Indeed... And its not like Perks and attributes are mutually exclusive, don't see a valid reason yet to just decide to get rid of them, instead of balancing them and make them have more on an impact on your character. That would make for more customization, along with the perks if they want to implement them. But totally remove them? Makes no sense to me.

I expect we'll learn more later. They seemed intentionally vague on the subject so maybe they aren't sure what they're going to do. As long as characters can have differing encumberance, stamina and magicka regeneration, and etc. then it's all cool to me.

While I don't know If I agree with him, I can answer your inquiry: Mass Effect 1, Alpha Protocol and Fable 2. Even though F2 was barely an RPG.

Not exactly, the new athletics&acrobat skill (let's call it conditioning for now) will determine how fast your character is. Carrying weight will more that liking be increased with a perk. The attributes are still there, they will just progress in the background as you pick skills and assign perks.

Pretty much no more 100 strength for stealth and magic types.

I understand what your trying to say but think about it, like I said and explained, except for Strength, Endurance and Agility, attributes had very little effect on your character. I don't see how you could balance the attributes after 4 games if you didn't figure out how to before. If you buffed the nearly useless stats your start to go insane like with Morrowind, you max out acrobatics and you could jump over a fort wall which is ridiculous. Stats were nice customization but they weren't integral to the game. They can easily be substituted by other mechanics to give the same effect while freeing up some of the customization to go toward things that actually diversify your character more from others and truly enriches your RP experience by making you even more "Who or whatever you want to be." You can't let yourself get attached to features and gameplay of the older games, that's why there are such fanatics that worship Morrowind and denounce Oblivion even though Oblivion was a overall better game. Let go of how the older games played and move on to how this game will play. Things can't always be the same, time moves on and with time comes better mechanics which can be used to enhance the game experience and being adamantly against it from the start is a good way to ruin the experience for you and thus making you believe the game is bad like in the case of Oblivion!!!!!

Fable 2 has Strength, Skill, and Will. Alpha Protocol is hardly a "console RPG"... more an RPG that's on consoles. Mass Effect... I'll give you that one. It's still pretty ridiculous to claim that removing attributes is "consolization" when the vast majority of console-exclusive RPGs have attributes (and, if they're lacking in anything, have nothing but attributes and levels).

Actually, if they did get rid of stats, there is no more strength for anyone, even that mighty nord warrior on the preview. Kind of odd? Its weird that Todd mentions that they want to make things a bit more realistic, at least in regards to combat, and they drop something that would make a big difference in the way someone would fight in real life. Skill should be very important, but a strong person should cause more damage that a weaker one when skills are the same, don you think?

This. Basically what I meant in a nut shell.



I don't think you guys are getting the concept of this. The current attributes from the TES games will still technically be in the game they just won't be something you put points into. They will be present through perks or other means of gameplay, they just aren't something you alter directly anymore because come on, quite frankly you spent maybe 1% of your time deciding what stats you were going to put points in. What's the point of keeping a system that you spent nil time in when you can scrap it for a system that is more meaningful and put the effects that you got from Attributes into the game in different means.

I wouldn't consider Fables..."skills" to be attributes. I'm not sure what they are actually, like I said it was barely an RPG. AP was a lot like ME1 to me, whether its a console to PC, or PC to console game I could care less. But like I said, I don't really agree with the OP. I just don't want certain skills merged, like we've discussed before.

Not a big deal to me. What did attributes govern? Health, Fatigue, Magicka (max and regen); Speed; Encumbrance; Melee/Ranged Damage; Disposition; Effective Skill Bonus.

Health, Fatigue, Magicka: You apparently get to develop these directly by choosing at level-up which to improve.
Melee/Ranged Damage: This overlaps with the associated weapon skill.
Disposition: This overlaps with Speechcraft/Mercantile. My guess is one skill now covers speech checks and getting better prices.
Effective skill bonus: Well, this would just be gone and skills would be exactly what they appear to be.

That just leaves speed and encumbrance. They can either flatten encumbrance and make it more constant for characters (in which case it will probably be handled by perks) or else they can make it less of a hard limitation, and more of a weight-based penalty to running and swimming that the Athletics skill diminishes. Speed could be merged with Acrobatics to form a general "Agility" skill (apparently there is some sort of bullet time skill -- maybe this would govern that along with passive speed and jumping ability).

A general point on encumbrance, speed, etc. Some people argue like this: previous TES games have used mechanism M to achieve effect E (in this case, attribute values to determine running speed, or encumbrance). But Skyrim is getting rid of M. Therefore, in Skyrim, there won't be E. (In this case, no attributes in Skyrim, so no differences in running speed or encumbrance). But this is risible reasoning - there's more than one way to skin a cat! As others have pointed out, presumably Skyrim will feature some other mechanism for achieving the same effects - perhaps running speed will be determined by your athletics skill, or encumbrance by your armor skill, or something like that.

I just wanted to make this general point because this fallacious reasoning seems to be going on in other places as well. For instance, the debate about how good/bad losing skills is. Some people argue: losing skills means less character differentiation and complexity. But this overlooks the fact that Skyrim might feature new mechanisms for achieving those effects (perks, for instance).

no attributes might be what they are going with when you consider you don't make a character build at the start.

your character is whatever skills you decide use the most.

Not to mention we are assuming that they got rid of attributes. They could easily just be background stats that you don't govern on leveling up. Thus negating a reason to put them in the preview.

I'm betting there will be perks to increase your swing speed and hit damage. So when you get your level up and look through the perks you'll see something like, hit hard with two-handed weapons, so you pick it. The introduction of perks will allow you to spec your character to be come a melée juggernaut.

Nope, that is an acquired ability and therefor a perk and not a skill.

Like any of the Fallout games can prove, you can do perks and still have stats in the game, they are not mutually exclusive. Stats define your character physical and mental attributes, and affect the related skills in meaningful ways, while perks allow you to specialize by rewarding you with bonuses related to the skills you proficient at. They both allow for customization. Still don't see what are we gaining by getting rid of stats, and the need to do so.

Alternatively, they just assume that when you improve a physical skill, part of that is building and training the muscles associated with that skill; but, for convenience and balance, they are ignoring any side benefits such muscle training would have on other skills in the real world.

this non-attribute system bolsters the "make your character as you play" style.

You keep gleaning on perks when I said perks and other things. I don't see what you gain from keeping stats as the game has evolved from it's DOS origins. In Arena and Daggerfall they were incredible important and felt rewarding. Starting with Morrowind they became less important and in Oblivion they just seemed useless beyond Strength for Encumbrance, Endurance for health and Agility for Ranged damage. Now with the new incarnation of TES, Endurance is no longer needed anymore because of straight health increase. Agility is no longer needed because Ranged damage has been increased drastically to make Range damage more realistic and an equal force in the Combat Triangle. As for Strength, Encumbrance can be solved by many means including perks or building it into skills. People need to stop being pessimistic and try change. I know a lot of people are afraid of change but change is the natural order of all things and most of the time it is a good thing and I believe it will be for Skyrim as well.



I don't see how it is realistic for attributes either. Ok so I just leveled, I magically got beefier or smarter? Really? Now if you thought of it as you gain these things over the course of training your skills yes that would work but the same goes with the new system. You level skills and then your "attributes" that are no longer a points system still increase, they just aren't evident on the surface. I don't know why people feel the need to tweak their attributes when they make nearly no affect on the character in small amounts.

Actually, thinking about it more, this whole thing is ending up to be even more unbalancing than the previous system... We now have no level cap, so basically you can get every perk in the game since the only requirements would be skills, which you can train endlessly because they raise with use, and since all skills contribute to leveling, there is nothing preventing you from maxing your character in any way, on the contrary, you are encouraged because of the whole 1 perk each level thing. I'm not a fan of this approach. The old leveling system needed change, badly, but this new one is nothing that will actually make leveling any less unbalanced or allow for any kind of meaningful specialization.

Yes, in principle, but levelling becomes much slower at 50. It seems from Todd Howard's comments that they are aiming for characters to still be fairly distinguishable and specialised at higher levels, but below 50.

Aside from the leveling curve, which apparently makes it extremely slow when you try to level past 50 and likely makes reaching a level far past 50 take so long that there'd be no point playing a single character for that long.


Encouraged to... specialize, because increasing skills that are already higher causes you to level faster. The more you diversify, the slower you'll gain perks.

EDIT: Not liking the way something sounds is fine, but you seem to be hating it first and grasping for reasons to explain why after rather than giving the system an especially thorough and reasoned consideration.

It hasn't been confirmed attributes have been eliminated right? Maybe it's like Fallout; you spend points in the beginning of the game on attributes.

Then again, the interface description didn't say a thing about attributes, so eh.


So what is the carrying capacity of your character governed by if not by strength?? Stamina maybe?

That doesn't mean its effectiveness won't be tied to a skill. Dodging was also a perk, but it was part of the acrobatics skill.

Hate is a strong word, just think that the new system makes for an even more unbalanced experience. I have explained why, even if you think my points are not valid or deserve any merit. I have thought about it, and have my reservations about the implementation of the leveling system, which have nothing to do with any aversion to change or desire to cling to old Rpg mechanics.