If everything they cut is somehow still in the game, just in another way like perks etc. Things will be fine, but from what they are saying, it doesnt seem that way. What about Luck? No more luck now?

This is so tough for me. I have alot of faith and trust with BGS and Todd. Alot of the announcements are very exciting (deeper economy, Radiant AI/Story deepening, better animations, etc) and have me thinking that this will possibly be the best TES yet. However, when I hear things like removing Athletics and Acrobatics, I get concerned. I'm the guy who jumps everywhere to boost my jumping height and swims for hours to boost my speed because I play a stealth character and those two aspects are hugely important to my playstyle. Yeah it looks rediculous but it's what I need to do to prep my character for play.

Maybe jump height and character speed are now perks, and if that's the case I"ll be somewhat appeased. But when I'm used to having 100 acrobatics, 100 athletics, 100 Speed, super lightweight armor with jumping and speed bonuses and a spell that boosts my jumping and speed by another 100 apiece, simply having a few perks isn't going to be enough for me. I want the flexibility and granularity that attributes can give.

I still am taking the "wait and see" approach, and even if my worst fears are realized, I'll still get the game cause there's nothing else like this out there. But I'm having the same feelings and concerns I had when the lead up to Mass Effect 2. I still got ME2 and enjoyed it, but felt they improved the things I was secondarily concerned about while axing the things that made the game cusotmizable. Hopefully Skyrim doesn't go down that path.

As I (and some other people) said earlier, all the perks are related to skills. There are no general perks.

This is probably because Bethesda is trying to make races more different this time. To me, it seems a great feature (unnecessary) is sacrificed for this.

The removal of attributes greatly effects the level of depth in the game. This ranges from playing 'weird' characters such as a stupid Altmer, and a charming Orc. It also decreaces the possibilleties in combat, no more drain and damage strength against strong opponents, for instance. The same for enchanting and otherwise preparing your gear, from enchanted rings to poisons and potions prepared against a specific enemy also suffer from this. Opponents that would provide great danger for those who do not know what they are going to face or are not prepared for (think grater bonewalker) will become even more rare.

Removing attributes harms the options in the game. And while perks are a great way to extend the skill system, they will not be able to effectively replace attributes, witch, since Arena have been the core gameplay feature. By removing this, I fear the game will soon feel 'hollow'.

For those who are going to say I don't want any change (It will probably happen), I agree that changes should be made and the games should 'evolve', otherwise the games would simply remain the same all the time. However, those changes should mainly expand on the games options, and while perks are a great way to do this, removing attributes is not.

I do agree in a way.

If they felt that attributes weren't doing anything, they should have made them do something, not just remove them.

Getting rid of Luck is the first thing I would have done had I been in charge.

Well at least you're cool as long as everything is in perk form. Some people aren't even happy about that. Pete confirmed attributes have been folded into skill perks and health/magicka/stamina.

Why? Because you want ES to be a linear action game?

How was that any different that in Oblivion or Morrowind where you chose to be a heavy armour tank, and chose your major skills best suited for a heavy armour tank, and did things best suited for a heavy armour tank?? What other differences will there be apart from the fact that you don't get to look at your strength and endurance, and only see your health??

I would actually argue that the attribute system in Oblivion caused all of the characters to be the same (except for racial abilities and birth sign). In Oblivion, you were able to raise all attributes and skills to 100. So now my orc butt-kicker was just as strong as my wood-elf mage, and just as effective with magic. With there being around 280 perks, but only being able to choose 50-ish of them, there will be much more differentiation between your characters. You will now be forced to decide if you want to be effective with both axes and swords, or be very effectvie with just one of them. Do I want to be able to deal out a ton of magical damage, have decent magic damage with some defensive magic, or be entirely defensive magic with some melee ability. Or any combination of the above.

Attributes have been folded into skill perks AND health/magicka/stamina. Confirmed. By Pete.

Removing the 5/5/5 or 5/5/1 "temptation" is a major bonus for this. With 200 perks and only 50 chosen, I see a wide variety of characters by end game, but from starting out until somewhere in the middle of early game, characters withing the same specialization (Combat/Magic/Stealth) as another with that specialization are going to all be much more similar to one another than they were in previous installments unless you are able to select a few perks right during character creation based on what skills you selected.

I don't know how its going to work any better than anyone else, but if you can just select perks for anything despite what you've done :swear: I can't imagine that they would do that though. You can't select a jumping or running perk when you haven't done anything that even remotely resembles physical exercise right? Or select a perk for more magicka reserves when you've never cast a spell right? The perks you are able to select from seem like they will be tied to how high the "logically" corresponding skill for that perk is.

I do see a problem such that the "logical" relationship between some skills might not be very sound. If Heavy Armor is tied to your Stamina, getting hit while wearing heavy armor may make you eligible for a speed increase which would be downright nonsensical and awful.

I'm fairly certain that the main reason they completely reworked the entire attribute concept is because they don't want level 2 characters beating their main quest again.

A quick overview statement on many of the responses: people need to be aware of the art and science of public relations. There are professionals, and Todd Howard is one of them, who are specifically tasked with the job of making negatives sound like positives.

Think of Todd Howard as the Beth equivalent of the White House Press Secretary and you might have a bit better understanding of the amount of credence you should grant his statements.

Particularly when he falls back, yet again, on an obvious talking-point buzzword like "spreadsheety."

A possible solution to this would be to give each race a, say, 10% or more boost for 'favoured' attributes, witch could also be done for the classes. Just removing attributes because you have gotten yourself perks seems a really strange way to work. Why not have both?

No, I said I wouldn't buy it until there were mods that undid these changes (by which I meant, until some one makes a mod that rewires the system to have attributes) and that will be for the PC, I said in one of my responses that I was going to log off the forums until I calmed down a bit. having done so I might even buy a 360 copy, its not as if every one who started the series with MW boycotting the game would stop it from selling major amounts of copies. thats what I am complaining about, they are dumbing the game down so that its more fun for people who just want to play the game for the MQ and the achievments.


the same results of attributes will be there, but the point is that they aren't earned by smart leveling, you just get them automaticly or by selecting perks from a list.

Tood? how is this less like a spreadsheet, replacing attributes with perks is not replacing a spreadsheet for a perk tree, its just a dumbed down spreadsheet that you don't need to look at.



I guess our combined luck attributes were not high enough for the luck attribute to survice the perk skill check.

This was because of level scaling. None of the games besides oblivion had this problem.

There were no intelligence speech checks in TES games, ever.

Racial bonuses can now actually matter this time.

Nothing really stops them from making some races faster and other races to have more magicka than others.

You're saying it like it's a bad thing...

Hell, following your logic would make FO3 a better game because it has attributes.

So I take it that people complained about Oblivion being too "confusing"?

Why does Beth insist on stripping games down on each iteration? It doesn't make sense, especially with the rage Oblivion inspired.

Because Oblivion's +attribute leveling system was so beloved. Leveling your main skills penalized you.

Someone doesn't like change very much.

Every time I see the word 'spreadsheety', it makes me think they are just trying to appeal to people that probably dont even like RPGs.

good post. I never really realised the implications that removing the attributes would have, especially concerning spells/potions like drain/absorb attribute. They really added a massive element of depth to things - it is really fun having to figure out what attributes enemies were strong in, or what attribute they were trying to drain etc - it was sort of what made the really strong enemies interesting (in morrowind more than oblivion I guess).
I certainly wont be getting depressed about it though, because I know that it will be an extremely fun game in its own way, just perhaps not as in depth in that regard, which is a shame.

it seems like beth is turning ES V into more of a shooter than a role playing game. We used to have sword, dagger, mace, etc and in Oblivion we had just edge and blunt.
the # of skills keeps going down, and in ES V this continues but has Perks to enhance the skills.
I am not sure i will get the game now. I think i will need a demo to see if i like all of the changes that are being made.

I really don't understand how a perk system with millions of different combinations is less complex and less like an RPG than 8 attributes and 21 skills.

Except they aren't dumbing down the game... People keep saying they are dumbing things down when in reality the games have been requiring more player skill, that's not dumbing down, that's smarting up (TM of Sleign :tongue:) There is more customization in Skyrim than in Morrowind or Oblivion, we've crunched the numbers. Oblivion was a step in the right direction and Skyrim seems to be the destination in the right direction from what we can see. We have three attributes now and to be honest, most people only used these three attributes with the exception of willpower, agility and speed and speed was only used because it made you op. We only really need health, stamina and magicka.

Also, how is it only fun for people that want to do the MQ? Didn't everyone complain about the MQ in Oblivion? Oblivion actually made the greatest side quests ever and that's the majority of the game, so yeah, the game has only got more intelligent, not small minded.