Reputations in New Vegas were just really frustrating to me. It always seems off to me that the Legion would send an over-powered death squad after anyone who dipped into Shunned rep with them, and then of course killing the death squad would lower your rep even more. And locking us out of quest content based on faction rep might have worked for NV (the jury's still out on that one), it's antithetical to the open-world philosophy Bethesda approaches their games with. Karma suffered from different problems - in 3 there was no real reason for us to be evil and in New Vegas it was just arbitrary who was considered good, neutral, and evil - and while I'd say reputation is too important in New Vegas, karma just isn't important enough in either games.

For karma, I don't even want a karma metric as much as I want a reason to choose neutral or evil. Getting the truly good outcome in a quest should require extra steps, more work, and even risk betrayal; it should be hard compared to staying neutral, and less rewarding (in a materialistic sense ) than being evil. The good/evil outcomes of specific quests should reverberate throughout the world, changing what kinds of random encounters we see, or the choices we can make later on down a questline. A karma metric would help for how NPCs react to you and whatnot.

For reputations, I think they'd be better served to use something similar to how Skyrim's holds tracked regional bounties and thaneships. Each faction would track crime separately, and disguises would hide that criminal record until you committed another crime. Okay really, just don't lock us out of content and send ceaseless death squads to kill us for dipping into the negative territory.

Of course, my guess is that karma and reputation won't exist as metrics in Fallout 4; which isn't to say we won't get complicated political relationships and moral choices. Incidentally, we weren't shown any sign of karma/reputation in what we saw of the Pipboy menu, but that doesn't instantly mean they're no longer there. But I think Bethesda could really do a good job of tying in karma and reputations with their Radiant Story system.

I've always loved factions, and reputation and playing the game. In Everquest II, my dark elf rogue was happily welcomed into EVERY city except the recently-added Frogloks. Took a lot of faction "grinding" to get everyone to like me, of course. I would love it if your actions had consequences in terms of how people react to you; like, if you kill innocent civilians, when you approach a new, innocent, civilian, he may flee from you... but a raider may not be aggro and instead nod and give you a chuckle and a cheer. Or if you routinely free slaves, then raiders may start to recognize you and aggro more readily, and perhaps (through Radiant) you'll be contacted by people who want your help to rescue kidnapped / enslaved friends of theirs. That's a quest that a slaver/killer kind of character would never receive.

Clearly Fallout can track at least SOME of our achievements, since the radio would talk about them (although sometimes you have to wonder how they found out that, for example, you massacred an entire village and left no survivors ---- no survivors, so how did anyone find out!??). The question I guess becomes, how do NEW people you meet know who you ARE until you tell them? Instantly recognizing a total stranger as "That Guy" that they've heard about seems a little strange.

Well openly killing members of a faction should affect your reputation. It would be neat if killing all the witnesses cancelled out that reputation drop though.

But all in all I liked it in NV.

Karma didn't seem to affect too many things and seemed more like a way to personally keep count of my deeds and misdeeds, which I personally thought was nice.

I'm hoping that we can actually be evil. I'm a little worried our settlements could easily end up being happy little sanctuaries for dopey NPCs.

Factions and reputation makes me feel like an actual part of the organization, I know it's just some stupid second screen on the pip-boy but it makes me feel like my character is connected to that faction besides occasional interaction.

I hope they expand on New Vegas' reputation to make it feel like there are more risks and rewards, that you're more connected to the faction for better or for worse.

"Open-world" isn't the same as "do whatever you want with no consequences."