Between the new season of the Fallout show, New Vegas’ 15th birthday, Fallout 4’s 10th anniversary, and our interview series celebrating all of the above (complete with print cover story!), I’ve been in a bit of a Fallout mood. I smashed through Fallout 3 in a week and change over Christmas, I’m getting asymptotically close to the end of a New Vegas run I started in November, and I’ve put a humiliating number of hours (28.2, according to Steam) into Fallout 4 in just the past five days.
My cold take: New Vegas is still my favorite entry in the series, including the 2D originals. My hot take: Fallout 4 is a vastly superior game to Fallout 3, and deserves more credit than it gets in RPG snob circles. The writing is much better than you remember, with more interesting quests and characters than Fallout 3. The color, vibrancy, and general art direction look fresh even 10 years on. The gunplay is so much better and more satisfying than the prior 3D Fallouts, and the weapon customization is a genuine advancement over what you see in New Vegas.
That’s not even getting to the settlement building stuff, which Fallout 4 generally has gotten its proper due for. It’s been particularly illuminating to see the contrast between my subsistence powergamer auto turret and water purifier penal colonies versus my Animal Crossing and Stardew-loving fiancee’s thoughtfully-planned communities.
Something that’s made all the difference for me, though, and which may change how I approach Bethesda games (and other RPGs) in the future, is Survival Mode. Fallout 4’s harder than hard setting borrows ideas from New Vegas’ similar Hardcore Mode, but takes them even further. Here are some of the topline changes:
- Ammo has weight and adds to your encumbrance, you can carry less in general, and you take damage if overencumbered.
- You get hungry, thirsty, and tired, requiring you to see to those basic needs, while most drugs and medicine spike your thirst meter.
- Fast travel is completely disabled.
- There’s a Survival-only system of diseases and parasites—swimming and eating uncooked food are just two risk factors.
- Enemies no longer show up on your compass.
- Perhaps most punishing of all: You can only save your game by going to sleep at a bed. You get a temporary “exit save” on quitting the game, but that disappears once you load it.
Jesus Christ. It sounds tedious just writing it down for this story, and that isn’t even all of the changes. Survival does throw you a few bones, though: You get double the experience from killing enemies, the increased frequency of legendary enemy spawns means more legendary items, and you generally do more damage thanks to an “adrenaline” bonus that increases the longer you go without sleeping. Still, the bottom line remains more friction, more challenge, more things to keep track of at any given moment.
Hardcore to the mega
A great paradox of RPGs is that they’re almost always fantasies of cultivation, accumulation, and growth—number go up—and I’ve never played a single one whose challenges keep pace with that progress. The genre comes with a reverse difficulty curve, where the early game is the hardest part. I don’t know if it’s something that can be “solved” as much as “accommodated,” since the power fantasy is a crucial draw.
But I often find the early parts of RPGs, particularly Bethesda and Bethesda-adjacent open worlders, to be the most memorable and exciting. The world still feels big and threatening, and I haven’t yet fallen into the mechanical rut afforded by an OP build—I’ll encounter tough scrapes where I have to improvise my way out. Quests or expansions that take away most of your toys, like New Vegas’ Dead Money, can recreate this feeling later in the game, but they can’t consistently sustain it.
Survival Mode has extended that window in Fallout 4 in a way that’s made me see the game in a whole new light. The Commonwealth feels bigger than it did when I first visited in 2015, even though I came back with a pretty good understanding of the map. I’m paying closer attention to everything, stopping at more locations, and taking it slower because the game forces me to be careful, lest I lose a ton of progress and have to repeat it again.
I spent the first 10 hours doing laps around Concord and Sanctuary, clearing out locations but also accumulating cash and purified water at my little survivalist outpost before even stopping in to say hi to Revolutionary War reenactor Preston Garvey and his dopey little friends. 30 hours and 28 levels into the game, travel still feels costly, random encounters may spell doom, and saving my game at a dirty sleeping bag in a ruined gas station can feel like an utter lifesaver.
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Even with a full sneaky sniper guy build at mid to high level, typically the point where these games start going down too smooth, Fallout 4 still feels threatening and textured. It’s less about sheer difficulty, and more how it engages me on multiple levels. Oblivion Remastered on Legendary is difficult, but it’s not captivating in the same way—guys just take a million hits to go down.
PCG senior editor Chris Livingston once spent five years playing The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion as a normal NPC. YouTube video maker Any Austin recently conducted a similar experiment with Cyberpunk 2077 over a 21-hour stream, roleplaying as a Night City waiter despite there not being any in-game mechanics to support it. His conclusion about the experience has really stuck with me: “If you want to get more out of something, put more into something.”
As I’ve gotten older, my heart hardened and my imagination dimmed, I’ve struggled to really roleplay in RPGs like I used to. But years of playing FromSoftware games have inoculated me to the tedium and repetition I might experience getting instagibbed by a grenade, losing twenty minutes of progress, and having to start the hike from Sanctuary yet again. The iron discipline enforced by Survival Mode has made me invest more of myself into Fallout 4, and my experience has been richer for it.
Part of why I still feel so far away from finishing New Vegas is that I’m already an immortal badass cowboy sniper god zooming around the map and checking off quests, Hardcore or no. I clearly needed harder stuff like Fallout 4’s Survival Mode. Next time, I’m definitely grabbing New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer’s sickos-only jsawyer mod. I want to check out Skyrim’s survival deal later this year—that one even adds hypothermia. There may be something wrong with me.
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