Well regardless we're going to have buildings that feel similar to one another. That's how large city areas are though, buildings both residential and commercial tend to look the same given enough buildings.

Now if your talking about more focal point/landmark type buildings then yea, there certainly should be unique and mostly one of a kind.

1. Combat is effected by skills.
2. Whether change, rain, snow, wind.
3. Better physics, bullet drop, bullet time (Optional for this) And have it effected by wind. (I know fallout is not this FPS tactical [censored], but it really adds that difficulty to the game.

4, Obsidian making it.
5, Bigger map.
6. More consistent lore.
7. Have DLC really having deep meaning and actually story that means something. And have it connect with the main game and other DLC.
8 No transportation other than your feet.
9. Hairy death claw.
10. Pip boy 2000
11 Far more UNIQUE weapons. Not just a basic weapon that's colored green with 1 extra damage and a different name. Some NEW, something that is not like any other.
12. More sniper rifles....
13. Bottle caps differ in price depending on which one. Like normal bottle cap would be well 1 bottle cap. But maybe a quantum is equal to 5 normal ones.
14. hardcoe mode that's more realistic... Not dying from hunger and thirst after 10 minutes of walking.
15. Bring back the floater. (And it's variants)

Oh, and:
16. Bring back the kill percentage. Instead of having to have that level to pass a speech, or this and that. Just have a percentage depending how high your skill is.

And frankly it's just [censored] and a dumb COD this and that type of thing. We don't need that trash in fallout.

I hope they address the lack of water dangers you got a lake lurk problem hop in the water and let them float in front of you there is just no danger in the water

Speaking of accuracy mechanics. Sway, spread, recoil. I would prefer RNG but those three work as well to mitigate player dexterity. Also the game should not let the player close enough by just rushing against a swarm of incoming bullets - the danger of death should be far higher. There should be other methods to get closer if not feeling accurate enough. Sprinting from cover to cover (not sticky cover) when cover is available; smoke grenades, suppressing fire, etc.

Melee skills could - to compensate the difficulty of getting close up - provide a derived attribute that makes the player harder to hit (lowering NPC accuracy), with added closeproximity penalties for firearms and interference moves for melee/HtH characters (both PC and NPC) shoving the pointed gun aside and staggering the enemy.

Or something.

What I am suggesting is the reinforcement of an RPG system with realistic dynamics that make sense and enhance the gun play because lets face it fallout is now an RPGFPS and I purposely order in this way as it is still primarily an RPG game. Just clearing that up before anyone gets to hyped up over the claim, but bottom line since Fallout 3 we have entered a new chapter of the series.

Agreed good idea

I want VATS to be different, it might go against the skill level systems that go with fallout but I would really like a bullet time sort of thing or maybe more Red Dead Redemption.
I also want melee combos that should get more diverse, complicated and damaging as you level up melee skills.

I would be against a slowmo bullet time VATS like RDR or Max Payne.

VATS as a feature sure needs a lot of tweaking and improvements, but I can't really think of anything more boring and gimmicky than bullet time. Never been a fan of that mechanic.

But why should we beat the red paste that used to be a horse anymore?

The Project Nevada time lets you slow down time at the cost of AP. Woo PC

Great song, I agree, perfect for a future game!

What I really want for Fallout 4 is a whole bunch of new post-war desgins for assorted objects and technology.

What we know about the insitute makes them out to be far in advance of pre-war technology (Atleast, in their little bubble) so having them manufacture new energy weapons or armour would be nice. Some other gadgets to help us with various skill checks would also be nice, like the implants in Project Nevada.

I really hope that the insitute designed and manufactured weaponry is so superior in power that it becomes a gameplay mechanic. Kind of like how all energy weapons used to be in old Fallout. A few quests made around this idea would be really nice. A good idea I think is to have one where you are paid to smuggle weaponry out of the insitute and into the hands of a local warlord who wants to dominate the surrounding area.

Also at the top of Page 4 someone talked about putting old weapons from classic fallout into Fallout 4, and I very much agree for the energy weapons. The wattz series had a very nice design to them, and I would love to have them be in Fallout 4. Stuff like the desert eagle though? Not really. Weapons pulled directly from our timeline wouldn't work very well, but I am in favour of resdesigning them a little bit and having them in, so long as they were around in the whole 50's era. The .45 Auto Pistol and This Machine from New Vegas were how I would ideally go about this, the weapons weren't exact recreations of a 1911 or a M1 Garand, but they were close enough to satisfy people who want real guns in Fallout.

Kind of in response to the thread in general more than pulling specific quotes:

I still feel like one of the primary hurdles for a game like this, in terms of combat, is just providing the player enough feedback to know what's actually going on. If you have a target lined up dead in your sights and you miss because of a RNG implementation, then there needs to (ideally) be an unobtrusive, clear, and intuitive method for the game to let you know that's what happened.

That's sort of why lately I've been coming around more to the idea of instead of trying to cram percentage chances based on character skill into a real-time game with direct aiming, it's probably a more elegant and natural design decision to instead focus on the character's skills, attributes, and perks directly affecting the direct aiming. So long as a character with low skill is missing a lot, and a character with high skill is hitting a lot, then I'd call it mission accomplished for the most part.

Of course, I'm still a big fan of my "shrinking circular reticule" idea, but there's more than one way to skin a cat. Weapon skill could certainly have an effect on recoil, drawing and reloading time, etc.

I would say that I'd rather continue to see skill have a direct impact on damage dealt, however. A bullet does not always do the same "damage" no matter what. If that were the case a hunter wouldn't bother with trying to find the "sweet spot" for a clean kill. If I take a bullet to the head, there's quite a large difference between a shot that grazes my ear off, and one that goes right between my eyes. Same bullet, vastly different amount of "damage." That's what the damage variables are supposed to represent. And obviously, the more skilled you are the more likely you are to be hitting vital areas, no matter what part of the body your shot landed.

I don't know - I'm kind of the opposite feeling, really. In a lot of games, bullet time is what makes it playable (or at least approachable) for me. I just don't have the shooter reflexes to have that much fun with a lot of games of that type - having a bit of slow-mo lets me take my time a bit more. Plus, in a game like Red Dead Redemption, for example - I found it also gave me a chance to really relish some of the cool emergent stuff going on as a side effect of their physics system and hit detection. I certainly feel like shooting someone's horse out from under them while at full gallop is a lot more fun to watch in slow motion than in the thick of a fast-paced shootout.

I still maintain that VATS is essentially bullet time anyway (it's obviously not turn-based after all.) And to be honest, I think there's too much dissonance between the real-time combat, and VATS's percent-to-hit gameplay. I feel like either there ought to be a way to connect the systems more intimately, or move towards one or the other entirely. Certainly, I'd rather a TB game but if we can't have that, then I'd just as soon see a more polished real-time combat than trying to duct-tape other systems onto it.

Frankly, it's been a good couple years for turn-based games and the next few are looking even more exciting. If Bethesda's Fallout isn't going to be giving me that same fix, then I've plenty of other avenues now and in the future. Obviously, I've strode off onto another line there, but to dovetail it back to topic:

I guess what I'm saying is that lately I feel like the important thing is that character skill have an immediate and applicable impact built-in to the game. How that's achieved is starting to become less important to me as much as hoping that it actually will, in some manner, be improved upon going forward.

My biggest complaint with the way VATS was implemented in Fallout 3 was that it was massively overpowered. A 15% boost to critical hit chance is huge, and the 90% damage reduction while in VATS was just ridiculous. It all but begged you to cheese combat - just time entering VATS so you'd be in the animation when the enemy's bullets/rockets hit you, with any non-zero chance to score a hit with your equipped weapon, and you could tank those hits and take almost no damage, unless someone was using a Fat Man against you. Combine it with the Grim Reapers' Sprint perk, which restored all your action points when an enemy died, and you were pretty much invulnerable to any significant damage.

New Vegas nerfed VATS a bunch and did a much better job of balancing it with regular combat. It could no longer be used as a "get out of death free" card. I know they'll be bringing VATS back for Fallout 4 - I agree it's not a real good fit with a real time shooter combat system, but it's a staple of the series by now. I just hope they lean toward the New Vegas version of it.

This. Exactly this.

There are couple of things here. The current perspective and presentation aren't really supportive of too much abstraction. Direct skillbased damage multipliers, as they are now, lead to a situation where every shot is an abstraction of missing the sweet spot. You've probably seen the FO3 video where the guy starts shooting Doc Hoff's guard in the head at four feet of distance in front of Megaton. That's 32 nicks in the ear, even though we see clearly the bullets landing in the guards eyes, nose mouth, cheekbones and forehead. The only thing imparing the shooting is the damage calculations. The the guy stands still and heals while taking nicks in his own ears from the guards assault rifle. I'm not one to argue about realism, the game need and should not be "Boom, headshot, killedya!" frat boyism. Oh, no. There are HP (overall and individual for different bodyparts) values and armor ratings for a reason. But presenting it the way it has been looks, feels and is just stupid. You are doing static amount of damage up until you hit the threshold in your skill that gives you the next point of damage, you literally can't find the sweet spot and have to proverbially carve half the guys head off through nicks and scratches before he dies. That's the fundamental flaw in these skill induced damage multipliers.

More over. If you impair the accuracy (through recoil, sway, and spread) and the damage, you are in a situation of complete svckage. There is no promise of incoming "greatness" because nothing implies it; few of your bullets land, but they don't do anything worthwhile. That doesn't encourage progression, or it does, but it also makes it a chore and the combat still feels stupid and ineffective. If the weapons pack a decent punch even at low skill, the few times you hit, give you something to look forward to -- put points in the skill to actually score those delicious hits.

I'm at work so this might come off a bit hasty, but you get the point.

The current damage multipliers probably aren't the most elegant solution, either.

I always thought that the neat thing about playing a videogame is that computers are very good at math, to say the least. It potentially allows for highly complicated algorithms for any number of variables. So long as the output continues to behave in an intuitive manner, you don't necessarily need all of the calculations to be all that simple to understand.

Along those lines, you could probably design some manner of damage algorithm that gives each weapon a variable range of damage, with your relative skill level "weighting" the results toward one extreme or another. For example, if you have a weapon that does 1-10 damage, that doesn't have to mean that at any given skill level you have an equal chance of "rolling" a 1 or a 10. An unskilled shooter would be more likely to hit a 1, but still have a chance to make a "lucky shot," and likewise an expert marksman is still going to be off-target on occasion.

Obviously, critical hits and misses go a long way toward representing that as well. But you could still have the underlying base damage calculations support this as well.

I do think there needs to be a proper balance between utilizing a good RPG system that supports the style of play Bethesda is going for, and properly representing those outcomes in an intuitive manner as well. If you're putting 30 rounds into a human being's head and they're just shrugging it off, then not only is that not fun, but the game is also visually representing one thing, while the RPG mechanics are saying another.

In tabletop games, I prefer to think of Hit Points as something more than simple structural integrity. Health, fatigue, morale, and basic willpower all factor into it, ideally. 1 point of damage doesn't necessarily have to represent the amount of tissue damage a bullet causes as it grazes your arm. A close shot can also have an effect on your nerve and coolness under fire, undermining your will to fight, for example. Likewise, a hit that takes out half your HP at once doesn't have to mean your arm is hanging on by a thread. The benefit of having a GM translate the raw output of the game mechanics into a narrative context tends to be what makes these mechanics "work."

The problem, obviously, of a videogame is that you by necessity have limited interpretations - especially visually. A bullet will either hit or not, causing either no reaction on the part of the NPC, or a blood decal hopefully somewhat close to what you were pointing at. Which leads to the issue of seeing someone hit multiple times for low damage - the visual output and the mechanical output are counter-intuitive, if not directly contradictory. And I'm not sure what the "ideal" situation could be, honestly.

There's also a potential balancing issue involved. I recall in Mass Effect 1, for example - playing that game on anything above Hard difficulty just got ridiculous. I would be blasting named NPCs across the landscape with the Mako's main turret for minimal damage. This points to there being more to making a game challenging than simply tweaking the HP values of the player and NPCs.

So, "briefly," a proper balance needs to be found in making damage as it's visually represented intuitive and in accordance with player expectations; while doing so in a manner that doesn't contradict good fundamental RPG mechanics.

I would say that while I favor skill level as a variable in the damage range of a weapon, I do feel that most of a skill's "weight" probably ought to be in relation to accuracy (ie, skill level playing a larger factor in determining whether a shot hit than how much damage it does.)

One of the biggest complaints with Morrowind's combat was that the dice roll mechanic would often register a miss, especially at low skill levels, even though on-screen, the game was telling you that you had landed a solid hit. These last two posts show that in some ways we really haven't progressed that far from Morrowind's "clunky" combat system.

This can be somewhat explained away with swords or other melee weapons - it takes a lot of practice and skill to land truly effective hits on an opponent. With a gun at extremely close range though, the skill requirement is largely negated, as any hit (besides a graze) is much more likely to be a very hard and debilitating one, whether it's delivered by a novice who manages to get a lucky shot off, or by a seasoned marksman. And the odds of scoring a hit are also very high at close range; the skill component for using a gun really only starts to become a more significant factor when the target is at longer range. Another way to put it is that with a gun, delivered damage is a much more binary thing - you either do huge damage or none at all, whereas you can easily do "middling" damage with a melee weapon, especially if you're not skilled at using it, and/or your opponent is adept at dodging or blocking to at least attenuate the blow.

It's an interesting problem. Bethesda attempts to use a one-size-fits-all system to represent both combat types. Maybe it's time for them to look at treating them as two completely different methods of dealing damage, and develop different skill-based systems for them, each with its own set of multipliers and other tweaks to make both more satisfying.

Hmm... I think that what i would like to see most of all, is a proper town/city.

Not just the same pieced-together-with-junk town, but something akin to Vault City and NCR.

Proper housing and walls.

BTW, what is Vault Citys walls/buildings made off? Is it just normal walls with a wierd design or are they a kind of (Dune-ish) hardened sand-structures?

I always felt they were normal walls but the art design made them look like the hardened sand structured and I would love to see an actual developed city.

Dual Weild: The only way that I could see this as a viable game option is if ammo is much scarcer than the previous games. Say if you only had 4 rounds for your 1911 and 3 rounds of .357 for your revolver, then dual wielding makes sense. Or, sawn-off in your off hand and pistol in your dominant ( truth be told it would make the sawn-off a more useful weapon ).

Also, if human opfors reacted realistically to incoming fire ( I.E. Go to cover, run, duck/drop to ground etc ) instead of the ol' bumrush then dual wielding semi autos and/or revolvers could momentarily give you initiative against a group as a suppression action, thus giving you a chance to escape, get to cover, advance and engage, etc.

But all this is based on a much more realistic A.I.

I like the idea of melee/sidearm combo but just for flavor.

Heheh, I'm the other way around. I always figured it was made of sand, kinda like concrete... so, Sand-crete?

It is Sandcrete. They used the GECK to learn how to make it.