They're being surprisingly quiet about it except saying that the armor is "layered" now, whatever that means.

Think there will be any major changes, or pretty much the same ol'?

It means you can wear it over clothes, rather then it being either.

We know it's divided in more segments, with separate arms and leg slots, it uses the DR system of 3 and each piece has a stat for ballistic protection and radiation protection, might have been a stat for energy too.

If you check out the pip-boy footage in the E3 trailer you can see a bit about it. The PC is wearing his vault jumpsuit, but when he goes to inventory you see he has the option of adding pieces of armor over top of that... in this case they are light leather. The pieces shown are R arm, L arm, chest, R leg and L leg. Each piece has the stats that remmus pointed out and they each add weight.

In some of the combat footage you can see the leather pieces over top of his jumpsuit.

Potentially you could have an armored prewar suit. Which is awesome, or if you want an armored red dress with high heels...I'm going to try that out with my male pc for [censored] and giggles...

I can't wait to armor up pre-war clothing.

What Todd Howard meant by layered armor in Fallout 4 is that you can equip seperate pieces of armor on your Player Characters (PC's) body like in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

Like this.

Dwarven Left Gauntlet, Daedric Right Gauntlet, Steel Helmet, Ebony Left Pauldron, Iron Right Pauldron, Iron Cuitass, Iron Boots, Left Glove, Right Glove.

I am foreseeing a great many screenshots and youtube videos of up-armored sixy sleepwear.

Individual pieces to mix/match? Huh. That opens up a whole lot of possibilities.

I'm excited to see how it affects gameplay.

Now that armor really occupies a specific slot, left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg, torso or head, will this mean that these areas are protected by their respective armor?

So in other words, if an enemy has armor on his legs, arms and head, but not on his torso will that mean his torso is more vulnerable? Because that would be awesome.

And how will this work with armor seemingly being damaged or destroyed. Can i shoot armor enough to destroy it, opening up a weak point?

The possibilities excite me, i hope they didn't cheap out on it and somehow have Armor on your left arm also protect your right leg.

Hopefully some outer part fall off after been hit so many times.

Looking at the Pipboy menu, it shows the DR ratings for each limb in the apparel tab. Looks great. As for shooting apart armor, we don't know how that works. There's no armor health in the equipment tab outside of Power Armor, but the combat montage showed us shooting apart a Raider's chest piece. So I dunno.

That's what I'm taking from it. This makes VATS that more important.

I think the layered system will replace repair. So under clothing wont need to be repaired, however you will need to replace the layers that get blown off you over time. Which is a good trade off, as who wants to repair layers that have no damage resistance? So you can wing it and go with no armoured layers or take some time to build some parts up. Hopefully combat armour is layered now, as that would be pretty damn cool. Looks like the new system will add more to the game as others have said. So i imagine you will now need to pick shots more carefully and aim for weak points. This will add a whole lot more to VATS as well, so i dont see anything bad about this.

I can't wait to just make some odd looking armor..

Really?! Wow, if that is true, that will be freaking awesome! Some days ago I had an argument with a member, he was saying that such armor slot mechanics is unbalanced and flawed. Of course, I disagreed on certain points. For me, the problem doesn't lie on having different pieces of armor/clothing but rather on how such mechanics are implemented by the devs. Just like VATS, VATS itself is not the problem but the way it was implemented in a 3D real-time environment like FO3.

I'm more concerned about the damage resistance system. FO3 was bad and they topped that in Skyrim with an ever worse system so you could cap resistances with literally any armor during mid-game. I hope they learned their lesson this time but I'm afraid they didn't, based on sticking to something like Skyrim in those videos.

Yeah looking back at that raider i think he was actually wearing power armor. Which is cool in its own right of course, some scrappy piece of power armor made up of scrap metal and such.

We know armor is still using pure damage resistance to reduce HP loss and that the cap for such resistance is probably still 80% as it was in Skyrim. Anything else is just an aesthetic choice.

I'm going to weld together cans of beans and make bean can armor. Hopefully I'll find a giant can o' beans so I can wear it as a helmet as well.

We also take two kinds of damage... that we know of. Energy, and bullet damage.

In the Fallout 4 combat Gameplay Compilation vid, you can see that completely changing clothes, other than your vault suit or power armor is totally possible. I'm pretty sure you can loot corpses for their armor to either layer or replace the vault suit.

we do know a red dress with high heels has the highest armor rating - as it should be

With the Brotherhood of Steel in the Commonwealth in full force, I actually wouldn't be surprised if some Raiders managed to kill them and scrap their Power Armor - they wouldn't know how to use it in its regular state, but they can still mangle it into some solid scrap armor. Kinda like some of the NCR soldiers in New Vegas.

I just had an idea for my Wasteland Don Quixote character.

Yeah this raider almost certainly has a scrapped and cobbled together power armor leg.. http://i.imgur.com/44c8STb.png

Not to mention the Raider Boss we shoot a Mini Nuke at, or the chestpiece we blew off of a Raider Psycho, which even had some mechanical innards IIRC.