Even as some of the greatest entries in the open world RPG genre, there are a number of major problems that seem to pop up in every Bethesda game. Fallout 4 is already making some big efforts to fix these legacy issues, and this list looks at what they've fixed, what they haven't fixed, and what's still up in the air.

Confirmed Solved:

Redundant Skills System- The new SPECIAL perks-based leveling system looks to be a huge improvement over past games’ skills increases. The old games already relied on benchmarks (25, 50, 75, 100) for many skills to show real improvements, so FO4’s system is not only streamlined, it’s more accurate.

Weapon Variety/Customization- New Vegas dipped its figurative toes into weapon modding with a few basic components, but it looks like we’ll be able to personalize every weapon we find in FO4. With the sheer volume of variations for every slugger, rifle and laser, this feels like the first game in the series where downloading weapon mod compilations won’t be necessary to spice things up.

Useless Clutter- As a side-effect of the weapon customization, we finally have a use for all of the random junk laying around the environments. Whether this exacerbates the problems with hoarding and encumbrance remains to be seen.

Clunky Gunplay- It’s not Destiny, but shooting looks really clean compared to FO3. Animations feel less jilted, and things like pistol-whipping make VATS less necessary when dealing with speedy enemies or groups.

Alternatives to Fast Travel- The ability to summon Vertibirds to travel around the wasteland seems like a decent middle ground between walking and teleportation. Let’s just hope it’s a smoother experience than Dragon Riding was.

Arbitrary Level Cap- Yes, your potential to be overpowered is now greater than ever, but that beats the feeling of completing an entire DLC campaign after hitting the level cap and thinking to yourself “If Bethesda had just raised the cap in this DLC, I’d be like 5 levels higher right now.”


Confirmed Unsolved:

Separate Interior Cells- The first big letdown thus far; environments are extremely complex in Bethesda games, it takes loads of processing power needed to keep track of every interactable object, NPC AI routine + equipment and stats, and how these things react to each gunshot and explosion. This makes it very tough to seamlessly integrate dense interiors with huge amounts of objects and NPCs with the rest of the world. There was a lot of optimism that the Next Gen transition would solve this issue, but it looks like the new systems still lack the processing power to give us a fully integrated world.


To be Determined:

Bugs- The obvious one. Bethesda seems to be taking a solid 2 months for bugfixing before the game goes Gold, so they’re putting effort into dealing with this. We’ll definitely have to wait until November to see if their work paid off.

Enemy Variety- Mods adding enemy variants (Martigen’s Mutant Mod, MoMod, etc) have always seemed essential for past Bethesda games, where every Mirelurk and Vicious Dog looked exactly the same. The Feral Ghouls we’ve seen so far all look pretty similar to each other, so hopefully this isn’t indicative of a low variety of appearances. Combine this with the fact that just about every enemy type shown thus far was in FO3 (molerats, yao guai, mirelurks, etc) and there’s some cause for concern.

Difficulty Scaling- FO3’s level scaling was an improvement over Oblivion’s, but it was still pretty broken, especially after installing the Broken Steel DLC meant the Wasteland was suddenly crawling with bullet-sponge Albino Radscorpions and Feral Ghoul Reavers. Skyrim’s system is the best so far, and it looks to be what Bethesda is using for FO4, but the end result remains to be seen.

Difficulty Levels- Simply put, past Bethesda games have treated the “Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard” options as “how much of a bullet sponge do you want your enemy to be?” The Witcher 3 made every difficulty level feel distinct, giving enemies new abilities and adding caveats to Geralt’s skills without ever seeming unfair or tedious, and Bethesda should definitely try something similar. Bonus points if the difficulty is a modular menu, allowing you to turn features on and off at your preference (options like “Ammo has weight,” “Stimpaks heal over time,” “Increased health for enemies,” etc).

Other Minor FO3 Gameplay Issues:

Unlimited Ammo for Enemies- This makes sense in a straight shooter, where keeping a constant flow of action is important, but it’s out of place in a survival RPG where resources are meant to be scarce.

VATS Wonkiness- 95% chance to hit… except that we didn’t calculate for the weird collision on the object you were using for cover, so you just emptied five rounds into the wall right in front of you.

Repair is too Strict- “Oh, a Chinese Assault Rifle? Sorry, you can’t repair that with regular assault rifles.” New Vegas fixed this with the “Jury Rigging” perk, something FO4 should definitely have.

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Thoughts? Did I miss anything?

Fallout is not a survival game, nor was it ever meant to be. Fallout 3 wasn't even a survival game.

Repair seems to not exist outside PA.

I'd like to add floaty running to that list. A lot of times in 3/NV it felt like I was gliding everywhere.

Honestly? I don't care how powerful a system is, I kind of prefer major "interior" spaces to be separate cells. Especially with the wonky physics & random "open world" happenings in Bethesda games.... I'd really hate for a cool location to be ruined because some wandering Raiders & BoS dudes lobbed a Mini Nuke too close to it. Loading Screens have never bothered me.

And, random aside...

...you know, I've never felt that way? (Heck, my first play of FO3, I hit the 20 cap just on sidequests, before I'd even made it to GNR in the main quest. I finally finished the MQ at 25 hours elapsed, and then went on to play that character for another 50 hours beyond that. And I wasn't bothered by the fact I wasn't leveling.)

oh my god that god awfull moonwalk crap that that war rampant in morrowind oblivion and fallout 3/nv and for some reason fallout 3/nv had it the worst! Thank god they put a stop to that in skyrim.

Considering that you can literally build weapon parts, power generators, and buildings out of random junk, it seems Jury Rigging is an innate part of the game (unlocked/bolstered by perks like Gun Nut & Science). Weapon and armor degradation seems not to be a thing in the game, from what has been examined from the gameplay videos we've been shown thus far. Whether or not that's a good thing is up to individual opinion, but personally, I'm somewhat giddy at the notion that building & modding brand new weapons, buildings, and settlements has taken its place.

Armor and weapons may actually break in Fallout 4 not just Power Armor. The pcgamer.com employees who went to QuakeCon 2015 talked to Pete Hines about CND when they saw Health for the Power Armor and all Pete Hines said we won't be talking about that yet and Todd Howard said more details soon, the pcgamer.com employees even said their is a visual inspecting type system for the weapons where you can look at them if they are rusty, etc.

No way Pete Hines would say we won't be talking about that yet when the pcgamer.com employees talked about CND existing in Fallout 4 or not. If CND did not exist in Fallout 4 all Pete Hines would of said is only Power Armor breaks in Fallout 4.

Yes, but that's not really "repair" as people think of it normally, a skill one levels up, or a condition bar one looks at on their inventory menu.

Its more like "part maintenance" now then actual repair.

I really hope repairing armor and weapons is in Fallout 4. From the way Pete Hines and Todd Howard talked it makes me believe armor and weapons will break in Fallout 4.

I dont really care wither way, so long as its NOT in the game like it was in Fo3/NV.

They thought it svcked, tried to fix it, found that none of their ideas were really any better, and so just removed it entirely? Good for me. I respect any dev who is willing to go "we couldn't find a way to do it that didn't svck, so we didn't do it at all, as we didn't want to leave a [censored] and broken system in the game, thus dragging down the quality".

They thought it svcked, tried to fix it, made up something new that worked? Also good for me.

As long as its not the same utterly abysmal [censored] we got in Fo3 and NV I am happy.

...you're talking about repair? Huh. As a general concept, I think it fits well in the "scavenging leftovers from The Time Before" post-apoc thing (which is why I'd be a bit disappointed if there's no repair/maintenance system at all). As it was implemented in FO3/NV.... honestly, it seemed fine. It certainly doesn't seem worthy of such strong reactions.

But Fallout isn't post-apocalyptic, its post-post-apocalyptic. There is supposed to be some rebuilding going on, and even with what little Fallout 3 had, they still had ample weapons and ammo. Guns are not supposed to be this precious thing from a time before that are rare and always breaking down, guns are supposed to be common items that people still make after the war.

As for repair in Fo3 and NV, it just svcked, and utterly failed to do what repair is supposed to do. It never actually MATTERED, because it was so easy to get everything repaired, or find something to repair it with, that the negatives from not repairing your stuff never came up. It never negatively impacted your items, it just caused you to have to spend 1 minute fast traveling to the nearest repair guy to get your stuff repaired every hour or so.

Fo3 had the additional problem of making everything get worse after taking 1 hit with your armor, or firing one shot with your gun, which doesn't make sense. But the repair skill actually somewhat mattered, as it determined how much you could repair things, and no merchant had over likr a 60 repair skill, so you really did NEED the repair skill to get your stuff back up to top condition. But that was largely negated by the ease at which you could buy top condition guns, and how many skill points one could acquire making actually putting points into repair not negatively impact you in any way.

On the other hand, NV fixed Fo3's major problem by making items only start losing effectiveness after a certain threshold, BUT, utterly ruined the rest of the system in every way possible. They made the repair skill worthless, as you could repair items to 100%, even with the base 15 skill, it just took a few more items. On top of that, there were several easily accessible merchants with 100 repair skill, making needing to take the repair skill even more pointless, as you could just pay them to fix it for you. To further compound the issue they added in weapon repair kits, which weren't that hard to make, and utterly negated the already negated repair skill, but also negated the cost trade off of using merchants to repair your stuff, thus further unbalancing the system, at least when it came to weapons. and it still had the problems of it being easy to buy top condition guns, and having way too many skill points to make actually putting anything into repair prevent you from doing something else.

And both had the problem of the condition bar being just that, a singular bar, where every part of your weapon just got magically worse all at the same time, which isn't how it happens at all.

It was just bad, from top to bottom.

Some of my requests but not super worried considering it can all be modded anyways.

1. Loot collection streamlining. For example a player can go through as usual and loot stuff but also give an option when an area is clear to call in a vertibird say with mr handy who goes around collects loot and brings it back to a storage location.

2. Inventory management/space (hardcoe request). Given a loot streamline process I think FO4 should implement a finite amount of inventory space to limit how much we can carry and not just weight. As a bonus for intelligent characters they can pack things more efficiently giving reduced item sizes. Not a big deal and could be modded.

3. Realistic reload: Switch to a magazine system instead of just bullets for most guns (hardcoe request?). Perhaps an additional advantage of energy weapons is that they just use cells and don't need magazines.

This is one of the things that bothered me about New Vegas. It used the same decrepit POS weapon models that FO3 did. This despite the fact that you had groups like the Gunrunners manufacturing and selling brand new guns. Obsidian even lampshaded this with a snide remark from one of the Gunrunners. Something about being unable to believe what passed for a weapon in those parts.

We should be glad Obsidian didn't change the texutres TBH.

Given that they somehow managed to make all generic NCR and Legion armors look like they were half the resolution of the armors they copied from Fallout 3. I dread to see how them trying to redo all the weapons would have turned out.

I will be extremely disasspointed if Super Mutants can still haphazardly shoot their rockets at me at their leisure.

The leaked video from Gamescom showed the Sole Survivor giving the dog an instruction to go around picking up anything of value from the Super Duper Mart. How comprehensive a system it is, what he grabs, and if Dogmeat's the only one who can do such a thing remain to be seen, however.

Do we know if enemies will have customized weapons equipped as well? Like, will every raider be using the same laser rifle, or could they be toting randomized guns like a "focused laser sniper rifle?"

It would certainly go a long way towards solving issues with loot variety.

I really do think Bethesda likes to make children a little extra rude just to piss off the players who take it way too seriously. I loved Mayor MacCready, and Little Lamplight in general.

As for seamless interior/exterior transitions, that's not a performance limitation as much as it is a design choice. It's how the engine was built, and it accommodates their workflow of building areas from modular pieces. One of the quest compass markers in the E3 footage showed a door icon, so I'm pretty sure that indicates an interior/exterior transition like it does in TES games. It's not really a big deal, the loading times are the important thing.

My biggest complaint would be.... Fatman won't lock on at decent ranges... you almost have to be right on top of the target in F3 but from looking at the E3 demo it looks a bit better now. Maybe I won't get a radioactive tan this time heh.

Actually though, me real complaint would be that annoying nudge you got occasionally while walking. You would go to move forwarn a little bit and then it's like someone gives you a kick and you slide forward about four feet. When trying to get an interact interface to pop up so you can open a box or something was when it was the most annoying. But like they say at the Planet Express... GOOD NEWS EVERYBODY... it's a new engine... compared to Fallout 3/NV. No more Gamebyro so hopefully, no more nudge, nudge, wink, wink, ARRRGH, ARRRGH.

As a note - discussion of killing children is strictly prohibited on this forum. Let's steer clear of that particular topic please.

In the Concord gameplay, the player picks up a pipe assault rifle with a scope already attached. So, it appears that way.

Did you try laying off the Med-X?

i hope on the world side of things that bethseda take a leaf out of obsidians book and even their own book and add in more netural npcs in the wasteland. I liked walking around in new vegas and running into scavengers searching around in the world and also in oblivion where you had a chance of finding an orc adventure in random dungeons. I also dont want to be the only guy running around in spotlessly clean power armour. one of my gripes with skyrim was the fact that i was the only person running around in full deadric or dwarven armor. hell the only time iver saw anyone in full ebony armour besides my self was the ebony warrior. Not even the orcs in the stronghold would were orcish except for one chief who was part of a quest.

I also want the world be unleveled as well. I dont want to walk around the world at lvl 1 and only fight rad roaches , wild dogs and low level raiders. I want to walk around the world at level one and actual see raiders in makeshift power armour mixed in with low level raiders, i want giant radscorpions to be mid tier enemies that i have to run from at low levels. I dont want deathclaws to just be found in 2-3 places of the map. By all means have their nest areas like Old Ony and Quarry Junction, but also have them out and about in the wasteland so that you have always be careful ( obviously i dont expect to see a deathclaw appear outside of a BoS base unless its a corpse).

Basically i want the world grow outside of what my characters level is when compared to skyrim. a perfect example is road to Bleak falls barrow. below level 15 you might encounter a wolf betweenthe riverwood bridge and the tower with 3 bandits but above that lvl 15 you would instead fight a frost troll. Another example is Whiterun Hold, below level 10 you will not find a single sabercat, just wolves and skeevers, but once you hit level 10 bam sabercats suddenly appear and then at lvl 13-15 bears start to appear.