A simple re-balance suggetion

[mrspongeworthy]

Like many, I found one of the major pitfalls of Fallout 3 to be that it is simply far too easy. The wasteland never feels all that dangerous once you are past level 2 or so.

 

I've tried a lot of re-balance mods, but most of them simply broke balance in other ways. I'm looking for fun, not necessarily realism, although harder would certainly be more realistic in most cases.

 

Anyway, way back I had the PS3 version, so no mods. I found it too easy and had to "rebalance" it myself. What I did was "pretend" that I couldn't carry any stimpacks. When I was wounded I had to either tough it out, or manage to run away and hide, and then sneak very carefully around until I found a stimpack. Then I would use it immediately. This was actually the most balanced and fun game of Fallout 3 which I've played to date.

 

So my suggestion is a (hopefully simple) mod which increases the weight of stimpacks to an amount which you can't move with at all, even with carrying-capacity mods. Something like 9999 pounds!

 

This, combined with a good radiation-threat mod so that food makes you sick fast, and I think the rest of the game balance would fall into place fast. Imagine you're fighting all those super-mutants, and you know there is no way for you to simply pause the game and take some stimpacks. You've got to escape and go find some healing.

 

It would be great if someone could do this mod.

[Burbinator]

Now medicine is near useless, because if you can run a cell away, you can just fast travel to doctor/bed, heal, fast travel back. In the handful of situations you can't, I don't think you'd be able to find many stimpacks anyway. Hell, you even need to leave the map. Find a sink, put on an advanced rad suit (they cost like a hundred caps?) and drink up. Rad-x base cost is 20, you'll find more of them then you'll ever use anyway, and you mentioned nothing about radaway. In fact, radaway technically has higher healing potential than stimpacks cap for cap.

 

So what you're doing essentially is making stimpacks useless. Unless you like to sneak around with half health just in case you find one.

 

Anyway, why not just do what you did in the ps3 version? Exercise discipline and not use stimpacks. I'm not really sure what this adds, perhaps for people with terrible self control?

[Alastair91]

Check out the recommended mods.

 

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10867

 

Will make your game much more challenging.

[evilneko]

T3T Weapon Tweaks tends to make it more challenging, given the increased weapon damage cuts both ways...

[mrspongeworthy]

Hey folks. Thanks for the link, there is some good info there. But, as I said in the original post, I have tried MANY of the rebalance mods, and I haven't really liked any of them. The most balanced game I've had yet was the simple modification I mentioned above. If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't have bothered to mention it.

 

I think, if this is easy, that someone should give it a whirl and see if people like it. If it isn't easy, then yeah, I guess there isn't much point because we can just "pretend". But if you have to "pretend" something just to make a game challenging doesn't that mean there is something fundamentally wrong?

 

Anyone remember the original AVP on the Jaguar? It was one of the few games I've ever played which felt truly dangerous . In terms of scary atmosphere it might still be unmatched. One of the best things was (IIRC, this was a LONG time ago), that to get major healing you had to drag your sorry wounded butt all the way to the infirmary level. It's the same basic concept here: easy access to healing is one of the major flaws in most current games. Eliminating that one flaw, IMHO, goes a long way towards making a game more enjoyable. So I do feel this is worth a try...

[Alastair91]

Are you sure you have tried Real injuries mod + Real injuries patch? It also significantly increases radiation. You do not get easy access to healing.

[Burbinator]

Hey folks. Thanks for the link, there is some good info there. But, as I said in the original post, I have tried MANY of the rebalance mods, and I haven't really liked any of them. The most balanced game I've had yet was the simple modification I mentioned above. If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't have bothered to mention it.

 

I think, if this is easy, that someone should give it a whirl and see if people like it. If it isn't easy, then yeah, I guess there isn't much point because we can just "pretend". But if you have to "pretend" something just to make a game challenging doesn't that mean there is something fundamentally wrong?

 

Anyone remember the original AVP on the Jaguar? It was one of the few games I've ever played which felt truly dangerous . In terms of scary atmosphere it might still be unmatched. One of the best things was (IIRC, this was a LONG time ago), that to get major healing you had to drag your sorry wounded butt all the way to the infirmary level. It's the same basic concept here: easy access to healing is one of the major flaws in most current games. Eliminating that one flaw, IMHO, goes a long way towards making a game more enjoyable. So I do feel this is worth a try...

 

Your simple fix simply doesn't work well though. See what I said earlier: it makes stimpacks essentially useless, because any time you can run you can also heal yourself in other ways (wasteland, fast travel, indoors use a bathroom sink + radsuit/radaway). The only thing that stimpacks are currently useful for is convenience and instant healing; again, if you read what I said before, radaway is actually more cap efficient for healing with a bathroom sink, even if you can't afford the 100 caps for an advanced radiation suit. You take away that convenience of stimpacks, and there's no point in having stimpacks. You're looking for a total revamp of the healing system thinking it can be done with a change to stimpacks, which it can't. You're going to have to rebalance fasttravel, full (limb) healing with 1 hour of sleep in ANY bed, super cheap doctor costs, and the radiation system as well. Otherwise, it'll be incomplete, inconsistent, and pointless.

 

Also, you don't have to "pretend" anything. Just don't pick up stimpacks. Now, on the other hand, if I had to pretend that I did more damage than I normally do, that would be difficult. This is the sort of thing that mods tend to do the best with.