So here's something I did by mistake: I accidentally played the first 15 hours of Fallout 4 on Survival difficulty. With your damage resistance at the minimum, the chance to spawn a ridiculous amount of Legendary enemies and Stimpacks that heal you very, very slowly, the first ten hours or so were an absolute slog. But I loved it. When I finally realised my mistake and turned the game down to hard, it felt as though there was something missing. I had gone from being on the back foot to absolutely annihilating everything in my path. Don't get me wrong, hard mode is still difficult, but you don't get that same sense of emergent challenge that you do when you're playing completely out of your depth. Cranking up the difficulty and making things that bit harder really does benefit the role-playing side of things, too. When you're low on health, running away from a pack of Feral Ghouls that have surrounded you only to stumble your way into a den of Super Mutants during your escape and managing to stay alive by the skin of your teeth, it feels genuinely epic. Although being able to murder everything is fun, it robs you of those small, accidentally tense set-pieces that make survival games so great.
