Skill did not let damage remain constant.

At all.

You can max a combat skill in a few levels and never worry about it every again.

If there are level requirements, that won't be possible in 4.

And you're using hyperbole when you say your damage fell behind heavily. That was not the case unless you had already maxed a combat skill, and were working on another. Or you were spreading yourself thin, in which case that makes sense; you're trying to master 5 different things at once and are going to have to take a hit in some department.

In fallout I can increase guns and energy weapons at the same pace, being a master of both with no requirement with perks. They only need cool and quirky things, they wouldn't make a weapon useless in my hands.

Ok I'll accept your claim on one condition, show me proof through data found in the games that skills do nothing. You have yet to back your claim up with anything, all you do is make accusations that skills are useless and how should we take your word on that? Because you play differently then we do? Because you cheat or use an exploit?

You're the one going "skills are useless" which makes me believe you use console commands, that shows you never played the game legit. Have you fought in 3 or new vegas with a gun while your gun skill is at 15? Or when your melee is at 20? Scopes are hard to use at that low level, even when crouching. I've played these games numerous times, between 360 and PC I've logged over a thousand hours into New Vegas and have made dozens of characters, I can sure as hell tell you and back up my statement with proof that skills do in fact help.

Excellent example. That's just another little feature that I expect we'll lose with this transition from skills to perks.

And honestly I think the transition would be harder on the passive skills than the combat ones, tbh.

well, I really like skills. Let's see how it behaves this new system.

I just hope that at the end of all, the characters we created are significantly different from each other.

@Cider! and @Longknife: I can understand what you are saying. Personally, I think I can adapt to the new system. Looking at the range of customization (right now) makes me think that there could have been a kind of hybrid system where the skills existed but in separate ranks that required more perks to get to the next rank of.

Oh well, guess I can try to make myself in this new Fallout (nerdy, smart, not so charming). Maybe also make a non-canon female soldier-type character.

You aren't even reading my posts at this point so I give up.

You refuse to budge from my claim that skills are useless because they do small things, despite me agreeing that yes, they affect damage and accuracy.

That's it.

They do nothing 4 or 5 ranks in a perk can't do.

And you can shoot the bottles outside the saloon with the lowest skill (4) just as well as if you had tagged it. There are YouTube videos showing it if you care to try, or load the game up and do it.

Skills did nothing interesting. But yea, I used console commands and something about a Wikipedia link is the basis of your argument. 10/10. Play the game all you want. They stopped being interesting at 100 and weren't very interesting besides boosting damage before that, sorry.

pft any walleyed idiot can use thoes scopes even with "Sway" from being under level, just pop 10 points into the skill is usualy all you need, and you will end up with them in the 80s soon enough as it is.

A character with 1 agility, 1 perception and no combat skills tagged can handle a gun reasonably well, and amazingly well when crouched down.

Part of what I'm saying, like in that one post, is that again, can such a system work? Absolutely.

But do we have any evidence or reason to believe Bethesda knows what they're doing? No, no we don't.
I would advise you to be pessimistic and on-guard about this "hybrid system," not because I want to say that (why would I?) but because the main issue when trying to make the transition from skills+perks to a pure perks system is that a lot of little features and fluid progression can fall apart or cease to exist completely.

For example, do not expect the scope sway with lower skill that you'd see from before. Nor can you expect debuffs to happen where a skill was temporarily lowered and it resulted in something like scope sway happening. And as stated, progression won't feel so fluid with damage feeling appropriate as it goes up constantly, but rather there will be awkward little moments where your damage is either 20% too much or 20% too little.

Please go load up New Vegas, get a character with this build, find an Anti-Material rifle, try and snipe with it, then fraps it all and upload it so we can see just how easy and just how minimal the sway is.

You see when you constantly cheat skills will become useless, getting a skill to 100 is suppose to be mid to late game, not start of the game. You yourself make the skills useless by cheating, you miss the point that they're rewarding they make the game a challenge at the start and encourage players to choose paths with perks being another reward for doing said paths.

Skills are important, sure perks can completely take over but the end result is doing so is a bad move and as such people will complain. You probably weren't here when skyrim was released but these forums were filled with people shouting their anger about how attributes and birthsigns weren't in the game, those two can be pushed aside easily as skills and perks did a good enough job but stats and perks alone? That's something people won't admit needed to go away.

Maybe for a cheater like yourself you think "Oh it's just rubbish" but that's not the case for a lot of people, a lot of people like building characters around a set of skills, it's one of the fun reasons of role-playing.

So you're arguing that skills should be replaced by perks, and what we used to call perks be removed?

Skills did something. Weapon skills let you be more accurate and do more damage, medicine (and survival) helped you survive, barter let you shop, stealth let you sneak, lockpick and science let you open doors and terminals, repair let you be more efficient when repairing. Perks were specials. They were, you know, perks. I much prefer that you use skills to improve your basic character and perks to give your character something special. If you only use perks to improve your skills, then what's the point of perks?

This is said as someone who, as much as possible, avoided perks that gave skill points or flat increases to damage. Perks should be special. They should be something unique. They should NOT be skill replacers.

You're entire argument is based on me using console commands for a video game I own for the 360.

Lol.
@above
Who are you to say what skills should or shouldn't be? As mentioned earlier, medicine did nothing interesting save make medical items better. A medicine perk can increase the effect and duration of the same items just like the skill.

Survival making food better? Well guess what, perk can do the same thing.

@Longknife: I myself am not going to look at Skyrim as the ONE piece of evidence that kills any system. That is all it was, ONE ATTEMPT. For all we know they may have gotten better at that style of character building since Skyrim.

Plus, we have absolutely NOTHING to go on to say that this system in this game will in fact be exactly like Skyrim's, so please let it go.

See dis person gets it.

When I level up, I want a perk that actually gives a new ability like Paralyzing Palm or Super Slam or Solar Powered.

I do not want to spend my perks on "you now repair weapons 20% better," and then be expected to take four more ranks of the damned thing. With those perk slots, I could've gotten all three of the awesome perks I listed above...

The complaint with Skyrim was it's streamlined cause they axed attributes.

The complaint here is this is streamlining because they axed skills.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice....

Wont defend the move. It's an ... interesting choice? I'm still shocked that we're getting a voiced main character, maybe this hasn't hit me just yet. Still, I'm willing to play it first before I question further.

And if Paralyzing Palm is still a thing?

You can do the exact same thing you've been doing, increasing damage with a perk like skill points or fine tuning the skill with interesting perks.

You will spend skill points to repair things, but not a perk?

And what if you get multiple perks per level, since they are all seemingly very useful

Or god forbid there is some sort of consequence of picking the 20% perk or the paralyzing palm perk. Do you want to wait a level to do this or that?

What some neglect for the lackings on the previous skill systems is that it is the fault of the implementation not of the system itself. Work could've been done with it, but wasn't.

You just had to go remind me of traits, didn't you? I miss those.

So far the problem is only hypothetical for me. I can imagine problems with it, but I can imagine it working well too (I think). I doubt I will have any useful opinion on it without play-testing it.

You don't get it.

As I said, using New Vegas' system, I can both increase my repair ability by about 20% and take Paralyzing Palm. By the next perk choice, I could have increase my repair skill by a total of 40%, then I'd have Paralyzing Palm and Super Slam.

With this new system, in the same amount of level ups? I'll only be able to get the 40% better repair. I need more level ups to gain the same amount of strength as in the old system.

The only time this can work is if perk choices are restricted and capped for the sake of uniqueness with characters. If Skyrim is an example for this, there will not be a cap.

The result is that all the new system serves to do is to slow down progression and make it take longer, not to mention that little features such as skill requirements, speech checks and scope sway/swing speed are now gone.

Again:

The above is the most important thing to understand. Apply it to this new perk-only system. You are arguing a hypothetical. No one here is saying a pure-perk system is fundamentally flawed. We are saying that Bethesda has shown absolutely zero signs of being capable of putting in the work required to make it work. Meanwhile, an example you cite (all skills hit 100 in New Vegas) is the result of poor planning in regards to DLC, and could easily be remedied with simple tweaks to skill-gain-per-intelligence or the amount of skill books within the game.

I am just going to stop with this. My point is that I loved the Skills in New Vegas and Fallout 3. I also liked the way Skyrim and TES in general handled leveling their skills (learning by doing). Personally, I can get used to not having skills that I have to put points into because I do not care about the skills as if they were the only thing that worked right in Fallout.

I hate to be that guy that says the classics are an excellent example of how skills worked.. Wait no I don't.

Instead of gutting mechanics they could have improved upon them. You know by moving the cap to 300 and requiring more skill points to level said skill at intervals like 100-150 requires 2 skill points, 150-200 requires 3 skill points.

This removes the jack of all trades and gives us a reason to specialize instead.

Edit: Not arguing against you, just using your statement as a platform for mine.

Ok we have someone here who does not even realize HE JUST NEGATED HIS ENTIRE ARGUMENT!

Seriously? "Do we have any evidence or reason to believe that Bethesda knows what they were doing?" Rely? THAT'S YOUR ARGUMENT? then your Argument is that with the FALLOUT 3 SYSTEM THEY DID NOT KNOW WHAT THEY WERE DOING! THEREFORE THE COMPANY THAT CREATED THAT PIECE OF CRAP SYSTEM (because hey Bethesda created it!!!! in reality it was a lot different under the hood with the easily maxed out 100 point system then the previous hard to max out (But also kind of broken) 300 % system from earlier Fallout's!)

In other words your trying to argue THAT BECAUSE THEY OBVIOUSLY DID NOT KNOW WHAT THEY WERE DOING THEN WITH THE SYSTEM THEY CREATED THEN, THAT SOMEHOW YOU THINK IS PERFECT BUT ALSO DECLARE THAT IT IS SIMULTANEOUSLY PROOF OF BETHESDA TOTAL INCOMPETENCE... THEN THEY CANT POSSIBLY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING NOW!

Dude stop posting on the forum. Talking out of both sides of your mouth like that just proves that either your a Damn fool or a troll who loves to create arguments for the sake of arguments.

In your example you can create characters that are good at everything because perks did nothing but add nice little quirks.

In the new system you can't be a mater mechanic who is also an eagle eyes marksmen and able to hold his own against a super mutant in a fist fight while also being able to talk his way out of said fist fight with a silver tongue.

These are not compelling skills. You're defending something horribly broken and are afraid of a system that worked well in skyrim, which was an odd combination of the two. We can't grind skills in FO like we could in that game, so yes, you hit odd dry spells but that's not possible. In a game with no skills.

You decide on if you want to do more damage, or do you want to make a weapon mod that will do more damage along with letting you customize your power armor a bit better.

Your afraid of the system because of skyrim but NV and 3 both handles skills terribly. They were not compelling. Did they increase dmg or health gained? Yes. Did they set your character apart from another? Not really, since eventually you'd have 100 in LP with everyone, and 100 repair and science on everyone as well.

I'd have a thing or two to say about that 300 skillcap thing, you know, spreading the effects too widely apart and all that... but it's of no use to argue about that anymore.

This is just.. wow. Do we have any evidence or reason to believe YOU know what you're talking about?

The backseat expertise is so strong in here sometimes.

On topic, I don't really see how the old skill check system is more "balanced" or "gradual" then larger increments. I personally always start maxing a combat skill, and I don't spread my points at all, especially in the beginning of the game. How is spending 21 points on guns different from getting rank 1/5 in guns? Admitted, maybe you didn't play this way, but it was possible and thus it doesn't affect any balance at all.

Also, on perks having skill requirements: again, still totally possible. Let's say the perk Cyborg requires at least 2 ranks of the Science! perk. Is that any different to "requires 50 science"?

The discussion in this thread seems really hyperbolic, and I really think this is a very minor, and in my eyes great, change. Some of the counterarguments almost boil down to "I don't like things that are different!"