Yes, HP is the primary reason why you get OP at high levels. It get worse with fallouts system where health is derived from your endurance.

example Health=level*(endurance+4) + 50

Now you want to boost your endurance for other reasons and play the game an very long time you will end up with so much health you get very hard to kill.

Yes you have other factors, synergy between perks, the best gear in the game and so on however most of that you will get before the level cap and you can still get better gear after the cap.

Being an expert in everything will not increase your dps, it will give you flexibility so you can use the best tool in any situation.

For me I would love an cap on health as I prefer low health characters for the challenge, one thing I liked in Skyrim was that you selected how much you should put into health so I could keep it low

I agree that the hero should be awesome.

But its important to still get a challenge, to feel like death is just waiting to claim you but because of your skills, perks, armor, experience you pull through.

Im not talking about balancing like those garbage mods that kill you in a few hits. Just making sure the games balance is upheld.

FO3 had alright balance until Broken Steel, and Skyrim has pretty good balance unless you play on Legendary.

Legendary is supposed to be nightmare hard.

Fallout 3 was too easy at high levels. Only thing I would not kill in one VAT session using Lincolns repeater would be the securitrons.

Worse they was the toughest enemies and had problems killing you unless you nerfed health on purpose.

nope, none of them had balance. Balance is when all playstyles can be played equally. in skyrim, there was ZERO reason not to use magic, none at all, thus a pure warrior character was gimping himself for no gain for example. both games had zero reason not to use stealth all the time when possible, there was no negative for doing it nor no gain for not doing it and all characters could do it right off the back. in both games, using only a single, specific type of weapons (one-handed swords or only shotguns) was also gimping your self for no mechanical gain.

I could post even more problems with balance. IMO, when i talk about balance, i am talking about what it would be like in a multi-player experience.

that is not balance. everything was able to work not because of balance, but because the games are SO INCREDIBLY EASY that you can do whatever you want.

When it comes to playstyles not everyone uses every available game mechanic, just because they can. I hardly used any magic at all when I played Skyrim, unless I was playing a mage. Likewise for stealth, if I wasn't roleplaying a stealthy character I didn't use the mechanic. Both games are far too easy, even when you restrict yourself. You have to seriously gimp your character if you want a real challenge in either game.

Thankfully there is always a way to make a game more challenging with a little imagination.

With regards to the original post, I'd be suprised if there wasn't a soft cap at about level 50 or some sort of xp scaling the higher you level, like you got in fallout 2.

I'm hoping that you will level up fast at first.

Then it slows down as you get higher in level.

I'm wondering what level they figure you will be when you complete the main quest and wrap up most of the other quest lines.

Will it be level 50, 75, 100, or higher?

I betting seventy five since even with Books and Bobbleheads you will still only cover about a third of the perks available.

With 275 plus perks plus perks spent to raise Special Stats, there is a lot of room.

The balance is your special stats, if you choose not to put extra points into your stats... then you limit yourself on the perks you want to take.

If you look at the Microsoft E3 demo, it shows the PC leveling to 2 in the Concord museum, pretty much one of the first things you get to do in the game.

I think for a single player game, balance is more "is each playstyle fun, and does every playstyle choice offer a valid reason to choose over another?" So for me, Oblivion and Morrowind had the most over-powerful magic. All of the utilitarian spells were clearly more desirable alternatives than lockpicking, speechcraft, sneak, or even Morrowind's acrobatics; Skyrim nixed a lot of those to justify using Lockpick or Sneak, but they also made it viable to use Destruction purely, without using any melee. The most common complaint I've heard about magic is that there's no point, to be honest. It was more challenging, since you needed to account for more things like weaknesses/resistances and your magic pool. But I found that it made things really fun, and the extra challenge actually felt really nice.

I think Beth designs to be easy deliberately. Probably even making differently difficult playstyles is by design, too. But I do wish they'd give us more options to tweak the difficulty, though.

Balance, the feel of the game, too hard, too easy, usually takes some game play experience and experimentation to find what works best for each player. For starters I'm sure there will be the standard settings from very easy to difficult before we even start tinkering with SPECIAL... There will never be a perfect fit for everyone, but to worry about it now seems a little presumptuous. Personally, I really liked the setup in Oblivion, but it required some thinking and planning, which apparently many people thought too cumbersome. Skyrim was way simpler and intuitive to use,

I'm willing to bet Fallout 4 , although a bit more spread sheet like, will have a similar feel to it as you progress. I like the idea of no level cap ceiling, but the likelihood of reach some astronomical number is probably remote. At some point hardly anything will touch you damage wise, that's when you are now master of the game, and have hopefully received a sense of accomplishment while getting there. And then it's time to re-roll with a new character type and a different approach to surviving.

I think it comes down to two things.

1. Self discipline - If your character is a type X character, make choices appropriate for an X character. X being whatever playstyle you so desire. You will have the entire perk chart available to look at in order to plan it out. If you don't want an OP character, don't make one.

2. Soft cap - There may be a soft cap at some point, slowing down your progress. It may be significant enough to discourage you.

Skyrim isn't easy at all, especially with the Dragonborn expansion. Also, I think comparing them to multiplayer games is ludicrous.

If imagination is required to limit yourself or make the game harder, then there is a design flaw in the game.

Making yourself not do something when the game allows you to is not something I ever want to be doing in a game. If you want to create your own imaginary story while playing that's fine, but "just use your imagination and don't do something" should never be an answer to a problem with a game. EVER.

Yeah, you want balance, you'll wait until all the DLCs with their ridiculous attempts at providing challenge *coughalbinoradscorpioncough* are done with, and a competent overhaul mod like FWE or Project Nevada is released.

That's how it has been since Oblivion, it would be foolish to think it changes now.

Consider that news and videos about the "Rubber-banding" system of leveled enemies came out before news of no level cap.

https://youtu.be/Jggte7H33ug

A growing character requires a base of increasingly more challenging challenges.

Consider how, if a character has an Intelligence of 10, they'll level up substantially quicker than a character with fewer points in Intelligence. They could be at level 5 or 6 by the time someone with an intelligence of 1 makes it to level 2.

A character with 10 Intelligence might level up by simply flushing a toilet, or saying "hello".

Projecting that further, a character with an Intelligence 10 could potentially be at level 50 around the time a character with an Intelligence of 1 makes it to level 10.

In those respects, the whole rubber-banding system of scaling enemies over time in sympathetic adjustment for the level progression of your character across the range of slow, medium, and rapid level progression becomes rather important.

Main question is how enemies are handled, if many of them don't have an max level game will start getting harder at high levels.

Its an limit how much damage you can do, best weapons, upgrade them, maxed out perks, good specials.

If you are able to handle many types of weapons just make you more flexible, not twice as dangerous.

Now my fear is that we end up in an high level Oblivion setting where both you and the enemies end up with loads of health and limited damage.

Encounter difficulty for high level encounters can be increased not just by making the enemies tougher, but by increasing their numbers. I'm hoping that the more powerful machines Fallout 4 will run on will allow bigger battles with more combatants than previous games and that part of scaling encounters will involve larger groups of enemies at higher levels.

That's certainly something some folks may find issue with.

The root of it is the video game paradigm of the health bar.

We'll have a health bar in Fallout 4, and so will all the enemies.

To resolve this, however, a new standard in damage calculation without the health bar would need to implemented.

Like the real world, a homeless drug addict with a box cutter can cut your throat and kill you as quickly as a trained military sniper with military equipment.

Implemented as such in a game world, there could be a bit of scaling, but, across all levels, a head shot, a cut throat, a severed limb, a through and through torso wound should have similar result.

This would require getting rid of the health bar, and implementing a triage indication on location damage from light, medium, severe, and imminently mortal, or immediately mortal. It would also require quite a bit more sophistication with the armor system, such that higher level enemies, while they could plausibly be killed with one shot, might take more than that due the kind of armor they're wearing, where they're hit, and what they've been hit with.

I'm sure the technology is available to implement more realistic attendance to damage and how armor could mitigate it, but, on the other hand, we've a video game standard in place, and this is a video game, and if some of the basemant dwellers are ready to rage quit over a voiced protagonist, or skills getting absorbed by perks, imagine the squeals and cries of offense if the health bar were eliminated in favor for a system that you, or anyone could get killed with one shot and damage calculation was significantly more flat and realistic.

It'd probably break the internet.

On the other hand, it would no longer matter what level any character or enemy was. All enemies across all levels would then be potentially just as deadly as at the very start of the game, and the player character would never turn into something like a god in power. All enemies would need to be dealt with with caution.

Say, what if our level wasn't factored into our max health, and it was just our END and perks? I'm 99% sure that's not how Fallout 4 works, but if thry did that they could go a lot easier on the level and health scaling in the game, so that battles don't drag on in the lategame and we can still get killed.

We obviously have different playstyles then, which is fine. I use my imagination to enhance my games story and to make them more interesting to me. I'm not saying you have to, if you want to play a MOAT and use every available game mechanic to your advantage that's fine, you can do that. But please don't assume we all want that.

Forcing me to keep leveling up and taking skills and perks in F3/New Vegas is what annoyed me after a while. I couldn't limit myself If I wanted to.

Hopefully perks will be optional and all this will be moot.

That sounds like one hell of an idea for a mod.

When did I assume that, I even said if you wanna use your imagination, then that's fine, it's up to you, you can always do that, it's your own make believe world.

All you need is some mod that will allow you the option to stop leveling up, since those are the rules and limits you are setting for yourself, and not playing by the game's rules and world.

Why are you assuming I want a MOAT character. There is a problem with the game if it allows you to have a MOAT character in the first place. It doesn't make sense and isn't good for game balance.

I think we're actually on the same page, but I got the wrong end of the stick when you said. "Making yourself not do something when the game allows you to is not something I ever want to be doing in a game." I read that as you doing everything just because you could. And somehow extrapolated that into you also wanting to be over powered.

My mistake, here have a

This is what makes me giggle about you folks

"I'm gonna be a mage"

"I will just be a pure warrior"

"I will stealth a lot, go rogue and steal stuff"

Me? I'm just gonna "be awesome" and do a little bit of everything... and then some.

Me too. I don't do character concepts based on 'builds', but rather tend to play pragmatists who seek to learn how to do whatever it is they need to be able to do as dictated by game play. If I've been having trouble with locks, I learn to pick them better. If I'm getting my butt handed to me in combat, I focus on that. My characters learn to do what what they need to do to achieve the objectives I set out for them. If that makes them a MOAT (master of adventuring trade), so be it. There are things I tend to ignore ... barter, unarmed combat, explosives, etc. But if I need to master something to defeat enemies, get to hard to access places, keep my equipment in good repair or build my settlements, I'm going to learn it.