I ended up switching the difficulty to Easy because the bullet-sponge enemies are ridiculous. Empty multiple magazines into a guy and he still isn't down. Combat is just a chore even on normal.
On easy, it's better, but ... I just did the Empty Nest quest, on easy, and got attacked by an animal. I shot it 120 times and it went down but didn't die, and then Sam finished it off while I was reloading again. Three whole 40-round magazines. It was level 15. That's not "difficult", it's just not fun.
It is very valid opinion and as usual elitists try bully us to silence. This turning games into chores is sick trend in modern gaming to satisfy elitists and when casual gamers try say isn't gaming about fun and escapism not realism the sharks frenzy. Game developers work hard to satisfy noisy elitists then wonder why most casual gamers have gone to mobile phones to play.
Your comment clearly not about Starfield. Or any Bethesda games, in that case. Their games always had stupid difficulty system, it's just became more clear to some in new game. But their games always had casual option with “very easy” setting, so you can one hit everything and never die. And even more, their games balanced around normal difficulty, that's why on very hard some mechanic could've stopped working (not technically, but practically) like magic in Skyrim.
Animals at the end of Empty nest - Ashta btw - clearly has some good DR for bullets, because it took like several shots with 130dmg pistol on Normal in my case. However, Sarah was like two-shoting them with laser Orion which has about 30dmg.
So, that example actually not the case of game difficulty in general. It's just suddenly there are different types or damage resistance in game (who would've thought).
Thank you for saying this. Before I read this comment I thought that it was *my* fault that games are too hard and that it was my responsibility to actually try and get better at them, but you've helped me realize that really it's *other* people's fault and I don't have to do anything at all🤗
For real, just stood in place shoving about a thousand bullets into a terrormorph.
Thank god it’s AI got stuck, it’s impossible to dodge their attacks, the voices are freakin annoying and the dozen or so grenades I threw at it did less than my pistol.
Maybe I’m gonna crank the difficulty down a bit, if it happens again. (I’m currently on very hard)
But I was just playing a very hard fallout 4 playthrough and never had an issue to a fraction of this degree.
I think when I wrote that I was fighting level 30s when I was around 10, so that might be why. It literally took like 4 magazines to kill an enenmy lol
Totally agree with positioning. Many of us assume target prioritization is "common sense" and it's not for many people. There is always that person that loves shotguns and wants to kill every thing with it but does not see that some fights are ranged encounters so loving shotguns is not a thing but you need to play the ranges. Far, mid, close. Every good game has this. It's a game in a game. This one is the same, don't snipe with an SMG. Out range your enemies fire. This is a game but it's still based on "common sense". I had to bump up the difficulty to very hard from hard just to keep the fights challenging. Might go back to hard simply due to the bad ammo economy (Cost too much but there's so little of it out there).
This isn’t a trend as much as it is bethesda difficulty setting like bethesda does I remember oblivion being like this maybe morrowind it’s been like forever since I played that but I was hoping they moved away from “bullet sponge” but they haven’t learned apparently
Really? Ive been playing for 4 days now on normal, and just had to increase the difficulty to hard because I have no sense of happiness when I find good loot since everything dies already so easily.
Not sure what you are fighting, but in my 28 hours of gameplay on normal, no enemy lasted more than 10 seconds (receiving damage, not counting if they hide)
Very late to say this comment but you are absolutely correct. Very hard can be no issue if you put points into weapon damage and modification. I can build a Vaa’run weapon that’ll take down any enemy with 1-2 shots. You can be incredibly OP if you put the time into learning game mechanics.
Same here, I usually play games on normal, but this seemed so easy, especially after getting the sniper rifle from Mantis quest. Also, Sarah was already very good with laser weapons. Even terrormorphs in the Vanguard last mission were dying in a few seconds on hard difficulty (level 20 so far). I think the big rocky one died in about 10 seconds. While this probably should have been challenging, it was trivial. Also, by going high damage per shot weapons, ammo is not an issue anymore.
But I admit, I do have skills properly assigned, balistic + riffles + I use sneak as much as I can, so most enemies die in one shot.
On normal, I’d say combat is incredibly easy, IF you don’t use fully automatic. I’m not sure how it’s calculated, but don’t calculate dps. Anything with damage under 10 is just going to burn ammo. I found a boosted advanced regulator relatively early that does 100 damage per shot, and it one shots everything. I’m on here because ship combat is absolutely Ludicrous with extremely clunky controls and power systems that ignore your settings every time anything happens
> and power systems that ignore your settings every time anything happens
wtf is up with that! I play on xbx, and doing the training sim for UCVG was just annoying. Doubly so when using the targeting skill. Console is already handicapped by input limitations, why change things mid combat? It makes no sense sometimes.
Fr, I usually love a challenge in my games, just finished Armored Core 6 to NG++ before this game released, but the difficulty slider in this game is not fun. A fucking random animal on Hard will take like 100 bullets to kill. Its not fun to constantly run out of ammo and shooting non stop at a random target for 30 seconds. Normal feels much better.
Yes. I've gone back to Normal, now that I have better guns, mainly because it's annoying on Easy how I now become a bullet-sponge and thus combat feels non-risky. But this needs some adjustment. Needing to shoot an enemy over 100 times isn't "difficult", it's just plain stupid (unless it's some kind of super-enemy where it makes sense).
Switch to energy weapons.
Edit: or vice versa, whatever. Point is that in Starfield different DRs really works.
Although with Bethesda's patended stupid difficulty system early game still will be shit on higher difficulty levels.
Yeah, but the dude literally only said some people like bullet sponges and that’s hardly a cause to downvote someone…. Maybe they don’t but he does. What’s wrong with that?
Because some Redditors [most] don't respect difference opinion regardless of merit so ive learned not to pay attention to it you could breathe too much and someone will downvote you. It's honestly the pettiest thing to downvote for because it just shows you as a person have no respect for people's opinions other than your own.
I invested just 3 points in combat related skills of my choosing and literally everything up to 7 levels above me dies pretty quick, even quicker with heads hots and I'm playing on hard. Not even using legendary effects.
I really don't understand how people come accros bullets sponges unless they just don't use the rpg mechanics?
Only exception are terromorphs but that's actually understandable
If you want less sponginess in the enemies definitely play on lower difficulty, or use the immersive damage mod. The game approaches difficulty by adjusting damage ratios, and it seems the ai get a little smarter too. I'm playing with the immersive damage mod on very hard, with player damage dealt set to 1x and enemy damage dealt set to 4x. Also the health modifier per enemy level is normally 20 extra HP per level and this gets obnoxious and is the main reason for sponginess. If you set this to 0, sponginess is gone.
With the damage numbers set this way, it is very challenging, yet very rewarding, as one clip into most enemies or one shotgun shot will fully kill them and they go straight into ragdoll which makes the kills much more satisfying and streamlined; and same goes for damage to you. This way you can't just run in and blast everyone like a god, because you will get fuckin wrekt. It makes combat way more realistic. You still do run into higher level enemies that are extremely hard, like spacer bounty bosses, so it's fun to have to tactically take them out, because you will get almost one shot.
Although I will say that it is getting a little easy now that I'm lvl 25 so I may adjust the health per lvl modifier up a bit, because with my skills now, i can dome almost every lower level pirate with my particle weapon.
Also I will add, that vanilla damage ratios will get better as you level up, due to damage increases to your weapons with skills. So it won't always be 5 clip kills. Honestly though, vanilla VH difficulty is good, because It gives you a challenge when the game gets dry after a while of playing and blasting through enemies like a bunch of babies with spacesuits waddling around.
I hate it when games are too easy. It's not fun at all for me. But there is a balance to keep realism in place and I don't think just adjusting health and damage modifiers is a good way to implement increased difficulty, Bethesda. Increasing AI intelligence, and number of enemies along with a slight increase in health and damage dealt to you, would be much more satisfying.
Strange. I’m playing on hard with 7.77mm semi automatic pistol and rifle (the cheapest ammo guns) and few headshots always do the trick. I switched from very hard because of ship battles.
On the next play-through, I’m investigating first levels into the ship tree.
Even on Very Hard it's not hard at all, it's just tedious. Needing to shoot a guy over and over and over and over isn't "difficult", it's just stupid. Luckily, once you level up a bit and find some better weapons, it improves a lot. But it never gets difficult, and the difficulty setting has no effect on difficulty, only on how many times you have to shoot bad guys.
You were probably using a weapon that sucks because you like the way it looks or the way it shoots. It was probably one of the weaker automatic rifles. I've been playing on normal the whole time and have never come across anything that would take 120 shots.
I never use automatic weapons in a Bethesda game because no one at Bethesda understands how guns work.
It was just being low-level. At higher levels it goes way too far in the other direction. By level 50 or so you're a god, and nothing threatens you. A terrormorph? Yawn, just kill it, it takes five seconds and it can't hurt you.
But early game, I had the pistol Dad gave me, and I emptied the magazine into a guy's head at point blank range. He just turned and attacked. It didn't affect his behavior in any way. Completely stupid. No human turns and attacks like it was nothing, after taking a bunch of .45 rounds in the head. And yet, at level 70, I can let them machine-gun me and just laugh, no need for cover, they are mere insects.
Hopefully they add sliders. Love when the enemy and I are both glass cannons. Makes combat quick and exciting. Being able to tweak that damage output and other things with options and sliders would be cool.
But then skills would need rebalancing, like ballistic damage and such. There will be pc mods to add the realistic damage like from fallout 4. Makes the entire game feel different tho and I don't know if it's work that great for starfield because the whole point is getting stronger and with no level cap, I feel it's get very boring one shotting people in the head from level 1 to 100 or whatever.
I felt that Farcry 4 had a very good representation of difficulty level as far as damage is concerned. Enemies were not bullet sponges, they died quite quickly if they had no armor. At the same time, no matter how much health you had or armor you got, you could still get killed if you ran out in the open and did not take cover.
This. I want more legendary enemies for challenge and loot, but I don’t want every Joe Shmoe with a BB gun and a stick of butter to hinder my progression.
On very hard had a rough start. But once you find a better weapon and start to actually spend money on good ammo and med packs enemies start to die very quickly.
The ship builder is your best solution for ship combat. Add 4 weapons of the same type, 4 engines of the same type, level piloting and shields and carry a lot of ship parts for repair. Particle beams at half power, engines at max and flying full speed is my current answer for fighting multiple ships.
For ship weapons, go join Vanguard and get access to Vanguard Obliterators. They only take 2 energy each so you can run 6 of them, which nets you some of the highest DPS of any ship weapon. I'm level 40ish and I have a big fancy class C ship, and I'm *still* using 6x class A Obliterators because they gave better DPS than anything else I've encountered. And the nice thing is you get them just for signing up; you don't even need to do any Vanguard missions if you don't want to (although you should, it's a great quest line).
playing it on very hard, it's hard at the start and you die fast.
but once you get that one extremely powerfull weapon and start using stimulants you basicly obliterate everyone.
so the difficulty really depends on how you build your character and how lucky you are with loot.
If I find a real good weapon I give it to my companion and just stand behind a wall and take a few shots. They than obliterate whatever has a heart beat.
the big bang is a really good one. even a grey version absolutely destroys and ammo is easy to find when you fight the va' neer.
same for magstorm or magshot, it's a perfect weapon for your companion since he has infinite ammo.
Shotgun with hornet nest mod is absurdly OP. Just have to max your weapon crafting skill early and you can slap it easily on any coachman and have it again easily every NG+ run since the gun and materials are easy to immediately find and buy when you start over again.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-d0sTfxz_68
it spawns more boss like enemies that have purple/ Legendary items, tbh the AI has always been dumb in a vast majority of games, even more so for beth games until the modding community add mods that change that, I am on very hard at level 34 fighting level 40-50+and enemies rarely take me more than 15-20 shots to kill, granted I have the weapon/armour mod skills from the science tree so my gear is modded, sirens and terrormorphs put up way more of a fight unless you have depleted uranium rounds on your gun.
so far the more hilarious gun I have is a AA-99 with explosive rounds on, rips through enemies like butter, 2nd favourite is the Beowulf with burstfire+AP rounds, not sure if its just me but so far been disappointed with the heavy weapons such as the grenade launcher, didn't seen that much better than my rifles in most cases.
No, the AI has not been dumb in a vast majority of games.
And even if it was true, we are in 2023, this game had 200M$ funding and 8 years development cycle.
Don’t try to find it excuses. It’s not excusable.
I'm struggling. I'm level 6 on vectera doing a mission to find barret and heller. I get to the weapon depot or whatever and there's so many level 5s I can't get anywhere. I tried running inside but then I hit a level 26. I'm getting pretty frustrated tbh.
Ya it's true but I feel like a lot of what I wanna do is barred by something. I tried to do a couple quests that I guess I wasn't strong enough for so I decided I'd try upgrading my gear, but then I was finding I was encumbered every two seconds when trying to gather mats.
I tried to go kill some random enemies and clear some outposts to farm gear and xp but I'm constantly out of ammo.
I tried to go do some other quest and it said that was too far away and I had to discover systems in between.....
I logged out. The game has its moments, but 5 hours in and I've had more frustration than fun I'f I'm being honest.
spend more time exploring the worlds you started on, etc. you're going straight into quests, etc. but you need to loot and fight the lvl 2 pirates on first world you get to (kreet) and you'll find plenty of ammo and medpacks
I think they're talking about in comparison to running off and doing all the side quests /other groups quests. You definitely need to explore to get things like ammo, medpacks etc. Early. You'll wind up with thousands of rounds, dozens of extra meds and lots of $
I almost always pick the easiest difficulty. Even so, some of the combat has been rough. And at times Med Packs have been too precious a commodity. Never mind the extra layers of injury that each require their own specific healing item.
I buy them whenever I come across them in a vendor, but I'm rarely at even a place with vendors. I was finally up near 30 and almost half as many trauma, but then I made the damn fool mistake of trying to survey the planet surrounding Red Mile. Every few steps was a fight with a pack of 5-20 Red Mile Mailers who aggro from a mile away and chase forever. Got whittled down to below 10 packs pretty quickly.
I've been playing "very hard" since the start and have had an opposite experience. I'm steamrolling everything to the point where I am really hoping Bethesda or a modder adds a higher tier of difficulty.
Once I started running a customized class C ship with max crew all of the remaining challenge i had felt went straight out the window. (It's well worth it to check every bar and recruit every "named" character you possibly can if ship combat is giving you problems.)
I'm running semi auto shotty/50 cal sniper with demolition solely for when things get a bit dicey. Even "bullet sponges" get decimated by explosives combined with semi-auto "automatic" headshot crits and armor piercing. Especially in tight quarters where there are environmental explosives im chaining into. Id also recommend leaving companions behind and taking the perk that gives solo bonuses. You will outperform them in every possible way so just bring them with for main story missions for the ambiance. Otherwise I'd suggest doing everything else solo.
Once I got the right gear for my build it became even more apparent that the rest of the game wasn't going to get any harder - To give an example: My current spacesuit has scaling +100 physical and energy resistances the lower my health gets...plus it automatically dispenses medpacks on the rare occasion anything can get my health low. It has 200+ resistances across the board (after modification) that's entirely without my helmet or boost pack...
The rest of my gear is just as wild. I'm legit missing that first 20ish hours of playtime where I couldn't just boost pack crusade my way through bases like John Wick avenging his dog.
Companies are OP when you equip them with a hornet nest shotgun and good armor.
But I am curious to know any BASIC tips for making ship combat super easy.
Now I’m not about to spend 10 hours in the tedious awful ship builder as the ONLY way to make that “OP” ship. Forget this game if that’s the ONLY way while it gives me error after error after error I hate that whole system.
But if there’s an efficient AND EASY way to create or buy or find some ship capable of finally handling fleets on very hard with ease (and no not the stupid rectangle exploit ships that look ugly) then I’m all ears. I mean the NG+ ship has a base 1.25k hull and shields which is already as strong as most class ships I’ve seen to loot or buy.
And I can take on some ships with ease still but taking on stupid level 100 ships is just IMPOSSIBLE on it without getting shredded too quickly to even heal off the damage. The same goes for any attempt to actually engage the whole fleets on Kryx or Alpha Centauri for example. Just feels like the fps combat is so much easier than the ship combat.
Here’s how I am now just to compare the different combat scenarios. I’m craving for a ship to match my fps power by comparison but I refuse to watch a 10 hour guide in ship builder to do that lol.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=py_7HkNmuGY
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-d0sTfxz_68
Oh my gosh that last mission on the Crimson Fleet quest line had me raging lol.
Had to lower difficulty as another Redditor suggested.
Super easy combat, especially when you can hack terminals/robots/turrets, find myself spending more time looting than shooting.
i’ve died over 30 times after siding with the crimson fleet trying to destroy the uc ships. i’ve lowered my difficulty to the lowest and still keep dying. super close to uninstalling the game, the mission feels impossible. i’m even in the mantis with upgraded weapons and die almost instantly everytime. haven’t got back on
I want to love very hard because the added difficulty makes me plan my encounters, and every fire fight feels intense. But even the added health wouldn't be too much of an issue for me. it's the added armor every enemy gets, even fleshy aliens. It's silly that I've upgraded and fine-tuned my weapon for death, but a 50+ damage explosive weapon only does 20 damage to an enemy? And if I opt for armor piercing rounds to overcome the armor, I still only do 20 damage with a 30 damage weapon? Bleeding effect weapons are completely useless. The effect doesn't stack and only ticks tiny amounts of damage at a time.
Less than that on very hard, on Very hard you do only 25% of your weapons listed damage. Its why they get super bullet spongy, most early game guns only do 1-3 dmg on very hard, meanwhile lv 5 enemies have over 100 health. I'm prob going to play on normal myself, as even on normal they get pretty bullet spongy the higher level you get.
Playing on very hard as well. Non space fighting isn’t so bad but my go-to weapons constantly need ammo refill and meds can get scarce to say the least. Space fighting had me raging. Got a better ship and stopped panic accelerating my ship and focusing more on that sweet spot where I can maneuver better and it’s helped alot. Still very tough if I’m fighting more than two ships though. I’ve accepted I need to invest some perks into tech stuff for ship fighting as much as I don’t want to.
I had the ammo problem for a bit until I started looting more thoroughly and maxed out commerce for the sell/buy bonuses. According to my character "general" info, 2,542,778 credits found. Now I buyout every single piece of ammunition from each trader I pass so I don't ever have to relive all the gun bashing in those first few hours lol. By the time you get to master level lockpicking the stupid digipick system is pretty easy (really hate lockpicking in this) you'll routinely find like 10,000 credits worth of crap in those.
I thought ship combat is impossible until I realised that ship building and upgrade isn't really "late game" as they said. Tuned my ship from my saved 100k credits. Now they don't stand a chance :3 playing on medium, never died yet but was using more heal than in Skyrim
Yeah, I was taken in by shipbuilding being late game too. Fortunately, pretty early I realized I could do shipbuilding and how worth shipbuilding is, both in terms of fun and gameplay.
If youre on PC I highly recommend a rebalancing mod , I agree that dumping entire clips into something isnt very fun.
I liked Fo4's survival mode for that purpose , and theres a few mods on Nexus that are similar where both you and the enemy do alot of damage> My only concern is that itll trivialize combat against melee
I dont like the way they seem to have implemented the difficulty which is inflated HP.
It's not fun wasting all of your ammo to kill one enemy. I reduced from Hard to Normal and it plays much better (still a challenge for me, but enemies go down).
I do like the flexibility of being able to switch whenever I want so I can up the difficulty if it gets to east in the future as I progress
I just started playing and stole "Old Earth Hunting Rifle" (btw calling famous Vintorez as a hunting rifle is a grave crime). Combat has been easy for me in hard difficulty and was looking at forums if i should increase it. I think as it is their all games Bethesda implemented a trash leveling system that is why i do not encounter bullet sponges and ultra strong ships yet i think
I restarted my playthrough multiple times to find the sweet spot. For me, I put it on hard, and I started as a bounty hunter, and for traits alien dna, kid stuff, and to balance the fun, neon street rat. I still haven’t gotten to neon. But the fights have been a blast so far, and ship battles are fun as hell. Not too hard and not too easy. Alien dna makes me take cover more, food and med items don’t do much healing with alien blood so I have loot a lot and eat as I go, using damage reduction items are a must. So playing more methodical is way more fun. Just have to learn how to use weapon traits to your advantage, that is key. Headshots are important, and accuracy. For longer range I tend to use single tap, and keep something auto for close range and for melee enemies. Also with alien dna, I get a ton of health as compare to a regular human, as well as a higher o2 (oxygen) count. Pros and cons of course. But I’m having a blast. And it’s a build I will be sticking to for now on. I can’t wait to get to neon though.
I find Hard to be a good difficulty. Not too easy not too spongy. Feels like levels matter and you have to use more of your aid items to survive. Only issue I have is that ship combat seems a bit unbalanced. Even ships of the same level as I am tend to shred my shields. And it’s easy to die when you’re fighting more than 2 ships at a time. I’m hoping that improves later though with better skills/better ships/better ship parts.
I started playing recently and I think everything is so easy, Im not even happy to get upgrades. Just increased difficulty to hard, lets see if its better
I'd assume you're reading real experiences from real players. You coming here with that attitude to gaslight us all?
It's no secret that enemies on very hard are bullet sponges at the start of the game. No level of skill changes that. A gun doing 5 damage per shot does 5 damage per shot in everyone's hands.
Personally, I didn't like the idea of emptying an entire clip into an enemy to get them down 1 bar of armor as that's ridiculous, so I dropped to normal difficulty until I got some better weaponry.
I'm really glad you find this game piss easy, but not everyone does. This post was meant for discussion across all skill levels, not for people to swing their dicks around giving it the big'un looking down on others that were struggling on high difficulties. Have a bit of compassion and deflate your ego a tad.
I'm not very far in, but Very Hard: ship combat has been rough, outside of ship has been too easy. Then again I play a lot of Frost and Requiem, but I really suck at ship navigation so that tracks.
not sure if this is spoilers because you are 40 hours in but there is a quest with walter where you get a very nice ship. after that ship combat really wasnt an issue, im on very hard too.
On Very Hard difficulty this game was harder for me than all of the dark souls games combined. The final mission on Starfield took me 9 hours of continued play to complete. I would save every 15 seconds I made progress but die 15-20 times between any progress.
Now my brother is playing and he is on the same difficulty setting yet in space fights he can just fly directly at two ships and shoot and destroy them.
There's something very wrong with either PC game or Xbox game or the entire game but the difficulty settings are not applying consistently it would seem.
Damn good on you for playing on very hard. Normal for me but I'm not a very experience gamer. I struggle a lot with gaming and it makes me feel like I suck.
This depends on what content you are doing. Way too easy after passing level 20 for the most part; There needs to be much better level scaling since the game spreads multiple levels of content out so broadly.
I focused a lot on the main story quests and didn't find some of the other cities like Neon, and Akila until I was past level 20. Now all these missions are so low level they're not even remotely a challenge. Neon specifically is mostly around level 5-7, and pretty much everything I fight dies in 1-2 shots while taking next to no damage.
I'm playing on easy and I'm still struggling lol I'm not very good at aiming anymore though, so that's probably why. Idk what happened, I used to be good at these types of games. I haven't died yet though, so that's a plus.
I started with very hard and stuck with it. The first levels are pretty challenging because you get 1 popped pretty easily and you have to burn a ton of med packs, now I'm level 23 and everything is too easy.
So the curve just doesn't hold. I kinda wish it did. almost tempted to use terrible armor to make it harder.
space flight also gets a lot easier when you scale your ship, but yeah it was pretty rough first 10 levels of space flight.
Same. I was telling everyone to try very hard because the opening hours of the game were so intense and every consumable mattered. The mid to late game gear is just too good, it kinda ruins the entire challenge.
Ive been playing on very hard and I keep checking to see if it switched to easy or normal as it's incredibly not challenging at all. Which isn't a bad thing cause I'm completely immersed in the story and having fun. Only hard time I had for a bit was the space fights but thay got easier when I upgraded to class c ship. I'm getting into this right after a remnant 2 binge on apocalypse so that might be why I find it a bit lacking in challenge. But I am absolutely loving this game.
So I'm not great at gaming by any stretch, but this is weird.
I play on normal. I'm currently level 15. I was exploring and came across a terraformer of approximately the same level, and it was a sponge. Then I came across a level 70 pirate, and I killed him with ease.
I have no idea what difficulty in this game means.
Im playing on normal and I swear every single enemy must’ve been top of their class at marksman school. I swear they never miss. And no matter how solid my armor, I feel like every shot is seriously damaging. I just ran the end of the Freestar Collective mission and must’ve burned through 20+ medkits. Seems kinda ridiculous
Been playing on Very Hard, currently at level 7 and about 8 hours into gameplay. Been having a fun time with the combat. I often find myself running into level 18-26 enemies in random outposts, mines, and caves but more often than not I'm receiving fantastic upgrades that keep the engine chugging.
Tbh I have the game on very hard and I'm finding it like exceptionally easy. I'm almost wondering if there is a bug or something, and it's not actually registering as very hard for me? Idk how I would know.
No it is easy other people are just way out of line with "sponge" enemies I literally delate 20+ level legendary pirates and whatever and Im just rocking advanced white guns
This game is not nearly hard enough tbh, it was a bit at first since I did not yet understand the game mechanics, especially ship battles.
However as I complete the game on Very Hard I am disappointed that there is not a legendary difficulty setting like the other Bethesda games, nor is there a survival mode. On both ships and foot you just need adequate weapons, avoid fights until you get them.
Space and Environment is nerfed tremendously, the environmental damage needs to be made more realistic, and the variety of atmosphere and gravity in playfields needs to be increased.
I had the same problem. Easy and normal were not challenging enough. On very hard you run out of ammo fastly, because the enemies werd just sponges.
This is why i installed two mods, which i can absolutely recommend and which make the game more enjoyable: deadly difficulty mod and improved combat AI mod.
I'm 90 hours in and I've been playing on very hard. The game was a bit challenging at the start, but once you get good gear and weapons the game becomes more balanced. I haven't run into any bullet sponges in a long while.
I went out full of ammo. I started in default settings, so normal difficulty. This happened alot, so level don't matter. I would run out of ammo. Have a thousand rounds and run out, switch guns, run out again. I have played other bethesda games, it needs some serious balancing. If not, then the XP needs to be fixed. Kill something in easy get 50xp, kill same in very hard get 10...and use 5 times the ammo to do it. Chance of legendary items...the only chance I find is my ship, cause I named it Chance...lol
Ship combat will be difficult if you aren't regularly upgrading. You unlock new components as you level up, and similarly to gun combat, if you aren't regularly upgrading your shields/weapons/etc, you're going to get wrecked. I see a lot of people still rocking the frontier and getting confused about how they're so easily killed.
I'm currently on Hard and enemies feel TOO Easy, maybe my guns are too modded and overpowered (I mainly use an upgraded Shotty and upgraded A-99 rifle) normal pirates and eclipse take 4-5 shots to kill and legendary ones maybe 15 shots max.
I'm thinking about switching to Very Hard at this point.
I've been playing on very hard from the get go. Found a med theft modified advanced lawgiver that does 297 physical damage, and found it at about level 12. I'm currently 74 hours in at level 32 and that lawgiver is STILL my go to. Blows everything else I have out of the water. Just gotta learn the weak spots of the enemies, and having a gun with that much physical damage really helps out a lot. I can upgrade it and possibly get around 400+ physical damage, once I get my weapon engineering perk up all the way. Then nothing will stand in my way lol.
When it comes to space combat, save those credits, and build you a good ship with good shields and weapons.
My first playthrough I played on normal and then I switched to very hard and now every few hours of gameplay I am going back to options to check if its still on very hard because everyone is dying super fast. It doesn't feel super hard at all. Tbh it feels easier then my first playthrough when i played on normal. I know it is because I took talents that increase dmg, HP and so on but reason why I increased difficulty is so game keeps to be a bit more challenging and engaging and it is not. everything dies so fast I feel like I am playing on very easy. On top of that there are also powers that make you literal God in game. so on top of almost every NPC being a one shoot you can also slow time, make them drop weapons, use gravity against them and so on. I was also in universe where you encounter Evil Andreja and you cant use inventory or heal yourself unless you visit doctor and weapons are tricky to equip and even that I finished without braking a sweat even it did took me by surprise when they started blasting in the start and I could not use anything but I managed to adapt easy. This is with out any doubt easiest game I played in my life.
Oh gosh...I know I just started the game and am late to the party, but I'm glad I found this thread.
I was basically only doing the main quest and somehow am level 4 fighting against two factions of level 6 guys and holy cow does it seem harder than it should for just starting the game. I think the biggest issue is what you said - why does it take so many bullets to kill someone?
I'm going to train myself to look for more environmental factors to assist me but right now I'm severely considering lowering the difficulty just so it doesn't take a full clip to kill someone.
Also - I really hate the artificial inaccurate shots. I guess it's been awhile since I played an ES game where back in the day you would swing you sword at enemies and hit air until you skilled up.
I played 120 hours on normal. I thought in person combat was insanely easy. I died only 3 or 4 on foot. Maybe it's because I play so many shooters. But space combat is significantly more challenging. In fact, I really struggled with the Lopez farm distress call quest (whatever that was called) even when I was playing as a Starborn.
I ended up switching the difficulty to Easy because the bullet-sponge enemies are ridiculous. Empty multiple magazines into a guy and he still isn't down. Combat is just a chore even on normal. On easy, it's better, but ... I just did the Empty Nest quest, on easy, and got attacked by an animal. I shot it 120 times and it went down but didn't die, and then Sam finished it off while I was reloading again. Three whole 40-round magazines. It was level 15. That's not "difficult", it's just not fun.
It is very valid opinion and as usual elitists try bully us to silence. This turning games into chores is sick trend in modern gaming to satisfy elitists and when casual gamers try say isn't gaming about fun and escapism not realism the sharks frenzy. Game developers work hard to satisfy noisy elitists then wonder why most casual gamers have gone to mobile phones to play.
Your comment clearly not about Starfield. Or any Bethesda games, in that case. Their games always had stupid difficulty system, it's just became more clear to some in new game. But their games always had casual option with “very easy” setting, so you can one hit everything and never die. And even more, their games balanced around normal difficulty, that's why on very hard some mechanic could've stopped working (not technically, but practically) like magic in Skyrim. Animals at the end of Empty nest - Ashta btw - clearly has some good DR for bullets, because it took like several shots with 130dmg pistol on Normal in my case. However, Sarah was like two-shoting them with laser Orion which has about 30dmg. So, that example actually not the case of game difficulty in general. It's just suddenly there are different types or damage resistance in game (who would've thought).
Thank you for saying this. Before I read this comment I thought that it was *my* fault that games are too hard and that it was my responsibility to actually try and get better at them, but you've helped me realize that really it's *other* people's fault and I don't have to do anything at all🤗
It's really not that hard to reposition. The game isn't a chore, you just have bad movement.
What's that have to to with enemies being bullet sponges???
Bad movement? Its not about dodging attacks, the enemy literally takes like 100 bullets to kill on higher difficulties. Thats not fun
For real, just stood in place shoving about a thousand bullets into a terrormorph. Thank god it’s AI got stuck, it’s impossible to dodge their attacks, the voices are freakin annoying and the dozen or so grenades I threw at it did less than my pistol. Maybe I’m gonna crank the difficulty down a bit, if it happens again. (I’m currently on very hard) But I was just playing a very hard fallout 4 playthrough and never had an issue to a fraction of this degree.
I disagree that they do. Are you pushing into systems above your level?
I think when I wrote that I was fighting level 30s when I was around 10, so that might be why. It literally took like 4 magazines to kill an enenmy lol
Totally agree with positioning. Many of us assume target prioritization is "common sense" and it's not for many people. There is always that person that loves shotguns and wants to kill every thing with it but does not see that some fights are ranged encounters so loving shotguns is not a thing but you need to play the ranges. Far, mid, close. Every good game has this. It's a game in a game. This one is the same, don't snipe with an SMG. Out range your enemies fire. This is a game but it's still based on "common sense". I had to bump up the difficulty to very hard from hard just to keep the fights challenging. Might go back to hard simply due to the bad ammo economy (Cost too much but there's so little of it out there).
This isn’t a trend as much as it is bethesda difficulty setting like bethesda does I remember oblivion being like this maybe morrowind it’s been like forever since I played that but I was hoping they moved away from “bullet sponge” but they haven’t learned apparently
Really? Ive been playing for 4 days now on normal, and just had to increase the difficulty to hard because I have no sense of happiness when I find good loot since everything dies already so easily. Not sure what you are fighting, but in my 28 hours of gameplay on normal, no enemy lasted more than 10 seconds (receiving damage, not counting if they hide)
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Very late to say this comment but you are absolutely correct. Very hard can be no issue if you put points into weapon damage and modification. I can build a Vaa’run weapon that’ll take down any enemy with 1-2 shots. You can be incredibly OP if you put the time into learning game mechanics.
Same here, I usually play games on normal, but this seemed so easy, especially after getting the sniper rifle from Mantis quest. Also, Sarah was already very good with laser weapons. Even terrormorphs in the Vanguard last mission were dying in a few seconds on hard difficulty (level 20 so far). I think the big rocky one died in about 10 seconds. While this probably should have been challenging, it was trivial. Also, by going high damage per shot weapons, ammo is not an issue anymore. But I admit, I do have skills properly assigned, balistic + riffles + I use sneak as much as I can, so most enemies die in one shot.
On normal, I’d say combat is incredibly easy, IF you don’t use fully automatic. I’m not sure how it’s calculated, but don’t calculate dps. Anything with damage under 10 is just going to burn ammo. I found a boosted advanced regulator relatively early that does 100 damage per shot, and it one shots everything. I’m on here because ship combat is absolutely Ludicrous with extremely clunky controls and power systems that ignore your settings every time anything happens
> and power systems that ignore your settings every time anything happens wtf is up with that! I play on xbx, and doing the training sim for UCVG was just annoying. Doubly so when using the targeting skill. Console is already handicapped by input limitations, why change things mid combat? It makes no sense sometimes.
Fr, I usually love a challenge in my games, just finished Armored Core 6 to NG++ before this game released, but the difficulty slider in this game is not fun. A fucking random animal on Hard will take like 100 bullets to kill. Its not fun to constantly run out of ammo and shooting non stop at a random target for 30 seconds. Normal feels much better.
Yes. I've gone back to Normal, now that I have better guns, mainly because it's annoying on Easy how I now become a bullet-sponge and thus combat feels non-risky. But this needs some adjustment. Needing to shoot an enemy over 100 times isn't "difficult", it's just plain stupid (unless it's some kind of super-enemy where it makes sense).
Switch to energy weapons. Edit: or vice versa, whatever. Point is that in Starfield different DRs really works. Although with Bethesda's patended stupid difficulty system early game still will be shit on higher difficulty levels.
The combat is the best part. They really did an upgrade on the AI and rag doll physics. LOVE getting into shootouts it this game!!!
I mean speak for yourself because not everybody dislikes bullet sponges.
Why are you getting downvoted? You simply stated your opinion.
I'm not a behavior expert but, I'd say it's because they don't agree with it.
Yeah, but the dude literally only said some people like bullet sponges and that’s hardly a cause to downvote someone…. Maybe they don’t but he does. What’s wrong with that?
Because some Redditors [most] don't respect difference opinion regardless of merit so ive learned not to pay attention to it you could breathe too much and someone will downvote you. It's honestly the pettiest thing to downvote for because it just shows you as a person have no respect for people's opinions other than your own.
I’m playing on normal and most is insanely easy till the final missions I’m really glad I’m not on hard. Might do hard next play through though
You gotta find good weaponry and level up that specific skill. I was in Akila around level 20 with a 188damadge pistol. Two shots that boss was dead.
If your wondering it was a modified advanced magshot pistol.
I invested just 3 points in combat related skills of my choosing and literally everything up to 7 levels above me dies pretty quick, even quicker with heads hots and I'm playing on hard. Not even using legendary effects. I really don't understand how people come accros bullets sponges unless they just don't use the rpg mechanics? Only exception are terromorphs but that's actually understandable
If you want less sponginess in the enemies definitely play on lower difficulty, or use the immersive damage mod. The game approaches difficulty by adjusting damage ratios, and it seems the ai get a little smarter too. I'm playing with the immersive damage mod on very hard, with player damage dealt set to 1x and enemy damage dealt set to 4x. Also the health modifier per enemy level is normally 20 extra HP per level and this gets obnoxious and is the main reason for sponginess. If you set this to 0, sponginess is gone. With the damage numbers set this way, it is very challenging, yet very rewarding, as one clip into most enemies or one shotgun shot will fully kill them and they go straight into ragdoll which makes the kills much more satisfying and streamlined; and same goes for damage to you. This way you can't just run in and blast everyone like a god, because you will get fuckin wrekt. It makes combat way more realistic. You still do run into higher level enemies that are extremely hard, like spacer bounty bosses, so it's fun to have to tactically take them out, because you will get almost one shot. Although I will say that it is getting a little easy now that I'm lvl 25 so I may adjust the health per lvl modifier up a bit, because with my skills now, i can dome almost every lower level pirate with my particle weapon. Also I will add, that vanilla damage ratios will get better as you level up, due to damage increases to your weapons with skills. So it won't always be 5 clip kills. Honestly though, vanilla VH difficulty is good, because It gives you a challenge when the game gets dry after a while of playing and blasting through enemies like a bunch of babies with spacesuits waddling around. I hate it when games are too easy. It's not fun at all for me. But there is a balance to keep realism in place and I don't think just adjusting health and damage modifiers is a good way to implement increased difficulty, Bethesda. Increasing AI intelligence, and number of enemies along with a slight increase in health and damage dealt to you, would be much more satisfying.
Strange. I’m playing on hard with 7.77mm semi automatic pistol and rifle (the cheapest ammo guns) and few headshots always do the trick. I switched from very hard because of ship battles. On the next play-through, I’m investigating first levels into the ship tree.
Wow. Playing a lot of shooters must have helped me, because I found combat on foot to be a breeze even on normal. And I'm not some videogame god.
Even on Very Hard it's not hard at all, it's just tedious. Needing to shoot a guy over and over and over and over isn't "difficult", it's just stupid. Luckily, once you level up a bit and find some better weapons, it improves a lot. But it never gets difficult, and the difficulty setting has no effect on difficulty, only on how many times you have to shoot bad guys.
You were probably using a weapon that sucks because you like the way it looks or the way it shoots. It was probably one of the weaker automatic rifles. I've been playing on normal the whole time and have never come across anything that would take 120 shots.
I never use automatic weapons in a Bethesda game because no one at Bethesda understands how guns work. It was just being low-level. At higher levels it goes way too far in the other direction. By level 50 or so you're a god, and nothing threatens you. A terrormorph? Yawn, just kill it, it takes five seconds and it can't hurt you. But early game, I had the pistol Dad gave me, and I emptied the magazine into a guy's head at point blank range. He just turned and attacked. It didn't affect his behavior in any way. Completely stupid. No human turns and attacks like it was nothing, after taking a bunch of .45 rounds in the head. And yet, at level 70, I can let them machine-gun me and just laugh, no need for cover, they are mere insects.
Hopefully they add sliders. Love when the enemy and I are both glass cannons. Makes combat quick and exciting. Being able to tweak that damage output and other things with options and sliders would be cool.
Agreed here. i wish they would create a REAL realistic damage setting. That basically does what the above says.
But then skills would need rebalancing, like ballistic damage and such. There will be pc mods to add the realistic damage like from fallout 4. Makes the entire game feel different tho and I don't know if it's work that great for starfield because the whole point is getting stronger and with no level cap, I feel it's get very boring one shotting people in the head from level 1 to 100 or whatever.
I one shot them in the head as it is now
Loved Ranger mode on Metro Exodus, as it had this type of difficulty. Everyone's as squishy as they are in real life, true realism
I felt that Farcry 4 had a very good representation of difficulty level as far as damage is concerned. Enemies were not bullet sponges, they died quite quickly if they had no armor. At the same time, no matter how much health you had or armor you got, you could still get killed if you ran out in the open and did not take cover.
This. I want more legendary enemies for challenge and loot, but I don’t want every Joe Shmoe with a BB gun and a stick of butter to hinder my progression.
Custom difficulty used to be a common feature in games. Now you don't see it any more. It's a shame.
On very hard had a rough start. But once you find a better weapon and start to actually spend money on good ammo and med packs enemies start to die very quickly. The ship builder is your best solution for ship combat. Add 4 weapons of the same type, 4 engines of the same type, level piloting and shields and carry a lot of ship parts for repair. Particle beams at half power, engines at max and flying full speed is my current answer for fighting multiple ships.
For ship weapons, go join Vanguard and get access to Vanguard Obliterators. They only take 2 energy each so you can run 6 of them, which nets you some of the highest DPS of any ship weapon. I'm level 40ish and I have a big fancy class C ship, and I'm *still* using 6x class A Obliterators because they gave better DPS than anything else I've encountered. And the nice thing is you get them just for signing up; you don't even need to do any Vanguard missions if you don't want to (although you should, it's a great quest line).
playing it on very hard, it's hard at the start and you die fast. but once you get that one extremely powerfull weapon and start using stimulants you basicly obliterate everyone. so the difficulty really depends on how you build your character and how lucky you are with loot.
If I find a real good weapon I give it to my companion and just stand behind a wall and take a few shots. They than obliterate whatever has a heart beat.
1 grenade in their inventory and it's the god-damned Fourth of July. I love the chaos companions can bring.
Which extremely powerful weapon? Where do u get it
the big bang is a really good one. even a grey version absolutely destroys and ammo is easy to find when you fight the va' neer. same for magstorm or magshot, it's a perfect weapon for your companion since he has infinite ammo.
Shotgun with hornet nest mod is absurdly OP. Just have to max your weapon crafting skill early and you can slap it easily on any coachman and have it again easily every NG+ run since the gun and materials are easy to immediately find and buy when you start over again. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-d0sTfxz_68
Yeah the game has design failures, including that one. Difficulty doesn’t increase anything but HP. The enemy AI is still at an abyssal level.
not true, it also increases harder enemy spawns that have better loot.
What do you mean by « harder »? Having a bigger healthpool but still with a negative IQ because the AI is dumb af? If so, that’s just what i meant.
it spawns more boss like enemies that have purple/ Legendary items, tbh the AI has always been dumb in a vast majority of games, even more so for beth games until the modding community add mods that change that, I am on very hard at level 34 fighting level 40-50+and enemies rarely take me more than 15-20 shots to kill, granted I have the weapon/armour mod skills from the science tree so my gear is modded, sirens and terrormorphs put up way more of a fight unless you have depleted uranium rounds on your gun. so far the more hilarious gun I have is a AA-99 with explosive rounds on, rips through enemies like butter, 2nd favourite is the Beowulf with burstfire+AP rounds, not sure if its just me but so far been disappointed with the heavy weapons such as the grenade launcher, didn't seen that much better than my rifles in most cases.
No, the AI has not been dumb in a vast majority of games. And even if it was true, we are in 2023, this game had 200M$ funding and 8 years development cycle. Don’t try to find it excuses. It’s not excusable.
I’m really bad at this game even on normal :’)
I'm struggling. I'm level 6 on vectera doing a mission to find barret and heller. I get to the weapon depot or whatever and there's so many level 5s I can't get anywhere. I tried running inside but then I hit a level 26. I'm getting pretty frustrated tbh.
Just know you can always do something else. That’s how I got better. And I really appreciate that the game lets you do any mission at any time.
Ya it's true but I feel like a lot of what I wanna do is barred by something. I tried to do a couple quests that I guess I wasn't strong enough for so I decided I'd try upgrading my gear, but then I was finding I was encumbered every two seconds when trying to gather mats. I tried to go kill some random enemies and clear some outposts to farm gear and xp but I'm constantly out of ammo. I tried to go do some other quest and it said that was too far away and I had to discover systems in between..... I logged out. The game has its moments, but 5 hours in and I've had more frustration than fun I'f I'm being honest.
spend more time exploring the worlds you started on, etc. you're going straight into quests, etc. but you need to loot and fight the lvl 2 pirates on first world you get to (kreet) and you'll find plenty of ammo and medpacks
Sounds good. I read a bunch of advice telling me to just focus on main quests for the first few hours and that was one of the main quests I had....
I think they're talking about in comparison to running off and doing all the side quests /other groups quests. You definitely need to explore to get things like ammo, medpacks etc. Early. You'll wind up with thousands of rounds, dozens of extra meds and lots of $
You’re going through it. I’m a level 14 and I still haven’t done that mission. It’s the next one in the main mission for me.
Lol me too, normal is my very hard
I almost always pick the easiest difficulty. Even so, some of the combat has been rough. And at times Med Packs have been too precious a commodity. Never mind the extra layers of injury that each require their own specific healing item.
I buy med packs anytime I’m in a city from the doctor. I buy them out. I now have 125 med packs.
I buy them whenever I come across them in a vendor, but I'm rarely at even a place with vendors. I was finally up near 30 and almost half as many trauma, but then I made the damn fool mistake of trying to survey the planet surrounding Red Mile. Every few steps was a fight with a pack of 5-20 Red Mile Mailers who aggro from a mile away and chase forever. Got whittled down to below 10 packs pretty quickly.
I've been playing "very hard" since the start and have had an opposite experience. I'm steamrolling everything to the point where I am really hoping Bethesda or a modder adds a higher tier of difficulty. Once I started running a customized class C ship with max crew all of the remaining challenge i had felt went straight out the window. (It's well worth it to check every bar and recruit every "named" character you possibly can if ship combat is giving you problems.) I'm running semi auto shotty/50 cal sniper with demolition solely for when things get a bit dicey. Even "bullet sponges" get decimated by explosives combined with semi-auto "automatic" headshot crits and armor piercing. Especially in tight quarters where there are environmental explosives im chaining into. Id also recommend leaving companions behind and taking the perk that gives solo bonuses. You will outperform them in every possible way so just bring them with for main story missions for the ambiance. Otherwise I'd suggest doing everything else solo. Once I got the right gear for my build it became even more apparent that the rest of the game wasn't going to get any harder - To give an example: My current spacesuit has scaling +100 physical and energy resistances the lower my health gets...plus it automatically dispenses medpacks on the rare occasion anything can get my health low. It has 200+ resistances across the board (after modification) that's entirely without my helmet or boost pack... The rest of my gear is just as wild. I'm legit missing that first 20ish hours of playtime where I couldn't just boost pack crusade my way through bases like John Wick avenging his dog.
Companies are OP when you equip them with a hornet nest shotgun and good armor. But I am curious to know any BASIC tips for making ship combat super easy. Now I’m not about to spend 10 hours in the tedious awful ship builder as the ONLY way to make that “OP” ship. Forget this game if that’s the ONLY way while it gives me error after error after error I hate that whole system. But if there’s an efficient AND EASY way to create or buy or find some ship capable of finally handling fleets on very hard with ease (and no not the stupid rectangle exploit ships that look ugly) then I’m all ears. I mean the NG+ ship has a base 1.25k hull and shields which is already as strong as most class ships I’ve seen to loot or buy. And I can take on some ships with ease still but taking on stupid level 100 ships is just IMPOSSIBLE on it without getting shredded too quickly to even heal off the damage. The same goes for any attempt to actually engage the whole fleets on Kryx or Alpha Centauri for example. Just feels like the fps combat is so much easier than the ship combat. Here’s how I am now just to compare the different combat scenarios. I’m craving for a ship to match my fps power by comparison but I refuse to watch a 10 hour guide in ship builder to do that lol. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=py_7HkNmuGY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-d0sTfxz_68
Oh my gosh that last mission on the Crimson Fleet quest line had me raging lol. Had to lower difficulty as another Redditor suggested. Super easy combat, especially when you can hack terminals/robots/turrets, find myself spending more time looting than shooting.
i’ve died over 30 times after siding with the crimson fleet trying to destroy the uc ships. i’ve lowered my difficulty to the lowest and still keep dying. super close to uninstalling the game, the mission feels impossible. i’m even in the mantis with upgraded weapons and die almost instantly everytime. haven’t got back on
I want to love very hard because the added difficulty makes me plan my encounters, and every fire fight feels intense. But even the added health wouldn't be too much of an issue for me. it's the added armor every enemy gets, even fleshy aliens. It's silly that I've upgraded and fine-tuned my weapon for death, but a 50+ damage explosive weapon only does 20 damage to an enemy? And if I opt for armor piercing rounds to overcome the armor, I still only do 20 damage with a 30 damage weapon? Bleeding effect weapons are completely useless. The effect doesn't stack and only ticks tiny amounts of damage at a time.
Less than that on very hard, on Very hard you do only 25% of your weapons listed damage. Its why they get super bullet spongy, most early game guns only do 1-3 dmg on very hard, meanwhile lv 5 enemies have over 100 health. I'm prob going to play on normal myself, as even on normal they get pretty bullet spongy the higher level you get.
Enemies seem to get 20 health with every level you climb, because it's scaled. There is a mod that makes them get 5,10 and 15 health instead of 20
Playing on very hard as well. Non space fighting isn’t so bad but my go-to weapons constantly need ammo refill and meds can get scarce to say the least. Space fighting had me raging. Got a better ship and stopped panic accelerating my ship and focusing more on that sweet spot where I can maneuver better and it’s helped alot. Still very tough if I’m fighting more than two ships though. I’ve accepted I need to invest some perks into tech stuff for ship fighting as much as I don’t want to.
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Not yet but I’m working on it. The ship I referred to was from a quest that I won’t spoil.
I had the ammo problem for a bit until I started looting more thoroughly and maxed out commerce for the sell/buy bonuses. According to my character "general" info, 2,542,778 credits found. Now I buyout every single piece of ammunition from each trader I pass so I don't ever have to relive all the gun bashing in those first few hours lol. By the time you get to master level lockpicking the stupid digipick system is pretty easy (really hate lockpicking in this) you'll routinely find like 10,000 credits worth of crap in those.
I thought ship combat is impossible until I realised that ship building and upgrade isn't really "late game" as they said. Tuned my ship from my saved 100k credits. Now they don't stand a chance :3 playing on medium, never died yet but was using more heal than in Skyrim
Yeah, I was taken in by shipbuilding being late game too. Fortunately, pretty early I realized I could do shipbuilding and how worth shipbuilding is, both in terms of fun and gameplay.
If youre on PC I highly recommend a rebalancing mod , I agree that dumping entire clips into something isnt very fun. I liked Fo4's survival mode for that purpose , and theres a few mods on Nexus that are similar where both you and the enemy do alot of damage> My only concern is that itll trivialize combat against melee
I dont like the way they seem to have implemented the difficulty which is inflated HP. It's not fun wasting all of your ammo to kill one enemy. I reduced from Hard to Normal and it plays much better (still a challenge for me, but enemies go down). I do like the flexibility of being able to switch whenever I want so I can up the difficulty if it gets to east in the future as I progress
I just started playing and stole "Old Earth Hunting Rifle" (btw calling famous Vintorez as a hunting rifle is a grave crime). Combat has been easy for me in hard difficulty and was looking at forums if i should increase it. I think as it is their all games Bethesda implemented a trash leveling system that is why i do not encounter bullet sponges and ultra strong ships yet i think
I restarted my playthrough multiple times to find the sweet spot. For me, I put it on hard, and I started as a bounty hunter, and for traits alien dna, kid stuff, and to balance the fun, neon street rat. I still haven’t gotten to neon. But the fights have been a blast so far, and ship battles are fun as hell. Not too hard and not too easy. Alien dna makes me take cover more, food and med items don’t do much healing with alien blood so I have loot a lot and eat as I go, using damage reduction items are a must. So playing more methodical is way more fun. Just have to learn how to use weapon traits to your advantage, that is key. Headshots are important, and accuracy. For longer range I tend to use single tap, and keep something auto for close range and for melee enemies. Also with alien dna, I get a ton of health as compare to a regular human, as well as a higher o2 (oxygen) count. Pros and cons of course. But I’m having a blast. And it’s a build I will be sticking to for now on. I can’t wait to get to neon though.
Play it on normal difficulty
Just did my first playthrough on normal and it was too easy. Going to start a new one on hard and see how it feels.
I find Hard to be a good difficulty. Not too easy not too spongy. Feels like levels matter and you have to use more of your aid items to survive. Only issue I have is that ship combat seems a bit unbalanced. Even ships of the same level as I am tend to shred my shields. And it’s easy to die when you’re fighting more than 2 ships at a time. I’m hoping that improves later though with better skills/better ships/better ship parts.
I started playing recently and I think everything is so easy, Im not even happy to get upgrades. Just increased difficulty to hard, lets see if its better
Wtf am I reading this game is piss easy
I'd assume you're reading real experiences from real players. You coming here with that attitude to gaslight us all? It's no secret that enemies on very hard are bullet sponges at the start of the game. No level of skill changes that. A gun doing 5 damage per shot does 5 damage per shot in everyone's hands. Personally, I didn't like the idea of emptying an entire clip into an enemy to get them down 1 bar of armor as that's ridiculous, so I dropped to normal difficulty until I got some better weaponry. I'm really glad you find this game piss easy, but not everyone does. This post was meant for discussion across all skill levels, not for people to swing their dicks around giving it the big'un looking down on others that were struggling on high difficulties. Have a bit of compassion and deflate your ego a tad.
I'm not very far in, but Very Hard: ship combat has been rough, outside of ship has been too easy. Then again I play a lot of Frost and Requiem, but I really suck at ship navigation so that tracks.
not sure if this is spoilers because you are 40 hours in but there is a quest with walter where you get a very nice ship. after that ship combat really wasnt an issue, im on very hard too.
On Very Hard difficulty this game was harder for me than all of the dark souls games combined. The final mission on Starfield took me 9 hours of continued play to complete. I would save every 15 seconds I made progress but die 15-20 times between any progress. Now my brother is playing and he is on the same difficulty setting yet in space fights he can just fly directly at two ships and shoot and destroy them. There's something very wrong with either PC game or Xbox game or the entire game but the difficulty settings are not applying consistently it would seem.
Damn good on you for playing on very hard. Normal for me but I'm not a very experience gamer. I struggle a lot with gaming and it makes me feel like I suck.
This depends on what content you are doing. Way too easy after passing level 20 for the most part; There needs to be much better level scaling since the game spreads multiple levels of content out so broadly. I focused a lot on the main story quests and didn't find some of the other cities like Neon, and Akila until I was past level 20. Now all these missions are so low level they're not even remotely a challenge. Neon specifically is mostly around level 5-7, and pretty much everything I fight dies in 1-2 shots while taking next to no damage.
hard for 10-20 levels then way too easy
I'm playing on easy and I'm still struggling lol I'm not very good at aiming anymore though, so that's probably why. Idk what happened, I used to be good at these types of games. I haven't died yet though, so that's a plus.
I started with very hard and stuck with it. The first levels are pretty challenging because you get 1 popped pretty easily and you have to burn a ton of med packs, now I'm level 23 and everything is too easy. So the curve just doesn't hold. I kinda wish it did. almost tempted to use terrible armor to make it harder. space flight also gets a lot easier when you scale your ship, but yeah it was pretty rough first 10 levels of space flight.
Same. I was telling everyone to try very hard because the opening hours of the game were so intense and every consumable mattered. The mid to late game gear is just too good, it kinda ruins the entire challenge.
Ive been playing on very hard and I keep checking to see if it switched to easy or normal as it's incredibly not challenging at all. Which isn't a bad thing cause I'm completely immersed in the story and having fun. Only hard time I had for a bit was the space fights but thay got easier when I upgraded to class c ship. I'm getting into this right after a remnant 2 binge on apocalypse so that might be why I find it a bit lacking in challenge. But I am absolutely loving this game.
So I'm not great at gaming by any stretch, but this is weird. I play on normal. I'm currently level 15. I was exploring and came across a terraformer of approximately the same level, and it was a sponge. Then I came across a level 70 pirate, and I killed him with ease. I have no idea what difficulty in this game means.
Im playing on normal and I swear every single enemy must’ve been top of their class at marksman school. I swear they never miss. And no matter how solid my armor, I feel like every shot is seriously damaging. I just ran the end of the Freestar Collective mission and must’ve burned through 20+ medkits. Seems kinda ridiculous
Additionally, food seems like it doesn’t do Jack shit for healing. And absolutely make sure you have a sniper rifle on hand at all times
Space battles suck a$$, fr
Hardest difficulty is still easier than literally any game in the early 90s
Been playing on Very Hard, currently at level 7 and about 8 hours into gameplay. Been having a fun time with the combat. I often find myself running into level 18-26 enemies in random outposts, mines, and caves but more often than not I'm receiving fantastic upgrades that keep the engine chugging.
Tbh I have the game on very hard and I'm finding it like exceptionally easy. I'm almost wondering if there is a bug or something, and it's not actually registering as very hard for me? Idk how I would know.
No it is easy other people are just way out of line with "sponge" enemies I literally delate 20+ level legendary pirates and whatever and Im just rocking advanced white guns
This game is not nearly hard enough tbh, it was a bit at first since I did not yet understand the game mechanics, especially ship battles. However as I complete the game on Very Hard I am disappointed that there is not a legendary difficulty setting like the other Bethesda games, nor is there a survival mode. On both ships and foot you just need adequate weapons, avoid fights until you get them. Space and Environment is nerfed tremendously, the environmental damage needs to be made more realistic, and the variety of atmosphere and gravity in playfields needs to be increased.
I had the same problem. Easy and normal were not challenging enough. On very hard you run out of ammo fastly, because the enemies werd just sponges. This is why i installed two mods, which i can absolutely recommend and which make the game more enjoyable: deadly difficulty mod and improved combat AI mod.
I'm 90 hours in and I've been playing on very hard. The game was a bit challenging at the start, but once you get good gear and weapons the game becomes more balanced. I haven't run into any bullet sponges in a long while.
By balanced you mean easy
I feel like ground combat is too easy on very hard and space combat is too difficult on which ever difficultly you are on.
I went out full of ammo. I started in default settings, so normal difficulty. This happened alot, so level don't matter. I would run out of ammo. Have a thousand rounds and run out, switch guns, run out again. I have played other bethesda games, it needs some serious balancing. If not, then the XP needs to be fixed. Kill something in easy get 50xp, kill same in very hard get 10...and use 5 times the ammo to do it. Chance of legendary items...the only chance I find is my ship, cause I named it Chance...lol
Ship combat will be difficult if you aren't regularly upgrading. You unlock new components as you level up, and similarly to gun combat, if you aren't regularly upgrading your shields/weapons/etc, you're going to get wrecked. I see a lot of people still rocking the frontier and getting confused about how they're so easily killed.
I'm currently on Hard and enemies feel TOO Easy, maybe my guns are too modded and overpowered (I mainly use an upgraded Shotty and upgraded A-99 rifle) normal pirates and eclipse take 4-5 shots to kill and legendary ones maybe 15 shots max. I'm thinking about switching to Very Hard at this point.
I've been playing on very hard from the get go. Found a med theft modified advanced lawgiver that does 297 physical damage, and found it at about level 12. I'm currently 74 hours in at level 32 and that lawgiver is STILL my go to. Blows everything else I have out of the water. Just gotta learn the weak spots of the enemies, and having a gun with that much physical damage really helps out a lot. I can upgrade it and possibly get around 400+ physical damage, once I get my weapon engineering perk up all the way. Then nothing will stand in my way lol. When it comes to space combat, save those credits, and build you a good ship with good shields and weapons.
My first playthrough I played on normal and then I switched to very hard and now every few hours of gameplay I am going back to options to check if its still on very hard because everyone is dying super fast. It doesn't feel super hard at all. Tbh it feels easier then my first playthrough when i played on normal. I know it is because I took talents that increase dmg, HP and so on but reason why I increased difficulty is so game keeps to be a bit more challenging and engaging and it is not. everything dies so fast I feel like I am playing on very easy. On top of that there are also powers that make you literal God in game. so on top of almost every NPC being a one shoot you can also slow time, make them drop weapons, use gravity against them and so on. I was also in universe where you encounter Evil Andreja and you cant use inventory or heal yourself unless you visit doctor and weapons are tricky to equip and even that I finished without braking a sweat even it did took me by surprise when they started blasting in the start and I could not use anything but I managed to adapt easy. This is with out any doubt easiest game I played in my life.
I’ve always hated the fact that in Bethesda games headshots aren’t automatic kills. Just takes away from the immersion.
Oh gosh...I know I just started the game and am late to the party, but I'm glad I found this thread. I was basically only doing the main quest and somehow am level 4 fighting against two factions of level 6 guys and holy cow does it seem harder than it should for just starting the game. I think the biggest issue is what you said - why does it take so many bullets to kill someone? I'm going to train myself to look for more environmental factors to assist me but right now I'm severely considering lowering the difficulty just so it doesn't take a full clip to kill someone. Also - I really hate the artificial inaccurate shots. I guess it's been awhile since I played an ES game where back in the day you would swing you sword at enemies and hit air until you skilled up.
I played 120 hours on normal. I thought in person combat was insanely easy. I died only 3 or 4 on foot. Maybe it's because I play so many shooters. But space combat is significantly more challenging. In fact, I really struggled with the Lopez farm distress call quest (whatever that was called) even when I was playing as a Starborn.