Survival Mode · 5:42pm Mar 29th, 2016
art by Wingedwolf94
Just a brief announcement regarding Fallout 4:
Bethesda just graced those of us in the beta with the new, hardcore Survival Mode. The new features became available earlier today. According to Bethesda, the new mode offers new incentives for strategy, exploration, resource management and roleplaying.
Below the break, you will find a quote from Bethesda advertising how they went about achieving this. A few of the new features sound like they would really add to the game. Fatigue, for example, affects your AP bar the way radiation affects your health. This will force you to actually sleep on a regular basis. And just to make it harder, different kinds of beds have different effectiveness of rest. Apparently, sleeping bags are not that helpful. (In my own playthrough, the lack of such a feature has led to Angel going days without bothering to sleep, which has always felt a bit weird.)
Other new features are more questionable. Personally, I find inventory management to be bothersome. I don't want to spend the majority of my game staring at my Pip-Boy inventory, backtracking for stashed items, or making multiple runs through cleared buildings trying to gather loot while avoiding encumbrance. So I really don't need reduced carry capacity and the addition of weight to bullets.
And then there are some really ugly additions, such as the inability to save except when sleeping. I know people who love that sort of challenge -- they are the types who play X-Com on Ironman Mode -- but I am not one of them. Worse, the lack of saves would effectively kill the Angel's Pip-Boy Diary blogs, since I do most conversations and battles several times to get good screenshots and take proper notes.
But the new Survival Mode also comes with unadvertised features. One of those is the disabling of all mods. And unfortunately, that is a deal-breaker for me. I understand why they did it -- you can't really have a proper playtest of a major overhaul if your playtesters are using a bunch of third-party material. However, disabling mods makes the game less fun and reverses mod-accomplished gameplay fixes. I'm not willing to playtest at the detriment of my own enjoyment and gameplay.
So, sadly, I am opting out of the beta at this point. I won't be able to answer any questions on my opinions of the new Survival Mode because I won't be using it. At least, not until it is out of beta and released in a mod-friendly form.
Feels like I'm really missing something...
art by Wingedwolf94
Here are the touted new features:
Saving with Sleep: Manual, quicksaving and almost all autosaves are disabled. To save your game, you'll need to find a bed and sleep for at least an hour. This means your fallback options are reduced, forcing you to be more concerned about what you are walking into and whether you’re prepared to handle it. Some fights you may deem above your level and decide to avoid. Other fights you may decide to go all in. Scouting and gathering information to make this decision can be fun in its own right. Also, when beds are your only means of saving, they become the Holy Grail. With that level of importance tied to them, you will scour the Earth to find the closest bed to your next chosen encounter – and in doing so you will likely discover things that you might have otherwise missed.
No More Fast Travel: Fast Travel is disabled. If you wish to be somewhere, you'll have to get there the old-fashioned way. In other words, exploration is now mandatory, exposing more of the Commonwealth’s secret gems. This will also take you out of your comfort zone, but encourage you to take advantage of the well-placed workshops throughout the Wasteland. And, while Charisma may seem less important to your immediate survival, there are certain Charisma-based perks that make managing your bases less painful.
Increased Lethality: You now deal, but also take, more damage. You can increase the damage you deal even further with "Adrenaline" – more on that in a moment. This makes combat more dangerous, which in turn slows you down and gets you to think about what you’re walking into. Combine this with it being much harder to save your game and suddenly each encounter becomes much more tense and dire.
Combat itself is also more strategic, because both you and enemies are more powerful; this means fights are about trying to use positioning and timing to get in your shots without taking enemy hits. This has an even bigger effect on melee players, who will now need to use their block/parry to keep themselves from taking damage during fights. While this change raises the skill necessary to play, those who opt into Survival know what they’re getting into.
Facing the Unknown: Threats, unless added by a Recon scope, no longer display on the compass, and the distance at which locations of interest will appear has been significantly shortened. You can no longer rush through the world, knowing what’s around the next corner. At the same time, you’ll likely explore even more, in order to ferret out any and all locations.
Adrenaline: Adrenaline, a new Perk that comes standard with Survival Mode, provides a bonus to your damage output and is increased by getting kills. Every five kills increases your Adrenaline rank, adding 5% bonus damage for up to an extra 50% damage at the max rank of 10. That extra damage is alluring. Adrenaline motivates the types of stupid decisions that always lead to the best water cooler stories. (Sleeping removes anywhere from 2 to all 10 ranks of Adrenaline, depending on the time you’ve slept.)
Wellness – Exhaustion, Hunger, Thirst: You'll find it difficult to survive without taking proper care of yourself. You must stay hydrated, fed and rested to remain combat-ready. Going for extended periods of time without food, water or a good night's sleep will begin to adversely affect your health, hurting your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats, adding to your Fatigue, lowering your immunity, and eventually even causing physical damage to you. This will affect every decision you make, because you have to consider your overall and ever-changing health. The drive to simply stay alive might push you into new and unexpected adventures. At the very least, you’ll likely find yourself hunting for valuable meats, triggering encounters with dangerous wildlife. But not everything you can consume is good for you: Certain items in the game now have negative consequences to balance out their positive effects. These counter-effects may make you thirsty, hungry or tired and possibly even hurt your immunity, leaving you vulnerable to Illness.
Fatigue: Fatigue mostly comes from being tired, but both hunger and thirst also affect it. Fatigue works like radiation, but affects your Action Points (AP) rather than your Hit Points (HP). The more Fatigue you've built up, the less AP you'll have for actions like sprinting and V.A.T.S. The amount of Fatigue you've accumulated is displayed in red on your AP bar.
art by Wingedwolf94
Time to start a new game and get my ass handed to me.
>Disables fast travel
derpicdn.net/img/2016/2/11/1085381/large.jpg
Yeah... no thank you. Making things difficult can be fun. Also disabling saves so that you have to backtrack further every time you die ruins it completely.
Especially with all the bullshit insta-death that's already in the game without them adding *more* damage to enemies.
Hell yes! That's gonna be awesome!
I can understand hardcore but some of this stuff is a little over kill. Why not make a classic mode like the original fallouts, those games were hard and had punishing difficulty but weren't crazy hard once you master them.
So you're saying that this mod will be like playing XCOM on Ironman mode? Try XCOM Long War on Ironman mode! I'm in for this stuff!
Looking forward to more APBD
Don't worry, I'm sure there's gonna be a fanmade patch when the full version releases.
I don't know? I don't think I like the change done with the fast travel. I mean, sure if they didn't have a perk already associated with fast travel, I might think that would be a cool choice.
But with having a Perk Associated with fast travel, it just seems like Bethesda is taking away something you earned. It probably would make more sense to have some sort of penalty system in place that wears you down with Exhaustion, Hunger, Thirst and Fatigue. Make it so you use fast travel smart or you might just kill yourself if you try to rush somewhere and your body can't take that kind of journey in your current condition.
Seems like they're trying to force exploration. One of my favorite things to do in games is explore every single building I come across, so they didn't need to push it on me. I already avoid fast-traveling since my game will get stuck on a loading screen if I do it too much, especially in the area between Diamond City, Bunker Hill and Castle. Not sure why.
Not sure what to make of this. Some parts look like a fun challenge, some look like just extra effort and annoyance.
Wonder what the illnesses will be like?
Actually, this seems like my type of game: ultra realism.
Saving with Sleep: no big deal, beds are everywhere.
No More Fast Travel: well, looks like I'll have to run through the main quest to get access to Vertibirds ASAP.
Increased Lethality: hell yes!
Facing the Unknown: I'm actually happy that radar is gone, I never liked it.
Adrenaline: sounds like fun, especially with increased lethality.
Wellness – Exhaustion, Hunger, Thirst: now we're talking!
Fatigue: eh, why not.
Now, let's add all those features to the Main story.
Just kidding, no one would be crazy enough to try doing so in a story. Right?
Overhauled Survival difficulty sounds great and all but there are a few features that could be customizable to player's preference. When/if the new Survival difficulty is 'moddable' for such flexibility remains to be seen but it would be nice to be able to disable some of the more potential deal-breaking features. No fast travelling but especially no mods allowed to be enabled is just a bit ridiculous. Not every mod is done for the sole purpose of cheating the game or making a play through easier. I feel as though the no saving except when resting and the mods disabled features tells us Bethesda does not trust the player enough with the goal of Survival. It also concerns me they would throw in such a unmentioned feature of disabled mods. Mods are what keep the game going and interesting, they enrich the player's experience with new content made by the community. Since this is a singleplayer game series with a emphasis on roleplaying, these couple of features seem forced upon the player. I believe Fallout, should be played however you want, whether that be as an easy breeze, a normal experience or a hard struggle.
As always, nice beginning and closing art on the blog post. Gawd damn.
Fortunately, I'd give it a negative number of days until a mod is out that lets you pick and choose which of these features to use.
Disabled Mods?!
Nope, I need my weightless ammo mod
That's practically a requirement unless you're running pure melee which the game seems to encourage, but there's parts of the game where guns save you twenty minutes or so with ewse
I'll probably enjoy it, once I can have mods with it.
Sounds like fun, but not my kind of fun. I usually just stick with a normal difficulty setting in any game unless it changes it automatically. I think the only game that ever changed difficulty on me that way was Infamous. Although that game wasn't to difficult to begin with
I'm currently enjoying the first Fallout 4 download. I'm so out of practice with this game these robots are actually giving me trouble.
If the final version is both mod-compatible and customisable in what features we enable (no way am I dealing with those save restrictions), then I may start using this for my main playthrough. But otherwise, I'm going to have to start a second game for this.
No mods, No way.
Did you happen to come across any other unlisted features?
I can understand why they did most of what they did, and I remember playing a couple realism mods for NV that did actually enhance gameplay, but removing quicksave is a bad idea on every account.
For some people, it might be more fun, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that bethesda games are generally unstable to begin with, and as soon as you start adding mods (*), instability rises. Fallout 4 may 'Just work', but eventually people will start running out of RAM, or some mod just wont mesh well with something, and as soon as you run into that, you crash, and have to go back to the last bed you were in.
I don't know about you guys, but when I have to manually save, I usually forget to do it for hours at a time, and losing that much progress is a gamebreaker for me.
(*)Which is basically essential for bethesda game... Who doesn't want your character to be an anime girl?
EDIT: Speaking of mods, where the fuck is the GECK?
3835033 They should have done something like Hardcore Mode on New Vegas, not simply Dark Souls mixed with the Fallout 3 survival overhaul mods. At least NV still let you save and fast-travel, even if it did doom you in the long run.
If I wanted to be almost completely out of control of my progress, be forced to walk everywhere, and not be able to enjoy the thing as I wanted, why the FUCK would I bother play a video game?!
3836110 The GECK should be coming out in April. I'm guessing in between Wasteland Workshop and Far Harbor.
3836110
I have been told that the console commands have also been disabled. That alone would have been a deal-breaker, since I use "tm" to get clean screenshots. (Not to mention the amount of times I have had to use "tcl" to get un-stuck.)
Ugh, no thanks. Added tedium and time sinkage does not make something more 'challenging' it makes it more tedious and boring.
Well, I can tell you this Kkat: You're not missing much. While I do like the ideas behind Survival mode (I personally loved playing with Hardcore mode switched on in New Vegas), I feel like this was almost a complete miss for proper implementation.
The biggest issue that I have encountered so far is with the core needs. The problem is that you cannot actively check your hunger/dehydration/sleep deprivation values until they actually start to negatively affect you. Personally, I find this to be an enormous pain as it makes planning ahead very difficult. With no fast travel, I'd like to know at any given time exactly how far along the levels of fatigue I am, and hiding the bars from me really does no favors. This issue is only compounded by the fact that restorative items don't actually tell you how effective they are; You just have to keep cramming yourself with random bitsof food and water until the game informs you that "You're properly fed". In New Vegas, I found it particularly helpful that I could see exactly how effective certain foodstuffs were at filling me compared to others, especially with inventory space at such a premium.
The second most annoying detail is how they've rebalanced the game. Going into this, I was expecting gameplay to be much like Ranger Mode in the Metro series: You can die very easily if you're not careful, but likewise your enemies will not last long under sustained fire. Unfortunately, this doesn't always seem to be the case. While some enemies, such as the first raiders I encountered in Lexington, seemed to be fairly easy to kill, other similarly leveled foes seem to be ridiculously damage-spongey. While roaming the wastes looking for salvage, I came across a single Gunner at level 4 who was wearing no armor and supported only by a turret on the other side of a small barricade. Looking to snag some better energy weapons, I pulled out my Laser Musket (Strongest weapon I currently have) and popped a Med-X, expecting the turret to give me some trouble. Still, I was at full health with rank 1 of the lifegiver perk and had a full set of raider armor, so I shouldn't have expected *too* much difficulty, right? Wrong. After loading both energy cells into the Musket, I fired upon the Gunner using VATS, landing two solid hits to the chest. This took off a whopping quarter of her health. Immediately she retaliated and fired twice using her laser rifle, killing me before the VATS sequence had even completed. The turret didn't even have a chance to fire on me. I'm not sure yet if things will even out a bit as I level up, but at the moment I feel like I have to take great pains to avoid any potential fights with humanoids because in all likelihood, I simply won't win.
And that brings me to my final major complaint, the saving system. I can appreciate what Bethesda wanted to do here, really I can. Locking out save-scumming is one of the most effective ways I can think to keep players on edge and ensure that they be constantly aware of their surroundings. One mistake, and it's all over. However, when the game is *this* ridiculously unbalanced, it just becomes an absolute nuisance.
There were also some other minor tidbits that I found to be rather annoying. While walking along the dam near Sanctuary, I took a quick moment to loot some dead raiders that a couple of settlers had presumably managed to take down. After a few moments, I hear a plaintive whine and the message "Heal your companion!" pop up as a quest marker. I look around and see no enemies nor any sign of Dogmeat. After toggling on the quest marker, what do I find? Yeah, Dogmeat fell off the dam, and now I have to waste a stimpak on his clumsy arse. Again, this is a feature that I can understand the underlying motivations behind, but with NPC pathfinding as bad as it can be sometimes (I distinctively recall Dogmeat falling from Trinity Tower several times during my first playthrough), babysitting your allies can easily become an obnoxious chore.
Granted, all of this is still subject to change and I really do hope that Bethesda does some cleanup regarding the issues I outlined here. While I've never been happy with the way that Bethesda balanced their games (No, hitpoint stacking does not equal higher difficulty!), I've still got some hope that they'll turn this around in the end. If not, we've still got mods.
That was quick, may want to try this out, if you want. After backing up saves of course.
SMWMM (Stop Messing With My Mods)
Or maybe not, I was reading this thread: How long will mods be disabled?
and this appears
PSA: Workaround to enable mods in survival causes junk and scrap system bug
I understand this new Survival mode is only in beta yet, I kind of got caught up in thinking the Survival mode is not in beta anymore, which it is. And only on the PC version for now. Still, it seems there is evidence of modding Fallout 4 gradually became more difficult in official patches. There is also concerning evidence that Fallout 4 and mods are being tied to Bethesda.net
community.bethesda.net/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadImage/2-11214-129776/9d5K8QG.png
Uh, so yeah.. Bethesda will hopefully work out all the kinks by the time the G.E.CK. or Creation Kit is released. How is the G.E.CK. not released yet? I thought it was, guess not yet. Sometime in April.
Does Fallout: Equestria have any mods? Or is it survival mode?
3843388 What are ya talking about
3846102
Just a joke, I guess Season 2 was a mod since Kkat modified the story to include Season 2 canon. That's all, just wanted to make up a few mods "Fallout Equestria" used in its "game"