[I might be late on this discovery, but thought I'd share]

There were multiple heated comments earlier today about skills not appearing in Fallout 4.

The biggest piece I found to go against this is that when you pause the E3 presentation at the "Settlement Building" portion, you can count the number of bobblehead slots on your bobblehead stand. There are 7 for the 7 Specials that you can see immediately. In addition, there are 13 other slots for what I assume to be the skill bobbleheads.

Another point is that when we are shown the new pipboy feature, the screen starts on stats, and there is a toggle to go through the "Stats" portion of screens. Perks is hidden when the player character initially opens their Stats menu. However, they scroll one section to the right and Perks are now revealed, although not highlighted. My best guess is that one more toggle to the right will reveal the skills section, which is easily hidden by this new condensed user interface.

So there's my 2 cents of digging into the videos. Thought this might help cool down those of you who got into a tiss earlier about skills not being in Fallout 4, because these two points have me fairly convinced that Bethesda didn't cut them out.

Can't help about the dialogue issue though! Still looks like a condensed Mass Effect dialogue wheel, but hey, we got jetpacks!!

Given the recent implication of "ranks" instead of skills -- which will likely work as they did in Skyrim where the more you use a certain skill, the more it improves -- the bobbleheads may level up a rank in their respective category (Science bobblehead ranks up Science, etc.)

I'm super behind on Fallout 4 info right now. Where did we hear about ranks?

I couldn't tell you exactly where but in the E3 presentation, as part of the new crafting feature, it is shown that something requires "Rank 2 Science," or something along those lines. That, among the lack of a "skills" menu in the Pip-Boy may imply a ranks system to replace it.

Although, the skills or ranks or whatever may be in a seperate "character menu" as I recall they were in FO 1 and 2.

Interesting... Gopher said it could be possible they re-did the whole skills system and that they couldn't really "dumb" it down more than how trivial it is in the Fallout series.

in this video covering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unji5X-zl8o, you can see what appears to be skill requirements pop up from time to time on the right-hand side of the MODS window. At the six-second mark, for example, you can see that making the modification requires rank 1 in Science.

I saw Science appear for some mods and Gun Nut appear for some others. Some perks in previous Fallout games have ranks; you can take these perks more than once. My guess is that skills for Fallout 4 will appear as ranked perks, and that you gain a new rank in a skill each time you take its perk. It also looks to me as though Gun Nut might now be treated as a skill.

The Gamestop website has a box description for FO4 up, with one particular line of interest:

You're S.P.E.C.I.A.L! - Be whoever you want with the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. character system. From a Power Armored soldier to the charismatic smooth talker, you can choose from hundreds of Perks and develop your own play style.

No mention of skills, only "hundreds of Perks" to choose from.

I was hoping with all my might that the skill/leveling system from Skyrim would not make it into Fallout. I liked Skyrim but I hated the dumbed down skill system. What They don't seem to get is I like pumping numbers into a skill, that is part of the RPG experience to me. To remove that kind of character management almost makes it stop being an RPG.

To me, playing an RPG is more about RP than Game and numbers. and what is RP? I feel that is more based on the choices I make. The skills after character creation takes a back seat in importance because either a: The skill is one that is tagged/used often enough to justify the points, and it gets maxed out as soon as possible, or b: it is not used and the points inside it do not matter.

That is further evidence of what some of us are predicting, that skills will be labeled as Perks.

There isn't too much difference anyway.

Skills really only worked in multiples of 10s. So if you have a 10 tiered skill perk it works exactly the same.

Similarly lockpick only works in 25s. So if you have a 4 tiered skill perk, it works exactly the same.

In fact there is greater balancing because that the "soft" skills could and should require less points to max compared to the all-important all-powerful combat skills.