Here's one issue with removing stats: No chance for stat-based dialogue or options checks. In Fallout 3 or New Vegas, lots of options opened up based on stats, and without intelligence, you are going to not have a stat on which an option could be measured against. Of course, I guess the reverse of that is that people don't like being told what THEY can or can't do simply because of an arbitrary number, which I certainly understand. We'll just have to see how Bethesda manages their dialogue.
Well said. Basically, they COULD have quantified attributes like intelligence the way I described them, but clearly that was not the direction they wanted to go.
I don't disagree, I just want to point out that this sort of motivation for attributes probably isn't going to apply across the board. It's probably going to depend on the individual attributes and skills in question.
Take the intelligence example. How could the game quantify intelligence? By how well you do in dialogue, how much magicka you have, and how well you can pick locks. What Bethesda decided to do was remove any overarching governing attribute for these game mechanics, and let each mechanic be governed by its own number. For dialogue there's the Speechcraft skill; for magicka pool there's the Magicka Pool; for lock-picking there's Security. (I'm assuming there are these skills, but if they are perks the point still stands). Now, you might say that all these things my character is doing are expressions of his intelligence. That's not entirely wrong, but it could be a little misleading. It's pretty obvious that someone who is very intelligent in conversation might be very poor at picking locks; and vice versa. The sorts of abilities we describe as manifesting intelligence are a pretty motley bunch. There's probably no unified cognitive capacity underlying all of them, which is the person's "intelligence". In this case, Bethesda's decision seems reasonably well-motivated.
But on the other hand, this sort of design decision is less well-motivated for other combinations of attributes and skills. How could the game quantify your strength? One obvious answer is by how much damage you do in combat. But now suppose that's governed by the relevant weapon skill. Now consider a character with a high one-handed skill and a low two-handed skill. How plausible is it that if that character starts using a two-handed weapon that they'll do pretty much the same amount of damage as a character who also has a low one-handed skill? Not very, to my mind. This is where the Strength attribute looks well-motivated: it represents a unified trait of the character which is manifested in a variety of abilities. Of course, there are other ways of solving this problem without using attributes, and just using skills, HP/MP/Stamina, and perks. But the attribute method looks a natural one.
Anyway, the main point here is, to reiterate, not that I disagree, but that the relation between Intelligence and its related abilities may not be the same as the relation between Strength and its related abilities, or between Agility and its related abilities, and so on. This complicates this argument about attributes - in both directions. Todd's argument that raising Intelligence is just about raising Magicka, therefore Intelligence is redundant, is fair enough; but problems arise when one wants to generalise it to other attributes. Similarly, while there's an argument for retaining a Strength attribute, because of the way it governs multiple weapons skills, that argument doesn't easily generalise to other attributes.
» Wed Mar 30, 2011 1:57 am 
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