The problem with certain perks like Cowboy & Grunt was that they covered a varied array of weapons rather than a single, straightforward type of weapon. It's easy to distinguish handguns from non-automatic rifles from automatic weapons. What the Cowboy perk covered & didn't was up to the devs to decide rather than slotting things under a simple definition (Is it held in one hand? Gunslinger. Is it automatic? Commando. Is it not automatic? RIfleman.). That was the root of the issue, and hopefully in FO4 it's been done away with.

My only concern here is that certain weapons don't easily fall into such definitions. Are shotguns covered by Rifleman? What if there's an auto-shotty? Is that under Commando? I guess we'll have to wait and see, but it's something to ponder.

I never knew how much I needed ponchos in Fallout until I saw this comment.

Don't get me wrong guys, I'm loving the way it's all shaping up, I was just really hoping we wouldn't have to take a perk to cut people in their sleep. Thats something anyone can do with the proper mindset and/or motivation. Still, I hope it still plays the little jingle as we slice folks!

Well, this wasn't the cause behind ALL of the problems, but, during the era of Oblivion, Fallout 3, and NV DLC, both Bethesda and Obsidian went on record several times as stating DLC can neither be patched, nor can DLC interact with DLC.

If a DLC adds a perk that makes all X class of weapons get 25% more damage, the only weapons that perk can effect are the weapons from the base game, and THAT specific DLC. If a DLC released before or after it added X class weapons as well, then the perk couldn't effect it, because it came from another DLC, and DLC can't interact with DLC.

This is also the reason why the home added in the Dragonborn DLC, which released after Hearthfire, lacked any and all of the Hearthfire home improvements, since they came from different DLC.

I am not 100% sure why they can't, but I think I read somewhere it has to do with doing so making DLC dependent on each other, forcing people to buy every DLC, or just have none of the DLC work at all. That or they would have to release a weird series of mini-mods, that basically server as compatibility patches between the various DLC, which would be difficult to keep track of.

The rules were, from what I remember
-DLC cannot interact with the base game(You can't tell Caesar you killed Ulysses or Graham for example)
-DLC cannot interact with other DLC(You can't show Christine or Ulysses the tapes you found in OWB for example)
-DLC cannot be patched, which is why none of them ever were.
-The base game CAN interact with DLC(Such as telling Graham you killed Caesar, or telling Wernher you heard about the Pitt from Kodiak in The Citadel)

I get it. Quite complicated, to be honest. It's like a double-edged sword.

With the .esp structure you would have a hard crash if you loaded a .esp that had something else as a master that you didn't load. I remember Fallout 3 would get to the first long note on the main theme, before booting you back to desktop.

Its a bit easier to get your head around some of the weapons in Fallout since its quite simple how its implemented. That grenade launcher APW thing in GRA not being part of the grunt list is a good example. You'd need to be adding the APW to the list of weapons that Grunt effects, and that would require making a entry in GRA for something in HH. There's no way to get around GRA needing something inside of HH to work at that point.

What is neat though is that its a very simple operation to make your own mod to add these weapons to the lists. You just find where that list is and add a item to that list. So its trivially easy for modders to make the APW conform to Grunt whereas it would require a complete overhaul of the .esp system for developers. Funny how that works.

Hopefully the new perk structure cuts down on a lot of that, since they won't be needing to add new normal leveling perks or w/e.

Hmmm...
Ninja perk Vault Boy is holding a throwing star. Do you guys/gals think that since they set up a special button for grenades that we could also equip throwing weapons to be used in place of grenades? I don't think it would be a far stretch.

Glad to see the system turns out to look as great as I was expecting, of course one should reserve final judgement until it can be proper field tested, but so far, looking great.

Im not really sure how the programming on it would work. If its the same as Fallout 3 and New Vegas then taking the Commando perk for example would just flip a switch on your character that gives all of these weapons on this list a bonus.

I think Skyrim has some things going on where it looks at the type of a weapon to determine stuff like Armsman for one handers. I haven't crawled through the creation kit to mess with values nearly as much as I have with the GECK. Maybe someone who does modding beyond the "Mess with values to make my equipment feel right" would know more.

Don't really understand how some of that is going to work though. What if I turn my pistol into a rifle or something else? Does it actually change the characteristics of the weapon or will it be based off of the base gun. QUESTIONS

Im guessing since you can just turn a laser pistol into a laser rifle with the new system there's something more than lists going on where it checks what weapon type you have instead of what weapon you have.

It'd be the difference between the perk Commando telling the game "Laser Rifle is a item that is on the list to be a rifle" than "Laser Rifle is a rifle and thus it goes into this list of rifles."

Again, I kinda think thats how Skyrim does things, the later part, but I don't know for sure.

That's what I suspected Skyrim did, and assumed Fallout 4 would be doing as well.

Ooh that would be friggen Awsome! Like if a raider/slaver only has a couple of hitpoints left after a firefight, instead of wasting a bullet on him/her you can just launch your trusty throwing axe at their face, then casually rip it out as you walk past, coool.

You guys are both kind of right as the enemies in the tables do not increase in power (HP, etc.). However, as the PC levels, completely different and more powerful enemies are generated from leveled encounter tables. No enemies have a variable hit points, but there ARE higher level versions of those enemies that spawn as the PC goes up in levels. Some enemies in an encounter will not be much higher level but others will be significantly more powerful.

In Oblivion, ALL the enemies would be equivalent to the PCs level and be equipped with equivalent level gear. VERY bad news if you were not a combat powerhouse character.

I think it's cool how they've shuffled a lot of perks around, and have even changed a few. This shows how much they have clearly tested and refined the whole chart, which can only mean good news for all of us

Hmm...with the wording of the Charisma 8 Perk Inspirational - "Because you lead by example, your companion does more damage in combat, and cannot hurt you." (emphasis mine). It looks like there is Friendly Fire damage in the game. That is probably a Perk I'm going to want right away. It would really svck to have Piper, Codsworth, or whoever else off me just because I got in their way during a firefight.

Yeah Oblivion...Was kinda messed up. You got it right.

In Skyrim things get replaced with different creatures/NPCs of higher level until you reach the top and you have the best the game has to offer being thrown at you, with no stat trickery behind it. Everytime you levelled up in Oblivion there would be a direct increase to the stats of nearly everyone you were expected to fight. So if you were level 5000 you would have bears that would be a direct match for you and your cheating ways.

Also all the enemies in Skyrim have lore-appropriate gear the majority of the time. No picking up several sets of glass from bandits on your road between a single city. Although all that high level armour combined with my dislike of fast travel has made my Oblivion character the richest of them all.

yeah this is the best description on how the NPC will scale up with your level, and some zone no metter what will always have high level NPC.

Best thing to do in Oblivion is not level up

Who is Piper?

Fo4 companion.

Shes some news reporter lady who uses you to get inside Diamond City.

Indeed! Also, you could open melee combat by throwing your knife/whatever and close the distance so you can use your melee weapon while they are stunned from the impact of your thrown weapon.

Don't forget that the chart is almost completely nonlinear. So you're going to have to be playing and building a character unique to the experience you want for the majority of the game's content, unless you deliberately grind somehow early on so you can go through most of the quests and stuff at like level 100. And then there's the point that there's more than 270 perks/ranks you can choose; the highest level requirement I saw on a perk's rank was level 50, which is presumably (especially if the progression is being compared to Skyrim) the "soft cap" of sorts when your character starts reaching the endgame; which is less than 1/5th of the entire perk chart. So, I don't understand how uncapped leveling can possibly kill the replay value when you can take your character in virtually any direction at every level, and it would take hundreds of levels to even start to feel like your character's homogenizing into an everymaster.

At the lowest, I'd say the soft cap is around level 50. At the absolute highest, I could see it being 100.

I can see how Intimidation falls under Charisma; you need a good sense of people to know how to boss them around, and in this case your level acts as the intimidating factor rather than your strength. And I think level works better than strength; I would be just as intimidated by an off-the-hinges mad scientist or an expert marksman as I would by a pissed off circus strongman.

I'm just curious why it's not possible to just create an "if" parameter or provide a fallback in the event a specific DLC is missing.

** Now that I think about it, instead of individually needing to add weapons to a list, they could have assigned weapons to a class which would automatically link up with the associative perks.

There must be an underlying issue that I'm missing, though...

Yeah, I spotted that.

So you get diminishing returns the closer you are to full health? Could this be where food and drink come in, by healing a fixed amount?

Interesting.