My the biggest fear is how that feature will influence on game it self .will it still be Fallout or Sim city - fallout?! Whole point in post apocalyptic world is to roam wasteland and try to survive...so if I make settlement where I have everything I need ,why going elsewere? Just for quests? It would be too artificial and immersion breaking. It would be nice if someone from developers could tell word or two about this.

Fallout isn't post-apocalyptic though, at least according to some. Its post post apocalyptic, meaning stuff would be rebuilt.

Fallout was also never a survival game, nor was it meant to be one.

It will be the same deal with a settlement the whole try and survive it will be a struggle to get it up and running, you will try to survive the skirmishes with raiders and other things, and i would speculate you would need to get a water supply to the town and dwellers in order to keep the settlement safe so that you can leave the settlement and go explore as you would have done otherwise.

I do not think it will just be i made a settlement i do not need to do anything else now mission complete i survived the wasteland i win, i think it will take a lot of resources and time to get a good settlement up and running and you need to collect materials for the settlement, it is a fluff thing you do not need the settlement but it can be made if you want to, but i would gather a lot of materials before i would start to build a settlement.

When it comes to things that seem new, I look forward to building outposts and seeing them grow into new settlements. That seems like the kind of dynamic gameplay that takes the world building elements of games like Minecraft and incorporates them into a world that is actually interesting to partake in. Hopefully those settlements sprout up the way we want them to and aren't just prefab things we have to find parts for and everyone ends up with the same communities.

The number of guns also seemed very interesting. New Vegas sort of delved into weapon mods, but not nearly this hard.

That's your biggest fear?!! Weird! Mine is dying on the toilet. Man, that would be embarrassing!

I don't think you will automatically just "have everything" you will most likely need to spend many hours if getting everything is your goal. Also, you don't even need to build anything. You can roam the wasteland if that's how you want to play.

Since Beth has made it clear its a 100% optional mechanic, the simple answer is to not use it (or like I plan to do, use it exclusively to make a custom home for my character and nothing more)

I, for one, can not wait for this feature!

Settlement building and too colored world will make post apocalyptic ,a hard place to live, into a rainbow happy sim city! Thats my fear! Well...we will know in 100 days...

Consider raiders and other "bad" thinks attacks your settlements, trust me there is still a harsh, post-apoc undertone event to the settlement mechanic. And again if ya don't like it, don't use it.

The whole point in Bethesda open world RPGs, however, is to explore, and do, or NOT do, anything and everything you do or don't want to within the limits of the game.

If you want to build a gazebo out of the right arms of every enemy you maim in the game so you can have an all-right gazebo, you can. If you don't, then, you don't.

You can do whatever you want, and you don't have to do the things you don't. That's the point.

There is a swampy player built settlement shown, and it is certainly not sunshine and rainbows! I can't wait to build Blackmire there!

*thinks of the classic gazebo D&D story and snickers*

The settlements are pretty much a game in and of themselves.

That you can build multiple settlements is a wonderful thing.

So is the choice to not do so at all.

So:

Fallout Individual Modified Settlements

FIMS

Will you be playing the Fims?

Personally, I think that if you can spend hours creating a village or town and NOT have the ability to share with friends then that's a shame.
I realise multiplayer could potentially ruin the experience but perhaps the ability to invite friends to "visit" or perhaps help ward off intruders would be a great addition???

I see this as a massive layer of improvement on Bethesda's part. Fallout is currently over 200+ years since the Great War and plenty of the West Coast has come to be rebuilding and it's time for the East Coast to as well. They don't have an NCR or anything, but that doesn't mean people can't build their own nation states or what have you. If anything I'd argue settlement building is a key point of Fallout because Fallout has always followed man's restoration of what it lost. As the ashes of the Old World are settling and burning out this new world should not be unprogressive humans who squat in tin shacks all day, that's counter-intuitive to the very nature of human beings.

I'm looking forwards to the settlements since they will give me a sense of influencing the Boston area and give me a reason to continue to scavenge and loot long after I usually stop due to an unused stockpile.

But yes I will be playing FIMS

Personally, I think that if you can spend hours creating a village or town and NOT have the ability to share with friends then that's a shame.
I realise multiplayer could potentially ruin the experience but perhaps the ability to invite friends to "visit" or perhaps help ward off intruders would be a great addition???

according to the opening cinematic of FO1. And that's awesome.

post apocalyptic games we already have countless examples. From Two Crude Dudes to Metro 2033.

Like Fallout, I dont remember anything similar. I may be wrong, though.

Personally, I find civilization boring. If I wanted that, I would go outside.

Most games tend to find some way to negate civilization, be it by war, or being so far out on the frontier it doesn't effect anything, for a reason. Civilization is boring, I want to do stuff in my game besides playing NCR Paper Pusher: The Game.

There is a reason even Van Buren's plot involved someone trying to re-nuke everything, and then they resurrected it for Lonesome Road, and even if you disregard Lonesome road, NV basically says each factions is beyond doomed, and going to collapse.

Though I don't feel small player made settlements with a merchant or two qualify as Civilization.

http://fallout.gamepedia.com/Zimmer%27s_dialogue

"The Commonwealth itself is nothing but a war-ravaged quagmire of violence and despair. Inside the sealed environment of the Institute, however..."

http://fallout.gamepedia.com/Horace_Pinkerton%27s_dialogue

LW: "What do you know about the Commonwealth?"

Pinkerton: "Most of it's a blasted nothing, just like here. But there's talk. Rumors, mostly. About a place called the Institute. That's where Zimmer and that android came from. God knows what else they got goin' on in there, but it puts our tech to shame, that's for damn sure."

Sounds very civilized....... / sarcasm

But this is 2008. Is not it better to be based on new information as to what was shown in the trailers? Even journalists will be present.

The new information doesn't contradict any of it. All we have seen is a Megaton like town, and one news reporter, which people like Three Dog supposedly had, but we never actually saw in-game. Nothing that has been shown is any different then the C.W. in Fallout 3.

We got super mutants infesting the city proper, bases of groups like the Commonwealth Minutemen being overrun by raiders and ghouls, people being forced to relocate to new towns because of various dangers, its exactly like the C.W., and exactly as described in Fallout 3.

I assume that they don't have to be settlements, you could simply build lavish (for the PA world) houses for you own use with turrets to keep the riff raff out.

I don't think we know at this point how you gain NPC settlers, do you simply build something and the necessary NPC turns up to farm, sell stuff or man the barricades or do we have to recruit someone who appoints NPC farmers, merchants, guards etc.