Definitely overboard on crafting however I like the change to individual armor pieces like TES. It is overboard in terms of crafting but that's not exactly a bad thing. Customizing weapons is something I've wanted since Fallout 3. New Vegas dipped it's toes in the pool and Beth went Full Deep with Fallout 4. Plus we can craft the Enclave Mark II armor and helmet, can't wait till Nov 10th.

I don't think the crafting will lead to OP weapons. I assume each module will slightly modify the gun's stats (e.g. +5 accuracy for a long barrel), and might also have a negative effect (+2 weight). It will, however, allow us to adjust our weapons to our own particular tastes and play-styles. I like scopes on my rifles, and shotguns with quick-load magazines. This crafting system looks like it will be a lot of fun to play around with.

I'm sure you can take or leave it without being heavily penalized, if you can't be bothered. In NV, I slapped a few mods on my favourite guns, but I never really got into making my own ammo. In Skyrim I did a little smithing, but I almost completely ignored making potions. It never felt mandatory to do the crafting stuff beyond what captured my interest.

I think it's fine. Borderlands was overboard, where you couldn't modify a gun at all, you had to keep farming until you got the right gun with the right modification that you wanted. At least with Fallout 4, you just need the right components. I'm looking forward to all the different things I can do and, with any luck, I can make something really overpowered.

Too much crafting? Never such a thing. If you feel like crafting and such is too much of a waste, or takes away from your game experience, then really just ignore it and focus your character development into other areas.

Lets see we have

Guns energy

Conventional bullet guns, (I suspect a lot of mods for guns and energy weapons will not be that cross compatable)

Heavy weapons(

Explosives

"Mines"

Melle

"unarmed"

"Weird" (may not be its own category but the Junk Jet = Rock-It Launcher so we may see railway dart and some other "oddballs"

so 8 (maybee 9 with Plasma? or 10 with "Flame" thrower) catagorys of weapons

roughly 70 or so mods each class.

I think for guns it was

Muzzle

Barrel

Stock/grip

sight

Receiver-capacitor-cylinder

Magazine

so really for each type of weapon 10 or so mods per mod slot is not that insane.

We can make plasma sniper rifles now....The crafting system is going to allow people who want to play with certain weapon types exclusively to do so effectively... I mean, want to go all energy weapons? Now you've got a variety of mods for those weapons that make long range, short range, and medium range possible. Want to go melee only? Now you can take a regular baseball bat and make it awesome..... and so on and so forth. The crafting is going to allow players to customize to their own play style, and if they don't want to craft? They don't have to, as there are already over 50 weapons for them to use without having to modify them. Is it overboard? Perhaps, but it's adding quite a bit of options for players to play around with if they choose to do so. I also don't think raiders will have access to the extensive system that the player will, so their weapons might have a few mods here and there but nothing compared to what the player will have.

Better to have it and not need it then to need it and not have it.

Options, man. People love it when there are many options out there.

Yeah the plasma sniper rifle is interesting, but kind of against the lore of plasma weapons in general. I mean there's a reason we've never seen one before, and now we are going to use junk we find laying around and put together something the best scientist of their time could not figure out. I mean ... Yeah, Plasma Sniper Rifle ... but another part of me is going ... Wait What!???

Just because they haven't been invented yet doesn't mean they aren't a thing.

Boston is home to the most technologically advanced faction on the planet. I think they could figure out how to make a plasma sniper rifle, and you can head canon the survivor learning it from them if it's such a bother.

I'm excited about the crafting in FO4. And I certainly hope that with a little investment of time, the stuff that you can craft will be better than most (but not necessarily all) the stuff you can loot. Nonetheless, the act of looting still should be enjoyable for a dedicated crafter if you can scavenge parts from the things you find--like maybe the gun you just found isn't better than the one you crafted, but it has a better scope, which you can detach and use. I certainly hope this is how the system will work.

The only way it's possible for crafting to go "overboard," IMO, is if it's needlessly abstruse or time-consuming, and--most importantly--leaves you never sure that what you've crafted is actually the best thing you could make at any given time. I'm thinking of Dragon Age: Inquisition here. Equipping everyone with all the best stuff was such a chore I dreaded meeting new party members. It's one of the reasons I stopped playing the game and sold it back without finishing. I'm confident Bethesda will do better.

Meh I'm going to love having customized gear. I'm not worried about any of it.

At one point in the e3 presentation, they use a pre-war workbench to make a 'Gyro Compensating Lens' from adhesive, circuitry, glass, plastic, and screws. It appeared the required science rank for that is 1.

This is where the weapon mod system might feel like the weapon repair system from F3. You take all this worthless/ordinary stuff and are able to magically produce something in perfect working condition. But hopefully they refine it to a reasonable level of believability.

I fear it shall end up very much like Skyrim in that level lists will produce equipment of quality equivalent to whatever we produce ourselves, but without the investment of time. The description of Luck suggests this very strongly.

The thing that most interested me about the crafting system was that you could select an item you wanted to make and then the game would alert you somehow when you picked up scrap that was useful for your chosen schematic.

That alone will make me use the crafting system 1000x more than I ever did in any previous game because it will help me get things that I need without me personally having to remember all the parts involved.

To me, overboard is when a game just dumps a lot of content in without any good way to organize it or convenient way to use it. I wouldn't call this overboard. I would call it well planned. It doesn't matter to me if what I craft is about the same strength as what I can find. It matters that I can make my weapons look different and therefore make my toon look cool and that's fun by itself.

Just wait until the modders get hold of this and start introducing even more base content, along with the variants the numbers of weapons could expand exponentially.

Because it's saying 'you have 405 units out of 5 required', not 'you require five units of the 405 you have'. It's more natural for the first number to change, not the second.

EDIT:

Also, note that weapon crafting isn't creating a new weapon - it's about modifying weapons. There's a big difference, and it means that 'crafted items' are 'found items', just customized.

Lol, has anyone NOT noticed how much fluff there is involved in the weapon mods? It seems like each specific mod (such as the Laser Rifle mods) are in 'tiered' formation. Going from just "Laser Splitter" to "Advanced Laser Splitter". Big guess, but probably correct, the mods are tied with the perks that you pick, and the perks come with ranks. The more you invest into said perk, the better the weapon mods come out as a result, thus you get 'tiered mods'. So 750 is more likely going to be cut down to actually 150 or 200 mods that are actually unique and not just a copy-paste format of a weaker version.

It's like a giant cake made of cardboard, with the good stuff actually down into the center. Gotta work your way through the crap to get to the good stuff

That's why I figure I'm just going to let the loot list take care of it. I'm sure it will.

your not the Lone Survivor, your Macgyver..

This crafting seems better and smoother than Skyrim, regardless of your build for the most part.

The issue with Skyrim's super OP crafting was it required you to grind out 100 levels of 2-3 skills, and waste tons of perks/time or you'd be far less powerful. So it was basically mandatory yet annoying.

In this game it seems like you'll just have to have a few points in INT (unless energy weapon) and take 4 perks depending on the primary weapon style you want to use. No huge grind or huge waste of build, even if it is mandatory/OP.

Something I didn't think about...what if crafting would be really better than finding actual loot, people would be forced to have a high repair/science skill, or just crafting in general.

Maybe they will add special loot for better weapons?

Perhaps Bethesda will make their usual ''god-like character'' that has 100 in every skill when it reaches level 20

It hasn't been mentioned yet but do you think we'll find modded weapons in the world, Borderlands style? Or is it likely modded weapons will be craftable only?

I highly expect modded weapons will be findable in the game world, since basic things are just modded base weapons, like the 'laser rifle' is just a modified laser pistol.

I'm curious if there'll be any weapons that aren't moddable.

you got your fist!