Does lack of any of those things mean you can't work with different factions and get different results? That's what you said was gone in Fallout 4. And that's what I disagreed with. You seem to have moved the goalposts somewhat.

But I have stumbled on a BoS related quest without being allied to them. And I've just reached the point where I've been told I will be considered hostile if I work against a faction. I think I may also be somewhat locked into a certain faction to some extent, but I not exactly sure yet. We'll see what happens.

Now, I liked New Vegas a lot. And there's some things I feel were done better than Fallout 4. But it was written by a different company, so that's to be completely expected.

I see a lot of replay value in Fallout 4, and frankly it sounds like you've written it off for not being New Vegas enough. Which is fine. I won't try to change your mind.

he dont know what he speaking about, u are force to choose a faction same as u do on NV, and u will get different result and enemy base on your faction. And yeah u are lock when u choose a faction.

I don't think that it is intended. At least, I hope so...............

@OP You make some good points. People do tend to overestimate how much skills actually mattered in FO3 and FO:NV. Skills also limited how much specials actually mattered. Intelligence was the alpha and omega of the specials, after you got it to 8 or 9 (if you beeline the implant and intel bobblehead) then you can assign your specials to how you want to play. You also started with way too many special points, you barely had to make any sacrifices in char creation.

IMO the perk system was basically a lateral move. It's basically replacing one subpar system for another subpar system. With the perk system it feels like a lot of things are missing. No specialization perks in energy weapons or guns? No survival crafting perks? You're an expert cook from day one. No accuracy perks? You can pick up any gun and have perfect accuracy with it from day one. You can do more damage, but you really don't feel like you're learning anything new. I think the perk system could have been great if they only expended upon it. Basically doubled the number of perks, 2 per special level. Adding accuracy perks, weapons specialization perks (beyond the style ones we have now), and some more of the ones missing from the previous games. There'd be a fair bit of overlap and perhaps redundancy, but i think it would make specializing your char feel important again.

I don't see the new character progression system as being gimped in any way. Everything is there, just that the way you bump up skills and stats is done differently. Now, rather than have a load of points to manually distribute for tiny increments across your SPECIAL and skills, and taking perks that were useful but comparatively not as potent as they are now FO4, you have the perks significantly powered up and tied to your base SPECIAL stats and gated by level. The only streamlining I see there is that what you used to have to accomplish with three different steps (raise Special, raise skills, select perks) is now accomplished in one (assign one point per level to either SPECIAL or a perk).

Yes, you had more flexibility to manually allocate skills for very particular combinations of skills, but apart from the oddball stealth/big guns type build, which is arguably gimped because of what you had to give up to make that character, most of the time you were manually raising related skills and taking perks to support a playstyle or create a particular specialized build. This is exactly what the new system helps you do but without having to allocate a mess of points to the specific skills that are now associated more generally under their respective SPECIAL category or perk cluster.

I DO take issue with the (so far, in my playthrough) apparent lack of application for some skills outside of combat. Everyone mentions conversations and only Charisma having any effect and I agree with that. Others I'm still not sure of but might work out. What used to be the skills Science, Repair and Medicine are now all under intelligence as perks, and I have already begun to see cases where having upped those skills is paying off, even outside of combat. I don't want to elaborate much because spoilers. Also Lockpicking obviously has an effect in-world.

Ultimately, though, I keep coming back to this: apart from stat checks and some extra conversation options, how much of an effect did all those individual skills really have that they don't have now? There were tons of cases in previous games where you could alter conversations by passing checks on any of four or five possible skills in one conversation. How meaningful is that really?

Before you get your panties in a bunch, read my post like 3 posts later where I corrected my mistake and mixing them up with another perk.

Point still remains, like Diablo 3 they are locked behind a level requirement.

Where previously I could spend all my points into lockpicking right off the bat and be a master of lockpicking early on, while svcking at most other things.

that involves too much grinding, the way its implemented is fine, picking locks doesn't help you level up, killing enemies does help you level up but its not like skyrim, you pick the perks you want, just like in fallout 3 you picked the skills you wanted to put points into, the game is plenty complex and involved so having to rely on using a skill entirley to raise it would just be too much like skyrim where you're having to make 1000 daggers to raise the smithing skill, that kind of grinding gets old, i didn't like that grinding part about skyrim, although i loved skyrim they didn't need to try and copy that system in that area.

Well it increased replayability of game, since some builds didnt have access to some choices in dialogue.

Also skills previously felt more immersive since they affected directly actions done by you, like science skill made hacking mini game easier and easier. or guns skills affected weapon sway which made you feel like you were getting better together with your character.

Well, you do end up having to choose between certain factions (and certain companions will turn against you). Some factions are neutral to each other depending on the route you take. I won't post spoilers here, though. Not sure about being independent from the factions, but there is the Commonwealth Minutemen you can join and see through to the end. That's as close as you can get to being independent of the three big ones.

There's one side quest where the decision you make can align or turn you against one of the settlements.

Not sure about disguises though. There is a mission for the Railroad where you can utilize a disguise to get past certain individuals for a certain mission - again spoilers that I refuse to post here (you are still prompted by a speech check so you need high charisma).

I agree with you that the perk system does everything you could do with the systems in earlier games but I have to call you on this one point. Finding the blocks of code to remove duds and replenish allowances is not tied to the hacker skill, only the ability to access and hack higher level computers. You can do that to basic computers with no points in hacker.

Rifleman applies bonuses to any 2 handed, single shot / trigger weapon. Basically anything that is 2 handed and not full auto.

I don't think it does increase replayability, because most of the time you could choose from a bunch of different skill-check based responses but for the same result. it doesn't really matter if you choose the Explosives answer or the Science answer if either choice gets you the same result, which was the case most of the time, especially in NV. One of my favorite games, btw, but the skill check thing can be kind of dumb.

As to the "immersion" thing, I don't understand what having your skills give you different abilities has to do with "immersion." Also, what you describe is exactly the same way it works in Fallout 4. In fact, leveling and picking perks in FO4 has a lot more noticeable effect than in previous games. The damage boosts on Rifleman or Gunslinger, for example, are WAAAY bigger than in the previous leveling system. I love taking anew perk when I level now, and immediately going out into the world to see the results because thy are apparent and more rewarding.

Rifleman I think

NV is a barren desert with hardly anything to do, i pretty much found every location and did most every quest in like 40 hrs and the game was over, combat svcks not because of the weapons but a total lack of tactical gameplay, no places to hide, no places to sneak around, no nooks and crannies, all the enemies were creatuires or melee, IE powder gangers, CL, so combat svcked, no intricate map to explore, almost no large dungeons, none really nothing in any close comparison with fallout 3 or fallout 4, so NV is not superior when it comes to locations, enemies to fight, tactical combat, its not even close so its a joke to even think it is, the story was good, how they structured it, but thats the only selling point, that and maybe weapons mods thats it, everything else they took like 10 steps backward.

Interesting opinions but I disagree. I personally enjoyed NV story and area more. Melee combat in FO4 is just so bad lol which is a real turn off.

Well Many people like this aspect of "role playing", it affects their enjoyment from game, like voiced main character effects enjoyment for some people(it affects how much they can immerse themselves in game)

Thats just it, in real life how skillful you are with guns will affect weapon sway or how fast you can reload gun but wont really affect how much damage you will do with guns. you can argue that its because we know better where to aim to deal maximum damage but that should be outcome of our better aiming and not magically increased damage from guns, but even than damage increased wouldnt be that great(not doubled for sure) and there is no explanation how we can increase damange of heavy weapons lke missile launcher or fat man.

Also not everyone prefers BIG jump in skills when leveling I and many people prefer smoother progression, generally in RPG's I play I am increasing multiple skill by few points each, it feels more realistic to me, it lets me get more "into" game, since it makes me feel like player character and me arent that different.

well it might your thing you stand out in the middle of nothing and not have any place to hide or sneak around, i'm not into that, i like the countless and numerous large areas to hide and sneak around in bethesda games and especially fallout 4, its massive, there's so many places to explore, sneak around, battle enemies etc, its not even funny, fallout 4 has more building complexes, dungeons, metro tunnels, variety of human enemies etc then any game i know of, i don't know any game that comes even close.

I hear you. I don't know- it's subjective, I guess. I feel very well-grounded with my character and I completely buy into what's going on on screen. I will say that since Skyrim I feel like there is a big shift in Bethesda games to putting more of the experience and immersion into the actual game world, the experience of playing, and less on stats and fine-tuning very nuanced character builds. I'm fine with that- even when I used to play AD&D (showing my age, I know), I was far less interested in stats and rolls than I was in the characters, story, setting. And drawing pictures of characters on the character sheet, lol!!

I do see your point, just for me, while I'm aware that the system has changed I'm much more interested in gawking and exploring and the actual gameplay to worry too much about only being able to see like 10 of my stats.

Actually they are tied to science, the higher your science skill, the more dud removals and allowance replenishing is present in the terminal.

At a low level you might only have two or three dud removals and sometimes no allowance replenishes.
At a high level you can get so many dud removals that you get an error when you click any more because there are no more duds to remove.

100x this.

Are people still seriously spreading this BS? Not to mention the fact that a good portion of what you have in your post is an outright lie or you just haven't payed very good attention and missed everything, I don't know.

"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. "

Haha. That happened to me a lot. I'd get so obsessed with selecting matching brackets that I wouldn't realize there was only one word choice left.

Meanwhile, plenty of perks in the perk chart are not only useless, but take up space that prevents more useful perks.

In the old system, there were plenty of useless and/or less valuable perks, but instead of preventing variety, they could only add to it.

Night Person, Refractor, Rad Resistance, Animal Friend, and several others have questionable value considering how many perk points you have to spend just to acquire their effects. Compared to stat drops like Rifleman, or crafting perks like Science, they aren't as worth it as they should be.

I'm not against the decision, but when skills were separate from SPECIAL, you didn't really have this issue.