Could be that I am mis-remembering this, but I could have sworn that I read somewhere that we would gain experience in skills individually, rather than just generic xp that we can use to increase whatever we want. I readily admit this may be misinformation I recall from discussions about how Skyrim handled their experience system.

I definitely DO remember, in one of the videos, seeing experience rewards fly up when the PC was modifying weapons at the workbench, however. That could still be generic xp that he was earning, but if it WERE xp specific to modding weapons, what would that mean? Is there a progress meter for every "skill/perk" so that you have to fill up the Gun Nut Rank 1 bar to max before you can purchase Gun Nut Rank 2? Or does becoming more skilled in Gun Nut rank 1 just allow you to craft better quality weapons? But still not the new weapons that Gun Nut Rank 2 would unlock for you?

In Skyrim, if you used a bow, your archery skill would increase, making you a better archer. You would have to spend perk points to get special abilities like the ability to zoom in the bow, or get increased critical hits or something, but the base accuracy/damage was based on your skill with the weapon, which increased as you used it.

If you used Blacksmithing to craft things (like 500 iron daggers) then your blacksmithing experience would increase and you would become a better blacksmith. You would NOT, however, automatically learn how to craft Ebony armor --- you'd just be a very good Iron blacksmith. You would have to spend perks in order to unlock the ability to craft Ebony armor and weapons.

If Fallout-4 has no skill measure, so that everyone is just as proficient as every other person at using a pistol, for example, then there seems no point to having individual "skill experience". If that were the case, and you have to have Gun Nut rank 1 to build THIS thing, then once you have Gun Nut rank 1 you can build that thing exactly as good as anyone else with Gun Nut rank 1. To make something else, you might be required to get Gun Nut Rank 2 perk but once you unlock that perk, boom, you can craft all the things it allows as good as anyone else.

On the one hand, I am not fond of "grinding" skills (like making 500 iron daggers to build up Blacksmithing) but on the other hand, it makes a kind of sense that if I use my bow/gun ALL the time, then I would be more accurate / do more damage than some Joe Shmoe who picked up a bow/gun for the first time and started using it.

As much as I exploited it, one of the things that always irked me about Fallout was that I could just hack computers, talk to people, and pick locks and gain experience and level up and then put skill points into my Small Guns skills and then buy a perk to give me increased criticals with my combat attacks.... even though I did not touch a weapon at ALL in order to get the experience to make those changes / advancements.

In previous Fallout games, if you had Small Guns skill of 10 then your barrel would sway and you'd miss a lot of shots... if you had 100 Small Guns skill, the barrel did not move and you could put the shots where you wanted. In Fallout-4, with no Small Guns skill, are all weapons now rock-steady or do they all sway?

While I can understand why the new perks replace some skills --- lockpicking really only ever had four or five 'ranks', and then it was all up to your player skill to unlock ---- other skills don't seem to have discrete Ranks (Speech, Medicine, Repair, weapons).

Rambled off point a bit there, sorry. Core question was whether we have individual "skill" experience based on WHAT we do, or if its going to be generic xp that we can earn by doing one thing (lockpicking), and then spend the rewards on something else entirely (guns).

Elder Scrolls has skills level through use, but Fallout (including Bethesda's Fallout) just has general XP rewarded from doing things. Which for F4 probably includes things like adding to our settlement, or crafting equipment. I don't think Bethesda went with a TES-styled leveling system for F4; what we know of SPECIAL and leveling doesn't really fit with that.

Fallouts xp is so much better than the use stuff of TES

I'm apt to disagree. Me and my brother have had extensive talks about this, being the TES nerds we are, and we are both in agreement that if you spend enough time practicing a skill, the better you should get at it, rather than periodic intervals of progression allowance. The way TES does it feels more organic to me.

Going out in the yard with your brother with wood shields hacking at each other with sticks would never make you masters of weapon and shield melee even if you did it 16 hrs day everyday.

But someone who had killed, oh say 1500 people in cc with his hands, two handed weapons, bows, mounted combat etc. would be alot more deadly than you if he got a shield and sword.

just because you do something over and over doesnt make you great at it. You need smarts, talent,strength, specialised training etc.

Xp points does this much better than letting bandits whack at my characters because their armor skill is 35 when my attack skills are 100 (it is easy to kill fast and effective) and then i have to lame around letting my character get hit. I hate that.

While that's true, grinding healing and crafting @#$%ing svcked. Although, that may be an issue of xp reward balancing rather than a systemic flaw.

So many skills.you have to grind. I hate that system

I think that it might feel more organic for the individual skills you use throughout a playthrough, but less organic for your character progression as a whole.

With TES's system, let's say your character only uses two-handed, heavy armor, smithing, and alchemy. Once you've maxed those out, you're done progressing naturally, and you might be stuck at level 17 or whatever from the midpoint of the game all the way to the end. The only way for your character to grow and progress further (barring the added-late legendary skills) is to grind skills you wouldn't normally use. I'm not a fan of any leveling system that requires grinding to max out most skills.

Fallout's system, while not designed to focus on individual skills, insures that your characters grow from all of their experiences (which is what 'experience' points are intended to represent). If you play the game to the end, you can almost guarantee that you will have a late-game character, because this system has you constantly moving forward with the game. Of course, there's no limit how far you can take this, so every game so far has given a level cap to keep everyone from playing the exact same maxed out characters. It has worked well so far.

Perhaps. But killing lots of guys with my gun wouldn't necessarily make me amazing at picking locks (which you can do, by sticking the skill points you earn into that skill).

Each system has it's plusses and minuses. That's why it's nice we have games that do both (and other methods), so that we can have variety.

I agree

Well, we have to hope (and the evidence in the gameplay we've seen thus far supports) that BGS kept general XP because that works better for Fallout. TES has always used level up with skill use, but Fallout has not (and really should not). TES' "level skills with use" is good in some ways but really bad in others (e.g., poor leveling rate for various skills leads to a need to grind to get your character developed to match the concept you have in mind rather than actually playing the game with the character). The latter issue is fodder for another thread, though.

For Fallout, BGS definitely needs to balance the XP awards so that various important acts are not awarded token XP. There were way too many actions in FO3 and FONV that awarded "token" XP rather than XP amounts that actually meant something for many characters. For example, it makes no sense that disarming a trap is basically worthless (maybe 2 XP or so?) when said trap could seriously hurt or even kill you if it isn't disarmed first. This concern is in addition to the simple fact of roleplaying, of course, where any character with modest abilities would definitely disarm traps rather than deliberately trigger them.

Let's hope that awarded XP (and by association, the XP leveling rate) is properly balanced for all actions/events.

Thing is, this highlights one of the things I think is wrong with the Fallout 3 / New Vegas method of giving experience --- you could get 60 xp for picking a lock and then use that experience to increase your Guns skill. One time, in New Vegas, I was trying to get to the Medical Clinic to buy the Intelligence Augment to bump me to 10 INT before I leveled... and I had to stop myself from habitually unlocking every lock and hacking every computer, and even avoiding "exploring" new areas or fighting foes since those all give experience.

I'm not saying picking locks, winning speech challenges*, or exploring new areas should not reward SOME experience.... I just don't like the idea that that kind of experience will suddenly make me a better ~marksman~.

Sidenote: * With no Speech skill with % chance of success, does that mean there ARE no speech challenges, or will they be "hidden" and you just don't SEE any speech option for which you do not have sufficient Charisma perks? In New Vegas, you could see that there was a dialog option that listed [ 25/45 Barter ] meaning that you had a 25 Barter skill but the challenge required a 45 Barter skill to succeed..... in Fallout 4 will you just get a notice that [ Barter Rank 3 ] is required for a given dialog option, or will that option just not show at ALL if you do not have Barter Rank 3?

While I do agree that Skyrim's system felt more organic, I prefer to know how many points I am getting, and where they apply if they are specific to a skill. If general XP is earned, I am okay with it because I will choose to spend my perk points on perks or skills at level up that I am actively using ala Skyrim system. This allows me to use a best of both worlds system that I enjoy most in my game.

For me, it's less about realism and more, can I play the game the way I want to without having to worry about how it affects my leveling? I don't want to have to spend any time grinding, or doing things my character wouldn't do just for the sake of XP. Fallout's system does that; Skyrim's too, although I hate the attribute multipliers and grindiness in the leveling systems for Morrowind and Oblivion. Daggerfall honestly had a better system, in some ways. Some ways.

As for skill checks, we've never actually seen one in use... but they might be color-coded, since there was an oddly colored option in Codsworth's dialog.

Did the TES games force you to grind skills? I never found that. I just played the way I wanted to, muddled through the hard parts, got good at what I wanted to do (not grinding, just playing) and moved on.

What I did find awkward was with Oblivion's levelling system, where practising a non-combat skill (alchemy) boosted my character's intelligence, as did conjuration - so my character levelled very fast and was quickly outclassed by the level of enemies I encountered. So there was quite a long period where I could only respond to enemies by running away frantically summoning as fast and often as I could - which kind of made matters worse when running away across country. I once ended up at a town gate pursued by a little parade of wisps, minotaurs and other assorted monsters.

I still feel bad about the guards who died while I cowered behind them, still summoning .

But I survived

Forced?

I like to play tanky super killers. But when i had max attack skill my armor was garbage due to fast kills. So i had to let enemies hit me to lvl it. I hated that

Ah, right. So the problem was that armour skill rose too slowly, or attack skill rose too fast, so fighting naturally the armour skill lagged behind unnaturally.

Yeah, that system may have been fine in theory, but I agree it was way too prone to balance issues.

Ok, I understand the grinding bit now. I never went in for it, but I can see how people would want to to get the character they wanted to play.

There probably won't be "skill XP". You won't improve in a skill if you don't invest in the perks.

It has essentially been http://www.gameinformer.com/games/fallout_4/b/playstation4/archive/2015/07/26/fallout-4-quakecon-presentation.aspx?utm_content=buffer11c8a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer&PostPageIndex=2 for the most part.

Gun Slinger for pistols at level 2 of agility

Commando for rifles at level 3 of agility

Sniper rifle at level 8 of perception

So I'm wondering will they completely gimp players who use a pistol, but don't invest any points into Gun Slinger? If Gun Slinger is a defacto "handgun skill" (like some of you have suggested) then having no Gun Slinger perks would essentially be like having a handgun skill of zero. I can easily see someone using handguns the entire game and never investing in the Gun Slinger perk.

For TES, Bethesda did work really hard to get the skills to level more appropriately, though. Like, in the older games skills only measured use, not effectiveness; it was more efficient to constantly cast 1 point spells, get repeatedly hit by weak enemies, or repeatedly attack enemies with a fast, weak weapon to level your skills. In Skyrim, skills level by how much magicka the spell costs (and only if it's used in appropriate context), or how much damage you inflict/absorb. I also feel like part of the reason they dumped Athletics and Acrobatics was in how you leveled them; Athletics only leveled at a decent pace if it was a major skill, and if you wanted to raise Acrobatics you'd be bunny hopping literally everywhere, which was just silly. (I still think an Athletics skill that combined Unarmed, Unarmored, Athletics, and Acrobatics would be a more desirable skill tree than Lockpicking, just saiyan)

Yes, however it was hardly unnaturally, you did not use your armor as you killed your enemies very fast, solution might be to increase difficulty or not use OP weapons and +40% damage enchants.

yes Oblivion had an problem as you wanted to grind minor skills to get good multiples for attributes.

Skyrim did this right however they should kept attributes and added the intense training perk from fallout.

I have an better experience from Fallout 3, wanted to get perfect score in the wasteland survivor guide quest so I needed to hack an computer, problem was that my science was to low, but I was close to leveling up.

Solution go downtown and grind supermutants its obvious that this will increase science.

And yes Fallout 4 will use xp as Fallout 3 as it has no skills. ESO uses an compromise system where you need to level up by xp and can pick a perk on level up, however you need experience in skill to unlock the perks.

skyrim's way of handling it wasn't very good but i do like skill xp. classes should determine how much experience you get in a skill when you use it (along with other factors like how exactly it's being used) instead of having everything level at a horrible pace (i have never and will never master black smithing, even on a black smith/warrior i made). i also do not want the TES leveling system in fallout

I think both styles have merits, i enjoy the skill up system alot more and i really enjoyed it in Skyrim in terms of gameplay. It sort of "ruined" the character creation abit, not beeing able to select the focus skills to level on. Then again the problem in Morrowind and Oblivion was that you couldn't level on more than those 7 skills, which was kind of silly, atleast late in the game. We already know it will go back to pure experience in Fallout 4 and i don't mind, it fits that series and the skill up fits TES.

We have seen no hint for skill xp... From what I have seen it's pretty clear we will have general XP like allways.