I’ve been playing a good deal of Fallout 4 in the last few months, like everyone else. I just plowed through the Mechanist DLC last week (good, but a bit short) and really liked the new robot/raider mixed faction that appears as well since the regular raiders become, well, fucking fodder.
In addition to the Mechanist stuff, last week, a major new playstyle was also released: SURVIVAL difficulty mode. In this mode you get to suffer hunger, thirst, fatigue, disease along with the normal people trying to fill you will bullets or eat you or burn you with lasers. Sound fun? What’s more, you can only save when you sleep in a bed. While it’s not exactly hardcore, you have to be very careful, especially if you are far away from a bed as all your hard work will be lost when you croak– an you WILL croak. Damage to you and that damage you do to others is super spiked in this version, and healing is much slower. Get shot outside your power armor with a double barrelled shotgun at level 5? You’re dead!
I’m not too far into it, but I tell you I’ve quit a couple times because I forgot it wasn’t saving the game at various points. My advice? Remember when you are dicking around in settlements that if you wander off and are killed, all the mundane building and assigning workers will be completely lost. Remember this!
A few other tips:
- Get all the bottles you can early and use the bubbler in the vault to fill those bottles to create purified water. This will save you from drinking radioactive shit early game before you have anything.
- Maybe run away from the first Deathclaw. You know where the power armor is, you know how to get it, but you also have to face down a deathclaw right after. Maybe run away? You likely won’t be able to establish sanctuary but you’ll have power armor and won’t be dead…
- Watch out for ‘regular’ fights. Raiders can easily kill you and you no longer have the auto spotter dots on your radar for enemies, so you have to sneak, get in position and shoot, then move. Rather than just running and gunning everything and stimpacking out of danger, you’ll get to see that the raiders/gunners actually have an AI!
- Watch the rad away– it increases thirst and hunger and leaves you susceptible to disease from stuff you eat. So drink fluid AFTER rad away, but maybe don’t eat right away or eat before. You will eat very yucky stuff, and you want your immune system to be tanked up– rad away will drop that down a lot.
- Reexamine the perks. Some of the perks you ignored before so you could blow stuff up real good become powerful for survival, especially the ‘drink shitty water’ one.
- Remember you have to walk everywhere so the game world that was once much smaller will feel HUGE. You will need bases of operations (and beds) all over the place if you expect to get anywhere in the plot. If you pick up shitty power armor with no fusion cell, it may be a long, long way back to your base– slowly, slowly walking…
- Speaking of plot, remember when you accidentally wandered the wastes for 10-12 play sessions and were super tanked up for the plot missions and they were too easy? Maybe that’s a really good tactic to use now…
- Ghouls are horrible to face now. After the first few levels you can swat them like flies in the normal game, but in Survival, look out. Use VATS to shoot their legs off so they can’t move and then finish them off when it’s safe.
That’s it for now, I am going to go back in and see how far I can get.