barter and speech skill will now be perks i think. and i like it.

..... Perks?

Like a TRADITIONAL fallout perk? Because that would be pretty lame. You would take a "Persuasion" perk once and then after that certain persuade options would become available I suppose.

Or did you mean something similar to the Skyrim perk system? Because that's a diff- No, wait. That would be awful too for Fallout.

unless Bethesda is SERIOUSLY, SERIOUSLY trolling us, there does not seem to be any skills anymore, it seems to be all perk-based.

If it's true they're doing away with skills, then the trolling has already been done man.

:/

People seem to believe that the bobblehead (Barter) shown in the e3 footage holds hope for skills.

I'm very skeptical.

Are conversations included in the gameplay ? Because Barter also has a significant role there. This is not the case in TES mainly because there is not any kind of diffrentiation in dialogue there, but it's a huge deal in FO.
In NV, I once played a character with maximum Barter but minimum Speech, it was really fun. The only times he shined was when money was involved, most other times he just failed the speech checks and annoyed the hell out of everyone.

You are not even disputing my point. I asked you a very direct question and you are failing to answer it in even simple terms.

If you can't be bothered to read what I said and reply with a coherent and revel vent answer I will not persist in trying to discuss it with you

What's a "revel vent"? Gotta love spell check eh?

Beth games, have, for the last 15 years, or more, slowly (and sometimes, not so slowly) Evolved from RPG games, to action/adventure games with (fewer and fewer) RPG elements. Even Attributes were gone in Skyrim. Next, I expect to see three skills, Stealth, magic, and combat...... It's a trend that I find rather depressing. Beth/Zenimax are being very corporate, and making games that appeal to the largest possible audience. Casual Gamers. I am sure the bean-counters love this, the 'hard-core' RPG fans just cry into their beer. I don't see the trend changing either. Too much money to be made.

Say it aint so!

that's pretty self-contradictory.

you don't reach casual gamers with state sized rpg's.

the optimal spot to blow out a revel yell

Seems to be working pretty well for them......... Like, EXTREMELY well......

Thanks, That explains a lot.

Skyrim argues that point, being BY far teh most casual of the game, but also, BY FAR, their top-selling game.

Casual gamers outnumber the RPG "purists" by absolutely huge numbers...... Wanna make big bucks on your games? Appeal to the largest audience. It really is that easy.

You never had a point.

In my opinion, the interesting question is not if barter and speech should be two different skills. The interesting question is if Bethesda is ready to make both of them viable, with real content.

The point of barter is to earn the player more money when selling loot and allow cheaper purchase of goods. In games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 such a skill was irrelevant for three reasons:

1) The player quickly becomes filthy rich.
2) Extremely generous amounts of general equipment (stimpacks, ammo) means little need to purchase it.
3) Merchant inventories are tied to player level, so they seldom have anything interesting.

The result was that money was abundant and useless. If more of the same is planned for Fallout 4, I think they should just cut the skill altogether.

Similar arguments can be made for speech. All to often it adds flavor text rather than being anywhere near as useful as combat skills. Sure, a few token quests could be made (and likely are), but it doesn't really give the impression of a sweet talker, does it? How about being able to talk ones way out of, say, a raider attack? Or giving the ability to interact with auto-attack NPCs?