least focus on changing) how the player character works.

 

Mostly looking at some of the perks. You have perks that:

 

1. make it possible to run around with unlimited items just not sprint (combined with 21+ Endurance you don't even run out of energy so you can just sacrifice sprint for unlimited carrying capacity), this is by far the most game breaking aspect as unlimited items can also be crafted into stuff which give experience which means you can level far quicker

2. double the damage of all weapons with 5/5 points

3. increase leveling speed by a lot (Idiot Savant)

4. reduce damage by a lot encouraging ditching companions

5. extend chem benefits so much you can literally use them for one in-game day

6. high levels are OP alone as you gain too much HP to be killable realistically, at level 210 now an entire Castle of almost 50 settlers with miniguns and nuke grenades cannot kill me before I kill them

7. combining certain perks gets you even more OP results

 

The explosive and instigating legendary effects are also too powerful. Instigating is especially powerful on a weapon with high damage in one hit, like a missile launcher.

 

Taking advice now on what should change to make Fallout 4 (sort of) hard again. What player stuff will have to be nerfed and how, without modifying too much the spirit of the original game.

 

I don't really expect it to be super hard, but you shouldn't be able to enter a dungeon and oneshot everything. Perhaps even a level cap would be great. Or maybe a soft cap like once you reach 50, going from 50 to 51 takes a heck of a long time.

Edited May 20, 2019 by ToroMontana

[HadToRegister]

It happens with Bethesda games in general, because once you reach a certain level, everything around you stops leveling, because of the way that the game locks the level of stuff whenever you enter a cell.

From what I understand, if you enter a cell at level 1, that cell will stay low level, so when you run through that cell again, it's just a nuisance

 

It's obvious from the perks, and the level requirements for the perks, that they realized the perks were a bit OP so it feels like they quickly slapped the level requirements on the perks to make a 'forced restriction' on the perks.

At the beginning levels you feel so powerless when you're shooting something with the 10mm pistol, or a pipe rifle, but if you get some weapon perks, all of a sudden you're one-shotting things (I play with a mod that removes perk level requirements, so I get to test the effects much quicker)

You can actually get a more powerful Sniper Rifle, towards the early game modding using Pipe Weapons, than waiting for a Hunting rifle to drop.

 

Anyway, I don't think it's the guns etc that are too much, it's that the enemies are really weak.

Back in FO1, FO2, FO3 and FONV running into a Deathclaw pretty much got you killed.
FO4's deathclaws, not so much

Remember the Cazadores in FONV? Guaranteed death with the DOT poison.

Most Creatures, Mutants, Raiders, etc in the game end up just being an annoyance after a while