Fallout 4

You don't need help, you need spurs that jingle jangle jingle as you go ridin' merrily along.

I bumped myself up to Hard difficulty yesterday, feels a lot more my level!

Good stuff.

Though you're reminding me how *little* of Pittsburgh came through with The Pitt F3 DLC. >.<

One bridge going in and a few buildings on the Skyline were about it. The Cathedral of Learning at Pitt University is the location of one of the hubs of the DLC but...eh. I dunno. Just doesn't feel as Pittsburgh as Fallout 3 and 4 feel to DC and Boston, respectively.

there are difficulties below Survival?

"Oh senpai! So brave!"

But really.

Playing on very hard. I greatly dislike the reduced healing rate in Survival.

I certainly haven't been pushed as hard as I expected from Hard Difficulty so I may go one step further with Very Hard in the near future myself.

I jumped from normal to very hard myself. It's definitely tougher but I find largely that's due to more "leveled-up" mobs in groups of raiders/ghouls/etc. more than anything else.

I gave survival a go but it just was too irritating. I depend too much on being able to blast my way out of close danger with a shotgun at short range to not get the quick healing from stims.

Random aside:

I got a legendary to drop a gamma gun.

...with +50% damage to ghouls.

Renamed "WTF is this ***?"

He keeps hackin' and whackin' and smackin'.

my problem with this game's difficulty, actually, is the same problem i have with most "high difficulty" games, which is that the enemies increase their ability to soak up bullets, while my ability to do the same is neutered(I feel like the witcher 3 is notoriously bad for this because on the highest difficulty I get killed in a fist fight with 1 guy if I get hit like 3 times and witchers are crazy mutants, but it takes me 17 or 18 hits to knock out even the rank and file in a fistfight). Nothing is harder, it is just more time consuming(have to shoot longer, have to hide more, have to spend more time scrounging for bullets, etc).

everything is as complex as it is ever going to be, but when I have to shoot someone in the head 15 times with a 50 cal bullet to kill it, there is a problem.

I'm only even playing on survival because even that is pretty easy. If I didn't have the slow health regen, stimpacks are so plentiful I couldn't ever see myself dying outside of getting instagibbed out of nowhere.

I don't think game developers devote enough time to a complex difference in AI patterns based on difficulty settings, it kills the immersion when your enemy can absorbs enough bullets to kill a dozen men.

meanwhile I die in two or three good shots.

In FO4, it's done about as well as I've seen it done, which still isn't great.

On survival you do 50% damage while enemies do 200%. It's not that they're particularly bullet sponges, because they really aren't if you're upgrading your weapons, but that you are much more frail.

They also tend to be much more aggressive with things like grenades and missile launchers. Which makes for a much more fast-paced and high-stakes experience. I have been on survival difficulty through my whole playthrough besides getting stuck in a death loop on the first deathclaw, where I had to lower it just to get away and get a fresh quicksave where I wasn't immediately getting picked up and smashed over and over.

This is the biggest difference I've noticed. Raiders not afraid to throw molotovs and grenades in hallways from the very beginning.

Yeah, the first few missions are pretty brutal if you go straight for idiot savant and start piling points into the perk for your weapon of choice. Then you have to go straight for stuff like science and the specific customizing tree or you're going to have a really rough time of it.

I like how precious every bullet is. It really makes you think twice about firing off your fat man for the lulz.

I'm such a "rainy day" saver of my missile launcher and Fat Man in games past that I end up beating the game having never touched them.

I've grown friendly to grenades in F4 though.

I played game on normal. I have zero interest in playing again until dlc comes out.And f the town management stuff.It got old fast.

I barely use them because they're so damn heavy to lug around...

Stash the fat man on a companion with no ammo. Grenades are well worth the weight. Maltov's especially for the DoT damage on high end targets with a seriously large splash area.

I collect all I can and keep three grenades and three Molotovs on me and deposit any extra I've picked up and haven't used -- or restock, if I've used more than I've found -- in my storage every time I touch base in Sanctuary.

I really try not to stop at home after every quest because it breaks immersion for me to fast travel nonstop. So, I setup a bunch of supply routes to settlements fairly spread across the map. That way I can run into secondary locations and stuff as I run from place to place but still be able to offload my junk fairly often.

I went more of a stealth route, since sneak attack damage is so crazy strong on survival difficulty, and my carry weight is pretty low (like 295 with lone wanderer)

I don't stop after every quest, generally once I'm fully loaded on things I'm not willing to just drop though.

Immersion is nice, but I like to tinker with my guns and armor too much to waste valuable resources!

It's always great finding armor and weapons stations in the various areas because scraps are so much lighter than armor. :x

I tend to pull mods off every weapon I find early on, since you probably can't make them yet, and I'll dump the mods and scrap when I need to. I've also been keeping notes on which locations I didn't have the capacity to plunder at the time and making second trips before advancing time too much, so I don't miss out on respawns. As it sits, I've got well over 10k of the common resources and a few hundred of virtually everything rare. Hopefully I won't have to do much gathering if and when I start doing settlements more seriously.

I'm probably engaging in suboptimal scrapping activities, to be honest, but I just find it difficult to devote that much time to doing.

Everyone has a system that works for them, I'm just giving you my take.

Credit: http://teamwreckloose.com/

Somewhat serendipitously, that picture sort of summarizes my problems with Strong.

I feel like I'm leading on some poor mentally challenged adult about Santa Claus.

I meant the Fat Man specifically, I get a lot of use out of mines and grenades though. Mines are kind of tough to utilize though except in a few situations (i.e. ganking the Mirelurk Queen or something), tried to ambush a bunch of random enemies in certain areas by placing mines in doorways and then making noise, but nothing seems to fall for it.

I've found that when it comes to mines the best way to use them is to sneakily place a few in choke points then start sniping until you're detected and then duck behind a wall and wait for them to come to you.

Raiders seem less interested in checking out noises in this game than prior Bethesda titles, and Ghouls can be pretty *** lazy too; they're not even going to show hostile until you get close enough, otherwise they just can't be assed to harass you.