I agree with the OP (not so much that I'm sure Bethesda will get it right, who knows, but it's definitely possible to use a perk system to translate a smaller set of skills into a much broader diversity of character setups).

I'm not even worried overmuch about the lack of attributes: strip away their effect on H/M/F, and they didn't do much that skills couldn't alone (need extra damage with certain weapon types? -- this sounds like a job for.. Weapon Skill!). You're pretty much left with speed and encumbrance, both of which could be merged and blended with acrobatics and athletics to make two much more useful skills. Encumbrance could be based solely on perks for all I care. More likely, the encumbrance bit will be in the Warrior section and the speed bit will be in the Thief section. As it stands, I see nothing to get too upset about in this regard.

FWIW, I notice each specialization now seems to get its own craft skill.

but the Boots of Blinding Speed (if they still exist) will not only make you run fast they would make you jump from town to town:


(I think they will not add Boots of Blinding Speed because of that:( )

Uh, No. My skills and proficiencies define me as a character and role-play. I have extensive backgrounds for my characters, it will effect the role-play and immersion for me. You cant tell me or anyone else how we play the game, or want it means to us, its different for everybody.

No, your personality defines you as a character and role-play. Broad skill-sets help, sure, but granular detail isn't nearly as important. I'm seriously trying to imagine a character for whom being able to run really fast but not jump very high is, in any way, an important trait, and trust me, the only answers available are incredibly silly.

But hey, maybe all you really want is a character defined solely by their skills and proficiencies, and think all that "role-playing" stuff is silly. In that case, Dwarf Fortress is still free.

Yeah, but that's part of his skills. Isn't that what a skill system is all about? Abilities? Your statement could be used with every other skill too. What if I'm some super agile and swift thief, isn't that a good description of who I am, but that probably means I'm good at acrobatics. The thing with this, is feeling consequences. In real life, you really have to train to jump higher, why does it have necessarily to be different in an RPG? If I can't jump high, that means my character won't be able to reach certain places, that means he'll take more time to get around something, that's part of who he his. But if my character is an acrobat and can jump everywhere, that means he's different and plays differently. Sure being able to jump high may seem like more fun, but what is fun is being able to create different types of character that all plays differently. If all characters run at the same speed, jump at the same height and all, it becomes boring, you're character becomes less unique. If everyone can wear any type of armor, it's the same thing. If every combat-based character end up with the same ultimate armor and weapons, has the same skill sets and attended the same guilds, it svcks. Oblivion made it further that way and I sincerely hope Skyrim doesn't further it.

Pretty much.

And once again: thank you so very, very much for saying this. I'm tired of being the only one to point these things out.

I've made this point before, and I think I've actually made it in this thread, but I feel obligated to make it again: for most people, it wasn't the character building that would draw them into computer RPGs during the genre's golden age. Darklands isn't great because your characters have a lot of different skills. Ultima 7 isn't compelling because of the size of its stat sheet. Daggerfall isn't capable of svcking players in for countless hours because of its inclusion of a list of useless languages your character can be proficient in. These are games that are remembered and loved not because of how their stats or skills were handled, but because of how their settings, characters, and stories were handled. The most brilliant thing about the genre, and its greatest strength for the longest time, was its ability to so bring the player so deeply into the worlds and stories that they presented, to allow you to live within another universe and interact with a plot that felt like it had real meaning and weight. Hell, I don't even remember what the character stats in Ultima 7 involved, but trying to deal with the Guardian's subversion of religion is still fresh in my mind because that's what that game was about.

I feel like I'm rambling at this point, but... well, this is a point of major frustration to me. Nostalgia for the things that the genre has lost seems to have clouded a lot of RPG players to the things that brought them into the genre in the first place, and the things that made those older games so compelling. That's not to say that I think there's no room for character-based RPGs anymore, only that focusing on those sorts of things as though they were the defining factor of "RPGness" leads to an industry like the one we have today, where RPGs that are character-based are so intent on providing that kind of experience that they ignore what's important and where games that aren't even RPGs in a traditional sense very often provide a far better roleplaying experience than any RPG in the past several years could hope to.


This is basically how it's handled. You can level your character however you like, though your character will level up faster if you're increasing skills that are already higher (meaning that, combined with the slower leveling at higher levels, you could start to develop your blunt skill at a higher level but you would gain levels at a much lower rate because of it).

This is actually a reasonable argument. Personally, though, I agree with the OP on this subject - I think Bethesda isn't trying to limit character diversity, but is instead moving to a system where character diversity is less dependent on skills.

I could be wrong, of course. They could just be removing skills and laughing evilly for... no particular reason other than to spite us, I guess. But until I hear Todd Howard actually burst into maniacal laughter on stage, I'm willing to extend Bethesda the benefit of the doubt.

Glad to see you speak for the entire World. :rolleyes:

If your a ROLE-PlAYER as you claim then you'll enjoy being able to do what ever you want. :bolt:

It's-a me, Mario!

If we are able to do what we want. Do I think they are going to dumb it donw to the point of say ME2, No, I hope not. But I don't want less than Oblivion had either.

You're willing to get very angry over the possibility that you might be unable to play a character who runs fast but cannot jump high.

Don't you think maybe you need to get a little perspective?

Meanwhile, Sovern wins the thread.

You're ignoring the point that he's making. Your skills and proficiencies define you as a character? Fine. Your characters have extensive backgrounds? Also fine. Your characters have such extensive backgrounds, within which the separation of their ability to run and their ability to jump play such a large role, that having those skills combined seriously impacts your ability to roleplay? That really doesn't make sense. Like he said, try to make a character where their inability to jump high while being able to run fast is a definitive element of who they are. It's really not doable, unless your characters are strange to an almost inconceivable extreme.

You've spent all this time harping on how bad it would be for those two specific skills to be combined because of how they would impact your roleplaying, but you still seem to be incapable of actually explaining how having those two skills in particular combined would make it harder for you to get into the role of one of your characters and every time you've been pressed to explain it you've shifted to talking about removal of skills being bad in general terms rather than bothering to respond with an explanation as to why the combination of those two specific skills would be bad in that way.



Glad to see that you're willing to uphold such a massive double standard that you can make blunt blanket arguments about roleplaying inherently requiring a large number of character skills while at the same time being willing to criticize someone for saying that it inherently doesn't (and with me providing a fairly long justification and you providing the justification that... well, more or less that it is because it is, no less).

I'm not angry I'm disappointed. Perhaps unjustly, but I am. Sorry that I like unique builds and role-plays.

I think Mass Effect was vastly improved from the first one and I enjoy it much better., I think Oblivion was vastly improved from morrowind and enjoy it much better. To top it all off, I think fall out 3 was a huge improvement from Oblivion and found it a lot more fun. Need I say more? What you see as dumbing down I see as improvements. If I still feel immersed in the world, THAT is what matters.

Yeah, seeing these forums, not everyone thinks the same thing obviously. Some of what he said are what I'd say partly true for most here, but there's some awful generalizations. Skills and different factions, artifacts, the travel system, limited level scaling, those are all elements that made Morrowind so much fun to me. Of course I loved the story and living in another world, but all this work hand in hand.



Meh, immersive game =/= good.

Explain how a system with three fewer skills (from a list of 21) and a large number of unique perks per skill is going to be less able to provide you with a unique build than a system with three extra skills and far fewer/no skill-specific perks.

EDIT:
So... skills, the game world, the game world, the game world, and the game world made Morrowind fun to you. With four of those being... pretty much exactly what I said is so important. As for skills... well, just as a thought experiment, if Morrowind had no skills at all and just had a more basic leveling system with automatic character progression, would that have ruined it for you entirely? Would the different factions, the artifacts, the way travel was handled, the way enemy difficulty progresses, the story or the world have suddenly stopped having any appeal for you?

The point I'm trying to make isn't that skills are irrelevant. The point I'm trying to make is that the specific number of skills is irrelevant in the face of several other things.

Did Oblivion benefit from a streamlined skill set? No, we effectively got less. Will Skyrim go the same route? I hope not.

In regards to your last post; depends, what skills are they getting rid of, or merging. But its not just that, I didnt like the whole tone of the article. I hope I'm wrong. I'm a Beth F@nboy, but I wont sit around idle, concealing my concerns.

I was going to respond to this, but rabish said it better than I ever could. "A guy who can run fast but cannot jump high" is not a unique build or role-play, and it's not important to any unique builds or role-plays.

Well, we'd need to play the game first-hand. All we say is that it doesn't sound good so far, but we have absolutely have no idea how it will exactly play out in the end. Though I think it's safe to assume some skills will be lacking despite perks, I'm not advancing that overall skills will be necessarily lacking.

Yet it is to me. Your opinion is just that, an opinion. Your not going to change my opinion, so you might a well stop quoting/ responding to me.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere.

This is really what we need to be focusing on. We have to stop arguing about whether or not less skills has to mean less diversity of possible characters - it most definitely does not. What we should really be focused on is whether Bethesda is actually going to do this properly, and is actually going to use perks to add more diversity between characters where previously they used skills. That's something worth being concerned over.

I talked about this not too far ago: it's written as it doesn't matter at all, but ultimately such character plays differently than one who doesn't run fast and jump high. The later will be able to get across steep environment easier, sometimes getting somewhere the other can't, while the other may have to get somewhere the hard way, he might get somewhere faster too. It's all about immersion and having consequences to your choices. If every character plays identically, what's the point of making an RPG? Why not just make an action adventure game. It just kills the whole fun. I thought a big thing about RPGs was having choice, it's not by limiting your possibilities, by limiting the consequences of the way you play that it's deeper or that there's a lot of choices.

Untrue. Every skill in Oblivion had four perks, and each of those perks had some significant impact on the game, which is quite a bit better than Morrowind's approach with the skills. The issues there were more with how the skills were used by the actual gameplay systems (overly aggressive leveling, simplistic combat, and a few simple exploits made a lot of them more or less irrelevant), but the skills themselves were considerably better-developed and more complex as a result, and in some cases (archery) losing the other skills allowed them to make pretty clear improvements to the system that the remaining skill used.

We didn't "effectively get less". We effectively got something different. You didn't like that something, but that absolutely doesn't mean that it's something less.


Okay, this can't keep going, it's getting ridiculous. Please, please EXPLAIN how you would make a character build that relies on the character being able to run fast but not jump high as a major element of his character in this series. Please. Don't give a vague response. Don't give a response implying that it's because you're losing skills, or say something like "because it is". Don't talk about it in terms of how it's going to impact game design, because we're talking about character builds in terms of roleplaying here. Now... explain.