Skyrim - Five Lessons for Fallout 4

Five Lessons Fallout 4 Can Learn From Skyrim is a new article at IGN and covers some obvious points, though I vehemently disagree with their suggestion of including Skyrim's "organic" skill progression system:

RPG veterans are all too familiar with the typical conventions of leveling. In many JRPGs, for instance, you earn experience in battle and level-up automatically, with all of your statistics taking some sort of boost regardless of how useful they happen to be to the character in question. A game like Bethesda's Fallout 3 stepped things up for the gamer by giving them a high degree of customization, continuing an established trend for the series with an existing formula. Leveling had its own perks, of course, but players could associate skill points to build up any statistic they wanted whether or not it was actually being used.

This system works fine, and in its own way it's quite rewarding. The thing is, Skyrim's leveling methodology is something Bethesda should take a close look at when it develops Fallout 4. Skyrim's leveling is, at its core, rather basic. You can only upgrade one of three statistics when you level-up. But then, things get much more complicated as you associate a very finite amount of skill points to impressive skill trees that require you to choose your course carefully. You simply cannot master everything in the game. Better yet, individual skills level up as you use them, not the other way around, which feels more organic and allows you to better embody the character you're playing as.

While we're on Skyrim, just about every site on the 'net is noting a Dragon Shout iOS app that offers a map and other features. It isn't official and I hesitate to recommend something that might just be a cash-in on someone else's work, so caveat emptor.