Playing Fallout 3 with mods

[quadomatic]

I'm really surprised at how little attention I've paid to mods with Fallout 3...until recently of course.

I've installed loads of mods now:

DarnifiedUI
Mart's Mutant Mod
Fallout Wanderer Edition
Project Beauty HD
Fellout
Realistic Interior Lighting
Streetlights+streetlights wasteland
Megaton lighting mod
WeaponModKits
Enhanced Weather

It's really a different game now. FWE makes it far more difficult!

I'm now getting NMC's texture pack and Fallout Reanimated.

What mods have you tried?

 

[lord_emperor]

I did a playthrough with Mart's Mutant Mod and Increased Spawns, on hardest difficulty, with Real Injuries and Real Needs, Better Power Armor, and some other make-it-harder mods.

OMFG it was brutal, just to do the Super Duper Mart quest I had to fight ~20 raiders outside and at least 50 inside. Every ghoul spawn that normally had one or two had 20-100 ghouls.

At the end I was so rich, like, loaded rich just from looting all the weapons and armor, but every fight was a brutal affair that I barely scraped through. I'm not ashamed to say I died a lot.

Mini nukes are going to be your friend.

 

[quadomatic]

Wow!

So, I was having really terrible performance with NMC's texture pack. I found out that there's quite a fix for that:

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6510

I tried this, and the difference is astounding. When standing outside of rivet city and looking around, the frame rate drops/stuttering due to loading was unbearable. Now, it's almost nonexistent. My card isn't amazing, so I turned down view distance a bit, and it runs quite well. I'm going to try the full resolution NMC textures now.

Anybody who has/had stuttering problems should give this a shot. I'm thinking about upgrading to a newer Nvidia patch to see if maybe the stuttering issue I had is resolved. Maybe then I'll get the additional performance boosts from the updated drivers, without the added stuttering bug.

update: Well, full resolution textures are a bit much for my system, so I'm sticking with the Performance set

Also, the latest Nvidia driver seems to have reintroduced the same nasty stuttering issues...stick with 182.50 if you intend to play Fallout 3.

 

[rivan]

I'm still on my first playthrough (just got it via steam). Should I even bother with mods yet?

I just poked around fallout3nexus.com and nothing is especially well-described. Is there somewhere with better descriptions/ratings to browse?

 

[quadomatic]

I'm still on my first playthrough (just got it via steam). Should I even bother with mods yet?

I just poked around fallout3nexus.com and nothing is especially well-described. Is there somewhere with better descriptions/ratings to browse?

Fallout3Nexus is as good as it gets, unfortunately...

For your first playthrough, I would only recommend using graphical mods:

Darnified UI (huge UI improvement)
NMC's texture pack
Fellout
Indoor lighting mod
Megaton lighting mod
Street Lights mods
Enhanced Weather