I stopped paying attention to you after you made it clear you don't know what you're talking about. You don't even know the difference between speechcraft and barter... And your nonsense post about repair shows you don't know what the words cut or merged mean. There were no separate repair skills in the previous Fallouts.

So again, merging and cutting=dumbing down.

You are being ignorant of the fact that being good at Chemistry does not make you a genius within physics. That is exactly how the current system works. It is all under 'Science'

You are wither being very dense or ignorant. What I am saying is extremely logical.

The current system is flawed but you seem to completely ignore any argument that disputes it and then do not have any conviction in what you believe in, or at least enough that you are able to make a coherent argument as to why I am wrong

Adapting and iterating on a system does not equate to dumbing down. You are using a very tired buzz word that was coined by other gamers who refuse to adapt or admit a current system is poor

I am aware there were no separate repair skills in previous FO games, point me to where I said there was? What I am saying is there should be, there should be more specific repair skills and perks that are focused on more specialized character progression

I work or have worked as a mechanic, I worked as a mechanic for a number of years at a reasonably well known car manufacturer. I could build a car from the bottom up, I can build an engine from top to bottom piece by piece. This skill does not mean I could build a robot or repair a robot. They are completely separate skills.

However under the repair skill it dictates I can do everything. Repair guns, armor, mechanical equipment, robots, vehicles etc etc. There is no logic in that system aside from lumping everything into a one size fits all = dumb, simple system.

What has been suggested would be for a more specialized system that takes those skill and makes them separate repair skills, not just 'repair'

Anyway just carry on with your popular buzz words

We get it, you don't know what cut, merge or dumbing down is.

How is the suggestion of making a more specialized system dumbing down?

How is having everything bundled under 1 system smart?

So how many skills do you think should be in the game? Shall we take a page out of the military's book, and have a skill for each possible MOS? (basically, a job number) Hint: There are thousands of them.

I do not.

No

I am suggesting the loss of skills in their current form is not necessarily a bad thing

I am suggesting though that the skills can be replaced as perks and within those perks there can be more added specialization

My problem is people see something has been removed within it's past format and instantly assume "Dumbed down"

Now maybe Bethesda have removed skills and not replaced them with a more intelligent tiered and branching perk system that would allow the specialization I have demonstrated

What I have suggested is a theory of what could add more depth within a different format

I am not saying this is what Bethesda will do

That sounds awful!

I think First Aid and Doctor into Medicine was a reasonable merging.

Big guns and small..... It's questionable. I can somewhat justify it due to the fact that if you were to imagine a gun enthusiast, it would be logical that said gun enthusiast would have at least basic knowledge of how bigger guns work.

But Speech and Barter merging is too much for my tastes. There's a distinct difference in charismatic conversation and knowing the intricacies of negotiating.

Way to change your "argument" ... again you don't know what merging and dumbing down is.

You attempt to argue for less skills and more merging and dumbing down, yet your "argument" is that we should have more skills and less merging. You make no sense.

My thing is, the old systems weren't even smart! The first two Fallouts were rife with dump stats, and SPECIAL was balanced horribly! The modern Fallouts took steps to fix that, but made it easy to become proficient at everything just by playing the game naturally, especially with the DLCs. How is that any smarter or deeper than (what we know of) Fallout 4? More numbers =/= more depth.

From what little we know of the new system, it still differentiates between Barter and Speech, with Charisma governing both. That hasn't changed, although it may be less "granular"; I question the importance of granularity though. And maybe the Local Leader perk adds leadership qualities, too.

I'm still curious over who wasted precious skill points in Barter...

Oh please stop telling people they don't understand what's "Dumbing down". It's not rocket science. We get it. We just happen to disagree or to better paraphrase it, you don't seem to see any actual advantages of a new system (which we don't even know how it actually works yet).
Yes we might lose "some" degree of freedom with a new system ( I will have to come back to that and finish my discussion with undecafindeed later) but we "can" potentially "gain" new degrees of freedom with a new system.
Discrediting "any" change as dumbing down seems to be the new very annoying trend.

Er, that guy made it pretty clear he didn't know what dumbing down was. If you can't keep up with what's being talked about, don't quote me.

Merging and cutting=dumbing down. Nothing you say is about to change that.

Not to mention I don't need any pre release info to know what Bethesda will do. Dumb down their games, like they always do and have done for 15 years. I don't expect the Skyrim and Fallout 3 come lately's to know anything about it.

Yeah sure, I mean the old way of doing things in games came from all knowing mighty gods. We don't want to change that ofcourse. /sarcasm/

Barter and repair had really strong synergy.

Or, you know, people that RPed someone who could barter. This being an RPG and all.

A crazy concept for a genre dedicated to role play, I know.

Roleplaying means little when the choices you make in your RP don't actually cause any real change in the gameplay.

At that point its not RPing, its pretending.

No! I looked it up!

Roleplaying means what s/he described. Roleplaying GAME means what you just said.

Barter did have an effect in game. Have you ever even played a Fallout?

And your first sentence makes zero sense. There are plenty of role playing mechanics and norms that have no effect on gameplay. Naming your character, being a major one.

I like when the game's skills and attributes accurately reflect the importance of each stat within the actual game. Gives me an idea of what kinds of characters I can make that there's actually gameplay for.

So, if bartering for better prices only has a marginal effect on gameplay (and it's possible to amass more wealth than you'll ever need regardless), it shouldn't be treated by the game with as much value as speech.

Assigning everything to ranked perks should ideally give every proficiency as much value as it deserves, according to the way the game is designed. Ideally.

Good thing barter had plenty of effect on gameplay then.

LOL at trying to rank importance of skills in an RPG, where it's all about choice and nothing is important or essential.

And as for barter I had plenty of characters that revolved around it. One of the reasons being I actually role play and don't metagame, so none of my characters ever found themselves with "so many caps you can't spend it all." Ask yourself, why would every character be a trading hoarder that scavenges every single thing in the area? They wouldn't, only a scavenging trader type character would.

Good post. There's a tone of uncertainty in this thread as far as whether FO4 will be "dumbed down" or not. If we look at the pattern historically, every subsequent Bethesda produced game since Daggerfall has had a considerable amount of content cut.

I find that there's a lot of people in the WRPG community who view Morrowind as some sort of revolutionary game with complexity and depth that is unrivaled to this day.

It was a revolutionary game for the artwork and scale of the 3D environment.

It was deep, by today's standards.

But what most people don't realize (I didn't realize it until a conversation I had with Pseron Ward a few years ago) is that Morrowind was pretty roughly criticized for the amount of mechanics and content that were cut from the game, when compared to daggerfall. The same thing happened to Oblivion, the same thing happened to Skyrim. The same thing will happen to FO4.

With how they handled Skyrim, I think the best way to go into this game is by expecting the worst and enjoying it for what it is: Looking to be an open world shooter foremost and an RPG second.

And I'm questioning how much is truly "dumbed down". And no one talking of "dumbing down" mentions any new gameplay mechanics they add. More skills =/= more depth.

More skills more possibilities and more choices. More choices, within reason, is always a good thing. Also, it's not only about what they've done in the past, but what they could do. Two skills as fleshed out as a hypothetical merged one, is better than just one fleshed out merged skill/perk.