not everyone is happy (when does it ever happen anyway ) with an attributeless system so im assuming someone's going to mod it in. Im curious to know how it would be achieved.

Personally, i like the TES system of "you are how you play" which was, imho, properly implemented by levelling mods and consider it a much better "fix" to the default system of optimizing your multipliers than the health/mana/stamina thing they have for Skyrim. For those who may not know, the mods i mentioned adjusted your attributes according to skill increases automatically so you dont have to think about optimizing anything. This means if you fight with weapon and armor a lot, you become stronger and tougher, mutter spells constantly, you have increased mana, run and jump all day, and get more stamina. Makes more sense to me than swinging a hammer all day and still possibly increasing mana at level up.

THIS IS NOT A THREAD ON WHICH SYSTEM IS BETTER. So please dont derail the thread by arguing for one or the other. I made the above description of OB mods to see how it could possibly be simulated for Skyrim. I'm thinking of this:

1) disabling the option to choose to increase Health, Mana, Stamina at level up like the multipliers were disabled for the OB mods
2) tracking skills which may be considered to affect the 3 and raise those automatically i.e. weapon skills increase health, magic skills increase mana, stealth skills increase stamina

#2 could do with adjusting once we know the actual skills and how they're used. also, it would be better if skills affect more than 1 new attribute. so armor skills could increase health more and stamina less, casting could raise mana more and stamina less, etc.

also, im not sure how carry weight is affected without a strength attribute or move speed without a, well, speed attribute but skill increases affecting both could also be tracked.

Modders will be equally successful in adding attributes to Skyrim as they were adding new skills to Morrowind and Oblivion.

Were they successful at that?

Which is ... ? (sorry I never bothered with gamechanging mods)

there was an unarmored mod in OB which i tweaked to my own tastes. cant remember the others as i didnt really use them

If it had been a success it would have been heralded as the greatest modding achievement of this cycle and everyone would know about it because Bethesda would have taken notice as they did with the other major breakthroughs such as the Akatosh Mount and Deadly Reflex.

Well there is concept of Perktributes
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1181187-perktributes/
Mix of attributes and perks, I expand it with some ideas
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1181187-perktributes/page__view__findpost__p__17500193
And like to see the powers of Creation Kit. devs says its really powerful tool now, interesting can we edit such features with standard scripts or need wait for SKSE?


In Morrowind for example was done
Herbalism for Purists, Advanced Herbalism add herbalism skill to game
Fishing Academy add fishing
Necessities of Morrowind add ability cooking
Aerelorn's Combat Enhanced expands combat skills
In Oblivion was done
Craftybits OBSE crafting
KEa Magic and Skill Extender ad many features for example make difference for long blades and short blades axes and blunts
Unnecessary Violence add wide and large number of features for example expands marksman skill, add true dual wielding with any weapon.
There is many interesting gameplay mods not just anime armors and texture replacers, ask what you want in mod detective thread, or ask me.

Honestly I'm not sure how we'll able to even get this in, thats the grip because Attributes had alot to Do with many many mods, I have a Sword mod that requires my character have 90 > Strength to even pick it up, and to unlock moves like power attacks I need increased endurance, Agility etc etc, but having the sword pay offs, whenever I get Debuffed I lose the sword and all the bonuses that come with it.

Modding in spellmaking is a tad easier because of the nature they are trying to make spell combo's, using an animation for handed and two handed charging along with some scripts can make a comprehensive realtime spell making. of course there is no challenge to this because there aren't Attributes like Intelligence and willpower both of which play in hand with magicka and Regeneration.

So the lost of attributes screams across several avenues of possibilities.

how do you tell the strenghts of a base character, and them getting stronger or being naturaly stronger seperate from PERKS which are rewards and do not grow with the player? 280 perks across 18 skills is hardly omnisituational all encompassing possibilities for playstyles.


Its gonna be tricky ::/

As much as I would love to see an Attributes mod, I highly doubt we ever will. And here's why:

The main issue is complexity. Consider, for example, the fact that every single NPC in Oblivion/Morrowind has pre-assigned attributes in the construction set. I'm assuming, therefore, NPC's in Skyrim will have pre-assigned perks/skillsets. In order to fully restore Skyrim to the attribute system that previous games have taken advantage of, each and every single NPC will need to have these stats manually assigned to them (and that's AFTER they're somehow implemented). Take in to consideration scaling and difficulty curve - It wouldn't be an easy task.

The easiest way to achieve modding in attributes, therefore, would be to only apply them to the player character, which, really, wouldn't be all that bad - It's not like we consciously think 'Oh, that dunmer I just killed must've had 56 STR, 42 END...' etc. The problem then lies with leveling and balancing gameplay - Making sure attributes wouldn't make the game too easy/difficult or, even worse, constantly varying. If such a mod was created, testing would require entire playthroughs to verify that everything's working the way it should. Bethesda has the time and resources - Common modding groups do not.

Summing up, it may be possible from an engineering perspective (In other words, yes, it's possible), but not from a gameplay perspective (In other words, yes, it's possible, but it wouldn't be very enjoyable). It really is a shame to see attributes go, but in the end I have faith in Bethesda. I haven't played the final game, so I shouldn't judge the system. For now I'm disappointed, but with any luck I'll be pleasantly surprised with the new system.

EDIT: By the way, thanks for making this topic Norbingel. It's interesting to discuss and consider - I'd love to see how a modding group would attempt to introduce attributes after Skyrim's release.

Yes thats possibilities thats was in Oblivion but not used or expanded by devs was greatly used in mods since they add variability of realization of new features, now when we lose many of such possibilities because devs don't use them in full power or don't try improve them become deleted from game, ok they remove spellmaking but birthsigns can work as starting traits-perks, attributes can work with perks and skill together.

What new features will provide Creation Kit to compensate loss of variability of possibilities?
I hope we can edit perks and spells, add new ones, have access to many variables and powerful scripting, edit parameters of actors and items in wider way, so if devs will not use them all let modders to work with them.
Oblivion is great example of game with unused and undiscovered possibilities what was not used by some reason during developing.

I'm hoping that we can put together a modular common library for attributes. The idea being that there's a common API with a separate core that can chosen by the user/modder. This approach would reduce incompatibilities between different mods, and modders could focus more on the attributes than on the infrastructure required to support attributes.

Unless BGS severely gimps scripting, which is one feature that has always improved for each new release, I don't think this will be a problem. Creating attributes is creating new variables.

There will be problems, such as getting attributes into the HUD (if desired) and methodically tying them to their respective skills. And BGS will have hardcoded formula, so there will be some limitations--or very clever and probably not entirely satisfactory workarounds will be required. Certain features may not be possible until modders figure out how to hook into the executable, and that's a slow process, because BGS doesn't and never will document their internals (for public use), though they also don't have problems with people figuring it out for themselves.

It's just an idea, but perk can be used in place for attributes for modding?

in addition to the perks for individual skills, there could be a set of general perks such as more strength, more speed, etc.

No. In terms of game mechanics, perks are modifiers to objects, not objects themselves. Perks will be used for modding, but not in this way, because it doesn't make sense.

A simplified explanation is that attributes are the x-axis, and skills/perks are the y-axis of a graph, so perks/skills are not replacements to attributes because they're on a different plane.

The addition of perks is like adding new animations on top of a physics system. No matter how good the animations are, if the underlying math for the physics system is ganked, then physical interaction will be weird and unsatisfying. Perks, like animations, are the gravy on top, but don't and can't replace the core.


Yeah, that should be easy to implement (once everything is in place).

I think any mod which attempts to reintroduce Attributes will have to be a massive undertaking.

Presumably the entire structure behind Attributes will be gone so perhaps the easiest way might be to create a Pseudo-Attribute system where the Attributes are actually nothing more than memorandum values. The actual effects of Attributes would be simulated using invisible buffs to Health, Mana, Encumbrance, Jump, Speed etc without any real reference to the memorandum attributes. This would give the player the gameplay experience of having Attributes without requiring major surgery to the game mechanics ot changing the way in which NPCs work.

There's a couple of other things to consider though:

1) Every Attribute has to be supported by corresponding Skills and that's a major problem because, unlike previous TES games, Skyrim's Skills have not been chosen with Attributes in mind. In Oblivion, for example, Speed was associated with Athletics (now gone), Acrobatics (now gone) and Light Armor (which never really made sense!). Basically, the more Skills you have the better the Attribute system. It would probably be necessary to add Skills as well, in order to make it worth reintroducing Attributes.

2) Any additions made through Attributes may require changes to the Perk system. That may not sound like a big deal but I think it would be a considerable challenge to keep the game balanced.

There could be some major dependency issues for this, such that if a mod is made that is dependent on calculating things from attributes, you will then also need the attribute mod for this mod to work. Also, there will likely be separate approaches to attribute modding, so you will need a SPECIFIC attribute mod as opposed to another one. How likely is it that modders will agree to standardize the attribute system early on so that these sorts of compatibility issues can be avoided?

Also, as far as modding each individual NPC to have attributes, how about instead designing a system that also adds "classes" back into the game and make it "automatic". Leverage the new system to generate information pertinent to the old. Base the class of an NPC on what perks they have.

So, if an NPC has perks associated with Heavy Armor, Blade, and Destruction in greater concentration than they do other perks, (dumbing this down for the sake of example) they would be given the "Battlemage" class by the script.

If an NPC has Light Armor, Sneak, and Marksman perks in greater concentration than other perks, they would be given the "Agent" class by the script.

Maybe other things already present in the existing Skyrim system could also be cues for the script to judge what class an NPC is.

Each NPC's attributes would be calculated by the script based on that class that was inferred by the information that is present in the non-attribute system and calcuated for level.

Posted by mistake

Thats really nice idea make common attribute system library, many incompatibilities can be avoided in such manner as well as support of large variety of mods can be done.


Yes thats is just need to estimate and test new toolkit


Well I assume global variables still can be found and edited and MessageBox still present in game, yes thats isn't looks good but until tools similar to http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Category:OBSE_Plug-Ins to work with UI will be done, thats will be best way,

Yeah, there are some big potential problems, and 100% compatibility would be impossible. But a decent API definition could provide some flexibility and avoid disaster. For example, you could categorize attribute classes of physical/mental/blah, and if an attribute that isn't recognized is requested, it could return a value from another attribute in the class, and log a warning that the desired attribute wasn't found. This is just off the top of my head, so I assume something better could be implemented with some planning.

It shouldn't be too difficult to mod Attributes in but I could see some problems happening if you keep perks in. The reason being that perks are going to take what Attributes had in Oblivion and by adding Attributes back in you'll be combining stuff with the perks. I think what's going to happens is for example with Strength you would have to reduce the amount of damage that you would gain off the One Handed/Two Handed skill and put parts of that damage into Strength to gain an equal balance otherwise strength will do extra damage which isn't bad but wouldn't the point be when adding back a feature to not make it broken but playable or an asset.

Why do you think we want Attributes and perks? Perks don't do what attributes do, Perks are limited, and even if they level which would be redundant they still do not encompass core features, Like FO3 they are using what works, and in FO3 Skills mattered more than anything.

theres just more flexibility and usefulness to perks and attributes than just perks alone.

I.E Arrow- Hold Breath - Eats massive stamina, this offset can be addressed by high endurance + willpower + a perk saying the player TRAINED hard enough and earned the reward giving the player a steady aim while not using too much stamina. otherwise everyone would get the option to Hold their breath for steady arrow aim when they don't even use Bows and arrows.

I think I know how
my theory is that although attributes are gone, we will still have them in CK to determine different things, fallout had this with things like poison resistance, you never saw it, but it still mattered
so you use a script for this that asks you to pick an attribute to level up, if there are no attributes that affect the character like in the way that Oblivion or morrowind had then you change the system setting with each

It's possible, maybe likely, that attributes still exist but are hidden from the player. In that case modding might be a lot easier.

Literally the entire purpose of scripts is to create and manipulate variables, such as attributes, that affect the character and game surroundings. There is no doubt that this will be possible, unless BGS decides not to release the Creation Kit. Creating and integrating an attribute system throughout every aspect of the game will probably be a huge and non-trivial task, though.

Hidden attributes can work, in such cases thats will isn't hard to bring in game message box with listing of all current attribute values or with certain tools add new menu into UI thats will show them in game.

We won't know until we get our hands on the CK. It has been said that the CK is radically different than the CS because it's a brand new tool for the new engine. So for all we know we have more control over the game than we have before.