Hi there, people, I need some modding advice on Fallout 3, but not the normal ones.

I recently bought Fallout 3 on Steam during a Sales. I am my self fairly used to old "hardcore" RPGs (Gothic and alii), and I was planing to play it, but my girlfriend saw it in my Library before I even downloaded it (I am on Risen right now) and she wanted to play.

Now, my girlfriend, while not completely casual (she learned English "with Disney and Morrowind") do not like difficult games. Except Pharaoh.

So I would like to know what you would suggest for mods that would make the game better (code patch, skin patch, content patch, ...) without making it actually harder (which I believe a large part of the Fallout 3 modding communauty is dedicated to).

Thank you :)

There's a god mode cheat code. It hardly makes the game easier (bar being so low as to render it unmovable).

Or you can probably (didn't try this yet, don't quote me) modify the .ini so enemies do less damage. But that's completely not cheating.

My advice: enable god mode, omit this crucial piece of information to your girlfriend. Once she starts playing, and killing her first deathclaw at level one with a knife, tell her she must be gifted.

LOL.
She does not need the game to be easier either. I am just looking for the bug-solving and content patch that does not make the game as hard as a Fallout game should have been.
[She tried Fallout 2, but the horrible temple at the beginning disappointed her so much she did not carry on. She went quite far at Arx Fatalis though, even though it is NOT an easy game.]

Oh. I understand. Well, as a general rule, F3 is nothing like F2, which might be bad for someone who enjoyed F2, but a blessing for those that did not. My advice is to just try the game and see how she likes it. If she liked Arx fatalis, I don't see how F3 could pose a significant problem, apart from the open world thing. There's a nice tutorial at the start of the game, and it gives you a quick rundown of the game. If by the end of the tutorial she's not impressed, I guess the game isn't for her.

Sorry I can't be more helpful. I played every Fallout vanilla + patches, and in fact very rarely mod my games (except oblivion, where some mods are basically patches).

in that case just use vacs (or whatever it was called) to make the combat pausable other than that it's not that hard a game

There are mods that tone down some of the RPG elements to make the game relatively easier... bullets go where you point, regenerating health, what-have-you... without making the game a cake-walk.

As for mods that "fix" the game without making it harder the only mods I use with Fallout 3 are Darn's UI and Weapon Mod Kits. I don't think Fallout 3's mechanics are really broken at all, it was more the quests and dialogue I thought were crappy. Mods can't really fix that stuff. It's not like Oblivion where the leveling, creature spawns and stuff like that are all broken.

New Vegas is amazingly good to me because it takes the mechanics of Fallout 3, which were good, and then adds in great writing and awesome quest design along with a faction system. BLISS.

Edit: Oh and I remove mouse smoothing and junk through the ini file.

I would suggest visiting http://fallout3nexus.com/ and explore the top 100 list first to see what might seem good. Have your girlfriend play a bit more then once she gets a feel for the game, you can look for specific things she wants changed and hopefully there'll be a mod for it.

Play as is, it will be fine, put the difficulty down and raise it to normal after she gets going (omit telling her) if she likes it a small boost to the difficulty wont be an issue

There's the Fallout Unofficial Patch, along with Project Beauty HD and DarnifiedUI.

I recommend following this guide (I did for my copy) - just omit what you don't want to have (like the extreme realism mods, etc.)

I'll agree with everyone else that said Fallout 3 doesn't need any mods to be playable by anyone that knows how to type and use a mouse. On Normal difficulty setting (I have no experience with Easy), there might be places where someone, if they are not paying attention, could wander into them and die. However, after about level 10, unless someone goes off the beaten track looking for trouble, nothing should be that difficult. Yeah, New Vegas is the better game. No contest. However, luckily for her, there are no cazadores (insanely fast overgrown wasp death-machines) in FO3.

I played a non-VATS oriented sniper for my Very Hard play-through of New Vegas. By the end of the game, everything was trivial to one-shot kill with that unique sniper rifle (Gobi something or other) except cazadores. I couldn't target them fast enough outside of VATS to 'headshot' them, but I often didn't have enough AP inside of VATS to kill all of them rushing me before they got to me.

Well, thank you all.

I can't say for the story, but the combat mode really is abysmal. VATS and then Real-Time combat is giving an incredibly unfair advantage to the player. I put the game in "Hard", did not mod anything in the difficulty, and my GF is breezing through the game with a baseball bat "like in Morrowind" (her quote)...

I just used the Code Patch for her.