Something worth mentioning some folks may have forgot;

Remember that one time Todd Howard said everything in the Wasteland has significance? Every piece of clutter and junk?

Now, be careful not to overload the hamster wheels, but, we have Magazines and Books in the game. This is fact.

Magazines and Books were once solely related to Skills.

We don't, however, have skills any more, yet, we still have magazines and books.

Now, if your hamster wheels haven't melted down yet, please try to consider that if magazines and books are still part of Fallout, TAGs might as well.

I thinks tags become even more valuable, let's say a low intelligent character who starts with tag...intelligent perk?

I would like for traits to return to better define your character. Any added thing to increase character development depth is great. It's time they add instead of cutting features.

Bethesda has pointed out that Skyrim is the last game they did before starting on Fallout 4.

I think they are using what they learned from Skyrim and adding in what they found popular and fun from the Skyrim and Fallout modding communities.

For example I doubt they will have level caps.

Certainly merging skills in to perks and having Special Stats play a MUCH larger role in game is so much better than combining all stats in to a Health, Stamina, and Mana bar.

Having Sole Survivors that can only access certain perks based on their stats and having the Special Stats directly impact the game play greatly increases the replay value.

In some ways they are in the position of Obsidian in Fallout New Vegas.

The game engine is fully established and will only be "tweaked".

That means they can concentrate on the story, the game play, and the open world.

No, not like traits at all. Traits are usually minor bonus/penalties that you give your character that affects the way you play. What the person you quoted is talking about is giving you a couple of perk points at the beginning to distribute.

Good points.

I hope you are wrong but your reasoning is sound.

I do think that since the Sole Survivor is a vet and about 35, it stands to reason that he or she will have some skills before coming out of vault 111.

The Sole Survivor could have enlisted at 18, served 12 years in the Military, used the GI Bill for 4 years, and been working in his or her new career for over a year.

That means anything from Sniper to Hacker is fair game.

The Sole Survivor may be level one when he leaves the vault, but could and should have several skills/perks when he does leave.

Three Tag skills and two traits could mean starting F4 with 3 skill perks and two trait perks.

Likely wishful thinking at least on the trait side, but Todd Howard did say that Fallout 4 was an unapologetic roleplaying game so taking some perks at the start only increases the roleplaying.

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With the Special Stats having so much direct impact on game play for your Sole Survivor, I'm wondering if they consider traits unnecessary.

Still I'm almost certain that traits will be added back in by modders.

Thanks for clearing that up. I must have quickly read the post and missed a few key words

Although;

Trait; a low level perk you choose upon character creation
Tag in new form; giving you a couple of perk points at the beginning to distribute which leads to a low level perk you have chosen around character creation

I see here a slight correlation, with bubbling semantic issues

Even though I loved the old system, I didn't really like how tag skills worked. You had several dozen skills and three out of them as tags. Limited character's build up quite a bit since everything you didn't spend on a tag skills felt like it was wasted. I did quite a many runs on old games and it was ultra rare of me to spend a point on a non-tag skill. Weakest mechanic in the old games, I'm not wishing for its return from a gameplay point of view.

In F3 and FONV, making a skill a Tag skill only gave a straight plus 15% increase in the skill, but that was a big increase for a 1st level character.

I'm hoping you will have a chance to assign a few skill perks and or traits at the start of the game.

I do think that Traits were not as critical as choosing a poor Elder Scrolls birth sign.

This is what I think is likely the case. I think they'll give you 3 free perks at the beginning to emphasize play style a bit more starting out.

Tagging SPECIAL points just doesn't make sense to me. Why not just add those points into the base starting points and remove tagging if that's true?

There were several mods for F3 and FONV (like Project Nevada) that instead of giving a +15% bonus, any skill increases at level up to a tagged skill were doubled.

Give a tagged skill a 7% increase and the skill went up 14%.

o.0? While I certainly don't doubt that (after all, that makes tagging behave similar to F1 and F2 tagging), I don't really see how this contributes to the topic at hand, especially since skills have been confirmed (if we're to believe the new details coming out of Quakecon from sources).

It's sort of like debating whether cookies or cake is better and someone pointing out that they're both food. Sure, that's true, but it doesn't really help the debate.

Basically if anything it will just be a choice of 2/3 perks you can already get based on your stats