Except the perks that aren't based on a skill, which still acts like perks.

Assuming that we get one perk per level up, this system means that we get to chose between advancing a "skill" and a "perk" whereas before, we got both. It made sense because of the fact that our leveling up represented character progression in becoming more skilled. That should happen with every level up. The perks were meant as a bonus. Now they're rolled together and the bonus (which is what a perk is, by the very definition of the word) is removed entirely.

Again arguing semantics over the word perk and seams very much based on "it was done like that in the old fallouts, so it should be like that forever and ever" mentality, personally I like the new system because it ads more weight to the decision of improving your skill or not everyone you level and in my book should help counter the problem 3/NV of it being to easy to raise and max your skills.

I disagree. I think that the fact that you can't improve certain "skills" if you lack the right S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is a horrible system, because it locks all development into your S.P.E.C.I.A.L., rather than allowing you to develop skills independent of your starting stats. As I've said before, you can be a general idiot about most things but incredibly gifted in a certain field of science, and you can be completely unlikable but a good enough debater that even though someone may hate you, they have to concede that you do have a point.

And don't try and accuse me of disliking the system "because it's different than the last game." I dislike this system because it seems like it lacks nuance. It looks like it prevents you from playing viable characters who have skill sets counter-intuitive to their main attributes. You can't have a smart person who, while physically unimposing, is a great fighter because they know where and how to hit a body to maximize damage, something that you could role with a character with high Intelligence that is skilled in Unarmed and possessing the Paralyzing Palm perk. You want to use Unarmed? Better go for a Strength minded character because that's the only way you're getting perks for it.

I wanted Fallout's character creation and level up system to be revamped as well. But this isn't the system I would have found ideal. I wanted a system where S.P.E.C.I.A.L. would define your character's limits from a physiological level. As in, a person with a 1 in Strength would never hit as hard as a character with 10 in Strength if they were of comparable build (e.g.: same skill level and perks). If two opponents are equally skilled, the person who is stronger has the advantage. But your physical build wouldn't be the deciding factor. It would augment your skills. Like perks, but in a broader, less nuanced manner.

Perks, meanwhile, would be split into five categories:

1) General perks: Perks that aren't gated by anything. You can pick them up as soon as you start. Cannibal, Night Person, Explorer. Things that just define you as a person and shape your personality. Or are perks that don't have a definite stat or skill to tie them to, such as Spray 'N Pray.

2) Skill-based perks: Perks that are blocked off based on your skill. Things like Paralyzing Palm and Mr. Sandman that unlock new abilities based on you being skilled enough to pull them off.

3) S.P.E.C.I.A.L.-based perks: Perks that are blocked off based on your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Strong Back, Action Boy/Girl, Nerd Rage. Things that are tied much more to your body's actual physical build than them being skilled enough to pull it off. A perk that adds a chance that you can coldcock someone with a single punch if they aren't hostile, not because you're a good fighter, but because you just hit them that hard.

4) Perks that are walled off by S.P.E.C.I.A.L. or Skills: Just like it says. These are perks that could reasonably be achieved by either being sufficiently skilled enough, or just physiologically capable enough to pull them off. Things like Sniper. You could have practiced enough with that gun to be able to hit a raider from 1000 paces, or you could have good enough Perception that you're able to achieve the same feat. Or, in the vein of a savant, you could be an all around idiot, but really good at hacking computers or fixing machinery, or smart enough to deduce how to do it even though you're inexperienced.

5) Perks that are walled off by both S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and Skills: Again, it's pretty straight forward. These would be perks that require both being physically built for a perk and skilled enough to pull it off. A good example would be a perk like Slayer, which increases the speed of melee and unarmed attacks.

One thing I like about this system is that it would allow for redundancies in perks. You could have a perk that lets you strangle somebody, since that requires you a larger gap in strength between the strangler and the victim, while a skilled unarmed fighter could perform a chokehold to achieve a similar result. Both achieve the same result, but are designed to allow for different builds. I'd also have it be a system where if you didn't want to put pick a perk or increase your skills, you wouldn't have to.

What's funny is that I remember someone talking about Todd Howard's rationale for streamlining character creation from previous games because it was too complex. Attributes, classes, birthsigns, etc. got the axe because you were being asked to make a bunch of decisions blind. How could you know what you would want to pick without playing the game? And now, with this system where only S.P.E.C.I.A.L. determines what perks you can take, it seems like we're in a worse off position decision making wise. You could pick a bad birthsign for your class and do fine, because other things were there to help you augment your character. But now? Instead of being asked to make several decisions about our character, with the potential to mitigate any less than optimal decisions we made, we're being asked to make one decision that bears all the weight of character creation, making the decision that much more important and therefore, that much harder to make blind. Better make sure that your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is exactly what you want it to be, because that's what determines if your build is going to be viable. Got the game at launch and didn't get to see what all the perks were when you designed your character? Hope that intro didn't annoy you, because you're going to have to do it again to make your character properly this time.

Having to make a bunch of decisions to determine what your character is going to be like can be a bit of a stimuli overload, but this can be similarly daunting and have much worse results. Suppose you were asked to find out which button among sixty won't blow up a building. Would you rather have the ability to select any fifteen buttons of those sixty that you wanted, with the building not exploding as long as you picked the right one in there somewhere? Or would you prefer to have the same sixty buttons, but only one guess?

Guess ultimately its down to agree to disagree then, because I find the system nuances, its maybe not the kind of nuance you wanted, but nuanced it is.

Figuratively speaking, this is how Skyrim is balanced. Combat is not balanced around the extremes, but around some rough median. Outside the median, characters are allowed to be overpowered and underpowered. Players must assume some responsibility for balancing the game, because that is how the game is designed. There are many different ways to boost your damage output, and those ways stack one upon the other, and the designer does not assume that the player will avail himself of all of them. There will be players who will take and use everything they are offered and who will then fault the designer for making the play trivial. I would prefer to avoid arguing over who is right and who is wrong, because it's all too darn complicated.

Without having a meaningful, 1-to-100 range of percentages, but having a few ranks instead, skills look a bit like perks. Cosmetically, it may be neater to list them along with perks, and to name them perks, than to list them under a separate tab.

The arrangement of perks into columns corresponding to SPECIAL and into rows corresponding to levels of SPECIAL makes it quick and easy to identify the attributes you need for the perks you want. I enjoy perusing a well-written user manual to learn what I need to know, but play-to-learn seems to be the current trend in gaming. The perk poster can also save us a trip to the wiki.

It appears that the ability to practice a skill, and to achieve various levels of skill, may now depend on a character's SPECIAL. If so, it's a pretty big change from the old system. I don't know what to make of it.

Let's assume that the speculation about crafting energy weapons at level 7 is correct. And that all base combat skills are low in the tree.

Your geeky hand to hand guy, with 7 intelligence, 2 strength and 2 endurance gets to skip "hacking" completely as he's "an idiot" about all that (or more likely just never bothered to learn it) and go straight for making energy weapons, which probably does take a lot of intelligence. He can also put 5(?) level ups in basic melee and probably 5 more in some kind of basic defensive skill, making him pretty damned competent. He can't get a perk that sends someone flying across the room with a single punch because he's not strong enough. But there may even be an Intelligence related perk, let's call it "anatomy", that lets him "know where and how to hit a body to maximize damage". This would make your intelligent melee guy very different to the bruiser who relies on brute strength.

Similarly, a stupid thug can't get the perk to make energy weapons, no matter how much they want to. However, Bethesda are unlikely to completely lock players out of that, so they probably have the option to pay someone (or maybe even threaten someone with a high level strength perk) to make weapons for them. And then of course, maybe companions can make up for some of the skills/perks you can't get yourself.

It could be very good, or maybe not. It all depends on how it is implemented.

Why would I need to know the pc specs to play my PS4 copy? ;p

My sentiments exactly.

At first I wasn't thrilled at the removal of skills, but the more I thought about it the more I realised it isn't really much different, and the skill system as it existed in 3 and NV wasn't very good anyway. My only real concern now is that there will be less perks that actually have a tangible effect on the we play the game, but it seems most are covered.

I know I really shouldn't reply to something so far off topic, especially a platform wars comment, but seeing as you're being insulting about it:

Apple established themselves as industry standards in many creative fields, such as graphic design, illustration, desktop publishing, and to some some extent architecture, due to the available software and the GUI. Windows was pretty horrible until version 3.1, by which time they had pretty much lost that section of the market. Later, many people found them very suitable for serious audio and video work. (There are reasons you'll almost never see a big name DJ streaming audio off a PC on stage, and it's not because they aren't trendy enough).

Of course marketing helped even in the beginning (the 1984 advert is hilarious), and they've certainly fed off the trendy image, but many creative types buy them because that's what they use at work and it's what they are used to.

I have both a PC desktop and a Macbook. I got them because each one suited my particular requirements. Both are very capable.

S/he assumes everyone plays on PC. They posted earlier about how nobody could possibly defend Skyrim's UI, but it worked very well on my Xbox 360...

All very true. As I said, wasn't meaning to state Apple products are universally terrible (cited that of course they make desktops much like PCs aswell), but the point is more to look at which aspects of Apple Bethesda has copied. It's all the ones that have style over substance as a priority, with Skyrim's UI for example feeling very akin to an interface you might expect from an iphone, ipod or ipad.

Not assuming, merely highlighting how nonsensical it is for PC users to pre-order the thing before specs.

As for how it "worked very well" on Xbox, please explain how. The scroll columns still take up excess space and do not allow you to see as many names as they could, meaning you're often "scrolling blind."

Fair enough. I may have read too much into what you were saying. I'm not that sure about where either OS is heading at the moment anyway. Which is why I'm still on Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. There's a trend for everything to be getting more smartphone / tablety.

Which ultimately comes down to personal taste, what you see as something thats style over substance in your mind is perfectly practical in another persons mind and ultimately Beth can't satisfy all tastes and judging by the talk sorounding pre order numbers, enough people are at least Okey with the new UI.

XD Thank you for the laugh, I definitely needed that

I never said it did, I said each of the +20% damage perks gave it +3 damage because the base damage of the weapon is 15, and 20% of 15 is 3. I never mentioned how it compared to an iron sword at all, beyond the fact that when it came to lower tier weapons, the +20% damage perks would give less damage increases compared to the dragonbone sword, thus making all those enchantments, poisons, etc. etc. negate more of the +20% damage increases for them they do for the dragonbone sword.

And since you wrongly simplified m post into being wrong because of that, you have yet to actually disprove any point I made.

That would be impossible, as you can't take damage while in a killcam in Skyrim. If you did, from something such as the killcam ending but not releasing the player movement/camera lock, that would be a bug, not a result of the system working like it was intended.

In which case I apologise, although it has to be said that you are making assumptions about a game you have never played and know little about.

I'm not too sure what you're getting at, here. I certainly never had a problem navigating to or finding anything I needed, and nor did any other console players I've heard from. That's why I say it worked.

Meanwhile, the majority of complaints I heard from PC users were based on the fact that the UI was based around consoles and not easy to use (which I can understand). Are you talking about font sizes or something? I know that's something SkyUI changed.

Edit: In addition, given the shortage of hotkeys and the 360 controller's notoriously crappy d-pad, the favourites menu was an absolute godsend.

Care to elaborate on those nuances?

But if you have a 7 in Intelligence, you wouldn't be an idiot. You would be smart. And that's where the problem lies.

With the previous system, you could have a character who is borderline brain dead but still extremely competent in their field of interest. If making energy weapons requires a 7 in Intelligence, that's impossible now, whereas it wouldn't have been if you simply needed a high degree of competence in a certain field to get the perk (Science andslashor Energy Weapons) to unlock the perk.

As for the idea of perks related to things seemingly outside of their designated S.P.E.C.I.A.L., I'd like that, but I don't see it happening all that often. With only 10 perks tied to that stat, there doesn't seem like there's going to be enough perks to go around.

It's not about semantics of the word, though do I feel that it's ridiculous to call them such. It's about the fact that we are literally losing a character building feature that we have always had. One that is almost universally loved by the fan base. Before, when we leveled up, we got an increase in skills (as we should), and then on top of that we got a nice bonus to represent our character basically learning a new trick. They aren't the same thing, and I don't see how you can just argue that they should be by just saying "semantics".

Not the killcams and that you achieve. The killcams that are achieved against you. Once your health gets low enough, an enemy attack can activate a killcam that insta-kills you, and you're given no option to block, move, kill them at the last second, etc. If you and some dragon are neck-and-neck, for instance, and the dragon just happens to get the last hit in, you have no way to defend yourself from that hit if it enters the killcam cinematic. Your character will just stand there and get picked up and thrown around.

If I learn anything, doing something because the fan base says so is, ironically sometimes a detriment to a games quality, so defending the skill system by saying the fans loved it isn't really a good thing, as I mention before, I like the new system because it gives a bit more weight to the decision of should I improve a "skill" perk or gain the benefit of another perk, instead of the system of 3/NV, which made it to easy to clime in power level very fast.

The whole perks skills discussion is just stupid since skills are still in. They are just called perks now.

All the changes makes sense

You can just pull the pointless 'because fans loved it' as a bad thing argument for literally any point that's being debated. When it comes to lore, I'd even agree with its use, but for a perfectly fine gameplay feature that represented character growth, it is a bad argument. If the gameplay is good already, and the fans both old and new think so, why change it in a way that strips out one of the key pieces of it? Becuz change, lol!

The decision you speak of removes perks as an entity. They're in the same playing field as skills now, which isn't where they belong. They represent different things. Why should they be together? You aren't supposed to choose between improving your skills and learning new tricks. The latter comes as a result of the former. For some reason though, they're now one and the same.

It's not stupid. Otherwise dozens of people wouldn't be on here pointing out the flaws we see in it. Skills are now nonsensically called perks now, yeah. And the old perks? They are now treated the same way skills are.

When you level up in 3/NV you up your skills and THEN pick a perk, now you just pick a perk. Not the same, you literally have the ability to learn NOTHING upon leveling up which makes it feel irrelevant. Skills and Perks are not the same thing nor should Bethesda try to fool people into thinking that

What is the problem in having one system called perks that contain both perks and skills?

There is no problem. This just makes it smoother and more fun. The content is still there.

But the old being level 5 with 100 guns skill is gone. Which makes sense. Better progression like this.

HOW? You would still be level 5 with 100 Guns in the new system! Just pick the Gun-related skills every level...seriously you are completely blind to how backwards this system is