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 can’t just crank up some numbers and call it a day. “Difficulty is more than just tuning weapon values and damage values and creature hit point values and things like that. It’s more than that. Behavior, environment, there’s a lot of stuff that goes into it.”
With New Vegas, Obsidian opted to tone down the scaling to make the beginning of the game more challenging, and to make it clear to players through not-so-subtle signals that they’d need to conduct themselves a little more cautiously. “That’s one of the reasons why there are deathclaws in Cazador and super mutants north of Good Springs, to show people from Fallout 3, hey, there are pretty challenging areas of the game and you can’t just slide all over the map and not feel the heat.”
The video is an interesting follow-on to one Sawyer posted in May, in which he said his approach to balancing New Vegas was “mostly vibes based“: Weapon and enemy stats have their place, but in the end it really comes down to how it feels. And, he acknowledged in the new video, by the time players reached the city of New Vegas, they weren’t likely to be “sweating bullets and feeling super-challenged by anything short of taking on overleveled content” anyway: “As levels rose, I realized that eventually you’re going to wind up getting a similar sort of experience as Fallout 3, which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing. You know, a lot of people came out of that experience really enjoying it.”
Which brings us back to the “vibes” approach to balance: It’s all about what you’re trying to accomplish with whatever kind of game you’re making. Optimizing your character into a full-on powerhouse and hammering everything you see can be a blast in games like New Vegas, but would be completely inappropriate elsewhere.
“If you were to make a game that really positions itself like, ‘This is a soulslike game,’ and that was the progression, I don’t think players would respond positively to it,” Sawyer says. “If the DLC for Elden Ring had come out and it was a cakewalk then people would have I think said, okay, this is bad. This is not what I want.
Sawyer’s been pretty chatty about videogames lately: In a video posted earlier this year, he talked about the possibility of returning to Fallout, and why he doesn’t care for Baldur’s Gate 3-style romances.
