Did this debate even got anywhere?

To reply to your fist comment, before you edited it: Because they are against gameplay mechanics in general, either because they didnt use them, Todd said so, or they just want to argue against us. That's the only reason. If Todd came out tomorrow and said swords are being replaced by wooden logs, most of them would actually try to rationalize and defend this. We are for things, for including more, they are against it for no apparent reason.

That's a somewhat uncharitable portrayal of the opposing view. They're obviously going to deny that character stats are additive, in the sense you're suggesting. In other words, it's not obviously true that the way that perks and attributes behave is such that we can think of the debate as a matter of one group saying "Let's have N amount of character customisation" and the other group saying "Let's have N + 8 amount of character customisation". One of the points in dispute is how one could even go about comparing the varying pros and cons of perks vs. perks + attributes; it's not obvious that the best way to do that is the way you suggest.

I don't think it should be like that... The whole point of attributes is to establish where they 'stand', and its not always equal footing ~that's the point. Certain characters should be inherently better than others at specific things (or tasks). Its bad IMO that every orc starts out with the same stats ~no one starts out as a blank slate on equal footing, unless they are a clone with no childhood.


I have all of those games, and does the story not get slimmer with each? This is not something I like in an RPG, as no RPG to date is capable of intelligently acknowledging a completely custom character. I don't want a PC with no past, or a PC with an irrelevant one.

You cannot see what a person can lift based on appearance (and none of the other attributes are visual).
Strength is not pure muscle either... A weaker person that knows how to use their own body can lift a weight that a stronger person perhaps cannot. (Granted... I've played RPGs that state in their rules, Strength is a Deadlift; but realistically strength is not just pure muscle).

But we don't want that. :shrug:
I want clear values that define the bounds of my PC in the gameworld; Stats.

Its plausible, but not something that I would enjoy (for the reasons above).

Because of the amount of redundancy that would be in those attributes. The attributes would add nothing, except maybe some headaches from the extra management.

In Arcanum, if you character was stupid (low intelligence), NPCs would make fun of you and call you a moron.

Troika FTW, thats basically because they got it from their Fallout 1 and 2, which was made by some of the people that created Troika. things like this could of been added to attributes to make them even better. You could have attributes checks etc. How detailed your map and quest log is could be determined by intelegence etc.

And yet you continue to ignore the position of keeping them and piling them onto a system that already does their job and more causes imbalance and inflates the bonuses too much and causes for game breaking imbalance. Then you say "Well just change them." but why keep them if you acknowledge that the new system already does their job? Why spend development time to just keep those 8 words shown in the game. The 8 attributes function is in the game so the 8 attributes are basically blank slates, nothing more than 8 words that were in previous games. Why spend development time trying to figure out a new function for them instead of just deleted those 8 words from the game? That's basically all it is, your wanting to keep 8 words in the game not their functions, as the functions are still in the game. It all comes down to being a slave to nostalgia and the only argument to keeping stats is because they were in the game first.






The problem with this is that it isn't realistic for people to know if your intelligent or not just by looking at you. What would be more realistic is if they wanted you to get something and you did it the hard way and made major mistakes, then they can call you stupid, but it really doesn't make sense if you walk up to someone and they are like "Wow, look at that guy. He is so stupid"

Excuse me but I like my games in a shorter development cycle than the "Forever" category. SURE it would be awfully nice if on a low intelligence every single NPC conversation would be affected accordingly but somehow, I got the feeling that's NOT what TES is about and a very very very very low priority.

Then you must not like TES games.


plus those are just examples, they could just have checks, or not remove them at all. They were only removed to placate a wider audience. The biggest problem with Oblivion wasn't actually attributes, it was level scaling.

Maybe by "above" you're referring to previous posts, but I guess I didn't see the point I was trying to make as supporting a "blank slate" view of how your character should start. I tend to agree that different characters should start out with different aptitudes. My suggestion was that this does not need to be captured by attributes - which are a relatively coarse-grained and gerrymandered grouping of character traits. Rather, the starting aptitudes could be captured by starting skills and perks, which are more fine-grained.

Do you know what is the "Forever" development cycle duration and how many successful games used it so far?

Adding in skill and attribute checks into NV didnt take them forever, so your whole statement is flawed.

You have it!

It's called skills AND perks.

No but they didn't go the whole "Int < 10 = dumber than a rock and every NPC dialog is adjusted accordingly". Beside there is NOTHING AT ALL preventing Bethesda from putting 5 checks per NPC dialog because as far as we are concerned, most checks in Fallout NV was based on your skills and skills ARE IN Skyrim.

Does it have to be? Those values can be used in scripts to imply quite a lot besides some silly comment about being strong, or smart.


Agreed


I'm open to examples (hypothetical ones at this point, until we know more). My concern (off the top) is with PC's having merged aspects that don't make sense, or contradict your character design. (Like a very skilled fencer also being equally skilled with any other sword; or in the case of STATS... A Hulk Hogan style aging warlord with a weak gut. He's strong, but gets sick easily). *Hogan is just for image sake... its just an example.

Besides, I would rather have my NPC responses to be in response to my dialogue choices, not on some arbitrary numbers (attributes) that has a negligible impact on your overall game experience, rp or otherwise.

Example: I walk up to some guy, he looks fidgety.

Fidgety Guy: Hey, can you help me, I lost my Skooma. Will you help me?

Three choices pop up. They are "Sure, when did you last see your Skooma?", "No, you crazy junkie, I'm calling the guards bwahahaha" or "Skooma is bad for you but I'll help you find a way to cure your addiction"

Now if you choose "Sure, when did you last see your Skooma?", he will say thanks and tell you where he last saw it and you go off in search of it. Now if you chose "No, you crazy junkie, I'm calling the guards bwahahaha", then he will start cursing at you, calling you a terrible person and you go off and tell the guards who reward you with gold and take the junkie away. If you chose "Skooma is bad for you but I'll help you find a way to cure your addiction." he will be apprehensive but slightly open to it so you go off on a quest to find a way to cure Skooma addiction. That, imo, is much better than having some worthless numeric value that has almost no impact on the game.

What was removed?

Attributes. they were merged or cut. they did not need to be. Noobs said "too many number, stats" and went back to COD. So they merge/cut them or whatever so the noobs come back.

What are you talking about, because you apparently dont know what Im talking about. have you ever even played a Fallout? people dont instantly know what you are. Its a check, you do know what that is?

[censored] double post.

Woah, this debate is still going on. I still stick by what I said yesterday and the day before, it's the in game effects that are important to me, not the attributes themselves. If I have a character that has a high speechcraft, and a bunch of haggling and brown-nosing perks, I know they effectively have a high personality, I do not need a number to show me.
I totally understand why some gamers do, however. The numbers quantify your character's traits and abilities, give a sense of progression, and let's face it are pretty much a rpg staple.
Personally, I believe the actual skills and perks will be a sufficient indicator of abilities ( what you can do and how well, not which part of your combined psyche and physique enables you to ), same with progression ( I have loads of hit points and can now resist the cold well, I know I am tougher ), and as for being a staple, not saying this is a fact, just a possibility, but the 'essential to rpgs' nature of concrete attribute scores may just be received wisdom.
No one likes anything removed they believe is essential, my personal belief is that attributes such as intelligence, as regards a number in your stats page, aren't essential, the abilities and skills you have reflecting your characters intelligence are a sufficient substitute.

But, attributes will always be a weak real world abstraction. People talked often enough about how bad the Intelligence attribute was explained already so I'll focus on Strength instead. What is Strength? How do you define it? Why doesn't it factor at ALL in the Bow skill checks since Strength is one of the most important factors in using the bigger bows and why does using bows not train strength at all? Why does hitting stuff with a dagger in your right hand allows you to carry more stuff while swimming for 5 days straight through the whole Cyrodil didn't? For that matter why does that little swimming training did NOT improve at all your stamina while picking locks does?

Why does picking locks help you do more damage while using a bow (Oblivion)? Why does training yourself to open locks in Morrowind improves the quality of the potions you make (trains Int) but making potions does not, it's when you use bows a lot (Agility) that you improve your lock picking chance?


Attributes are always too general and badly defined because they are often too hard to explain correctly. There will always be stuff that doesn't work well with them. Better use the much more specific skills which are less prone to such issues.


Of course, if you you can define all the usual attributes, assign them effects that matter, use them to describe any weird real life person, feel free to share your solution I'm sure a lot of people will be interested

How so? First of all, nothing was removed, the functions of attributes are still in the game. Secondly, how does removing attributes placate a wider audience? Attributes has never stopped people from enjoying Morrowind and Oblivion, which made our community explode in numbers. They didn't just remove attributes for no reason, they removed attributes because they had become ineffective at altering gameplay significantly in a smooth way. They were condensed to their baser elements, their extra effects placed elsewhere in the game and then a brand new system put in place on top of it all, adding far more customization and differentiation than before.

I would have hoped people would stop equating everything to some conspiracy to dumb down the game to get more players when in reality Oblivion and Skryim requires more skill on the players part to play, so the opposite of "dumbing down" to gain a better audience. The reason we get a bigger audience is only because the game is better, thus is why Oblivion got a bigger audience than Morrowind and chances are Skyrim will get a bigger audience than Skyrim.



Was I talking about fallouts way? No. It's your comment in conjunction with other peoples comments that the underlying goal is what I explained and I explained why that isn't realistic.

Why else streamline it, when they could of easily just fixed it?


??? Well I was, so what are you talking about, why are you quoting me then? You obviously do not know how checks work.

Nobody Played classic RPG's like Drakensang here, i think.