Plenty of leaked footage from Fallout 4 has made its way online. We detail what the leaked footage confirms, for better or worse, about gameplay in the Boston wasteland.

Fallout 4 is just about a week away, and gamers all over the world are clamoring to get their hands on the game and explore the wastes of post-apocalyptic Boston. Some crafty Fallout 4 fans have managed to get their hands on retail copies of the game early, which then prompted several videos and screenshots to make their way online. While we won't be posting any videos or screenshots from the leaks here, we'll be writing a summary of confirmed adjustments to aspects of the gameplay, whilst avoiding story-specific spoilers entirely.

Suffice to say, the below post still contains spoilers for Fallout 4and those who are interested in keeping their playthrough as fresh as possible should stop reading right now.

The entirety of the game's perk system has now been uncovered by eager gamers, who have shone light on a topic that Bethesda has purposefully kept mostly under wraps. The perks help with everything from literal dumb luck (gaining experience from a random action, with less intelligence points increasing the payout), to the ability to pacify human and animal enemies that have a lower level simply by pointing the player's weapon at them. Fallout 4's new perk system includes ranks, and has over 270 upgrades in all, so we won't be listing them all here.

It looks like the informative loading screen transitions from Skyrim have made their way over to Fallout 4, which makes sense as the latter is likely a much more enhanced version of the same engine. That said, the leaked videos have still been rife with some less-than-pleasing gameplay hiccups, which include things like NPCs not reacting to being set afire, some gravity and clipping related hiccups, expressionless talking animations, and the occasional 'group of NPCs all doing the same animation at once'. It's a little off-putting that these kinds of problems have survived since the days of Oblivion, but at least the in-game fighting of Fallout 4 seems lively and polished, despite cracks from an aging game engine showing through on occasion.

Leaked footage of some power armor combat has confirmed that pieces of armor do indeed fly off when damaged, and gamers will be given a neat entrance animation when they hop in the suit. During one bout of leaked footage, a Deathclaw had unborrowed itself from the ground near the player (they can do that now) and proceeded to demolish several NPCs as the player fought to garner hits with a powerful minigun. The power armor seems to be able to move fairly quickly, and different scenes of combat confirm that the VATS screen doesn't pause gameplay, but merely slows it down to a snails pace. This will force gamers to think on their toes, as previous generations of the Fallout series simply paused combat when VATS was open.

The leaks have also brought one of the game's legendary weapons to the surface, which happens to be a laser rifle called the Righteous Authority. The one-of-a-kind weapon will grant double the damage to critical shots, and will fill up the critical meter 15 percent faster. There's bound to be plenty of other legendary weapons throughout the wasteland in Fallout 4, and we wouldn't be surprised for more to be unearthed ahead of the game's official launch.

Intrepid gamers have also pieced together the full map of the game (albeit, without all of the locations discovered), and it looks list several key Boston-centric areas have made it into the world. While outlying cities like Concord and Burlington seem to have made it in, the most interesting inclusion is the town of Salem, which was the scene of the historic Salem Witch Trials in 1692. We wouldn't be surprised to see some spooky things over in that area, though no leaked video from Salem has surfaced beyond its geographic location being included on the in-game map.

Notably, a large portion of the map appears to be full of water, but thanks to the Aquaboy Perk allowing for gamers to breath underwater and not get irradiated for doing so, we wouldn't be surprised to see some hidden treasures along the coastline - tea, anyone? There's a group of NPCs called The Minutemen in the game, so gamers should expect no shortage of references to local Boston history.

Gamers also got to see their very first look at the Pip-Boy Model 3000 Mark IV during Bethesda's E3 presentation, which showed off several screens from the in-game menu. Later showings of the Pip-Boy in action showed the inventory screen containing a rotating image of whichever item was selected, but the image actually rotated beneath the text, with greens clashing on greens and making it hard to read when the image rotated over on text. Leaked video of the Pip-Boy from the finalized version of the game confirm that this has now been fixed, with the rotating inventory image pushed further to the right, so it doesn't clash with the text-based menu.

There's plenty of information popping up around the web, and it'll be hard for those attempting to avoid story-specific spoilers to keep hiding as excited fans share information they discovered. That said, we'll keep you posted as more core Fallout 4 news drops.

Fallout 4 releases November 10, 2015 for PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.