Balancing games is a tricky business—just ask Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead about that. Generally speaking, games need to put up enough of a challenge to keep players engaged without unduly punishing them when they get out of line, a mystical zone of difficulty sometimes casually referred to as "fun." In a new video on the topic, Josh Sawyer discusses his approach to Fallout: New Vegas, saying he wanted to ensure the game was a bit more of a challenge for players than Fallout 3 or Skyrim—but that he couldn't just crank up the numbers to make it happen.
"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 was not a hard game. There. Skyrim is also not a hard game. These games are not—the combat is not super-challenging."
