Or maybe smiting; a new name for the blunt/axe skill. :sweat:

IF the OP is correct about what Bethesda have likely done with the perks....then I am somewhat relieved.

Swimming is a useless skill primarily because the world has only a small amount of water, and the vast majority of quests will never take you near them. If the setting was something more like Bioshock's Rapture, swimming could be a very important skill to have. Most people will not have problems with removing skills that have no use in game.

That said, most skills are not like swimming. Things like Spear, Unarmored, Axe, two blade skills, etc are only useless if the developers insist on making them useless. These are not skills that are limited due to the setting the game takes place in. Certain skills (like Mercantile) are effectively, but not fundamentally, useless. In MOrrowind and Oblivion, you'd find yourself stupidly rich regardless of your skill at bartering. The solution is not to drop the skill, but to improve it. I want to see TES expandon what it does well, not needlessly limit itself.

Everything you just said is exactly why it only took me a few minutes to get over there only being 18 skills. :thumbsup:

The only reason I was worried anyways is because I was thinking it might be harder to roleplay characters that are very different from eachother, but after hearing about the other changes to gameplay it's sounding like it may be easier anyways.

Euh, no. If you use some skills a lot less, that just makes things more balanced. In Morrowind, I never bothered constantly taunting people and such to get my speechcraft up (being a warrior character), I don't know why that would change in Skyrim. Who cares if some people would bother using skills outside their skillset. You wouldn't be power gaming, unless you do it on purpose. Then again, you can train a skill to 100 if you have the money... And that's also where a certain type of skills can come in. Say you get some sort of minor ones which are easier to level up and work apart from the combat ones for example. You can't make it work differently too you know, but I don't see it as necessary.
Those skills may be useless to you, but if so, don't use them. I'd certainly want to be able to use them, or see the consequences if I don't use them, thing is not everyone play the game for the same reasons. But hey, I couldn't care less about dual wielding and sprinting, it's useless, why not take them out of the game? :whistling:

Thank you Orzorn. I think that the number of skills doesn't have as big of an effect as how they are implemented and how the game works as a whole.

oh no! what will I ever do without speech and barter!?????????????????? GUYS HELP ME!

So, the skills picture shows a list of skills, probably readable by scrolling sideways... But no attributes. They aren't mentioned in the article part about leveling up either. Do you think they've ditched them completely?

I doubt it.

If they did, that would really svck.

I admit I was feeling pretty miffed about the further reduction from 21 to 18. But this puts a bunch of my worries to rest. If the perk system is the machine of being able to specialize skills within a skill, I'll be happy.

This, your explanation has made me a little more excited because if they use perks the way you described, characters could get really specialized and different.

Guesswork on what the whittled skill list might look like:
any outstanding corrections?

Combat
1-handed melee (swords, axes, maces) (Str)
2-handed melee (spears, greatswords,...other big hammers) (Str)
Armor (End)
Shield (block) (End)
Smithing (End)
?---? (Per?)*

Magic (all confirmed, placement guessed)
Alteration (Will)
Restoration (Will)
Destruction (Will)
Conjuration (Int)
Enchant (Int)
Illusion (Per)

Stealth
Alchemy (baking and the like) (Int)
Marksman (Agility)
Security (Agility)
Stealth (Agility)*
Speechcraft (Per)
H2H (Str)

*If for whatever reason Sneak was classified under Personality, and Athletics or Dodge skill could fit the leftover Agility slot in the Combat section.
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I pulled this from the end of the other thread.
I thought about it as well, but they specifically stated 5 schools of magic, where Illusion has always been a school in the past.
I think they would keep it defined as magic.

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The odd duck in all of this seems to be balancing Personality.

Sorry if this has been discussed already, but did the article mention anything about attributes?

Same here. I must admit I don't have the mag in my hands and only heard a tiny bit about perks, but they better use this to make skills specialized and deep as ever.

Not that I have heard, just sticking to the old ways until we hear otherwise.

Here's my problem with that list:
We don't even know if attributes are in the game. I looked at the screenshot with the skills overlaid over the starts, and I saw several things. I saw the character's name, race, level, a list of their skills, their health, stamina, and magicka.

But no attributes. Not even a hint of them. Not even a hint of them in the article (or the parts that I read).

If there are indeed attributes, they made a poor attempt at telling us about them.

And I don't understand how they could get rid of attributes. How would one's stats be derived? Does everyone have the same encumbrance? If so, do I have to waste perks increasing it? Does everyone have the same speed? Why is the big dumb warrior more likable than the silver tongued rogue?

This is a troubling issue.

On the list itself:
They most likely do not have specializations anymore, like combat, magic and stealth. There really was never a need for the separation.

Perhaps they didn't combine armor skills. That would fill them back out.

Everything else seems in order, but we can never be sure whether they kept the same skills from Oblivion/Morrowind or created totally new ones.

Yes. In the article, they explain that leveling gives you a choice of increasing health, stamina, or magic rather than of increasing an attribute. They've explained the menus as well: up to show skills with constellations relating to different skills and individual stars in the constellations for individual perks, left and right for inventory and spells, and down for the map. Going by that explanation leaves no real room for attributes in the menus, and even the skills page that's visible in the screenshots is laid out in a way that makes the health/stamina/magic being their own individual traits rather than being tied to attributes seem pretty likely.

Obviously not confirmation, but it definitely looks that way from the article.

EDIT:
From skills, I'd imagine.


Or else it's determined by something like Athleticism.


Probably not - it could be determined by something like Acrobatics, or by a new skill entirely.


I shouldn't need to explain how this would one be tied to skills rather than attributes, it's obvious if you've played the other games.


GI article actually confirms otherwise.

That svcks a bit. I mean, attributes weren't entirely solely about health, magic and stamina, there was much more depth to that. Plus, attributes were tied to skills, so you couldn't level up attributes without thinking about this. While Skyrim looks better than Oblivion from the little information we got so far, this concerns me a bit.

Sounds simplified to me

This is all very true, I will have to keep it in mind.



In FO 3 the Special stat menu was completely segregated
Just something else to consider.

[] not sure what FO NV looked like.

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All in all the specific amount of spell schools and types is tipping my hand more toward a 6 attribute, 3 skill per, system over a newly randomized one. [2] And the well divisible 18-6 and 18-3 combinations. As opposed to 19 or 21.

Simplification isn't always a bad thing. Imagine if computers were never "simplified."
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/lecy0013/architecture/old-computer-thumb.jpg
Imagine playing Oblivion on this.

Not being able to level attributes without considering how they're tied to skills isn't really relevant anymore, given that they've completely overhauled the leveling system. Now, levels allow you to increase your reserves of health, magic, or stamina (like I'd said in the last post). There are no classes (from what they've said) and there are no primary or secondary skills, but you're encouraged to specialize just by nature of the fact that continuing to increase a skill you're already high in will allow you to level much more quickly.

And yes, attributes weren't solely about those things, but the role they served was typically more of an "invisible hand" sort of thing where they would impact the results of most of your skills. They did do a few other things, but they mainly seemed to be tied to skills. That's not to say that the decision to remove them isn't... odd, to say the least, but it could definitely have advantages if they handle the skills and perks properly (such as more unique skills, more diversification between skills, and generally more diverse gameplay).

EDIT:
Maybe, but I don't see that being the case here. They go into a great amount of detail about both the menus in the game and the direction they're attempting to go with them, and having a separate menu entirely for the attributes wouldn't really fit with that.

And again, they also detail the process of leveling up with no mention of attributes, so even if they are in the game and simply separated from the rest of the content they'd have to be static throughout the game (which, again, doesn't fit well with other stated design goals - Todd talked in the article about not wanting to have the player pick a class or choose out the skills they'd be using for the overall game right from the start and about that being a motivating factor for the overhauled character system, so it wouldn't make sense for them to have static character attributes that can't be changed throughout the game).

Yeah... I guess I'll have to play the game to see how it turns out ultimately. Like the two words "level scaling" didn't prepare us to how it actually worked in Oblivion, it may be positive in this case.

Posting my list of guessed skills here, since my thread really isn't needed:

Marksman
One handed
Two handed
Polearm
Defense
Hand to hand
Destruction
Alteration
Conjuration
Illusion
Restoration
Enchant
Alchemy
Sneak
Security
Acrobatics
Speechcraft & Mercantile
Smithing

An important thing here is that I don't foresee any classification like in previous games, since there are no classes. Skills will probably be based just on attributes, that's the way I see it.

The article only really talks about level scaling in terms of the random quests in the game, and it does talk about it in terms that make it sound beyond reasonable (those random quests being generated based not only on your level, but on your overall character build and general experiences - they'll track which dungeons you've explored and try to send you to the ones you haven't and populate those with appropriate enemies, for example).