The biggest debate in the Fallout scene whether it's the modding, critique, or just general gameplay discussion, is the importance and balance of the Speech skill. This is completely understandable since pretty much 50% of the core gameplay in Fallout is talking to other characters in the world.
For some bizarre reason, a very wide consensus regarding Speech is that it's too overpowered. Most of the arguments can be summed up as this: too many important decisions rely on Speech to result in a desirable outcome for some players, it's a "click to win" stat, "charisma 1, speech 100 is a ridiculous character build", etc.
Many people are quick to make these points regarding the Speech system, but all of the proposed solutions have been less than stellar replacements. Some suggest that Speech should be hidden from the player, so they can't tell if they'll fail or succeed based on the number indicating their current speech. This is a terrible solution for the obvious reason that it just obfuscated the mechanics, not adjusting the actual mechanics of the game. Anyone who wants Speech to be a core of their character will simply max out their speech as soon as possible and continue to choose Speech options to resolve issues.
Another "solution" is to go back to the dice roll Speech mechanic of Fallout 3, where raising Speech will only increase the odds of you convincing an NPC. There are three reasons why this is bad. Firstly, savescumming will be the work around for investing into Speech at all. Being able to leave Speech at it's base points from character creation and then just reloading whenever you fail a Speech roll makes the whole thing pointless and pretty much a dump stat. Secondly, people who invest into a heavy Speech character or even pacifist character will have immense problems if they have even a slight chance to fail a Speech check. They'll have to resort to savescumming to get a desired outcome and that just sucks. Thirdly, putting a percentage chance on a dialogue choice means that what your character says to the NPC doesn't matter, it just depends on how the NPC is feeling at that very moment which removes player agency.
Finally, the last popular "solution" to the Speech "problem" is to copy the Van Buren design document and split speech up into several different skills like Deception, Persuasion, etc. This is also bad for many reasons as well. Splitting up skills, but not changing the mechanics of the skills, means you just forced the player to spread out their skill points to achieve the same outcome mechanically. The consolidation of Small Guns/Big Guns into a single skill should have demonstrated that a single definitive skill is worth several similar ones. And how does this increase in speech related skills improve the dialogue, gameplay, or even make Speech less of a "click to win" button? Well it doesn't. It just makes speech focused characters more expensive in terms of stats.
It should be clear by now that some people don't like Speech being the most important skill in Fallout (even though it's basically half of the gameplay), but insist on replacing it with even worse solutions. But was Speech being powerful even really a problem in the first place?
Fallout has and always will be about player freedom. To do as you want in a lawless world, but with consequences. When you take away the player's ability to make a powerful, silver-tongued conman by making speech less of a "click to win" skill, you are taking away player agency (which sucks). You should NEVER EVER take away the player's freedom to create and destroy in Fallout because you don't feel engaged by telling Lanius to go away at the end of the game. That's why there are choices to start combat voluntarily or even use other skills in dialogue.
To end this off, I want to propose a theory as to why people feel like the Speech system is a problem in Fallout.
Your problem isn't with the Speech mechanics in Fallout; your problem is with bad quest design.
Every single argument about Speech being bad or unbalanced always points back to how that specific use of Speech in a quest. If you feel a Speech check was "click to win", it's because the quest was designed to be resolved by "click to win". Everything inevitably comes back to how the quest designer decided to use the mechanics available to them in the game to tell a story, and unfortunately they sometimes choose to use Speech as a "get out of jail" card to make sure the game is delivered on time.
For Fallout: Free Cheyenne, we're going to take a much different approach to the Speech skill. Rather than using Speech as dialogue resolve option, Speech checks are going to open up additional dialogue to choose from to influence an outcome (some of you who played the demo might have noticed this little experiment in one of the Barter skill checks in the "Law and Order" quest, where rather than immediately resolving the quest it opened up the choices the player could choose from for better or worse). I feel this is a good way to challenge players to use their own judgement to make decisions within the story while also rewarding those who invested into Speech heavy characters.
Anyways, thanks for reading. I'm hoping this will be close to a format in the future of discussing the mechanics/updates and behind-the-scenes work of the project for patrons on Patreon. Consider supporting the project if you'd like to see future exclusive content like this.
See you around.
- userKN
P.S. Mister Fairbanks got a wardrobe upgrade and will play a much larger role in the full release. Credit to Anotheraza on Nexus for the cool armor mashup.
