It was/is boring. ~shrug~

Mind you I'm not sure there IS a mechanic they can use that won't become boring given how much hacking takes place while playing Fallout so I'm not particularly wound up one way or another.

Hacking was fun.. I liked it. Like most people, I didn't know that you could remove words in my first playthrough.. I hope they add new hidden things into the mini-game. I like lockpicking as well although I didn't quite like it on safes.. Safes don't normally have a traditional key lock. If they did a separate mini game for safe cracking, that'd be nice.

I did not like that the game allowed the player to quit and retry the terminal ~indefinitely.

Not to mention that it's possibly illegal in some countries, to make even a loosely accurate lock pick minigame.

I would have loved a [PC] stat & skill based game that allowed picking the lock blind, or with insight from the PC's abilities.
(Such that as the PC became better at http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/lock4.gif, the player would get more and more information about the lock.)

*Of course, I would prefer it even more if the minigames were scrapped, and decided by weighted skill rolls, that rely entirely on the PC to manage the task.

I think it was quite ok, but as others mentioned, it probably should have been explained better. It could also have been a bit more nuanced, with different brackets, definately doing different things. Either remove a dud or replenish allowance.

I don't like artificially increased difficulty, due to poor explanations, then rather make the minigame itself harder, more challenging.

Agreed, but given the ability to quicksave/reload indefinitely, I think they should have just given you infinite tries to begin with and had done with it. As much as I'd love a Way of the Samurai-style save system (where your savegame is deleted when you load it, so you can't spam reload if something doesn't go well), we'll never see one in a Bethesda game.

I wouldn't like that design myself. It's not fault tolerant.

(Ground Fault; Power Company's Fault, Kid's Fault...~pulling the power cord.)

I'm fine with deleting if the PC dies, but deleting the only record of the game [upon load] opens one up to losing all progress from the start of the game for even a minor voltage drop during play, rather than just an hour ~give or take.

I for one enjoy the hacking minigame, more fun then staring at a progress bar and thematically appropriate, a intelligence themed minigame for a Int based character skill.

If I'm roleplaying a hacker PC, then they should be competent to handle it themselves; and in fact should not be hindered by a player that doesn't understand the minigame. A hacker should know how to hack. Vampire was a far better implementation of terminal hacking than FO3 IMO.

**And the reverse/flipside: No PC should be able to slip by on the player's understanding of a minigame. If the PC is not a hacker, then they should not be able to hack.

It's too hard for some brain dead people , so they dont like it...

I liked the mini-game, but what I don't like is what you mentioned here, "use your brain". Why should I have to use my brain in a RPG where I'm playing someone else? What if the character I'm playing has a 10 INT and is a super nerd ... and what if I'm not? I might get totally frustrated with a mini-game that my PC wouldn't have any problem with at all. Or turn it around and look at the Skyrim lock-picking mini-game. My PC might be a bone headed warrior that doesn't know a lock-pick from a fork, but I can make him pick Master level locks. To me it always just defeats the purpose of role-playing if my personal skills are used to that degree, to compensate for my PC's lack in skill, or the other way around.

But that being said I liked the mini-game and will add that the ability to save and reload kind of defeat it's whole purpose. If the ability to hack or lock-pick depended on my PC's skills, then no amount of saving and reloading would allow me to cheat my skills and I'd have to play the game as intended.

Well thats kinda one of the core parts of a action RPG, character and player skills are intertwined in a hybrid form of play.

I actually enjoyed the hacking mini-game personally. Quite happy to see it plays out exactly the same in Fallout 4.

how about if the hacking minigame had infinite tries, but to offset the difficulty, the hacking minigame would happen in real-time, meaning a patrolling enemy could see you if you take long enough.

I liked it in Fallout 3, not quite as much in Fallout NV since you had to wait for all of that random typing before you started that you couldn't skip through like in Fallout 3

I like it, though it makes it a bit easy when you just click the first 3 words then exit out and repeat until you get it. It should give you 8 attempts then locks you out for good. Then you have to smash the back of the computer off and plug your pip boy into it and depending on your science and intelligence it auto hacks it for you. If that fails it blows up in your face.

It worked well with WotS because a typical playthrough was fairly short (15 minutes to 1 hour or so). Much less opportunity for Mayhem to rear its head. While I'd be OK with a similar save system in a Bethesda game, I can see where most everyone else would hate it.

I'd love a system like that, and I wouldn't expect it to piss off Joe Average too much, either. We already have functionally infinite tries; may as well make them interesting instead of convoluted and tedious.

I liked it. I think it will be more exciting in real time. The lock pick "game" was good enough, IMO. Like others have said, I think it would be great to have a "bash lock" tied in with your strength skill.

Infinite tries would be nice, but the password would have to scramble itself again at some point. Otherwise players will just pick every password as quickly as they can until they eventually hit on the right one. Setting the terminal up with an alarm would be helpful, too, in scenarios where you're hacking surreptitiously.

The problem with any sort of Ironman/Way of the Samurai/Dead is Dead save system implemented in Bethesda games isn't necessarily Bethesda's design philosophy. It's just that their games are buggy as all hell; it's foolhardy not to keep multiple saves handy in case something goes haywire. People would find more cases of their saves getting screwed from bugs than they would from their own mistakes. That's something that's definitely better off being self-imposed, IMO.

edit: I would freaking love if they let us bash open locks with melee. They dumped it from the Elder Scrolls games because it made the Lockpicking skill utterly useless, but this time they'd just be making a few perks worthless; and only if you invested in attributes/perks that improved bashing your way in.

I liked it a lot more than most hacking minigames, it made a tad more sense than linking pipes, matching images, or navigating a wedge through a maze.

Hacking was cool in Fallout 3, but annoying in New Vegas when you could not skip the reboot screen if you logged out before eminent shutdown.

Challenges are cool, but it would have been lame if you couldn't indefinitely reset the hacking. Not everyone wants to be annoyed by a minigame halting your progress.

Also, I was never quite clear if 2/7 meant I have 2 correct letters out a 7 letter word, or do I have 2 correct letters in the correct place, out of a 7 letter word?

You have 2 letters in the correct place. It helps to find words with common chunks, like "-ed", or "-ing". That way you can pick a word and either rule out every word with that chunk, or every word without that chunk.

It would be nice if they highlighted the correct letters in the attempted password. It wouldn't make the mini-game itself easier, just make it easier to read.

That's what I thought, but wasn't sure. I've been using that method to guess the passwords. Like if I picked sEarchING, 4/9, I would assume I got the ING part right and pick words with E as the second letter.

Another trick I would do is pick any random word, then see if I could replenish my wrong guess in the codes, hopefully having 5 attempts instead of 4, once I removed a few duds.

I liked it myself, even though it was easy.

I liked this because I don't want to accidentally get locked out from a terminal... I love reading the past and lore. I would hate that I have to A: Reload a previous save a lot or B: Lose my chance to read it.

IMO the player shouldn't have that choice. Ideally a terminal should become impossible once locked out; or at least remain so until the PC returns with improved skill.