LogIn"You can't just slide all over the map and not feel the heat."
Obsidian Entertainment
If you felt the jump in difficulty between Fallout 3 and New Vegas, then Josh Sawyer did his job well. In his latest YouTube video, he talked about balancing games and why you can meet certain enemies in an early location.
"This is a controversial statement I'm going to make," Sawyer said (via PC Gamer.) "Fallout 3 was not a hard game. There. Skyrim is also not a hard game. These games are not- the combat is not super-challenging."
This, in his opinion, is one of the reasons why Skyrim is a game that fans play over and over again: it's "quite forgiving," so you can walk it up and down and probably not die once. "You might have to slam a bunch of food and potions and things like that, but it's a real low-friction gameplay experience. And I would say the same also applies to Fallout 3. There's a lot of scaling in the game and pretty quickly you can feel extremely strong and you can steamroll lots of stuff."
To make New Vegas more challenging, Sawyer couldn't just raise enemies' HP or damage, it's more intricate than that: "Behavior, environment, there's a lot of stuff that goes into it."
You start in Goodsprings and already meet formidable creatures there as a warning it won't be as easy as Fallout 3.
"That's one of the reasons why there are deathclaws and cazadores and super mutants north of Goodsprings, to show people from Fallout 3, hey, there are pretty challenging areas in the game, and you can't just slide all over the map and not feel the heat from it."
Obsidian Entertainment
Despite that, there was always balance, a way to progress without feeling "super-challenged" and even build your own "powerhouse," which might look like Fallout 3 the higher you climb, which Sawyer doesn't think is "necessarily a bad thing." He noted, however, that this progression is not suitable for every game.
"If you were to make a game that really positions itself like, 'This is a Soulslike game,' and that was the progression, I don't think players would respond positively to it. If the DLC for Elden Ring had come out and it was a cakewalk, then people would have said, 'Okay, this is bad. This is not what I want.'"
Fallout is not the only game Sawyer talks about in his videos. He has recently revealed that Obsidian discussed Pillars of Eternity 3 after the success of Baldur's Gate 3. He himself would consider working on it, but only for the budget Larian had.
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