Well there is the possibility that skills might not be in the game. Posting the video for people who have not seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQoAf0WoNzA

Watch all of it, its quite worrying in my opinion.

Oh this is topic number since the other one reached the limit.

I don't know how to feel about it. Without knowing any more, it's easy to say that it's a bad decision, but we don't know what role the perks will take in the game. It's assumed that many of the skills will worked into perks governed by Special. I think this has potential honestly. Decide a build at the beginning of the game, and develop your character from what you make, could add a lot to replay value and more unique playstyles.

With things like the Science and lockpicking skill, there were only 4 real ranks anyway, the multiples of 25 that corresponded to the rank of the terminals/locks. So stuff like that, yeah, I can see how they might be better as perks. Honestly, the only skills I'm upset to see go are the combat skills, Speech, and barter. I'm hoping, however, there is a way to play an unarmed character, unlike Skyrim.

That said, I'm glad special is back though.

The thing is I recall in new vegas depending on how you spent your skills points you could unlock unique perks and if this IS true then customization has really been gutted. Now I just want them to reveal how their new system works to quiet my fears.

Honestly i don't know how to feel about this (if its even true). It doesn't look like skills will/would be completely axed as the crafting menu brought up ranks. It seems like this would actually make you have to become specialized instead of maxing out every skill by level 20. I'm not too worried about it, people [censored]ed and moaned about the lack of attributes in skyrim, but really the split between h/s/m worked so much better than the stats of the past games in the series, so i gotta think that Bethesda went with whatever made the most sense to them

Dislike it, however not as bad as loosing attributes in Skyrim. Lots of the skills in FO3 / NV was only where to unlock features like lockpicking/ science on locks and computers, speech checks and perks. Exception is the weapon skills and repair.

Still this is likely to complicate perks a lot, afraid of loosing lots of the cool perks or that they require other stupid perks now.

There is a barter bobblehead and space for all skill bobbleheads too so may still exist?

http://i.imgur.com/xSJhDAE.jpg?1

Well, I have a feeling there's a high level cap, so I think we'll be getting Special perks, and general perks to specialize our character. In the E3 video, I saw the character as a a level 48.

They probably are in the game you just control them a different way. Inquisition, for all it's faults had an interesting way of doing it. I would love to know the reason behind these decisions as to a lot of people it can smack of change for changes sake or the dreaded S word. I gave Inqusition a chance and I'm gonna do the same here.

It's an unfortunate omission. A full layer of character customization and potential has been lost by merging skills and perks.

They have clearly done away with the skills which is very worrying because i liked the depth. They could have taken those skills and added them to the perks section. special would still affect them, and each one would have multiple ranks to upgrade, hence it wouldn't actually be that different. That would be okay because we wouldn't be losing any character development, just combining the two systems.

I have a feeling that's what's happening.

They also didn't show an inventory for ammo or a pause function. Hollywood gun rules are in effect and we better start saving those Mt. Dew bottles i guess.

I'm interested to see more before I pass judgement on whatever the new system is. I guess the discussion has been moving quickly since the title of this thread is Discussion 2 (didn't even see the first one), so this has probably already been said, but this is what I saw:

There is no Skills tab in the Pipboy, just Status, SPECIAL, and Perks. Skills still exist in some way, since the crafting screen showed prerequisites like Science rank 1 and Science rank 2. I wonder how many of the old skills have been rolled into the Perk tree? I wonder how many ranks there are for things like Science, Lockpick, or Repair?

Todd mentioned Mysterious Stranger, so some of the old Perks still exist along side the skill-perks. I guess at each level-up we'll be balancing our points between ranking up skills and choosing more unique abilities. I wondered if the unique perks unlock with ranks of the skill-perks, but I think that would homogenize peoples builds too much, so I hope that's not how it works. More likely some of the unique perks will have skill-perk rank prerequisites.

It's also possible that we level skills through a "learn by doing" system like Skyrim, and those skills become prerequisites for the perk tree. If this is the case, I wonder why there's no Skills tab in the Pipboy, but maybe they just show in the Perks tab.

Not to mention the bobble head stand had 20 spaces, 7 for Special, 1 for barter, and I assume one would also be for Science. What would the other 11 spaces be for if skills weren't in the game in some way, shape, or form?

If anything I would think it would mean more customization. It's confirmed that you can't make certain weapons without certain science perks and they probably won't even be available without high intelligence. We don't even know what http://i.imgur.com/HWZcUO0.jpg. That could be a teleportation device, robot creator, or a simple power source. Whatever it is you won't be able to build it with low intelligence. Also look at Charisma and how that could affect leading a town. More people might come to your town and be more willing to listen to you if you have a high charisma.

So I wouldn't necessarily say that customization was gutted. If anything I think it makes the SPECIAL system much more meaningful and important.

Make no mistake, though. It's a huge change. I remember all those people complaining about "stat driven" combat in games and I was worried then that Todd Howard would see that and decide to take it out of his games. It might make the game better, but it's like a different game now. I can miss the game I thought they were going to make and acknowledge that Fallout 4 is probably better.

This screenshot shows crafting a weapon requires "Science skill 2" http://i.imgur.com/IcU7mLH.png%C2%A0,and we do see a "Barter" Bobblehead at some point to, so... skills look to be there, but who knows.

Now you're gonna have to take a bunch of filler perks to increase your shooting rank or whatever. It's almost like the skyrim perk system, just a bunch of fillers for you to get to the few interesting perks.

Definitely removed a bunch of the depth in these games for me. It might be a great game, but I'm now convinced it's gonna be a bad fallout RPG and am very disappointed...

I really can't look past this. It's unfortunate cause the rest of the trailer and presentation was actually fairly decent, the only loss being the new dialog system looks like ass. That's still significant, but I never expected Bethesda to figure out how to write anyways. Seeing skills axed is painful, especially since you could hear people cheering just to see stuff like SPECIAL and VATS, realizing it was still in. No, Bethesda made sure not to mention the one they cut as best as possible.

Pure speculation here, but they always "put your best foot forward" with this stuff. Why aren't perks being shown? What purpose is there in withholding them from us? I'll bet the perks we get aren't so great either. :/

The problem with that argument is that it's based on Bethesda's flawed use of skills in the first place. Just compare with how skills were handled in NV. They weren't perfect there either, but through dialogue and other interactions you had more use of many of the non-combat skills (and sometimes even the combat skills) and they felt less static.

And that's how skills in an rpg should be used. They're there to allow you to roleplay a certain type of character. Not to be solely loot-enablers or damage/healing-enhancers.

Remains to be seen what their new skill/perk system has to offer, but this is one area where I have very little faith in Bethesda. Over the course of their games we've only seen simplification when it comes to skills and what they can do. The perks in Skyrim were an exception, but they didn't make that much of a difference from their previous skill systems and were pretty much lifted from Fallout in the first place.

It looks like skills have been replaced by perks. The crafting menu did have a couple weapon modifications that required 'Science Rank 1', 'Science Rank 2' and 'Gun Nut Rank 1'.

Presumably, you will pick a perk when you level up, and the chart in the garage implies that perks have certain SPECIAL requirements.

In the video when the vault tec guy came to the door to collect information and the player set his stats he had a total of 28 points to allocate to SPECIAL. I think (going from memory) you started with 41 SPECIAL points in New Vegas. Given the low starting stats, it looks like leveling up will also involve stat increases. Perks may or may not also have a level requirement.

So if you can pick either a perk or a SPECIAL increase each level and if the game has an ultimate level cap of 50 that would mean a combined total of 49 stat gains and perks. If balanced right that could actually work well enough and prevent 'sameishness' from character to character.

I say let's see where this goes.

For all we know, this could work out gloriously.

I remember being on the band wagon of people not liking how attributes were removed in Skyrim but I got used to it and somehow I see it working. Not the most perfect system, obviously, but tolerable. Since there is evidence that skills are still around, I am really intrigued what the heck they are doing with the skills.

That's kind of the thing, isn't it? We already had several skills in Fallout 3 and NV that were nothing more than 'gates' to abilities. Replacing those skills with perks makes no difference in gameplay or customization.

The Fallout series has ALWAYS streamlined. Especially where skills are concerned. The history of Fallout's skills has basically been one of repeatedly learning which skills are useless or broken and removing them. Even Chris Avellone admits the original Interplay team included a lot of skills that weren't very useful. And FO2 completely broke some skills. He even praised Bethesda for streamlining, combining, and fixing a lot of the skills in FO3.

It all depends on how they build the perk trees, doesn't it? Hopefully, the only perks that require other perks are the ones with levels, like Gun Nut 1 is a requirement for Gun Nut 2, etc.

If you read the SPECIAL descriptions in the gameplay demo, you'd notice that it specifically mentions under Charisma that it gives you more persuasion and speech options. So Speech perks are almost definitely present.

And we won't know how much Bethesda is employing skills (or Perks now, or SPECIAL) for dialogue and interactions until the game comes out. We saw a grand total of 2 conversations in the demo. One with a robot, and one that was a canned character creation excuse. It is too early to judge that sort of thing.

I must've missed where Todd said skills had been axed. Is this a fact or are we just speculating again?

Everything points to skills being tied to perks as opposed to being a separate system.