This is actually a somewhat minor but important aspect of game play flow that BGS has not addressed to my knowledge. When you are in combat, it's absolutely a pain to have to open up your inventory if you need to switch weapons or armor. Skyrim resolved this by creating the very popular "favorites menu" in which it allowed the player to quickly switch between weapons, spells, armor, etc., while staying in the action.

Fallout 4 could just copy and paste this system, or they could go with a traditional weapon toggle that is standard in first person shooters. Just give us a pre-determined amount of slots for weapons and allow us to switch between them in real time while fighting. Whichever system you prefer, it's absolutely crucial BGS has added this functionality to Fallout 4.

Do we know if BGS has spoken on this issue? Do you prefer one system over the other? Would you want something entirely different? Post your thoughts.

According to people at the gamescom demo the game uses a item wheel similar to what we seen in other recent videogames.

So then your answer is Fallout 4 is using a traditional weapon toggle system of sorts. Somewhat similar to Fallout 4 and some other recent first person shooters. That's fine and certainly that would make more sense than just a favorites menu which achieves the barebones minimum if this information is accurate. It's difficult to know as BGS is keeping everything under wraps and we won't know until release. Hopefully, whatever system they have incorporated will make sense and allow us to stay in the action at all times.

As I heard it its more like a favorites list shaped like a wheel, so its not just guns on the wheel, but any item you add to the list.

That's interesting. I think there should be some limitations with respect to what you can change in combat. Armor, for instance, is probably something you shouldn't be able to switch on the dime. It will also depend on how large the wheel is.

This will be useful since now we will probably be confused by all those modified weapons.

I was fine with the way they did the quick select in F3/NV, but whatevs, I don't mind trying something different.

Yeah. I didn't even really think about this. With how flexible weapons are now, carrying gear is probably going to be a bit complicated and involved. I'm curious to see how that all works.

*crosses fingers* Hopefully the item wheel is just the consoles interface.

Skyrim actually had hotkeys like Fallout 3 & NV did.... you assigned numbers while in the favorites menu. (I think my typical load for a fighter was sword on 1, bow on 2, shield on 3, and then either Heal or a special weapon on 4. Just hitting 1 or 2 would toggle between sword/shield and bow. I had shield hotkeyed just so I could get rid of it fast when I wanted it to disappear - screenshots/etc. )

So even if they do another Favorites menu, I still expect that we'll be able to hotkey stuff.

Op you realize in NV you could easily bind weapons to hot keys and only open the menu when you needed to change out weapons. Once you find a weapon path you might hardly ever change that often.

The wheel would make changes faster on consoles.

Just hope you don't have two versions of the same gun, say one heavy barrel and large scope for sniping and one with extended magazine and fast cycle receiver for high dps.

Controllers has an problem with too few buttons for games with loads of options. Might be an idea if they switched one stick for an 9 button pad.

Uses an mod on SKyrim to get more than 8 shortcut keys.

Just rename the weapons, problem solved.

NV wasn't developed by BGS. Keybinding is an archaic approach to switching weapons. I'd rather the game have built-in functionality, such as this wheel, to change between weapons.

Eh. The hotkeys on the PC version were in a 8-box "ring", so I imagine that on a controller it worked that way (selecting weapons/items using the 8 direction on the D-pad, I presume?).

So it's a ring on a controller, and number keys on a keyboard. How would you do it differently / how is that archaic?

(Also, hotkeys worked the same way in Fallout 3, Oblivion, and Skyrim... "built in functionality". It's not something Obsidian came up with.)

edit: or are we talking past each other with "hotkeys" and "keybinds". I'm talking about the in-game system where you go into your inventory, hold down one of the keys 1-8, and then click on an item to assign that item to that key. (FO3/NV/OB. In Skyrim, it's in Favorites menu). Not editing in keybinds in the .ini file or anything.

it's funny in my first & second full playthroughs of Fallout 3 & my first in new vegas I never used hotkeys but someone told me " you've been playing fallout 3 for 2 years & you never knew about hotkeys!" so I started to use the hotkeys & now I can't think of a reason not to in fallout 4 it's so useful.

Yep that's precisely how it worked.

Honestly the menu access doesn't bother me; and didn't register as an issue.

If they implement a hotkey system it doesn't affect me either way, but I would prefer that whatever system they implement, deduct APs for the switch. PC's should not be able to swap weapons (or use consumables) out without a time cost, and at the very least VATS should be affected by rapid equipment swaps just before activation. IMO opening the Pipboy should cost APs, and use of any consumable items in it should cost them ~(further depleting APs, such that VATS might not be available immediately afterwards).

APs == time, and these actions should all expend an amount of time to complete.

Sounds quite useless if the game isn't turn-based.

I'd imagine Fallout 4 already has the action-RPG equivalent, which is a time-consuming animation of us putting away our current weapon and drawing our new one. It's already confirmed from Quakecon that Stimpaks have a brief animation themselves.

That, and the items are already dynamically named anyway with prefixes and other attachments. So you'd have a Compensated Scoped Pipe Rifle, a Tactical Silenced Pipe Rifle, etc. Not sure why that would necessitate an overhaul of how the inventory works, which we haven't seen in any of the Pipboy footage anyway.

But yeah, all I've heard about the favorites menu is that it's radial, and you can hotkey stimpaks among other things. I'd guess that means that you can only have so many things in the menu at once; I wouldn't mind if it was designed as a loadout, so we could decide which melee, pistol, rifle, and heavy weapons we'd have quick access to alongside consumables like Stims and chems of our choice. That's probably how I'll be setting up my favorites menu anyway.

Really? Oh it's something I wanted for so long! Can't wait to see my character sticking a stimpak in his arm, or his leg. For some reason, I really like animations in FPS games.

Seeing your character swiftly sticking the stimpak in its leg, then perhaps pressing it to start the healing and maybe clutch his hand from the pain, it would be really awesome to see.

To not do this is giving the PC an unfair advantage. Spent APs are [supposed to be] time committed to action. To allow the PC access to VATS and instant hot-keyed equipment swapping, is egregious IMO, without some kind of AP cost.

Was there an AP cost in FO3, for reloading during VATS? (I don't recall.)

Also... Does activating VATS skip equipment swapping animations?

I believe Fallout 3 was supposed to work this way originally--accessing the Pipboy, reloading, and similar actions would deplete AP. I've recently bought the FO3 Prima guide, and it describes this functionality. I think this feature was removed during play testing, perhaps because people were confused by it (didn't see the connection between realtime actions and AP). I vaguely recall it being discussed in an interview around the time of FO3's release.

Now that AP can be used for other things like sprinting in real time, perhaps it would make sense to bring back AP drain for other actions in FO4.

No reloading cost for VATS in F3. Say you qued 3 rounds of VATS, two rounds fire, "uh oh, didn't reload before I started", reload animation played, third round fired. To me, it should have cost the point to VATS, and really I should've only been able to fire two shots because the reload took up the third point.

The enemies aren't operating off AP, either. Nor do any of the other general actions, like moving (no AP cost to press W and move forward 5 feet, etc). It's just not a turn based game.

VATS and AP were added in as a homage/callback/nostalgia for the earlier games, that's it. AP-use is not the core of gameplay.

That said, you should be happy that they're apparently adding a second "special" action that'll use AP - sprinting.

Hmm, I don't think you could even swap weapons in VATS - just queue up attacks (with it reloading if you ran out of ammo). As for starting a weapon swap and then triggering VATS in the middle of the animation.... sounds like an incredibly contrived situation that would take amazingly good player timing to pull off. If it even does anything.