So we already need a http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/59849/? for F4, to overhaul the perk trees? Most of these features read like Skyrim mods. Not really appropriate for a Fallout game, to my thinking.

Another gom from nma heard from. Hate to tell ya old timer but the brothers Herve sold "your" yard to the school for a playground years ago. Given that they had already decided what they were going to do to it (fallout Bos, Bos 2 and FOOL (only the most accurate game nickname ever) I would say fallout got off light. God only knows what ea or activision would have done with it (probably turned it over to the Saturday morning cartoon divisions since Fallout is loaded with humor and they don't need another COD clone on there hands)

That said why do you think it's just a skyrim mod is a bad thing since generally the top 100 or so skyrim mods made that game more interesting

Now I wonder what is the max SPECIAl you can have by end-game?

If you can raise everything to 9/10 then everyone is just the same yet again

Simple perks like "+20% whatever" may not be "cool", but they're still important; plus, they can turn a tactic from "why would I do that" to "why *wouldn't* I do that" pretty quickly. Besides, it's not like skills didn't work the exact same way when they were in.

I wonder how all of this will affect crafting weapons.. I'm assuming that some weapons will have strength stats needed to be able to use them well. (maybe not?) But if you need a high intelligence to craft all the weapons available that's going to obviously leave you with few points to put into other stats that you might actually need to be able to use those weapons. If I play as a big dumb guy will I simply not be able to craft anything?.. If I play as a super genius will I be crafting gear that I won't be able to use at all? It will be interesting to see how the balancing works.

Playing something like a highly intelligent, slightly charismatic, super sneaky thieving sniper sounds like it's going to be a really tough build.

Also, was there any news of a level cap? That will have a huge influence on amount of perks you can take and how specialized you'll have to be in character development.

I don't think there will be a guns and energy weapons perk that specifically replaces the guns and energy weapons skills. All the damage increases to guns and energy weapons will likely come from the guns themselves instead of your skills. Maybe the bloody mess perk might give you a 10% damage boost etc., but there is no reason for anyone to think that you'll get a massive damage boost like you did with energy weapons skill improvements.

Yeah, 9 looks like educated and 8 looks like the Robotics perk (like DarkenRed pointed out). I think I'm seeing a table at 8. So the science perk could be 6 or 7.

You can unlock higher level merchants at a charisma of 5 with the Local Leader perk. Supposedly that's how you get the best unique guns in the game. So you should be able to get by with just those weapons.

I wouldn't mod it before actually playing the game. You might end up making the game too easy for yourself.

You need intelligence to craft energy weapons and guns specifically. I haven't seen any intelligence requirements for crafting melee weapons yet.

Why would a low INT character be able to modify something as complex as a LASER or a device that magnetically contains and throws plasma? I got the impression that in the Fallout universe these things were not something any teenager could hack together using questionably legal LASER pointers from China..

If you've got a low INT character then you will have to be satisfied with what comes out of the factory or you will have to pay through the nose for unique weapons where someone else has done the work for you. To me this pretty well lines up with how things work in the real world. Most low INT people are not savants, which is the main restriction this SPECIAL/PERK system generally seems to disallow.

Knowing Bethesda (and their comments about the level cap in Fallout 3 being disappointing), there won't be a level cap. Remains to be seen if we'll be limited in raising our SPECIAL (and therefore, available perks), but even if we could raise them all to 10, you know, hundreds of levels to get everything and all that.

That would be really nice if there was no level cap. I wouldn't want all stats at 10's.. but I definitely want to be able to develop my build to it's fullest potential.

I don't think there will be a level cap. I'll just paste this in from another thread rather than type it out again:

With 28 starting points in SPECIAL, that's 28 base perks available to you, or between 107 and 112 total perks (depending if the few lesser-ranked perks fall within your pool of available perks). If you got beyond level 113, then I guess you wouldn't be able to pick anymore, unless you could raise your SPECIAL stats. Let's assume you can raise each stat twice. That would expose you to another 14 base perks, or another 56 perk choices. So that's perks up to level 163-168, and you're still locked out of over 100 more.

Basically, this SPECIAL-gated perk system removes the need for a level cap, since you can never get close to all the base perks (or their ranks) on a single character.

I'm guessing they'll replace TAG skills with TAG perks. Just for a head start on a particular build.

Adding to that, even if we can raise our SPECIAL and have no limitations on that, fully meeting the "potential" of our SPECIAL spread becomes astronomically higher. The point where we'd run out of perks to buy or SPECIAL to increase would be well over 300. So, good luck.

I don't see why certain perks (or maybe a lot of them) can't be tied to more than one special stat to 'blur the lines'? So then just because you have 10 in a stat doesn't mean you can get all ranks of all ten perks in that stat.

because the straight up said each perk was associated with a specific special..

Howard said that the traders with the best weapons come to your own settlements. So if you have a Charisma of 5 you can build the best Trader Stands for traders to come in and sell you the best weapons in the game. So you don't need to build your own weapons. Plus you can get discounts from the trader perks.

No idea what gom or nma are, or why you think I must be an old timer. I'm 26, genius. I just don't follow the webs and vidya game news every day. My point was that mod made Skyrim's perk trees useful; rather than senseless point sinks, perks interacted with each other, and had some useful tiers. A "AAA" rpg renowned for it's perks shouldn't pass that system on to modders.

Yeah, I noticed that one a while back, I've made a few other guesses, like Strength 9 is Slayer, Perception 5 looks like mad bomber or Demo expert, Agility 10 looks like ninja, Perception 2 looks like Heave, Ho!, and Strength 2 looks like Little Leaguer. All my current guesses, along with community and demo confirmed perks, are here; http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1526182-what-are-those-perks-and-what-do-they-do/ .

That's exactly the problem: you always need it. (granted, you don't NEED anything, but unless you want to suffer extremely tedious gameplay, yes you need to take those perks)

25% extra damage perks exist in New Vegas too...except no one complains about those. Why? Because the game is actually balanced around the base damage. The 25% extra is truly a perk: you hit harder with it, the only limitation being that you agree to utilize certain specific weaponry to enjoy the extra damage.

So why do people regularly complain about Skyrim's perks...?

Because in Skyrim it wasn't 25%, it was 100%. There were 5 ranks of 20% cooler perks. The gap is too big.

For me as a developer, I would have an easy time tweaking a deathclaw to be challenging for someone that hits for 50 damage a shot and someone that hits for 60 damage a shot. That's a close enough gap that the 60 guy will appreciate his superior damage and feel it, but not so big that it's broken.
Bethesda however stretches their goals out too much, because if you have a game where you can either have 0% additional damage or 100%....? One character type is legit killing twice as fast as the other. This is a problem. It's a problem because either the 100% guy is killing everything by breathing and making the game trivial and easy, or the game is made challenging for the 100% guy, the result being that the perks hardly feel optional at all, but rather 100% required, which is unfortunate because they're rather boring, dull perk choices when your 20% additional damage is met with enemies that have gained 20% more HP. In Skyrim, what happened was the perks felt essential, which meant no one in their right mind skipped these perks (unless you nuked the difficulty setting), but also the game was balanced around expecting the player to take them, so your character pre-perks and post-perks was killing enemies at the EXACT same rate (more or less) because the enemies you fought post-perks were more durable to account for your higher damage. They were essentially moot perks that you never actually felt impact gameplay outside of some of the first few levels where they could be taken at an accelerated rate (because one was available at 0 in the skill and another at a measely 20, so you could get 40% at the start while enemies only gained 20% and would spend a couple levels playing catch up), thus leveling your damage faster than enemies gained HP for a brief time.

Riddle me this: if the perks are so vital that I'm practically obligated to take them, then what purpose is there in merging skills to perks? Why not just keep the Skill system, let that provide 100% additional damage naturally over time, and then free up perk slots for more interesting and creative perks?

If any damage or defense or purely stat-based perk benefits exist, they need to be reasonable in scale and limited greatly. A singular 25% benefit is feasible to balance. It's what makes Lucky hit for 37 damage instead of 30, or the Brush gun hits for 97 instead of 78. Overpowered? Lolno. Noticeable and very appreciated? Absolutely, especially when combined with other damage boosters like Better Criticals. (cause Cowboy further amps the respectable damage amp of Better Criticals) But the gap is manageable. You design the game with the base damage in mind, and those who bothered with the 25% additional damage perks like Cowboy? Their reward is that they notice and feel the difference and feel powerful for it....as they should. Perks are supposed to feel significant. But when the scale is so large that Player B can double the damage output of Player A, then either Player B will slaughter the entire game without blinking or Player A is going to have the most tedious experience imagineable.

Im too lazy to find a gif of someone clapping, but rest assured i am doing it myself right now

http://cdn2.teen.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/week-in-review-ryan-gosling-gifs-cyrus-family.gifhttp://cdn4.teen.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/week-in-review-justin-timberlake-gifs-4.gif http://img.pandawhale.com/145363-Shia-LaBeouf-live-clapping-gif-Vgr7.gif, http://www.drodd.com/images10/clapping-gif4.gif http://x3.cdn03.imgwykop.pl/c3201142/comment_pyNXdAzZg486AQ06kWPAEBHlSieWkE8Q.gif.

God bless you google.

I agree with this assessment and feel that there will be more to many of the perks than a simple +dmg bonus, as I am beginning to think that Perks will generally stay with in-stat capabilities. By that I mean that Strength perks will likely add Damage, Knockback/down, carry weight increases, item weight decreases, and maybe unique attacks beyond that. Where as Luck perks will mostly affect what you find looting, critical damage and regen, unique abilities (Mystreious Stranger, Bloody Mess, and whatever the Leprechaun at the 10 spot does).

I edited some stuff in, and just because I feel it might be the most important part, gonna repeat this part I added in.

Riddle me this: if the perks are so vital that I'm practically obligated to take them, then what purpose is there in merging skills to perks? Why not just keep the Skill system, let that provide 100% additional damage naturally over time, and then free up perk slots for more interesting and creative perks?

Perks are supposed to be optional and supposed to be ways to tweak and fine-tune our characters to make them feel unique and perform uniquely. If perks feel required to progress feasibly without the game becoming tedious as hell, then how are they perks? Skills are something that, if I were to somehow play New Vegas without ever increasing my skills, yes I would be extremely frustrated when my Anti-material rifle sways like crazy and only hits 55 damage and I struggle to navigate Dead Money because I cannot meet the skill checks for any locked doors or terminals. That's why skills are natural and forced progression that the game will force the player to accept: it's how the game says "here, have this! It'll give you a sense of progress even if you feel clueless about which perks to take! Yay!" It may not be exciting for you, but it's automatic and not the main focus of character progression and customization anyways, so who cares? It's a nice, basic and very innocent system. Leave the flashy and thought-provoking character progression decisions to perks, and then have skills as a failsafe.

But if Skyrim is the reference, the skill-perks utterly failed. The only time they provide a sense of progress is during a brief time at the beginning when the damage gain rate outpaces the enemies. By the end of the game, they really don't matter. It's very telling that a legitimate strategy in Skyrim is to just never bother leveling up. This truly highlights how moot and meaningless those 20% cooler perks truly are, because a game where you never level up will see swifter, quicker battles than one where you maxed all of the perks out.

In that regard, I don't buy the smoke in mirrors when Bethesda claims "IT JUST WERKS!1!!" and says that merging skills into perks is a smooth transition where we lose nothing. It's not, and we do lose something. There was another thread where I actually got really annoyed when I heard Todd Howard was pointing out how aesthetically pleasing the perk poster looks. Why? Because I cannot help but feel like "it looks nice" is the only reason to call for a merger of skills and perks. "It looks nice" is the design philosophy that led Todd Howard to make the monstorous abomination that is Skyrim's UI system. Yknow, the very same UI system that no one in their right mind would dare defend, and the very same UI system that allowed SkyUI to be the top downloaded Skyrim mod of all time? I feel like for whatever wild reason, Todd and team are prioritizing looking pretty over actual functionality. All of their recent systems they've developed involved nice, well-rounded numbers, simplistic displays and systems, and pretty colors. But when you actually start examining the systems and what the changes entail, I see absolutely zero motivation for actually making the change.

I often see people argue "it could work, so stop judging something you haven't played." Cool, here's a counter-argument: why did skills need to be changed? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It wasn't broke, why was it fixed? Why did Todd Howard just march into my kitchen and "repair" my refridgerator by merging it with my toaster? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXpuRIZzJog

I would argue the ball is in their court, not ours. We cannot be expected to prove the new system won't work. We can try and make educated guesses and assumptions based on their past methods we've seen, but our knowledge is limited and it's still a form of speculation. They can however highlight clear problems (if they existed) with the old system and explain how those have been remedied under the new system. Instead that never happens, and all we get is "LOOK HOW PWETTY IT LOOKS." Seriously, let that sink in: no one ever asked Todd "why?" in regards to skills being dropped, nor did he answer. I'm sitting here asking "why is no one asking why" because it feels like pure madness to me.

Because

A. They aren't vital.

B. Alternatives exist.

C. One can take smithing, enchanting, or even alchemy, as a means to make up for the fact you don't have all of the +20% damage perks.

D. If not those, one can also sneak or magic to get around enemies if they feel they are unable to kill an enemy normally.

E. If you do none of those, there are still plenty of vanilla magical items in the game that that simply offer more damage via enchants, be they elemental damage enchants on swords, or +skill enchants on armors, to make up for not having all the +20% perks.

Also, letting skills provide the 100% bonus damage over time just results in the very thing they were trying to rid of by removing attributes and skills offering said bonuses naturally. Aka, every character ending up 100% exactly the same because of [censored] 1-100 linear progression systems, where everything is forced on the player, and everyone who gets 100 STR ends up exactly the same as everyone else who gets 100 STR. You basically just asked "why don't they want to make everyone's characters more similar!" because the whole point of RPG systems is to prevent that from happening.

Your post is also not-so-subtly flawed because you switch from % when talking about Skyrim, to hard numbers when talking about Fallout, thus hiding the actual numbers behind Skyrim to make it seem more broken then it actually is.

The best one handed sword in Skyrim and its DLC is the dragonbone sword, which does 15 base damage. 20% of 15 is 3 damage, meaning if you lacked one of the supposedly forced 20% perks, you would be doing 27 damage instead of 30. When facing something like a Draugr Deathlord, which can have 1000, or 1300HP, that takes the total number of hits needed to kill if from 34 to 37, in the case of the 1000 HP variant, or from 44 to 49 hits in the 1300 hp version. Which is a hit difference that takes about maybe 10-15 seconds to make up for, depending on how fast you click the button. So yeah, not having one of these supposedly vital 20% damage isn't all that bad for you.

Since Longknife has a cheerleader section, http://img.pandawhale.com/145363-Shia-LaBeouf-live-clapping-gif-Vgr7.gif.

Let me stop you right there.

All of your points can be summarized as "why not?"

If I ask you "why" and your answer is "why not?" I'm sorry, but this is how children speak. The burden of proof is on you. The burden of proof is on the one wanting the change. If I were to march into Tesla headquarters and tell Elon Musk that we need to change the way we run his company, and he asked why, imagine if I presented him with the following list of reasons:

Do you think anyone would take me seriously, let alone back me or my brave new plan?

Also, before that reply comes: no, you haven't proved my point wrong about those perks being required. Every alternative you listed is still more or less a requirement. You are suggesting alternative requirements, but requirements all the same.

The point is this: Fallout New Vegas can be completed quite easily without taking a singular perk, so long as you gain skill points. Why? Because they're PERKS! They're bonus benefits. It's really nice to knock enemies down with shotguns, but can I survive if I lack that ability? Of course!

Skyrim, if you take no perks whatsoever but continue to level up, is going to be the most tedious grindfest on planet earth, and you would sooner kill yourself than desire to complete the playthrough? Why? Because some genius with limited understanding of the systems at play merged perks with skills, and now certain perks feel required to progress at a reasonable pace without the game feeling like torture.