Yeah, I'm okay with most skills (especially non-combat ones) getting rolled into ranked perks. It means that at least I'll feel a tangible difference between each rank. And if the SPECIAL requirements are done right, we won't be able to max out every "skill" anyway.

Now that lefty666 pointed out that I'm mistaken about only adjacent tabs being visible, the point is no longer moot and I don't care enough to argue about the rest. Sorry?

There is an important difference between dumbing down and streamlining. If you have a system where you have to add points to a skill, but those points have an affect only after you add 25 of them, then is removing those points and replacing it with a new four ranked system dumbing down? It seems more like cutting out the useless crap to me and that would make it streamlining.

If they aren't just collectibles, bobble heads are going to be extremely powerful if they give you 1 rank, assuming most perks have 4 ranks.

For example, you can go grab the science bobble head at science rank 2, and bam, you're now able to craft most of the energy weapons and their mods. Each one is essentially a free level, and there is one for every perk line.

Maybe you'll have to select one at a time now that the bonus is meaningful instead of being largely useless for any skill except for the ones with 25 point thresholds.

It looks like the streamlining is worse than I expected. This is speculation and I really hope it isn't true

You won't be leveling up up skills like you would in skyrim,you'll just earn XP and critical hit points per kill.

After leveling up you'll pick a perk and certain perks will be available according to how you set up your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and what level you're at. You won't be placing any skill points anywhere.

Repair skill has been replaced with gun nut ranks 1,2,and 3. Likewise,science is also a perk,you'll just need to level up your character a bit to get science 2.

You wont be taking mentats to allow yourself to hack certain terminals you couldn't before or repair a gun you didn't have the skill to previously repair.

Hey no need to act like I'm gonna be a dike about it. I'm here to discuss and debate, nothing more. It's just a good way to pinpoint the correct ideas and weed out the incorrect.

This is an example of how the transition from skills to perks can be bumpy. In FO3 there was enough out there to master all skills, while NV made it easy cause of poor planning with DLC level caps. If bobbleheads did this, then wtf bobbleheads effectively got upgraded from 10 skill points to 25. Ridiculous.

I highly doubt they do that though. My money is still on minor perks. (aka +5% vats accuracy for guns)

That's true, yes. It's definitely more streamlining than dumbing down. My bad for using the word too quickly.

If we get a ton of perks as we always do, and replace skill-increasing with just a single rank of a "main perk" representing that skill, I'm fine with this change. It's not important to me to have 37 guns skill.

In Elder Scrolls though, leveling up your skills is a huge aspect of it. In those games I want skills. But as they've been implemented in Fo3 and FoNV, I can live with ranked perks representing those skills.

Chances are you'll be able to attempt lockpicking/hacking regardless of how your skill (er, rank) compares to the lock/terminal difficulty, and the perk only makes it easier. Maybe the hacking perk gives you extra tries before the terminal locks you out? And perhaps they'll completely bypass the lockout, so when you run out of tries it just scrambles the passwords again. That could work if we only got like, 2 tries by default and each perk rank gives us another try.

Or maybe they'll completely change the hacking and lockpicking minigames. I wouldn't mind that, but I'm one of those weirdos that actually really liked Fallout 3's hacking minigame. Whatever happens, I hope the mini-games play out in real-time so that we have to worry about getting caught/attacked.

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as confrontational. I was just saying that I had no point to make about that any more.

I wonder if skills are (in effect) still there, but operating in the background.

So, for example, whereas previously you might have needed a skill percentage of 30 to modify a weapon, now you get a 'level' in the visible perk for every 10 percentage points in the invisible skill - and it is the perk level that determines whether you can modify the weapon.

After all, I don't recall that anything required odd skill levels like 23 or 57 to pass a check - so any skill progress can happen quietly under the hood without actually changing the mechanics of the game.

Maybe, maybe not, but it'll certainly be interesting to find out

[edit]

I completely missed Mitheledh's post, and four others were added while I typed! I need more coffee

This is assuming they aren't just there to be collected.

It doesn't take a genius to see how they could cause a problem with balance if you only really need to invest 3 ranks in every perk from a min/max point of view.

I'll wager they noticed this during the development of the game, because someone looking at a video can notice such a flaw in a few minutes.

Or they could just be nice little bonuses like mentioned. +% accuracy in vats for combat perks. Better prices with barter. Slightly more effective medicine. Science and gun nut making the schematics cheaper by requiring 1 less component or some such.

We don't have enough information to make those assumptions. I'm pretty sure I saw Gun Nut rank 4, for all we know there could be 10 ranks for each skill-perk. Temporary skill/perk buffs will almost certainly still exist (we can see skill books or magazines in a rack in that garage). You possibly get one or more perk points at level-up, and you have to choose whether to spend them on unique perks or on ranking up your skill-perks. I'm sure we'll still be able to differentiate our characters as they level up. I doubt Bethesda would just take away skills unless they thought they had come up with a better system.

ok lets review

Skills where having say 33 over 25 (or even 32) was a actual improvment

"Kill" skills

Survival but only for the improved healing/food/water/sleep recovery of Items that were food drink

Medical for the same reason'

Dito barter that gave slightly better exchange rate on items as you leveled up

the two skill mini games had hard limits to even start them(you had to be at or over specific levels to even try) and then it was an easily gamed mini game after that that was easyer as you leveled up the skill and passed the minimum for that lock.

but for a lot of skills it was either you were over some minimum skill to auto succeed or you auto failed.

So why are we being so fussy about the fact that you cant add Exactly 3 points to speach skill because you have a skill check coming up in the next encounter and 6 points to Repair because the person who needs 3 speach points also needs you to repair a Mcguffins Brand Vibrating Noise Maker^™ so his Plotpoint Brand Thingamabob^™ will work and he will give you Stuff Brand Thingys^™ (and you can only ask him once because right after that if you cant get the speech check the first time it pops up he dies horibly because his Thingamabob^™ not working will get him killed offscreen

Because Ironicaly thats exactly what your wanting to do

5 ranks everyone, 5 - if they're converting straight from F3: Very Easy, Easy, Average, Hard, Very Hard. Everyone gets rank 1 in a skill/perk. I think most people forget about the beginning rank.

Need more logic that it's 5 and not 4? I'm strongly convinced that they have converted skills into a perk rank system in addition to SPECIAL still having an impact on a set of associated skills. And SPECIAL stats go to 10, not 8. To spell it out: 10 / 2 = 5. I'm guessing we gain a rank of a particular skill for every 2 stat allocation in a SPECIAL attribute which would make 10 of any stat sort of pointless. Then again, 10 in any SPECIAL attribute has always been sort of pointless.

This is of course all guesswork, but logic says it's most likely 5 ranks, not 4, when it comes to skills.

The only reason I think 4 for crafting is looking at the video, the required perk rank never goes above that, even when crafting what is seemingly top of the line and endgame equipment.

Example: when customizing the assault rifle, which is of higher value than anything else in the video, including the plasma stuff, the required rank for a modification caps out at 4.

The only thing more expensive than it is the junk launcher and the power armor parts, but neither of them display a required perk.

New Vegas tried to break it up by having different skill requirements for craftables, like 65 or 30 Science, but I still don't think much will be lost from those values getting rounded to the nearest rank.

From what we've seen, my guess (guess!) is that we get at most 5 ranks for the Gun Nut and Science! perk. They have to strike a balance between the ranks having a meaningful effect and having a wide enough range between them.

They might have made it significantly more useful, if the badass "level cap" perks like Solar Powered or Grim Reaper's Sprint require their relevant attribute to be rank 10. That may be why we get so fewer SPECIAL points to distribute at chargen, too.

Let me put it bluntly, if striping out the various skill % puts and end to the endless whining about how you can make a god character just by haveing 9/10 int and picking up a few too many skill books and collectibles in all of the "useful" skills and it gets replaced with a "you can get one Rank in whatever per level, THEN I AM ALL FOR IT!.

the reality was the 100% skills thing was broken from day 1 because of that. There WERE no "meaningfull" choices because it was trivial to max out skills

Woefully fewer. Going by the demo, an even distribution in all SPECIAL attributes only gives you 4 in each. That's lower than even F1 and F2

Likely, it doesn't make a difference starting out as I'm hoping they've rebalanced the game to compensate, but psychologically, it's depressing.

Think top of the line is more like heavy modified 12.7 mm anti materiel rifles. We did not see the high end energy weapons. 5 would make sense for stuff like this

Well its probably going to end up +1 on each from bobbleheads.

If my guess is right about how SPECIAL and perks work, SPECIAL will be where it's at for perk selection, and their actual effect on derived attributes like AP or Carry Weight will be secondary to that; it seems like all of the okayish, and important for most characters perks like Gun Nut or Medic, would have fairly low SPECIAL requirements, like in the 2-4 range. Then the choice, specialized perks like Solar Powered are for people who put all of their points in one stat (at the cost of lower points in other stats).

On the other hand, we saw fully automatic plasma rifles, and even they only required 3 ranks.

Granted, there are ~50 weapons and we only say like 6 in all the gameplay.

Not just that, but various skill checks too. For example I think there was a quest with a repair job that needed 90 repair skill to skip the laundry list of misc items for the job. At other points you'll get dialog options that need 45 guns or the like, etc. Dunno why they stuck to intervals of 5 though since again that resulted in people keeping passive skills increased by multiples of 5, not that that matters too much.

Which would be an example of sloppy transition. It'd mean bobbleheads were now effectively +25 of a stat, far more significant than ever. I sincerely doubt bobbleheads give +1 of a rank for that reason alone.

This would be wise. Intertwining the system as much as possible and providing a lot of SPECIAL requirements would be a great way to reinforce RPG mechanics.

My issue with this is that Bethesda streamlined Skyrim because of this. They didn't want people to have to make a new character because things you selected in the beginning were important . Well at least that's part of it, with the other part being to eliminate confusion and difficult thinking.

So then why would Bethesda, who streamlined their own baby for this reason, make SPECIAL this important later on in the game with perk choice?

I like your idea because it gives consequence to the character we build, but I can't see Bethesda going for it.

I'm not opposed to this "blending" that they are doing with the caveats that it:
1) Makes special actually mean something
2) Makes it harder/impossible to to max out the PC.

As it stands, removing the skill system we were used to in lieu of something else could wind up being mostly cosmetic.
I will wait until the game is released before decrying that it is going to ruin anything, or throw any babies out with their bath water.
At this point it is simply change. Good or bad remains to be seen.

I think SPECIAL will come into play more, but the flip side is that we will have more opportunities to raise our SPECIAL stats over the course of the game. There's no way they'd only give us 28 starting points otherwise. Maxing SPECIAL will replace maxing all skills.

Choices you made in the beginning of MW or OB were not important at all.

You got minor bonuses, yes, but racial powers like the berserker rage in skyrim could not be replicated by anything else.

Those choices were more important than getting your endurance to 100 a level sooner

Edit: though any evidence proving you incorrect won't matter. You're convinced this was done to promote less thinking, despite previous titles in the series doing nothing to promote the opposite.