I play every game with low intelligence.

While it might be easy to just not show dialog options that require high intelligence to think of, making the remaining options 'sound' like they are being spoken by someone of low intelligence just isn't going to happen with a voiced PC. Unless they have a "Duhhhhh...." option that gets used over and over again.

I'd mark this as yet another victim of the voiced PC.

On the Skyrim topic, you know the Courier is kinda stupid too.
Doesn't know her way around nor the different factions considering it's her job.
I'm really inclined to think she lost a good chunk of her brain when she got shot but Doc Mitch says otherwise.
That said, the Courier is my 2nd favorite, the first being The Chosen One.

Low INT was never really a feature for Fallout, so it's no big deal. FO2 was the only one that made it a special result of dialogue.

Normally, RPGs have results based on character abilities, not player abilities (the latter pretty much automatically eliminates the entire idea of role playing a character, after all). This means that outcomes of low INT, STR, AGL, etc are automatically a part of the game play, as they should be for a well-designed RPG (well-designed in this aspect, at least, not necessarily any other aspect).

For example, in FO3, low LCK automatically meant that all your skills were lower, thus meaning that you had to work harder (i.e., earn more XP for more Skill Pts to increase skills) to do the same tasks that someone with higher LCK could do more easily.

In FO4, low INT automatically means that XP are harder to earn (as SofaJockey suggested in the quoted post above). It doesn't need to have some type of penalty attached because higher INT already means more/faster XP gain. It's built-in. Likewise, there's no reason for explicit dialogue changes, per se. In fact, anything that is related to XP will automatically be harder to do/require more work for a low INT character than a high INT character.

The same thing applies to the other SPECIAL stats.

If the player wants to role play a character with a very low stat of some kind (and any other associated abilities), it is far better for developers to leave the specifics of the role play to the character rather than attempting to force their own preconceived notions of outcomes onto the player.

Yeah, the Courier at least has the "out" of being shot in the skull. Though you are right - that loses a lot of its power as the game progresses and especially in Old World Blues, where you confront your brain directly.

Again, makes me hopeful for the voiced protagonist making exposition less clunky.

It's just something they have to do to get the exposition to the player. That's why so many fantasy/sci-fi works have a protagonist that's just entering the world (vault dweller, dimensional rift, space explorer, etc), so that they have a reason for knowing nothing about their setting and they can learn at the same time we do.

As much as I like the NPC reactions to the low int characters, the characters themselves (in the older games) just didn't make sense. Someone that can't even speak and will just grunt and stare at things wouldn't be able to operate or reload a gun, take care of themselves, etc...they'd die quickly. Then of course you have the newer games where your character is completely average or intelligent in conversation 99% of the time but will randomly have a special line here and there like "me shoulder!" (which is funny, don't get me wrong) Clearly we won't be able to play someone who grunts instead of speaking since the protagonist speaks clearly before choosing their stats. At most I think it will be the occasional stupid dialogue option but I definitely wouldn't be surprised if it was gone entirely. What I think would work better than grunts or cave man speech if they decided to implement a low int protagonist is if you had regular access to Homer Simpson-esque dialogue options. The speech would be normal but the character would obviously be stupid and always drawing the wrong conclusions, be unable to understand things that were being explained to them, and be generally frustrating to NPCs.

That's exactly why the Courier was a stupid backstory. The Vault Dweller and Lone Wanderer grew up in vaults, and the Chosen One stayed in Arroyo up until the events of 2. Their unfamiliarity with the world around them is completely understandable. The Courier's isn't.

To be fair, the Courier did just get shot--in the head--at point blank range--and buried. So, some brain damage from cranial trauma and hypoxia is to be expected. Plus, Obsidian actually wrote the dialogue well enough that even when the Courier asks a really stupid question, he still doesn't appear as halfwitted as the Dovahkiin. Plus the Courier at least gets called out for acting like an idiot: "I really did blow half your brains out!"

This is a good point. I think, if nothing else, this confirms it.

I would rather have them spend time on designing a low intelligence character and the way people react to him than the stupid 1000 name gimmick with Codsworth.

Yea, with the voice protagonist I don't see a low intelligence run having the same effect as 1,2 and NV.

At least the Courier's reason was understandable (see Zaarin's post). Not compared to Mr./Mrs. ‘I don't even know the basic history of the continent/country I've lived in my whole life!’ Dovahkiin.

Never played a [censored] character so doesn't really matter to me

Agreed. It's sad to see this go.

Spending the extra time re-recording essentially the same dialog lines with one voice actor is a little different from writing and recording as much idiot-dialog as there was in the older games.

And since all of our SPECIAL start at 1 and then we raise them from there at chargen, I'd be a little disappointed if they made us complete idiots under 4 INT. I don't want to have to invest that many points in INT just to not be a blubbering moron. SPECIAL scales a bit differently than it did in earlier games; we get a lot less to start with, and it doesn't seem like there's a crippling penalty from setting an attribute to 1. I like the "Homer Simpson" interpretation of low INT, since it could still jive with generic dialog, but I'd rather it was only enabled if we kept INT at 1 the whole time.

Or maybe just keep the system as it was with stats starting at 5. Worked for over 15 years.

Probably gonna have to with how low character SPECIAL Stats would be... (I'm extremely upset with this still and am hoping for them to change it).

Why should they change it? They have most likely already reworked the whole leveling system... They wouldn't turn around so close to release.

That seems to be an excuse people have simply made up for why the Courier would be asking such questions. Although it seems fairly reason that brain damage would be why that is, the game itself never really specifies any of this, and the Courier seems unaffected by getting shot in the head throughout almost all of the game.

I don't know why they didn't use amnesia for the Courier. That would have made all of the dialogue options make sense.

Back on topic though, low intelligence didn't change all that much in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. There were only some rare dialogue options that would be there to get a chuckle out of ("pizza") but it never had much of an effect on gameplay itself like say Fallout 2, where some NPCs wouldn't even bother talking to the player character, and a good amount of quest and outcomes were blocked off because of low intelligence. At this point in the series with Fallout 4, I doubt low intelligence does anything significant now in terms of dialogue.

Eh, after the first play-throughs you can have a Courier that knows what's going on just by not picking the inquisitive dialog options. Then you only have to reconcile that the Courier has no experience or reputation. Or friends.

I don't see why you can't play with low intelligence. Just don't expect to do well with science and medicine or gain tons of experience.