>Pros: the level cap makes your character "balanced" (as in not overpowered) for the purposes of keeping the game challenging - unlike oblivion which had a disastrous implementation of "the whole world levels at the same rate as you do" - it also encourages player to replay the game as a different character build and explore the vast wasteland!
>Cons:
:)
Well first things first, level capping unfortunately affects your choice of perks and choice of starting attributes. This makes me think that level cap has been introduced as a newly made design decision, it probably wasn't supposed to be there according to Bethesdas initial design plans but was implemented later on.
As far as the perks are concerned, there is no practical value in meta-exp skills (skills that enable you to gain EXP faster) -- already there are mods that make you earn EXP at a slower rate -- so why waste 3-4 (out of 20) perks on that?
Furthermore, several perks require harsh prerequisites - many people will finish the game before they meet the requirements needed to obtain several perks - like for instance ninja or solar powered or explorer. Lawbringer perk should be available at lvl 1.
As the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (primary attributes) are concerned, strength becomes almost useless (except for the capacity to carry more stuff) and intelligence becomes #1 attribute - with it you can get more skill points as soon as possible. Furthermore, high repair skill is #1 skill of the game
There is no point in raising STR above 7 because you can get +1 from alcohol and +2 once you get power armor and 10 is the attribute cap.
There is no point in investing points into CHA because there are no more than 20 speech challenges in the game (as opposed to more than 80 lockpicking challenges and over 40 hacking (science) ones).
Endurance is pretty moot as it is - unarmed being as crappy as it is (spiked gloves and power fist are the only 2 weapons available for the unarmed, power fist is unavailable until endgame, paralyzing palm is a high level perk and without it unarmed sucks).
Agility is quite ok for a 2nd most important att. because it helps with V.A.T.S. combat, complemented by perception att. which is mighty good because of lockpicking challenges AND energy weapons.
Some weapon categories are not as common in the game as other, for an example, unarmed skill practically has no available weapons to go with it, making it suck big time, melee starts showing its effectiveness only if you know where to obtain the crafting recipe for the flaming sword (shishkebab) -- spoiler: its obtainable when doing the family quest in the vicinity of Meresti train station.
Absolute winner being -- "small guns" skill -- 90% of weaponry and available ammo fall under this category - making all other weapon skills pale in comparison. #2 choice being energy weapons. Big guns suck hard, because the game ends before you start finding ammo for this weapon type.
All these clues make me wonder whether the game was supposed to be twice as large as it is now, there are many towns out there in the wasteland which have been meticulously designed but have no quests or NPC interactions. It seems to me that Bethesda team decided to cut the game in half, improvise a (rather bad and anticlimactic) ending, wrap the whole thing up A.S.A.P. and ship it in time. Perhaps they want to follow Blizzards lead and pack the remaining 50% of the game into an expansion thus solving two problems. First of all this way they get to release the game on time (well, half of it anyways) and secondly -- they manage to charge for their work TWICE.
In this case I don't particularly mind paying for it twice or even threedog times -- simply because the game is brilliant in spite of all its apparent lackings.
I hope Bethesda decide to let the community have a user friendly mission designer -- they got burned once before by letting community artists earn $$$ by selling awesome looking armor for Oblivion, however I hope that this will not discourage them from allowing people to use the existing map (which is simply BRILLIANT by the way) to introduce more quests - for an example, all the locations are quite easily re-usable if you use the old "10 years later" method, saving wannabe developers the pain of designing art (maps and locations) and allowing them to concentrate on the story. They really shouldnt be jealous of people who earn (smalltime) bucks by improving on their game, au contraire, they should be looking for a way to employ them.
In my humble opinion, all these issues are symptomatic of the game being cut down in half in order to meet the deadlines. Level capping is a double edged sword - it makes you reroll and enjoy more of the wasteland adventures, on the other hand it makes many perks obsolete. Hi-end weapons begin appearing too late in the game - the game unfortunately ends at mid-game -- which is after some 60 hrs of game time.
Be as it may, it seems to me that we have finally ventured out of the era of content void WoW / The Sims and back into the age of quality content gaming.
Bethesda, please don't concentrate on more elder scrolls, but instead on Fallout expansions!
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