Balancing games is a tricky business—just ask Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead about that. Generally speaking, games need to put up enough of a challenge to keep players engaged without unduly punishing them when they get out of line, a mystical zone of difficulty sometimes casually referred to as "fun." In a new video on the topic, Josh Sawyer discusses his approach to Fallout: New Vegas, saying he wanted to ensure the game was a bit more of a challenge for players than Fallout 3 or Skyrim—but that he couldn't just crank up the numbers to make it happen.
"This is a controversial statement I'm going to make," Sawyer says in the new video, before taking a long, dramatic exhale and dropping his nearly-too-hot-for-YouTube take:. "Fallout 3 was not a hard game. There.
Skyrim is also not a hard game. These games are not—the combat is not super-challenging." That "lack of friction," Sawyer says, is a big part of why Skyrim has become essentially a forever game for so many players: "You can wander around the whole map to your heart's content and with a few exceptions you're probably not going to die.
You might have to slam a bunch of food and potions and things like that, but it's a real low-friction gameplay experience. And I would say the same also applies to Fallout 3. There's a lot of scaling in the game and pretty quickly you can feel extremely strong and you can steamroll lots of stuff.
" Upping the ante for New Vegas was a tricky business, Sawyer explains, because you ca.