This is what happens when your four year old designs your character.
I love Fallout. It is is, decidedly, my favorite game franchise of all time. I played the older games back when they weren't so old, and I have played the heck out of the new ones too. I'm in the small camp of old school Fallout players who actually prefer the new games, I like the fact that they are more immersive. Needless to say, I've been enjoying the ever-living crap out of Fallout 4. This past week, I decided to finally give the new "survival mode" a shot. I was highly disappointed by the survival difficulty of New Vegas, but I everything I had read led me to believe that this time would be better.
It isn't.
It seems pretty clear to me that the team at Bethesda isn't very clear on the meaning of the word "survival". I was expecting to be spending the majority of my time hunting for food and water. I was expecting to spend a lot of time avoiding combat in order to preserve my fragile existence. I was expecting farming and settlement building to become a necessary element of getting through the game. I was expecting to have to struggle to make it through each day, let alone pursue the storyline. Rescue Shaun? How can I do that when I can't even keep myself alive? I was expecting a challenge!
Instead I got minor inconvenience. Purified water is abundantly available from Vault 111, just take some empty bottles in there and fill them up. Food is equally easy to come by, the radiation levels on most pre-war items aren't that high and hunting and cooking are pretty easy. Having to sleep to save the game seems like a huge inconvenience at first, until you realize that you also need to sleep to avoid fatigue, so you save pretty regularly anyway. I will admit that gradually taking damage from being over encumbered is a nice touch, but there's enough alcohol and Buffout around to boost your strength whenever you want to. The biggest inconvenience, I think, is not being able to fast travel.
Survival Mode? More like Inconvenient Mode!
In "Survival Mode" I was still able to do all of the same things I'd do in non-survival mode. I felt no noticeable increase in the difficulty of accomplishing my goals. The "Survival" elements proved to only be annoying. "Hold on, let me drink some water! OK, game on!" By the time I'd gotten to Diamond City I was asking myself "Why bother?"
Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who complains about the overall difficulty of the normal game. I'm comfortable with how difficult "Very Hard" mode is. If I wanted a Dark Souls style level of challenge, I would play Dark Souls. I like the current generation of Fallout games for the atmosphere and the story and the fact that I get to feel like an unequivocal badass, not because I want a challenge. But I wanted more from something called "Survival Mode". I wanted to struggle. I wanted a challenge. I wanted to have to actually work hard at surviving. Instead I got "Fallout 4: Now with Annoying Debuffs".
Oh well, I guess I'll just go back to waiting for Far Harbor to release.
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