Oh ok. I just assumed that since we could only raise SPECIAL a couple of points in previous games and never max all of them it would be the same in 4.

I haven't been keeping 100% up to date on all the happenings, I don't wanna burn myself out before its released.

Even with the Level Caps in New Vegas and Fallout 3, I was able to create a multi-purpose character. I'm glad that Imaginary barrier is gone, as it shows that even if you're not a jack of all trades, you are flexible enough when your circumstances aren't perfect anymore in combat, and can use different tactics when needed. Bethesda once again raises the bar on what a RPG can be.

I'd suggest the majority doesn't care either way as long as the game is fun to play. Fallout 3's level cap was worthless because it was reached way too fast and it didn't serve any purpose since the player could max out or, with less effort, reach levels of competence in all skills and stats above which there was no reason to ever go (for the few measly points it left lacking). (And that on top of the skills and stats not really doing anything worthwhile for the majority of it.) From there came the criticism. And many people don't even understand what all's involved (judging from the comments I've read through the years) - the suggestions for no level cap and putting skillcaps somewhere up to 500 just for the sake of the increments but not so much for the effect of it (or - and I kid you not - just for the sound effect of gaining XP).

Skyrim's a bad comparison here since there the skills increase through use instead of investment and only sources of XP are the skilluses. Fallout's general XP gain through kills, quests and what ever work very differently and towards different goals.

I want to limit the playstyle just the same as others want to force one over me ("just gimp yourself and do some playpretend"). I would like a specific experience just as the other guy.

That the skills have been thrown in the river now and there's only perks and special, for me, suggests that the advancement is more straightforward (1 or 2 perks per level, for eg.). It's a ripe ground to balance the gameplay and XP economy towards such goals where the player is required to pay a little bit of attention over how the character is built, and eventually reach higher competence levels in a couple of areas at the expense of others or be fairly competent on all areas but not a master in any (mix and match). And like I said, when the pointless freeroam after the story begins, nobody cares if it started raining cats, so things could well open up there.

It just gives the experience - the main experience - a very distinct feel when you can't be the everythingman and need to pay a little attention when going through the main bits of the game; because you know the side stuff will provide so much experience that all the vital areas of competence will be reached with not much of an effort unless you stick strictly to the main quest.

Thats why I didnt want to start this discussion, we will just reiterate points until we are blue in the face and no ones mind will change.

There is nothing stopping you from being a thief sniper one game and a guns blazing maniac the next. Hell even in far cry games where you get all skills before halfway through the game sometimes I go sneaky, sometimes i just want to blow [censored] up and go loud. My point being is that if you have everything, you can attack anything you want in any way you want. With this freedom, why is it a bad thing? Why must i go through another playthrough just to go loud in one dugeon and sneaky sneak in the next. I dont want to sit through all the story again, I like exploring but once ive seen a place I am usually good. I love that I dont have to start from scratch just to try something new.

It has nothing to do with difficulty, nothing to do with adapting, nothing to do with thinking ahead. I dont want to be punished 100 hours in because i took Y skill instead of X, and now I realize oh that would be an awesome skill to try with this.

Maybe its just me, but I dont want to have to grind out looking at things Ive already seen just to try out a new skill. Thats why I love having no level cap.

Plus for a completionist like me, seeing skill trees not maxed out just gives me the heebie jeebies.

I was covered even when I was forced to pick perks/place points. If I played as a melee character, say, I'd just dump unwanted points into a skill I didn't use, say Energy Weps, and simply continue on my way. No muss, no fuss. Don't need the game holding my hand for me.

Too many people need for this to be a drama.

Well, i don't understand that at all. "Punished"? There's more to my characters than how they kill things, there's more to the game than how you kill things (hopefully ).

A new playtrough, a new character, different choices, different approaches to situations. Not "punishment", a whole new way trough the game.

Yes, but I was punished in the fact that I had to create a new character when I didnt want to, I had to give up my first character etc and had to sit through the story again.

Perks/skills/leveling up are about gameplay and in a sandbox game I just like messing around, I dont want to sit through the story again, or spend another 30 hours just to get to a point where I could try a skill. Yes I know it might take me longer to level up to try to get that skill on my already made character but itll be with the character that Ive grown attached to, and Ill be getting that skill by doing new undiscovered things, not things Ive already seen/done. Unless I am doing a clean install because of mods and stuff I rarely start a new character, just not what I like doing.

I see. I on the other hand play three distinctive characters (as archetypes: Battlemage, Thief and Barbarian ) so i build them (loosely) around that archetype, it's pretty much set in stone what skills and perks i want for them.

Well, no right or wrong way of doing it

Exactly, and with a level cap where I literally dont have enough points for doing what I wanted, it kind of svcked. But you still can do your 3 distinct characters and I can do my one "super character" now. Everyone wins, and thats why I don't get the big deal of the open ended leveling system

I think it's fair to compare FO3 with Skyrim. As long as you don't treat them as exactly equivalent.

FO3 had a level cap, but even so, you could max out your main skills very easily. I think is probably because there's a fairly big main quest and a bunch of independent secondary quests (and mamy of those were stuck way out where you wouldn't just stumble on them without making a point of exploring all the map).

Skyrim has a LOT more secondary quests including guild quest lines, civil war quest lines, random quests. They made the world more important than the main story. My longest serving chatacter did a couple guilds, civil war, main quest and a fair bit of random stuff being fairly specialist and didn't even max out his main skill.

With FO4 being apparently 400 hours long to do everything, I suspect a much more secondary content than 3. The old skill system would probably not have worked. Not if they want to accommodate players who just do the main quest plus a little on the side, players trying to do everything and players more into role playing a specific character. Something needed to change drastically.

So the main question isn't whether there's a level cap, but how much of the game you can get through before you start to pick perks that don't fit your character? My guess is a lot. But we'll see.

I've never really felt that way in a Bethesda game - they're not so difficult that they require "perfect" builds, and they're fun to make new characters in.

The games I've run into that style were things like Diablo 2 (and other ARPGs) - where, again, making new alts to try out new things is a big part of the game; and in D&D Online - where yeah, it was terrible and punishing. That's a game that required people to plan out their build before even making a new character, if you didn't want to be crippled beyond level 10. Annoying as hell.

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And, to respond to the "but how does my being able to play my way stop you from doing the same" comment - Diablo 3 is a perfect example. People complained that they could make broken characters/couldn't "respec"/had to level new characters to "fix" their build/etc in Diablo 2. And a good % had a playstyle that was all about grinding at the level cap to "perfect" their characters. I didn't - I enjoyed making new alts to try new builds, never made it to endgame, and never did the grind-a-boss thing. So Diablo 3 comes along - and it's entirely built for the first group.... leveling is fast so you can race to the cap, there's no need to assign skill points or stats because all skills unlock the same way every time and you can infinitely respec, and it's all about grinding at the level cap. So. Game designed & balanced around one playstyle completely invalidated another one. There's no point in ever leveling a second alt of the same class, because it'll all unlock exactly the same way.

Not that I think it'd be like that in FO4. Just giving one (extreme) example in response to that comment. And pointing out that dev decisions & gameplay features are not in a vacuum - changing one thing has an effect on other things connected to them (like world design, enemy scaling, etc).

edit: but, of course, this all comes from a different core preference - I enjoy making "alts" to try new things. The only games I ever tried to 100% were JRPGs back in the PS1/2 days... I'd play the game once just going with the flow/without spoilers, and then I'd play a second time with a guidebook trying to get & see everything. And then never play it again, because I'd "finished" it. I don't tend to do that with ARPGs / roguelikes / WRPGs / MMOs.

I just hope monsters stay dead in the wasteland for a while. At level 28 in Fallout 3, killing Albino scorpions was no fun.

I wanted an unambiguous example of a gimp that constitutes a real weakness.

Whether the game produces limitations on your character or you produce them yourself, the limitations exist, and the game responds to them. If your character concept requires that you give your character a high intelligence, then the game limits you to what a smart character can do. If your character concept requires that your character run around naked with nothing but a butter knife, then the game limits you to what a naked guy with a butter knife can do.

There is nothing wrong with a game design that allows the PC to master most things or all things. If a game does not permit the PC to master only one or two areas, however, then I have an issue with its design.

Please note the difference in verbs and objects. "Building a role" is a different activity from "Beating the obstacles." There is no self-contradiction.

This.

It doesn't make much sense to say either "level cap good" or "level cap bad" without knowing how the system as a whole plays out in the game.

Two Words: "Dead Money."

Going with past experience, and with the 400 hour notion, I suspect the player caps out way before halfway point.

Rather than one 400 hour game, I'd much prefer 4 100 hour games, or even better, 8 50 hour games, in all of which the character systems work towards a specialized PC (and without the need to start neglecting things early on).

Of course the limitations that I specifically impose on myself are there. If I decide that the character is a bad shot and start deliberately shooting so that only every fift shot hits, of course the game reflects it; if I decide that the PC has https://globalhealthafricadotorg.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/leg.jpg and thus needs to move very slowly, of course the game reflects that, if I decide to neglect the level ups and character progression, of course nothing will happen to my character.

The point is that that should not be a requirement for the game by default. It shouldn't be the players burden to create a game inside a game in order to enjoy a game. Gimping and play pretend are all fine and dandy for iron man runs and the like, but out of the box, it should play properly without the player needing to concern himself with outside afflictions to the established rules.

There is nothing inherently wrong about a game that gives everything to the player in one go if the game at hand is geared for such kind of "go get everything -- and when in doubt, put on your gimp suit and gagball and have fun"; but what it does do regardless, is it removes half the intrigue from the character progression, encourages extensive grinding, and kills the replayvalue.

I can't think of anything more boring and halfhearted (keeping the context in mind) than a game with so loose mechanical setup that it doesn't even know it, that says "make your own". In that kind of situation, it would be better to discard all character progression save for item based (what point does it serve at that stage anymore to have these systemic hindrances if everything'll be open anyway).

You won't need to self-impose rules, just play the game however you want to play it. It's not a self-imposed rule to say "this character's story is done, let's start over and do things a bit differently with a new character"; I did that all the time in Skyrim, and that was definitely a game designed to let players accomplish everything on one character. If you feel you need to 100% the game on one character just because the game lets you, you're missing the point. They didn't nix the level cap just to move the goalpost toward a 100% character; it was to allow all possibilities up to and including a maxed out character, and have the game continue to reward you for playing it instead of adding an arbitrary cutoff point.

And character development doesn't happen separately from the rest of the game. To begin with, it's all nonlinear; what will your first perk be? Your first 50 perks? Your last perk? And what will you be doing to get the XP to reach that point? Regardless of where character leveling ends, the in-game experience is going to be different every time you start a new character as you choose your perks in a different order, complete quests in a different order, and of course, complete those quests in different ways.

That was not a punishment, that was the best part of the game

For some strange reason that DLC gave me mild motion sickness, so I have to say not a fan of DM overall.

Well, don't you get that with 400 hours worth of total play?

Just play as much as you want with one chatacter, then start another with different stats and do different things?

I'm not sure I see the problem.

I've been trying to explain what level cap or the lack of it does to the gameplay (selfgimping being a side effect).

But there's none in the game, everybody gets everything and everybody's happy. Let's leave it at that.

Yes I know. But if you're only planning to play a quarter of the game before starting a new character, you'd almost certainly be under whatever cap they might have had anyway.

I'm not planning that (I don't need to). It'd be my preference that the game was designed and balanced around a level cap that (at least while the main story is going on - nobody cares what happens after that) allowed a quater or a third of the characters maxed out potential so I would actually need to do some planning for what kind of character I wish to build, and have the consequence of that choice, that I will be having hard time tackling the things I've neglected, be imposed to me by the game and not needing to start ignoring the endless character progression somewhere quarter or halfway through it and rush to the credits, you know play the game by its rules instead of needing to circumvent them by making my own. It's artificial and hurts the experience when the focus needs to shift between actually playing the game and keeping track on whether my set of houserules get broken (unless it's an ironman run or some such).

You can rest assured that, what with all the talk about 400 hours of content, while the very initial character build might require some thought, it will even out in first few levels, and then it's an open season. (And I'll be the first to admit being wrong on that if it so happens.)

If you didn't have an exact, Specific build that was predertermined by the Devs, you were going to have a really bad time.

Easy if you have energy weapons, or survival, or sneak or melee weapons and so on and so on And those damn vending machines everywhere, i thought it was supposed a commentary against handholding in modern games :rolleyes: