Josh Sawyer warns Fallout 3 players who expect a smooth ride that Fallout: New Vegas will have deathclaws on Cazador: 'You cannot just slide all over and not feel the heat.'

Ask Arrowhead, the developer of Helldivers 2, about how difficult it is to balance games. In general, games should be challenging enough to keep players interested without punishing them for straying from the rules, a zone of difficulty that is sometimes casually called "fun." Josh Sawyer explains his approach to Fallout: New Vegas in a video. He says he wanted the game to be a little more challenging than Fallout 3 and Skyrim, but that he couldn't simply increase the numbers.

"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 wasn't a difficult game. There. Skyrim is not a difficult game either. These games aren't--the combat doesn't seem to be very challenging."

Sawyer says that the "lack" of friction is a major reason why Skyrim has become an essentially forever game for many players. "You can wander about the entire map to your heart’s content, and with a couple of exceptions, you're not going to die." You may have to slam food, potions and other items like that but it's an incredibly low-friction experience. The same is true for Fallout 3. There's a ton of scaling in the games and pretty quickly, you can feel very strong and you can steamroll a lot of stuff."

Sawyer explains that boosting the difficulty for New Vegas wasn't as easy as just adjusting some numbers. "Difficulty goes beyond just tuning weapon values, damage values, creature hit points and other things like that. It's much more than that. There's more to it than that.

Obsidian chose to reduce the scaling in New Vegas to make the game more difficult and to send a message to players that they would need to be more cautious. "That's why there are deathclaws and super mutants north from Good Springs to show people in Fallout 3 that there are some challenging areas of the games and you can't slide all over the place and not feel the warmth."

The video is a follow-up to the one Sawyer posted back in May. In that video, he said that his approach to balancing New Vegas relied "mostly on vibes": Weapons and enemy stats are important, but ultimately it comes down to feeling. In the new video he admitted that by the time the players reached New Vegas they were not likely to "sweat bullets" or feel "super-challenged" by anything other than taking on overleveled material. You know, many people really enjoyed that experience.

This brings us back to "vibes", the approach to balance. It's all in what you want to achieve with your game. It's fun to make your character a powerhouse in New Vegas but it would be inappropriate anywhere else.

Sawyer says that if you made a game which positioned itself as a "soulslike game" and that was its progression, I do not think players would respond positively. "If Elden Ring's DLC had been a cakewalk, then I think people would have said, ok, this is bad. This is not what i want.

Sawyer has been talking a lot about videogames recently. In a video he posted earlier this year he discussed the possibility of returning Fallout and why he dislikes romances in Baldur's gate 3.