I hope there is an option to just outright ignore the dog. I grow tired of the dog companion in the apocalypse just because "DOE A BOYE AND HIZ DAWG".

I have to ask: what was the baby for? Didn't Todd say something about naming it? If the wife or husband is the character you pick and the only one that survives, then what is it even for?

They changed skills it obvious but i do not think you can say they removed them as there is references to skills/perks in the crafting system. Boggle heads reference skill names as well.

D&D survived for years as an RPG system with no skills so if you can't role-play with no skills then you can't role play.

I also love how because there are 4 dialogue options there can't be anymore than 4 choices in a conversation. WTF? How do come this this conclusion? Bioware has only 6 dialogue options on its wheel but you know what they do if they have more than 6 options available for a conversation? They use one of the 6 options to change the listed options to a set of new options you can say thus solving the limit. I am rather stunned that players conclude I see only 4 button choices this means there can't be more than four choices in a conversation. This has been around for a LONG time people. Could we perhaps keep the chicken little craze down to a min?

Speaking straight from the heart here, but I find it very hard to believe that they would cut something like skill books, traits, repair skill (or skills in general) that have been such an integral part of the FO series so far. Going that far away from your bread-and-butter core game features is not something I see Beth doing. They know why people love the FO series, and cutting all that would be completely alienating the fans. They way Todd speaks about their fans and his love for the game, I seriously doubt these features will be missing.

From a lore and story perspective, are you suggesting that it would be better if a god damned mailman was able to craft weaponry better than the Gun Runners can, despite the fact the Gun Runners do this stuff for a living and have decades up on your character?

From a gameplay perspective, it provides balance. Specific unique weapons being chosen means the developers can control and limit what kinds of "variable packages" are available to you. For example if you take the And Stay Back perk, you want a shotgun that shoots as many pellets as possible. However, you'll find that New Vegas basically has you choosing between fire rate (Riot Shotgun) and pellet count (Big Boomer). They do not allow you to achieve both via weapon mods.

A weapon mod system without limitations means you can get both, and then viola, everyone and their mother with the And Stay Back perk upgrades their shotgun to have both pellets fired and firing rate. They'd basically mod a sawed-off shotgun to have more clip size and firing rate, then viola.

Having to choose between different "variable packages" is thought-provoking and interesing. It requires some thought and foresight from the player to be as effective as possible and also encourages experimentation, as different character builds might mix different with different weapons. With everything modded though, you just grab all the best parts and viola. As stated, it would be like me just saying "ok give me the Riot shotgun's rate of fire and the Sawed-off Shotgun's pellet count."

That lighting bolt must be power armor power. So I guess when somebody hits your suit they also drain electricity from it as well. As soon as I saw that "hold breath" I knew that the gameplay was going to be much more reflex based than previous Fallout games.

Totally agree. ED-E was a breath of fresh air.

Has nothing to do with "BOY DO I LOVE EYEBOTS, SO GLAD TO SEE AN EYEBOT COMPANION." Has everything to do with "wow look, a companion with some originality to his name."

Kill off the dog and give us a Mister Gutsy or something instead.

I'm guessing we will see them later in the game. Perhaps the mom/dad & baby got released from cryosleep many years prior? Perhaps they are still in cryosleep? Perhaps you ARE the baby!? Who knows... I'm expecting some kind of plot twist.

Do you think were still going to be able to have human companions, or at least other things besides dogs? It also looks like he got the dog rather early in the game, so that might be a bad sign.

Yeah I guess they have to do something with it. I remember Todd was saying how they recorded a thousand common names for it, or something like that.

Well most places looked pretty open to me, having flying also pretty much require open cities.

From the perspective of a standard 1-100 RPG skill system, by the time you reach 100 "crafting", you have reached an equal level of skill as the people who have been doing it for decades. That is a "problem" with all RPG skill systems, but not something that is really addressable without making RPGs tediously slow in terms of getting better at things. So yes, if you have the same skill as them, you should be able to do the same things as them.

Also, balance in a single player RPG is meaningless so long as the choice to have something remain balanced or not lies in the hands of the player. It is not the game's job to hold a player's hand and tell them how to play, so long as the system can be used to make balanced items. A player's choice to make an imbalanced item is just that, their choice, and not a concern for the devs.

Non player controlled imbalanced are a problem though, such as imbalanced in hunger rates and temperature effects in things like hardcoe modes, which is why its best left to the community to make mods that can be altered on the fly by the player to make them as balanced or imbalanced as they want via whatever slider/menu system the mod uses. Devs cannot really provide this level of control, and thus, it will always remain an imbalanced system, and thus, isn't really worth their time to make.

https://youtu.be/2KApp699WdE?t=1h11m53s

Notice the six option? I assume this is a gender change vs coitis toggle.

https://youtu.be/2KApp699WdE?t=1h17m48s

Shows the dialogue option of you're a mutt. I assume this is a negative response to the dog as a german shepard isn't a mutt it is a recognised breed.

It does seem like you have options to change six and Mr. Howard did say you could play as a woman specifically.

https://youtu.be/2KApp699WdE?t=1h11m50s

I think you are letting your fears trump the evidence because choice does seem to be there for the player.

That means I missed a good minute from the beginning of the footage lol. I also missed the part where the dog is optional, that's good news.

I'm setting myself up for disappointment, but when I saw the player character shooting BoS members I thought, maybe, just maybe, there will be choices in the story. Also, it looks like they heard some of our begging and did not make the extremely human-like synths a common occurence. Maybe this also means that the android twist will not happen after all.

User created weapons enchants was better than artifacts in Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion enchanting was weaker while you could upgrade weapons in Skyrim making unique ones pretty useful.

Hopefully you can also modify unique weapons. making them even better.

And yes you could probably do stuff like adding an scope and larger magazine on an assault rife to make it more versatile by pushing into the sniper and heavy weapon roles. However you could probably also make an sniper rifle better in both sniping and increase rate of fire making it more of an question how specialized you want to be.

Ammo might also be an restriction.

No, no it's not. There's theories of game design where people gravitate towards the strongest stats and characters, so a strong character or weapon means the rest of the content largely goes unused and unexplored. Go watch some casual Let's Players who tried Isaac Rebirth, and I think you'll notice a lot of them obsessing over Azazel for that very reason.

Likewise, there is fun to be had with a balanced system. It makes characters dynamic, which encourages replay value. Simple example: you can take Fast Shot and the negative karma level 50 perk in New Vegas to get a character that fires crazy fast, but this does nothing for minigun or SMG/automatic rifle fire rate, meaning the character is inferior with those due to poor accuracy. This means you're motivated to create a character with the opposite focus, trying out Trigger Discipline and the damage up perk to see what effect it has on full auto weaponry. You might also make three different characters with the Medicine Stick to try and see which character's SPECIAL stats mix the best with the Medicine Stick, and there's some fun to be had in seeing which character turns out the strongest.

None of that will happen in a game like Skyrim because there's no balance and the weapons system means you make the best one. If one character discovers the best weapon setup in the game, your other characters need only craft it and they too are Superman. In New Vegas if I discover a super strong setup, it's only one of many, and copying that setup on another character often isn't feasible due to stats. This isn't bad though, cause it encourages me to try othr stuff with the new character. Suddenly, my first character has Heavy Handed, high Strength and low luck and abuses the Ballistic Fist, whereas my second character skips Heavy Handed, gets plenty of Luck, then uses a high crit fist like Rawr's Talon. Then I get to play with both of them and see which one came out stronger. Dunno about you, but that's fun for me.

No, not in the crafting system. They clearly said "Science Perks". Science was a skill in previous games, but that doesn't mean that it's a skill in Fallout 4. Just like some modifications required a science perk there were some that required the "gun nut" perk which was a perk in previous games and not a skill.

I actually like the direction BGS is going in with Fallout 4, but it certainty is a major change not having skills. Even if they merge it into the PERK system some perks will be cut off based on your SPECIAL choices. So you could never max out certain skills. That would basically force everyone to put at least 7 points into intelligence or perception just to be able to max out the PC's stats in a certain skill.

It completely changes the feel of the game without all that stuff going on under the hood determining whether or not you actually hit what you are shooting at.

The combat looks more like Rage or Bioshock than it does Fallout 3. There will be a ton of people who will just play this game like a straight up shooter.

It certainly seems built towards that idea. As stated, there's a "hold breath" button for sniping. Also I noticed that using the jetpack consumed AP for if you don't like VATS anyways. Perhaps you can slow time as an alternative to VATS with AP aswell.

I mean it seems pretty obvious at this point that Bethesda's development "plan" is "log on the nexus and copy the top ten mods for a game."

Heh, the original Dogmeat was there to provided 30 hours of gameplay just trying to keep him alive.

The Fallout 3 Dogmeat leveled with you and was fairly easy to get killed early on in game (especially since it was a higher priority target than the LW was), but the crazy pooch got tougher as the game progressed.

I am curious about the repair system - we've only seen it for Power Armour, but we have also seen regular armour get physically broken (as in bits fall off) in combat, so maybe all armour has it. Also note how Power Armour parts have individual "health" ratings, which show as number/number, so that's definitely their health not health they add to you.

Weapons however have no repair button or rating, so I guess there's no weapon degradation at all.

All of that ignores actually RPing.

What people do when they are meta-gaming and not actually RPing is of no ones concern but their own.

I can't hold it against him for seeing a good idea and putting it in the game. I wish more studios would do that. Plus, it's more about the implementation than just having ideas. It's going to be the little details that really make or break a feature. Especially the town building one. I could have seen that being very boring if done the wrong way.

Its been that way since Morrowind.

Todd and Bethesda have stated numerous times that a lot of their idea come from the most popular mods, so long as they are feasible for all the platforms they are making the game one.

Right, I don't expect much character diversity. I mean Bethesda's SPECIAL in FO3 was already pretty limited (Perception, Charisma and Agility were practically worthless), so this'll likely be the same. I just mean I don't expect to see balance amongst weapons, meaning they'll be homogenized as the same mods prove to be superior.

Yeah not really new, I guess I just wasn't expecting to see something like Wasteland defense copied, or to see Project Nevada copied THAT strictly.

I think a lot of people are missing the point that this is an open world game, which you can totally break if you want to. It's about limitations, doing what YOU think is right. If you want to build game breaking weapons, go for it. Me, personally, I craft what I think looks cool and what I like, and then I leave the game mechanics in the background. I don't need the best weapons to enjoy Fallout. Quite the opposite in fact. Getting the gear that feels right for my character is Alpha and Omega.

There's no way to properly balance a game for people who truly wants to break it. Simple as that.