The main problem with Fallout New Vegas' skills system, and why this problem drove me to decide to use the levelling glitch every playthrough.

You don't know what you're getting yourself into until you've actually played the game. There are so many functions that require 75 skill in Science, 100 in lockpicking, etc. So many fun things like rigging the location of the bombs at the Ghoul building by Novac. You don't know what functions there will be that require a certain skill. On top of that, you don't know if you will have the necessary skill by the time you reach that part of the game. So in order to make sure you can maximize your experience, you level yourself extremely high in the beginning in order to make sure everything is available to you.

Hopefully this is different in Skyrim. How would it be different? I don't know. But I hope it's different.

Im forseeing a similar problem occuring with perks demanding a certain skill level before being available.

"I DONT WANT TO LEVEL UP YET I DONT HAVE 50 DESTRUCTION SKILL FOR THAT PERK I WANT!"

Of course this can easily be solved by keeping it as the players choice when they level up (as Oblivion did) and having the perk demands retroactive. So that if you have 45 Destruction when you are granted a level increase, putting it off until you reach 50 Destruction will enable you to access this theoretical perk.

Or, you create a new character.

You aren't supposed to experience everything with one character and if you do try to do so you aren't supposed to be able to just stick to a couple of skills. If you want to complete the game with one character, it has to be a JOAT. Simple as that.

Well they can make the lockpicking just like it was in Oblivion, you could unlock any lock no matter what your skill level was. The level determined how many tumblers of the lock fell down if you broke a lock pick.

Yeah, I liked Oblivion's style of lockpicking better. I hope it stays like that for reasons the OP mentioned. Not just lockpicking either. They did manage repair(Armorer for Oblivion) so that anybody could do it, but pros did it best.

Fallout NV wasn't made by Bethesda and Fallout 3 never had this problem, at least not in quest sensitive situations where it matters. I don't think we'll see a problem

Two things:

1) Obsidian made New Vegas, not Bethesda. (That's why it was better :teehee:)

2) That's the entire point of an RPG. If you're not good at science, guess what? You can't do things that require you to be good at science. It's called choice and consequence. You choose not to level your science skill? Guess what? You can't do things that you need to be good at science to do. If anything I want more things like this in Skyrim. I want some Speechcraft options to require knowledge of other things, e.g. heavy armor or alchemy or one-handed weapons, in addition to your Speechcraft skill. Why? It's an RPG. Your character's ability should sometimes overshadow your ability as a player. Less so than in Fallout seeing as TES has always been a blend of action and RPG, usually with more emphasis on action, but still, it's a very nice thing to have and it makes for good roleplay by rewarding your devotion to a particular skill or archetype.

...That's why you make a build with certain strengths and weakness and you do what your character would do. If you dont do everything you want, then you make another character, then another and another.

This isn't as big of a deal for me, but I guess I can see how being restricted from game content like entire rooms could be frustrating, since you don't know what you are missing. I personally like that aspect of the game though. Not sure how to make a compromise... They already have linear central quests to help out the people who don't like multiple play throughs, isn't that good? :shrug:

isnt that the point of adventuring and leveling in a role playing game? to level up so you can do those things?
if im not mistaken those are side quests anyways. if youre not high leveled enough to play them the way you want to. then wait.
i never once had a problem with this.

You misunderstand me. I do not mean that you can't experience everything with one character. I mean that you miss opportunities to do some cool [censored] (like change the bomb's target location at the Ghoul building) because those events have a skill requirement that we are unaware of until we actually get to that point in the game.

Bethesda does not reference New Vegas to any of their games. New Vegas will have little influence on Skyrim, since it was only half-official.

My point still stands. One character is not meant to do everything unless you prepare adequately for every possible situation that could possibly come up. IE, you create a jack of all trades. If you miss out, too bad. Its not like you're limited to one character slot and a lot of the charm of these games comes from starting over and seeing things from a different perspective.

Although I personally kinda wish it were not the case, I actually don't think that will be an issue for Skyrim. The NV game was influenced by TES modders, (or just one modder?) who tend to serve a different audience. Much like the quests being linear in Skyrim to provide as much game content as possible for a single play-through, I expect that skills will bar you from a very limited amount of unique game content as far as quests are concerned.

Because that defeats the purpose of a lockpicking skill, plus everyone used the skeleton key anyway.

This exactly. This isn't a problem unless you consider the game being an rpg and having choices a problem.

They did similar things in Fallout 3, but IIRC the skill-checks were lower on average.

I don't see anything wrong with rewarding a skilled character, but it does feel a little unfair to see that your character has an "idea" for something cool, but doesn't have the chops. They could hide options/actions you can't perform, which may mean more surprise on other playthroughs. But probably easier to miss or bypass entirely on said playthrough.

Not? The wasteland survivor guild had lots of skill requirements, so did many other.

I liked it, having high speechcraft gave you something, in Oblivion/ Morrowind it was pretty worthless. Yes it might get you to delay quests like in level scaled objects did in Oblivion

Yeah, how dare we have to focus on a character build in a RPG! How dare the devs give opportunities to certain builds rather having everyone being able to do everything! Preposterous! This is an RPG!

I love you.

You can't always get what you want, Making a character and choosing skills will result in pros and cons. A tribal hunter shouldn't be able to hack a computer for obvious reasons. New Vegas handled character development better than pretty much any other game bethesda have produced (in my opinion).

I agree that it defeats the purpose, honestly it wouldn't bother me either way.

What!? This was not an issue at all, this was a good thing. A great thing. It made your skills matter. I think the issue was those skill magazines, which is some ways just undermined this(and seemed to have been made for players like yourself).

Or when you level up you get the perk point to buy one but you can buy it at any time once you got it.

I don't care as long as I can cherry pick my perks WHEN I want. Most of the perks will be modifier garbage that I will avoid. I always found myself picking the more unique perks anyhow in falllout 3.

Personally I felt New Vegas was very boring from a leveling standpoint. Actually there wasn't much there that I was impressed with to begin with. 20 hours in I got a gamebreaking glitch and refuse to play it.