‘Fallout 4’ Has No Level Cap And No Hard Ending

Fallout 4 is already expected to be a game that eats up a tremendous amount of time. Bethesda Studios revealed today that PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC owners will essentially be able to play it forever, if they want.

Bethesda Game Studios posted the following Twitter responses to fan questions about the level cap and whether players can keep going after they’ve finished the main story.

To fans who’ve asked: Fallout 4 doesn’t end when the main story is and over and there is no level cap. You can keep playing and leveling.

— BethesdaGameStudios (@BethesdaStudios) August 6, 2015

Both Fallout 3 and Obsidian Entertainment-developed Fallout: New Vegas had starting level caps of level 20 and 30, respectively. Later DLC releases raised the level cap limit higher, but players still had a hard stop when it came to character progression.

This puts Fallout 4 more in line with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, where the level cap was essentially removed with the 1.9 patch. The only effective cap after that was maxing out skills at 100. You could then make that maxed out skill “Legendary,” though, to reset it to 15 and allowed players to level it up again, while increasing the overall level of their character. Of course, a Legendary difficulty mode was added to the game to compensate.

What system Bethesda will put in place to keep Fallout 4 players who play indefinitely entertained is unknown. The tweet confirms that players won’t face a hard stop with a character once the main campaign is defeated. That gives them the opportunity to complete all the remaining side quests, and possibly continue to build and defend their own in-game communities using the construction tools that will be provided.

What we do know is that a new Perk system will be in place for Fallout 4. As previously covered in the Inquisitr, there are more than 70 base perks with multiple ranks to make them more potent. They are tied to a player’s S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats — i.e. Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. A new perk is earned every time a player levels up. Which perks are available is dependent on how S.P.E.C.I.A.L points are allocated.

“You have this Vault Tech poster with all of your perks, and there is a separate perk for each S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and each value of that S.P.E.C.I.A.L. from 1 to 10,” Creative Director Todd Howard said, according to Game Informer. “Each perk, except for a few exceptions, has multiple ranks. We have combined the previous skill system into this as well. If there are 70 base perks and you add all of the ranks, you’re getting around 275 of those. We’ve found that this gets us some really cool different play styles. It’s a very very cool and fun leveling system in the game.”

We’ll have to wait for more details from Bethesda, but it sounds like the lack of a cap in Fallout 4 is part of this new perk system. A cap would limit how much players could experiment with different perks in a single run with a character, but it doesn’t sound like it will be possible to max out everything without investing a significant amount of time.

[Images via Fallout 4]