DwarvenFood said:
I started Fallout:NV, finishing up the tutorial section.
So, the way to play it, is Hardcore Mode & no VATS, right ? This is my forst playthrough, so no mods yet.
Hardcore doesn't really make the game much more challenging, but some of the tweaks it adds makes the game less of a cakewalk. Food and water isn't too hard to get, and broken limbs can be taken care of more or less easily, though you may want to avoid unecessary risks if you are deep into unknown territory, but stimpacks becoming a heal over time effect instead of an instant heal ensures that you can't go into the inventory in the middle of battle and heal to full health in less than a second. Overall, hardcore mode adds a tiny little teensy bit of challenge, isn't too tedious, will require a bit of planning from you, which is never a bad thing, and adds a bit of immersion. So yeah, go for it, and you can always turn it off later if you do not like it.
VATS isn't really game breaking this time around. You'd only take 10% of damage while in VATS in Fallout 3, but you take full damage in New Vegas while chaining shots with more precision, so using it is often a trade-off situation. Given that you can use the iron sights this time around, you may not need VATS much if you have a good (player) aim, but it can help in a pinch. Of course you are free to not use it but I don't see any reason why.
As for mods, I played the game vanilla on my first playthrough and did not feel the need for mods, so I guess my next playthrough will be done in the same flavour, except for bug fixing mods. Actually, I did use one mod, and that was MTUI. It tweaks the size of the texts and menus to make the UI more suitable for a PC, and while it's nothing drastic, it's a vast improvement over the stock settings. Other than these, I do not recommend anything, but maybe I'm unaware of some totally must-have stuff.