I see a lot of people lamenting the loss of the Skill system, but they don't seem to realize what the system actually did (or more specifically, didn't do), so I thought I'd lay it out. The following is a look at what the skills in New Vegas actually did. The overall system was pretty much the same as the one from FO3, so much of this can be applied to FO3, as well.

Speech, Science and Lockpicking - Science and Lockpicking are the most cited examples, so we'll cover this group first. The skills themselves did nothing. Instead, in certain situations the game checked your skill value against a break point. If your skill met or exceeded the break point, you were allowed to do something. If not, you weren't allowed to do the thing. The only value that mattered at any given time was the break point value. In other words, only one of the Skill points out of the 100 was important, and only in situations where the game was actually looking at the skill. The rest of the time, not even that mattered.

Guns, Explosives, Melee Weapons, and Energy Weapons - each point in these skills gave +0.5% damage to their weapon type. Over the course of leveling the skill to 100, this was a significant boost, but on a per-level basis, the damage boost was negligible.

Medicine, Repair, Barter, and Survival - much like the previous skills, the boost per level was insignificant. Unlike them, quantities made up for quality. The items these skills covered were common enough that more items could, and often did, accomplish the same thing without harming your character or supplies.

Unarmed - You thought Lockpicking and Science were bad? Unarmed did nothing. The damage of an Unarmed weapon did not change with your skill level, so there was pretty much no reason to invest in it beyond arbitrary break points.

Sneak - I have yet to see anything quantifiable on Sneak. Nobody knows exactly how this works. There are a lot of vague tips, but no hard rules with quantifiable things like viewing distance of targets, angle of their view, cover, etc.

The basic point of this is that the skill system used in New Vegas was a placebo. We made numbers go up, and it made us happy. I could throw out buzzwords like 'Sense of Progression', but that is literally just a complicated way of saying that it made us happy. And people are complaining that the system is gone.

With the new system, every point has a significant effect. A massive damage boost, the ability to open or do things we couldn't, etc. To me, asking for the skill system back is like asking to be treated like a child: praised for every minor accomplishment, even when that accomplishment amounts to nothing.

With the new system, every point we spend has a noticeable impact on the game. We're accomplishing the exact same things we were before, but without the Pavlovian system where we spend a lot of points for not a lot of gain. To me, that is nothing but good, but so many people hate it, and it boggles my mind.

So there you have it: my interpretation of the old system, and why the new system is so much better.

Not to mention people are forgetting that the perk system was pretty bland in the base games and didn't get fleshed out until the DLC.

They're also ignoring the additional perks obtained through magazines. And the gotta catch em all companion perks.

Or the actual emphasis on specials.

You just covered up the "skills" and even that's enough to come to the conclusion, that the new system is far better.

If you now take into consideraton, that the skills and S.P.E.C.I.A.L.-attributes marginally had an impact on each other, where as now, there is a huge connection, than you have to be blinded by nostalgia, to not find the new system better.

Thanks for your post dude! I too love the new system!

I wouldn't mind the new system, but the lack of stats leads me to be uncertain about where my character is really at. Far from removing "spreadsheetyness", it feels like all the numbers are still there and I'm just not allowed to see them for the benefit of my own assessment.

A lot of perks as described seem less important/effective than they probably are considering how high the costs [requirements] are.

Also, I like sniper rifles and I'm not sure which perk sniper rifles are covered under.

Major difference is i.e. in lockpicking, where you could use other means (chems, apparels, mags etc) to temporarily boost you above a certain required threshold (FONV, can't remember FO3). Tradeoff cost being you could get addicted and time spend on micromanaging it. Especially with limited amount of levels available, this made a lot of sense, and for sure was a playstyle I adopted. Pointless to assign 100 to lockpicking if you wanted other things and could live with the drawbacks.

I'm guessing boosting charisma now will grant higher prices? But there is no longer a link between a stat boost and what you can do. Also having a hard time figuring out what to level up in the inbetween levelups when you can't beeline anything.

If level requirements were less harsh, I think enemy levels would have to be calculated differently, sort of attempting to counter your speciality. If rules allowed it, a GM wouldn't prevent this "exploit/power gaming", but rather think of ways to counter it. I guess that is an abstract that is very hard to do right in a computer game though.

What ticks me off is the complete arbitrariness of the new perk system. I don't have to put any work into a skill before I can be a master at it. Picking locks doesn't make me a better lock picker, shooting my gun doesn't make me more accurate, patching people up doesn't make me a better doc. Instead we get magical level limited perks. I can go around shooting everything in sight with a minigun and wander around hur dur like and then somehow magically increase my intelligence and my hacking ability. There's no sense of practice makes perfect, there's no correlation between what you are doing and the skills you can get.

And the level limits themselves are arbitrary. Like I've said in another post its like telling someone who has picked a 1000 locks that he is still an apprentice because he's only 35 years old versus some idiot who hasn't even seen a lock before being able to be a master because he is 45 years old. The only way to make any of it make sense is if you keep track of how much you use your skills and only put points into perks that relate to what you actually have used and that places the burden on you who's trying to make their character actually seem like he's learning instead of magically instantly knowing something without any prior experience instead of being a built in and entirely rational part of a system. You can have a slight correlation between the perks you pick and what you do because you are more likely to pick perks based on things you like doing, but you can also just randomly pick a perk or just straight up increase an attribute for no reason. I shouldn't become stronger just because I've picked a couple locks, I shouldn't be smarter after mindlessly mowing down some molerats and I shouldn't be more skilled at something through use of some other random skill. There's no logic in it.

This sums up your post pretty well. Basically you're saying that the skill system was somehow bad, because none of the skills were used all the time, only when it was appropriate. So essentially, you hate RPG character skill progression.

Is this the best the apologists can do?

Oh, and before you start putting things in my mouth, I've never said anything bad about the new character progression system, other than "simplified" and I didn't even say it in a negative way.

Picking locks did not make you a better lock picker in any previous fallout game. When you levelled up you could pour all your skill points there without having picked a single lock in the game. You're thinking about TES.

For me, the additions made to FO4 far far out weigh whats missing/changed from previous installments. I think if FO4 came before NV/FO3, people would be burning effigies of Todd and Josh in the streets right now.

P.S No disrespect to FO3 and NV, they are both also in my top 10 all time favorite games list, FO4 is just above them.

Certainly a valid point, but the same issue was present in the old system, too. I understand that you're looking at the Elder Scrolls system, but this post was only looking at New Vegas vs Fallout 4. Because this is a problem with both systems, I'm afraid that I don't consider it a valid criticism of the Fallout 4 system.

Don't misunderstand; I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that within the scope of the argument that I presented, it's not a valid criticism of one system because it applies equally to both.

Yeah I agree on this too!

Compare it with Skyrim where you had to grind every skill to reach a certain amount of points until you could finally choose a perk which in the end had an impact on your character.

Now the grinding is gone, with the perks intact. Makes more sense to me!

Even tho I don't mind the new system I don't think the old one was just a placebo.

It was just to easy to reach 100 in every skill, so the system didn't work as well as it could have.

Either way I'm happy with the new game and people who say it's entirely bad are mostly trolls.

People who complain about specifics most often have a point and shouldn't be regarded the same.

We all know FO4 is not the perfect game but it is a Fallout alright and very happy to have a new one.

If this came across as a personal attack, I apologize. It was intended as a general statement to the community; I had no one in mind when I wrote it.

Also, I understand that things aren't going to be relevant attt all points in the game. My statement on the Lockpicking, Speech, and Science skills was meant to point out that they didn't even affect what they did. Lockpicking didn't make the sweet spot any bigger, and Science didn't remove words. They did nothing beyond the break point check.

The thing the old system did better was presentation.

It's indisputable fact that the actual game effects of skills in 3/NV are reproducible in 4 by selecting the relevant perks (just as we would have selected the skills on level-up in prior games).

BUT, the way it's presented is in this massive perk chart where everything is represented by an icon that doesn't always do a great job of communicating what the perk does.

Even in FO4, we can break down the perks into some loose categories, and one of those categories could easily be what earlier games called skills. What I'd like is for the perks to be categorized by their type of function rather than just by their SPECIAL attribute and requirement. The perk chart as is is a disorganized mess that's very difficult for me to digest and make sense of. Someone who's brand new to the series would easily be incredibly overwhelmed by it.

I will concede these points. New Vegas did have excellent presentation, and it did have an excellent sense of progression. I just don't like the fact that what you felt you were accomplishing and what you were actually accomplishing were so different. Nor am I saying that the new system is perfect. I just believe that the new system is a solid step in the right direction. I definitely want more transparency in the perk descriptions, for example.

Lol, this guy.

Bravo, OP.

Maybe the addition of some kind of sort function to the perk chart would be of benefit, breakdown to perks that affect weapons, perks that affect abilities (lock pick, hack, mods), perks that affect settlements etc..

New Vegas? New Vegas was gimped from the beginning since it had to be developed within a year while stuck in the confines of the already established lackluster game engine.

Why wouldn't we be comparing skills to Fallout 1&2...you know, the games which not only established the rulesets but the games where skills were most dynamic and useful...especially in encouraging players to build specialized characters? Why?

I could not agree more, the new special system feels much more rewarding to me, as I can clearly see and experience the advantage of the perks.

Partly because it makes more sense to me to compare the game to the most recent iteration (especially given the drastic shift in gameplay that resulted from Bethesda aquiring the rights after Interplay went under), and partly because I haven't played the first two games, so I'm not qualified to make comparisons to them.

Well if you really want to see Skills implemented in a meaningful and dynamic way, I'd highly recommend playing them (among a myriad of other reasons, all positive).

The biggest difference for me is that you don't have to use a skill to become better at it. I'll try to explain myself with an example that just happened in my game.

I was scavenging in a complex when I was shot by a turret.. no problem I'll just shoot it. Yay for experience, I gained a level. Before I look at what perk I should get, I decide to loot the next room... whoa a terminal, let's see what it does. Locked. Advanced... I cannot hack this terminal. But I have a perk point! That's good I will take my perk in hacking. I've been delaying it for a while now.

Hacking completed.. the terminal was to disable all the turrets in the complex. And it hit me. With the old skill system, the experience I would have gained would have been in combat, not in hacking. I would not have been able to hack this terminal. Unless I trained in hacking and not in combat. But now experience is experience, you can be highly skilled in something you never trained.

It really is a "minor" issue, because now I always take perks related to what I've been doing recently. I try to roleplay it. But it does make a difference in some way, because now it doesn't matter what you are doing, because there is only one kind of experience.

Overall I think it was more rewarding to gain a new possibility (lockpicking an advanced lock, being able to cook certain items) by leveling your skill than by assigning a perk. I don't hate the new system, the rebalance of SPECIAL is good, but I liked the old system better.

So much misinformation and straight up bs.

For one, the weapons skills did more than increase damage, they Also increased the aiming, or decreased the weapon spread. On top of that, weapons had skill requirements that made you worse with them if you didn't meet them.

Lockpicking decreased the chance of a Bobby pin from breaking. But arguably did the least amount of any skill, mostly because it got used for opening almost everything, which had lots of useful items everywhere, would an argument can be made for how useful lockpicking is for supplies.

Science not only made hacking easier by giving more dud removals and allowance replenishes, but there were Also tons of crafting recipes that used science skills. Very useful ones.

In fact, repair, science, medicine, explosives and survival had tons of crafting recipes on top of their base uses that not only added more options, but Also added character flavour.

Unarmed was extremely useful, to the point it was overpowered, so I don't know where the hell you got that idea. I was able to kill the legendary bloatfly with ease by uppercutting it, knocking him to the ground with super slam, and then stomped his head in.
Another character who used guns died like 50 times trying to kill that bloatfly.

And then there are tons of perks, a ridiculous amount of perks, that require skills and special to be certain levels. Making every character and play through vastly different, while with the current system most characters are the same anyways.

hilarious considering 3/4 of the skills were useless in those games

-

Agreed OP

Never said it was without fault, but that's an exaggeration. Even if you look at the "lesser" utilized skills like "Doctor" you're able to reap pretty incredible benefits like the subdermal armor. And getting to that place is entirely without handholding.