I think the focus on combat is to avoid too much in the way of spoilers. Some of the non-combat solutions would enter into full on spoiler territory but I think it's pretty safe to show some run and gun footage

My experience of FPS on Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas has been one of contrasts.

I picked up FO 3 at launch on a nice shiny Xbox 360 and quickly found I couldn't target anything reliably with the control pad thumbsticks. The entire playthrough was largely reliant on VATS and while I enjoyed the game the combat was a bit tedious at times.
Recently picked up FONV (ultimate edition) on the PC and remember why I don't play FPS style games on a console, their natural environment is with a mouse and keyboard. Whole playthrough without resorting to VATS once, combat a lot more fun and visceral.

The only concern I have? is how powerful the stealth sniper is. I've seen it become the default playstyle because it is so dominant in both FO3, FONV and similarly the stealth bowman in Skyrim.

As an aside, any reason ?why my input to forums should invert, sentences type backwards, after hitting return?
?

I don't see this as a bad thing. In fact, I'm hoping for some intense Bioshock 1 type combat moments quite often. If I want to charm my way out of a fight, I'll save the charisma speech perks for my girlfriends. As for Fallout 4, I want blood, body parts and ragdoll effects galore!

Phantom Pain is a good example where the combat is done right while the story and everything is done wrong, making it a less enjoyable game than what I had hoped for. I think a lot of Fallout players, including myself, actually read through the dialog without skipping it, also wanting a good story to go along with guerrilla warfare.

RE: Thread title - Nope.

I hated the combat in FO3, sort of liked the combat in FONV. Since we haven't seen much of melee showcased, I want more and better of that. The FPS mechanic is right up my alley. Love the jump pack because I know there will be an attribute that can be modded to control how much and how long. Iron Man flight.

I tend to apply common sense survivalism to the game, would I rather get in close to the 500 pound super mutant and whack him multiple times with a lead pipe? or would I rather lay down several hundred yards away and remove his head with one shot from a sniper rifle?

The rifle just seems to be the better choice since the price is one bullet versus a bucketload of stimpacks when you get in arms reach.

Nope. The focus was critically needed just for competent playability.

Not sure how anyone could trash talk their writing since Bethesda is one of the few companies that I can pick up their product and know there is going to be more of a story to it than several other companies I can think of off the top of my head.

The story may be a little whacky in places and make you read things twice to make sure you got it right the first time, but they never dump you head first into a map with no explanation of why your going to kill everything they send running at you like so many others do.

Why does Bethesda always get a bad rap for their writing? In my experience their writing ranges from pretty okay to pretty good, compared to other games at least. And the writing in Fallout 1 & 2 isn't that impressive, if we're directly comparing Fallout games. (in fairness, New Vegas easily has the best dialog of any existing Fallout game, although I still can't be bothered to care about the main quest)

Combat is the most visual and immediate aspect of an RPG. It's also the most marketable.

All RPGs do this in their marketing. Every game release I've ever seen people always ask this.

Marketing is to sell the game, not describe it or portray it in a balanced manner.

I think it's as simple as that.

I get what you mean about NV main story. I thought honestly that the DLC's had the best writing for both Fo3 and FNV. Just my opinion though.

As for FPS well it looks honestly like combat is not clunky for once, so im pretty excited.

Because of [Intelligence] So you fight the good fight with your voice?

Bethesda's dialog is absolutely terrible - they have some of the worst dialog in the business, and I'm definitely including things like Duke Nukem 3D or other games with no real story in that. Dialog is about 60% of the writing; the rest is plot (and maybe 5% is books/etc, which aren't present in either Fallout game, most people don't read in the Elder Scrolls games, and the content of which has little if any connection to the actual game).

On the other hand, Bethesda has only started writing actual dialog rather than encyclopedia entries since Oblivion - they had only one game's worth of experience when they worked on Fallout 3.

Their plot writing is also bad - examples from Fallout 3 include 'Go into this radiation-filled chamber and die to hit that button rather than send in your radiation-immune companion!', 'We are secret vampires who heal by drinking blood and have a strong urge to eat people and we are not in a fantasy game', 'We are a town of only children who exile those who grow to become advlts to the surface because they are no longer immortal gods', 'Would you please set off a nuclear bomb to destroy a city so we can have a really nice fireworks show in exchange for ten pistols worth of money', and so on.

There are significantly fewer places where the writing is noticeably good in Bethesda games - The Pitt DLC's main quest is one example.

I believe I'll have to agree to disagree with you on that not Langy. I'm not going to start naming names on other game producers, but for the most part Bethesda's game plotlines make a lot more sense than a lot of others that pretty much consist of "here's a rifle now go shoot anyone wearing X color shirt or X kind of uniform".

Generally the dialogues are a lot more informative and entertaining than in several of those games as well.

I'll grant you dialog, or at least player dialog, although Fallout 3 was their first attempt at actually voicing the player (Oblivion's dialog system was just a pared down version of Morrowind's topics and occasional in-voice answers), and in general it wasn't nearly as bad as you make it out to be. And sometimes the dialog in Fallout 1 & 2 made no sense, or the options pigeonholed us into saying things we didn't want to say.

As for their plot stuff, I just have to think about how Fallout 2 had a quest where a subterranean group of mutants called Slags pretended to be ghosts to keep intruders away from their farm. Or encountering and killing an intelligent Giant Mole Rat named Keeng Ra'at, and then later meeting his albino brother named Brain, who was much more polite but also wanted to take over the world. Or blowing up an outhouse and covering a town in "goo". Disregarding all of the pop culture references. And if we can forgive Interplay for including a literal ghost as a quest, why can't we forgive Bethesda for not letting us send our companions into the Purifier? (something they admitted was because companions were added late in development and they didn't have time to change the ending sequence, at least until they did change it with Broken Steel)

I don't forgive Interplay the ghost quest; that didn't fit the game at all. I do tend to forget it exists, though.

The Slags weren't mutants - they were just people who had lived underground their entire lives and thus were extremely sensitive to sunlight. I don't see anything wrong with that quest line at all - it was actually well written, for the most part. Pretending to be something scary- and putting up some excellent scarecrows made out of minced animals - does not automatically make something bad.

The other 'negative' things you mention were all intended to be easter eggs/jokes - same with the Redding mine alien infestation. [Intelligence] So you fight the good fight with your voice? was not supposed to be a joke, nor was the companions refusal to push a button intended to be a joke. Most fans of Fallout don't consider those jokes to have been a good thing, either (primarily due to their shear density in Fallout 2).

To be fair so far all of the story we have seen amounts to your character taking a nuke to the face then waking up inside the hill, then taking a elivator to the surface, having a VERY brief conversation with a robot, then wandering off, running onto a stray dog, talking to him for a bit, the floping down on a sofa then suddenly going on a dress montage, then going off and murdering the hell out of eveyrone in your path...

How anyone can feel they are focusing too much on fps from the footage we've seen is beyond me.

They revamped the character system, added a voiced protagonist, have added countless of customization options through the crafting system, player built settlements that can be populated by npcs and companions you can romance. That's all taken off the top of my head.

And the one thing you manage to take from that is too much of a focus on FPS? I mean, I'd laugh but I think you're being serious.

As for that last bit, could you point me to a fallout game where, excluding vendoring, the dialogue has more than 4 choices on average?

Slight spoiler: That game does not exist.

The idea here is that combat has too much FPS focus.
In a game that has traditionally had character skills determining whether you hit your mark or not, the more "Modern" FPS-like the combat is, the more it is player skill based and not character skill based. That's the concern here.
I know damage inflicted can be a work around, but really?
If you svck at guns, is a bullet really going to do less damage, just because of that?
Like, they just don't try as hard. "This guy svcks, let's just phone this shot in"
No. If you svck at guns, you'll be less accurate.

I just hope that sway comes into play.

Considering skills are out, that concern be can thrown out the window.

Traditionally, the game was turn based. It isn't anymore. Why or how anyone could expect it to behave as such doesn't make much sense to me.

If you're just now concerned that player skill will trump character skill, you're a few decades late.

Whatever ideas you have as to how the game should behave because of how 1 and 2 behaved are irrelevant. I shouldn't have to point out that holding them to the same standard as a company who went under is a bit silly.

Bethesda has stated there are no sacred pillars. You're expecting similar mechanics to a game made in the 90s under an entirely different company. That's ridiculous.

As for increasing damage with perks not making sense. It doesn't have to. It's a gameplay mechanic. My ability to pull a mininuke from my pocket doesn't make any sense, yet it's accepted because it is required to make gameplay more enjoyable.

My pistol doing 2-6 damage doesn't make sense either. Nor does my missing with a minigun at point blank range. Enemies allowing me to attack them while they wait their turn is insanity.

But becoming stronger as you level up a perk is where the line is drawn I guess.

The point of any action RPG is to balance player-skill against character skill. It's not all player-skill based, although the players who'd prefer it be solely character-based may tell you so, or argue that the character skills are useless. From what we know of Fallout 4, it seems to strike a fine balance. And I'm with Todd Howard when he says they "can't apologize for being an RPG", and use that as an excuse for crummy combat.

This:

(from Todd Howard)

"We started out with Fallout 4 knowing that, look, we can't apologise for being a role-playing game."

"We have to build a first-person shooter, and it needs to be a really, really good one. We spent a lot of time on that."

Other Fallout games relied on VATS because the actual shooting was so clumsy.
But VATS remains as an equally valid choice:

"Those who preferred fighting with Fallout 3's VATS system needn't worry though - that ingenious targeting system will, of course, return in Fallout 4, and while players can treat the game as a regular FPS if they want to, using VATS will give players the edge over conventional real-time shooting. ...we want players to have the edge if they use the VATS system. ...If you're building your character for VATS, it's really powerful."

There, everyone happy?

I played New Vegas as FPS and i am glad they did go this direction.

This sounds like it will work for me. At range when I can take my time to line up a shot, I tend to do fine. Up close when action gets fast paced and chaotic, I tend to fall apart and rely heavily on VATS to save my butt. So if they have improved mechanics, it could work better at long and close range, and inside and outside of VATS.

I understand its supposed to be an RPG, and also understand the argument that the PC's skill should determine if you make the shot. I don't envy BGS having to walk this tightrope of balancing the two worlds into one game.

Well, if there's going to be fiirst-person combat why not make it look amazing

Who said anything about turn based?
NV isn't 20 years old, either.
I said traditionally character skill based. Character skill was present in both F3 and NV. 5 years is considerably less time than a couple of decades
And I'm not talking sacred pillars, I'm talking about what an RPG is.

Skills are also not gone. They are folded into perks.

Any rate, I'm glad I'm a VATS player.

I think the idea was to make both playstyles viable, so you can focus on either one exclusively (ie. ironsights for FPS-style combat, VATS for RPG-style). At least that's what I took from the e3 presentation. In FO3, VATS was merely a complement to crosshairs shooting, and not actually a playstyle.