Well to each his own I suppose. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what they come up with.

agreed

Eh, we don't have to wait and see. Bethesda is unlikely to make a drastic philosophical shift in game design.

In Oblivion, you were pretty godlike by the end, mastering everything you wanted to master.

In Fallout 3, you could do it all by the time you reached the level cap. Ditto with New Vegas, even though it wasn't designed by Bethesda.

Skyrim, particularly after the stupid legendary system, ultimately allowed you to get every possible perk in the game if you were determined enough.

Why would anyone expect Fallout 4 to be any different? I suspect it will open up with a level cap that doesn't allow you to learn everything with one character, but that with each DLC that level cap will be raised until at the end of the day you will have it all.

I agree it proberbly will be the same. But I can always hope.

The leveling in Skyrim worked quite well, but then you get people complaining about it being tedious. And how does it ruin any subsequent playthroughs? It's not overpowered if you never bother using it. In your next playthrough, actually use the skills, and voila, you've mastered a skill that you've actually used.

I quite liked the skyrim system. Made much more sense to me and would like to see an improved revsion return. I agree ruins replayability was a bit harsh but it's more skills like science, speech, repair, medicine etc that caused it because they affect things more when they are increased that cannot be avoided. The bigger problem is that it forced me to improve certain skills because I had already maxed out other ones.

The general philosophy shouldn't change. I've been mostly fine with Bethesda's leveling procedures save for Sky's pointless perk system. Legendary skills were a patch to a broken system to begin with. Want to play an OP character? Go for it. Want to play a specific build? Hell yeah it is fun.

There should not be limited choices but expanded opportunities. The best thing for specific build characters would be a "Lock in" feature so that you don't progress past what you are trying to achieve. If you want that Strength bobblehead without the stat increase lock it in and collect the bobblehead.

Or Bethesda can release the Editor to everyone if other solutions aren't in viable in such a short timeframe. That would be the easiest way to implement it actually.

This would be interesting but is unlikely

It wouldn't be a punishment but a game feature.

If my character has a 1 in a stat then I'm asking for bad things to happen to me because they will be funny.

If you don't want that then give the stat a 2 rating.

If you hang a huge kick me sign on your Lone Survivor's back then the game should spend a little time kicking him.

Done right it would be really funny.

Just like having a 1 in Intelligence in F1 changed many of your dialog options to a grunt because you were too stupid to understand.

Maybe someone can come with a mod for this.

I guess what it boils down to is how much pain are you willing to tolerate for a low stat? In my current Fallout 3 game, I bottomed out my LUCK because I figured it was a random chance for good things to happen, etc and I wouldn't notice it. But I AM noticing the lack of critical hits --- takes a lot longer to kill things than I remember from the time I had a 6 - 7 Luck with Luck-tied critical bonus perks. Guns also jam a lot more than I remember.

And my STR is also low, and I am ~constantly~ managing inventory to avoid trudging through the wasteland at a snail's pace.

If you had five stats at 5 (the old 'average') then you would have only 3pts to spread across the other two stats. So to be 'average' at most things, you'd have to be just HORRIBLE at two stats. I prefer the Fallout-3 method where you start out average across the board (5's in all) and then have five points to spend to make yourself above average in some regards. Of course we don't even know for sure that the SPECIAL goes to 10, that 5 is average, or how easy you can gain SPECIAL stats, or how useful / crippling a high/low stat can be.

Most likely there is some way to rise your stats in the game. With a perk or all 8 levels etc

I personally like the change. It forces the player to accept and work around having weaknesses rather than just being at least 5 at everything plus 5 points to distribute.

10 int and 10 charisma will probably be the best possible starting stats.. for me anyways.. i could solve most problems by eaither avoiding fights entirely or hacking/lockpicking into places to bypassing needing to fight or even hacking computers to turn turrets/robots on people..

on top of that having 10 charisma will guarantee i can get most settlement options for my settlement and the science(int) ensures i can get plasma weaponry for myself and my settlement for when fighting is unavoidable.

I liked the perk trees in Skyrim.
I would had liked to also have stat requirements to get a perk.

The "use it to improve a skill" was OK.

At least there were enough skills and perk trees that you could have very different Dragonborns.

I really didn't like having all the stats being merged in to three stats.

Done right having different stats can be fun to roleplay.

Especially if it is reflected in game and shows up in the dialog (with more options if the stat is high enough and maybe some humorous options if the stat is very low).

I think Fallout 4 is doing a much better job by changing skills in to perks and moving Special Stats to the front.

At least the skills are still there as Perks instead of being merged in to just three skills.

It is no different checking to see if a skill is over 75 then checking if a perk is rating 3 or higher.

As for the skills that impacted combat, having a group of perks that improve your abilities with Explosives in game is much clearer than having a skill impact it from behind the scenes.

Making the various stats have a real impact in game play, having stat requirements on the perks, and having the stats impact conversations and events in game really adds to roleplaying and replay value.

I have a much better feeling pre release about roleplaying opportunities in Fallout 4 then I had about them for Skyrim.

It also forces Bethesda to offer more solutions then just the most obvious one.

They have set it up so that Lone Survivors will be very different in stats and perks and that lets them expand the story by giving multiple ways to advance the story.

To quote "Fallout 4's narrative has a lot more branching paths and overlapping of "if that than this" than Fallout 3. They want the game to handle all the fail states of missions instead of forcing players to reload saves."

You might fail path A, in one play through and use path B. You might success in path A in another. And in the third you fail both of them and end up using path C.

Hopefully which path you end up using will have some impact in your Sole Survivor's future story.

That would really keep each play through fresh and different.

One of the great things about the Deus Ex series was the commitment to having multiple solutions and ways to get the mission done.

my first char will be Mr. Normal

S 4

P 4

E 4

C 4

I 4

A 4

L 4

just out of curiosity, is that something Howard said?

it was from a Bethesda hosted panel discussion.

http://www.gameinformer.com/games/fallout_4/b/playstation4/archive/2015/06/17/19-new-details-fans-need-to-know-about-fallout-4.aspx

19 New Details Fans Need To Know About Fallout 4

"Over the course of two Bethesda-hosted panel discussions and a conversation with game director Todd Howard, we gathered new intel on the highly anticipated return of Fallout. Read more to learn about how some of the game systems are evolving for the trip to irradiated Boston millions of PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 gamers will be making come November 10."

lol...

I was actually thinking about doing the same thing. I think it would bother me more having a stat really low than just having a so-so average character.

Woot! <--- is that still a thing?

Anyway... dancing bunnies, always a thing.

Thank you very much! I'm a bit more optimistic on how FO4 will handle quests.

I'd want at least one or two stats where I could pick up the mid and high ranger perks.

Setting every thing to 3 would let you increase one stat to 7 and another to 6.

I could even see setting one or two to 2 just to get one stat at an 8 and another at a 7.

I figure there has to be some way to raise your stats at least a few points.

I'd be afraid to set a stat to 1.

I think I would be a little disappointed if there wasn't something to reflect such a low stat.

Of course there are some critical perks on the 2nd and 3rd row of the Perk Chart that I think you would notice not having.

First Aid takes a 2 Intelligence and Sneak takes a 3 Agility.

I'm really hoping for some "Dumb as a rock" dialog if I took a character with a 1 Intelligence.

You know what would be funny? If we could spend perk points on the "SPECIAL" row of the perk chart to raise our SPECIAL instead of taking a perk, and we could only raise each SPECIAL stat by five points... so if you spent 35 perk points solely on raising your SPECIAL, Mr. Normal would only be able to become Mr. Almost Perfect.

Then, if there was no level cap, and no cap on how much you can raise your SPECIAL, you'd still need to reach level 112 in order to max out your SPECIAL and get every perk... even if the leveling rate was as fast as it is in New Vegas and Falout 3, that would take such a long time... Makes me not care as much about every character eventually becoming the same.

lol.. That would be funny. I hope it works that way.

I was thinking of maybe starting off even then raising some stats, like agility and int through leveling or finding bobble heads.

I figure there will be a way to raise most stats by 2 or 3 points, but there might not be a way to take a stat from a 3 to a 10.

So I figured I'd pick which stats and perks I wanted to play a critical role in my first Sole Survivor and build from there.