Editorial Could Hardcore Be More Hardcore?

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Tags: Fallout: New Vegas; Obsidian Entertainment

<p>Destructoid are so nerdy, they've found a way to make <strong>Fallout: New Vegas</strong> even more hardcore than it already is! And F: NV has at least 8 hardcore-points on a scale of 1-10. Right? If not more.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There was little hope of completing the game with what I had planned, so instead I organized an elaborate adventure course. I set up a mapped route that would take me through <em>New Vegas</em>&rsquo; more iconic areas, brush the very top of the map, and then careen back down the other side to where I began. With this ludicrous set of &ldquo;realistic&rdquo; principles in my game, could I survive more than a few feet? More importantly, would it even be remotely fun? <br /> <br />Ignoring these nagging concerns to my sanity, I tossed together a new character, named him, selected a properly grizzled beard, and then sent him off to the most remote corner of the game, at the scenic Mojave Outpost. I dropped all my equipment save for a vault jumpsuit, a simple pistol with a single clip, and one bottle of clean drinking water. Then, finally, I set myself up with the following insane list of &ldquo;hardcore&rdquo; changes: <br /> <br />- Difficulty increased to its maximum <br />- Food consumption increased <br />- Water consumption increased <br />- HUD display turned completely off <br />- No VATS mode whatsoever <br />- Perma-death rules <br /> <br />If anyone ever doubted the quantity of my nerd cred, I would tell them about the ridiculous charts I made for myself which, along with a little stopwatch, kept me on a regular schedule of food and water consumption. I won&rsquo;t bore you with the details, suffice to say it made me use up a much more realistic amount of supplies for the energy I was expending trudging through a terrible wasteland.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is true role-playing, with food, water and everything. But what about crapping?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.destructoid.com/no-clip-fallout-new-vegas-192379.phtml" target="_blank">Read the whole article here.</a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Spotted at: <a href="http://www.rpgwatch.com/#16617">RPGWatch</a></p>

 

[OminousBlueDot]

... Is this ... Is this larping?

If this is, I do not like it.

I am scared for this entity. Its sanity seems lax.

 

[daktari]

To be fair he later mentioned that the strict drinking / eating was no fun at all.

 

[baronjohn]

New Vegas was designed around a quest compass. Playing without it must be pretty frustrating. I mean, hardcore.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Oh well if it's no fun then that makes it okay than and totally not like LARPing.

 

[Crooked Bee]

- Difficulty increased to its maximum
- Food consumption increased
- Water consumption increased
- HUD display turned completely off
- No VATS mode whatsoever
- Perma-death rules

Judging by the list of changes, this sounds more like a "challenge" -- as in "low level challenge" and the like -- than LARPing to me.

 

[Suchy]

New Vegas was designed around a quest compass. Playing without it must be pretty frustrating. I mean, hardcore.

No, it wasn't. I disabled quest compass/radar right after installing the game. It's perfectly playable and NPCs give you actual directions, as opposed to Fallout 3. I think I only found one quest that required the compass, it was a crap fedex anyway, about finding a supply crate with "GPS marker".

 

[Konjad]

I think this game was made to be played without quest compass but they included it because FO3 morons would get all confused.

 

[racofer]

This is true role-playing, with food, water and everything. But what about crapping?

I guess merely playing the game counts towards that, no?

 

[SoupNazi]

I only had to use the quest compass in some of the casinos/camps because I was too lazy to look for the one NPC in the masses of faceless characters that all look the same. Otherwise it's really not needed. I think the one interesting idea from that article is disabling the GUI completely, i.e. not automatically knowing who's a friend and who's an enemy. I imagine that could actually make the game a little more interesting.

 

[OminousBlueDot]

Hated the tutorial where you had to find a very specific plant, and the only way to do this was to helplessly follow the quest compass.

Deity, I hope's the only time its necessary.

 

[SoupNazi]

She tells you it's on top of the graveyard hill. There's only about 3 plants there. How hard is that without the quest compass? I guess too hard for today's newfags.

 

[OminousBlueDot]

Truth, Soup. Couldn't recognize the glowiness of the plant in the dark, though -- had seemed to look like weeds. (Also, there was a plant hidden behind a tree in the schoolhouse yard -- it must be that -specificly- tagged plant, too).

I've got a doctor's note to explain my failures, though! :/ Congenital-stationary-night-blindness w\ astigmatism and nystagmis resulting in low visual acuity. (Rolls right off the tongue.) Oh ho! How I've one-upped you, sir!

 

[Mastermind]

Who cares if he's larping. Not my cup of tea but people play games to have fun and if eating and shitting in a game gives him a hard-on, that's his business. Certainly beats playing games to have something to rage or cry after like the average codexfag.

 

[torpid]

Who cares if he's larping. Not my cup of tea but people play games to have fun and if eating and shitting in a game gives him a hard-on, that's his business. Certainly beats playing games to have something to rage or cry after like the average codexfag.

Says one of the whiniest trolls on the Dex. Is defending LARPing going to be your new hobby-horse?

 

[Xor]

If he's doing it for "roleplay" value then he's larping and should be ridiculed.

If he's doing it for a challenge then it's still stupid and you should probably ridicule him just to be safe.

 

[CrunchyHemorrhoids]

It would make a lot more sense to drastically cut the amount of available water and food in the game rather than just forcing yourself to eat and drink every other minute. Talk about a shitty challenge.

Hardcore mode is just there to please the oblivion/FO3 larpers, not to make sense or provide a challenge.

For that to work it would have to take longer than a couple of minutes to run in between settlements: the gameworld would have to be a lot bigger and provide an FO1/2/Arc style travel system.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

He's setting challenges for himself, challenges that doesn't actually exist in the game unless he's using mods that expand the hardcore rules. It's a challenge, sure, but with no game to regulate it it's really just larping.

Also: he's really doing this to prove his "nerd credentials"? Really?

 

[Davaris]

If he has already played the game through before, then it is not that hardcore, because he knows where everything is and roughly what to expect.

Now if he wanted to be ultra hardcore, he'd find a way to forget his first play through.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

without everything being so easily branded for me, I could no longer make casual decisions. Other characters were no longer shown in simplistic green and red - a lone figure in the distance could be anyone. Was it a friend? Enemy?

Without labels, every character had become of equal importance, which made any small odd-jobs rather difficult. I had to survey rooms, ask hotel clerks for information, and actually unsheathe my critical thinking and discern the world around me.

Without items carefully color-coded to represent what was lootable and what wasn’t, I had to assess. Is this someone’s? Is someone around to see me take it?

I had to remember uniforms, look for NCR helmets or jackets, monitor behavior, and sometimes just avoid people entirely

If this is larping, then larping is by far less ridiculous in my book than posting walls of text trying to justify the "National Lampoon does PA Vegas" degree of retardation the game constantly throws at you.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

He's setting challenges for himself, challenges that doesn't actually exist in the game unless he's using mods that expand the hardcore rules. It's a challenge, sure, but with no game to regulate it it's really just larping.

Among the things he listed:

- Difficulty increased to its maximum

Tracked by the game

- Food consumption increased
- Water consumption increased
- HUD display turned completely off

Tracked by the game (the HUD thing can be achieved by messing with the "opaqueness" meter; food / drink with mods)

- No VATS mode whatsoever

Not tracked by the game, unless you consider going to the Options screen and unbinding the VATS key to be an acceptable way of tracking. There are mods to remove it for those among us that avoid the Options like the plague for some weird reason, and those who just can't resist mashing the button while complaining about its existence.

- Perma-death rules

This is the only part not tracked by either game or mods, and people do Ironman runs all the time with various games without being accused of LARPing.

The term is being thrown around so much it's losing its meaning. I don't think it should be used as a shorter way to say "playing the game in a way I wouldn't".

Larping = pretending your sword talks and you're exploring dungeons to find a treasure it told you about.

Challenge = playing with harsher settings, be they offered by the game or made up by the player. You thinking the challenge is silly or whatever doesn't make it Larping.

 

[Mastermind]

Who cares if he's larping. Not my cup of tea but people play games to have fun and if eating and shitting in a game gives him a hard-on, that's his business. Certainly beats playing games to have something to rage or cry after like the average codexfag.

Says one of the whiniest trolls on the Dex. Is defending LARPing going to be your new hobby-horse?

I'm not defending larping. I put larping in the same cathegory I put most of the shit codexfags jack off to in an RPG. I'm defending larpers. I'd defend codexfags (be they actual codex users or simply codexers in spirit) too if they weren't ruining so many forums and discussions internet wide. I really don't give a shit about what other people want to play as long as they don't demand that their whims be given priority even if the game companies/majority of players don't want their stupid fucking shit.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

Among the things he listed:

- Difficulty increased to its maximum

Tracked by the game

- Food consumption increased
- Water consumption increased
- HUD display turned completely off

Tracked by the game (the HUD thing can be achieved by messing with the "opaqueness" meter; food / drink with mods)

- No VATS mode whatsoever

Not tracked by the game, unless you consider going to the Options screen and unbinding the VATS key to be an acceptable way of tracking. There are mods to remove it for those among us that avoid the Options like the plague for some weird reason, and those who just can't resist mashing the button while complaining about its existence.

- Perma-death rules

This is the only part not tracked by either game or mods, and people do Ironman runs all the time with various games without being accused of LARPing.

The term is being thrown around so much it's losing its meaning. I don't think it should be used as a shorter way to say "playing the game in a way I wouldn't".

Larping = pretending your sword talks and you're exploring dungeons to find a treasure it told you about.

Challenge = playing with harsher settings, be they offered by the game or made up by the player. You thinking the challenge is silly or whatever doesn't make it Larping.

I was under the impression that he was going to increase Hardcore mode over what it originally was, like increasing the character's need for regular food and water. He's not using the game to regulate this. He's using a stopwatch (!) and pretending that he's increasing the hardcore mode when in reality his character probably was all filled up more than fifty percent of the time when his watch promptly told him "ding dong time for a snack". Of course if he IS using mods to increase this, then why the need for a stopwatch? He's larping. Pretending.

Not to mention that he's PRETENDING that he has to watch characters movements and signs of affiliation. I don't care if he removed the HUD, if you can't see difference between friendly NPCs and Viper gangs then you need to get your eyes fixed, binoculars or no binoculars. Most notable difference: the gangs, except for the Khans, will attack you on sight. They also hang around on fucking cliffs. You'll never see a caravan climb a mountain, I fucking guarantee you this.

The only actual challenge is the Iron Man mode. The rest is just self-inflicted fuckness to write a stupid article about how he had to write down what factions looked like. The Legion = no pants. Yeah, because you needed to write that down.

He may not be a larper but I say he is and I'm fucking right.

I gotta drink something.

 

[Esquilax]

I agree with Clockwork Knight. Also, I'd like to point out that nobody seems to bitch about not KOing any guards, remaining undetected, and not using any equipment in Thief, despite the fact that there are very few missions in the game with those objectives.

Whether you find it fun, sure, that depends on the person (personally, I would find a lot of this stuff annoying), but it's hardly LARPing.

 

[a budda]

the "no pants" bit is brilliant, reminds me of "Memento"

but the idea of switching of hud is great, i'm definitely giving it a try, i'm tired of playing games on, sort of, auto-mode, you just skim through labels and move-on, not giving yourself a second to actually LOOK at where you are and who you talk to and stuff

might not be as huge a challenge to our brains as that burger pictures it but still, a refreshing idea

 

[Andyman Messiah]

I agree with Clockwork Knight. Also, I'd like to point out that nobody seems to bitch about not KOing any guards, remaining undetected, and not using any equipment in Thief, despite the fact that there are very few missions in the game with those objectives.

That's a challenge. You're beating the game differently than what is normally expected. It's like beating Mega Man without killing anyone but the bosses (and minibosses) or getting a particular weapon and only using it for the remainder of the game. This is not, I repeat, not the same as pretending your character has to drink more water every five minutes.