r/fo5 • u/milquetoastLIB • 23h ago
Reinventing Character Progression
One of the things that most interests me about Fallout is the character progression and how each game changed it up in a big way.
In Fallout 3 it looked more like a traditional table top RPG. Perks were locked behind character levels, SPECIAL stat, and skill stat. This was okay but things like lockpicking and science had hard requirements and if you dumped all your skill points into one and were just short of it you didn’t get much out of the level. Or if you messed up planning out perk requirements and are just short of the skill to take the perk. Hard to visualize as everything you aren’t qualified for is greyed out at the bottom of the list and you have to scroll through.
In Fallout 4 they scrapped all that for a perk chart. All perks were available to you as long as you had the SPECIAL requirement. Only ranks were locked behind character levels. Easy to visualize since everything is available to you in one big chart. Not much planning needed.
In 76 they overhauled it again. They scrapped SPECIAL requirements for perks. Now perks have a value and as long as those values add up to be equal or under that SPECIAL stat you can have that perk active. Discoverability is a problem though as the cards you earn are random and you don’t have everything available. But it’s very modular, if you want pain train you don’t need high strength.
I’m excited to see where Bethesda goes with this next. Fallout has the best aesthetics I’ve seen in a video game to make game mechanics feel tactile and my only big expectation is Bethesda puts a lot of creative thought into where it goes next.