If nothing else starting with only 28 Special stat points is a good sign for replayability.

Biggest replayability problem with Fallout 3 and Fallout NV was that the PCs started to all look the same once you got to the later stages of the game and started maxing out your skills.

The Lone Survivor starts with a total of 28 Special stat points.

That is 12 points less than what the Lone Wanderer and the Courier started with.

Assuming that you can raise stats using Perks (with no limit) then you would have to put 42 perks in to raising all your stats to 10.

Plus there are 70 other basic perks in Fallout 4 based on the perk chart.

It looks like your special stats will limit what perks you can get since Perks often had stat requirements in both of the previous Fallouts.

There are 10 perks under each Special stat on the chart so it is likely getting Science 4 would require a high intelligence (plus the other Science perks).

That means it would take till level 112 to max your stats enough to get all the basic perks.

Now they say there is no level cap, but even if there isn't one, it would take a long time to reach that level.

Each Sole Survivor should have very different stats and perks.

They did say they wanted to make the Special Stats play a larger role in the game and I can't think of a better way than to limit how far they can be raised and make them a requirement for perks.

It should also work out to almost the same progression.

In Fallout 3, it would take you two levels to raise a skill to a break point (25,50,75,100) and you got one perk every level.

For Fallout NV, it was almost the same for the skills and one perk every two levels.

So in Fallout 4, with seventy perks, it must be one perk per level.

So if one perk goes in to a skill Perk like Science, and the perk you get next level goes towards increasing your stats or some other special ability, then your progression should be roughly between Fallout 3 and Fallout NV.

With your Special stats having such a very direct impact on the game (look at the Vault Tec registration form Special descriptions) and stat requirements on perks, each play through should feel very different.

It wouldn't be dumbing down the system if going to only perks would help prevent this.