Do you not think bethesda has maybe thought about all this,and done it even better...BUT still thought ,you know what,it's not working. If attributes were still around i'd still buy the game.But i'm looking forward to the new way.It could be the next best thing since sliced bread for all we know.It looks like they've put alot of effort on this game.I know some of you are pissed about attributes being gone,but bethesda hasn't done it to piss us off. We'll have to trust bethesda on the changes for now,and we'll see when the game comes out,or when we have even more info. There are still weakness's to what you've done,though it's not shocking. But we'll have to accept these changes aswell as the others and see what the experience brings.

As basic idea for attributes, this is okay. The effects of Strength, Endurance, Speed, and Agility are good, but could use more work. The effects of the others probably need to be different to do justice to the attributes.

Your learning rate is affected by attributes, and not by intelligence alone. Someone who is athletic, who is already strong and agile, will pick up ballet much more easily than someone who has been leading a sedentary life. Intelligence lessening the cost of spells isn't satisfying enough compared to how intelligence plays in stories. The intelligent hero might discover dialog options that others miss, or notice hidden things in his environment, or more quickly figure out how some device works. The other attributes can do even more. Heroes are often good at not letting pain, illness, or fatigue defeat them, and when someone attempts to control them through illusion or other means, their resistance might be strong. Willpower, Endurance, Strength, and Personality all help to boost, or weaken, a character's resistance to various negative effects. Lucky characters, thanks to luck, might -- as you suggest -- find a rare or special item or some money. Lucky characters might also find hidden enemies accidentally revealing themselves, or they might find their attacks hitting their mark even when they cannot see. They might find an unexpected ally appearing when they most need one. An unlucky character's weapon might break at a bad time. Luck can account for all kinds of crazy things. Personality should not determine how NPCs view you so much as it should determine how NPCs react to you. Before your character engages an NPC in conversation, the NPC would probably him as he views any other character of his type or appearance.

I didn't want to make the attributes too complex or more important then Perks hence why I went with one effect for Strength, Speed, etc.

Why did they get rid of the complex set of racial bonuses and penalties from arena? Why did they get rid of the amazingly complex bonusea and penalties system from daggerfall? Why did they get rid of so many skills? Why do the races keept changing more then lady gaga?

Because it was made that way;/

The elder scrolls is designed to change drasticaly and this is just one of many such changes. Its just how it works. Its why its still around.

So instead of asking for them back what I WANT is to know how exactly does the new system handle the things like feeling strong.. carrying more... moving faster.. being more agile... being smarter. having a stronger will. We have seen some perks already.. what do the smartypants perks look like? What do the speedy perks look like? And where are they?

I'm willing to bet we'll find out about that in the next couple of months. That's of course if Beth doesn't put this system in, which that decision is up to them.

Especially this late in development, keeping things simpler is practical. For single-use attributes, I like most of your suggestions.

Intelligence reducing spell costs would be okay. Offhand, I can't think of a better single use for Intelligence. I think reduced spell costs will already be included with improved skill levels, so having that effect alone makes it harder to convince people that attributes are needed.

Willpower increasing Magicka regeneration is something I like in Oblivion. I would prefer that Willpower to do something like providing Magicka resistance, or speeding the recovery time from being stunned or staggered. Magicka regeneration is okay, though.

With our automatically gaining Health at each level, along with our being able to choose to add yet more Health at each level, Endurance increasing Health seems too redundant. I would prefer Endurance provide something like disease resistance.

For Personality, I think 10 points of improvement in NPC disposition for 10 points of Personality is too much. There needs to be room for persuasion skills and perks to be meaningful.

Unfortunetly your waay too late. Right now they are all but feature locked and starting to press for getting everything ready for e3. Other then adding in more dungeons and maybe a house or two or a tree or rock here and there I dont think anything they hadnt planned on doing a month ago is going into the plan.

Thats why I am so cranky that we dont know all the skills yet. Im fine my main chars are all mages or part mages.. but what of warriors and rogues? The deadline is basicaly gone now and you dont even know something as basic as what your gona be doing? 6 freaking skills thats all and you dont know all 6 yet? Thats like not knowing if you have an [censored]! or can swim. And I must admit it is why im a tad erked about not know how smartyness or carrting around more is handled yet.

Its like dugeon siege 3 where I dont give a dang about any of thier blather I just havnt connected to the dang chars yet because I dont KNOW too much. My char is still just a blob... here as well as in that game.

I dont preorder a game unless I connect to one or more characters... and I havnt yet.

In a way I guess thats a part of the atribute drop.. trying to make the connection just got harder for alot of people.

@Wintermane, I do have to agree it's very unlikely with 6 weeks until E3 that they'll adapt my system but it's something that I'd thought to propose as the best compromise to Attributes without making Perks less important and I think my idea fixes some of the flaws that Attributes had in the previous games where they interacted too much with Skills.



I do have to agree that Endurance, Intelligence Personality, and Luck aren't the strongest Attributes. Unfortuantely that makes up half of them, I could come up with something better for Endurance definitely. I don't know if I would go with Disease Resistance, if there's some other form of resistance that's a possiblity. I did think of having Endurance lower armor weight but the Armor Skill or it's equilivent will deal with that.

Intelligence is so hard to factor, it used to do Magicka which was ok but now we have the Magicka Status Attribute so that effect on Intelligence is no longer needed and I didn't want to double down on it. The Spell lowering cost was something that I thought of quickly and yet it pretty much expands what happens when a Magic skill gets higher. Intelligence is something that I will work on and see if I can come up with a better effect then Lower Spell Cost.

Did you knew that in Oblivion, increasing Intelligence would more often than not increase your magicka regen a lot more than increasing Willpower would?

Magicka regen will simply be handled in the same way as in Oblivion : the more total Magicka you have the more you regen per second.

I don't think everyone is looking at buying this for pc, no guarantee consoles will get mods.

Luck will effect more than whats in the OP correct, Terror?

I want to hear details from the devs on the new system & how it will handle what was covered by attributes before. So far the Health/Stamina/Magicka as attributes has no explanation into its mechanics. Imo it makes no sense to take such a drastic cut. They didn't cut it from 8 attributes to 3. They killed 8 attributes, swept them under Health/Stamina/Magicka, then promoted H/S/M to attribute status. Bizarre to say the least.

If it were up to me to reduce the attributes, I would do one of two things, depending on what worked better.
Either
1)Cut the attributes from 9 to 4-
Strength & Endurance=Physical
Luck & Charisma=Social
Agility & Speed=Stealth
Willpower, Perception, & Intelligence=Mental

And if they were using that system, I would want to cut "Social" because Speechcraft handles "Charisma" and Luck is an awkward "attribute" at best. Which leaves us with Mental ("Magicka"), Physical ("Health"), and Stealth ("Stamina").

Hey, that looks familiar.

What's the other thing? You mentioned one of two things, numbered that one thing, and left us all hanging.

Luck is essential, whole builds can be based upon it. Its in the back ground but effects everything. Definitely need luck.

Whole builds can be built around an attribute which affects everything equally? An attribute which always had a 1x multiplier?

I don't even know how you could meta-game yourself into believing that your character goes to sleep and wakes up luckier.

Or 2) I would remove Luck & make the other attributes a background function in the game. The attributes would improve as skills improved, making skills the foundation of character development.

Health/Stamina/Magicka would increase proportionally to the attributes that determine their maximum as per the previous system. This would cut the attribute tweaking by players out altogether.

The player would determine how the character developed by excercising the skills that would shape their character in the desired fashion. The more correlated skills the player spent time improving, the faster the associated attributes would increase.

The only thing the player would assign would be perks. There would be two types of perks. There would be skill tree perks that add new functionality to a players skills, like add weapon attacks & special effects. Then there would be distinctive perks that give the character new abilities that don't fall under the skill tree perks, like Night Person.

Attributes, like Skills, are building blocks. Perks are modifiers. Magicka, Health, and Stamina are neither, technically they're 2nd-tier derived stats (from building blocks).

Strength for example, could be used for: fatigue effect modifier, resistance to fatigue effects modifier, general damage modifier, determination of thrown weapon range, I could probably spend all night listing the possibilities.

So let's say you're smartening up the fatigue system. You put together a set of equations, varying by circumstance, that factors in str, end, and will. You add checks for various results: when fatigue is < 50%, you slow down, do less damage, are less accurate, etc. When fatigue < 30% your vision blurs, you begin panting, etc, and you have a chance to drop weapons or trip. At fatigue < 10% you might fall off a horse. Anyway, for all of these checks (and more), you then make them a little smarter, still. Maybe a character with a high strength is less likely to fall down. A character with a high agility is less likely to trip. A character with high willpower takes longer before the screen darkens and tunnel vision kicks in, or the visual effects are less extreme.

Systems like the above have been created, and not just for fatigue, but for stealth, magicka, etc. It's hard NOT to use them if you care about combat and game mechanics, because the gameplay is much better, much deeper, and much more thought-out than what BGS provided. This isn't an insult to BGS, it's just that modders have hundreds of hours (and more) to obsess over details that BGS had to rush through.

Yes, you could throw out attributes, and try to use an "Enc x2" perk and a Magicka "attribute" as a replacment, but it will result in very poor gameplay, i.e. very dumbed-down combat physics.

I keep trying to get this message through: What happens in a game if you remove the physics, and add fancy animations on top? A very silly, cartoony environment. Or a lot of rigid, hard-coded stuff that isn't very sophisticated or satisfying.

Luck effects all chances, higher luck, better chance to succeed. Its pretty obvious. you make luck effect everything, enemy chance to miss, chance to flee, chance for critical, chance for loot, chance in mini games, obviously a useful and fun attribute in a high fantasy game. We are here talking about a hypothetical mod, not what luck did, or didnt do.

Let me break down option 1 a bit more,
Cut out Luck

Physical- Strength, Endurance, Agility, & Speed

Mental- Willpower, Intelligence, Perception, & Charisma

They're superfluous, perks can and likely will serve to define your character better than a small set of general attributes. There's no reason perks can't affect all of the things you've suggested attributes affect.

The amount of debate over which attributes should affect what things, which are pointless, which are overpowered or underpowered, etc. etc. on these forums is a perfect example of why attributes are an attempt to define capabilities that are far too numerous and complex to be lumped into such categories.

I would remove Luck & make the other attributes a background function in the game. The attributes would improve as skills improved, making skills the foundation of character development.

Health/Stamina/Magicka would increase proportionally to the attributes that determine their maximum as per the previous Oblivion system.

The player would determine how the character developed by excercising the skills that would shape their character in the desired fashion. The more correlated skills the player spent time improving, the faster the associated attributes would increase.

The only thing the player would assign would be perks. There would be two types of perks. There would be skill tree perks that add new functionality to a players skills, like additional weapon attacks, combos & special effects such as stun/knockdown.
Then there would be distinctive perks that give the character new abilities that don't fall under the skill tree perks, like Night Person or Black Widow.

I agree that Perks serve to create a more unique & well defined character. However, attributes shouldn't be removed from the game, just removed from player tampering.

I don't know what debate you are referring to when you say "The amount of debate over which attributes should affect what things, which are pointless, which are overpowered or underpowered, etc."
The previous two Elder Scrolls had clearly defined attributes that governed particular related effects, Strength increases carrying capacity, melee attack damage, etc. There was no breakdown of the system, no overlap.

Use the edit button and have a fishy stick.