Fallout NV Survival Mode Improvements

[Ediros]

As I haven't seen a thread like this, I would like to ask your opinion about how could we make New Vegas more dangerous without going overboard?

As much as I like it, I found NV survival mode way too easy.

So I came with couple of ideas:
1.Increased hunget/thirst/sleep rates - project nevada does it.

2.Diseases and such. I find it hard to believe our character never gets diarhea, headache and such. For example get a chance to get a disease from animal if it manages to go through your dt and dr.

Drinking dirty water or from bad places. Spending too much time in vault 22, etc.

3.Less supplies in the game - also project nevada.

4.Sandstorms and such that affect our character.

Feel free to add any ideas.

 

[Mr Fish]

Increasing the rate at which you need to eat and drink and sleep is not a solution to me as all it does is give some stat hits and stats in fnv are hardly 'that' noteworthy. It needs a overhaul in how it functions and what it does. For example, Dehydration should decrease you ap and running speed and your screen should be prone to dizzy effects. You need far more than little tweaks here and there to make survival worth a damn.

Then again, with how the gameworld is designed (compact and largely civilized) i dont think survival elements fit in. So personally i dont even care for them and use Project Nevada to get rid pf the need to eat and drink and sleep.

 

[Ediros]

Snip

I suppose this game suffers from too little area problem and the negative consequences are kind of weak.

Making the map bigger would help a lot but we can't have that. I like survival mode but I see where you are coming from Mr Fish.

In a perfect world we would have an entire checklist like:

Food
Water
Sleep
Ammo Weight
Diseases etc

And then we could choose the ones we want.

 

[Lucas9]

I use a few mods that make it much more interesting:

- Project Nevada: Core module only, as Rebalance fucks up the rest of the mods in this list.
- JSawyer: baby's first difficult overhaul, but nice.
- Vicious Wastes: a real kick in the nuts. Changes way too many things, makes the game much more difficult. Luckily it doesn't add new pointless and intrusive features like PN does.
- Cirosan's Classic Overhaul: followers module only.
- Mass Recalibration: adds weight to almost every item in the game.
- Immersive Minigames: lockpicking and hacking works just like in the classic games, your skill as a player no longer factors in.
- Realistic Reloading: have to manually reload. If you change your weapon and change it back, it isn't magically reloaded. The mod remembers how many bullets it had. Has an option to drop magazines on early reload, or keep them on inventory. Can recover unused bullets at a reloading bench.

Overall: combat is faster, items are more scarce, carry weight is heavily reduced (150 tops with 10 Strength, unless we factor in Perks, 50 minimum), almost everything has weight, minigames are more difficult (since a 25 Science terminal worked exactly the same as a 49 Science terminal, but not any longer), and a few more FPS features.

Game is much more enjoyable now. I'm also working on a mod that removes all enchantments from armor and clothing*, so far I've finished the core game and the DLCs. It also has an optional module for full compatibility with JSawyer and Yukichigai's Unofficial Patch.

*only a few select armors have enchantments now, mainly Power Armor, the tribals from Honest Hearts, and those which increased Sneak. Headgear still provides +1 Perception since it shields your eyes, and only glasses now correctly provide a bonus to Four Eyes.

 

[SnapSlav]

Increasing the rate at which you need to eat and drink and sleep is not a solution to me as all it does is give some stat hits and stats in fnv are hardly 'that' noteworthy. It needs a overhaul in how it functions and what it does. [...] You need far more than little tweaks here and there to make survival worth a damn.

Well changing how the stats work is certainly another avenue. Stats do so little that a hit to them amounts to very little, but what if they were to make a bigger difference?

My preferred solution was, as always, more of a hybrid of different things. Yes, stats doing more would mean losing some stats would have a larger impact, but having things like the visual effects would also work nicely.

For instance, my first idea was that Sleep Deprivation didn't lower ANY stats, but that it reduced your Exp gain increasingly as the status effect worsened. But then I figured this would make it meaningless if you reached max level, because you needed no more Exp. More recently I pondered about the idea of Exp gain being tied to PE and IN, and that Sleep Deprivation would lower PE, EN, and IN (since these aspects ARE impacted by actual sleep deprivation) and these would both decrease your Exp gain as well as impact you in several key ways.

Originally I figured that all Dehydration needed to do was lower Max HP. This made you weaker the more Dehydrated you were, and getting hydrated wouldn't heal the lost HP, just return lost Max HP. Depending on the numbers used, this might still be enough to go on.

Starvation remains, I think, the only status ailment in which lowering your Stats still makes perfect sense. As you weaken for lack of food, you lose energy to be as agile and spry, your lack of nutrition horrible impacts your immune system, and delirium sets in, so I can easily see ST, PE, EN, AG, maybe even CH (cause you start to look disfigured from malnutrition?) taking a hit as your Starvation increases.

If each of these had a large enough impact, managing your resources would be a really pressing minigame. Of course, the entire game would have to be careful constructed around these concepts, which it wasn't, so changing these sorts of things, like most mods, would serve to only put a bandage on a wound without fixing it, or worse, overcompensating for a fault so much that the rest of the game loses all of its fun.

It's a tough tightrope to walk, but I always enjoyed contemplating the theorycraft of it all.