I have to admit after playing Skyrim for about a year and a half I am really enjoying FO:NV. Choices, consequences, who would have thought these would be fun to have in a game?

But I have a question for those who have played both Skyrim and FO:NV. To be honest I’m getting a little un-nerved thinking about what Todd and company may be doing to FO4 based on the changes made from MW to OB to Skyrim. I’m trying to imagine FO:NV like this:

Beautiful graphics and great game physics.

No more S.P.E.C.I.A.L., just Strength, Intelligence and AP for VATS.

Skills Barter and Speech combined, Melee and H2H combined, Guns and Energy Weapons combined, etc. and etc.

Every other NPC marriageable. Just bring them some gecko skins or a bottle of purified water and they are ready to commit themselves to you for life.

Factions lead you down and straight and very linear path which if you follow to the end makes you the faction LEADER. After which you can just leave and never visit again.

Factions do not care if you belong to or are the leader of other factions.

I have seen people argue for over a year on whether or not these points are good or bad for TES. Would they be good or bad for FO though? I thought many of the TES role-play features were set in stone, white elephants so to speak, but Todd turned them into elephant BBQ. Could or SHOULD Fallout share the same fate?

Well, if Fallout 4 doesn't have SPECIAL, i'm gonna be pissed. Possibly even "GOTY Edition from sale" pissed, even though i got to the series at Fallout 3.

But i don't see them getting rid of it. It's a central part of Fallout.

Apart from that, i keep calling it Skyrim with guns, because that's what i expect it will be. Feel free to prove me wrong, Bethesda

Stats: I doubt they'll do such a huge overhaul for FO. In FO, S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is way more important than the stats were in TES. In FO you have strength requirements and stat checks all over the place. In TES, the only stats that did anything meaningful after Morrowind were intelligence (which determined magicka, strength (which determined carry weight), and endurance (which determined health and fatigue).

Skills: I could see some skills getting combined for the next game. Speech/Barter is the most likely candidate, because the rest of the skills are too well defined to be combined into one. The only other possibility that I can see would be Medicine/Science, but that's a huge stretch.

Marriage: This one I doubt. It just isn't a good fit for the atmosphere. In Skyrim you have a huge circle of friends and acquaintances, there're are 10+ towns, and nearly all of them have a chapel of some sort. In FO, you'd be lucky to see a third of the NPCS and towns, and religion is essentially non-existent.

Factions: Beth has been pretty good about factions in the past, and they saw how Oblivion handled them, too. I don't think we'll see joinable factions for the most part. I could see a main quest where you have to choose between to competing factions as we saw with Dawnguard and the Civil War questline in Skyrim, but if there are factions, I expect them to function like Reilly's Rangers from FO3, and/or the Powder Gangers, Khans, etc. from FONV.

Well to be honest I would have never thought that the attributes in TES would ever be scraqed either. I've been proven wrong.

FO does have marriage as there many married couples in the games. Whether this involved a church or was just a mutual agreement, hard to say.

I do hope that factions are something you can't actually join and advance in in FO. I think this more than anything weakened them in the TES games. Not the joining of them per say, but the advancing and becoming leader in less than a week part. Feels like the whole thing was to cater to kids that know nothing about how a real faction works or what role-playing is.

All of what you've said doesn't sound too far from being plausible, and to answer your very last question:

No, it shouldn't, but it most likely inevitably will, unfortunately.

I'll be very surprised if it does actually turn out to be good and BGS actually improve upon the systems instead of dismantling them. Otherwise, Fallout 4 will definitely be one of those titles that I'll be holding back from purchasing early on.

DEAR GOD NO!...but it probably will.

True the exploration side of thigs will probably be great, everything else...*shudders*

Ya know, it's actaully going to be quite amusing to go from New vegas's writing to Bethesda's Fallout 4 writing i reckon, and probably quite embarrasing for Bethesda when they realise their writing skills are laughable compared to Obsidian's. I just can't see Bethesda improving on their writing skills whatsoever, it's been getting progressively worse over the years.

If they make Fallout 4 as shallow as Skyrim, (removing of attributes, no consequences of the players actions, removal of different types of ammo for different situations etc), then i'm just going to be a very depressed young man. It seems inevitable though doesn't it.