I've been thinking about this, and I noticed no one else seems to be talking about it. I think this is because people know that there is no level cap, so most people are thinking along the lines of, "well, it's only a matter of time until you max out, so what's there to really talk about?" Please allow me to show you why I believe this is a topic worthy of discussing.

Let's say you only get one point per level to assign to your SPECIAL's, that would mean you would have to be level 43 until you max out all your SPECIAL's. How many points will you need to max out your Perks? Well, we know there's over 270 slots, so let's be generous and say 275. Added to your SPECIAL's, that would mean you would need to be level 317 to have a maxed character.

Please take a moment to imagine how much time it would take to reach that.

While I believe this game's content to be massive, I have serious doubts about them offering enough content to keep someone entertained long enough to reach that rediculously high of a level. To accomplish this, Fallout 4 would have the be the largest game not only in the current history of gaming, but possibly well past the next generation of gaming as well. People would talk about this game in hushed whispers saying, "you know, I heard of a guy that actually did everything, and then he lost his mind and built an actual vault in his mother's basemant and he's living there to this day."

Now, don't worry, because I beleive there will be oppurtunities to not only speed the process up, but to actually have a maxed character before acomplishing everything in the game. For your consideration and discussion. I offer you my concepts of what could possibly be available to us to help accomplish having a maxed character.

1. Bobbleheads
We're going to have them, and they will be important. I assume there will be one for each SPECIAL and one for each PERK. Each bobblehead will allow a point to it's description, so there's 77 points right there. I'm assuming that if you were to have maxed out a Perk or Special and then later discover the Bobblehead pertaining to that, it would give you a free point to distrubute however you please. With this, it knocks the min level needed to achieve max-stats to 240

2. Skillbooks
I do not believe there will be skillbooks.

3, Implants
If implants are in FO4, I believe they will offer it's own perk and won't effect anything else.

4. Intelligence Bonus
This I actually believe will be the key. With a high intellegence, let's say you score 2 points instead of just one. Well, with the Bobbleheads, that knocks your min level for a max character down to 120.

120 is actually in the ballpark, be it deep in the outfield, of achieving max-stats before acomplishing everything the game has to offer and you're resulting to grinding.

They've confirmed skill books/magazines are in the game. They grant you unique perks that increase in rank with each new copy of the same book/magazine you find. "Grognak the Barbarian", for instance gives you the Barbarian Perk, which is not on the perk chart. Each new issue of "Grognak" you read, Barbarian increases in rank.

There will be "skillbooks", but they'll give their own perks (the example Beth gave was 10 issues of Grognak giving the Barbarian perk, which ups melee damage).

Intelligence increases XP gain, so you level faster. Not more perk points.

And one of the videos showed the Bobblehead display rack, with (if I recall) 20 spaces in it. Seven for SPECIAL, 13 for "skills", presumably. Given that the skillbooks give unique perks, the "skill" bobbleheads might as well.

Besides that

You seem to be going on the assumption that maxing out everything is a goal that they designed the game to accomodate, rather than just an option for obsessive completionists. I personally doubt that the game's content is balanced around reaching max level.... similarly to getting all 100's in Skyrim - and then going Legendary, and resetting skills - maxing out everything seems like something that would require lots of extra grinding.

If there is a max level of something, some people will go for it. As long as Max level in something is not a gateway to content, then it does not really matter what it is.

So the books do exist, and they pertain to a new perk? I did not know that, and thank you for sharing that with me.

Well, that means that while there's no level cap, your choices do matter.

I'm happy with this.

To max out would be such an overkill

"You seem to be going on the assumption that maxing out everything is a goal that they designed the game to accomodate, rather than just an option for obsessive completionists. I personally doubt that the game's content is balanced around reaching max level.... similarly to getting all 100's in Skyrim - and then going Legendary, and resetting skills - maxing out everything seems like something that would require lots of extra grinding."

My hope actually is to promote roleplaying by showing how out-of-reach maxing is regardless of level cap.

If this game has as much content as the previous titles, I will max out a character at some point.
Maybe after about 5 builds or so.

overkil? it's there. i might not try to max out for the first few play throughs. but when i have done everything, i give it a try to see how far i got before getting bored with the game.

Yep, that's a lot for sure. But don't forget that Bethesda are hopefully going to release as many expansion packs as they did for Fallout 3.

It is far more likely to get all the perks from magazines and bobbleheads before getting the last level perk.

Posted already on several threads but here goes:

Total number of ranks in all 70 base perks = 268 (not including Training perks which have 'unlimited' use)

Total number of stat points required to max all stats to 10 = 42.

Total number of achievable level increases is therefore 268 + 42 = 310. And so the highest level will be 311.

Using my formula of 25(2*n+4)(n-1) to reach level 'n' (which sits in between FO3 and Skyrim, exactly as we have been told), hitting the maximum level will require 4,851,500 XP.

All maxed characters would be pretty much identical, except for appearance, right. So if you played long enough, at some point in the game (level-wise) your character would start to become less special as you leveled higher and approached the status of 'maxed character.' Any specializations your character had would start to dissolve into the homogenized stat perfection...yay.

If you spend 300 hours on a single character, sure. The only person to blame would be yourself, since you aren't forced to put points into stats, or even take perks if you don't want to. No point crying over spilled milk, that's still in the jug, and in the fridge.

Looking at the suggested XP requirement in my previous post, it will take a lot longer than 300 hours!

EDIT: if you gained an average of 2,000 XP per hour, hitting level 160 would take around 600 hours. That's only a quarter of the total XP required to max everything out, and so you would probably be looking at around 2,500 hours in total!

Maxing out a character will most likely only be achievable if it's something you work at way past the ending of the game. How fast you'll be able to do it will totally be dependent on how fast and the amount of respawns occur.. (since killing creatures will be the only possible way to get to max stats.) However, I'm sure plenty of pc users will max out the stats before the end of the game since they will have the cheat console available to them and won't have the willpower to not use it. "player.addperk 000111 "bloop" (Another reason I don't initially buy bethesda games for pc.. I'm too tempted to mod and cheat, I ain't got the willpower not to.)

And along the way get all 100 books.

I'm sure someone will do it...

I think the max level is actually 276 without bobble-heads, or 269 if you get all 7 SPECIAL bobble-heads before maxing any stats.

The recent Character System info indicated that the training perks are included in the total perk number (which is 275), so there's no +42 for the SPECIAL upgrades. From the article:

"With each SPECIAL having 10 Perks, there are 70 base Perks. With Perk ranks, it increases that number to over 270. That number also includes a top-level Training perk for each SPECIAL, so that you can essentially skip a regular Perk and raise a SPECIAL by 1."

Or......maybe its like fallout 2. After you beat the MQ, you can have a item that max out your char.

The total number of perk selections on the chart has been confirmed as being 275 (which is actually the exact number of years between the formation of BGS in 2002 and the start of their first Fallout game in 2277). As you said yourself, this total includes the training perks, which count as one selection each. The reason for this is because each training perk is a single rank perk that can be selected multiple times, whereas the remaining 268 are unique choices, split between the 70 base perks that Todd mentioned. The section that you highlighted above even reinforces this.

Also, every time we level up, we are given the choice of either choosing a regular perk or increasing a stat (we can't do both). This means that, on top of the 268 levels required to choose every single rank of the 70 base perks, we would also need to level up a further 42 times (maximum) to increase every stat to 10, when compared to the 28 points we are given at the start of the tutorial. This gives us the total number of level increases that I have shown above

I'm not so sure about the single rank perk idea. In the Character System video, there are 10 stars shown for each training perk, with the character's actual SPECIAL stat represented by filled-in stars (just like acquired perks). This implies that each training perk has 10 ranks, and our starting SPECIAL stats are treated as ranks we've already taken. That's why I think the remaining 42 points needed to max our SPECIAL are included in the 275 total.

In any event, the max achievable level is still much higher than most characters will reach, whichever way the training perks work.

Edit: Here's a http://cdn.idigitaltimes.com/sites/idigitaltimes.com/files/2015/09/24/fallout-4-perk-chart.jpg showing that the training perks have 10 ranks.

If training perks do count as multiple ranks, then they would count as 9 each (the maximum number that we can increase any given stat). This would take 63 perks out of the total of 275, leaving an average of just over 3 ranks for each of the 70 base perks. This would mean that the highest achievable level without taking any bobbleheads would actually be 255, and not 311. However, even if they did only take out 42 from the total, as per the maximum number of stat increases in any given playthrough, this would still not work out based on the number of perks we have already been shown with either 4 or 5 ranks. And so it is far more likely that the details I have provided above are in fact correct.