This isnt what we want, this is what we know is going to happen.

Just look at the reveal trailer. Core is full when the player character gets in, a bit later the Core has depleted somewhat. We don't know how much time lapsed between those moments as the trailers skips ahead (and back) a fair bit. But we do know something gets drained when the power armor is used.

It's from the spotlight on the helmet. That's why there's a giant text field that says SPOT next to the power gauge: because it's drawing power.

Yea this absolutely

I don't understand it either.

But I have encountered certain players in the past who want the game to be as hard as possible, because they like the challenge of that.
Which is all fine and Dandy Boy Apples for them, but it's not the game I want to play.
I just want to have fun, not obsess over the fact my power armor is about to become a metal coffin.
And that's why we have hardcoe mode, you want your challenge, play that and keep the power limiting mechanic in that difficulty only, so it's not pushed onto every player.

Maybe the spotlight is running on an independent battery and the battery is getting low.
I can't really see a small flashlight that size draining the entire suit of power!

Sorry, but you dont KNOW anything.

If anything its likely to be a start point thing that'll cause you to lose the power armour until a later point in the game, but not outright indicative of the suits requiring constant refueling/more power.

Could also be linked to effects of power armour, like flashlight, damage sustained, any number of things that might drain slowly and recharge over time.

It would be completely stupid once again for their most iconic item in the series to suddenly become a hassle to deal with, just to impose some extra level of false difficulty.

Lore wise you'd already be wrong. There's no sense in it.

Really hoping you are right tre288. If the T-45d and the new T-60 run off of energy cells I'm fine with that.

But the T-51's should have unlimited useage.

I'm sure that unlimited useage will be modded in if it's not in the base game. But I'd rather not have to wait for it.

It would be a means to balance the Power Armor out while allowing it to be used when you like.

We don't know how it would work later because we haven't seen late-game power armor, it is entirely possible that there is an upgrade that increases the core capacity. Like the jetpack seems to be an upgrade as well.

We also, as mentioned, don't know how much energy it consumes. You're worried about "constantly refueling" when during that snippet it barely went down. No idea how long you can go on a full Core, and no idea how much a full Core takes. It might be entirely possible it's fueled by Energy Cells, which as an ammo you can carry abundantly.

Sure it could in theory just be to power the flashlight, but do you honestly believe that? They're going to give you an infinite energy Power Armor, but it can't keep its headlight on? Which isn't a problem for the little pip boy somehow... Seems highly unlikely.

The Power Armor already has it's Health. Seems redundant to add double cost, one being the health of modules that need to be repaired and the other being energy.

Also lore wise i am not wrong. What you find is the most common model of Power Armor, the T-45d model. Which uses Small Energy Cells as fuel, SEC are also an ammo type, and burned through it an alarming rate. It was the newer model of Power Armor that came with an "infinite" microfusion energy pack.

Just google T-45d and check it's back design and compare that to the Power Armor of Fallout 4, it's practically identical.

edit

Scratch that, upon closer inspection it seems its the T-60 armor you find in Fallout 4. It runs on Microfusion Cells, and it still seems looking at the Core in the HUD that it drains energy on use and not damage taken. Taking damage, even big hits from a Deathclaw, don't reduce the Core but instead show up on the left in the visual representation of the PA, where damage parts turn red or disapear.

It's a bit confusing to make it out from the gameplay trailer because they used several different playthroughs of that bit with the Power, cut and pasted pieces of each playthrough to make the montage we see.

The number under Core in digital seems to read 11. I'm just guessing, but maybe thats the number of Microfusion Cells you have.

The jet pack also drains core power. It is easy to deduce from this that the add-ons for Power Armor draw core power; and that is why you must have more cores.

That doesn't make sense to me.

Judging from what I've seen, the jetpack is flame powered, which would mean you'd need to refuel it with petrol or something.
You can't convert nuclear or electrical power into fire, it's not possible.

So it wouldn't be possible for the core to generate rocketpowered jets in order to fly, so why would it drain?
If they haven't thought of any of this, they need to re-examine how the power armor is designed.

But honestly, I think we're all speculating at this point.
The only way to settle this is to find out exactly how it works ingame or interview the Bethesda team responsible for power armor about it.

I hope it isn't that worthless prototype microfusion verison though, like I don't use enough of them for laser rifles etc, the power armor wants to eat them too?

We can't convert electrical power into flames, but the Fallout universe can - just look at Mister Handy.

I think its just a live action theatrical trailer that should be taken ad confirmation of anything. If that were the case can I just casually walk and blind shoot mole rats as they come at me? I think not.

Isn't the main character supposedly a military veteran (possibly of Anchorage?) - if so it'd make sense that he'd already have PA training

Nah, it doesn't hint at anything. It's just a live action trailer that glosses over some of the stuff you can do. Kill stuff, kill more stuff, kill stuff with your dog, find power armor, get in power armor, walk around in power armor with your dog following you, etc.

With that said, I don't think Power Armor will be as limiting as people believe it to be. Naturally we'll be able to go from interior to exterior and vice versa with a suit of armor on.

I definitely do not see sneak happening in power armor, though.

You need to break more of those robots.
Everytime I looted one, it had flamer fuel inside it.

So considering I was always finding that ammo inside them, I made the logical connection it was used for their flamethrower.
Or if you had the civilian version, a nice creme brulee.

Does he mean the jet the Mr Handys hover with?

Civilian model mister handy's came with a flamethrower, in the beginning of FO3 that's generally what Andy uses on the cockroaches attacking the med-bay. The civilian models, and even the medical models, were good places to look for flamer fuel when you were out.

It was the military and security models that had the flamer replaced with a plasma weapon but you could still sometimes find flamer fuel in them though not sure what it was there for.

Hey guys, New here. One thing nobody mentioned was the casting documents, The PC says "Museums need alot of power right? That means there's an on site fusion grid. I bet theres a fusion core in this very building. You'll have to cover me from here, And ill need one of those rifles." What I got from this is that yes power armor need cores but if you get a simple core from a museum then why wouldnt there be military issue power cores. It makes perfect sense.

I hated it in Skyrim how the dark brotherhood questline was so easy to find and immediately in your face in the first town. It was the thing I was looking forward to the most, finding the brotherhood... and I did... after a few minutes of playing.

Same thing goes with the power armor. It should definitely not be available right from the start, not only because it would break early level balance, but because there would be no sense of accomplishment getting it right from the start.

Even having companions available right on the outside, and two of them at that (from what we've seen), feels to be more disappointing than convenient.

Just a personal suspicion of my own, with nothing really to back it up of course... But I sort of suspect that suit of power armor isn't actually as 'close' to the beginning of the game as what everyone seems to think it is.

I'm sorta thinking that after several hours of play testing, and banging around with the house tools, and the crafting bench, and maybe a few "jump off that ledge and see if it kills you" type moments, the player was directed along the story advancing quest of the game which leads to the power armor.

Then when BGS discovered they were only going to get like 15 minutes of airtime at the revealing they maybe sorta clipped out a little bit of the hours, or days, of footage... probably keeping the really flashy parts that they knew players would want to see.

So not to deflate the hopes, or encourage the fears, of anyone reading this, but I REALLY doubt that any of us are going to be able to lay hands on a suit of Power Armor in the first 15 minutes or so of gameplay...

I'm actually thinking that more true to the BGS style of things, you'll probably have reached the point where you could fight that deathclaw without the power armor just as effectively by the time your facing it.

The xbox one reveal trailer shows the Sole Survivor hit lv2 while doing the quest in the Museum of Freedom, that leads ultimately to the bit with the Power Armor.

The enemies could not have been to high level to begin with. As well as the Laser Musket not being a particularly high-powered, high level, weapon.

Another thing that might hint at the level is how Raiders give just 5xp for a kill for a lv1 character.

It is still possible it was all just done for demo purposes, but so far signs seem to point to you getting the Power Armor fairly early on.

Someone with a better understanding of the geological layout might be able to tell us if the Museum of Freedom is close or far from the starting point of the game. That would also be a solid hint.

I think the use will be limited and should be limited as well. As seen in the gameplay, you use this gadget to steamroll your way through a dozen raiders and a Deathclaw at level 2, which otherwise would not be possible. That is how potent that thing for the start is. I know it might be a densified timeline for the E3, but I guess this really is within the first three objectives of the main quest line.

I know it is iconic, but if it think about why it is so iconic then I can only recall Fallout 1 and 2, where it offered the most powerful gameplay attributes. It was simply superior to any other armour in the game. I did like the Fallout 3 and NV approach way better where they were indeed not as good and offered some heavy disdvantages to certain character builds (sneak detection and agility reduction). Still in Fallout 4 these disadvantges seem miniscule when you can slice through a dozen raiders and even have a jetpack strapped on your back.

That being said, it is limiting itself via the location, as it will be in your "garage" or settlement whatever, so you have to travel there first and come back (and we do not yet know whether fast travel will be possible with this thing or at all), and we know it gets damaged and likely needs repairs which might take time and/or parts. As we see that it is fueled as well it is likely that additional cells need to be aquired. The pillaging from raider bosses seems a decent option as well as extracting said cells from pre-war facilities.

Furthermore even the Wiki states that they do not really know what to think of this power armour. It is new, it might be a prototype developed by the BOS or the Institute. But we know it is called the T-60 which is totally new. Everything else is speculation so far and we will see in three weeks.

Actually it's not new if you look at the set up screens closely when they are showing off the limbs attachment.

The torso unit actually is an old T-45 series body frame which makes sense. When power armor was first introduced into the game it ran on small energy cells, and then later was upgraded to run on fusion packs or micro-fusion packs.

By the time the T-51 series was released it was supposed to have an on board reactor.

But we can't really judge anything about distance based on the levels and such in the trailer, because if they decided to do screen shots of the player in power armor that day, they would have told the player handler to head to the pick up point for it post-haste, skipping side quests... no go Around that mob of raiders... yes you can stop and pick the nutfruit if you want... okay yes start there with the camera record and lets run through this after everyone takes 5 for a coffee break...

The t-60 shares similarities in looks with the t-45, in particular the helmet. But the shoulder/arms are different. We can see in the reveal trailer that the shoulders that look identical to the shoulders on the Power Armor we enter are called T-60. At some point they have one arm T-40d, and the other arm T-60 and they are distinguishably diffirent.

What is entered into the back of the Power Armor looks like a Microfusion cell, not an Energy cell. And the T-60 was known to run on MFCs.

Well I won't argue that it looks like a micro-fusion cell being put into it, but I would delicately point out that if it is a T-60 series suit of armor, then it was developed for fallout shelter and fallout 4 so its really not "known" for anything besides what we see in the helmet display, lol.

Think Shouts in Skyrim. You can't spam them (without abusing the game). But there are Talos shrines, amulets, and potions that make using them more practical without outright breaking the game.

MF cells and different armor types and mods will function as the Talos shrines. Some of the Intelligence perks like engineering and science might help too.

Then there's armor maintenance that'll be used as a balance too.