If stealth is no longer a skill per se, how will stealth actually work? Will you just pick a perk to enable stealth? I dont like the idea that you have to pick a perk in order to do a basic action.

I doubt it's a thing that hidden, you probably just start out with low stealth capabilities based on sound and lighting, moving slowly and all that, and perks enhance that from there.

Stealth is affected by your agility stat, there is also a perk which add further bonuses to stealth, including adding the effects of silent running at higher ranks.

There is a perk named Sneak for Agility 3. It makes you harder to detect when you're sneaking.

So it's as I feared. Sneak has been reduced to a binary system with a handful of 'set' sneak levels.

i'm guessing.. if it is no longer a skill.. stealth is no longer existing?

No more sneak?...

As opposed to the virtually meaningless progression from Sneak 40 to Sneak 41 on a scale of 1 to 100?

^This

Sneak, much like every skill in any game that uses a 1-100 skill system, only mattered roughly every 20 levels or so.

Agility, which now controls sneak, uses a 1-10 system, and we have perks to further augment agility's bonuses to sneak, so its not that simple of a mechanic, yet its not also as pointlessly bloated as before.

I do not understand this statement.

It will most likely go back to the old Sneak word phrase over "Stealth" like thing, that and the chinese recon suit we had seemed quite Overpowered, i liked the old Sneak better than the stealth gameplay we had with stealth boy and recon suit.

You will still be able to sneak from the very beginning. Just not very well. You will pick a perk to make you better at it.

Hopefully it is improved. Using a stealth based character in Skyrim was absolutely boring for the Ai was absolutely stupid. You would reach a point where you could pretty much just crouch two feet away with them not even noticing you. Total easy mode.

Say you have two characters, one at Agility 3 and one at Agility 10. The Agility 3 character can take the Sneak perk and is 20% harder to detect. The Agility 10 character gets the same perk bonus, but due to the higher Agility is harder to detect than the Agility 3 character. It might even work out that the Agility 10 character without the Sneak perk is harder to detect than the Agility 3 character with the Sneak perk. They would require more levels in the Sneak perk to be harder to detect than the Agility 10 character without the Sneak perk. Therefore to be the sneakiest, Agility 10 and Sneak 5 is required.

I agree sneaking in Skyrim was OP when a certain level was obtained. It changed from a sneak/stealth check to being "constantly invisible" no matter the action taken by the player.

Skills made it appear that with increases in points you were slightly better at sneaking, hacking, lockpicking.

It was obvious with hacking & lockpicking that the skill improvements were actually

I could sneak straight past the nose of a home owner when nicking their stuff

Yep. At a certain lvl in Skyrim I could one hit-one kill everything. Everything. It made the game really boring after that.

Ah. Thanks.

Sure, just like Small Guns (which has been broken down into Gunslinger, Commando, and Rifleman now), Big Guns, Melee, Unarmed, Barter, Medicine, and pretty much every skill from Fallout 3. No idea what the big deal is, and I have no idea how anyone can jump from "there's no sneak skill, nor are there any skills" to "there's no stealth in the game". They showed us a ranked Sneak perk (which includes Silent Running and Light Step in the ranks), and we see a Mr. Sandman perk just after it. Then there's the description for Agility. No idea where you're getting "binary" either.

I'd actually be down for instant-kills from stealth, at least on humanoid enemies, with the right set of perks and weapons - if they don't get killed instantly, they should at least get ragdolled IMO. I want the stealth to be balanced, but I also still want it to feel like a stealth game. Which means the balance would come in the form of smarter AI, like going on alert when they detect the corpse of their buddy.

The Agility stat is the base factor which determines your effectiveness at sneaking. Also, you had to put skill points into Stealth in the previous games to be good at sneaking. In Fallout 4 it's the same thing, except you pick five perk ranks instead which basically equal about 20 points per rank. Not to mention each rank of the Stealth perk will unlock different abilities, such as Light Step (a used to be perk from 3 and New Vegas). So, what exactly is the problem here?

I actually think this is a huge improvement. In Skyrim, you could break almost any element of the game by stacking multipliers to skills. Now the perks add multipliers to a static base skill. Sounds like it is basically the same as Skyrim but everyone is stuck at 20 sneak skill for the entire game. I'm expecting that at max sneak you will still get kinda bored by how easy the game becomes, but I am hoping that will require a high level (due to perk requirements) rather than just a high agility.

the sneak perk is the skill and it has ranks so rank 1 is like 20% more silent so by rank 5 its like 100% stealth like the sneak skill at 100, so instead of numbers like 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 its just ranks 1,2,3,4,5, it eliminates the for the most part useless numbers in between, like having lockpick at 99

The best sneaking was in Morrowind. You could waltz into the Vivic vault wearing yellow, cymbals on your toes and 20 10-year olds throwing firecrackers and the damned guards wouldn't see you.

I'm sure the serious-minded hated it ("Oh, it's so unrealistic...") but I thought it was a gas.

I hope sneaking in F4 is as much fun.

Did you use 100% Chameleon for that? I couldn't Sneak for crap in Morrowind, Illusion magic was pretty much always the better option.

Hmm... It's been a while but yeah, probably. So I guess the rough equivalent of having a 100% sneak, the Assassin suit and a pip-boy.

Seriously, I hope the sneaking is nice and tricky; I like using the environment, tricking guards, all that jazz. But I also hope there are enemies that no amount of sneaking will fool.

And yes, after many hours of effort I hope to be able to achieve impossible sneaking stunts. Because it's fun.

The game needs to balance sneak success with the Perception of the nearby AI (and give NPC actively searching a PER bonus). It should be easy to sneak past a sleeping or otherwise occupied NPC, but nearly impossible to sneak past an alert guard (certainly not sneak thru their line of sight). Hopefully the new system will fix some of the glaring OPness of late game sneaking in past Beth games, but they need to change the way NPC detect sneak attempts as well. Also, why should you be able to KNOW if someone detects you? I always thought that portion of the sneak system was questionable.