Survival games are games in which a player fights to stay alive using limited resources. Fallout 3 is the most famous example of a survival game – probably because Fallout 3 is not a survival game. It is an RPG / FPS with optional stealth elements and exploration. The same is true for Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4, its sequels, which are basically the same game with different plots and characters.
The lack of change between New Vegas and Fallout 3 demonstrates a sensible “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude by the developers, Bethesda. Fallout 3 was incredibly successful. It has had teenagers listening to old swing jazz on public transport. However, the Fallout series in later generations had no real survival challenge LINK.
One difference was that New Vegas improved on Fallout 3’s total absence of survival elements by introducing a Hardcore Mode.
Hardcore Mode
The Hardcore Mode introduced the need to eat, drink and sleep, depicted by the sliders FOD, H20 and SLP on the Condition section of the Pip Boy. Much like with RAD (radiation level), once the slider reaches 1000, the player dies, with mild, moderate and critical stages in between.
I wish I could state the effects of severe dehydration, starvation and sleep deprivation; but unfortunately, for reasons outlined below, it’s amazingly difficult to find out. I predict reductions in Endurance and Strength, possibly Perception and Intelligence for sleep deprivation. It would be nice if there were other effects, such as hallucinations and an increased drive towards / ability for / positive effect of cannibalism and vampirism – but judging by the predictability and similarity of other in-game effects, this is highly unlikely.
I would also have taken sun exposure / temperature as a valid survival consideration, since the Mojave is located in the open, heat-scorched desert of Nevada. Temperature could also be effected by the types of armour the character is wearing, from Heavy to Light and other details, such as leather versus metal, which are different in breathability. This would add another dimension to the survival element.
If Bethesda had decided to introduce acid rain or other difficult weather conditions, that would also have increased the survival challenge, but they couldn’t do that, because it would have affected the game experience for people who don’t want a survival challenge; or else, created more work for them, turning on and off considerable elements of gameplay between the two modes.
Map furniture
One truth of survival games is that they are antithetical to RPG and FPS genres. People who want to fight and grow levels don’t want to be set back by the need to survive, and people who want to focus on survival elements don’t want to be set upon my beastly strong enemies and engaged in long combat.
These different genres have different needs for map layout. Modern FPSs feature many chest high walls or other cover. Introducing a Hardcore Mode into a regular Fallout game doesn’t work very well, because the map furniture is the same for both modes which have different needs. In some cases, it makes no difference, such as all the campfires and water sources which are of absolutely no use to anyone playing in Normal mode, but don’t get in the way, either.
But if there was sun exposure, an arguably significant part of survival in the desert, you would need a lot of shelter on the map. This shelter is of no use to people playing the ordinary game, and may serve to slow the game down, thanks to Bethesda’s obsession with gated areas. Since every indoor area in a Bethesda game is gated (i.e., you have to walk through a loading screen to get at it), ducking inside shelter frequently would be right a pain in the arse.
Gated areas
Too much of the map of any contemporary Fallout game is made up of small shacks without much going for them but a locker with some junk in it. This wouldn’t matter if they were loaded in chunks as part of the main map, as is conventionally so in open world first person shooters. Bethedsa has you sitting through a loading screen to get in and out, which is a piss-take if you have to do it a lot.
Gated areas are a notable feature of Bethesda’s famously detail-rich RPGs – you can collect everything from books to baskets, and everything is operable; it has physics and you can move it around “realistically” (or not, given the glitchy nature of such detailed games). With this format, you need each area to be separate in order to avoid loading delay. The game confines the data to a small section and effectively teleports the player to it via a “gate”, which is activated when the player interacts with a door or other entry point. It’s basically a separate microworld, creating the illusion of being connected to the outside. This process is supposed to make the world seem fuller, but does so at the peril of other important aspects of the game.
Sitting through loading gates is the ultimate price, taking away from the experience of immediacy and immersion. You could get rid of this by simply having less detail inside buildings. Not everything has to be operable.
In Hardcore Mode, it makes a lot more sense to have a load of junk you don’t need lying around, because the search for items you need among the junk is increased. You really have to find food among the boxes of detergent, or you may starve. Many of those useless items, like wrenches, become vital because they allow the building of weapon repair kits and doctors bags, which you will need. But you don’t need every item with no use whatsoever to have detailed physics data. Who needs or wants to pick up a scorched book? Ever?
Abundance of food
The sheer abundance of food in the game makes the idea of having to hunt high and low for it laughable. Moreover, it stacks up fast, because the player really doesn’t need to eat that often. I’m sure a calculation went into deciding how often a player should need to eat before they die – every couple of weeks, probably – but this could do with being less realistic, because two weeks in a Bethesda game is hours of gameplay, making the survival elements all but non existent. The most common reason to eat food is not to combat hunger, but to regain health after combat.
The thirst aspect is a more pressing need, as there is less drink than food in the game. Sunset Sarsaparilla and Nukacola actually dehydrate you, as does any kind of alcohol, including beer. For the record, that’s bollocks. If you are dying of thirst IRL, do drink a coke or a beer if that’s all you can find. The water content is higher than the sugar or alcohol content, meaning they would not dehydrate you further. However, despite the comparative absence of portable hydration, staying hydrated is still too easy.
Abundance of drink
Thanks to your endeavours in the main storyline of Fallout 3, water sources in maintained residential areas are clean in New Vegas, not irradiated. Much as I appreciate this development in plot, it’s problematic from a Survival game perspective. There are far too many fixed water sources around and any one of them takes the character’s thirst right down to 0, because there is of course an unlimited amount of water in each one.
I think that in a Survival game, there should be a significant price for an instant reduction in thirst. In New Vegas, a drop in dehydration from 1000 to 0 should spark a hefty increase in Radiation. This forces the player to consider balance, or find better options – bottled Purified Water, which is rare, or the purification of water at campsites using dirty water, surgical tubing and (bizarrely) a glass pitcher.
Abundance of sleeping spots
Beds, also, are ludicrously common. Sleep is scarcely needed and Nukacola actually reduces the need to sleep, when it should exacerbate it in the long term. Nukacola can be found everywhere, in predictable places, and in bulk. It seems to run the entire wasteland, much like contemporary real life America.
It makes no sense in a game with selective realism, not to mention a pathological need to punish players for taking boost substances, to suggest that coke is a healthy replacement for sleep. It’s a mark of the strength of caffeine culture that it never occurred to Bethesda to make Nukacola addictive, like Psycho and Jet.
Oh, it must be fine, because caffeine is the substance of the gods. It heals your ills and in Hardcore Mode, Nukacola is arguably better than a Stimpack. It lasts for longer, which is more useful during a long a gruelling battle, even if the overall health gain is lesser. It’s also less annoying because longer lasting items less frequently throw up the notification “X has worn off”. You’re going to see a lot of those in Hardcore Mode.
Health in food items
If it wasn’t for crippled limbs, the player would be invincible in New Vegas, even on Hardcore Mode, because of the abundance of food items available in the Mojave (particularly from hunting). It means that the player can, given enough safe waiting time, heal fully just from eating. This completely destroys the point behind eating for survival, because, given the rarity and expense of Stimpacks, the player will eat far more often than they would need to merely avoid starvation.
This makes food items like Instamash basically useless, unless you can bear to hold onto the extra weight long enough to build a Caravan Lunch at a campfire, which has significant healing properties. Instamash alone heals very little. Its only advantage is that it decreases the FOD slider significantly, being a proper meal item. But, because of the constant eating to restore health points, such an item is never needed.
It would have been better to have health items and food items entirely separate, and thus the rarity of each could be adjusted. Health items should be more abundant, because of the stresses on the player from enemy attack. Eating is a comparatively uncommon need, and item availability should reflect that, or the FOD slider is a pointless addition. Having more types of immediately useful items also increases the satisfaction of scavenging.
Fullness and overhydration
If the game had been custom designed for survival, or if Hardcore Mode had been more than a tip of the hat in the direction of the Survival genre, it could have included a “full” or “overhydrated” option, whereby a player cannot use any more food or drink items without starting to experience negative effects.
I must have eaten about 12 steaks of various kinds while fighting Deathclaws. Since the game has a concept of sluggish movement – usually from being overburdened, or crippled in the legs – it would have made sense to make the character sluggish from too much food. In addition, being overhydrated can, at it’s most extreme, actually kill you.
There are real-life substances, like ecstasy, which increase the risk of overhydration by artificially inflating the experience of thirst. The substances in Fallout all have the same negative effect – risk of addition. Some of them could, instead, have other unique effects; in one case, introduce the negative effects of dehydration while the slider indicates that the player is perfectly hydrated, or else, introduce prompts to drink while hiding the slider, so the player is temporarily uncertain how thirsty they are.
Levelling up
The RPG element gets in the way again, here. Many desperately important items can’t be built without a certain Science, Medical, Repair and Survival skill, which requires several levels. Level building requires completing stories and killing enemies. Experience points are not granted for survival antics, except at certain landmarks – 50 meals prepared at a campsite, etc.
Story modes are neither especially interesting or practical while the player fights for survival, especially not the classic fetch-and-carry missions which allow quick travel. If the landscape was more variable and the combat more forgiving, manual travelling everywhere could be a prerequisite for Hardcore Mode, which might make such missions better, but the resultant experience points would be few and far between. So you’d still have the problem of being underskilled for basic survival until about level 10, if you targetted your skill upgrades appropriately.
There are also base limits to needed attributes (attributes include Intelligence, Charisma, etc). Particularly important are the Sneak, Perception and Agility skills/attributes. Without these, the player cannot simply flee, sneak past or reroute when they notice difficult enemies. The enemies may not show up on the radar until it’s too late (low Perception), they may catch up with you if you run (low Agility) and notice you if you try to sneak (low Sneak). This would matter less if enemies weren’t so absurdly punishing, on any difficulty mode.
Combat
Combat remains a major problem in New Vegas. The point of Hardcore Mode should have been to make everything harder except the combat. There is a separate option in the settings to change the combat difficulty.
Yet, because Stimpacks do not heal instantly nor restore limbs in Hardcore Mode, even on Very Easy mode there is a distinct chance that the player will be destroyed by a nest of Giant Radscorpions or Cazadors, and a near certainty of death should an early player stumble across Deathclaws.
Even using the binoculars doesn’t help much with this. As a side note, if the binoculars are going to be counted as a “weapon” with a weight value, the player should at least be allowed to strike opponents with it, even if it does cause minimal damage. It beats switching weapons just to fight a Radroach.
Crippled limbs
Another problem of combat is the likelihood of crippled limbs, even against weak enemies. Giant Mantis are not difficult enemies, but when they go for your legs, you get crippled and can no longer run fast. This is frustrating when in Hardcore Mode, there are not enough resources available to combat the number of crippled limbs the player will encounter. It is too far the opposite extreme to Normal mode, where everything including sleeping can magically cure broken legs.
In Hardcore Mode, not even Stimpacks will heal crippled limbs. This leaves the player with only Hydra and Doctor’s Bags, both rare and expensive, and the latter of which has a weight value. It is a low weight value but it all soon stacks up.
The items for creating a Doctor’s Bag at a work bench also weigh more in combination than the bag does when built – an absence of realism I appreciate, if the alternative is heavy Doctor’s Bags; but nonetheless, if you can’t find a workbench soon, you have to discard items which will be needed for making Doctor’s Bags in the future, simply because their accumulated weight is too great.
Not being able to build doctors bags on the go – basically immediately after acquiring the components, is one cause of this problem. If the components were scattered rarely enough, survival difficulty would not have to depend on the scarcity of workbenches.
Fleeing home
The upshot of all this is that you have to flee back to the last, nearest, or best-stocked down using quick-travel, which I think defeats the object of a survival mode. You want to be out in the field as much as possible, if not constantly. In true survival games, the option to just go home when things get difficult simply isn’t there.
Hardcore Mode in New Vegas basically forces you to quick-travel home, because when your limbs are crippled, you will need to find a doctor to sort them out. Since there is no way of knowing where the nearest medic is until you have discovered a town, this invariably means travelling backwards.
Even if you wanted to keep travelling forwards to find the next medic – which you wouldn’t, because the restrictions on movement, weapon usage and vision are too great with crippled legs, arms and head – you would be unlikely to continue to survive prolonged combat, and would never be able to flee difficult enemies on a crippled leg.
Stock shortage
Worse still, in the early game when you have access to few towns, it is too easy to entirely deplete the stock of the town medic, meaning that it is several in-game days – several real-time hours of play – before you can replenish your stock of Doctor’s Bags, no matter how many caps you have accumulated in your travels. Money is easy to make on the wasteland, and forever difficult to spend.
A game which wants you to stay outside, which any survival game should, should make sure that if you are in a town, you can stock up properly to avoid having to return. Honestly, even classic RPGs are better at this. There is no such thing as the Mart running out of Potions in Pokemon. It may be counterintuitive to have survival games with unlimited vendor stock of certain items, but if the alternative is needing to return to town every five minutes, it is the better option.
The best option would be to have significantly more Doctor’s Bags available in the field, either in abandoned clinics (in preference to Stimpacks, which are mainly for healing crippled limbs in Normal mode), from a larger number of wandering vendors, or from the ability to trade with just about anybody.
You’d think, in a Bethesda game famous for questionable levels of character detail, the ability to trade items with anyone – as opposed to pickpocket them, or play a damn hand of Caravan – would make sense. After all, in real life, who would turn down the opportunity to nose through someone else’s inventory?
Makeshift items
Another possible patch up should be things like splints and the – already existing but entirely useless – crutches. Moreover, these shouldn’t have a weigh value, any more than worn armour should, because it’s being worn, not lugged around on the back. These could, at a slighter movement cost, partially heal crippled limbs while the player carries the makeshift helper item. That is more scavenger friendly than building Doctor’s Bags on workbenches in town.
Weight gains
A significant part of Hardcore Mode is adding weight to ammo. Although I do not object in theory, I do find it odd that the natural curb of item collecting should be weight restrictions as opposed to limited supply versus demand.
Increase the demand and you create a scarcity out of an abundance, thus, there is no need to restrict the player by reducing the amount they can carry. It’s against the feeling of Survival game to pick up a large amount of resources at once, only to have to abandon them.
The problem is different categories. A wrench, used for weapon repair, is equally as useful to me as forceps, used for the Doctor’s Bag. But you will usually find them somewhat near each other, and in predictable places.
An indoor area with usually have a storage area and a medic area. The medic area will have a table near a bed with either forceps of scalpel, both needed. The storage room with will have at least one toolbox and some metal boxes, at least one of which will contain a wrench or duct tape, as well as Wonderglue and scrap metal, all of which are useful.
Predictable locations
Fridges always contain food. Ovens, when containing food, contain a predictable type – cooked food, worth less than packaged and raw foods, in terms of potential. Ovens always contain pilot lights. Pressure cookers are usually found on stoves. Fire hose nozzles are always in fire boxes. Lawn mower blades are always in lawnmowers. Motorcycles gas tanks and handbrakes are always found together, and almost always next to the empty husk of a burnt out motorbike.
It’s as if everything has been laid out neatly for you. It’s not very wasteland. After an atomic war, I expect to find wrenches on roofs and surgical tubing wrapped around trees. I also expect every one of these items to have a variable condition, just as weapons and armour do. After all, there’s no manufacturing in the Mojave. Nothing is new, which means it all must have been blasted, covered in debris, patched up and passed around.
Finding a wrench on a roof increases the value of it to the player, compared to predictably finding it in a toolbox, in a building. Every building. Survival games work off on anticipation and resistance, like how soft porn used to be more valuable to individuals before the internet. Difficulty of acquisition increases appreciation – this is one of the fundamentals of video games, whose founding principal is to make a player “work” for a reward.
How survival should be
The game that is actually closest to a survival game is its polar opposite, the life sim. Life simulation games are also concerned with the minutiae of things, but concentrate on the trivial as opposed to the vital. Nothing happens if you don’t eat, but you’ll want to water the flowers. Life sims are there to package life into an easy and predictable form, where survival games are there to create a world in which just day to day living is difficult.
In both cases, it’s small matters that make up the entirety of the game, not big matters. Killing the boss, levelling up and getting stronger, or completing a quest are not the aims of life sims and so should not be the aims of survival games. Taking over the wasteland requires growth, and survival isn’t about growth. If the character grows, and no longer struggles to survive, the game loses relevance before its purpose is served.
The purpose of survival games is exploration – the feeling of being on a journey of discovery, arriving at a destination against the odds. On the long and winding road of constant treachery, the destination doesn’t matter – it’s the arrival that matters. You’re looking for the feeling of arriving at your mountain shack after a long trek through rainy forest.
The problem with Bethesda games is that exploration is more of a scenic wander than it is a fight for survival. Sometimes, that’s fine, it’s exactly what you want. But if you’re playing Fallout New Vegas in Hardcore Mode, that’s exactly what you don’t want.
You Must Insult The Ones You Love 