Well, when they've announced games earlier, several things happened.

1) they talked about features that they were working on, that ended up being scrapped due to various issues... which resulted in many people complaining about the devs being liars/the game is ruined/etc.

2) see this forum, and how it's picking apart every little detail they can find in a screenshot, making assumptions about everything that they can half-see in a screenshot, and then using those detail & assumptions to declare that the game is terrible/Beth svcks/Fallout is over/etc? Thats what the forums have been like for previous games, just for many more months. Led to a lot of anger.

Announcing closer to release is a good thing, overall.

...that said, there have been "features you'd like to see in upcoming Fallout games" threads in the general Fallout forums for years now. So, people have been able to suggest things (who knows how much they pay attention to those threads, of course.) Just not the folks who only came here after the FO4 announcement.

It is a very smart move to keep the game under wraps long enough that complaining won't change the development. I speak from experience, i have been to the new Mass Effect forum over at Bioware. It is a war zone.

http://www.gamesas.com/forum/26-the-elder-scrolls-series-discussion/
http://www.gamesas.com/forum/34-fallout-series-discussion/

I believe these are where the requests go. If I were a Bethesda developer, I would go there.

OP, it's too late for them to change anything. The game is basically 99.98% done. All that's left to do is last-minute debugging, multi-copying into the disks and shipping them out to retailers around the world.

It's also a very good idea to announce the game months before the release date. If they had announced it four years ago, we would have been frustrated and wondering what was taking them so long. Look up 'Zelda U' for an example of what happens when you announce a game way before release date. All the Zelda fans have to go by are a few gameplay trailers and screenshots. No word on where the developers are in the game, no word on the status of the game period. Some even speculate that they've scrapped the game entirely. If Bethesda had announced Fallout 4 in 2011, we would've been reacting much the same way.

We know Fallout 4 exists. We know it's almost done. We know it's coming out in November.

Zelda U? They only know that it exists. The status of development is unknown, which is worrisome for some Zelda fans.

However they made Argonians and Khajiit playable in Morrowind.

On the other hand they had the magic system in Skyrim who was very heavy criticized and came out far worse than the worst expectations, no way of scaling spells making just a few relevant at high level.

And yes promising features including synergy then casting two spells at once was dropped even if announced less than an year before launch.

GTA III ? I think San Andreas. It wasn't tied to Stats, but what you did in game. I believe in one of the Sims games (again 3 I think), had a similar feature. I thought this was pretty neat, and wouldn't mind seeing something similar if it was a bit more subtle.. not gain 60lbs instantly after I've eaten my sugar bomb quota.

S - 10 Str does NOT necessarily make you look like Arnold. Look at Cesaro from the WWE able to carry 2x bodyweight yet he's one lean, lanky mofo.
P - 10 Per = You have either Spock ears or actual antennae.
E - Realistically, dragging this up reduces Str. Look at Marathon runners and compare to Strength trainers.
C - High subjective but a possible modification for this attribute is a 1 Ch protag would have a highly asymmetric body like the guy from 300.
I - This is where I'd like to see 1 int dumdums.
A - 1 Agi = You stumble every 10 steps. You trip over every time you see a deathclaw.
L - yeah...

Here is another example of a person who thinks "immersion = realism."

Your powers of sarcasm are even greater than my own.

Dragons dogma has something like that I believe.

So using this method someone with a low Charisma will automatically be ... ugly? The sliders get locked so the character can only look like a version of Quasimodo?

I still think that the PC will be a vet, and with the military's standards there are only so many body types you could pick. You can't be too short or tall or fat, etc.

If I NEED a fat PC I'm sure that a mod will come out shortly for it anyway, but I prefer the PC be lean and mean like myself ... twenty some years ago.

I more worried about the SPECIAL part of character creation than anything elze right now.

Charisma does not equal looks. You can be the best looking bloke in the wasteland and have a C of 2. Charisma is your ability to lead, to convince, to get people to do what you want. That's why you see ugly guys with hot chicks. They have high C (and probably power and money too). Donald Trump would be a good example of looking terrible but having high C.

True, I suppose that would be Comeliness I'm referring too. With Trump it's all about the hair.

Combover adds +3 C.

@OP:

Actually, the gameplay showed things like Yao Guai and Death Claws that make your claim invalid (i.e., they are large creatures but have incredible speed and agility, something that would not be assumed based on their basic appearance). The same is true for human/humanoid characters such as Super Mutant Behemoths or for various people (i.e., you can have a very strong person who does not have large muscle mass because they simply happen to be wiry in body build, and you can have a very fast person with a large physical muscle build).

I'd imagine if you want someone taller... you literally grab the top of the head and pull up! For a shorter person, they should give us a mallet and "hammer" them down

not really, there WAS a slight change when it came to height and agility. Smaller was faster, bigger was stronger, but it had VERY little real effect.

only game i can think of that actually has something like this is DB: Xenoverse, and while its effect are not major (player skill was more important) NO ONE likes it.

Like character creator whack-a-mole!

It seems a lot of people imagine the way fable did it and have a bad feeling about it. I did too when I played that game. In one step my character went from normal to looking [censored]. Also the way GTA did it with eating 1 hamburger and gaining 50 pounds was bad.

I assume that Bethesda would do something similar to the following. Taken from Skyrim, they had a body slider at creation, but no Strength stat to tie it to in the game. I assigned Strength values to the slider in the image below.

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipN2NYHR3jipqMpH3vqpkbmbLCuUlCuPb6xItC-4

It is subtle, but you can definitely see change. Assuming the way stats have increased in past fallout, the average person might add 3-4 points of Strength to the character during play, so it is something that isn't going to be too dramatic.

Endurance is really the only one I see having a direct visual representation. A high endurance character is going to be in better shape, so they gradually become more cut and muscle definition more defined.

All of the other stats already are represented very well in past fallout games, although I guess they will be dropping dialog option based on Intelligence since the main character is now voiced.

As for the comments that this can't be done because the game is now 4 months away, I really don't know. My past experience with game development is that until a game is 'Gold', usually a few weeks before shipping, changes, additions, deletions and bugfixes are constantly being made around the clock. If they want to add something, they will. They aren't going to pay their programmers to sit around doing nothing for the next 4 months. For all we know it might already be in the game.

This ruined Fable 2 for me, Big NO from me.

Should having high strength/endurance be tied directly to character appearance?

Oh let's see... hmmm... NO, never.

I don't want to invest 1 or 2 hours in character creation getting everything right then 5 minutes later end up walking out of the vault with my female char looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger in a skirt just because I picked a strength value of 7 or higher.

So again HELL NO.

Bugs are one of Bethesda's persistent problems. At this late stage in development I want Bethesda to put all their resources into bug-fixing, not adding new features.

Are you aware of how software development works? There's no question that they have a QA team working on squashing as many bugs as they can, but the art/creative department, marketing, etc, aren't going to twiddle their thumbs and sit idle - now that would be a gigantic waste of resources.

You know that bodybuilders look strong but are totaly week compared to weightlifters? And weightlifters are mostly the ones who look totally chubby. But they are stronger than any muscular bodybuilder.

It might not have been a massive difference, but it was for a key feature in the game an effected the combat.

Don't remember DB having anything like that, but I didnt really play it past the first 3 missions.

Of course, "new features" seems like it would be a codemonkey task (not art or marketing). Plus new code could run afoul of whatever current bugs/bug fixes were being worked on/etc.

also, re: art & creative guys sitting idle being a waste.... yeah, that's why work on DLC starts a handful of months before release of the base game (prompting gasps of "omg, DLC content was held back!" ). Because those guys aren't working on the basic game anymore, and it's more efficient to get them working on new stuff.....

(especially when the pre-production/programming/QA/release process takes a few months, best to get it started so that the stuff can come out in a timely manner after the game's release and not 6 months later....)