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[Rolan7]

Especially if you allow me the "Bonus damage to the weapon type you use!" perks, which are absurdly unimaginative.

Certainly the original fallouts never had such tripe!

No no, you did it wrong
Not my point!  Perks existed which simply boosted certain weapon types.  But in Fallout 4 they are by far the most important perks... and they're *tiered* to offer more false choice.

The perks which don't increase weapon damage are ass in FO4, and that is not true in other Fallout games.  Which had more imaginative combat-boosting perks *also*.

[nenjin]

TBH I'm not sure you could beat FO4 without the weapon perks. They envisioned the game so that you'd specialize into weapons to keep your damage concurrent with scaling enemy HP (especially Legendary Enemy HP, good lord.) I think around Level 25 or so I was starting to struggle to kill things and burning through a shit load of ammo. Only the sniper rifle was really doing its job in a meaningful way by that point and I was turning to it so often I was exhausting all the .50 cal rounds anyone would sell and spending 90% of my time hiding and going for a Sneak Attack Headshot. So I started investing into weapon perks and the amount of time I was spending shooting guys quickly flattened off and I wasn't stuck to full auto-panic fire at close range to survive.

Which...I dunno. Either everything is so easy you can kill it with every gun at the same level of difficulty and any weapon perks you take completely trivialize things.....or you get what we have now. In that sense perks function just like a Sword Skill or Automatic Rifle Skill, it's just that the levels are highly truncated so it doesn't feel like a skill. If the Rifle or SMG or Pistol perks had 10 levels of gently increasing bonuses, they'd be "skills" through and through. Instead you get these massive 10%/25%/40% jumps in effectiveness in keeping with the current idea about what a "Perk" is. It's the same story with damage mitigation, carry weight, healing value, ammo drops, settlements, modding and so on. You basically end up getting to decide where your pain points are going to be in gameplay until remove the pain through perks and stop devouring consumables to make up the difference (ammo, drugs, stimpacks, rad-away, caps, so on and so forth.) I suspect most people end up with the same basic set of perks and there are only a few real tradeoffs (i.e., increased health or damage resistance but you probably can't get away without either after some point.)

Eventually you hit this median effectiveness in all things where everything "works", some things just slay absurdly well or trivialize the game and you're sitting on a mountain of stuff you don't use in this post-apocalyptic world of scare resources.

And to be fair, Bethesda has tried it the other way in FO3, where perks unlock after putting X points into skills which marginally affect the trait they govern (i.e, the combat traits by and large.) It didn't turn out much better either. I remember investing in skills strictly so I could unlock perks and then feeling underwhelmed by perks.

None of this is truly new. It was more or less the same in Skyrim. You had this perk nodes that would radically increase effectiveness in your bread and butter activities (combat, stealth) and you'd actively fight getting them until the enemy scaling required it. The difference in Skyrim was there were upgrade pathways and in some cases you HAD to take these boring "difficulty equalizer" perks to get to the stuff that was even mildly interesting. So it'd seem they learned from that with FO4. Perk trees that are also your player scaling mechanism are dumb, because when your game is consistently too damn easy without everything becoming a bullet sponge, forcing people to outclass the content they're dealing with makes them waste time micormanaging YOUR mechanics instead of enjoying them. Bethesda games are one of the few games where I have to actively stop the game from making everything boringly easy for me.

I wish they'd embraced "learn by doing" like in ES games. Let us skill up stuff by actually doing things (instead of just one day deciding we do 25% more damage with a gun we haven't unholesterd in 30 hours) and make unlocking perks part of that process. And quit tying the level scaling to these things that are supposedly are side-benefits rather than the core of the advancement system.

Meanwhile all the "RP" parts of RPGs still get short shrift, dealt with in the same systemized way combat is. Charisma and most things associated with it are still pretty much uninteresting or relegated to "you want that optional quest pathway? Got the Charisma to make the special dialog option?" and fiddling with prices at vendors. Which is the same kind of static, repetitive stuff that just further throws off game balance. (Yes, I carry a suit and tie with me everywhere so I can ekk out that ~8% increased caps when selling. Cause I sure as shit don't ever buy anything. Multiply that by every vendor I meet and every piece of crap I sell and money is no object. I just arbitrarily decide to drop 18k caps on a legendary I don't need and probably won't use.) Doing things like being able to get a random enemy to put their weapon down doesn't really fulfill the idea of roleplaying. You should be able to have a chance to get almost ANY enemy or quest figure in the game to put their gun down if you invested enough into doing so.

[Grim Portent]

I've beaten it three times without weapon perks, one of those times on survival, one on hard and one on normal. I always had all the crafting perks though, so my weapons kept up damage on upgrades alone really. 1st run I favoured melee weapons, in particular a Powerful Chinese Officer's Sword, 2nd run I used a mix of melee and rapid fire guns, 3rd run (the survival one) I mostly used a Penetrating Automatic Laser Rifle until I got Final Judgement during the end game. All 3 runs I wore power armour most of the time though.

The only fights I ever struggled with were the battles against the Brotherhood, a few early ones against Ghouls in Cambridge, the Mechanists lair fight, and once against the Super Mutants at that satellite array when there were two legendaries and that blasted rocket launcher guy. Wound up running out of fusion cores and had to get out of my armour towards the end.

Really I feel the most fun perks are the ones like Pain Train, because who doesn't want to ram people and send them flying? Cannibals a fun one to me as well because I love to omnomnom, always took it in FO3 and FNV as well.




Learn by doing in ES had a lot of problems. The major one was that since enemies scale with your level it meant leveling skills in the wrong orders could result in you facing minotaurs while you still had a combat skill level of 20 but an alchemy of 100, and it made it nearly impossible to level up combat skills you had neglected in the beginning of the game. Trying to level blunt or heavy armour as a thief character was incredibly hard since you were basically starting at rock bottom with them while fighting end game enemies unless you leveled the before your main skills.

[nenjin]

Sure there's modulation problems with it as implemented. But it is kind of the point of LBD that if you switch mid game to something you've never done, you go through the "pain" of learning at a more difficult point in game. At least in Skyrim you leveled a lot faster from nothing mid-game too IIRC. Level scaling though has its own issues. It's a lack of forethought to have your game mandate plenty of combat and then directly scale difficulty to something that nothing to do with combat other than buffs and potions. Bethesda has just never put in the work there to make scaling truly nuanced in any of their games, although I do think it's better in FO4 than it's been in past games. There's a better distribution on enemy subclasses (Mongrel, Mongrel Alpha, etc..) which keeps groups feeling more mixed and varied.

Also GG on getting through it all with no weapon perks. I don't think I'd have the patience. Even after weapon modding damage flattens out while they keep scalin' away.

[Grim Portent]

I found the HP scaling quite tolerable through the 74 or so levels I took to complete my survival run of the game, even with automatic weapons and a non-stealth build. The only guys that are really tedious to fight at all are the higher grade super mutants really, even Final Judgement takes a good 5-8 seconds to chew through them and my other weapons barely hurt them. The more powerful mirelurks are also time consuming, but I actually find them fun to fight.

For some reason my preferred play style in FO4 has been very different from FO3, FNV and the ES games. I used to favour near pure stealth builds, with a smattering of power armour tanky builds in FNV (in FO3 it was too annoying to rush the main game to get power armour), but even they tended to have lots of points in stealth and a few stealth perks. In FO4 though I spend nearly all my time in power armour bullrushing enemies or mowing them down with heavy weapons or machine guns.

I've also started to feel crippled whenever I don't have my jet pack.

[nenjin]

FWIW I've only used Power Armor like twice, usually when I encountered it and once for a settlement raid that was beyond any and all measure of the settlement's success.

[Grim Portent]

I love power armour in FO4. It's probably the single item that can most affect how you play the game since it adds in several abilities that otherwise just don't exist or are hard to get. Short range flight, bullrushing, damaging auras, jump slams, target highlighting. Pretty sure there's a few other mods they can get that add other stuff, but I mostly just use flight, jump slams and the Pain Train bullrush, with my other upgrades being passive effects.

[NullForceOmega]

Really the arm mods for PA are pretty underwhelming, I tend to stick tesla on the arms and forget about it, it would be nice if there were more game-changing options like there are for the head and the torso.

[Krevsin]

(and who did not subsequently devolve into a frothing pile of rage over how shitty modern RPGs are)

Oh boy. Are we doing this? Dude Person of indeterminate gender, what about Dark Souls? Or Witcher? The new Shadowrun games?

Kindest sir/madam/internet person, I was in fact making a joke.

[Mech#4]

I have found survival mode quite fun so far but I would like to have at least auto-saving on transitions to reduce the amount of redoing due to a quickly flung Molotov.

[BFEL]

Learn by doing in ES had a lot of problems.

The problem *I* always had with it is that you can learn maybe 4 skills by just doing them, but everything else you have to create elaborate, grindy scenarios to train. Combat and magic skills are ALWAYS in the latter mind you, so basically the game is entirely based around combat, but good luck gettin gud at that!

I mean, spend entire game stabbing things? Never see lvl 50 skill. Look at a alchemy stand a little too long? CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE LEVEL 100 ALCHEMY!

Come to think of it, a case could be made for the weapon skills not representing your skill but "percentage of worlds total population you have stabbed" with how slow it fucking levels.

[Damiac]

The learn by doing approach sounds so cool, but I've never seen an implementation of it that was even close to as good as a point buy system.

The problem is, even if the devs intend you to naturally make your character good at the things you do with them, they have to assign certain weights to certain actions for each skill.  If 1 sneak action were as good at increasing sneak as 1 jumping action is at increasing acrobatics, either sneak is going to level way too slow, or acrobatics will level too fast.

You also run into the issue as a player that you want to be good at certain things.  You can play naturally, and hope it happens (lets not even get into all the level scaling problems that happen when blacksmithing improves faster than sword skill), or you do what every good RPG player has done since this system was invented, and grind the hell out of that skill.  Casting destruction spells into the sky, purposely wielding a shitty weapon to get lots and lots of hits in on weak enemies, etc. 

Here's the problem with that: It's not fun.  Going out, wiping out a bandit nest, levelling up, and choosing to spend my level up points on sword fighting is fun.  Going out, making sure to NOT use my destruction or restoration spells, because their level is already too high, and using my rusty short sword of shittiness to improve my sword fighting isn't fun.  The learn by doing model gets in the way of fun.

Another example would be dungeon crawl.  Once upon a time, it had a learn by doing model.  So after each kill, players would cast spells over and over, or wield a crappy weapon and beat on weak enemies, to get their desired skills to use the built up XP. It was called victory dancing, and was pretty widely hated.

Now, dungeon crawl uses an allocated skill model.  It's essentially a point buy system, except you decide ahead of time where the points you get will go, and you get points from every kill, rather than on level-up.  It's much more well liked, and allows the player to just play the damn game.

Learn by doing is realistic, and getting good at skills in real life is boring, repetitive practice.  Point buy is a decent approximation of training, but with the negative gameplay aspects stripped away.  In the game, I kill everything however I want.  When I level up, I decide I was thinking about swordfighting that whole time, so I train that.  In one model, I spent my time playing the game in the most fun way possible.  In the other, I spent my time playing the game in the way that would train my desired skills, instead of trying to most effectively complete my goal.  So which is really more realistic?  Would an adventurer really take dangerous risks to get a little more sword practice, or would they just kill their enemies as efficiently as possible?

[nenjin]

If players want to wreck their own experience, more power to them. That doesn't make the system itself bad because players are unimaginative, lazy and mechanically greedy (gotta level them all!)

It's only bad when the system is so broken it requires that stuff to win or even compete. (Like Oblivion where you had to be careful NOT to overlevel because they introduced your core character level as the the scaling mechanism.)

[Rolan7]

If players want to wreck their own experience, more power to them. That doesn't make the system itself bad because players are unimaginative, lazy and mechanically greedy (gotta level them all!)

They don't have to be greedily levelling alllll the thiiiiings in order for it to be grindy.  Last time I tried to make a new Skyrim character, I wanted to be a thief.  So I needed to train sneak.  It's not practical to do this by sneaking in important situations:  You get detected immediately and learn almost nothing.  You practically have to crouchwalk around town for a couple hours, ducking behind cover every time the non-hostile NPCs detect you.

Sure it makes some roleplaying sense, but it's not a fun mechanic except maybe once.

It's even worse for weapon skills...

It's only bad when the system is so broken it requires that stuff to win or even compete. (Like Oblivion where you had to be careful NOT to overlevel because they introduced your core character level as the the scaling mechanism.)

But, this is true of Fallout 4 (and 3, and NV, and Skyrim).
The arguable problem with Oblivion's level system was it was really easy to *permanently* screw your stats through inefficient leveling.  But all those games are happy to let you level up with non-combat skills.  It can still be painful when you get to train your skills on levelup, but it really hurts with learn-by-doing.
http://imgur.com/gallery/8M1cj3Q

Of course in Oblivion (and Skyrim I think) you can just turn down the difficulty slider...

[nenjin]

You keep blaming learning by doing for the sins of level scaling. They're two separate systems where one unfortunately defines how the other works.

I've wanted Bethesda to ditch level scaling or at least try to do it in a way that doesn't suck since Oblivion. I'm still waiting. But in a game without level scaling or with a lot less level scaling, where wolves don't suddenly become as tough to kill as bears and bandits are supporting ancient legendary armor, I don't see the problem with learning by doing. And Skyrim even balances it out by making you skill up faster against tougher guys. I've only ever played Stealth characters and I've never had to sneak around the tavern in broad daylight to level of my skills. Rather I had to _Not_ buy any of the stealth perks so stealth actually worked in an interesting way instead of just becoming an invisibility cloak.