The thing about Bethesda games is that you can make them as easy or as difficult as you want.

No points in Endurance, no chems, light armor pr no armor, require food and sleep daily, no crafting, limit your scavenging to pre-war money and caps only....whatever.

Make it hard or make it easy....it's all there for you if you just use you imagination.

Or in other words...Role Play.

LOL

Very much agree. Seriously they should stop doing that. Everytime they release a game, I am always fearful of what will they have removed from it.

They took a good step back with armor layer though. Almost makes me think of Morrowind and wearing piecemeal armor instead of the bodysuit armor onsies we got in FO3, FONV, and Skyrim.

Base skill + stat raising chems and apparel + skill raising mags +++ - and you can open a lock way above your skill level. So it still mattered a lot, every single point counts to somehow get above the threshold. Although I agree such thresholds are not optimum design, but what can you do with a crowd that can't accept dice rolls.

It is a game where the driving objective is to play a role successfully. All other objectives are subordinate to that principal goal, and all of them contribute to the fulfillment of that goal. It would be dishonest to say that Fallout 4 is not an RPG.

Your anology invites us to consider what must be sacrificed to attain broad appeal. Such a pursuit is worthwhile. Unfortunately, your anology also invites your audience to imagine that everything was sacrificed in the making of Fallout 4, that nothing of the original Fallout remains. Your audience knows better than that, because they find their experience in Fallout 4 comparable to their experience in Fallout 3, and they find it comparable to their experiences in Fallouts 1 and 2. For me, that experience encompasses role playing as I have always role-played, even through the years before I touched my first computer RPG.

Fallout 4 enforces limitations on characters. No character benefits from a perk unless he has the perk. No character benefits from a stronger attribute unless he has the stronger attribute. No character benefits from an item unless he possesses and uses the item. Through the game interface, you manipulate a mathematical model that represents your character. The model limits what you can accomplish. No amount of skill on your part can cause your character to exceed the constraints of the model.

I'm a bit too late to the party but first of all, you shouldn't have bought without researching it first. Even then you had the chance to refund. Skills were nigh meaningless even in 3, I'd say what they did in 4 is an improvement.

And lastly, no. They aren't PC gaming company. Look at how much they sell to PC and how much for each console. I suspect they're still releasing on PC to get ideas from modders.

... And the [missing] mechanics define the boundaries of the role, in a way understandable to both the player and the game engine.

Would you name something that is left of it?

No surprise there ~right?

And yet...

• The perks are given out like candy; what character doesn't have easy access to those perks?
• Those attributes were intended as a commitment; and to define the PC, and direct the character's path of possibility.
  Now they are intended to be maxed as a kind of mini-game in and of themselves. No PC has to deal with the world within their limitations; as their stats change every couple of days.
• The player aims the weapon; that is 100% player skill. (Worse now; as there are not even weapon skills in FO4; it's entirely on the player ~replacing the PC in situ. There is no roleplaying the PC, unless the player decides to fire wildly because they decide that their PC would miss... But even in that, the PC would be trying to hit their attacker, so that's not roleplaying their PC either.)

The intrinsic difference here is that Fallout gave access to a native individual; while FO3 gave access to a native individual's situation... big difference there, as the latter is effectively wearing them as a costume, rather than extrapolating how they would (and could) react, and seeing what would come of it.
In effect, it's sometimes similar to seeing a Barney Fief -like character be played like Chuck Norris ~and the game being fine with that; and the player being fine with that.

*IMO the game should not be fine with that; and Fallout 1 or 2 wouldn't have been.

FO4 seems designed around playing the world building sim. I tried just skipping it and wandering the wastes trying to get to Diamond City, but you get your head handed to you a lot.

It is very easy to go over the 2hr refund mark before you discover that this FO is very different from 3/NV and that you really need to do the world building ...and put the points into charisma required to do so.

FO4 is a terrible FO. It is a decent game on its own and I love the world and its potential as a template for future modding, but ...to commandeer a complaint that started this streamlining away from traditional RPG sensibilities, I have to say it:

Fallout4 is spreadsheety, except in this case all the data and numbers are hidden and you are left to random guesses ...and guessing wrong is very easy if you think you are trying to play a Fallout game ...which in the beginning you aren't no matter how much you'd like to.

Fallout 3 still exists dude. If you want to play a Fallout with skills, you're welcome to.

This is Fallout 4.

Agree completely. This game is a disgrace and the way they marketed it as "just another Bethesda game" is borderline fraudulent. I'm done with Bethesda now and I'm done with AAA games.

The classics will always remain, at least, and there are other studios out there actually concerned with developing games as opposed to playing their own game of financial growth.

The Witcher 3 should get the GOTY/Best RPG Award this Year.

I stopped playing Fallout 4 now (after only a few days) and switched back to Geralt for the time beeing and keeping an eye on the Mods who are coming out in the near Future. This Game just didnt grab me like NV or Skyrim did, its just not fun, nothing interresting got added, instead they removed things (i will not get into detail, its been said over and over again).

Damn Shame

Personally I'm fine with what is, and isn't in the game. The only real selling point to this game for me again was the added settlement building. Sorry but Fallout has gotten old, the new stuff makes it enjoyable again. What I'm not happy with is, what they did add is flawed, buggy, and unplayable. The glitches and outright game killing bugs in the game makes people wonder why on earth they purchased it. Most games have up to 3 or 4 patches at release. We are almost a week into game and only 1 patch. That's my concern, instead of fixing all these game breaking bugs they're saving it all for one big patch release? So screw all the people that paid to play the game, lets take our time and let them play an unplayable game. Fantastic.

I'm not entirely sure what 'spreadsheety' means these days, but in premise (as far as I can understand the term), I don't have any problem with that; and likely prefer it to not being 'spreadsheety'.

I'm really enjoying most of the design changes BGS made. Skills were just 100 level'ed perks. They were effectively replaced by the revamped SPECIAL and PERK and now character creation actually matter and INT isn't the god-like, broken stat it used to be.

I'm also fine with Karma being gone. Your companion rep sort of replaces that. To be honest, I much prefer the choice/consequence system over Karma any day of the week. Fo4 uses it, but TW3 did it much better. You don't have a good-o-meter. Instead, outcomes vary greatly based on your choices.

Finally, I'm completely fine with item degradation being gone. Having to worry about gun condition is tedious and doesn't really help me RP any better. TBH, the overhaul on crafting makes that tradeoff a no-brainer from a gameplay standpoint. Most of the issue that I've seen with item degradation being gone is people missing the RP behind it. Well, what about the crafting system? What about having to go around scavenger parts for a better weapon? What about the mods and guns looking like things you cobbled together? Item degradation is gone, and I couldn't be happier. I don't see any benefit it offers over the crafting system from a mechanics or RP point of view.

What an awful sentiment, rather than abate the process of simplification; let's just be simple!

Nothing is ever achieved through acquiescence, if people want games of greater complexity they'll have to demand it, not accept it.

Your notion is asinine (literally), it's a worry that it has taken about 7 years for the Fallout community to finally understand that the series will be simplified regardless of their opinion on it, but at least there's a nascent spark of consciousness starting to spread through the community.

The shift between Fallout 2 and Fallout 3 is repeating itself with Fallout 4, it's only a matter of time until fans of Fallout 3 and New Vegas become the new wave of 'Fallout dinosaurs'.

Skills were a margin of control for the PC for a given situation; (it was what degree they could impose influence). That was discarded in FO3 for tiered access to certain content, and given in such a way that the PC could never attempt an action that they were not guaranteed to succeed at; for the most mart if they couldn't succeed, then they couldn't attempt it. That's an infallible PC. Is it any different in FO4?

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/Gizmojunk001/apropos_zpsuniupglf.jpg

(I really don't care for that sentiment either; IMO it tends to lead to a bad end.)

If Fallout 4 didn't please you, literally nothing in your life ever will. Your standards are off any kind of reasonably sane grid.

It's almost like you want to hate the game to be taboo. It's the same mentality behind the meta bomb syndrome.

Yea those can be hard to find and so far I cannot see a 'recipe' for crafting them, I can fix up PA with Zippo and stuff but cannot make a Bobby Pin???

Can't call it horrible yet with my playtime (not a game of my owning but of a friends), but it is boring as [censored] on so many levels and nearly everything seems to ooze that weird miasma of irrelevancy that does its utmost to repel me (with the context of Fallout in mind). Trying too hard to be too many things in one shot - none being even close to a bullseye.