I’ve found that mods like iHUD, removing the cash register sound for XP, directional pipboy light, flashlights, darker nights, and storms (these can be set to be just visual rather that radiation inducing) all help make the game more immersive without dramatically changing the difficulty.
I do enjoy the health rebalancer which removes scaling health and instead makes some enemies baseline tougher and some weaker. IIRC it also makes headshots on humans instant death. No more blasting away at some scaled raider as they just keep attacking.
Recostuming the Minute Men in something closer to surplus military clothes makes them instantly less lame.
Also replacing all the pipe guns with weapon packs of real world handguns and machinepistols is for me nessesary, as I do not at all enjoy the FO4 pipegun designs.
Finally, the backyard bunkers mod allows a bomb shelter with a hatch you can place inside a settlement. Going inside moves you to a private space. NPCs won’t barge in and it’s a safe place to store extra gear.
We’ve also reached a point where the novelty of ultra realism has worn off. People expect certain AAA games to look realistic, but nobody is wowed by it anymore.
(Anecdote time: Personally the last time I was wowed by realistic graphics was Battlefield 3. The Frostbite 2 engine was a noticeable and impressive step up, but ever since then I haven’t felt a sense of visceral awe even if I know graphics keep getting better).
In my mind the graphics themselves barely matter as much as aspect ratio, controls (for some genres), and stability on modern hardware when it comes to judging if a game is “hopeless outdated”.
Since this comment chain started with Half-Life, I admit there’s no way around it looking dated, but it doesn’t hurt my eyes or confuse me as some really old games do (Goldeneye 64 sadly falls into this category). I understand what the game is showing me, and the gameplay, art direction, and tone hold it up for me.
The late 90s and early 2000s were a time of rapid increases in game graphics.
We went from DOOM in 1993 with sprite enemies, abstract textures, and technical limits like not even being able to have second story rooms on top of each other to Half Life in 1998 with full 3D characters and objects, physics, and much higher resolution textures.
Jumps in graphics back then could be huge. As graphics get better though, improvements on them become diminishing returns. It stops being going from 2D to 3D or going from block head models with textures pasted on to modeled faces, and starts becoming things like subcutaneous light scattering. Things will keep looking better and better but we’ve long ago hit a baseline with graphics.
Mass Effect was made on Unreal 3. While we are currently on Unreal 5, there have been lots of games released in the intervening years that either used Unreal 3 or a modified version of it.
Wasteland 3 without looking up any guides poses some difficult choices, usually in the form of being forced to side with a certain faction at the expense of another, with no option to skip the choice once it’s presented.
It’s very good, but the tone can be totally broken if you master combat. Killing soldiers doesn’t lower morale, so they are free targets.
Depending on what locations spawn, it is possible to completely ruin the intended vibe. I’ve wiped out the military outpost and ended up with so many supplies I didn’t know what to do with them all.
Edited: There was a recent patch this year. Which supposedly has fixed the technical problems that made Spacer’s Choice unplayably bad. I still can not recommend it because it was broken when I tried to play it pre-patch, but it has supposedly been fixed. Edited to slightly soften the tone against it.
A lot of comments in this thread are confused about what “Spacer’s Choice” means. This is the “remastered” version of the game that was not done by Obsidian. It is a Game Of The Year style pack that includes all the DLC. The upgrade flowchart picture on the storefront page is needlessly confusing, ignore it. As of May this year, this version was very buggy and unoptimized. Texture pop-ins and laggy framerates are widely reported. For me personally I couldn’t even get it to run at all.
I wanted to play Star Wars Rebellion, but my copy is doing a thing where all the icons in-game are upside down. Apparently it’s a known issue running the game on newer OS (How? WHY?!) but until it’s fixed I can’t really play.
I’ve been playing Call Of Duty 2 as part of taking notes about the roots of the series. Not sure if there’s enough meat for a proper essay but I will see.
I really can’t wait for Christmas break to immerse myself in something. Maybe Deus Ex.
I’ve been playing the original Call Of Duty games, starting at the first one. I beat it and United Offensive. I’m working on the second game.
It’s all in service of a write up about the core identity and the design philosophy of the games. How the original games were fresh for their time, and how COD4 used a lot of the sensibilities of the WW2 games that preceded it. There’s a lot to mine and digest in the old games, COD4, and Modern Warfare 2 as a contrast and turning point. I just don’t know if people care enough to follow it.
I don’t want to come off as to PCMR, but truly Bethesda developed games need to be played on PC to get the most out of them. The mods tremendously elevate the experience. Everything from bug fixes and optimizations (that Bethesda should have done) to full on overhauls and DLC sized expansions, and everything in between.
I think I average about 200 mods simultaneously on Fallout 4 playthroughs.