Ya, but in his example the fan asked about intelligence, which relates directly to magicka, one of the new 'attributes'. What if the fan had asked about speed?

Personally, I'm looking forward to the new system. Not sure how good it'll be, but it'll be nice to get away from the Oblivion attributes - one spent so much time/thought/effort meta-gaming your stat gains (from choosing Major skills at character creation so you could control your leveling, to keeping careful track of skill gains as you got them so you'd know when you were close to +5 bonuses, to artificially "training" skills to force a levelup when you actually had the +5's) that it distracted somewhat from actually playing the game.


So, yeah - I'm looking forward to how the new system works. Because the old one wasn't really very good.



Edit: I've played dozens of cRPGs and many pen-and-paper RPGs over the years. I've seen all sorts of different systems of stats. Nothing really surprises me at this point, and I'm always open to something new.

Here's where I got the quote: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1189517-part-02-todd-howard-interview-norwegian-magazine-gamerno/

I think Todd was trying to say that there 3 attributes Health, Magicka, and Fatiuge and every time you level up you get to pick a perk which gives bonuses to your high skills. The luck, speed, agility, strength, and magicka regenration might depend on the race you pick for ex. Kajhits have higher agility and speed than a Breton but a Breton has higher strength and magicka than a kajhit whre a woodelf would have higher luck and a high elf faster magicka regeneration, ect. :goodjob:

There's 18 skills. Must be a mistranslation.

Theres 18, they have said this many times, I think Todd made a mistake....

I have no idea but that wasn't my point.

Todd never makes a mistake.

I'll admit, I am anti-meta game thinking. I play a lot of D&D and it really ruins the game when people do that. However, is that level of customization and character building not what defines an RPG?

I'm okay with it...

Those other things were the exact same things that skills did. More damage? Weapon skill. Better disposition? Speechcraft.
And why the hell everybody brings up Luck. It just added a small bonus to every skill. Don't know how you'll miss it...

I hear a lot of people say that they want to do away with attributes because they don't want to needlessly grind skills and play more of the game.

And conversely other people think character building is an important part of an RPG, and simplifying the system hampers the personalization.

So it's sort of a ''pick your poison'' situation.

I liked the attributes themselves, but completely agree that worrying about the +5s detracted from the experience. I never tried to "game" it that hard, and just took whatever bonuses came, but always felt slightly cheated as a result.

No. I'm not happy they're gone. I like playing Oblivion characters who are fast or slow or weak or strong or intelligent or dim or agile or clumsy, simply for the sake of being those things. It provides distinction and helps to make characters individuals. The argument that the "only" purpose the attributes served was to affect the derived attributes of HP, magicka and stamina simply doesn't apply to the way I play the game. If anything, it's THOSE attributes that were secondary - not the eight basic ones. Nor do any of the arguments about number-crunching and grinding and such apply to the way I play the game. In the first place, I've never done any of that, and in the second place, any number-crunching and grinding anyone felt compelled to do had nothing to do with the mere existence of attributes, but with the broken leveling system and level scaling in Oblivion.

I just prefer the simultaneous clarity and complexity of, for instance, having a character who's notably weak, which translates out to less weapon damage and less encumbrance and less stamina and so on. She's not defined in my mind by her stamina and weapon damage - she's defined, to that extent, by the fact that she's physically weak and the rest is merely the consequences of that.

We'll have to see how the new system works, of course, but I just don't see how anything could be as simple and intuitive as starting with something like strength and using that as the basis for a whole range of logical effects.

:shrug:

A rose by any other name is just as sweet.

Um, do you really think he's going to explain where each and every attribute has been moved in one interview? It's common sense. Use your head. Athletics and Acrobatics have been discarded outright and I'm assuming there is no Speed anymore since the only thing that attribute affected were those two skills.

I would say no. Character development is essential, through the ROLE of the character in the setting and story. Numbers and levels are not essential at all.

You'll still get those characters.

That's not entirely accurate. It's more like being forced to grind skills you have no interest in so that you can maximize your distributable points a level-up so that you're not gimped later in the game.

With Sprint, fatigue and sprint related perks

How will I get a character who is, for instance, weak?

By raising magicka and/or stamina instead of health.

I didn't ask how I'd get a character who has less health. I asked how I'd get a character who is weak.

Never leveling up? Playing on the hardest difficulty? Fighting in your underwear?

Don't use weapons.

We don't know yet - we have no knowledge of the mechanisms in Skyrim that effect the two main results of Strength - carrying capacity and melee damage. Whatever ends up effecting those two things (perks for bonus damage, "strong back", whatever), you could not take advantage of them (just like in Oblivion, you would avoid picking Strength as one of your three stat gains on levelup).