art by HereticOfDune

It's been another big week for those of us eagerly anticipating Fallout 4. This week at QuakeCon 2015, a (sadly very sick ) Todd Howard (get well soon! ) unveiled quite a bit of new information about the upcoming addition to the Fallout series, with primary focus on character development design. That's right, all those questions and concerns (and varying degrees of fan panic) about skills have been addressed. And while we might not know the full picture*, we do know a lot more than we did.

But first, I am going to share an older video for those who haven't seen it. Why? Because in this video, Todd Howard confirms and expounds upon Fallout 4's dynamic weather. As I mentioned before, I love seeing more ideas from mods that I considered "must-have" becoming integrated into each new game. I'm thrilled to see weather incorporated, and the weather that Howard describes sounds amazing.

With Fallout 3, I played the game with hundreds of mods. For Fallout: New Vegas, I only played with a few dozen. The number of mods that I considered critical enhancements for game enjoyment dropped severely. With this next game, I might end up using just a few random mods that look cool... and anything produced by Puce Moose. (I've spent much of the last week playing Fallout 3 again, despite how horribly unstable it has become, just to finish up "To Sleep - Perchance to Dream". I had left it unfinished when Fallout: New Vegas came out. Now I find myself looking forward to whatever adventure mods he dreams up for Fallout 4! The game just wouldn't be the same without him.)

art by Turbopower1000

Thankfully, although I was unable to attend QuakeCon myself this year, I had a brony at the convention to give me the inside scoop: Matt from the SnMGameDungeon. Here are his bullet points from the presentation:

1. Masks they gave out were creepy. I have one since I was in the first 150 people into the room. 2. Fallout Shelter for Android 8/13/2015. Also adding Deathclaw attacks, and Mr. Handy's that can collect drops for you, so when you let it play in the background you don't have to worry about your people dying of either no power, no water, or no food as long as you have enough prodiction the robot will move about and collect it for you in player absence. They can be found in a robot box, so we can expect other robots eventually as the game updates. They promised not to stop updating within the foreseeable future, due to the massive interest in the game. 3. The dog is cute, and they based it on the developers dog, following it around for a long time, and scripting so that whenever the player is doing something, the dog is also doing something, so doubled the scripting work. Including on the Vertibird where it was dangling its head out the site with its tongue hanging out enjoying the air. 4. Gameplay was fun, you can totally blow limbs off. 5. Skills are indeed gone. 6. SPECIAL stats are tied to what perks you can unlock. There are 70 Perks, I.E. 10 for every SPECIAL, one for each level of the SPECIAL. All of them are ranked between 3-5 including Bloody Mess (4 rank perk, I think it needed Luck 5 to get, not certain) 7. Even a de-legged/de-armed ghoul will try to bite you. 8. All types of basic crafting material can also be found on world directly, so you can pick up some items and get plastic, or metal, or wood, that kind of thing. 9. There is now an animation getting to and from terminals, as well as no apparent loading screens. I thought they cut it out originally until I realized player position outside of each building. There is about quarter second of black between areas, which is the rendering phase most likely. 10. Vertibird zipline Lyon's Brotherhood of Steel is a great way to show up to wreck some raiders apparently. Yes raiders sometimes carry a Fatman on them now, be very afraid. 11. Crashing Vertibird animation was very cool, and killed the raider who fired the missile to take it down as the wreck landed and exploded on him. 12. New companion is a thief/catwoman-esque type, who is near Diamond City. Yes, the Robot Butler is also a companion, so is the leader of the Minutemen with the Laser Musket. 13: Luck is tied to how good of loot you find as well. I am unsure if that is due to perks or something else. 14: Even "instant" items now have an animation for them. Example: Stimpack. You can see your character bring their firearm down, and stick themself with it. The needle is offscreen of course, below screen. They didn't want to trigger warning anyone, I guess. 15: For VATS targets, each time you target an area an "orange bracket" forms around the "green bracket" that has the percentile chance. So you can see how many times you selected it. It doesn't show on the right (head, head etc.), it just shows on the body of the target on VATS display. So like say, left arm, right arm, head, it would show 1 set of orange brackets around each of those 3, showing you had 3 locations cued up with whatever weapon your using.

I spoke with Matt later and got more details on how the new character development system works. And yes, to reiterate, skills are gone. And that's a big and scary change!...

But let's face it, there are some big faults to linear percentile skill systems, and perks have always been where the real character advancement and customization have taken place. I remember playing Fallout 2 and being annoyed with the levels where you didn't get perks -- they felt like stepping stones on the way to a real level. Particularly Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, skills were a largely intangible thing that you virtually never saw the effects of outside of incremental increases in VATS percentages and whether you met hard thresholds (that could have been far better represented with perk requirements). Yet at the same time, the push for skill points would constrict my character development choices. I always ended up taking traits that gave me major skill boosts ("Good-Natured" anyone?) and the "Educated" perk felt nearly required. Similarly, I never really got to enjoy playing a low-intelligence character in Fallout 2. Plus, with the skills system, I'd suddenly dump a bunch of points into a weapon type I'd never used like energy weapons or big guns to be great at them when they become more common late-game. So as integral as nostalgia might make Skills seem to Fallout, I don't think I'll miss them. And I don't think Fallout will necessarily suffer for their loss.

So let's look closer at what they have replaced it with.

S.P.E.C.I.A.L.'s take a much bigger role in what your character can do and you can develop him or her. There is a 7 x 10 grid called the Perk Chart. Each S.P.E.C.I.A.L. has ten associated perks, and your rating in that S.P.E.C.I.A.L. determines how far down the chart you can grab perks from. Not only are perks no longer tied to skills, they are no longer tied to level. If you start out the game with a rating of 10 in one of your abilities, you can take any perk associated with it. For example, if you start out with a Luck rating of at least 9, you can take Grim Reaper's Sprint as your first perk. And since the Perk Chart will be available from the beginning, you can easily plan out how you want to design and focus your character. You will receive a perk every level, and there is a starting maximum level of 50. (I fully expect that to raise with DLCs.)

Or, at least, here is what we have figured out so far.

Todd Howard, QuakeCon 2015:

"There is a separate perk for each S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and each value of that S.P.E.C.I.A.L. from one to ten. So if you have a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. in that you can pick one of those perks right away. So like this intimidation perk, if you have a high charisma, allows you to control other people. And each perk for the most part, except for a few exceptions, has multiple ranks. So we have combined the previous skill system into this as well. So if there are seventy base perks and then you add all the ranks, you're getting around 275 of these. So, when you're coming out of the vault, if you decided to go right to a 10 on a stat and lower your other ones you can be some very cool perks. We've found that playing the game over time, this gets us some really cool different play styles. So very, very cool, fun leveling system in the game. "

And the different ranks of a perk will allow for different things. For example: multiple ranked perks will unlock the perk requirements for things like crafting and town-building. Want to build a laser weapon? You need quite a few ranks in Science! to make that possible. (I suspect I will be putting a lot of ranks into perks that allow greater crafting!)

I particularly like how this system makes each S.P.E.C.I.A.L. important. As Matt points out, stat-dumping Charisma is no longer "just an inconvenience until you get a high enough Speech/Barter. Now its actually an impediment, as you only get the rank 1 Perk."

Additionally, we are told that you will be able to raise your S.P.E.C.I.A.L.'s, but I am not sure yet if that will be through perks, bobbleheads, cybernetic implants or a combination of all three. Although with the Institute in play, my bottlecaps are on cybernetics. (We do know that there is a bobblehead stand though, and we have seen game-play footage of a "Barter" bobblehead. Are they just for show? Or do they give mechanical benefits? We'll know soon enough!)

Those who have been fretting over "Skyrim-ization" of Fallout need not have worried. The new design in Fallout 4 is nothing like Skyrim and feels very much like an evolution of the Fallout design. The core elements to Skyrim's character advancement were skills increased through use, skill-based constellation trees with single-rank perks, and and a lack of attributes. This has none of that.

Here we have is a complete removal of skills altogether, attribute-unlocked multi-ranked perks, and player freedom of choice in advancement.

(There will also be books like good ol' Grognak the Barbarian. Without skills, I don't know if they have any mechanical benefits. But I'm eager to find them anyway because I'm hoping that they can actually be opened and read now, much like the books in Skyrim! That's something I would be really glad to see them take from there sister game.)

art by Sketchywolf-13

Of course, there were more revelations than just the perks system. At QuakeCon 2015, they revealed some very nice information about companions. There will be roughly a dozen companions, and you can have one at a time (much like Fallout: New Vegas, I suspect). Four of these companions have now been revealed: Dogmeat, Codsworth (who is voiced by Stephen Russel, perhaps best know as Garret in the original Thief), Preston Garvey (the guy from Boston's Commonwealth Minutemen that we saw featured in previous videos) and now Piper. Matt describes Piper like this:

Piper, the female that convinces the guard at Diamond City to let you in, under the guise of a trader who can 'stock up' the General Store. She and the Mayor of Diamond City have competing Newspapers. He runs like a pro centralized government and I think she runs some kind of counterpoint like the Boston Gazette of Benjamin Franklin's Day. I.E. a Pro freedom/pro liberty newspaper. So, both newspapers are at odds. Piper and her sister get kicked out of Diamond City, by the Mayor.

Piper and her newspaper will of course have quests for your character.

In addition, human companions will be potential romance partners. And it is nice to hear that those romances will not suffer from gender limitations. As Todd Howard put it:

You can have one [companion] at a time, and we wanted to have a lot of different archetypes and we track how they feel about you. With the humans, it can even lead to romances, and that is regardless of whatever gender you're playing.

But that's not all. So here is a video with even more fun tidbits of information!

All of this news has made me more excited for Fallout 4 than ever before. The game has never seemed so close... and November has never seemed so agonizingly far away.

But in the meantime, another big piece of great Fallout news: Fallout Shelter is coming to Android on August 13th! (And for those already playing it, the date also comes with a major update to the game that adds some great-sounding new content.) For more information, check out the article here!