Tell me where there is a perk (what are you talking about with stats? there are no stats. stats=attributes) that increases mana regeneration or overall movement speed.

Attributes govern how well you can perform your skills. perks are simply little bonus features, such as "increased arrow recovery" or "chance to disarm opponent", though not limited to those, but that's the way it should be. Attributes could also govern how well you can perform your perk bonuses as well!





Because it provides balance to the gameplay. It adds a sense of realism. You'd expect a mage to have a high intelligence than a warrior, or a warrior to have a higher strength than a mage.

I can see where you're coming from with "well, now it's just that we expect mages to cast magic and warriors to use swords/ages/maces".

But without attributes, now it's just "oh, you want to be a warrior? well, do you want to use an axe or a sword? light armour or heavy armour?" instead of "do you want to hit harder, or do you want to move faster, or a balance of both? do you want to use an axe or a sword? Heavy armour or light armour? If you choose heavy armour, do you want to balance the speed restriction with increased speed attribute, or do you want to maximize your tank ability by increasing your endurance and physical resistance?"

It simply adds another element of customization to the game. Without them, the game just feels boring and our characters are forced into tighter molds that restrict our freedoms.




Light armour and heavy armour are exactly the same, end-game at least, provided you choose the perk that makes them weightless.

And sprinting is not the same as increasing your maximum speed. It's a short burst of energy that makes you run faster. I like it, and I'm glad they finally implemented it in the series. Speed is an OVERALL maximum increase in movement. There is a difference.

i like that attributes are gone. they were a relic of an older era (figuratively and literally )

the attributes always felt a bit artificial and contrived in TES. switching to a more skill-based nature is a good direction, hopefully next they'll remove the whole levelling bit and have skills fully control character development and derived stats.

They are not wrong, you just did not like them because they were not implemented right.

What if those would be classified as minor skills and would not contribute to leveling at all! Some may find this a bad idea but just a thought as we are all just brainstorming!

So you are saying they ARE doing the exact same thing Skyrim does without attributes...


Yes, there are a perk for those.

And only attributes are stats? Seeing the rest of the reply, you completely disregard the skills, because those are not numerical values that represent your characters capabilities? Those are stats, or attributes, so skills are also attributes.
Skills can also govern how well your perks will do, in fact it would make more sense.

And what do you mean "the way it should be", where is it stated how things "should be".

I haven't read this entire thread, but I *REALLY* miss being able to make faster characters.

there is no good reason my Orc shouldn't get bigger buffer and maybe slower less agile, while my bosmer gets faster and more agile.

I liked the attributes for sure.

Bethesda forgot that many people like numbers, in this type of games. It seems silly, but it is not. They envisioned the situation this way "a player capable of monstrous jump, levitate, or run faster
than the powder does not make sense,let's do it more believable and human".
Not a bad idea, but breaks the freedom and fun for some people. I think a system that lets you focus on three or four attributes and skills, and limiting the rest with penalties (eg, forgetting an untrained skill over time and penalizing its corresponding attribute), would have perhaps a better or same result.
You want to run and jump higher than anyone in the game?. No problem but when you want to focus on other things, take a chance of losing what you have learned.
That would make it difficult to end up being a "superman" maintaining the old style..

Well, now there are the perks ... future mods perhaps correct that feeling.

Oh yeah? Then show me, or tell me the names of them and I'll look them up.



Ah, you're right. I guess I was confused.



Skills are just there to govern how you gain levels, and which perks you unlock for each skill, and slightly modifies the performance of the skill. Like one-handed damage, which isn't all that noticeable. The real power comes from choosing the damage perks, which I personally think should be removed.

I'd much rather have strength govern the damage of melee and bows (albeit, less influence on bows), and your carry weight. This way, if you use a combination of different weapon types, you still receive a bonus to damage for all of them, factored in from your strength.

And I would like to see endurance influence not only your HP, but your resistance to physical damage in general.

I mean, if we had to combine some of the attributes together for the game to flow better, then I wouldn't have too much of a problem with it. As long as we don't boil it down to only a few attributes. Maybe combine agility and endurance together, I'm not sure.

Of course, there would have to be tweaks to everything so that it doesn't break the balance of the game and such...




Because I think it flows better that way. I would like to see attributes govern the passive abilities of skills, while perks add non-passive traits. I feel like it makes more sense this way.

Or maybe a combination of both, where passive abilities of perks are enhanced if you increase the corresponding attribute.

Again, it's all about further customizing your character to make it more defined from the rest.

I honestly don't miss the attributes at all. Sure strength was supposed to raise your attack power on top of increasing your carrying capacity... But honestly, other that raising my encumberence, I really didn't notice the raise in attack power. Actually, to be quite frank, I didn't notice it at all. The mere upgrade from iron to silver daggers were bigger upgrades than from 40 - 80 strength.

As for the rest of the attributes? Same deal. The only one that mattered really was speed. My honest opinion is this: I'm glad I walk around like a normal human being (a more realistic experience). I'm glad I sprint around with a limited capacity, and like a normal human being (a more realistic experience). I'm glad I can work on my endurance to increase the longevity of my sprint... which also seem more realistic. The speed attribute pumped to 100 made you run faster than a horse in Oblivion (Top it with Athlethics...more speed). That always seems crazy to me.

The speed attribute always broke immersion for me. Just my two cents.

So, instead of tweaking it, you'd rather just scrap it entirely? That's no fun.

Erm, you might wanna re-read your post, you never mentioned Stamina in it at all, you just said you hated skyrim's system.

In effect, yes... but only to a certain degree. With Oblivion's attribute system you could develop a character in more subtle ways than Skyrim's three options + perk currently allows, giving you more control to define your character and adding to the role-playing element (ie. dropping points into personality for a character specializing in speechcraft). Whether that level of control is actually desired is purely subjective but I think it did give more freedom. You could argue that perks do the exact same thing but as someone else stated, perks are chosen skills/abilities whereas attributes defined your character's basic makeup eg. a high strength low intelligence warrior or a high agility low strength thief. Now characters are only defined by their skills which seems to blur the distinctions between characters. To me that lowers the replay value as I feel there's less room for creating unique characters given the shallow perk system.

Never did I say it had or should be one way or the other. Just giving my opinion on how it actually is.

I miss attributes too, although the perks system somewhat makes up for it.

The only thing I hate about the perks system is getting around the stars on a console IS A NIGHTMARE.

I miss Speed too. It was always fun in MW to pick the fastest starting SPD race, then pick the Steed birthsign for +25 SPD, then pick speed as a custom stat for +10 SPD and you could be zipping around like a hummingbird at level one. You could do the same with END instead with Redguard and the Lady and END as a custom stat. Etc. Oblivion had lower bonuses but you could still do the same kind of thing.

Thats what I miss most about stata.

Yeah, it was fun leveling up speed, agiilty, athletics and acrobatics to outrun anything and jump on rooftops. Of course, with the leveling system of TES games, you always leveled up too fast with these attributes.

I cannot tweak the attributes on a console. I decided to buy Skyrim on the 360 due to finacial reasons. But honestly why have speed, when capped out, walk/run faster than superman flies? IMO, have it normal and let the modders tweak it UP, not the other way around. I only say this because people are ALWAYS look for realism mods... Running faster than a locomotive is always a start.

Don't go there. Saying a SYSTEM is 'dumbed down' is not an insult. As systems can not be insulted, they have no feelings. I am not "insulting a broad group of people" by saying the REMOVAL of something is dumbing down the system.

I am not even stating an opinion. I am merely listing a truism that can not be argued against. 3 stats are LESS THAN 10 stats. This is not an opinion. Removing complexity is what it is. "dumbed down' is the slang for vastly reduced complexity.

Yes in Oblivion it was wonky.
But in MOrrowind, the whole point of super maxed stats fit in perfectly with that game's open ended structure. I mean really, becoming godlike in Morrowind was the entire point of that game. Doing it via stats was hilarious and sometimes game breaking, but you are essentially becoming a god in that game, so at high levels, it made sense to have godlike speed and strength.

I have not played enough Skyrim to say of being godlike is good or not, but early reports are enchanting/smithing glitches make you even MORE powerful than Over Maxed stats in Morrowind. So already this idea that "stats lead to exploits" has been debunked and reducing the complexity of stats in Skyrim did nothing to curb Godlike characters from appearing in the first few hours of the game.

The downside is there a REDUCED COMPLEXITY (again) to what type of god you can become.

In morrowind I could become a melee god or a super speed god, or an acrobatic jumping thief god, or a summoning god who floats and flies.

In Skyrim everyone just has endless magic and super armor, no stats, so every character is essentially the same. Again this is reduced complexity, reduced variety, and reduced re playability.

That right there sums up the reason why Attributes and Classes are not only needed but ESSENTIAL in an RPG.

I don't.

EXACTLY!

My personal problem with having just skills and no attributes is that skills now exist within a vacuum. The nice thing about attributes is that they have a compound effect on anything associated with them, for example under older systems the strength attribute influenced all actions that you'd associate with being dependant on how strong a person was, I could hit things harder regardless of what I was hitting them with and could carry more. If damage upgrade perks are essentially strength as some people on here have claimed then why doesn't spending a perk point to increase my one handed damage also modify my damage with two handed weapons? You could argue that skill is more important but that wouldn't account for the complete lack of correlation between the skills given that damage bonus perk = strength stat and arguing that skill is paramount essentially invalidates the argument that strength just exist in a modified form.

What about if Bethesda decide to put arm wrestling or moveable boulders into their games? they'd either need to put two new skills in the game or find some contrived way to tack them on to already existing ones as befell magic resistance and hand to hand. They could solve this by having a strength skill but then hey presto, you've pretty much got attributes back! Attributes also allow for player actions that perhaps don't really deserve their own dedicated skill. Just look at athletics and acrobatics for a prime example, a lot of people (including myself) thought that those two skills were a little bit redundant as there was no choice involved in levelling them bar walking everywhere and never jumping. Wouldn't it have made more sense just to make run speed and jump height dependant on attributes? With Skyrim that's not possible.

On a related note, I'm not fundamentally against perks but I don't like how they were done here. Why can't I be good at resisting magic damage if I don't want to train in alteration? Or hand to hand without investing in heavy armour/wearing gloves. I just don't think current perk system is fit for purpose, why do we have damage bonuses when that could be covered by the skill level? To stop me becoming master of everything? Wouldn't allowing me as many perks points as there are perks have the same effect? Limiting the amount of perks you can acquire is what results in specialization, not the perk system itself and limitation can be done with attributes too. Also why include mechanics that should have already been integrated into the core system, like weapon specialities? Destruction magic does it, each element has it's own unique characteristics like stamina or magicka damage, why isn't bleeding damage a facet of axes to begin with? Why should I be forced to take perks I don't want to reach ones I do want? Why do perks range from basically useless, to ones that trivialise entire mechanics like the light foot and conditioning perks? Why if there's such a discrepancy between perk usefulness do they all cost exactly the same to unlock? You know what you're getting with attributes, each attribute point I take will increase that attribute by the same amount as the last one did, it's more consistent.

Not to bash perks though, I'm sure there's things that simply work better as perks and Skyrim has some examples of this but they're generally rare I think.

I'm rambling a bit here but my main point is that sure, attributes and perks could be considered interchangeable. Except that perk type character improvements only work in relation to a single skill whereas attributes describe the general qualities of a character and can work in relation to multiple actions, even ones that aren't assigned skills.

what exactly is a roleplaying game? are stats needed to play a role?

I would argue yes, because stats interact directly with the world and the game is able to react based on values that it understands. It's the reason why we can't really roleplay as someone who undresses people by barking or Maven Blackbriar's pet hamster. The game cannot react appropriately to those situations. We could imagine that the game was reacting to those roles but then why bother with the game at all?

I'm sure that's probably an unfair anology but I don't really roleplay so I wouldn't know