Fallout 4: 14 Brand New Features You Need To Know About

4. V.A.T.S Doesn't Pause The Action, And No More Random Critical Hits

V.A.T.S was Bethesda's stop-gap gameplay implementation that for the most part went down very well. The perfect mix of turn-based gameplay and full-on real-time gunplay, you were free to pause everything, allocate your shots and items accordingly, then switch things back and continue. Fallout 4 is leading with the idea that this actually made things a little too easy, so no longer can you pause things entirely. Instead, the game will enter a super slow-motion state, where you'll essentially do the same as before, albeit with a far more pressurised timescale effecting things. I'd assume if you rank this up to max you'll be able to freeze everything completely again, but it appears the action-heavy focus of F4 is filtering into the design here, too. Lastly, no longer are Critical Hits anything of a randomised stat. Instead, you'll continually have a bar on the bottom of the screen that'll fill, and when it's full you can expend it to pull one off. Its speed to fill is now governed by your Luck stat, and it's a more simple and dependable system, but many fans are already against the idea of a life-saving crit being something you can trigger with the push of a button.