Fallout 4 Eliminates Skills From Character System
- Thread starter Conrad Zimmerman
- Start date
You can tailor perks, and while it's extremely useful to go all-in on those skills, it's also quickly game-breaking, as at low levels you can gain tons of elite equipment and access. All it is: it will take more character experience to achieve access, and that's not a bad thing at all. Might not be as fun, but what you're doing is taking a shortcut to arguably the most powerful skills in the game; what's normal to us in FO is actually pretty ridiculous by RPG standards.008Zulu said:
How is this any different than a FO character having a Ph.D and mastery in everything, along with a boat-load of perks, many of which are on the level of superheroes? At some point, all FO characters become a Mary Sue and are experts in everything.Sir Thomas Sean Connery said:
Is there anything to suggest that you will not need appropriate perks in F04 to be good with any gun? I may have missed something, but it sounds like you need to invest in ranks of the right perks to be good at specific things.
How do you get that from a change in character progression? Seriously, are these annoying numbers games that require convoluted character builders hardcore RPG players are used to having to math out every single level and stat point so they can properly min-max and meet requirements and shave it all down to perfect science really necessary? I know they're wanted because this, itself, is a skill and something people enjoy doing, but for many people this is boring and foists players into building characters in certain ways in order to hit targets or pass a stupid speech check.
Speaking of checks, that's really what I'm left questioning. I sure don't want to worry whether 60 or 65 speech is going to be enough for the content I'm playing so that I can persuade an annoying NPC to do something I need for a quest. It's not fun, it's not immersive, and quite honestly the pool of attribute points on leveling, or the "here, just increase your mastery in anything and we'll say that you earned it" that is a part of the classic RPG system really needs to evolve. I'm not saying F04 is the evolution, but I welcome any RPG (particularly one that should not be a numbers game) which strays from this old, lazy design that was necessary before video game development could embrace more fun and realistic approaches to character progression.
On the plus side, I look forward to Skills inevitable return when Obsidian gets licensed to make an actually decent Fallout sequel again.
Something Amyss said:
This change is shite, fellow escapists. Skill system worked great in FO1 and 2 for some reason and then, SUDDENLY, stopped in F3 and barely came back in NV. Why? Obviously because skills were used in improper way. Skill system in Fallout was designed to force player into building a character to get results they wanted. How to make skills matter in FPS Fallout? Make tem be impactful. Return SPECIAL the way it was supposed to be: make weapon damage output and opponent attributes constant; instead, make accuracy depend on skill. Make each skill point matter - build the game to make level 20 if not level cap, then barely achievable. In that case top-level character will only have tag skills maxed and a couple of additional skills on useful level. That is called "character build". On perks - again, for some reason in F1 and 2 perks not just did matter, they were as important as skills, because perk combo which would resonate with skill combo would double characters effectiveness output. And, finally, SPECIAL itself should matter; in F3 and NV there were three SPECIAL attributes with any meaning - Intelligence (Skill Points), Charisma (only for talky characters) and Endurance (only for characters who like to melee). F-ing STRENGTH was almost useless in melee! Roleplaying system plain didn't work. So how did Beth decides to fix that? By balancing? By restoring proper SPECIAl mechanics? Naaaah! Let's just throw skills out of the window - that'll do!Happyninja42 said:
Captcha: graveyard shift
A lot of it in my experience as well is that most of these "complex" systems are actually very similar to solve. If you have balanced attack speed, crit chance, and base damage once it gets easier and easier to do it again. Most of the more complex systems people obfuscate this a little but, it still ends up being the only calculation you are really making. So calling them more complex is like calling 1+6+8+9 more complex than 10+14, while technically true it?s just making you do the same thing more times.Conrad Zimmerman said:
Well at least we're moving back to the old kind of shitstorms.
Already we're seeing the good old "No True Scotsman" fallacy being trotted out in terms of what constitutes an RPG and a genre being declared dead because of changes because apparently the old ways were always better.
I feel like people put too much into certain systems.
Already we're seeing the good old "No True Scotsman" fallacy being trotted out in terms of what constitutes an RPG and a genre being declared dead because of changes because apparently the old ways were always better.
I feel like people put too much into certain systems.
I know right? I can't wait to see what Obsidian does when they get a chance at the wheel again. Hopefully it isn't that technically flawed though. For all my love of New Vegas, I can barely play the base game anymore with out crashes or frame rate slower than slide showsSoviet Heavy said:
Well I wasn't referring to perks in my comment, but the skill point system, since that's the issue of this thread. What I mean is that even if you don't max your INT to 9-10 at start, just going through the content and DLC's, you end up with so many skill points, that you have to dump them somewhere, if only to get off the Level Up screen. My most recent playthrough was a Dr. McNinja build. He always ran around in a lab coat, I found a particular Legion mask that looked kind of like a ninja mask, and he used a katana for all his fighting. I would just run in, shoot up drugs and hack n slash my way through people. It was great fun. But even for his build, which didn't include guns at all, I ended up with points to burn.kenu12345 said:
Oh sure, I don't know if the system will be good or not, I'm just optimistic. Based on what I've seen, it seems like they are replicating what you get for having a high skill at something, with the perks. For example, boosting your Small Guns skill makes your accuracy go up, reducing the spread radius of your shots. It's likely that the shooting related perks will do this very thing. So that someone who invested heavily in shooting perks will be a much better shot than someone without them. Thus tailoring them to be a sniper/trickshooter/etc, compared to the guy who put his points into the social related perks. Which makes 2 totally different characters. One is the Lone Gunman concept, who can shoot his way through any challenge, the other is a person who talks his way out of trouble, and relies on guns as a fallback. I feel very confident that Bethesda will make the system work really well. As Jon from Many A True Nerd put it, in his list of things he wanted to see in FO 4, I want to be bad at things. I don't want to be able to do everything in the game, because then I don't have to actually try and think my way through the problem.Something Amyss said:
How about the doomsayers in this thread actually wait to see more info on the system before you guys actually judge it? I get being wary but I don't think judging something without seeing an in depth example is a good idea.
Well, thats only really an issue in later levels honestly and there is still a good variety of skills to invest in to the point where its only an issue near dlc cap. This system is no better since they already stated there is unlimited leveling and you can up your special. Min-maxing actually seems easier here. 3 you had to abuse the bobbleheads, which are going to be in 4 too, and New Vegas was just a case of adding too many levels.Happyninja42 said:
I am seeing the info right now and I am not liking it. I hate this sort of argument. Its not productive at all.WonkyWarmaiden said:
I have to mention that no, homosexuality/bisexuality is in, all human companions can be romanced by any gender despite the fact that both options for the protagonist are in a straight marriage. Also, it's highly likely that perks that are like Cherchez La Femme and Confirmed Bachelor are simply rolled into perks like Lady Killer/Black Widow, as each perk has multiple levels that do what individual perks used to do. There's actually far far more perks than there used to be as a result.Chicago Ted said:
That would be a lot better of an idea than what we're getting. While I will live with and possibly even come to see it as better, Fallout 4's perk system appears to lack the nuance that the skill point based system had. People love to say "there's no difference between X skill if it isn't at X points" but this simply isn't true, they just aren't noticing. For instance, picking an average level lock requires a skill level of 50 yes, but forcing the lock becomes more likely at higher skill levels, and more importantly the margin for error for the sweet spot in the minigame increases as the skill levels go up, there's less words to pick as your science skill goes up, Gun sway decreases and VATS hit percentage also increases as the player increases the guns skill, etc. Every skill in Fallout 3 worked like this, as it was increased you got slightly better and chances improved at whatever it was the skill affected. This was great because it created a middle ground between being bad at something, good at something, and great at something, thus creating an actual sense of progression, the Perk based system that Fallout 4 is using won't have that. Sure, up until this point it was far too easy to become an master at just about everything with enough skill points, levels, and books but that's simply the result of the developers being far too generous with skill points than they should be and thus easily fixable.Wiggum Esquilax said:
Regardless, I'm just glad they aren't going with a use equals skill increases equals levels as the Elder Scrolls uses. I hate that system and greatly prefer the experience based system because it ensures the player has to, you know, actually PLAY THE GAME to become good at it. The use system may seem more realistic on paper but the reality is all it does is become far far too easy to exploit that system and just do the same thing over and over and over again to raise those skills and thus become an all powerful master of everything without having to actually do anything else to get that powerful.
Fun fact: Intelligence was an essential part of communication in the original Fallouts. Making it your dump stat would result in hilarious interactions with other people.MarsAtlas said:
Oh man... I just imagined a voice acted low intelligence character. All my yes!
IIRC, Fallout 1 this didn't matter, but in Fallout 2 it was gloriously implemented. Not only was a 1 INT character barely able to speak, but people treated you entirely differently.secretkeeper12 said:
The village elder, to a normal character "You must venture out, find Vic, find Vault 13, save us all, Chosen One!"
Make that INT 1 and... "FIND VAULT 13! FIND VAULT 13! FIND VAULT 13! FIND VAULT 13!"
As well as people in Arroyo going "You're the chosen one? Oh god..."
As a long time fan of the franchise though I'm of course a little put off with the change, but interested to see it applied. The Elder Scrolls way of leveling up skills always made more sense to me (it improves with use, not because you put points into it.)
Bethesda hasn't made real RPGs for a while now. Skyrim certainly wasn't. They make sandbox action games with RPG elements. I called this, Bethesda's design direction for a while now has been to simplify, streamline, remove complexity and difficulty, and appeal to as wide an audience as possible.Sir Thomas Sean Connery said:
Great for moving tens of millions of copies I guess, but for people like me who want a more hardcore experience each new game they release appeals to me a little less.