I'm assuming morality is back and will affect how NPC's react to your presence. I'm curious to know if you have bad karma and build settlements, will similar evil NPC's occupy your settlement or merchants who sell different weapons and gear than if you were a good guy?

Ooh I'd love to make a raider town!

Exactly what I was thinking! It would be so cool to have a town of raiders and villains wiping out humanity. It would be like you being Caesar or Lanius from New Vegas.

It would be cool if we could rent out spaces to NPCs and create our own factions with our settlement as well.

Bad PC: "I don't get it! I built a nice little town but no one wants to live here!"
Companion: "Boss, you kill 90% of the people you meet. You shot a merchant for overcharging you on Squirrel on a stick. Then took all his inventory."

"Then sold all that to another merchant. And then shot him when you decided he gave you a bad deal. Then you took all of that guy's inventory and, well... you kinda built a town to store all this [censored] you keep stealing."

Huh, that's actually a pretty cool idea. Actually put karma to some use than just companions and what Ron Perlman wants to say about you during the ending.

No I hope not. If karma comes back at all, it should only affect random karma-based events that happen to the player. I don't want karma to be a measure of how people see my character. Reputation is a much better system than that.

I hope there is no Karma in the game. Good and Evil are meant to be subjective and it's stupid how "stealing" things from "bad" people (who themselves likely stole them) will net you negative Karma sometimes even when they are dead.

The Karma just doesn't make sense most of the time.

Personally I view Karma as a Role Playing tool for measuring how much Guilt and Innocents a good player has for his actions, a Psychopathy being personalty being blind to the feeling of guilt. Karma should come back, and should allow the player to do some things. High Karma giving some one in example, the ability to over come a situation between two factions and getting them to trust and work together in an instance that gives you quite a bit of power, a reward for selflessness, while Low Karma will lock that option off completely, even with a High reputation in both factions, they choose not to follow a suggestion you make, on the perceived idea that you are goading them both into a situation that you as the player character are going to exploit, punishing the player for doing what comes easy. Naturally I think Both Karma and Reputation have a potential ability to immerse the player in an experience when both tools in the toy chest are used properly.

Annnnd it was stupid in New Vegas how if you killed evil characters who were just going to attack you anyway (such as the Fiends) you would get +karma. If I wanted to be evil I'd have to miss out on all that decent loot by avoiding Fiend territory completely.

I don't think there was an option to join them either.... Which would have fit in perfectly with an evil character.

Agreed. That would've been fun!

Fun fact, leftover scrpts and such in Fallout 3 suggest that, at one point, gaining very evil Karma was going to make Evergreen Mills radiers friendly to the player.

Which is why it has all the things needed to be a functional city, and even a seeminly random friendly merchant.

Now I feel cheated that I couldn't officially become a raider lol

The whole 'stealing affecting karma' was indeed a half baked idea from jump. Especially if no one was around to witness the theft. If anything, karma should be based on deeds or misdeeds you perform when there is more than one NPC to witness your actions. Sort of like in Red Dead Redemption where if you tried to rob a bank, you would actually have to execute the witness before they made it back to town to rat you out.

I was actually thinking that myself. If you build a community, and you have a "reputation" (karma) of being a 'bad person', the only people who'd want to join those communities would be other 'bad people'. Very few 'good people' would willingly join someone who basically kills everyone they meet unless forced to do so.

Though, I actually think that we'll be seeing these settlements play an endgame role, either in the war that will happen (it's Fallout, there's a bloody war in every game) or in how the area is affected by your actions after the game ends.

Thats assuming that Karma is a reputation thing or just the vibes your PC gives off.
Personally I think Killing anybody, including raiders is wrong, how dose murdering a murderous rapist make you any better than them for murdering them? Karma should be in the games to a greater extent

I don't mind if karma is "psychic", especially since it's an abstract concept by nature compared to faction reputation. I just hate how arbitrary it can be; my friend went through New Vegas as an insane cannibal working for the NCR, and somehow managed to get "Very Good" karma. The most effective way he found to bring his karma down to neutral wasn't slaughtering a town or completing evil quests, but just activating an owned terminal over and over again.

I want karma to be in 4, since it's a great factor for radiant questing and settlement building, but it needs work. Good & evil karma should be measured separately, like mixed reputations in New Vegas, and it should only change from quest outcomes and murdering innocents.

Since Todd said 'raiders can and will attack your settlements', it might be wishful thinking to think we can attract goons and thugs to populate your settlements but I would hope this is the case. Perhaps a mod will fix this if not.

I would definitely hope our created settlements would have some affect on the endgame even though Todd stated that creating settlements is an option and not a requirement. Maybe a spin off of Skyrim's civil war but way more detailed and personal.

Agreed but it's so subjective, you would eventually have to have a definitive system for karma if it is indeed a factor this time around. Sure many will critique and disagree but Bethesda ultimately making a decision for the gaming world to view you as heroic for slaughtering murderers and rapists is something the player would have to accept and 'deal with it' like that Xbox dude tweeted, lol.

Same here. Maybe a Slaver town as well. That way you'd have to defend from Brotherhood of Steel, Brotherhood Outcasts and groups like Reilly's Rangers and the Regulators. Probably other Raiders, Slavers and Super Mutants too.

Don't think Karma will have a huge influence on who will live in your town (for better or worse).

Just speculation but..

My guess is your first settlement will start with the 5 survivers that are trapped with Preston Garvey, likely fairly early in the game. Here's a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aig4pgvgQnE&t=2m55s to the conversation that kinda suggests this to me.

Kill a million fiends? I am now a Messiah, clearly Jesus must have killed a million fiends back then.

In my opinion it would be best if Bethesda just completely throws out the Karma system and focuses on improving on the reputation system from Fallout New Vegas as while the reputation system might have flaws, it at least makes sense.

I want hunters to visit my town. We specialize in "meats" after all.