1. Can you crit outside of Vats? Can the crit meter be filled/used outside of Vats?

2. If not, won't this severely gimp people who don't like to use Vats? Especially Unarmed Weapons which heavily relied on Crit? Are the days of just wacking enemies over and over gone, and I will have to use VATS regularly to be a badass?

I was under the impression crits would still occur percentage based outside of VATS. Now that I think about it, I don't recall that actually being confirmed.

Well I was looking at the Perk Chart thingy on Orcz, and it only mentioned VATS on all Critical Perks. Not sure how accurate that site is.

This has me worried as I do not like to play with BGS version of VATS nor do I want to build for it. Unarmed relying on real-time crits for most of its damage in the FO3/NV also has me worried i'll be forced to VATS.

I wonder if maybe they've said something in any recent interview or video that someone else may have picked up on.

Orcz is definitely not the be-all end-all, a lot of it is speculation.

I'm pretty sure there will be criticals outside of VATS - we see one go off when he vaporized a dude with the Laser Musket, and it didn't look like any action was cut from that shot.

^ This. There will almost certainly be "regular" Crits outside of VATS. You just won't be able to ~plan~ them as you seem to be able to do in VATS. What worries me about the VATS Critical system is that it seems you have to make several attacks to build up your crit "meter" and ~then~ you can choose to execute a critical. Unless it somehow "remembers" how much crit-meter you have built up over time, then it looks like you could never ~start~ combat with a critical hit, which is unfortunate. It also looks like it would be really easy to build up the crit meter by shooting foes, building it up, building it up.... and then everyone's dead and your crit meter goes back to zero (assuming it does not remember how far you built-up the crit meter from earlier time in VATS).

Watching the character video last week, when it scrolled past Better Criticals, it just said "50% more critical damage", nothing about VATS. We haven't seen details on a lot of the perks, so if they have a filled out chart, it's got to be a lot of guesses.

I'm also wondering how VATS orientated the combat is.

I'm doing a playthrough FO3 at the moment without VATS, and taking a regular good kicking and wasting loads of ammo due to spread even with high gun skills.

Looking at what's confirmed for FO4:
-Perception affects accuracy in Vats
-Agility affects no of action points
-Luck affects critical charge rate

So for non VATS, we're just down to perks. Various weapon types have their basic perks, but after the first one, they are level gated. Then there only seem to be a few related to shooting or dealing more damage (mainly in Luck, which was going to be my dump start) and they look a bit like VATS perks too.

I know they have tried to improve the FPS side, but I'm not sure I see many ways to improve my chatacter along those lines.

I'm pretty sure he executed a VATS critical to vaporize that raider, because his critical meter was full immediately before and then empty afterwards. You are referring to the "Fallout 4 – Gameplay Exploration" at 3min4s into the video right?

Perception and Agility effected VATS that way in FO3, as well, so nothing new there. Where does it say that they only have an effect in VATS in FO4? And there seem to be plenty of Perks that could effect gunplay - looking at the perk chart, there are perks that prominently feature guns in their pictures at STR 5/7/8, PER 2/3/8/9/10, AGI 1/2/8/10 (ignoring CHA, we know what all those are, and the INT ones are all about crafting.)

Yeah, but there was no VATS targeting of body parts or anything. He just shot and the kill-cam played, and displayed the critical information on the HUD.

There's your mistake. Stop that.

Look at the mole rat combat scene at 13min17sec into the "Fallout 4 - E3 Showcase World Premiere" video. The player brings up VATS, doesn't have enough ap to attack the mole rat torso, but somehow critically attacks the molerat torso, while at the same time being notified of insufficient ap on the HUD. This is clear evidence of possibly needing VATS to target and execute a critical on something.

It's clear in the case of the raider vaporization that there's no obvious targeting of a body part with VATS. However, there are other instances where it seems as though VATS was used even though the actual VATS targeting was never shown. For instance, at 1min55sec into the "Fallout 4 – Combat Gameplay Compilation" it's clear that the player possibly targeted the head of the raider with VATS, but no VATS targeting was shown.

While we can't necessarily rule out the return of "regular" criticals at this point, no one should be surprised if they end up needing VATS to execute critical attacks at some point.

You might be able to only make the bar fill up while in VATS, but not necessarily only while using the auto-aim feature. I think VATS is now a slow motion system that steadily drains AP and you have the option to use AP to auto target attack like before as well. Maybe if you wack away while in the slow motion system without auto attacking with AP, you can still get criticals this way?

It seems like Bethesda is trying to cater a bit more towards the VATS-free players in this game (relative to FO3) so it would be strange if they made Luck a VATS specific attribute (especially when Perception is already a pretty much VATS specific attribute).

Now that the game is out, can anyone answer these questions?