Fallout fans can now enjoy a hefty new overhaul, and it might be a good reason to revisit the 2008 classic.
It’s hard to believe that Fallout 3 is nearly 17 years old. It feels just like yesterday we were setting out from Vault 101 to find our Da and bring clean water to the Capital Wasteland.
Sure, we may have all moved on to Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4, but Bethesda’s first outing into the nuclear post-apocalypse will always be special.
Now, a new fan-made Fallout 3 expansion has overhauled the combat to make it more interesting and challenging for the player, and it feels like the right time to go back and revisit the game.
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Project RP’s aim is exactly as the title implies—it overhauls the game’s combat systems to make role-playing feel more intuitive and challenging.
As the mod description reads: “NPCs follow the same HP rules as the player, removes bullet sponge enemies, doubles weapon damage, buffs creatures, reworks sneak, VATS, all weapons, and armor stats for more balanced combat. Gear lasts longer, perks adjust HP instead of DR, and the whole game feels fairer and more immersive.”
It should make NPCs feel more realistic by following the same rules as the player, where they feel like realised characters within the world of Fallout rather than just a husk for the player to shoot at.
Following on from this idea, the mod’s creator ImmDsy decided to tune the difficulty to make enemies not feel like bullet sponges.
As a result, all weapons do double damage, and all creatures have twice as much health and also deal twice the attack damage to stay competitive with NPCs. Smaller tweaks to various hostile NPCs have also been made.
On the other hand, ImmDsy has also nerfed sneak a little to be more realistic, and VATs is no longer the preferred way to deal damage.
There are also a bunch of other changes and rebalances, such as certain weapons no longer being useless. I’d recommend taking a look at the mod’s page over on Nexus Mods, because the changelog is pretty large.
All in all, Project RP seems like a decent reason to pick up Fallout 3 again. I haven’t played the game in a decade, so I’m certainly getting the hunger to try it.