Will there be more of a "challenge" in sneaking? I found myself not leveling up Agility in Fallout (& the equivalent of Skyrim) because I felt that once leveled up (even to the slightest moderate degree), that I could be crouching right in front of an enemy and not be spotted. I feel it would be less inconsequential if the stealth stress was placed on noise and not on the fortuitous notion of enemy blindness when Agility is leveled up. If not maybe another dynamic that carries more versatile conditions with Agility and sneak in particular to any given situation. With that said it would be awesome by the end of max leveling to have this super ninja cloaked stealthiness.

Cool story. Depends on play style. I enjoy being a sneaky sniper so successfully sneaking around is important to me. Don't worry, I will be murdering every red dot on the mini map instead of bypassing them.

I suppose you can just try to resist taking every possible sneak perk. I think at high level with the perks sneak will be pretty overpowered but probably not as much as in Skyrim as a lot of people have complained about it. But we'll just have to wait and see. Will be playing stealth character myself too!

I expect Sneak to be good when you invest deeply into it.

Stealth may have been really powerful in previous Bethesda games but keep in mind that it is an investment you make. And everything you dumped into Sneak was not spend on making you stronger. And the moment you got spotted all that Sneak did exactly diddly.

So if it would be to hard to Sneak and you constantly end up detected then there would be no reason to invest anything in Sneak. I'd prefer it's slightly on the easier side than the harder side, at least if it's to easy to sneak i can choose not to invest to deeply.

The problem in FO3 was the stealth suit.

Unsurprisingly, unlimited and on demand complete invisibility breaks things. More news at 11.

In Skyrim and to a lesser extent F3, I always think of the higher levels (of any skill really) as being almost superhuman with around 60 being the best a normal character would be able to achieve. This way, if I am a high level sneaker, it makes sense that I can be sneaking right in front of NPCs because I am basically a sneaking superhero/villain. Since Fallout 4 seems to do away with numbered skill levels, perks will decide how sneaky you are so if you don't want to be God of Sneaking, you can simply not pick a higher perk for sneak in order to maintain some chance that you will be caught.

Verily but I still likety.

I don't mind that I can sneak past hostiles easily at a high level but once the bullets start flying I want the hostiles to act accordingly not just look down at their fallen comrade and say "Oh, that svcks Bob's dead" and then go back to playing cards.

Stealth has always been about getting in and out, taking out enemies unseen and unheard, and making off with the goods before the five o'clock news.

Stealth is not about challenge, it's about being clever.

The challenge is being good at stealth. Some people can't stealth.

Here is how to stealth:

Press shift.

Are you telling me there are folks that are unable to press shift? You can be in an open cave, smack dab in the middle, with no cover anywhere around you, and still remain undetected. Unlike most stealth games, such as the Deus Ex and Thief series, there is no need to observe the NPC's movement patterns, no need to plan a route between cover, no need to use tools to distract the enemy. You just need enough brain cells to one-shot everything that moves with your bow (around 2 should suffice). It is a literal I-win button.

I'm not saying a BGS-style game should have the same level of depth for every play style of other, more specialized games. But sneak really has always been a bit of a joke and is an excellent way to ruin one's first playthrough.

It's...not really so simple. You can press shift, and still make a bonehead move and get spotted, ruining the entire plan. It's about timing, placement. If I kill him, his buddy right there will be alerted and come investigating...If there's more than two, okay now there's a squad investigating. May need to rock out the SMG here.

It helps a bit if you disable the ui icons that tell you when people are on to you, increases the chance that you get caught or at least put some thought into sneaking.

But yeah, I'd prefer if they simply disabled sneak attacks with ranged weapons since they really don't make sense in the first place, and it would help balance things as well.

But it doesn't matter if they come to investigate. In the early game you won't be spotted if you just move back a bit, even in the open, and at high sneak levels you become the invisible man. They can be standing literally at arm's length, staring at your face, and not spot you. And if you one-shot an NPC with a sneak bow attack (which will be often), the others won't have a clue where the shot came from anyway, so even if you had to relocate to not get spotted, you wouldn't have to. It's utterly broken.

I think the sneak is needed for certain builds. Unless you are making a bullet sponge character sneak is the other option. Taking that away would mean everyone would need to be heavily armored all the time.

It is strange that stealth has had very little changed in all their Fallout and Tes games back to at least Oblivion. They made huge changes to combat and magic but the stealth has for all practical purposes stayed the same.

As a mod creator I love how the dev designed the components of the system. As a player I am just not as big of a fan of how they implement their system.

The system they made is simple an logical and includes all the conditions you would want such as light level, sound, movement, and naturally skill. And it is open enough to mod easily.

In my mods I fine tune the conditions so that NPC will spot you easily if you are moving or turning or attacking. And I put a very high degree of importance on distance and light level even over skill.

Doing this made the system that would allow the 100 skill sneak to stand in front of a victim as if they were invisible as long as they did not move and as long as you were not in H2H range. You had to wait for the victim to turn away from you (not looking in your direction) before you could attack or move to another positions.

This made the existing mechanic much more believable and more fun as it included player involvement and not just raw actor skill. The player need not have god like skill they just had to make logical choices to "win" with a super high level sneak skill actor.

I hate doing stealth in other games. After about 2006 I never again buy any stealth based games (er except assassin as I wanted to try the cool looking combat but I stopped playing that after only 15 minutes because of the very bad controls). But I love sneaking in TES and fallout using a modified version of their systems.

Since it will take you longer to level it will remain challenging for much longer. Especially since some perks are level locked. Meaning, even if you got to 10 in agility, you might have to wait until level 50 to take the last perk in sneak.

I think we see eye to eye on this very much so. I love Bethesda games and have since Redguard (lol, I'm old) and have found it interesting to see BGS's progression at fine-tuning their games. I'm hoping they've taken it up a level in the Agility/Stealth level and made this area more challenging as well as rewarding for those of us who immerse ourselves into the very ether of their games. I'd love to feel like I am a kick butt ninja who stays challenged while sneaking. Again, I know this poses a conundrum in the real world execution of this mechanic in a game (different variables and conditions, etc.) but I feel the dichotomy of choice here should lead to both challenge and gratification. Hopefully in FO4 one will not be exclusive to the other. Thanks for sharing!

I would truly love to see BGS implement a more 'Metal Gear Solid V' sneaking system - there's no real need for Bethesda games not to have the same level of depth for every play style (that they support) of other, more specialized games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHbF9ynGZV0

You mean to tell me nobody enjoyed these moments?!

Hopefully they do make enemy detection a given after you attack someone and either don't kill them or their buddies have better detection and heightened awareness after entering stealth combat.

They need to take even more hints from dedicated stealth games, in terms of the things you can do and the challenges you face. (although they'd still have to build it in a way that doesn't necessitate stealth, so that nonstealthy characters don't get screwed, and that does close out some design opportunities for Bethesda)

Right - as I said, take cues from MGS V. In that game it's entirely viable to go around murdering everyone loud and proud, but it's also got great stealth mechanics. There are only a few missions (the 'redo this earlier mission with these restrictions!' type challenge missions) that require a stealthy approach; all the others you can do what you like, and it's goooooood.

I wasn't suggesting taking away sneak, just the detection icon and the damage multiplier from shooting someone that does not see the bullet coming. I am all for melee-range sneak attack multipliers though, since they make sense logically and it is balanced in terms of game play. Sneaking already provides a ton of other benefits such as allowing you to easily line up head shots, scout the area, plant mines, position yourself tactically, get the first shots off, or even bypass certain enemies outright.

Also, since I rarely use armor, I certainly would not want to be forced to play as a bullet sponge! In my other Bethesda games I have not been forced to play as as a bullet sponge despite modding out ranged sneak attack multipliers.

I favor stealthy characters. In Fallout 3 and Skyrim, I never found sneaking to make me invulnerable, even with 100% mastery and all of the perks (excluding Shadow Warrior in Skyrim, so I can't say anything about its effects). There are many opportunities to find yourself being spotted against your will.

There are numerous factors affecting your chances of remaining hidden in Skyrim. Light level, noise level (affected by armor, movement speed, spells, and weapon use), line of sight, distance, and an enemy's having previously detected you, all of these elements matter. Your enemy's detection settings affect things too.

Sneaking in Fallout 3 is considerably more unreliable than it is in Skyrim, but I still enjoy it (though perhaps not as well). If sneaking were to begin seeming overly effective for me, then I would simply avoid taking the perks that make it seem that way.