And slowly all attributes that were deemed dump stats start to become useful.

You know what I noticed from the Endurance YouTube video?

That when the Vault Boy gets hurt his health does not regenerate and only when he eats food or drinks water his health regenerates.

I will be very happy if Bethesda Game Studios made it so your health regenerates if you only drink water, eat food, sleep or rest, and not regenerate out of no where like in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

An insinuation that eating and drinking are important to some aspect.

This alleviates that concern. That's good.

endurance perks might benefit your resistance/shedding of radiation side effects as well..IE you can raise some eating perk that may start to give you the effect of radaway over time to get rid of the red bar... could be quite useful honestly.

I'm not sure how much more clear cannibalism is than a severed human foot on a plate that Vault Boy sticks a fork in....

I don't disagree that a general meat eating (actually radiation infected food) element was hinted at earlier, but it sure appears that END is related to cannibalism now (and that actually makes more sense than anywhere else).

One complaint I had with Survival in New Vegas is that many food items became straight up better than Stimpaks. Even in hardcoe mode where items heal over time, I would just eat like five different types of food and my health would shoot back up to maximum. It was a little silly.

That's what I'm hoping for, too.

I agree...Twice, they hint at cannibalism without reference to other meat. If they showed Vault Boy chowing down on a lot of meat, then picked up, say a foot and shrugged and popped it in his mouth, I could see how it would reference all meat. But we are clearly seeing a reference to outright cannibalism.

As to it being tied to Endurance...Well, it appears all the perks are tied to a stat, so if you had to pick one, the one that's sort of closely tied to how your body works...digests...internal biology...your guts...All that...Endurance would be the way to go.

[announcer voice] After all, Jimmy is going in your stomach, Little Billy. Once you swallow, it's all up to your body now. Your part in your grim lunch time has been played. Let your stomach and digestive enzymes do the rest!

By that logic we should remove half the stuff in the game.

And all the survival skill in NV did was make the logically better chems and stims worse then food, destroying game balance and logic.

I would rather those things be there just for the sake of non-intrusive immersion.

Or make all things useful? Which is exactly what Todd has already stated is going to be the case.

Ah, but usefullness is subjective...

What is useful for one, is garbage to another.

The usefulness of food is already covered by chems mechanically.

Cool vid, I think the 4th perk from the top is Lifegiver in the Endurance tree.

Also Cannibalism.

It looks like all of the food in Fallout 4 will be useful to eat.

Sugar Bombs might make you feel fatigued and sluggish, since eating a lot of sugar does make you tired.

Food with radiation will give you radiation poisoning and if your immune system is strong you will get less radiation poisoning.

Different food will give you different effects. At least I'm hoping and I'm hoping health does not regenerate automatically out of no where once you are done being in combat when you are injured.

I completely agree, but due to this being on the main chart and having such a high stat requirement, it would make more sense if this covered more than just eating human flesh. This is especially true considering the inclusion of ranks, and it would also prevent there being two perks with functions that are too close together. For this reason, I had already changed Lead Belly to effect contaminated water sources only, and I added the Carnivore perk at E8, that reduces radiation from contaminated meat, at the same time as increasing the HP gain, as my previous suggestion of Tank was too close to the Toughness perk. The name I have suggested allows for all meat, and the description of the perk now fits in with everything that we know so far, including the new details about cannibalism (I have updated the description of Carnivore to include details on cannibalism, and I have also slightly amended the description of Blast Radius accordingly). What's really interesting is that the video emphasis eating fresh meat over lesser types of food, which again fits in with my suggestion.

Here are 3-4 new things we can expect.

Food and water will be part of the base game (no hardcoe mode needed)
Endurance will affect what you can eat as well as what benefits you receive from them.
There will be a sprint button & endurance affects your sprint duration.

One thing I've tried and liked in some mods is giving food lower power, but longer duration buffs compared to chems. And my ideal purpose for food would be tying it in with HP regeneration - so if you eat something, you'll slowly regenerate lost health for a few in-game hours. Then Stimpaks can be used for emergency healing or healing crippled limbs. They could also tie it in with AP regen (Caffeinated Nuka Cola, anyone?), and maybe some cooked/crafted foods could even help us slowly flush out radiation. It's not impossible to make food useful without stepping on the toes of chems.

Well, the usefulness of a revolver is also covered by a laser pistol, mechanically.

This goes a bit beyond satisfying the basic game mechanics. The game could be cut down to one gun, one suit of armor and one NPC if you just needed to cover the mechanics.

Food and drink in the game plays a big role for everyone except our PC. There are restaurants in all communities, you see people sitting down for breakfast in the Rivet City Market, and food has already made useful in healing HP (an incorrect one, granted). Correcting the usefulness of food to keeping you alive rather than healing you would be a smart move. It would also actually make you want/need to buy or cook food in all these places that you never shop at because, well, you don't need to eat. Skyrim Hearthfire, for instance, was completely useless unless you played with a Needs mod.

Other items, such as Teddy bears, e.g., are arguably less useful and could be cut if needed (unless you're sporting the Rock-It Lanucher). I, however, feel that they add atmosphere. Seeing a child's room in a house with a teddy bear in the crib is kind of sad, just like seeing kitchen tables set for dinner, but the food untouched. Or a lawn-mower sitting on a now desert-like lawn. It lets you know how quickly life changed and provides an essential feeling of post-apocalypse.

It looks like we've got:

E1: Toughness

E2: Lead Belly

E3: Life Giver

E4: Chem Resistant

E5: (Unknown, but it's the one that involves swimming)

E6: Rad Resistance

E7: Adamantium Skeleton

E8: Cannibal

E9: (Unknown, but Vault Boy is walking away from a mushroom cloud)

E10: Solar Powered

Something that stands out to me in the perk chart is that there's really no place for any sprinting related perks under Endurance. Of course, there weren't any perks or anything that improved sprinting in Skyrim, and there isn't much you can add to it that couldn't be covered effectively by the stat itself. Maybe there's a perk in Agility that governs movement speed in general?

Sorry but I do not think that the perk could be any more clear, it will be a perk that allows cannibalism. I believe this will be similar to bloody mess and be a single level perk.

If you pay attention to 2:14 in the video and see it as anything but cannibalism I cant understand your reasoning. It shows you eating a leg with a hand and skull laying on the ground. No other types of meat shown. The voice over also says "the flesh of your fellow man"

Hoping these survival needs are incorporated in the base game, whether it is part of a special difficulty mode or perhaps an optional toggle for those who don't enjoy these features.

Was especially excited/surprised to see reference to a possible infection system. This gameplay mechanic was not included in the vanilla New Vegas hardcoe mode, only available in mods like Arwen's Realism Tweaks.

Wounds bleeding out or getting infected, requiring crafted bandages, splints, antibiotics, etc, made combat a lot more challenging with these mods.

Looking at the position of the perk on the chart, as well as the way the rank system works (total of exactly 275 ranks), allocating only a single rank to this perk would unbalance the rest of the chart. This can be verified from the leaked Gamescom footage that shows the majority of perks under Charisma as having only 3 ranks, and so most other perks would have to have either 4 or 5, with a few exceptions based on how incremental/decremental changes would fit within the perk structure.

Also, it would make sense that each perk has a function that is not duplicated elsewhere on the chart. The only other place that raw or cooked meat could be included that would make any sense is Lead Belly, but that would mean that both perks had a very similar function. For this reason, I believe it far more likely that E8 would incorporate the consumption of all meat - raw and cooked, animal and human - into a single perk.

I wouldn't bank on an infection mechanic being in the game just from an infected foot in this video; that whole bit was mainly a reference to a question in the GOAT, I think. It would be really cool, though, but I don't know how Bethesda would go about deeper infection/wounding mechanics. They don't make ARMA games.

In terms of the E3 video, it seems like Howard emphasized how items in the game will all serve some sort of purpose. Instead of toy cars, spoons, and the like being just random junk, they will all have some usefulness when it comes to crafting. I feel that food should follow suit. I see no harm in trying to find a purpose for items that would usually be considered trash.

You are right that the food in NV could very well make chemicals obsolete, but that does not mean it should go back to being useless. Tying it to basic survival instead of health recovery and then using the Endurance stat to influence consumable's effects seems to be reasonable enough.

I suspect that healing rate from food and drink is governed by the Endurance stat itself, not through a perk. As far as base stat effects, it looks like Endurance covers food/drink healing benefits, rad resistance, something to do with crippled limbs, infection(?) and sprinting duration (distance per AP usage).

The cannibalism perk does indeed look like just that--a way to benefit from eating "the flesh of your fellow man" as opposed to other types of meat.

On sprinting--I like how Agility comes into it as well, since it governs your total AP, and Endurance covers sprint distance per point of AP. They seem to have several abilities that draw on multiple stats, like how stealthy activities depend on Agility for the sneaking and Perception for the actual thievery.

I disagree, I feel that you are attempting to push your reasoning on something despite evidence to the contrary. (Mighty blow!?)

Perhaps this perk has levels that have different effects. But assuming hunger is an actual issue long pig is going to be by far the most common source of food in this game.

You brought up "lead belly" that perk protects you from radiation as you drink water. Dont you think that it is just as far fetched to have 2 of 10 perks each with 4 levels dedicated to basically the same thing? One improves your ability to drink contaminated water and one improves your ability to eat contaminated food?


Concerning the 275 perks, there very easily could be 10-25 quest perks. So chart imbalance is not really an argument.