Hardly, since it can be easily argued that the TES games can be classified as action/adventure as well. Your "definition", which didn't really define anything to begin with, is simply your opinion and not fact at all.

I don't really think there has been any game that had a stat system quite like Skyrim's. But I can try to explain it as thoroughly as I can with the information we've been given. Sorry if you already know a lot of it:

- The primary/derived stats from the previous games (health, magicka, fatigue/stamina) are now called "attributes."
- There are 18 skills, categorized into combat, stealth, and magic, although any character can use any skill, and there are no major/minor skills.
- You still raise any skill purely by using it.
- Every time you raise any skill, it gives you some amount of "experience" that counts towards leveling. The amount of experience will be larger for higher skills, so raising a skill from 60 to 61 gives you more experience than raising a skill from 30 to 31.
- ^ This is complemented by having the experience requirement for the next level increase each time you level up, slowing down drastically by the time you reach level 50. You can keep leveling after this, but very slowly. The max level is somewhere in the 70s, based on whenever you can get all your skills to 100.
- Once you get to high levels, you will need to specialize and focus on raising your high skills in order to contribute much towards leveling.
- Every skill has what would be called a "skill tree" in other games, though many of them sound like they will be passive and are thus called "perk trees."
- Each perk tree has 12 to 20 perks, often grouped for specialization. For example 1H and 2H have perks for sword, axe, and mace specialization, and destruction will have perks for fire, ice, and lightning specialization. There are a total of over 280 perks.
- Every time you level, you get to choose one perk. There are also some requirements for choosing perks, so you can't pick a perk just because you already have the previous one in the tree. They are playing around with the details, but it's possible that you will only be able to get 50 perks max.
- In addition, every time you level, your health increases a bit. Then you get to choose to bonus health (further), magicka, or stamina.

Some things that attributes previously had an effect on will be solely handled by skills, others might have perks to handle them, and others might be dependent on health/magicka/stamina.

Pure speculation:

- There will possibly still be skill trainers, allowing you to pay to increase skills.
- My guess about the "requirements" for perks is simply that you will need a certain skill level for each perk in that skill. Others have suggested that you will only be able to choose perks from skills that you increased to contribute to your last level up. I don't think that is likely because that system would have the potential of level ups where you can't pick any perk, and I don't see Bethesda implementing a system where that can happen.
- With no willpower I'm guessing that magicka regen rate will be a fixed percentage of your total magicka per second, instead of being handled by perks or skills.
- I'm also guessing the same for stamina regen rate. If this is how it turns out, you can effectively raise your speed by increasing your stamina: sprinting will cost stamina, so raising it will allow you to sprint for longer periods of time, plus the increased stamina regen rate will decrease the time that it takes to start sprinting again.
- Some people have suggested that there will be perks that do not belong to any skill. I haven't really seen anything to support this, and the math seems to add up with perks being skill-related only (average of 16 perks per skill x 18 skills = ~288 perks)



So yeah, I can't think of any RPG that had a stat system that worked very similarly.

And Eye of the Beholder being deeper than Mass Effect?! That's it, I quit...

Problem is, if you go with the "in real RPGs you can create any character, without any restrictions", then there hardly would be any RPGs on the market...

And then there's the fact that most of the "olden days" games where you could "create any character"..... well, you could do that because they were mostly fantasy-themed strategy games, with very little story of characterization.

Yeah, you could create any characters you wanted for your party in, say, Wizardry 1 or Bard's Tale - but those were dungeon crawls. "Beat up guys over there until you find out where the Big Bad's dungeon is, then go beat up him. Hooray! We're saved!"

Of course dungeon crawls have lots of attributes, gear, stats, etc...... that's pretty much all they have.

The role you play is set for you from a to z, its not like a TES game where you can be a peaceful healer. There is no way to play that game peacefully.

Huh? There is a way to play TES games peacefully?!! You are joking, right? One of the greatest flaws of TES games was that yes, you could make pacifist characters, but there was nothing for them to do, no way to fulfill quests (most of which were "kill X" affairs), no free-form good deeds to perform (and have them acknowledged by the game), etc. The only way you could "play" your healer was by LARPing. For which one doesn't need a game, really.

Unfortunately, instead of including proper gameplay for non-combat skills and an optional non-combative main quest path, Beth opted to prune the non-combat skills with each subsequent iteration. Which, IMHO, is a much greater lost opportunity than the attributes!

I dont present things as facts.

Sorry, but when you say things like your definition is "foolproof", that pretty much implies that you are stating something as a fact, not an opinion. Which is the reason why I replied to your post in the first place.

D&D has always had attributes, but they played a very tangible role in that system. I can't speak for anything before Oblivion, but there they just played a very minor role and seemed more like a throwback to the D&D system than a viable game mechanism. Far too many people, when they think of RPGs, think of some variation of the D&D system, which essentially started it all. But it's not really necessary when dealing with a computer based game.

If you want to model that in a game, then you need those stats, period... But the recurring idea that computer games don't need stats to govern events scares me.

As I mentioned in another post, there's hundreds of numbers in these games that operate in the background that the player is completely unaware of. Those stats you speak of are no different. The computer can deal with them perfectly fine on it's own without the player having to worry about any of that.

Baldur's Gate was one of the best action adventure games there is!

Regardless of the effectiveness of attributes in TES or D&D, can we stop with the whole "attributes (or numbers) were necessary for PnP, but not for computers" meme? It's just plain silly.
Attributes in PnP were designed to model reality, specifically the physicality of a character. If you want to model that in a game, then you need those stats, period. Computers are not magical devices.
If you want to argue that that aspect of modeling is unnecessary, fine. But the recurring idea that computer games don't need stats to govern events scares me. Next we'll start arguing about whether the earth is flat.

Or posts that state that attributes like strength and speed don't exist in the real world.

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance was bad there is many examples of better action adventure games there, even old Diablo from PS1 is better. :teehee:

Yes, sometimes sarcasm doesn't translate very well over the internet. :whistling:

Nah, I forgot that there was a lame spin-off on the consoles...

Well they don't really. I base my strength on how much I can lift, and my speed on how fast I can run. I don't necessarily have a value of 50 Strength or Speed, my perceptions of my abilities are based on pounds lifted, or feet per second. There's other ways that a computer based game can handle those values without needing attributes that are visible to the player, yet holds very little meaning for him/her. If I look at my stats screen in Oblivion and see that I have a Strength of 60, that doesn't really mean very much to me in terms of my game. Yet if I look in my inventory screen and see how much weight I can carry, that has real value to me as a player.

Games don't have to model reality, so it's not like Todd's honor is at stake, requiring people to jump in and deny reality to protect him.

If I'm playing an RPG, I would like the game to model reality as much as possible. When I get into Oblivion or Fallout, I like to feel that it's me in that world, not that I'm simply controlling an avatar in a game. So any system that allows me to avoid the distraction of having to deal with numbers is going to feel much more realistic and organic to me than one where I have to be concerned with stats and values. For that reason alone I agree with the direction Skyrim is taking with character development, not simply that I'm worshiping at the altar of Todd. Frankly, I'm getting really tired of this kind of response and find it rather insulting. It's simply saying that people who might have a different viewpoint are simply too stupid or naive to come up with an independent and logical conclusion on their own.