I would love if most of the non-essential buildings were destructible, but I'm guessing it's more like in Skyrim where there are 4-5 plots of land you can modify.
No solid numbers on that yet 5 months before the release
They showed a couple places in the trailers.....my guess is anywhere from 8-20...?
Well, some say Sanctuary Hills is a possible one, but that is just from conjecture floating around on the forum. Other than that no names of locations or numbers of settlement locations are known at this point.
I think what he means is it is the same size as Skyrim roughly but it will feel bigger because instead of huge mountains that you can't really explore taking up a great amount of space, there will be more buildings and land to actually explore in their place.
Another thing that Mr Howard mentioned was that you could create communities and set up caravan trade routes between them. So that really piqued my interest.
The E3 presentation showed in flat open areas, in the middle of urban sprawls, and at least one shot of one out on the coast. As for limitations, I have no idea. Todd said there would be a number of areas made specifically to be prime real estate.
My conservative estimate is 3, if I want to be liberal with it, while being reasonable, I'd say 8. What I'm wandering is if we'll be able to tear them all down, and focus the materials into just a few of the possible towns. Like if there are 8 towns, tear them all down and then focus into 3 of them. Those towns would become more like cities with good defence and then set up your caravans to go between them.
To be honest, I wouldn't personally want to go TOO crazy with settlements. I wouldn't start a second one until I knew my first baby was safe and secure. And even then, by the time I shelve the game, I'd expect maybe three total.
After a while of playing Fallout 3, I found that the caravan traders would eventually die from getting into skirmishes. Once they were dead nothing would replace them. I wanted to be able to heal these characters (ante-mortem) to keep them in the game. I even reversed pick pocketed the traders with a few stimpacks in the hope they would use it to heal themselves, but they never did. So I'm hoping if a caravan trader dies in between your settlements, you can replenish them.
We know for a fact that there are two at least.
5 seems like a reasonable number but if I wanted to go crazy with my estimates I might be tempted to go as high as 15 on my guesses the map is supposedly much bigger than even skyrim so even 15 might be a little too spread out depending on how big the map is.
I wouldn't even hazard a guess.
Though I would love to see a little more of how it works, in some sort of spoiler free (areas/persons) video release.