The biggest mistake that they made with Outer Worlds was trying to make it at all like New Vegas. New Vegas is basically a sequel to both Fallout 1 and 2. It had all of the lore, world building, and design of those games to work off of without needing to start from scratch. It also had all of the assets from previous Fallout games including reusing everything from Fallout 3. They had this massive concept and world already there for them to play in and some of them had already worked on Fallout beforehand.
Outer Worlds should have been a small scale game like Fallout 1. The first game in its franchise. Not 'New Vegas in Space' as if New Vegas just exists in some vacuum and was not surrounded by a decade of previous Fallout lore to build from for the game. It should have been all about establishing its world and lore and giving the player a lighter game. Then once they get the world built they can make their own New Vegas in space.
What are you talking about? That's exactly what Outer Worlds was: A short, simple game that set up it's universe, much akin to Fallout 1. It never tried to be "New Vegas in Space".
The problem lies with the drama surrounding the game: Everybody was pissed off at Todd for releasing Fallout 76, and rivarly between OG Fallout fans and Bethesda fans within the community was as bad as ever. When Tim Cain announced TOW, the OG fans saw this as a "return to roots" and a way to humiliate Todd/Bethesda fans in one go. Note that New Vegas never gets brought up in marketing for the game, only that the creators of Fallout(1) are behind the game.
Likening TOW to New Vegas was a mistake, the only similarities lie in the gameplay mechanics being similar at first glance. When the game didn't kill Bethesda and wasn't much more than an average RPG you could finish over the weekend, all the people who hyped it up got real quiet. The game was soon forgotten.
The game has many faults, but one of them was never "trying to be New Vegas 2". That was entirely the result of some Fallout fans wanting to get back at Todd and getting angry that they didn't get what was never promised. Really retarded situation, but then again I think most conversations about this game I saw had people completely not knowing what they are talking about regarding it. I don't know why this game of all RPGs attracts so many polarizing opinions.
NV's Hardcore is fun mostly because it makes things like food, doctor's bags, and the Survival skill actually useful, which makes me suspect Hardcore was intended to be the default and was nixed by Bethesda. FO4's Survival mode, introduced long after the game launched and obviously aping better and more sophisticated mods, just feels like a pointless grind, especially when you combine the lack of fast travel with the constant nudzhing to babysit your settlements when they're attacked and you're on the other side of the map.
There is zero reason to play NV in anything but Hardcore mode. Never mind the survival needs, basic stuff the franchise had for years like ammo having weight or companions being able to die are only available in hardcore mode, never mind some of the new changes like stimpacks healing health over time instead of instantly and removing the retarded magic cripple limb healing effect from them that Fallout 3 had(which originally had doctor's bags but cut them due to inconvenience, same way Fuel was cut out of Starfield)
Survival mode in Fallout 4, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass and adds mechanics that the game never intended to have. It also makes no sense at times, like how you can build your own cushy little house in settlement mode but wake up and get sick from something as if you slept on a dirty mattress exposed to open air, forcing you to look for a doctor or to make anti biotics. This kind of gameplay simply doesn't work in Fallout, the only sickness the game should have is the radiation induced kind. This also doesn't even touch on how broken the actual survival mechanics are, for example stimpacks and most chems make your thirsty. Wouldn't Stimpacks make you hungry if they're healing your wounds? Radaway is also a diuretic, so it should make you much thirstier than it does in game, it should force you only take it near a water source. And how does Psycho make you thirsty, anyways? Nobody thought this thru, people complained that the game was too easy so they threw something together to appease "hardcore" players without thinking the logic behind the mechanics thru. Don't even get me started on the limited saves, in a franchise that has a history of every entry being crash city.
In NV, every change Hardcore makes fits the setting and complements the gameplay, you can tell this is the intended way to to play the game and turning it off just enables "Fallout 3 hand-holding" mode. My biggest problem with it was that the actual values for thirst/hunger/sleep deprivation are an afterthought. Thirst is fine, food you will rarely ever have to eat(especially if you invest in END or Survival), Sleep you quite literally never have to do if you play your cards right. All DLCs set sleep value to -1000(most you can do, even if it overflows) so that you never have to sleep during the DLCs(despite each one having plenty of beds), even if you don't use DLCs the counter goes down so slowly that you will be surprised more than anything when the notification first pops up. If you rest in beds for the well rested bonus you can completely forget about the status, period. If you're going to play Hardcore mode for the hardcore element, you're going to need mods or play around with values yourself.
