Its kind of realistic. Do you have a "class" in real life? A name for your "class" that summarizes all of your skills?

Uh yeah. My class is called middle, and it certainly summarizes all of my skills, as well as my incomplete education.

Well, according to those sheets of paper in the corner, I'm a "Mechanical Engineer" with a subclass specialization in "Product Design".

Given that all but two of the characters I've ever created in Morrowind/Oblivion used a custom class because of the idiosyncracies of the levelling sytem, no, I won't miss classes at all. I want to be defined by my actions, not some silly title.

The only real reason I liked the "Class system" died after Morrowind (I best people are real sick of that phrase), I Just thought it was cool being addressed by your title in conversations. With Oblivion, that kind of, well, didn't happen ever, and all the "Classes" in practice, were arbitrary titles given to a select assemblage of skills.

So really, we didn't lose anything, except having to list our preferred skills, in addition to just using them more. When you think about it, players will still actually have their major/minor skills, major will just be the ones they perk towards, while minor are the skills they might just use to boost level a bit more. It wouldn't surprise me if that line of thinking was exactly what went through the big-shots heads when trying to redesign the whole system, and shaving truly superfluous things from the game.

The only thing I will miss is my awesome custom class name of Pimp, and OB asking me "Are you sure you want to be a Pimp" other than that I use a leveling mod in OB that does everything behind the scenes.

But without the Major/Minor system you will no longer CHOOSE those skills and you will no longer be REQUIRED to use those skills in order to level up. Thus your play style will most likely change

I'm glad the classes are gone, I hated how major and minor was used in the past. Raising the Skills with the Attributes was a big turn off. Now though Skyrim has one class Dragonborn but what you specialize in as the Dragonborn is up to you.

Nooo... that's the point. You can use any skills you want to level up. So guy who likes predominantly using magic will still be predominantly using magic. The play style won't change, just the effectively-meaningless-anyway class label/restrictions. You want to be a mage? Simple, you use magic. You want to be a thief? Simple, you steal stuff.

I like the fact that there are no classes. I just created my own every time anyway.

Anything taken out is a bad thing in my opinion.
I loved having a custom class, with my own name.

So now all I can customise in that regard is my name, not the name of my class. Sigh.

I wonder if the NPC's still have classes, if they are healers or bards or scouts..
And if so, why cant I?

I read a lot on this thread about how pointless it was to have a class in Oblivion.
But you dont just remove something because the previous game did it badly.
In Morrowind you were called by your class in several in-game moments. Oblivion svcked in that regard, I dont think they even mentioned my name once.

Morrowind did it perfectly and Im sure going to miss being 'Merari, the Altmer Avatar'

Only problem I see, is I dont want my character ending up "god". I dont want me magic only character to be able to just switch to a melee character on a whim.

But you could do that with the pre-defined classes as well. Essentially you're saying that the new system changes nothing. I disagree, the new system changes the entire leveling system. No longer will you only level up when using major/minor skills, so now if you've built a Mage character and decide you want to be a mage/fighter you can shift mid-game with no penalty. Likewise, I assume, there is no longer the (+X) attribute system so people have no need to powerlevel or grind, which changes gameplay immensely.

You will be limited to how high you can level effectively. Supposing the new system will let you get to 100 on 3-4 skills before the level 50 "drop", I'd wager you could only get 8-10 to 50. Multi-class characters will not be as strong in the long run

No, they have said that you will raise your level faster by using your strongest skills. This equates to the effect of your major and minor skills in OB. You probably COULD use a sword after using destruction magic half the game, just like in oblivion, but you would level up slower and you would be weak as hell. The point is that in your early hours of playing, you have the opportunity to give everything a bit of a go and decide what's best for your character before you get into the game seriously.

Just like real life, you can learn taekwondo your whole life and then change to playing checkers in an instant. You'll just be [censored] at it.

The obvious difference to point out here is that if you used a sword instead of magic in Oblivion you wouldn't level up at all, not just level up more slowly. In Skyrim you will level up, just slowly. Eventually you'd level up at the same speed. If you wanted to switch classes in Oblivion you'd still have to use your major/minor skills to level up. Most notably for the new system, if you realize a skill you thought you were going to use isn't being used it's not an issue. In Oblivion/Morrowind if you chose Illusion as a Major or Minor skill and ended up never casting an Illusion spell you were still stuck with it.

I'm so happy the classes are gone. I felt they were a bit restrictive. Now I can actually play my character how I want. If halfway through the main quest my Nord character wants to start using daggers instead of warhammers, he can. I'm not chained to the 7 skills I originally picked at the start of the game. My character can develop more naturally this way.

Yes, that's true, but I like that idea, because it does leave your options open, but at the same time, you know it's going to be a lot more effort. Minute for minute, doing this would make you a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none type character for a long time where you would be a master of several but not all if you had kept with your original plan. It mostly just gives you more opportunity to find what is best for you before diving in. You can eventually become a master of everything, but this was posssible in Oblivion too.


Which is why I think this is good. You can level up with anything so long as you put in the right amount of effort. I hated going through a game with a class I realised I never used.

I never said it was 'bad'. I just said that it changes the play style from Oblivion/Morrowind. Granted, it doesn't change it THAT much if you don't powerlevel/grind, but it still changes it. Essentially the major difference in the new system is not having to level major/minor skills to level up and not having the +X attribute system which forces you to manage non-major/minor skills as well. In this system you can just play and not have to do math whenever you're trying to level up.

Yeah, but for the better, no? I hope the new system does change the entire levelling system, it's easily the most maddening and tedious aspect of TES, and leads to such ridiculousness as creating a custom class and putting all the skills you actually want to use as minors, or thematically ludicrous major skill selections just to ensure you've got each attribute covered for your +5s at level-up. Honestly, the only bit I care about keeping is using-skills-to-raise-them, beyond that I'm not attatched to the old systems at all.

As to the shifting-mid-game-without-penalty thing, it's being overstated I think. If at level 20 my mage decides he's bored with magic and wants to run around with an axe instead, then he's going to have to deal with the fact that he's now got crappy novice axe skills with which to take on the level 20-nasties he's finding, and so is going to have to do some serious training to get up to speed. I doubt you'll be able to go from master mage to master warrior in an instant and on a whim.

(Slight sidetrack, but I'm reminded of Morrowind here, where thanks to the abundance of trainers it was possible, once you had a good supply of gold, to completely reshape your character in a matter of minutes, and turn a fighter into a mage or whatever, rendering the class distinctions and major/minor/misc skill division pretty pointless, at least for the very wealthy.)

edit:



And hooray for that too. :biggrin:

im worried they are going to mess up this game, there was nothing wrong with the class system you simply needed to know what you wanted to do. i think perks are a dumb idea, they shouldn't be taking stuff from FO. oblvion was a great game and it seems like they are altering some of the key aspects of it, which for hardcoe RPG fans may prove to be disappointing.

I like the concept of removing classes from the game and making it so that a character simply grows into whatever s/he becomes, based on what skills s/he uses.

However, my experience (going on 12 years now) with TES games leads me to believe that somehow they're going to bunge it up. Again. Whether it'll be as bad as Oblivion, in which they effectively punished you for using your major skills too much, remains to be seen, but I have no reason to believe that it won't have some sort of fairly serious flaws.

I disagree (and this was something I forgot to mention in my last post), perks, as they are limited in use per play, encourage specialisation and strategy as you can only choose so many so you have to choose good ones for your character, and higher level perks will require you to reach a high level in a skill first to get them, so you need to level up these skills as much as possible.

Again, not saying the new system is bad, just different. Also didn't mean to imply that it would be efficient to change classes, just that there is no active penalty (such as still needing to increase other skills). Sadly there is a broken enemy scaling system so I guess there actually is a penalty.

The very wealthy have ALWAYS been able to change classes fairly easily. Why do you think so many actors can become politicians, or sports stars actors, etc.

I just worry a bit about all-rounded characters and WHEN in skill development balance becomes a compromise. Then again, with the perk system you'll probably be better off just focusing on 4, maybe 5 skills. And that's about as much as I can now see a generalist being truly effiicient.