1. JSawyer
Josh Sawyer
Download Joshua Eric Sawyer is one hell of a developer. and a master in the art of the roleplaying genre. Well known for his work with Interplay and Obsidian Entertainment, J.E. Sawyer has brought us RPG masterpieces such as Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Icewind Dale, and is currently working on the upcoming Pillars of Eternity (get hyped). At this point, you may be wondering if JSawyer is a person or a mod. The answer is both. Few developers would have the insane dedication to mod their own game post-release for free, after everyone's stopped working on it. Not fully content with the final product, J.E. Sawyer decided to tinker away in his free time, fixing bugs, tweaking values, and making the game even harder for hardcore fans. It's made very clear that this is in no way an official patch, but rather an optional modification that isn't guaranteed not to break your game. Ironically, it's a lot more stable than most official patches developers put out these days. So what does the JSawyer mod do? A lot, actually. Over the course of five updates, it rebalanced certain aspects of the game such as the Karma system, and fixed a few overlooked details that couldn't have been fixed by the team proper. Many of these are non-controversial, and only make the game better for most players. What it also does is make the game a hell of a lot harder. Base health has been quartered, the base carry limit is now 50, the level cap with all of the DLCs is 35, and perhaps most damning of all, Stimpacks are weighted. Hardcore thresholds has been increased, but at the trade-off these values increase faster. Suddenly, surviving in the wasteland isn't all fun and games anymore. With its multitude of bug fixes and content additions, along with the increased level of difficulty, JSawyer is a mod no hardcore Fallout fan should go without.