Fallout 3
- Difficulty and Combat Settings
This is one of our posts on tips to optimize your Fallout 3 experience -- giving you the best gameplay experience through a careful mix of cheats and mods.
For the full index, click here.
In this post we will discuss Difficulty settings and setting up combat encounters in Fallout 3. We first start with what we consider "good combat".
What is a "Good" Combat Setting?
Most of the combat you encounter can be termed "random encounters". That is, on your travels, you encounter some hostiles. They are not important to the plot and to keep the action moving and to keep the quests and stories advancing, they shouldn't totally absorb your time in heavy strategy or multiple reloads/re-dos.
To draw on some 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons methodology, a "random encounter" is just filler action and shouldn't be a life-and-death struggle. You
should be able to come out on top having used only just a fraction of your resources (and in a game where you can get mods to have unlimited storage, "resources" means what you Strength allows you to carry, without mods). Random encounters are meant to be exciting, but because they are ultimately unimportant, they shouldn't really take you too much away from the rest of the game, or risk killing you unless you are deliberately putting yourself in excessive danger -- This is our benchmark for what makes combat "good".
Difficulty
As you know, you can choose five settings: Very Easy - Easy - Normal - Hard - Very Hard. The chief difference is:
- Very Easy: Enemy Damage 50% Player Damage 200% XP 50%
- Easy: Enemy Damage 75% Player Damage 150% XP 75%
- Normal: Enemy Damage 100% Player Damage 100% XP 100%
- Hard: Enemy Damage 150% Player Damage 75% XP 125%
- Very Hard: Enemy Damage 200% Player Damage 50% XP 150%
Beyond the numbers, what does this mean, actually? We can look at the early game where you fight Raiders and see how each setting "feels". Then we match it up with whether we like it or not -- although in a game where adversaries can be of a "higher level" and absorb more damage, we can only go so far with using this as a benchmark.
In the early game, at any difficulty, you can expect that a handgun will kill a person with a shot to the head if they are unaware (Sneak Critical). This is pretty reasonable. We can assume that when they are aware, even a direct hit to the head is just an abstraction in a game where dodging is limited to strafing and ducking.
Once we get to Hard difficulty and Raiders of level 4+, it can start to swing either way, where you might or might not kill someone with a bullet to the head.
At Very Hard difficulty, a typical levelled Raider of about level 9 has a good chance of living through one rifle bullet in the brain. They can also definitely survive a full clip of assault rifle fire. This, to us, is not reasonable. It makes combat hard, certainly, but something about the reality-defying nature of it is just irritating. On top of this, the enemy does double damage. Combined with their coordinated accurate shooting and strafing, this can make for a lot of stumbling into no-win situations.
You can use stims, eat food, and drink water in copious amounts during combat by binding something to a hotkey or opening your inventory, but this is really a type of unreasonable compensation for a too-high difficulty. Realistically, are you going to administer a stim to your crippled head during a gunfight? Or somehow pull out a Brahmin Steak and eat it in between trying to shoot down a mole rat with your rifle? It is our opinion that if you
rely on having in-combat healing, then the fight is too tough and should be classed as a mini-boss or boss fight. If you only occasionally use one of these "magic healing potion" options, it's not so bad since chance and mistakes happen in combat. But if most fights, or every fight, is like this, then you've set the difficulty level way too high for things to really be fun.
I recommend the highest Difficulty Setting to be Hard and still get reasonable-looking results of sniping actually being useful rather than just drawing attention. In general, playing on Normal is probably the best. We can up the difficulty in a different way, and still have reasonable kills against the enemy, instead of fighting supernaturally tough enemies.
If you insist on near-death experiences in every fight, then you are really looking for an FPS shooter, and Fallout 3 really isn't one.
Combat Encounters
If you play Fallout 3 without mods at Normal Difficulty, it can be quite a bit too easy as long as you're not swarmed, and typically the game won't do that to you. If you slide up the Difficulty, it is still doable, but as discussed before, fights look strange when you've emptied a clip from your assault rifle into the raider and they're still coming. Instead of unreasonably tougher opponents, we can instead have more opponents -- by using
Mart's Mutant Mod.
Mart's Mutant Mod introduces some creatures from previous versions of Fallout, but the most extreme of these additions can be turned off. For the purposes of this post, the key attributes of Mart's Mutant Mod is in the flexibility in which it generates monsters. You can increase the number spawned by the game by a random factor of x2 to x5 or more. The vanilla "slightly increased" version gives you 1-3 enemies for each that normally appears. This not only adds difficulty by having more creatures, but you never know exactly how many you will face even if you've been to the location before.
By increasing the number of adversaries, we can retain the feel of combat against each, as well as make combat a more varied experience. If you find even having a lot of enemies to be too easy, you can then increase the difficulty if you want them freakishly and unreasonably tough.
We recommend Slight Increased Spawns (1-3) and some combination of Soft Unlevelling and Dynamic Player Scaling so that the occasional really-tough monster (i.e., boss fight) shows up to challenge you. Otherwise, keep random encounters light.
V.A.T.S. vs. Real Time vs. Bullet Time
The VATS system in Fallout 3 is really a compensation for AI opponents who calculate moves far too quickly.
- At range, they and run-and-gun very well at all levels, thereby dodging your attacks while hitting you with uncanny accuracy. Unless you are exceptionally good, you cannot match that level of coordinated agility with just your keyboard and mouse.
- At close quarters, you cannot always intuit whether your weapon barrel is too close and in fact pointing behind the target (and thus your shots will have no effect); the AI automatically knows this and can compensate -- All within a split second.
- In melee, they can move, turn, and strike as well as calculate weapon distance to weave into range of their attacks or out of range of your own. They also constantly circle you, and you are stuck with either turning in place to find them or zooming out into third-person view where you have inferior targeting.
Because of all this and more, they give you VATS, which basically lets you queue a few attacks. While in VATS you take only 10% damage, to compensate for not dodging while in VATS, and having to wait for your Action Points to fill up once the VATS sequence ends.
Instead of VATS, you can slow the world down to 25% speed for everyone -- including you. At that speed, you can think, move, and fight approximately as well as the enemy. What they can do, you can do too. It then comes down to damage and weapon spread, both of which are determined by the skills your character has developed. A simple mod that does this is
GQ Bullet Time, which lets you toggle 25% time on and off.
Whether you fight in real time or bullet time, you may still want to use VATS:
- Melee: It knows if you can score a Sneak Attack, and will go for the head if you can -- you can't always do this in real-time from a crouched sneaking position without losing your Hidden status (and therefore your ability to Sneak Attack). If it cannot start with a Sneak Attack, it will aim for a gun if possible to disarm your opponent before safely completing its attack sequence.
- Arcing Shots and Throwing: For attacks that require arcing (such as all Grenades and some Big Guns), VATS will automatically arc your shot to land your projectile where you choose. You would otherwise have to figure it out yourself. VATS can't bounce Grenades off walls to go around corners, so you will still need to do that on your own outside of VATS.
- Apocalypse Armoury: This vastly increases the number of weapons. By giving out a wider range of weapons, you will get wider variety in combat as each opponent adapts to how their weapons are best used (shotguns, for example, are shorter range weapons; assault rifles are medium range; and rifle-using enemies tend to stay at range and wait for you to pop out).
