Fallout 3: Difficult Times

One of the things that prevented me from getting into this game when it first came around was The Hump. There's not better way to describe this than to say that for a time, you will be frustrated out of your mind. This happened in Oblivion too. It's strange: you're at a level, and because the game scales the levels of enemies to match your own awesomeness. But sometimes, they up the level of the enemies to a point where you just have a rough go at beating them. You can't explore the vast wonder of the world without fear of dying over and over again. This happened for a bit as I travelled to Rivet City for the first time; now granted, that was an ambitious journey, and required lots of saving, but I made it.

But The Hump reared it's head and I couldn't go anywhere without dying, and reloading. And I found it was getting in the way of my enjoyment of the game; I love going to new places, seeing how the world has evolved and to a lesser degree, meeting some interesting characters. I've been immersed in this game for nearly forty hours now and the major thing that almost prevented me from continuing on was The Hump. But even when I could trudge my way through the environment, ammo and health were always dangerously low. I was saving every minute, fearful of the next dark corner. You never know, you could hit a land mine and have three of your limbs crippled. At that point, it's easier to load instead of going through the "proper" way. You're supposed to use stimpaks, see doctors and whatnot.

So, here's what I did: I put the difficulty down to "easy." Some would consider this cheating, and to that, I must argue. There is some technical fault there: the setting is in the game, so why not use it? Would increasing the game to "hard" be cheating too? Rock Band gives you the no fail option, providing you the option to just play through the music. For some people, that's all they want to do. I just want to play through Fallout, enjoy the story, the world. In some games you may be penalized, or motivated - depending on the way you look at it - to play on harder difficulties through the awarding of achievements and various in-game items. I certainly don't feel like I'm getting less of an experience here, and I'm not feeling guilty for doing it. There are plenty of games to test the challenge: remember in Goldeneye, where you started off on the easiest difficulty? You couldn't tell while playing, until after you beat the level and opened up the harder difficulties. But here's the real key: not only did your enemies get harder, but you had more objectives. More things to juggle, and to me, that should be the de facto standard for difficulty scales.

When you beat a game like that, you feel accomplished, then you can go back and play more becase there are additional objectives to reach. They are harder, but there is that compulsion to do them. The difficulty slides up at a nice rate, not making impossible leaps; this keeps you coming back. Rogue Squadron did the same thing, and in doing so, increased re-playability greatly. Will lowering the difficulty increase re-playability on Fallout? Will I be compelled to go through the game again? The sheer number of hours is enough to dissuade me from such an act, but I can see the appeal for some: go through the game with different stats, do quests in a different order and choose different outcomes. Unfortunately, that's not for me: I want to go through the game once and move on: there's a backlog of games waiting to be enjoyed.