Original OP:

Gopher posted a link with his take on the skills being converted to perks at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOOz_fHHt0o.

He makes some good points about the skills still being there just hidden and modified by what perks you take.

His point was that converting perks to skills wasn't dumbing down the Fallout skill system but actually improving it by offering more choice.

By using perk skills you can create a better defined character since the perks show what the character is good at better than just having a single skill rating covering everything and it was cleaner to boot.

For example in F3 and FONV, a scientific courier with an 80 in the Science skill is equally good with producing chems, hacking a terminal, working on energy weapons, or discussing quantum string theory.

In Fallout 4 depending on if you take the Computer Wiz or Science perk, you can be an expert in software but useless with the hardware.

A Bounty Hunter with the Cowboy, Gun Nut, Gunslinger, and Commando perks would be better with lever action guns and pistols but not as good with automatic weapons like a grease gun or mini gun.

And since there were a lot of perks that had major impact your character's combat abilities already, moving the skill system to perks just put it all in one place.

Continuing:

First, I vastly prefer the Fallout-style experience system. ES-style is, I suppose, more 'realistic', but it leads to character skill grinding which isn't realistic - or good roleplaying - by a long shot. Remember hopping everywhere in Oblivion and Morrowind? Sheesh.

I like the Fallout system pretty much for the reasons you state. I have some small game design creds in my past (I was an author of Horror Hero, knew Chris Avellone when he was a funny, skinny kid, and totally ignored his advice to learn programming, being a doofus). I hate to play the boring age card but I was playing tabletop and computer RPGs before a lot of folk on these boards were born. (See, I'm old enough to use the word. 'folk'. Sheesh, again).

I impose all that on you just so you know I'm not just another armchair quarterback. I know and love RPGs.

From here on, if I say, 'Fallout' I'm talking about the new iteration of the franchise (F3 and FNV). Sorry, Gizmo!

So, the Perks as Skills question: First, we don't know how it will be implemented. All our discussions are conjecture. Beth, whatever their faults, are masters of addiction. They know how to hook people into playing their games again and again. So I trust them to have given much thought to any changes they've made; it's easy to pick on individual components of their game systems but on the whole they provide good gaming experiences (YMMV, of course).

I'll miss that list of Fallout Skills; it was a handy progression barometer (at low levels, at least...). But I've devoted a fair amount of thought to the hypothetical Perks as Skills system, striving to keep an open mind, and I think it might work. Looking at discussions of the numbers, it seems like it might actually result in more focused characters. That's a good thing, surely? Isn't that why we're here, to play a unique character of our devising (origin story notwithstanding... I'm hoping there's a vault gate hard save so we can skip the intro on replays)? The old jack of all trades might be extremely difficult to pull off (on at least one playthrough I'll try, of course, because nerd) so that's a good thing, too.

Anyway, I'm guardedly optimistic. I've seen RPG franchises come and go, I've seen them mutate. Change is the nature of the beast. The Fallout franchise has wandered far, gameplay-wise, from the days of the original games. Only an idiot would deny this. If I had to classify it I'd call it an Action-RPG. In terms of the market and what the majority of gamers seem to be asking for, it's the next logical progression. As a dork who spends nearly as much time in menus as I do playing the game (and as someone who dislikes shooters), I have my fingers crossed that the new features will entertain me enough that I don't miss what's been left behind.

So, whatever shortcuts and streamlining they employ, and no matter how much it offends our old-school sensibilities, I am optimistic that the result might be fun and entertaining characters. Fingers crossed. I guess we'll know in a few months.

I'd love to see a mod for New Vegas that perkifys the skills so we cansort of get an idea of how it will all work.

You can kinda get a feel for it with Skyrim, as a lot of the skills are really lackluster without perks boosting them. FO4 is following this to the logical conclusion of having efficacy totally determined by perks. FO4 has the ability to do this since in TES games XP is determined by skill usage, while Fallout has a more traditional general XP pool.

Actually, I've been thinking about this a bit, and kind of think that the only reason they needed to do skills that way was to simulate the learning of a skill (and later to accommodate legendary skills). They actually don't need the skill part to even exist, they could just have used a basic leveling system giving you a perk every level, with the perks themselves providing the prerequisites for the next perk in the tree. It would have cut down on grinding in exchange for simplicity, at the cost of a questionable realism. Why do I say questionable realism? Why does jumping on a fire boost my Destruction, would a bandit seriously keep on hacking at my shield for an hour, or how long is Sheogorath going to let me hit Pelagious with my conjured long sword?

the guy has great arguments. If is really the way that he spoke, I liked it a lot.

Just more dumbing down.

So, my grievance with the Fo's skill system was that it meant you would have characters that had maxed out skills they never touched at all, you were forced to skill them just to get past menu. Skyrim's system felt grindy but it was facilitated by money sinks like trainers who could boost skills 5 times per level. My sword and board warrior was only ever good with one-handed/block/heavy armor, and somewhat skilled with other abilities like speech (from selling a lot of stuff) and archery (combat opener).

It avoided the jack of all trades issue, despite giving players the option to pursue one anyways.

I sincerely cannot tell if this is a good or bad move. Someone make this simple for me.

I have the strangest feeling that we'll be dithering about this long after the game's been released, regardless of how well it's actually done.

The system looks like it still has tons of options for creating diverse characters, and differentiating between different talents. It'll be great.

Besides, one ought not to get too attached to any gameplay mechanics Bethesda uses. Beth themselves are content to let the older games stand on their own merits, and try new things with each game. Call it "dumbing down" all you want, Bethesda's justified every design decision since Daggerfall and they've added more to each game despite having leaner systems.

In the earlier Fallout games, master of all trades (aside from using a cheat item in 2 you could find after you beat the game) was impossible due to diminishing returns past a certain point. If you put points too much into things you didn't use, you didn't have them for what you did use. Also with tagged skills being the ones that grew the fastest because it signified what your PC was gifted in. You could even exit your character screen without adding all your points and save them till later.

What bothers me with his reasonings is that he focuses solely on bad implementation when he calls the old system "dumb" and the new (by comparison) allegedly "more intelligent" with a "best case scenario". There's nothing in the new stats-perks system and the speculated way it works that couldn't have been done in a more comprehensive manner (due to more variables in largers scales interacting with each other) with the old three way system. The "old system" is not "dumb" as a system, it is dumb only when it is used in a dumb way and the new system has the potential to be even dumber (what with most perks potentially being used as gates). The perks only thing, while it may well work for what its worth, isn't inherently any better -- it's just assumed to be more effective without considering how the old systems implementation could've been improved. It's a reductionist way, and it removes a huge amount of potential and variety.

The skills could have been squeezed into a scale of 1-10 (where each point packs a punch) without losing much at all of the potential of the system. For example; if guns were still tiered under certain soft thresholds the skill might work such that those tiers are reached at every second point in the skill; and lacking in skill might've provided a hefty penalty. Eg. a skill of 1 is lacking 1 point from reaching tier 1 weapons, as an effect, you fire the gun with 25% penalty to accuracy and recoil control, tier 2 is much farther away and fires for 50% penalty, tier 3 at 75%, and tiers 4 and 5 are so far away from your current aptitude they have a whopping 90% penalty and literally shoot like [censored]; better put those points where they count. Additionally, perks might still work as providers of higher level specialization; even between skills. A set of ranks for one handed weapons, antoher for twohanded, one for more specialized use of scopes, they might act as compensations for your lack of strength for example (which might have a heavy effect on how much recoil throws your aim around), or you might have the optimal build in mind to begin with and thus operate on a far higher level of aptitude than if you just used them to slightly bend the rules in your favor in the situation of lacking the required skill or stat.

And that's only talking about one skill. The lockpicking skill might well work similiarly with tiered locks for example. What if there were perks that tied in different skill pairs to provide new abilities that were otherwise unreachable? You could tie in science and lockpicking to allow the player tackle electrified locks or create items that ease up picking normal locks (eg. certain kinds of acids that don't just destroy the lock and jam it, but the knowledge to do the right doses); you could tie in explosives and lockpicking to get the ability to blow locks open more reliably with less chances to [censored] things up; you could tie in science and medicine to create more potent drugs and have a better knowledge of the subject in dialog options. You could tie speech with every other skill to gain an upper hand in convincing someone. And all in different degrees of aptitude based on the interplay of skill levels, perks and stats. And then there are the independent perks on top, and traits, and other possible methods (like the "challenges" from New Vegas) to further boost the possible variety of creating complex characters that stand out from each other with much higher degrees of differences.

However it will work in the end (good or bad), much of that potential is lost with the perks only thing that reduces the possibilities and the more finegrained nature of the system.

I think one of the things that sold Bethesda on this new system was that it doesn't need a level cap to work; all of the best perks are gated by SPECIAL instead of level, and New Vegas's attempt at balancing skill points on leveling became futile after they raised the level cap so much with the DLCs - which was the only way they could justify adding new perks into the mix in the first place.

None of that is a problem with this new system, although I'm not sure we'll see new perks from DLC. The perk chart artwork seems pretty finalized, especially if they're selling it as an actual poster with the Collector's Edition; they'd need an auxiliary menu for any new perks. Which still might not be a big deal, really. We don't know enough to make that judgment.

Yeah. With the last two Fallouts, after a point, it was exactly like that - you spent Skill points just to move on.

I usually just ignored those Skills I could (like Unarmed), although you were stuck with passive Skills like Barter (although you hardly needed it by that point, except in NV after the Gun Runners stuff appeared).

In the Skyrim system, despite playing it forever, I never came close to maxing a character before boredom set in.

In terms of providing tools to create and limit a (sort-of) unique character, I guess Skyrim wins. Is this going to follow through to F4?

Oh, and you can probably bank perks with this new system, instead of being forced to distribute points and pick a perk the moment you level. >.>

This honestly depends on how much we can raise our SPECIAL, and what the leveling curve looks like. If you can't raise SPECIAL, then there's no problem with making our characters unique and we'll grow into our initial SPECIAL distribution by level 28, although that doesn't account for ranked perks. If we can spend a perk point to raise our SPECIAL, a la Intense Training, we'd have to do that 43 times to max out all of our SPECIAL. It would be another 70 levels after that to take every real perk, again not accounting for additional ranks. So unless it's really easy to reach level 100 and beyond, I've got the feeling we'll be done with a single character long before we get close to maxing them out.

I think I said this before, but I do not know what is better. I just feel like the more recent skills felt a little one-dimensional. Certain skills in New Vegas were rather useless, while a few others were OP (Sneak and Speech). Certain perks were op, and other were not if you did not build for it (vats perks for non-vats builds).

After looking at set of stills from the E3 preview, the image of the Boblehead stand has altered my thoughts on this issue. I'm not 100% sure skills are gone from the game now. The display text SPECIFICALLY lists BARTER SKILL (not to mention at least a dozen empty Boblehead slots UNDER the 7 SPECIAL ones at the top of the stand).

I'm not saying that Skills exist in the same manner as the previous games, but it does seem that some form of them DOES still exist (and I guess the theories stated in this thread don't actually contradict that possibility).

I'm actually thinking the bobbleheads are just 1:1 copied from FO3 as easter egg to decorate your home...

Perhaps they add a rank to a relevant perk, like the Speech bobblehead adding to Local Leader or Guns adding to Gun Nut etc.

Or maybe as Thure93 said they are just for show

I wouldn't be surprised if bobbleheads now just gave a free perk or something...

Maybe a Skill set based on SPECIAL exists but is invisible. X in STR gives you a base X in Melee Weapons, for example. This will never improve unless you increase STR or buy a Perk.

Lol, that would be something. You'd have 12 skills with 5 perk levels each to cover 1-100. That's 60 additional perks (some of which would be essential to your character build). In New Vegas you only get a perk every two levels by default so they would have to change that. It would be tricky finding a balance on the number of perks you should get each level.

It would basically make the game less stat driven. So you would rely on your actual aim with a KB & Mouse a lot more than in previous games. You'd basically set your strengths and weaknesses in the beginning of the game with your SPECIAL. Anything that you are low in would cause noticeable handicaps for the rest of the game.

So if you have a low perception stat for example, you might have a harder time hitting stuff out in the distance. If you have a low strength skill you might have a harder time holding big machine guns or you might have more recoil even with small guns etc. etc. These deficiencies would be noticeable, but most casuals would just assume that is the way the game is and carry on anyway without making an issue out of it.

You would have no weapon skill to augment weapon damage. Any weapon related perk would likely be focused on giving you access to better weapon mods on the bench.

The old system is much better if you are going for stat driven combat. That's why I think they are going to have players rely more on their actual twitch skills with a controller versus relying so heavily on VATS and your character's weapon skill. There had to be some reason why they would take skills out of the game. I suspect we will know everything in 8 days or so.

The one I saw just said Barter not Barter Skill. Barter being a skill in Fallout 3 doesn't necessarily mean it will be a skill in Fallout 4. Besides those non-combat skills aren't really the issue. There probably will be a set of science, barter, gun nut, medicine, and repair perks. However, if there aren't any perks that directly affect your damage output then perks won't make up for losing skills.

I rather like the perk based system. I would still like to see how these all factor into the number crunching and I'd expect a great deal of balance between your character's skill and the player's skill, but all in all I think it'll be great.

I like the idea of skills still being present but only being raised by perks.

Say you have a barter skill and you buy a barter-related perk. You get whatever the perk does and your barter skill raises +10 for buying something under the barter skill tree.

Maybe that's what the video proposed. I haven't had time to watch it.

To me, all the perks could be sorted into skill lines pretty easily and it makes sense that having a perk relating to science would give your science skill a boost automatically.

I don't know. I'm interested to know what they've done. I'm not overly worried about it being bad though. I think it'll be fine.