It has to be dark, midnight, with no moon out, on a Saturday, during spring, and the player's name must start with a "J". The player must have 3 balls of yarn in their inventory, and the weather must be cloudy, but not raining.

These are completely different situations. Being able to spam spells is not unbalancing the game in any way, all these things are. It's like comparing apples to oranges. Yes, they're both fruits, but that's were the comparison ends.



It's called the console.

:goodjob:

It just doesn't make sense if those restrictions aren't there. Otherwise I just spam spells and the game is ruined /sarcasm

You don't find having the ability to cast or create new powerful Master level spells at level 1 hurts the game balance?

IMO we are comparing apples to apples, smaller apples to bigger apples perhaps.

It doesn't make sense that we can only level those in combat actually. You think people dove head first into battle in order to learn how to use a sword? I would advocate being able to practice those skills outside of combat on random things like trees too.

While I can see your point, I wouldn't want it to be that easy to practice a spell. One thing I never understood in Oblivion, if you go to the Arcane University they have a special building devoted to practicing spells, but you couldn't actually practice anything there. Same with those archery targets and practice dummies scattered about the game. If you wanted to spam something in the game, you should at least be required to do so in some sort of meaningful context.

I completely agree, there were all these interesting spaces designed for training in Oblivion and the best we got was a Fade to Black if we paid a trainer. (Although there is a skill boost if you watch the fighters outside the Arena for a while.)

It could be cool if when you go to train with a 1-Handed or 2-Handed master, for example, someone at the Fighter's Guild, you begin some sort of practice fight in the training room (without killing each other). Same goes for the training areas at the College of Whispers, or whichever mage's faction will be joined in Skyrim. The training with a master could be a sort of combat or active lesson in a specific type of spell casting.

I would be all right with that but then what's the difference between a dummy or a target and a tree :shrug:
I just see it as only making it too easy if you're willing to stand there and spam it. If you're willing to spam it the problem isn't that the option is there it's that you're making the choice to make it too easy for yourself when you could just as easily ignore it.

That would be kind of cool actually, alot more immersive than simply entering a menu in order to train something.

Immersion for one thing. But there would at least be some sort of inconvenience and sacrifice involved. You couldn't just decide while walking through a forest that you're going to start pounding on some tree you're passing. You'd have to travel to where you knew there was an appropriate practice facility and be forced to decide whether it was really worth the bother at that time.

A good middle ground in this hypothetical situation :thumbsup:
Too bad Beth probably isn't going to do that if the information in the OP has any merit :sadvaultboy:

The unlock example makes sense, but the restoration and conjuration ones do not. Restoration should give experience any time you use it to heal actual injury, wheter it is sustained from a swordblow to the skull, or from stepping too close to a bonfire, or from leaping from a rock that was a little too high.

Likewise, why would conjuration experience only be gained if your summoned being does damage to an enemy? Daedra aren't even always summoned for combat puroses. Their are masters of conjuration in the game lore whose main reason for summoning Daedra is information gathering. The examples you give for these two fields suggest tying experience to combat, even though they are not neccessarily combat related spells or schools of magic.

I think you have some valid points here.

Those were just a couple of ideas off the top of my head. Hopefully whatever the dev team has done is much cooler. (although the unlock spell thing seems like a no-brainer)

It's late. I'm tired. It is possible that I missed something. So far, nothing I have read about Skyrim offers me even the teeny-tiniest inkling that we will increase our spell-casting ability by any means other than casting spells. To me, that means we only raise our spell-casting skills by casting spells over and over again, which means mashing buttons.

Not only that, but you don't get full value for your actions when using a practice facility. So if you take a swipe at a practice dummy with your sword, you only get half the experience that you would against a real opponent. Same thing with spells.

The reason why it seems the repetitive spell casting is removed from Skyrim is the following quote from Todd Howard (which could be mistranslated or misunderstood, granted).

While people might not like repeat button pushing, it is pretty clear from the number of people who do it, that they at least like the results, and the like the fact that they CAN do it, even if they don't particularly enjoy the process.


Also, in most cases, it makes sense. How and Why would you gain more Restoration skill from healing yourself during a fight than you would from healing yourself after a bad fall, or from curing yourself of a disease? Why would you get experience from summoning a Dremora to bash in your enemies head (something most Dremora would be happy to do anyway), but not gain experience for summoning a Dremora to sit down and have a cup of tea with you. . . especially if He hates tea! Why would summoning a light spell to brighten a zombie filled cave grant experience, but casting one to brighten your rat infested basemant not do so?

To make spells only give experience in combat situations serves only one purpose . . . drastically handicapping your ability to level skills more efficiently. You still have to mash buttons. You just have to wait for the right opportunities to do it. And that journeyman spell you were so eager to use. . . will remain locked to you for many hours longer. And then legions of people will complain about that. . . but at least they will be complaining about a feature that they CANNOT optionally get around, rather than one that is left entirely to their discretion.

No, no! Not Spring. Winter. Spring darkness isn't dark enough. It has to be Winter Darkness. And it has to be cloudy, so no star, But there cannot be any snow on the ground. . . cause, you know, reflective light.

I can only speak for myself, but I would be ecstatic if it were confirmed to be impossible in Skyrim to cast unlock repeatedly on a door to raise Alteration, for example. I would be ecstatic because it would mean no more meaningless button mashing.

I would be thrilled to cast my first journeyman Alteration spell after naturally reaching that level from casting open lock in meaningful gameplay situations. (i.e., actually opening locks)

Man, you still don't get it do you? No one is forcing you to play that way, that's entirely your choice. I don't play that way in Oblivion, aside from some early Conjuration spamming, and my character doesn't suffer at all from not doing it. Just the opposite in fact. Everytime I play I get bored at about level 15 because I'm just not coming across many enemies that are a match for me, among other things. At that point I pretty much need a 3 to 1 match, with at least one of them being a high level creature, before I really end up breaking a sweat in combat.

If it would thrill you so much why not simply do that anyway even if you could simply spam the spell? Why would you do something you clearly don't enjoy and then complain about it when the option that thrills you so was always there from the start?

It's like punching yourself in the face and complaining that it hurts.

No one is forcing me to equip the most powerful weapons I find, to craft the most powerful spells I can craft, to build my character in the most effective way possible (which can mean something ridiculous like picking major skills that you never use, etc.) , but that is part of a role playing game for me. To look at all the variables and enjoy the game as my character grows from insignificant wimp to a legendary hero. Personally, I don't spam spells very much, usually just to get those last few levels to journeyman, but I still believe the mechanic that lets you do that is broken.

If there were an unintended glitch where you could talk to a certain NPC and suddenly get 100000 septims, certainly, we could all just avoid it, and most of us probably would (myself included). But the dev team would acknowledge that that is something broken that needs to be fixed.



I find the entire leveling system has lots of problems in Oblivion and I prefer to play with several overhaul mods that make combat a lot more deadly. (In order to get through almost every battle, I usually die at least a few times and have to reload.) Each playthrough lasts at least 300-400 hours for me.

The Game Informer preview in February says that the class system has been replaced by a "system that rewards experience for everything you do in the game and has safeguards in place to limit exploits" (p. 50). I think the question and answer you quoted address exploits rather than routine skill advancement. In Oblivion, there are numerous simple, repetitive exercises players do just to raise skills. Players may cast a basic light spell over and over again to improve their Illusion skill, not because they need light. They may go into sneak mode and set their character to auto-walk into a wall just to raise their Sneak skill, not because they need to sneak past anything. My impression is that the developers are making an effort to limit our experience gains to needed uses of skills, not to any use of skills. So, to prevent us from gaining experience simply from casting "unlock door" a bunch of times on a door, perhaps they will award experience only once for unlocking a particular door, or award a diminishing amount of experience for repeated unlocks of the same door. I am only guessing, though; Bethesda might surprise me again.

The only question is, is it worth preventing me from skill up by casting a spell over and over again, if the price means screwing over gameplay entirely?

Because I can't find a way to prevent myself from playing my way without punishing everyone else.

It would lead to the situation where you would be using the skill legitimately, but was unable to gain skill points because the game thinks you are not using the skill "as intended".

That's the point, really; if making a change screws more people over than help anyone, is it worth the change?

(That's pretty much what happened with levelled rewards in Oblivion: in order to "fix" game difficulty, Bethesda destroyed the entire risk-reward mechanic in the process. Baby, bath water, etc.)