It is my hope that everyone understands that this point in the development cycle for Fallout 4, we customers will have very little impact on any further development of the game.

That is to say, I could propose an truly new concept, something that has never been done before, something that will revolutionize the gaming industry and something extremely easy to impliment, it will not make it into Fallout 4, UNLESS BGS has already thought about it and and has already implemented it.

Design is already complete. All systems have been coded. NOTHING NEW IS GOING TO BE ADDED. Testing and debugging are just about the only things that are happening now. BGS is in what is called Crunch Time. Which basically means they do not have enough time to complete what is scheduled much less anything that is unscheduled. Fallout 4 is at a stage of development where features are removed, not inserted.

I am not saying you are wasting your time. A good idea WILL be considered, but if it isn't already in Fallout 4, it will be considered for a FUTURE game. This isn't an episode of Star Trek Next Generation, where Captain Howard says, "Make it so." and the Starship BGS goes zooming off to the next quadrant. It just does not work that way.

I don't think anything we say will influence them but I don't see how a game that is probably more than six months minimum from release would be in testing and de-bugging now. They will no doubt still be finishing off parts of the world + features.

I think most people are aware of that. I'm seeing less "Bethesda should put this in" and more "I hope Bethesda puts this in" or "this is how I think/hope they'll do it".

Not like it would change anything either way. Being an armchair game dev is fun.

More like "I hope Bethesda HAS put this in" ... There were 262 speculation/suggestion threads (each with 200+ posts) in the "Fallout Series Discussion" forums, prior to the game being announced, and I'm certain almost everything being hoped for in the newly created Fallout 4 forum was suggested/postulated several times over

Still never saw a dev even look into the forums. I'm hoping they did so under anonymous or something.. I've seen some devs (or employees at least) check out this subforum, but as far as I've been able to tell he/she hasn't so much as opened a topic yet.

I could be wrong, but this is based on my limited observations as a couch potato on summer break.

I'm sure at least some devs pay attention to the forums, although it's probably for the better they don't actively participate outside of the modding or lore forums. There are some devs in the Creation Kit forums that give modders advice about scripting and how some systems work; that's pretty damn cool.

The devs have visited the forums and replied before. However this was back before NVs release, so these were the Obsidian devs and Obsidian has always been more present than Bethesda.

I'm aware of the Obsidian devs, but I've never seen Bethesda. Then again I don't frequent TES forums even though I was a fan of Morrowind and Oblivion.

One word..

DLC.

That's not Bethesda's policy, they don't discuss anything on these forums. And I don't blame them frankly. If it were to be made aware that they were official devs, they would be spending so much time in discussions with various people, or having to wade through pointless requests, that they would never be able to get any actual work done. That doesn't mean however that they don't have a look around from time to time. It's just a good policy to see what the players want from their games and consider the suggestions.

Obsidian and CDPR handled it perfectly fine Both are seen discussing with their fans to deliver a game that people want. I just hope they do actually discuss with people, even if it means secondary accounts.

This is very true, we was able to change Morrowind as we got into the cycle early.

No major changes on FO4 is possible, balance tweaks and so on will happen but we does not know as we did not know magic was underpowered in Skyrim until we played it.