Steamlining doesn't necessarily mean "dumbing down" or anything of the like. It's a catchy buzzword with no real meaning. I'm a little skeptical of this particular change, sure, but I'm less skeptical than I was when it was civilly pointed out to me -- on Reddit of all places -- that hey, the skills will probably have to be used for you to be good at them and that's awesome for gamers who like to roleplay. I like to roleplay. Boom, crisis averted. Anyone else remember when there were a lot of people worried about Skyrim's changes to its leveling system, but that revamp was miles better than what Oblivion had?

People can change their minds and have different opinions. Really. Let's remember that we're all fans and that we've only seen a tiny bit of what the game has to offer.

The meaning is smoother sales. That is both the definition and the point.

I wouldn't say Skyrim's leveling system was better. Losing attributes was huge. One step forward from adding tons of perks, two steps back for losing attributes and not even trying to "fix" them for those who found them wonky. A Fallout 1-10 parameter system would have worked fine in Skyrim, while fixing the subjective problem of worrying about +5s or not.

"Granularity" and "precision" mean nothing when those granulated and precise systems didn't add any effective increase in things like weapon damage or w/e the system controlled.

Having a 1-100 melee skill means nothing when only skill levels 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 added up to any noticeable amount of damage in the weapon.

MOAR means nothing when everything is so fractioned as to be worthless gameplay wise. And the MOAR stuff you have, the MOAR you have to spread total power over the various things in order to maintain balance, resulting in increasingly worthless fractionalization of power increases. There is no point to keep all the skill levels besides 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100, when those are the only ones that mattered.

False on both regards.

Streamlining mean taking away all the filler that adds nothing to the gameplay, thus making the meachis easier to understand, and actuaslly more effective overall.

I can, you have just yet to provide a situation in which it is needed.

Literally all of them.

-Weapons skills were so OP that it made getting any sort of weapon related perks pointless, because you did SO MUCH damage anyways that all the perks were just more overkill on what was already massive overkill.

-Speech OP because you could never fail

-Barter was OP because of how much cost reduction it gave you when buying, and how much it raised prices on things you sold.

I mean, there isn't a single skill in fo3 or NV that isnt so OP as to make SPECIAL and all perks nothing more then dress up options that don't matter.

I just didn't want to sound like a complete ass in the thread title. I actually did mean "dumbing down" though. The oversimplification of gameplay mechanics to reduce complexity and appeal to a broader audience.

name a single console game in the last 5 years (that was part of an existing genre) that didn't do this on some level.

That's a blame for the implementation (whose idea was it to do it like that? --- 20. 40, 60, 80...), not the system itself.

I'd rather name a console game that went the other direction > Fallout New Vegas.

Say you...

As for this, I can agree with that, but that's Bethesda's own mistakes, they are the ones that set that up; the Fallout series didn't have that problem before they got a strangle hold on it. You are declaring other peoples points false with reasons based on effects that would not exist if the aforementioned points were implemented.



MOAR means nothing when everything is so fractioned as to be worthless gameplay wise. And the MOAR stuff you have, the MOAR you have to spread total power over the various things in order to maintain balance, resulting in increasingly worthless fractionalization of power increases. There is no point to keep all the skill levels besides 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100, when those are the only ones that mattered.

False on both regards.

Streamlining mean taking away all the filler that adds nothing to the gameplay, thus making the meachis easier to understand, and actuaslly more effective overall.

I can, you have just yet to provide a situation in which it is needed.

Literally all of them.

-Weapons skills were so OP that it made getting any sort of weapon related perks pointless, because you did SO MUCH damage anyways that all the perks were just more overkill on what was already massive overkill.
-Speech OP because you could never fail
-Barter was OP because of how much cost reduction it gave you when buying, and how much it raised prices on things you sold.

I mean, there isn't a single skill in fo3 or NV that isnt so OP as to make SPECIAL and all perks nothing more then dress up options that don't matter.
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Streamlining can also be done to cut down on the clutter of a fiddly leveling system, as Skyrim did for TES. It wasn't perfect, but it was an improvement. I didn't feel like I was creating an esoteric spreadsheet.

Edit: spelling. I need a nap.

touche ,and let's face it if Bethesda still has the deal with Obsidian ,we may see another New Vegas-esque fallout from them,but at the same time it's also one out of how many games?unfortunately it's the trend of new gamers to want everything handed to them (a very sad trend ,but that seems to be the territory we've been dragged into by the CoD generations)

Most of your posts seem to distill down to essentially telling every other person, "No", unless they've previously agreed with your posted opinion.

Says you...

As for this, I can agree with that, but that's Bethesda's own mistakes, they are the ones that set that up; the Fallout series didn't have that problem before they got a strangle hold on it. You are declaring other peoples points false with reasons based on effects that would not exist if the aforementioned points were implemented.

**Can't do anything about post #109. The website has been mangling my posts all month, and then http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/Gizmojunk005/Clipboard01_zpsb8r6rqtv.png the damage. I cannot edit it.

That is just the natural result of having to spread power not only over a 1-100 skill system, but also an equally large attribute system, whilst also having to keep balance in the game.

Your assertion implies the devs just went "lets make all skill levels beyond these specific ones worthless!" when it was really "we have to spread the total power over 200 points, so lets take the total power increase, divide it by 200, and then give each point that amount of power increase so we can make all skill icneases logically equal, and maintain balance.".

That has nothing really to do with design, but rather, its the natural result of having a large range to spread things out over, on top of having multiple systems cover the same things.

Devs are left with three choices

-Keep things the way they are, with having most character "upgrades" mean nothing at all. Which causes people to complain that increasing their skills/attributes isn't doing anything for them when it should.

-Increase the amount of power each skill/attribute increase gives. Which solves the problem of skill/attribute increases not meaning anything, but only destroys balance in the game, which is turn causes people to complain that they have become OP.

-Remove all the skill/attribute levels that didn't mean anything, merge all the bonuses those skill/attributes gave into lump sum bonuses that actually offer noticeable improvement, and then find new powers to fill in the few remaining gaps in leveling, thus giving the player more ways to noticeable and effectively improve their character, whilst still keep the same balance as before. OFC, this does lead to complaints about "dumbing down" from people who want more numbers on the screen, regardless of if those numbers actually mean anything or not.

Personally, I am glad they chose option 3 myself.

Fallout 1/2 had notoriously bad problems with SPECIAL/PERK/Skill balancing.

I would like examples (that I can agree or disagree with) rather than blanket claims with no proof.

*But ... I mean... Perks were all cheats by design. They made beneficial exceptions to the rules for the PC, and the PC alone. They gave action points unwarranted by the PC's stats; they altered the hitpoints they should have had; they made standard actions cheaper than for the opponents... That's what they were ~minor cheats that changed the balance in the player's favor.

/Jaden Smith

You mean besides the rather infamously poorly designed Temple in Fo2, that was considered a nightmare by most to do because of how badly the game calculated things like hit chance, thus making you basically unable to hit anything unless you jammed ALL your points into a weapon skill right at the beginning?

Hell, you can just Google things like "Fallout 1/2 balance problems" and find several results leading to discussion about the balancing issues, and mods people recommend to fix them.

IS this an insult or what?

Uhmmm That's how it should be no? Poor weapon skills (with a spear) should mean that you don't hit anything. There were no guns in the Temple, and the combat was was optional. The animal AI each lost a turn 1:2, and all anyone has to do is walk away from them.

*It's the same in Fallout [1] with the rats in the Vault cave... You just walk around them and leave.

(Unless the player decides that the PC wants to waste bullets on rats.)

**You don't have to kill anything in the temple, just pass through it. You can even talk your way past the fist fight; or steal his key and leave by the door without permission.

You don't even need lockpick or explosives skill, as the first lock pick attempt NEVER fails no matter how low the skill [afaik], and the explosives are easy to find, and automatically open the door.

No, even I can hit the broad side of a barn with a spear despite having only thrown one once before.

That is, ultimately, a problem with dice-roll combat in general. Illogical amounts of missing, and why devs have moved away from it in general.

Being compared to a gibberish dispensary is never a good sign.

Fine, then I will explain. When you try to make all things important, you end up doing the exact opposite. With the old system, the skill points were pretty much given like candy (in both 3 and NV) and the special was little more than perk-gates, with the perks being not as helpful as they should be outside of a shotgun/melee hybrid build.

That is by design and certainly not a problem. You might be able to hit the barn, but that PC is not you, and percentile skill indicates their personal confidence and control over the task. That's how it is with all the skills in the game, all the tasks; not just speech. And that's how it should have been in the Fallout series as a whole; before Bethesda just chucked PC education entirely with their rampant streamlining.

Consider that any person can fail to open a lock, no matter how simple someone else thinks it is. Everyone here has surely come home and tried to open their own front door ~with the key to it, and dropped their keys... That's failing to open the lock.
(It's no different were it lockpicks instead of the key... That's the 95% lock picking expert failing to open the consumer door lock.)

*A potentiality that is totally absent in Bethesda's threshold system... Under that system, the PC is either totally inept with that level of complexity, or totally infallible. Both are horribly simplified, limiting, and unrealistic.

It depends on what is the power or powers you are spreading within one single metric, in what all cases are those numbers used in and in what way.

No, it only implies that there was a lacking design call made somewhere down the line. Not necessarily an intentional one.

It is, like I said, about what you want to spread. The second option you give is obviously the best one of those; the "OP" part is once again a mishap in the design; pacing for one, and the overall balancing for another.

You could well have (with "Guns" for example) a system where every 10th point decreases the size of the cone of fire, but you also have VATS there which, if designed to be more profound gameplaymechanic, does benefit from percentual increments (you know every point counts towards better results). Same thing with lockpicking; every 10th or 20th point could just open the lock while everything in between counts towards a success in attempting before that threshold; New Vegas already offers granularity with knowledge checks in dialog with various skills, if only it had percentual checks for those based on pure appealing to ones "feels" and it already would justify smaller increments. Just for an example.

I suppose you are.

I know I'm not.

That is an arbitrary conditional of RPGs that was only made up in the last decade or so.

Even as far back as the D&D boardgame, people played it as if their characters were just an idealized version of them, and indeed, this has been true of not only RPGs, but every other genre of video game ever made. Devs have always said the PC is YOU, not just someone you are controlling, regardless of it being dice-roll combat or not.

None of those do anything to fix any of the problems mentioned.

Decreasing the cone of fire every 10th level does nothing to fix the problem that gun damage/accuracy is spread across such a large range, such as the 1-100 gun skill, that each rank doesn't add any effective increase in accuracy. That ijust stacking another power onto the skill without doing anything to address the already existent power which is broken.

Furthermore, skills ALREADY work on the system that "every point counts to better results". The problem is that large ranges, such as 1-100 spread of a skill(not to mention attribute ranges), make each individual increase so small as to be negligible. Doing that doesn't do anything to solve the problem, as it already works that way, and its still broken.

Your lockpick example is the same as the gun one, its just stacking more powers onto a skill without actually fixing the broken power it has already.

You are trying to change the argument from "people are complaining that the powers skills offer don't increase in an effective way" to one of "people are complaining that skills don't have enough powers", and those aren't the same thing.

If nothing else starting with only 21 stat points to add to your seven stats at rating one is a good sign for replayability.

Biggest replayability problem with Fallout 3 and Fallout NV was that the PCs started to all look the same once you got to the later stages of the game and started maxing out your skills.

It wouldn't be dumbing down the system if going to only perks would help prevent this.

The Lone Survivor starts with a total of 28 Special stat points.

That is 12 points less than what the Lone Wanderer and the Courier started with.

Assuming that you can raise stats using Perks (with no limit) then you would have to put 42 perks in to raising all your stats to 10.

Plus there are 70 other basic perks in Fallout 4 based on the perk chart.

It looks like your special stats will limit what perks you can get since Perks often had stat requirements in both of the previous Fallouts.

There are 10 perks under each Special stat on the chart so it is likely getting Science 4 would require a high intelligence (plus the other Science perks).

That means it would take till level 112 to max your stats enough to get all the basic perks.

Now they say there is no level cap, but even if there isn't one, it would take a long time to reach that level.

Each Sole Survivor should have very different stats and perks.

They did say they wanted to make the Special Stats play a larger role in the game and I can't think of a better way than to limit how far they can be raised and make them a requirement for perks.

It should also work out to almost the same progression.

In Fallout 3, it would take you two levels to raise a skill to a break point (25,50,75,100) and you got one perk every level.

For Fallout NV, it was almost the same for the skills and one perk every two levels.

So in Fallout 4, with seventy perks, it must be one perk per level.

So if one perk goes in to a skill Perk like Science, and the perk you get next level goes towards increasing your stats or some other special ability, then your progression should be roughly between Fallout 3 and Fallout NV.

With your Special stats having such a very direct impact on the game (look at the Vault Tec registration form descriptions) and stat requirements on perks, each play through should feel very different.