Todd Howard - "You are released from your enslavement to numbers my child. Feel your freedom and rejoice!"

lol (not a real quote)

Edit: Your sig is awesome.
Edit 2: ????? What is your avatar sir?

I never approach them that way, I approached them the way Todd said. It was lame, at the time it was fine because I did not think of any other way to do things, but I am glad there gone. Now its easier to roleplay with out a stupid number that is redundant getting in the way.

Yep, I agree that the "leave it to the imagination" argument doesn't have a lot of force, although I'm not sure if it's for the same reasons.

It strikes me as pretty obvious that there's going to be a huge amount of variation in what people are willing to "leave to the imagination" when playing a role-playing game. Some people want to have the general Intelligence attribute to represent some aspect of their character. Others are happy to "derive" that trait from some combination of other skills or perks or whatever. But there's no right or wrong about this.

Except many of the people on these forums say they are fine with the removal of attributes or say it was the right thing to do (I'm in that category) so he wasn't out of touch with the fanbase, just part of it which of course they are never going to have everyone happy so it's not a surprise.

+ 1

So long as you're not complaining in your neither right nor wrong opinion

oh noes, im clicking text that says Magicka instead of Intelligence, end of the world.


only this time I didn't have to grind out minor skills for a proper boost due to a horrid system.

keep showing your ignorance no one is complaining about the abilities being gone here,

http://wallbase.cc/wallpaper/845411




Thank you. That is a very good point, and might even be the core of the discussion.

Even characters with 0 intelligence could read books, sounds like a broken system to me :goodjob:

Except I'm pretty sure most players DID increased their intelligence for the sake of raising their magicka, seeing as that is the main effect it has on gameplay, you can talk about role-playing all you want, but if players have to choose to raise a certain stat, most of them are going to choose the one that benefits them most, and really, that actually makes sense even with role-playing logic, because stats and skills are important for role-playing because they have some sort of impact on the game, whether it's increasing how much magicka you have, letting you do more damage, or something else, if they don't actually do anything that effects the game, then they're not needed at all, the idea is for the effects of attributes to help players to play the kind of character they intend to role-play But if you want to role-play an intelligent character, you can still do so even without an intelligence attribute, in fact, even with an intelligence attribute, if the only thing it does is increase your magicka, there's nothing stopping you from taking every oportunity available to play the game as though your character is intelligent. Having magicka be raised on its own rather than determined by intelligence just means that your character doesn't have to be intelligent to have lots of magicka, and doesn't have to have lots of magicka to be intelligent, so it makes sense for you to play a character who acts intelligent even if you don't use magic and don't want to focus on intelligence as a result.

But really, it doesn't really matter, no matter how much we talk about the subject, attributes are out and they're not going to be put back in, adding them back in now would require major revisions of the character progression system, and Skyrim is probably too far in development for that, so whether you like it or not, attributes are gone, we're not changing that in Skyrim, now, if after Skyrim is finished, Bethesda decides that removing attributes wasn't a good idea after all, then maybe they'll bring them back in a future game, but for Skyrim, it's pretty much decided, so we really don't need ten different threads all saying "OMG Beth took out teh atirbutes!!!!!!! Skyrim is RUINED FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111!!!" I'm certainly not saying removing attributes was necessarily the right choice, I don't know if it was at this point. It's certainly different from past games, but that can be a good or a bad thing, it all depends on whether the results are for the better or not, and since at this point, it won't change even if we complain about it, I see no reason not to wait until I've seen the new system is like before passing judgment.

Well, most slightly less intelligent people can still read...

Having ZERO intelligence could hardly be described as "slightly less"

People were confused over what you do with your characters? i neither care nor am confused. Much like you pretended that increasing your intelligence increased your actual intelligence, you can now pretend your magicka does likewise.

It is true that it is up to the individual, and that is why there are more than one RPG on the market.

I like the complex idea of an attribute actually creating some kind of observable effect, such as a person with very low athletics getting winded easily or stumbling from time to time, or a person with low intelligence reading slower or having difficulty reciting spells or not being able to understand complex concepts, or a person with low willpower getting a headache after focusing too hard casting spells or being easily affected by jedi mind tricks.

I think that people will be able to find more common ground from neural interface gaming. In a combat game you may be able to design a set of moves, such as a fighting style, and trigger them as general concepts rather than mentally detailing the physical actions of your entire body in response to your opponent. Some people may be better at one or the other. Maybe they will consider utilizing neural interfacing for their next game in 5 years. This will allow the player to inject role play elements directly into the context of the game, while still coexisting with the game's predefined structural components.

Yea that was a total cop out.

I'm tired of see people say well oh why don't we just imagine everything then if we have to imagine a character being smart.
Like someone posted earlier that combat should now be imaginary; it's just ridiculous that you assume because something can be derived from imagination based on your character instead of an arbitrary number that it applies to all situations because you don't agree with it.
Deriving our characters intelligence based on what kind of character you're playing is not the same as imagining combat.
Combat is arguably the most important thing in the game because we'll spend most of out time fighting while intelligence wasn't; it increased your magicka (which you can still do) while telling you how 'smart' you apparently were (which you can decide yourself now basing it off whatever you wish be it magicka or whatever).
Now suddenly you can have magicka and not be smart or vice versa so now every ones like oh noes I better make baseless points about imagining core gameplay elements because I'm afraid of change even when I end up with the same results and it makes things better.

Technically you imagine combat in books, pen and paper rpgs, and to a certain extent Morrowind

Why to a certain extent in Morrowind?

This isn't a book or pen and paper rpg the idea that combat is integral might be the same but they are complete differences in how it's done. in a video game its shown visually and that's how video game combat should be done while pen and paper inherently means you imagine it. Morrowind is an odd duck but because it's shown visually I don't consider that imagining plus they were kinda limited by the dice roll system.

Also what would be the point of imagined combat in a VIDEO game? Attributes are a concept that can't be shown visually (unless a stat counts or even worse changing body types according to playstyle like fable but let's not go there) so leaving it out doesn't affect the experience as much especially when the main effects of leveling them
(raising magicka/health/stamina) can still be done, be it through a boost at level up or possibly perks the effect is the same.

nah i think he hit the nail on the head with that one.

Because it didn't show you miss I guess and you had to kind of imagine it. You just kinda just swung the sword until you see blood indicating a hit.

I was just giving examples of successfully imagined combat. I didn't have any huge issue with Morrowind's combat. Then again I'm not disagreeing that visually depicting the combat as realistically as possible improves the experience of videogames. As I said, was just saying you CAN imagine combat.

Can anyone frame an argument in support of the removal of attributes that isn't either a non sequitur or a bland regurgitation of Todd Howard's talking points?

I ask because I've yet to see one. Pretty much all I see is that they didn't make sense (which seems more a statement on the person offering the argument than on the attributes themselves), they forced grinding (which is unquestionably a statement on the Oblivion level-up system rather than on attributes themselves) or they were redundant and they're being folded in with the derived attributes and perks and the rest of the carefully parsed ex post facto rhetoric Todd spewed out specifically for mass consumption.

The closest thing I've seen to an actual, valid argument is that that's the way Beth's doing it, so that's the way Beth's doing it. It's not a particularly compelling argument, but it is at least sound.

So - anyone? Take your time.....

Of course it may seem like bland regurgitation because we have little info on it so far but that doesn't make it not a good argument. you still get everything they offered just in a different way and it fixes problems with strange ways of leveling. As I always say in these threads they would have more than likely tried to change the old way before moving on and creating an entirely new one but they decided this was better.

I have yet to see a compelling argument that the removal of attributes is a bad thing other than bland regurgitation of "I like the old system better."

If you can come up with a compelling argument of why a system that does basically the same thing just in a different way and fixes the previous problems is a bad idea the feel free.

So - anyone?

It makes it easier to code the skills. It makes leveling easier. It frees up the class mechanics. It removes pointless and meaningless numbers. It saves a page in the instruction manual. It removes entire groups of annoying spells that were either aggravating or game-breaking. Reduces micromanagement. Frees players from grinding as much. etc. etc.