Now I've loaded the Complete patch and I'm playing through on Veteran, and this thing is mind-numbingly hard. I never finished or even got very far into this game as it was too buggy, I found artifact collection to be annoyingly difficult, and several times I broke the scripting and was left with an empty land. After I totally borked my Fallout New Vegas with The Rockwell Pursuit (great mod, just a mod too far on my rig) I've switched to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.