Fallout 4 may not contain a skill system

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Sn1p3r187

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They may have replace the skill system with S.P.E.C.I.A.L/Perk based leveling. More like a Skill tree that was present in Skyrim and it may focus on a leanr by doing type of leveling. Like say you want your gun skills to get better, learn how to shoot straight and use guns often. I don't know what to think of this. In some ways this might be good as it may prevent OP characters in Single Player but it feels like it detracts a bit from Fallout. But then again RPGs shouldn't be purely classified by DnD stuff and dice rolls and the such. But opinions?
 
Yeah, this is old news.

Since Fallout 4 is Skyrim with Guns, and since Skyrim doesn't put as much relevance into skill points... You get the picture.

Opinions? Who cares? Fallout 4 is not Fallout, just as Fallout 3 wasn't. They can and will do whatever they like.
I'll judge the game on its own merits.
That said, Fallout 3 was crap, much like Oblivion. I enjoyed Skyrim a lot more than Oblivion, so maybe Fallout 4 will be less bad?
 
Morbus said:
Yeah, this is old news.

Since Fallout 4 is Skyrim with Guns, and since Skyrim doesn't put as much relevance into skill points... You get the picture.

Opinions? Who cares? Fallout 4 is not Fallout, just as Fallout 3 wasn't. They can and will do whatever they like.
I'll judge the game on its own merits.
That said, Fallout 3 was crap, much like Oblivion. I enjoyed Skyrim a lot more than Oblivion, so maybe Fallout 4 will be less bad?
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It's not old news when nothing is confirmed yet.
 
While I was playing Skyrim when it came out I was thinking about how the constellations perk tree system would be appropriated into Fallout 4. I'd imagine the Vault boy dressed in a lab coat for Science let's say; and the perk tree is overlaid with the vault boy like the constellation/perk tree.
 
Skyrim is actually a good game, the best Bethesda has ever made in my opinion. They're much better at building beautiful worlds full of gratuitous hack-n-slash than writing quests and dialogue, and Skyrim is exactly that. I wouldn't mind Fallout 4 being essentially Skyrim with guns.

But seriously, are they going to put multiplayer in the game? What the fuck is this bullshit?
 
As stated above. Fallout 4 might turn out to be a decent game and allow for some hours of fun. "Skyrim with guns". Alright, I'll take it. (Still sad we probably shouldn't expect more than that, 'cos that's not a lot, considering it's the frickin' Fallout universe we're talking about here.)
 
I won't mind the Skyrim leveling system as long, as it's not too "grindy". I don't want to have to make a thousands sandwiches before I get good at survival. :P
Plus there should be more emphasis on learning from someone as opposed to learning all by yourself. In Skyrim trainers were practically restricted to filthy-rich characters in the end-game when you didn't feel like spending that much time on mastering all the possible skill trees.

But then again, there is going to be arbitrary experience gain, so I doubt you will learn skills as you use them, as those two ways of leveling don't seem to go together.
 
Magnus said:
Skyrim is actually a good game, the best Bethesda has ever made in my opinion. They're much better at building beautiful worlds full of gratuitous hack-n-slash than writing quests and dialogue, and Skyrim is exactly that. I wouldn't mind Fallout 4 being essentially Skyrim with guns.

But seriously, are they going to put multiplayer in the game? What the fuck is this bullshit?
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It's already confirmed no multiplayer. BGS doesn't touch multiplayer.
 
thats stupid, dont see why they're dumbing down further from fallout 3 when the game sold extremely well =/
 
The dumber they make it, the better it sells. Pong sold millions. Dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb.
 
It all comes back to WOW. WOW's the most recent major title that served as an example of "the self-perpetuating black hole" video game. e.g. People play it because so many people play it. Sadly, the fact that it was a fluke seems lost on most game publishers, so despite the fact that aiming for a targeted audience is much more reliable for better sales, more publishers want to adopt the "wider appeal" model in order to mimic WOW's success.
 
I think "100 points of granularity" for skills is a holdover from tabletop, where skill checks could be done by trying to roll under your rank on the skill on a d100. It's simple, easy to do, quick to understand, and basically a good idea for that sort of game. When you transition from tabletop RPGs to video game RPGs it's worth questioning which holdovers are still a good idea and which you're just holding over because "that's how it works." A computer GM can handle all sorts of bookkeeping and you don't have to interpret any of the rolls itself, so "systems are easily understood by the player" isn't even of value anymore."

The long and short of it is that Fallout 3 and New Vegas really didn't use all 100 ranks of each skill. You'd get a bunch of points to spend at every level, but it's hard to tell the difference between sneak 65 and sneak 70. So dropping the 100 point skills isn't wholly an awful decision because they give you far more granularity than you want or need. So this isn't automatically a bad decision. After all, if you're removing mechanics that you never really used for anything, you're not "dumbing down" so much as "streamlining." I just want to see how this works in practice. I imagine it will at least solve the Fo3/NV problem where your character ends up with max ranks in everything eventually.
 
Streamlining IS dumbing down. You're going backwards if you're trying to excuse the latter by calling it the former.

That said, while the point of "is this still valuable" is a good question to consider, when it comes to RPGs, tabletop OR video game, the answer is always "yes". When you ROLE PLAY a character who is not yourself, you assume certain attributes that are not your own. You may be average looking, but be ROLE PLAYING a character with fantastic charisma, and these things are represented by numbers on a list. Dice rolls will determine whether you persuade everyone you come across, whether the dice is physical or invisible, and for a character you're ROLE PLAYING who has high numbers in those areas, the roll will almost always succeed. Likewise with someone ROLE PLAYING a muscular Greek God type of character whether or not they themselves actually are. If we're talking about people sitting around a table, there's always the prospect of the player assuming their character's role by saying exactly what course of action they will take, but these are STILL filtered through the dice rolls, because ultimately the game has to follow the formula that a person who is not who they are ROLE PLAYING must emulate the character's qualities, not the player controlling them.

When the Bethesda games took away the combat system and reduced it to a first person perspective with decent shooter mechanics, it COMPLETELY destroyed any use for Combat Skills, and combat was more down to player skill, and ROLE PLAYING had almost zero presence in the matter whatsoever. It worked perfectly well as far as a game is concerned. A player's skill with the game should be an important factor in how they play the game. But don't forget that it wasn't just a game. It was, supposedly, a ROLE PLAYING game. Assuming the role of the character SHOULD have been a priority, and "streamlining" the mechanics to shift away from this IS "dumbing it down". The less the games try to funnel the efforts of the player into emulating a character, the less they're ROLE PLAYING games. That's fine, if they wanna stop being RPGs, but this is an RPG SERIES, and they're still categorizing them as RPGs. So what makes a good RPG should still be taken into consideration.

What I must say is that the original titles really got it right when they designed them to utilize the physical tabletop rules but in digital form. Other games that simply mimicked the shape of it, like Diablo, were just glorified action games. Good games, yes, but shitty RPGs. If you want a good game, do what you will. But if you want a good RPG, then the tables and formulas are still VERY important.
 
SnapSlav said:
Streamlining IS dumbing down. You're going backwards if you're trying to excuse the latter by calling it the former.

That said, while the point of "is this still valuable" is a good question to consider, when it comes to RPGs, tabletop OR video game, the answer is always "yes". When you ROLE PLAY a character who is not yourself, you assume certain attributes that are not your own. You may be average looking, but be ROLE PLAYING a character with fantastic charisma, and these things are represented by numbers on a list. Dice rolls will determine whether you persuade everyone you come across, whether the dice is physical or invisible, and for a character you're ROLE PLAYING who has high numbers in those areas, the roll will almost always succeed. Likewise with someone ROLE PLAYING a muscular Greek God type of character whether or not they themselves actually are. If we're talking about people sitting around a table, there's always the prospect of the player assuming their character's role by saying exactly what course of action they will take, but these are STILL filtered through the dice rolls, because ultimately the game has to follow the formula that a person who is not who they are ROLE PLAYING must emulate the character's qualities, not the player controlling them.

When the Bethesda games took away the combat system and reduced it to a first person perspective with decent shooter mechanics, it COMPLETELY destroyed any use for Combat Skills, and combat was more down to player skill, and ROLE PLAYING had almost zero presence in the matter whatsoever. It worked perfectly well as far as a game is concerned. A player's skill with the game should be an important factor in how they play the game. But don't forget that it wasn't just a game. It was, supposedly, a ROLE PLAYING game. Assuming the role of the character SHOULD have been a priority, and "streamlining" the mechanics to shift away from this IS "dumbing it down". The less the games try to funnel the efforts of the player into emulating a character, the less they're ROLE PLAYING games. That's fine, if they wanna stop being RPGs, but this is an RPG SERIES, and they're still categorizing them as RPGs. So what makes a good RPG should still be taken into consideration.

What I must say is that the original titles really got it right when they designed them to utilize the physical tabletop rules but in digital form. Other games that simply mimicked the shape of it, like Diablo, were just glorified action games. Good games, yes, but shitty RPGs. If you want a good game, do what you will. But if you want a good RPG, then the tables and formulas are still VERY important.
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http://i.imgur.com/wr7qvB0.jpg
 
If SPECIAL can survive on a 1-10 point scale, then so can Small Guns and Medicine. From what I've seen, the perk system will basically function like this. As PossibleCabbage said, the difference between 60 and 70 sneak isn't a huge one, and you aren't going to lose much by having the same difference, only between the 6th and 7th perks in the sneak tree.

No problem with melee damage being scaled with melee weapons skill, that makes sense. If they get rid of insane damage scaling based on skill for guns, and replace it with greatly increased gun sway at lower levels of skill, I'll be happy.
 
Agreed on the gun sway. In Fallout 3 using a snipe with guns at 40% was pretty hard at times. In New Vegas you can roll heads in no time.
 
The thing is that by appealing to multiple audiences, you can't appeal to niche audiences or make specialized games. There's a difference between refining some gameplay aspects and removing complexity for the sake of making it more accessible. For example, on release Morrowind had a terribly messy journal system in which you couldn't organize information by questline or guild, which just made it hard to use without adding much value to the RPG experience. So in the first expansion they fixed that and allowed you to categorize based on quests, which made it a lot simpler and more useful - but you still had to interpret the information instead of just following a map marker.

The problem starts when depth just starts to unecessarily vanish. "Lowering the bar" doesn't necessarily mean a decrease in quality but rather more simplified rules and mechanics. Some genres can benefit from that more easily but since the beggining RPGs have been partially based on abstractions of physical representations. The idea of measuring strength or intelligence as a number means a character has its own attributes which modify all interactions with the game world, be it a dice roll for a successful attack or an increase in damage for that same attack based on your skill. Now when a RPG becomes more dependent on player input (like an attack isn't just about the skill but also in the player's ability to pull it off correctly), developers need to find different ways to apply those numbers - maybe you combine the dice roll and the player input into the same system (like Morrowind), or you make it so part of the damage is negated based on your attributes (like DT in New Vegas), or whatever way you use them. But the stats aren't forgotten in the gameplay.

The moment you remove the importance of skills and attributes is a huge change, not just a single characteristic of gameplay but a design choice which will dictate so many aspects of the game. The whole point of stats is defining they character you are playing. Without them, the user avatar is less of a character with unique qualities and more of a middle agent.

Let's take Skyrim as an example. Skyrim was the first game in the Elder Scrolls series to not have attributes, only skills. And even then, the skills had a definite lower amount of influence than before. Due to those two factors, you could see every character would have more or less the same feel: a clumsy strongman with varied abilities. The removal of some key stats made it so every character played similarly with only a bit of variation, especially considering you had to incentive, or reason to be specialized. But Fallout 4, if it has no skills at all, takes a significant step further: characters will only really be defined by their equipment and by small bonuses (like perks), which in practical terms, means they won't really have tangible differences at all. In fact, I'd argue that even if the initial impressions are wrong and the game does, in fact, have skills, they will still be integrated in a similar perk system that adds up to the same result - generic character creation.

It's not that I am against changing mechanics, but this would be removing a core aspect of the type of RPG Fallout is built upon, and removing complexity without really bringing any benefits other than a more accessible, easily marketable gameplay. Fallout should still try to be a quality RPG. I still find that such a drastic change like removing skills would be unecessary since they don't have to streamline the game, it's going to be commercially successful anyway. No reason to over-simplify something that works so well already.
 
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I find that 'all-roundedness' to be a big thing in the Fallout series. In 3/NV, your stats don't seem to mean anything. A speech check here, a picked lock there, one more gun to add to your INV that you sell for 200000000 caps, and the rest is just damage output. In the older ones if you don't have a decent perception and agility stat you can struggle at times. In the FPS ones, reloading, moving, aiming is like running a knife through butter.
 
SnapSlav said:
It all comes back to WOW. WOW's the most recent major title that served as an example of "the self-perpetuating black hole" video game. e.g. People play it because so many people play it. Sadly, the fact that it was a fluke seems lost on most game publishers, so despite the fact that aiming for a targeted audience is much more reliable for better sales, more publishers want to adopt the "wider appeal" model in order to mimic WOW's success.
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Don't know about others, but i played it, because it blew my mind at the time. When i saw it being announced, i couldn't believe there could be a game where you can adventure in a big, beautiful world with other people. Plus i was a huge warcraft and diablo fan at the time. Although for the first year i played in not so legal servers (which i found to be more fun because it was more akin to adventure, when the servers were not complete, and you never knew what's behind the corner), so my memories are a bit skewed.

As for fallout - great. It's playing on beth rules, so might as well make it less akward for the game to feel like it's something else, when it's not.
 
AskWazzup said:
When i saw it being announced, i couldn't believe there could be a game where you can adventure in a big, beautiful world with other people.
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Uh... WOW came out AT THE END of the MMO Golden Age... EQ had been out for almost a decade at that point. EQ2 was out. The Star Wars MMO was out. COH was out. L2 was out. The FF MMO was out. MMOs had been a thing for a long time by the time WOW came out. So if WOW was the first you'd heard of being able to journey in a vast and seamless world and interact with hundreds+ of other players who all existed on one game world simultaneously, then... you missed the MMO train, I guess. XD
 
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