...if you were in to that sort of thing.

(Yes, I tried Smithing. And I did have it on most characters in some form, if not maxed out, to improve gear a bit. But I never did the whole Enchanting/Alchemy/Smithing synergy bit. Sure, I'd save any Smithing potions I might find in loot, and I did find a couple enchanted gloves or rings on some characters. But that's it.)

It would not have been difficult for them to make an actually sensible combat system instead of scaling enemy HP to the moon and letting you make 1,000,000 damage weapons all while operating behind 80% DR but "armor rating" numbers with no meaning. Hopefully they will not do that again.

Note that if the model or material requirement are different its an different item. You would have to be able to upgrade or replace that splitter anyway.

Yes the better parts probably require high crafting perks but the number of different models was impressive on the three weapons we saw.

I look forward to this part of F4 the most. My PC will likely carry 4 weapons, sniper rifle of some type, scoped high caliber pistol, sawed of shot gun, and a knife. He will wear combat armor, and everything he has will be modded in some form or another to make it unique to him. His home may contain a plethora of modded weapons that he will likely just keep in storage or sell, or swap out if he finds himself in a situation where another weapon type would be more useful.

I also plan to have a very heavily guarded home/fortress. I can already picture coming home from a scouting run and finding loads of dead raiders on the doorstep.

If its overkill, than so be it.

*edit*- My Skyrim PC did similar to this plan. I crafted everything I could, enchanted lots of things. I fancied him as a weapons freak that just loved all aspects of weapon making and their usage.

It's not overboard.

It's never overboard.

It's just most likely very generic.

5/405 to me would read: the item I'm trying to build requires 405 and I have 5.

405/5 tells me I can make 81 of this object.

Crafting in general has gone overboard.

I don't see why the game 'needs' all of these crafting options in the first place.

What's so bad about weapons simply being their own weapons with a few mods that can be attached to tweak them?

Why is it such a necessity to craft your own weapon that they have to divert so many resources towards... 'This'?

If a game is to have crafting then it should be something that is vital to the game mechanics, the game should pretty much be built around the crafting system. Any game that does not do this often come across as either lackluster or overkill. In Fallout 4 I see overkill. There is too many crafting options. And why do I find this to be an issue when I don't have to use it? Because just take a step back and look at the bigger picture here, these systems weren't created over one coffee fueled night. No, this took time to create, this took resources to create, this took money to create. Everything that a game developer does tightens the noose around the game development in those three areas. Time, resources and budget. So we got a crafting system that is overkill and which you honestly won't be using all that much because once you find a weapon or two that really suits you you're going to leave it alone for a good long time and same with the settlement, a good looking one won't be created *snaps fingers* like that. A good looking one will take a long time to actually build, and that might be fine for the first one but do you really think you're going to have an enjoyable time going around to every location you can craft a settlement just so you can do the same exact tedious thing all over again? And hope about the next playthrough? Will you jump with glee at the realization that all previous settlements are gone and now you got to recreate them or create new ones?

And just imagine what else we might have gotten if the programmers behind this didn't have to waste their time on it. We've already seen Bethesda's quest design take a dive when it came to Skyrim, and they assign their programmers in Fallout 4 to 'this'?

Every single thing that a game development studio does tightens the noose. They only have a set budget to allocate to their resources which in turn will determine how much time they got before they gotta push the game out. The more you water this down, the less each facet of the game will feel polished and fleshed out.

And honestly, crafting is overrated anyway. I don't even particularly like the Survival crafting. It feels like, to me, that if I can play through the game just fine without crafting a bunch of things for nice little bonuses then why would I bother crafting things at all? Why go out of my way to collect stuff and then sit and micro manage the crafting supplies to squeeze as many little boosts out of it as possible when I can just, yknow, not? Like I said, unless a game is built 'around' the crafting system (which Fallout 4 isn't) the crafting is often just a token game mechanic that we'd really be better off without. Cause maybe the time the programmers spent on the damn crafting system could've been spent to improve the quest design.

As far as crafting balance goes, I really do hope it isn't too powerful. I also want to defeat extremely hard enemies or extremely hard quests and get an uber-unique that is better than crafts.

But I'm glad that in this game it seems those who love to uber min-max won't have to go out of there way to do boring grinds and alter builds towards crafting too much.

All of this implies that Bethesda isn't so loaded with money that they can't do whatever they want, without any real detriment to other sections of the game.

They can, the only compnay more free with thier cash is Valve.

People who work on primary systems programming aren't the same as those who design or program quests; they're generally two completely different groups of people, with completely different skill sets (crafting doesn't require writing skills, for example, and really that's the primary thing that Bethesda's quest design needs more of).

But yeah, Bethesda could have fired some of those programmers and hired more writers/designers if they chose to - but they didn't, and a large portion of their fanbase enjoy customizable weapons.

Note also that it means we'll have a much wider variety of weapons in FO4 than we have in any previous Bethesda game, since the crafting allows you to customize weapons in such a huge variety of ways (thus making it so a single 'weapon' can be represent an assault rifle, a pistol, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, and an SMG all at the same time).

I for one can hardly wait to tinker with my guns and houses!

*edit* Forgot armor since it looks like we will be able to mix and match stuff this time!

Agreed!

Says who? We won't know any details of the current team structure until the Making of.. documentary is released shortly after the game.

Like Awes Poss said they made a mountain of cash from Skyrim which will afford Todd even more personnel which he hand picks by the way. They had 100+ by the end of Skyrim's dev cycle with groups of 2-5 people making 5-8 areas each. The videos we have seen show us Bethesda's most detailed world to date and that is only possible if more people can spend more time making each area of the game. Mark my words, their current team is likely 150+.

Todd's philosophy is incremental increase in fidelity and consistent quality across all game play aspects. Todd knows that if you climb all the way to the top of the fidelity ladder on one cycle then it leaves little room for improvement on the next and likewise any one aspect of game play that is far above or below another greatly reduces the shine of the overall package. This is why we get a modest improvement across the board with each release and no one aspect that makes another look like crap by comparison. Todd knows how to run a studio like few others because he is aware of those two aspects of development.

Knowing that, it stands to reason that the entire game is going to be near or slightly greater in quality and depth to what we have seen so far. I think BGS seeks to shatter the meme of ".a mile wide and an inch deep."

Well if someone doesn't want to mess with crafting I hope they are not totally gimped with later encounters because it's required to survive. This was definitely the case with Skyrim and it's later dragons and such.

I never had to use crafting to fight end-game dragons in Skyrim.

It was harder, but never required. All you needed was a 100 weapon skill and the +damage perks.

And a penchant to scrub every nook and cranny of every dungeon you enter for that occasional good loot ^^

Of course. It was just the first thing that came to mind, my point is more like "just assign them to 'anything else' but a crafting system to help flesh out other aspects of the game". It's rare for a game that tries to throw all darts at the board to flesh out each aspect and polish it enough for it to be worthwhile. Bethesda, least to me, has never really been able to flesh out 'any' aspect well in any of their games. Everything is always lackluster. The magic in Oblivion is varied when it comes to spell variants in terms of effects but when it comes to actual world effects it's pretty much just self, projectile and touch with or without AOE effect. VATS was a nice idea in theory but is horribly broken and unbalanced and breaks the flow of the game terribly. Shouts in Skyrim were often worse than the magic or enchantments, I found, and so I barely ever bothered with them, especially not the ones that you have to rank up before they're any good which means you either need to play the game for an extremely long time or use a guide to find the walls that make certain shouts worth a damn in the first place.

AI is crap, dialogue is half-assed a lot of the time, quest design had some ups in Oblivion and Fallout 3 but took a dive in Skyrim and even in the former 2 their quest designs weren't stellar, world design is poor when it comes to consistency and believability, too many dungeons that feel like copy pastas of one another. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Oblivion and Fallout 3, they weren't bad games on their own merits, but if we were to take and anolyse any of their games' mechanics on their own merits then they've never been excelling in anything really. That's a big problem for me with this crafting system. Instead of maybe taking the elements of the previous game and just fleshing out each of these elements that they already have a foundation for they instead go for tons of new things and change old things that they now have to polish anew.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I think this was not the time for this kind of system to be implemented. If it had to be implemented it should've been in the coming game after Fallout 4. Fallout 4 should have been the chance to improve upon all the flaws of Fallout 3. And they squandered this opportunity, trying to do too many new things and I just can't see how it'll work out well. While I find the crafting systems to be pointless and a waste it doesn't mean I'd be against them being implemented, so long as they don't have any affect on the other aspects of the game. But this was not the right time to do this. Fallout 4 should've been Fallout 3 Version 2.0 (or Fallout New Vegas Version 2.0), instead they're trying to reinvent the wheel, again...

That is what they do best and it's what keeps me approaching each new game as if it were the first.

It's a series, it shouldn't be approached as if each new iteration were its first.

I don't believe the game will be short handed in any area, despite the naysayers. If they truly started this game after FO3, then they have had 7 years to work on it. With proper planning, nothing needs to be shorted because it was likely in the plan from the get-go, and money was allocated for the feature. Nothing I have seen says that BGS or its parent companies is in any way strapped for cash (you know, like having to sell an IP to raise funds) so it is possible that even if they decided on this feature later in the development cycle, they just increased the overall project budget to accommodate it.

It could also be that I choose to see a glass half full, instead of like most posters on this board who always see the glass as completely empty.

Says the fact that the programmers creating the crafting system actually created the crafting system rather than be fired prior to implementing it (you may have missed that my statement included 'fire programmers' as well as 'hire writers', with the connection being that they could pay for the writers with what they got from the programmers).

The wildly successful game director turned executive producer Todd "The Godd' Howard says otherwise.

He is probably wrong though, because your approach is much more original and timeless. You should start your own studio and show the Industry just how to make a sequel. I'm sure you'll be a great success with much more cash than Bethesda in no time flat.

Seriously though, as much i fell in love with Bethesda's game model I'm not sure i would have stuck around for Morrowind 3 on 11/11/11

you didn't read MY post did you?

They don't need to fire in order to hire silly, they are made of money now and have increased the team size with each cycle... so...my post that you quoted explains quite well why your statement was fallacious.

1. I don't care what he says. Financial success does not mean it's successful artistic integrity.

2. I probably would.

3. Morrowind 3 would of course not be an exact replica of Morrowind, the features would be polished and fleshed out and evolve naturally over time so Morrowind 3 would be better than Morrowind 1, if you enjoyed Morrowind 1 then Morrowind 3 is like "here's more, but better and it's set in a different locaiton with a different story."

Because you have 405 out of the 5 required, not 5 out of the 405 required.