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Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Well, at least we can be pretty sure that this is what the actual game will look like and we're not being shown some doctored-up marketing graphics.

Right?

...right?

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Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Not sure how I feel about skills going away.

On the one hand, it was a pretty binary system--you either pump skill points into a skill or you don't--and it made Intelligence more important than it probably should be. On the other hand, they'd better have a great Perks system or I'm going to really feel the loss of "builds." And I hope Intelligence does something more than "some dialog options and increased experience gain."

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

xutech posted:

Why do you have to punish some players for what is an enjoyable playstyle? This is reinventing the wheel when there are even old games like Thief (1998 and onward) that were able to offer some clever solutions, like different noise levels of floors (metal, carpet, wood) or cones of detection (stay out of the line of sight) or a detection gem or other metric to measure detection levels.

Implementing completely artificial penalties for stealth is a poo poo idea and poo poo design. Copy and steal from the large number of existing good ideas if you can't invent your own.

Stealth play should be satisfying as an alternative to commando style slow walking armored murder.

And of course stealth sucked in New Vegas and Fallout 3, because you were only going to attract perhaps four or five enemies max if you were spotted. Hardly a dramatic struggle when you get caught.

The lack of a direct skill system in Fallout 4 gives them the opportunity to implement better stealth, I think. When you don't give players a big Sneak skill to upgrade, you don't have to worry as much about finding a linear way for your sneaking effectiveness to increase. Instead of giving players a scale of 0 to 100 where 0 is "you can't sneak" and 100 is "you're somehow pretty much invisible because abstraction," they can instead offer a selection of perks, likely associated with Agility and/or Perception, that allow you to sneak better in specific, tangible ways. Then implement sight cones and more robust sound detection, maybe throw in some mutated animals who can detect you by scent, and you're golden.

Whether Bethesda takes that opportunity, of course, is a very different question. It's entirely possible there'll just be a "Sneaky Little poo poo" perk that you can put points in to become invisible just like the old Sneak skill.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

ymgve posted:

Did you look at later upgrades to the perks? It's more than just stat increases.



One perk point per level, I assume?

Have any of the leaks indicated how fast leveling is and/or how high of a level we should expect to reach? I'm wondering how feasible it will be to recreate my usual Fallout 3/NV build of "sneak, snipe, lockpick, hack, persuade" given the SPECIAL requirements for perks and all that.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

What's the deal with the critical meter? Do you still get increased damage from headshots outside of VATS, or do you now have to build up the crit meter to ever get criticals?

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

ImpAtom posted:

You still do increased damage with headshots and you still get stealth criticals. The critical is just a stored assured critical hit.

Ah, okay. And does the Better Criticals LUC perk work on non-stored criticals, too?

I'm probably going to end up spending a bunch of perk points just to increase stats so I can be the best at sneaking, lockpicking, hacking, sniping, and persuasion all at once. :ohdear:

EDIT: Also, is it worth it to go for those perks that give you access to better high-tech mods and such?

Harrow fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Nov 7, 2015

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

New Leaf posted:

I plan on modding weapons as much as possible, so I'm leaving room for bobble heads to get that Science! perk, but I'm trying to go pretty middle of the road everyman with room to grow.

I completely forgot about bobble heads! Is it confirmed they're back in Fallout 4? That'll save me some perk points on increasing my SPECIAL stats then.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Beautiful. Now to make my perfect build where I never have to make difficult choices about what I want to specialize in. :v:

(I noticed there aren't any energy weapon perks, only radiation weapons. Does that mean energy weapons share perks with kinetic weapons? Like, taking Gunslinger makes you good with both pistols and laser pistols?)

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

I still think I'm going to miss skills and skill points, really, even though there's probably no more difference in the granularity or breadth of choice offered by FO4's system.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Rookersh posted:

Does Fallout 4 have guilds/factions now? Does it have more then two towns? Does it have more then 17 sidequests? Because Fallout 3 was designed so that the main quest was all that mattered, and after that was done, you basically just go collect the remaining Bobbleheads. If Fallout 4 is the same and we already know the ending, then I hope the Settlement stuff is really well done, because it and Bobblehead collecting is probably going to be the only game left.

I think my own perception of Fallout 4 will probably be enhanced by the fact that I'm going into it with reduced expectations from the start. Everything you said about Fallout 3 is why I think it's really lackluster--fun enough to be worth playing, but not nearly the RPG behemoth that it seems to be treated as. I fully expect Fallout 4 to be "Fallout 3, but new." I'd say that I hope Fallout 4 gets a pseudo-sequel to be the New Vegas to its FO3, a game where worldbuilding and exploration aren't just emphasized over the main quest but basically are the main quest, but I doubt that'll happen in this case.

I really don't have the high opinion of Bethesda that much of the internet does, I think, games like Skyrim included.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

How do energy weapons work this time around? I saw a perk for "radiation" weapons, but none for energy weapons. Do they use the regular gun perks, or are they classified as "radiation weapons" now?

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Infinity Gaia posted:

Regular gun perks. They're now divided by type of gun rather than tech of gun, if that makes sense? So the handgun perk gives boosts to 10mm pistols and laser pistols, for instance.

frajaq posted:

Now it's more based on what mod perk you choose, picking Science! over Gun Nut would give you more stuff to mod your energy weapons

For pure damage bonus you can choose based on Heavy Weapons/Revolvers/Pistols/Rifles/Assault Rifles, regardless if they're ballistic or energy

Yep, that makes sense. That's nice--it means I can more easily experiment with both ballistic and energy weapons before committing to one or the other. I really never used energy weapons in 3 or NV.

So the "high-tech mods" in Science! refers to energy weapon mods, then? I didn't know if that's what it meant or if it meant high-tech mods for any kind of weapon (laser sights, stuff like that).

I'm going to have some hard choices to make. Getting all the perks I want would probably require me to spend at least 6 levels worth of perk points on SPECIAL stats and I don't know if that's going to be too much or not.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Infinity Gaia posted:

It actually depends not only on the type of base weapon, but also the type of mod being installed! Some regular ballistic gun mods require Science!, such as night sights, while some energy weapon mods require Gun Nut. It's not as simple as one providing gun mods and the other providing energy weapon mods!

Ah, so I was right in how I read those. Cool.

So now that I know most people are finishing around 50-60 and that I can get one bobblehead per SPECIAL stat I suppose I can decently plan out what kind of build I'm going to go for and preemptively cry over the perks I won't get.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

^ They probably wanted a clear divide between "sniper" and "gunslinger" builds.

AriadneThread posted:

does health still go up with level independent of damage?
because i could see that getting really tedious towards the end of the level curve

Knowing Bethesda, I'd assume that yeah, enemy health is going to go up independent of how much damage your build can do, so you're really going to want those +% damage with X weapon type perks.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

ImpAtom posted:

A think I feel I should emphasize for those mind-maxing:

Remember that the gun-mod abilities are for crafting, not equipping, those mods. There are ways to get mods without crafting. (There is even an NPC who noticed a unique weapons I was carrying, had dialogue for it and sold me mods for it. I don't know if it was that specific weapon or not but it would be sort of odd if it was.) You can equip any mod if you have it, just not craft.

Well, that's probably good, then, depending on how available mods are without crafting them. I've never been huge into crafting in the first place, so if I can still reliably buy/find good mods without crafting them, I can safely ignore those perks. (Though if there are really good crafted-only mods I'll still probably level them.)

Another question about perks: one of the build trees seems to give you the first rank of each perk for free for having the requisite SPECIAL stat. Is that accurate, or do you have to spend a perk point for rank 1 of each perk? I assumed the latter, but I just want to check.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

ImpAtom posted:

They're pretty available. Enemies have modded weapons you can rip stuff off and there are shopkeepers who sell them. Unique weapons are going to be harder to get crafting parts for though since they need their own custom crafted parts instead of using generic ones.

That is incorrect. You have to spent a perk point to get it. The SPECIAL stat is just the gating requirement.

That's what I thought with the perks, it makes the most sense that way.

Thanks for all the answers!

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Kiggles posted:

It seems to me that the intent is your SPECIAL really shouldn't be changing much over a playthrough. Look at the perks. Decide which are absolutely vital to your desired playstyle. Try to get as many of them unlocked with the starting SPECIAL. From there, things should take care of themselves.

I think the fact that each SPECIAL stat has a (potentially pretty important) passive effect might make it worth it to drop some perk points into leveling those stats just to have those stats. I plan to have high Charisma to pass speech checks, for example, even though I don't really want much from the Charisma perks. I'm sure doing that is going to require me to change my SPECIAL a decent amount as I play.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

So is Luck as good as it looks? I don't really care about VATS perks but Bloody Mess and Better Criticals seem like pro picks.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

frajaq posted:



hahah Maccready is still a little poo poo

Am I reading that right that Piper disapproves of both peaceful and violent options?

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Vargs posted:

I wonder if you can cheese this by quicksaving before turning in a quest. Sounds super tedious but I'm sure a lot of people will do it if it's possible, especially considering how effective that would be. Same with quicksaving before charisma checks, which are now apparently %-based for some unfathomable reason.

Oh god, why? What is the point of making a speech check based on a die roll in a world where quicksaving exists? It just adds tedium.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

ShadowMar posted:

bethesda is really bad at making video games

Knowing that SPECIAL-based dialog checks are now based on a die roll really makes me devalue Charisma and Intelligence as stats on their own. Obviously Intelligence has some neat perks associated with it, but Charisma's just going to earn me the right to get pissed off when I fail a Charisma check that I theoretically had enough Charisma to qualify for.

To be fair, video games doing persuasion as a purely binary thing that is as simple as picking the [SPEECH] option from a list is obviously kind of boring and lovely anyway, but hey. I always thought the best way to do it in a Bethesda-style game would be to have speech/Charisma add new options to the dialog but not flag them as speech checks, so it's still up to the player to recognize that those are the better options. Probably not possible now that we can only ever have four options at each dialog choice.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Magmarashi posted:

Exercise Restraint.

F5 forever. :colbert:

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

I haven't even watched the streams and now I kind of want to just... not get this.

Which I probably should have predicted, because it's Bethesda, and I was never all that enamored with Fallout 3.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

NecroMonster posted:

i never really cared if i passed them or not so rather than reload a save like a giant sperg i just kept playing

and you can too

Percentage-based checks where you never get another shot are lovely when they're tied to a skill you have to invest your limited points into. There's nothing quite so demoralizing in a game with skill builds like that as failing a critical check and then thinking about all the better things you could've put your skill points into.

That said, I've never seen a video game do persuasion checks well anyway. It's always just "pick the thing that says PERSUASION from the dialog menu and you'll get a better result."

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Magmarashi posted:

I'd put money on it that the same people who complain about the % based checks forcing them to save scum also reload and set their skill levels up to pass skill checks in NV all the time, too.

Actually no. I'm cool with not getting to pass a Speech check in New Vegas because I haven't leveled my Speech high enough yet, or coming back to places to unlock/hack things I couldn't before. I'd be annoyed if I had leveled it high enough to have like an 85% chance and failed it, though.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

NecroMonster posted:

psure yeah fallout games are about tooling around in a wrecked rear end wasteland full of broken poo poo and crazy weirdness these days sorry people who obsess about the black isle days

spoiler: not actually sorry

Fallout: New Vegas lets you do all that tooling around a wrecked rear end wasteland with crazy weirdness part and also manages to have a compelling story with cool branching paths and all that neat poo poo. It ain't mutually exclusive unless you're Bethesda.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

NecroMonster posted:

but this is bethesda

I know :smith: I have no real grounds to be disappointed, I knew this was going to be "Fallout 3 but newer," but I guess I just like to post bad posts.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

alphabettitouretti posted:

The rockpapershotgun review complained that most of the quests are resolved by blowing heads off with no option for talking your way around it so charisma didn't seem that useful.

Bethesda really has no idea how to do RPG quest design, do they? "We can't give people with high Charisma/Intelligence/other relevant SPECIAL stat a different route through this quest," they think, "that would mean we'd have to create something that a player might not see on their playthrough. Guess we better just make Charisma the bargaining stat. :v:"

Oh, well. At least I can safely dump my favorite stat. :smith:

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Mesadoram posted:

Interesting. Is INT important for that though? So you can upgrade the sniper rifles?

One thing about INT is that, because there's no level cap, getting more XP from quests means you just straight-up get more perk points by the end. That said, I haven't played yet, so I'm not sure how noticeable the XP bonus you get from INT is.

ImpAtom posted:

It depends.

You can find pre-silenced weapons which is the big thing you'd need INT (for Gun Nut) for but having Gun Nut makes you far less reliant on finding that loot instead and allows you to modify legendary weapons you find dropped. I'd say grab enough for Gun Nut just to be safe. That said having 4 so you can hack gives you a bit of extra flexibility. (Hacking level 3 is the top level you should get. Hacking level 4 is a total waste of a perk.)

Higher levels of INT are not worth it. You do need Science for some upgrades but I don't really think it's worth the perk slots unless you're going energy weapon or going all-in on crafting system stuff.

What about CHA? I've read that persuasion checks don't really affect quest outcomes this time around--more just bargaining for better rewards--so now whether I level CHA or not is going to depend on if the perks are worth it. Like, Local Leader--what do you actually get for those supply lines?

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

ImpAtom posted:

I invested in CHA and regretted it.

CHA is, as near as I was able to tell, a fairly flat check where having 10 modified CHA means you will succeed on every single roll. The thing is that you can very very easily get 5 CHA just from equipment. (There's a quest reward that gives a +3 CHA armor, the Trinity Tower one IIRC, and then +1 Cha from glasses and hats.) Add in to that chems which can give you 3 or more and you can pretty reliably succeed any difficult check at like 2 Cha.

The CHA perks all felt pretty meh to me. Local Leader seems like a thing to get if you're really into the settlement creation but useless otherwise and the pacifying perks are amusing as a gimmick but that's about it. The one that improves your companions is nice but not necessary.

Well, I suppose the good news is that I can now very easily get every single non-CHA perk that looks even remotely interesting to me with all the perk points I won't be putting into CHA. :v:

Now my main decision will be if I want to go all-in on weapon crafting (INT 6 for Science! and Gun Nut) or just ignore that and roll with the mods I can find/buy. And also whether Idiot Savant is worth it if I'm going INT 4 for Hacking no matter what.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Are the resistance traits worth investing in (Toughness and Refractor)? I don't know what Fallout 4's damage/defense scale looks like so I don't know if 50 Damage/Energy resistance is a big deal compared to what you can just get on armor or not.

sector_corrector posted:

Hmm, it's almost like totally ignoring speech as a game mechanic makes CHA a useless dump stat.

Oh, wait, I forgot, "You're mentally disabled if you use gear to meet speech checks instead of playing the game, brokenly, like Bethesda intended."

If you use gear to meet speech checks with a low-Charisma character, your character just cleans up real nice. :v:

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

ImpAtom posted:

CHA to pass speech checks is still a thing. The big issue (and this is my #1 complaint about the game) is that it's either a flat CHA check or nothing. There's no "I have Science!, I can repair your thing" or "I have stealth, let me recommend a different plan" or even "I have Intelligence, I can figure out Three Dog fights the good fight." That is the biggest loss in this game and by far the thing I was most unhappy about. Even in the simplistic Bethesda way instead of the New Vegas way I'd rather it be in than not.

And the weird thing is there are places where it seems like they wanted to do that? Like there's a quiz you get where you're asked to answer questions and one of them since a "Science!" answer but you can pick it without any levels in Science!

Yeah, that's what really bums me out and makes me feel like this is going to be good for one playthrough and that's all. Having skill-based dialog checks is tons of fun. Remember getting to do Caesar's brain surgery yourself if you had 75 Medicine in New Vegas? Or blundering through it on dumb luck if you had 9 Luck and getting the "I have no idea how I did that" dialog option after? That poo poo was fun and made me want to play through the game with different character builds just to see what other crazy poo poo I could do in quests.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Frankenoodle posted:

How many ways are their to permanently raise stats? Bobbleheads, I'm sure. Surgery, too? I remember it being a waste to start with a stat at 10, or even 9 in many cases because of bobbleheads and surgery. But you also needed X Endurance to get so-many surgeries.

Bobbleheads. You can also spend perk points to permanently raise your SPECIAL stats.

Frankenoodle posted:

I'm definitely a min-maxer kind of player. It was fun making god builds in FO3 with 10 INT and a million skill points. It seems like that's not a thing, now, due to there not being skills.

There's no level cap and Intelligence gives you a bonus to the amount of XP you earn from anything that gives you XP. That means that, hypothetically, a character with high Intelligence will end up with more perk points overall than a character with low Intelligence, because there's a finite amount of quest XP available in-game and high Intelligence means you get more of it. So you still kind of get that whole "you get more skills with high Intelligence" thing, it's just less pronounced.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

ImpAtom posted:

You get energy weapons early on and ammunition is absurdly plentiful. I had well over 1,000 rounds of energy weapon ammo by the end of the game.

(fun fact: the HUD Ammo counter only goes to 999 even if you have more.)

And they use the same perks as ballistic weapons, right? Because I've never really used energy weapons in Fallout before because I didn't want to commit to them, but this sounds like I'll actually be able to do so this time around.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Hashtag GBS posted:

played this game for 10 minutes, realized it was the same regurgitated garbage i'd already seen in NV, and uninstalled


:shrug:


is there a way to give games you've already played away on steam?

No, but you can easily get a refund if you only played for 10 minutes.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Frankenoodle posted:

Thanks! So, each time you earn a perk point you can spend it on SPECIAL stats instead? With no limit? That's an interesting trade-off. Using perk points to enable to you to get better perks. EDIT: Oh wait, that's not even new. The old Intense Training perk could do it, but it was generally not worth it.

Question to anyone, is it silly to take 8 in three stats and 1 in the rest. I used to really enjoy hacking computers, picking locks, sniping, and sneaking. Sort of a spy type character. Looking at the perk chart, I want at least 8 INT, and 8 PER, and a 7 AGI. That only leaves one point. I'll have a very low STR and wont' be able to carry around jack, probably. I don't necessarily care about CHA checks or Luck.

You only need 4 INT and 4 PER to get hacking and lockpicking. I've heard the high-INT perks aren't worth it, but maybe the Sniper perk from PER would be pretty neat, and Robotics Expert in INT could be cool if there's a good amount of robotic enemies (not sure if that's the case though). It's also worth noting that perks like Gun Nut and Science! only affect whether you can craft high-rank weapon mods, not whether you can use them if you find or buy them. I like playing the same kind of character as you do and I plan to go 4 PER, 4 INT, 7 AGI, and the rest split between Luck and STR probably.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Volkerball posted:

"You can place 21 stat points when creating a character. However everytime you level up you can choose between placing another stat or choosing a perk. Note you can save your build by bookmarking the URL with your choices."

Wait, so can you choose to put another point in a SPECIAL stat every time you level up, or does that mean something else? Also leveling is infinite now, right? If you can choose to put a point in special, every time you level up there's basically no locks on your character.

You can spend a perk point to increase a SPECIAL stat, yes. The only real limit to your character is your tolerance for grinding, I suppose, because there's a finite amount of quest XP available in the game. Eventually your only source of XP will be just killin' poo poo.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

^ Assuming things scale the way they do in other Bethesda games, you may not want to skip too many +damage perks. Enemies often scale in damage, health, and damage resistance independent of how well you've built your character to deal damage, so you could end up leveling yourself into a situation where you're level 40, the enemies are level 40, and you can't do poo poo for damage to them.

Things could be super different this time around, though. I'm just working off assumptions from previous Bethesda games.

ImpAtom posted:

Money is trivially easy to come by in the game. I was sitting on nearly 10,000 caps by the end without any of that. If you were willing to minmax lugging stuff back to sell you could do even more.

Does crafting weapon mods feel worth it to you? I think I'm between grabbing Local Leader to try to go full-on Merchant Prince or leveling INT high enough to grab Science! and Gun Nut and tricking out my guns.

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Colt Cannon posted:

Why would you not want to trick out your guns?

I mean, I definitely want to do that, but I can do that with purchased/found mods, too. I'll level Gun Nut and Science! for the purpose of getting mods that are hard to get otherwise, or earlier than I could otherwise get them, and thus have the most excellent guns in the Commonwealth.

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Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

Carrying capacity: how big of a deal is it? Does ammo have weight? For people who are playing, do you feel like you're regularly unable to carry more? I'm trying to decide if my sneakin' sniper build needs high Strength and Strong Back to carry all the sweet loot I'll be getting or if I can safely dump it.

Khanstant posted:

Man, Luck doesn't seem to be as cool as it used to be. CHa seems like a dump stat but that local leader sounds dope. Still havent gotten oput of this starting character poo poo lol

Luck seems like it's really good but doesn't have that much flash to it, except for maybe Ricochet. I plan to level it to 6 to grab Bloody Mess and Better Criticals so I can do the most damage possible with my sneaky sniper.

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