Strength is Melee and Carry weight

Perception is likely compass range and VATS accuracy

Endurance is Health and sprint duration

Charisma is speech

Intelligence is....EXP? Damn the mighty have fallen

Agility is sneak and AP

Luck is crit

But here's the thing: you start at 1 SPECIAL each and you only get 21 points.

For the first time ever, the average character will be a 4 in everything, rather than a 5+.
This leads me to suspect that 1's are viable, AKA, you can safely leave any stat at 1 and still be a totally viable character. In past Fallouts, dropping SPECIAL down could hurt, but here? It'll probably work fine.

So then...

What if I make a character that has no intention of using melee or VATS and I myself am patient about leveling up? I have no motivation to increase Strength, Perception, Intelligence or Agility. What's more, Charisma has always been a neglected stat, and my hunch says that hasn't changed. This means that wtf I should just pump Endurance and Luck to max for better HP and damage respectively. Viola. Best character build.

Am I missing something?

I am pretty sure that the perk system - the substitute for skills - will work entirely on attributes. Meaning INT will govern science perks, STR will govern melee and carrying capacity perks, CHA will govern speech and trade perks, etc. If you can't actually raise the attributes all that much through leveling up then that would mean that you would be permanently locked out of certain perks. Meaning a low charisma would equal you not having diplomatic options whatsoever. At least that's how it should work, I'm pretty sure it will all be made so that kiddies could get everything out of the game in one playthrough so SPECIAL will prolly be meaningless.

That could potentially be good if they're aggressive with it, AKA they make you take 7+ of a SPECIAL to get certain perks. In that case you'd only be able to get those with 3 SPECIAL per character, encouraging replay value. Otherwise, without such requirements, this system would quickly fall flat.

to be fair special has never really been all that balanced. It appears that its going to play a massive role in character builds and dialogue. I'm hoping that to max one you'll have to seriously neglect another, making each character feel unique.

I think min-maxing will be very popular once people find out which stats are the most useful. Like if there are only 20 charisma checks in the game, or none of the perks that require chrarisma are any good, then you'd never want to put any points into it.

I think the farthest they'll go is maybe this: Let's assume there are three trading perks. Not having them equals you get the absolute worst prices, it may only be minimally changed with your base Charisma score. The first trade perk requires 5 Charisma and it makes the prices you get slightly better, the second requires 7 which makes the prices actually acceptable, the third would require 10 which would mean that you get the best prices possible - selling items for more than they are worth, and getting a sizable discount when buying stuff.

Of course this is a really rough example, I basically thought it up while taking a piss. Diplomacy would be a tougher nut to crack because of the nature of diplomacy itself - how would you decide which situations require the best diplomacy perk available, and which only the crappiest one? If they include a diplomatic solution for the ending of the MQ, I assume that would require a seriously Charisma oriented character, and thus most of the Charisma governed perks would had to have been picked during the game.

I still get the feeling that maybe they'll just go for a bs system that doesn't mean anything, and basically means character building is an absolute no-brainer. They completely embraced the "do everything in one playthrough" philosophy in Skyrim, why wouldn't they do the same in FO4? I wouldn't even be surprised if they included perk respec at one point.

There's a big difference between "could be better" and "this might be worthless." New Vegas for example only boasted the flaws of Intelligence being tweaked and geared towards level 30, Perception is a stat that's always been validated by perks, and I personally think Charisma was actually underrated, but most weren't fond enough to bother with it. Srsly though, having a tanky companion can do loads to take focus off you. FO3 suffered from Agility having horrendously tweaked numbers to the point of the stat being near worthless, Perception is the same as always, Int was stupid powerful and Charisma was worthless. This here could potentially be a lot of min-maxing as many of these seem geared towards specific playstyles, and intelligence is now in the same boat as Charisma. Perks could save it though.

Charisma is definitely a worry of mine. Remember speech checks in Skyrim? They were incredibly rare. Charisma and speech elements are not really something Bethesda keeps in mind all that well. I'm very surprised that they didn't adopt the effects Charisma had in New Vegas here. Or hell, since this is next gen, could possibly consider following suit with what it did in FO2 by increasing companion cap. Dunno if feasible, but worth a look.

See, I think those numbers are crazy ambitious for Bethesda. We're talking about having a total of 28 stats, so an average of 4. Anything above 7 is a huge stat investment that eats a third of your stats. (third since one fourth of the stats you have is the 1's and can't be re-allocated)

Knowing Bethesda I'd expect to see rank 1 having no Charisma requirement, rank 2 having a requirement of 4 and rank three having a requirement of 7 or 8.

No, probably not. And it doesn't appear very effective either.

I don't think this is an issue. Either you make characters that are the most effient or you make characters that are concepts. I have never had a problem pumping up CHR for my characters why? because I make characters that are concepts first and effient second. I don't care if I do x,y & z I'll get a combat monster of a character. That isn't intresting to me. I am more concerned with making an INTRESTING character and min maxing I find create the most boring characters in an RPG. That said if bethesda's vision is to allow a min max character aka its not viewed as an exploit to them then by all means have at it. People should play with their specials in a way that is fun for them.

You have to think about how many time Bethesda will let you level up your attributes. It stands to reason that you'll have the bobble head bonuses, that's basically confirmed. However, how many levels would it take for you to be able to allocate a bonus attribute point? Actually, what was it like in FO3 and NV? I completely forgot.

I personally haven't spotted the Intense training perk on the perk poster..... so its unlikely we will be getting SPECIAL increases from that.

Which would cut out the biggest source of SPECIAL uppers from the past games.

In a game world with MIT and androids I would be surprised if we can't enhance our stats with implants or something along those lines.

If we get less special points, but natural ways to increase them by tinkering with ourselves I think that's a fair system, instead of being an average guy in all like in 3 and NV.

The big problem was dumping useless stats like perception (vats perks were useless) or charisma, and making yourself a super man.

You could easily lower Perception and Charisma to 1 in Fallout 3 and not suffer much of a penalty apart from enemies being harder to see on radar (No Big Deal), Better Criticals (No Big Deal, games easy enough) and speech percentage for skill check but getting a high speech will offset the low charisma.

In New Vegas you could easily lower Charisma to 1 and the only negative is companions and some flavor text.

Hopefully with Fallout 4, more choices will matter with Special, am I optimistic that will be the case, no but it could always be different.

FO3 and New Vegas both had a +1 to every stat system, though Vegas' depended on Endurance so it could potentially be less.

Then there were misc quest rewards that gave stats. For example FO3 offered STR or PER from the ants quest, I think two different +1 luck scenarios, and maybe some others. FO:NV offered STR from OWB (1 or 2) and then one stat for beating Lonesome Road.

I'm interested to see what may happen with a low intelligence character.

Spending time on balancing single player game is, IMHO, an overkill. Players will either RP their characters or exploiting the game engine to be as powerful as they can be. But the point is that the player will regulate him/herself. What Bethesda should do instead is make so that most combination are playable and enjoyable ( still, no balancing needed )

I like what Obs did with the skills during dialogue. If you played a character who knew about explosives you could wrangle some dynamite off of easy pete etc. I loved that sort of thing for role-playing different characters. Its what kept me coming back again and again.

They cant really do that now with just special. I mean it could work for some things like Strength and Intelligence, but not for any specialised knowledge our character might have learned.

On that note I would say the new dialog system is more of a worry. I'd agree it's not as feasible without skills, but more importantly it's faaaar less feasible with the dialog wheel now. Don't expect it, sadly. :/

Until we see the full game, there's no way of knowing how to max character builds yet.

My thoughts are that we'll obviously have some new features and system for character builds, much like Skyrim on its release, so we'll just have to wait and see.

I thought Skyrim's changes to character building were terrible and I was extremely angry, but now I think it's one of the best games I've ever played. Bethesda is full of surprises. I for one can't wait to see what kind of new characters are available with the layered armor system. Maybe a full Power Armor character is no longer a viable option?

I'm gonna reveal my obvious inexperience with dialogue wheels and ask why exactly wouldn't skills work with them?

It's more that it's overwhelmingly impractical and Bethesda has NEVER shown much interest in dialog.

So basically let's look at it this way:

The new dialog system offers 4 cues at a time. No more, no less. Let's say you have a scenario where you can answer one of four ways, and then they decide that intelligent characters need an additional option. This means that one of the four buttons would become a "more dialog" button to thumb over to the next menu, where the intelligence check would be listed alone. It would look very sloppy and it would be unneccesarily tedious, because instead of just getting a list of options we scroll through, we have to hit a button to "turn a page" back and forth, and including the button to "turn the page" already reduces the number of dialog options on the screen at any given time by one.

This system is simply impractical for a game with expansive dialog. Combine that with the fact that Bethesda has never included expansive dialog and the most expansive they ever got was FO3 with the good-neutral-evil options, I find it insanely unlikely that they'll bother with skill checks in dialog at all. Of all my predictions for FO4, this is the one I'd bet the most money on for being correct.

Depends how the perk system ties into it really.

Also if you want to exploit the game to power build that is your own choice. Personally I try to gimp my character slightly to make for a more challenging experience

When talking to Codsworth post 200 years, there is a yellow colored dialogue option asking if he's okay after he offers to find you something to eat. Not sure if that means skill check, but it's indicating something's different with that choice.

Charisma will also effect settlement building now. When they installed the trading post the pc had to have leadership perk ranked 3; which I assume would be based off of Charisma like NV leadership did. Also the dialog tree could add special dialogue options to certain situations so there could be more then 4 options, there are more then four buttons on a controller. The leaked script did have Special dialogue check options ifrc.

Why couldn't having perk in explosives work to represent special knowledge that x/100 skill did?

Based on the evidence from the trailer, is it absolutely confirmed that skills won't work like they used to?