I'm talking more of the simplification of the mechanics as an ethos. Will it continue with the next TES game? Attributes are important for RPGs, a core I'd say, thank God they left them in F4 and ditched skills instead. But you see my point right? It's about removing the complexity to make the series appeal more to people whom wouldn't buy it normally, for more sales obviously, and where does it end exactly?

For the record I'm actually fairly optimistic about the SPECIAL/Perk chart scheme in F4.

I understand, and while I would imagine if you have a strong emotional attachment to what the series was change might be painful. Yes, I realize that is sad for you. But havent you said all there is to say on the matter by now? You keep dwelling on it. There are plenty of people that like the new fallouts a ton, and actively like where the series is headed. Discussion of the kind you want to have is better put in the series section of the forum. Not in the news threads.

I'm also very optimistic about the perk system assuming that perks are optional, No Easy Way To Respec (Have my fingers crossed on this one) Special is optional and you can't get all 10 in Special unless you intentionally try to do it.

None taken.

None seen ~so far.

With this I do agree; it would be worse if it were the other way around.

No, actually... They are not. You can have a great RPG game without attributes AND skills actually.

There's a huge list of things that can be used to help make a great RPG and attributes are just one of the things on the list... Same with skills.

That fact how SPECIAL and perks works in a game, as far as we've seen and heard, has apparently not reach you yet?

Most likely the people who enjoyed Mass Effect 2 and 3.

Maybe it was different for people playing with controllers, but for me, on the PC with a mouse and keyboard, those issues were plenty manageable without VATS. There were two primary ways to deal with those issues. First, choose guns you had a high enough skill for. Second, choose a weapon that was appropriate for the situation. I seem to recall two main things that affected your accuracy and that would cause those wild shots. You had weapon sway and you had the cone of random bullet spread. If your skill was not high enough (or stats like strength) the weapon sways randomly in your hands making accuracy difficult. The higher your skill, though, the steadier it became in your hands. The same was true for the bullet spread. It got smaller as your skill went up. Just because you pick up that hunting rifle and it's the most powerful gun you have, that doesn't mean you have to use it. If you don't have the skill, you're probably better off sticking to the weaker varmint rifle. You'll land more and more accurate shots. This is especially true if you walk into a big fight. Trying to use that single shot rifle you're not skilled enough to use is just going to get you killed. You need to pick a more appropriate weapon like a shotgun or an automatic where accuracy isn't as much of an issue.

When I was doing a non-energy playthrough, I almost always carried with me a long range, single shot rifle like the hunting rifle or the AMR, an SMG and often a pistol. By making sure that I had sufficient skill for the weapons I was using and making sure to use the right one for the situation, I rarely ever needed VATS.

Oh, and there was a third thing I would do. If I did want to make a long range shot with a weapon I wasn't skilled enough to be using well, and if I had enough time, all it usually took to make that shot was a bit of patience. You just had you wait for the sway of the gun to line up with the target and it would usually hit if you fired at the right time.

With how it sounds to me, I really don't understand why you and a few others are acting like this is a terrible thing. In previous games looking to see what was on a body (or in a box) meant pulling up a menu which paused the game and interrupted the flow of gameplay. You could then sit on that menu for as long as you wanted while deciding what to do. It was entirely possible to run through looting bodies in the middle of firefights. Now it seems you can look over the corpse (and maybe boxes) to see what they have in real time. As you're doing that, though, the game is still going. People are still shooting at you while you're checking out the list of stuff. If you decide to actually loot the body, it might still pull up the menu and pause the game. Even if it does, it still makes for fewer interruptions to the flow of the game. I don't understand how this is not an improvement. At least from what we have heard. It certainly could prove otherwise once we actually play the game.

Can you give us a modest example?

Ah. I slightly understand but also, I feel you may not understand something else...

Usually, what would create a "fugacious glance", as you put it, to a game series could be described in a simple word. Rehashing. FYI: Those "run-of-the-mill" game series you might be thinking about feels like that and gain those glances simply because the creators just rehash too much of the same game over and over again to make said series... While a company, like Bethesda, doesn't necessary do this to a strong degree. (Yes, certain ideas and mechanics are rehashed but the overall games in their series are highly different from one another and give different experience and enjoyment)... Which is why Fallout wouldn't become a "run of the mill" game series to me.

Except it isn't about removing complexity, for any reason. Its about removing traditional, and by traditional I mean 20+ year old D&D boardgame, RPG mechanics, in favor of ones that do the same thing, but better.

Attributes aren't required for an RPG at all, nor are they important in the slightest. What is important however, is the things those attributes effected, and having various ways to change THOSE things. A RPG having a "strength" attribute doesn't matter at all, what matters is being able to influence melee damage, total stamina, health, and carry weight, the things strength influenced(In Morrowind for example)

Attributes are actually a fairly terrible way to do RPG mechanic in the first place, because they bundle multiple major character stats into one, thus forcing blanketing upgrades to various aspects of your character, even if you don't want them, increasing homogeneity between characters.

Skyrim is objectively more complex then past TES games in this regard, because HP, stamina, and melee weapon damage are now their own individual stats, controlled by their own individual skills, perks, or attributes. By getting rid of attributes, Skyrim managed to give the player more ways to define their character that aren't tied together, thus INCREASING the number of possible ways to define your character.

Didn't FO3 rehash the entirety of the Fallout 1 & 2 plots, paired with effectively Oblivion 2.0 gameplay?

I think that complexity is appropriate when the product's name implies a 20+ year old D&D boardgame, RPG mechanics contemporary series.

Yeah, but once you realize that absolutely nothing ever stays the same the easier it is to accept. I'm not afraid to admit that sometimes change just svcks. It's easy to get comfortable with the way things are even if the way things are aren't so great.

You also have to admit though, Bethesda's Fallout is nothing like any other game out there. Sure, there may be FPS similarities, but overall the game is still very unique.

Not off the top of my head, simply because of the type of RPGs I play tend to have skills, attributes, or both. However, I've thought of many ways of making an RPG game work without skills and attributes just fine.

The thing with RPGs is that you must be able to define your character (or the main character) in your own eyes/way, and this can be done without skills or attributes easily. But that's mean other aspects of the game has to be much stronger... Such as choices, dialogue, quest trees (as I call them), etc.

That's fair enough, but to me the increasing influences from TES and now from GTA V (Todd has said) are no longer influences, but identities of which I no longer recognize from the crowd.

I don't think so. It appears to me that you must be able to define your character to the game engine; else how does it know anything at all about the PC's limitations, and how to present those parts of the world available to the PC?

I never got that implication from Fallout's name. Indeed, I liked the older Fallout's because of how not D&D they seemingly tried to be.

Neutering the often used 1-50/100 attributes systems into a far smaller 1-10 range that offered far greater increases per rank, since it wasn't spread out over such a large range. And the great emphasis on perks.

Change is necessary and without it can result in stultifying experiences.But with change one hopes to see remnants of it's antecedents, legacies of an evolutionary path that one still embarks.Fallout has mutated and changed it's evolutionary path, along with it's ancestry and ultimately it's legacy.Only for what was to simply become a quaint if irrelevant fossil record.

I'm not saying it's ultimately wrong, but for something so indelible in my life to rapidly evanesce from everyone else is saddening...

Contemporary can also mean a competitor or just another of kind that were around at the same time.

Why should the game limit the PC?

Better, I'm not sure if lessening RPG mechanics is better. I mean I'm all for improved combat but I still want some RPG aspect with it. While I do like the Perk system, it's a lot harder to show your gun skill off without a Gun Skill. All your relaying on is Strength to hold the Gun, Perception to aim the gun, Intelligence to have knowledge with the gun, and Agility to have flexibility with the gun. That system works but I don't think it's superior. I like cutting the middle man out but that also means Fallout 4 will not be as good of an RPG as it could be. You could have had a system where Skills stay but you added more and also made it go up at an amount where MOAT isn't possible unless you grinded 200 hours of leveling out.

The main problem with skills though is that Beth didn't add enough of them and had such a low amount in Fallout 3 that MOAT was just screaming to be had, forced on you without an option to avoid it unless you intentionally lowered your INT which to me compromises the aspect of Roleplaying IMO. Beth Could've added in more skills for Fallout 4 but they didn't and I'm glad that Skills are gone if they were going to have the same mindset of "Forced MOAT because it just works". I would've liked them to fix the system, add more skills in, have it be more like Fallout 1 and 2 where your Tags mattered more, have skills go up slower etc. That didn't happen which is disappointing, however if they were never going to fix it, then I'm glad it's gutted.

True, but as has been pointed out before, things change over time.

The idea that just because Fallout and 2 played that means means future Fallout's do is as utterly fallacious as saying because Megaman 1 and 2 played the way they did, Megaman Legends had too, or else not be part of the Megaman series, which is OFC objectively wrong.

Also, I never argued against complexity, only D&D style complexity in the form of attributes and skills.

Ah, I see. So you are not calling it less of an RPG based on some universal term. You are comparing it to the other Fallout games and determining whether or not Fallout 4 is an RPG in itself. Because it has changed into something different than what it was established as in the past, the future of the Fallout franchise does not offer a role playing experience?

This is what I am addressing. You are expressing your dislike of the changes simply because they make the game different from the games you played and loved in the past. While I can understand why you would not like it, change was inevitable. Many forms of media change with time and that is simply how things work. You may not like the new identity of the series, but many others do. I ended up parting ways with other game franchises as I was not fond of the changes it had gone through. It never meant the games were bad. It meant the games were more for an audience that I was not a part of. When it comes to Fallout 4, I am cautiously optimistic. While I can see some simplification in game mechanics occurring, I am still willing to try out the game. If I feel the changes make the game better, then I will be satisfied. If they make it worse, then I can either continue playing for find some other means of entertainment.

Fallout 4 may not be the same type of game you are familiar with, but it is still a Fallout game that offers a role playing experience.

Most "old school" table top RPGs involve stats and skills as a basic mechanism to measure your characters progress. Without those, there's no real reason to keep track of XP, roll dice or do any of the other things that we know from the old games. Granted, there are table top RPGs that involve no stats, no dice or anything involving chance and numbers, where you just play a character that's an empty shell and you fill in the acting. I've tried those as well, and I never enjoyed it because there was no way to track the progression of my character, and we usually ended up dying in every scenario anyway because no one really cared about their character.

That's what FPS feel like to me. Yeah, the shooting is fun, but I want stats to govern my character and skills to roll against. A certain set of rules and chance. Removing all that leaves an empty shell that I don't really care about. I totally understand what Gizmo is saying and that's also where my concern for the development of bot hTES and Fallout comes from. I enjoyed the old games as much as anyone, and there's a certain nostalgia there, but I also understand that the series, and games in general, have to evolve, but there's a good way to evolve and a bad way.Taking away all the RPG aspects is the bad one.

RPGs are entirely about limitations.
(That's what a PC IS.)