Fallout New Vegas and slightly increased actor draw distince=Incline?!

[deuxhero]

Playing New Vegas (yet again) and tweaked the ini to draw actors a bit farther away. Holy shit, this improves the game dramatically. I'm not surprised this means you actually can snipe things. What I am impressed about is that there's actually some encounters that actually function now.

The Powder Ganger complex behaves much differently now, as it has snipers in the guard towers that actually work and would make approach hard if they are hostile (and could aim, since I have Enemies Can Miss installed). If I didn't preemptiviely solve that by sneaking onto the ledge nearby and sniping them myself, I would have died quickly from them.

Just east of Nipton there are some Vipers who are supposed to ambush the player from a ledge, which they kinda do but they normally don't pop into play quick enough for the most devious part of their trap to work. There's some not all that hidden mines nearby which normally just get disarmed by the player. With increased draw distances this is a trap to lure the player to disarm them then shoot him a bunch when he's in the open. This gave me my first serious injury of the playthrough (aside from an instant death by falling off a rock that was barely a story tall).

So yeah, another flaw in New Vegas caused by the shitty engine and and nothing else.

 

[Yosharian]

I wish I could erase my memory of the 10+ times I've played the game so I could re-experience it all over again, fresh

 

[razvedchiki]

with enemies can miss npcs will not hit you even if you stand next to them.

 

[deuxhero]

Another New Vegas thing of note. Since you can leave and return from Lonesome Road and the first part has no combat but lots of loot and a vendor with lots of caps, you can get quite a lot of caps (or good equipment) by doing it early.

 

[Sigourn]

One user suggested using the in-game NPC draw distance setting to simulate low/high Perception. What I do not know is whether lowering the draw distance stops them from "working" altogether (which would negate the whole idea).

 

[Black Angel]

Playing New Vegas (yet again) and tweaked the ini to draw actors a bit farther away.

Noob here, what numbers I need tweak to achieve this?

 

[ortucis]

Um, I remember shooting those snipers without any ini tweaks when I first played NV (when it was released).

Am I missing something here?

 

[deuxhero]

ortucis
You can shoot them, but they don't spawn till you're so close they aren't very good at shooting you. With the ini tweak the fights with them vary dramatically.

Black Angel
If you use actor instead of NPC, this is easily found via a search engine.

 

[TheImplodingVoice]

I wish I could erase my memory of the 10+ times I've played the game so I could re-experience it all over again, fresh

Same here.

 

[Multidirectional]

So does it make game more challenging? I haven't replayed it in a long time, and partly because I remember how easy I found it overall even on Very Hard + Hardcore + Sawyer mod.

 

[deuxhero]

Multidirectional
It's hit and miss. There's some encounters (the ones in the OP so far) this makes new and exciting, but also plenty of trash you can snipe before it even sees you (though these tend to be random encounters that weren't that hard in the first place). I'm sure there is something to fix the retarded stealth mechanics and mitigate this though.

New Vegas, to its credit, didn't really have a lot of combat set pieces in the first place, especially not outdoors where NPCs start hostile. The non-Dead Money DLC might be the best chance since they have open areas populated by enemies with ranged attacks.

 

[Trashos]

I am interested in this.

- I vaguely remember that some of the changes in the ini file could not be undone, and a full reinstall was the only way to go back to default settings. Is this the case here?

- Are there any obvious drawbacks to this change? Eg, does performance suffer a major hit?

 

[deuxhero]

1: I've never heard of such a thing, but knowing Bethesda code I wouldn't be surprised
2: Very mild. There are far more important things for FPS.