I'll probably pick up F4 at some point, but I'm doubtful of a few things -

1) A Voiced protagonist. This will be the biggest mistake Bethesda ever makes. A voiced MC will completely eliminate the sense of building your own life that what makes people play Beth games for years after their release. Would people still be playing Morrowind if the Nerevarine had a voice, personality, quirks, attitude etc..? I doubt it. Topics such as "I just made a new roleplay xxx build" I predict will be absent from the F4 boards. People play Beth games because each time they make a new character, it feels like a new game.

2) The world just doesn't seem all that apocalyptic. In the images released so far, locations seem too colourful and lively. Where are the desolate, grey and bleak landscapes that define the very themes the game is built on?

3) Removal of skills. DXHR was an awesome game, but character builds were limeted after a few playthroughs. Fallout 4 seems to be built on a similar perk-based character system. I fear after a few playthoughs, all character builds will be 'seen and done', compound that with a voiced protagonist just adds to the sense of limitation.

4) The mistakes of Skyrim. Things that should have been patched were ignored, or basic options were left out such as a respec before leaving Helgen keep.

1. No one can make you like the voiced protagonist, and it's a big paradigm shift, but I don't believe it will damage role-playability as much as some people believe.

2. They've talked about this. Not only has it been 200 years, so life and color are coming back to the wasteland (which has been happening in all of the games), but there are still places like the Glowing Sea that look bleak and utterly apocalyptic.

3. Honestly, they've explained the new character system in detail and it seems to offer everything skills did in Fallout 3 and more. It makes more sense, and it's more balanced.

4. If you're talking about bugs, then yeah. If you're talking about design decisions that everyone complained about, I couldn't care less.

My response in short: "Well that's just like, your opinion, man."

Respec before leaving the vault has been confirmed in btw.

Also might want to double check your numbering

Having voiced protagonist doesn't really help with RP because of actual voice you will be hearing. You'll have to RP same person with different skills all the time. Silent player always leaves a room for your imagination about voice fitting appearance of YOUR character and so forth. F4 doesn't leave me anything at this point. Same was in Mass Effect series, bald Shepard or bearded Shepard or Barack Obama - it's still Shepard. There will be that vault 111 dude no matter how hard you try. Background story also changes amount of Rp one can put in his char, so i can say that F4 is not about RP at all. It's about you living vault 111 dude's life.

If it's not in already I'm sure a mod will let you turn off the voice itself. Then it wouldn't really be any different than 3.

1. I, personally, think the voiced MC will be one of the BEST decisions Bethesda has ever made. You will still be able to select the tone of his/her responses - snarky, nice/helpful, mean/angry, etc. So, you can play the evil guy if you want to. Or the good guy. Or the guy who is a selfish jerk and just wants to know how many caps they get - screw the morality of it all.

2. The desolation will be there. Haven't you seen some of the concept art of the decaying ships, the dank marsh, etc? And, of course, we have yet to see what the Glowing Sea looks like. Even with vegetation returning, the world is still a pretty crummy place. And, of course, there are the Rad Storms. They can really mess up your day.

3. I LOVE how Bethesda has rolled skills into perks and attributes, and made it more streamlined, without limiting it. In Fallout 3, if you had Lockpicking at 25, you could open Very Easy and Easy locks. If you had it at 49, you could open Very Easy and Easy lock. What was the point of those 24 points?? They didn't make it any easier to open Easy and Very Easy locks. You didn't get a chance at opening Average locks. You had to wait until 50 to open Average locks. And then, everything from 51 to 74 was basically pointless beyond working to 75 to open the next level of locks. Same thing for Hacking. It was basically a perk system, it just wasn't called a perk system and didn't look like a perk system.

4. Skyrim is a different game. Sure, Bethesda made it, and yes, there will be bugs in Fallout 4 - bugs are inevitable. No piece of software, of this complexity, is ever made, by anyone, without bugs. Now, the best a company can do is learn from their previous experiences and try to improve. Not every bug will be patched. After a certain point, it just isn't cost-effective. Especially depending on the number of people it impacts, how game-breaking it is, and how long the game has been out. Fixing a bug isn't just fix the bug. You have to fix the bug, te3st the fix, see what the fix does to other parts of the game - does it break anything else? If so, how do you fix that? What does that fix break? And so forth. It's not like slapping a patch on a leaky tire.

Game companies have priorities for bugs and the completely game-breaking ones usually get fixed first (especially if they impact a lot of people). But even if a bug is fairly prominent, after a while, the company needs to move on to other projects. That's the way of the market. That's capitalism. Unless there is some sort of monetary reason or law that forces them to continue putting out patches, eventually, they will move on.

In the end, it's up to you to decide if/when you will buy Fallout 4. If you do, I hope you enjoy it! Based on what I have seen, and my past experience with other Bethesda games, I know I will. And if there are unpatched bugs, I know the mod community will do their best to help out. And for that, I am very appreciative.

That's exactly it. When it's a mid-30's american male voicing all of my characters... how can I roleplay anything but that?

1. I don't see it as that big a deal. other games have used voiced protagonist, didn't ruin them. funny how you mention DXHR, cause all 3 of those games, and it's hard to argue the first didn't have very strong RPG elements, used a voiced protagonist.

2. it's probably fair to say we've seen <1% of the game world. seems pretty hard to draw those conclusions already.

3. as other have said, nothing has been removed. perks, skills, and special have all been combined. now you have a system where each special will have 10 perks, and most, if not all, of the perks will have multiple levels. it actually looks like there will be more to it than the previous game

4. never played Skyrim, so can't speak to that.

I love to roleplay hermits in Beth games. How can I roleplay an old hermit if Im generic young american guy?

How could you roleplay an old hermit in Fallout 3?

Just like before. Imagination

The videos I've seen, everything looks appropriately ruined/etc. Of course, they fixed the whole annoying "green tint" issue that FO3 had, but de-saturation does not a "post apocalypse" make.

(Honestly, it's nice to see games using color when all the "realistic" and "modern" games have been so dreary-d down with grey/brown/grey. )

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re: voice..... yeah, I'm just speaking for me, but... I've never had a problem playing a game with a voiced protag, but then I don't "think" audio strongly in my head (i.e, my inner voice is generally entirely neutral. So non of my previous Bethesda game characters have had a distinct "voice" or accent of their own.) Obviously, not everyone is like this.

...a secondary part of that might be that I've always been content to "roleplay" the presented character - the Champion of Cyrodiil, the Dragonborn, the Lone Wanderer; same as I played Shepard in Mass Effect. My "character creation" is picking different playstyles/skillsets & alignments. Perhaps that makes lousy roleplayer.

I understand your concern, and I am sure that there will be a mod that will silence the Main Character at some point. What I wish Bethesda had done, is included a slider that would adjust the pitch/bass of the voice, so that you could get various voices without having to record additional dialogue. Now, maybe they did include that (though I doubt it). I think I will really enjoy the voiced character, but I can understand the concerns of those that might not. Although, I think some may change their minds. We will see.

They picked the voice actor to match all sorts of appearances. Most of my characters will be designed to be old - an older [censored] that always picks the snarky dialog, and then at some point an old wasteland Don Quixote that sees his surroundings as if he's a knight-errant in a medieval fantasy setting. You can imagine how much disbelief I had to suspend to do that with the dialog in any of the prior Fallout games, but I made it work.

And technically our characters had no voice whatsoever in TES prior to Skyrim, which in a way made it easier to project our own voice... but if we can use the imagination argument for our protagonists, why doesn't anyone buy that argument elsewhere?

A pitch slider on the voice would have the same problem as a synthesized computer voice; it's impossible to do that and still create a voice that sounds natural and human. Especially for an audio engineering student like me who knows exactly what processed voices sound like.

+1

Make character old, live in shack and don't talk to anyone.

and how can you not do that in Fallout 4?

So if you do the same in Fallout 4, then you won't have to worry about the voiced protagonist.

Also, your character in Fallout 3 was a 19-year-old kid. Anything else was make-believe, so do it again in Fallout 4.

So you'd be roleplaying a 19 year old, "old man" who everyone refers to as a kid?

Also, even though the MC in Fallout 3 isn't voiced, his grunts of pain whenever you were hit sounded like a young man.

3. Considering that you need to be about level 270 to max out everything, then there will be a ton of different builds. An easy way to create different characters is max 2 SPECIALs. A Max Strength and Endurance character plays very differently from a Max Charisma and Intelligence character. Even playing a Max Strength and Agility character will play differently from a Max Strength and Endurance character.

Anyone think it will be possible to disable the voice of the protagonist?

I have never been able to play an RPG with a voiced protagonist for longer than an hour. This guy's voice sounds neutral enough that I'll give it a try. Worst case, I'll just skip dialogue.

I also play old geezer chars about %50 of the time. To me, the problem of being called a kid in Fallout 3 is worse than just skipping my own dialogue in Fallout 4.

#1 - This was originally my biggest concern. After listening to interviews with both the male and female voice actors (over an hour each), I feel like Bethesda has chosen who they wanted very carefully. The actor & actress also stated in the interviews that they have recorded lots of nuanced dialogue, so it sounds like we will be able to respond in many different ways.

#2 - The world looks amazing from what we've been shown so far. It sounds as if the world is going to be huge and there is weather now. The concept art shows areas with desolate marshes, oceans, ship wrecks, cities. There will be rain, fog, radiation storms so it doesn't sound like everything will always be bright and sunny.

#3 - Skills are still in the game, just implemented in a different way.

#4 - Skyrim is still very playable. I realize what you're saying but as others have mentioned, they can't possibly keep working on one game forever.

To sum up my thoughts - I very much enjoyed Fallout 3 and TES games and am trusting Bethesda because they wouldn't have made these changes without a lot of consideration. I am pretty sure that Todd Howard and his team want us to have the best experience possible and I do not want to regret not giving Fallout 4 a chance.

I don't think there will be any option to just turn it off, so we'll have to wait until some very patient guys arrive and manually mute that couple of thousands of sound files.

My thoughts exactly! Bethesda is going in wrong direction.