Yes and no.

They should be unkillable for newbies and people who play on easy difficulty.

But for more experienced players they should be killable (normal and hardcoe difficulty).

I don't mind having to revive, but hell no to requiring a skill or perk for it.

A stimpak should do the trick. No reason to funnel people into certain builds for the sake of companion maintenance. But, this (unconscious until revived) was the way my two favorite modded companions in Oblivion worked. It wasn't possible in Skyrim because Skyrim didn't even have an unconscious state ... an NPC was either up, dead or doing that stupid down to one knee animation. THAT is one thing I don't want to see in the new game.

For my part, if a companion is going to be anything to me beyond 'disposable cannon fodder', they need to be protected in some way. I don't really like the save and ratchet approach to gaming where you reload after anything bad happens. If I know a potential companion can die I either callously dismiss them as disposable tools or ... if I like them for some reason ... don't even take them with me and expose them to danger in the first place. In other words, an NPC traveling with me is either a protected companion or a red shirt.

You're right! That gives me a ray of hope.

It was a smart addition to FONV, it was the worst thing ever in FO3 when Clover or Jericho just got ganked by that random Albino Radscorpion and you havnt saved in long time...but i think hardcoe mode should let them die...assuming they bring HM back of course

stimpacks won't work if the companion isn't organic

It worked in the last game...just saying

okay wouldn't make any sense? Just saying, don't see how its possible to repair ED-E from new vegas with a stimpack. kind of ridiculous if you ask me

I didnt say it was sensible, im just saying i wouldnt put it past Bethesda

Heh, ok. Maybe save the skill and the doctor's bag for a hardcoe mode.

You couldn't heal the robot companion in Fallout 3 with stimpacks

You couldnt heal any companion in FO3 with stimpacks except Dogmeat, there was no companion wheel back then and the Dog was the only one with the speech option. Robots cant self-use any item because they are locked into their weapons with no utility. In NV we have a companion wheel and ED-E can be healed with Stims

I meant by giving them stimpacks so they would use them to heal themselves. You couldn't heal Segeant RL-3 with stimpacks by giving him some.

NV wasn't made by Bethesda.

and Bethesda ditched the companion wheel in favor of contextual commands.

Like i said no robot could "use" items from their inventory, it is a limitation of their in-game model...oh wait it is you...the one who defends Bethesda beyond the point of basic logic...im not even gonna bother getting svcked into that pathetic hurricane

Which was exactly the point I was making. Its designed to be that way, and since Beth doesn't have the wheel, we wont be able to do it that way either.

I wasn't defending anything, simply pointing out a fact. Stop trying to personally attack people and maybe you would realize what people are trying to say.

I have yet to see any proof they dont have a Wheel, it is a natural progression of the Companion system. Beth loves streamlining and adding the wheel smooths out the entire companion system therefore making it beyond stupid to not include it. Maybe if you got your head out of gamesas's rear you wouldnt get such responses from people

They should die in hardcoe mode, if HC mode is offered that is. Otherwise they should be immortal, but with an more in-depth health and limb restoring system.

Skyrim was released after NV and lacks the wheel, and when talking to Dogmeat in the Fo4 e3 videos, no wheel showed up, and Todd then SPECIFICALLY mentioned that interacting with the dog "was all contextutal"..... exactly like Skyrim.

The wheel does nothing to smooth out anything, if anything it makes it more clunky and cumbersome, as it forces the player to go through yet another menu just to talk to their NPC companions.

Simply looking at the companion, holding the interact button, and pointing at something is a FAR more efficient system, and is whya Todd demonstrated at E3.