I don't miss all of them. I don't miss Luck, for instance. I always thought having Luck as an Attribute one could raise during the course of a game made no sense whatsoever. From a roleplaying perspective (which is how I play) I also thought raising one's Intelligence made no sense either. In real life luck and intelligence are not things we have too much control over. I like the concept of Personality a lot, but it has never had much of an effect on anything in any of the three TES games I have played. Perhaps if Bethesda did something important with it I would be sorry to see it go, but I'm not.

That leaves Agility, Endurance, Speed, Strength and Willpower.

When I play Skyrim I have to say I really, really miss Strength and Speed. I hate that every character - heck, practically everything in the game - moves at exactly the same speed and that there is no way to permanently increase that speed. That is just plain, flat-out wrong. From a roleplaying perspective (which is how I play) I should be able to run faster the more I train my body. I should get stronger the more I swing a heavy warhammer. I should be able to jump higher the more I practice jumping. These are basic roleplaying game mechanics, they have been a crucial part of the Elder Scrolls series since its inception. I can only hope they bring them back for #6.

I miss seeing my character every time I open the inventory.

Doesn′t make me worried. Nope, not one bit and you know why? Because I have Oblivion!

Most things, but mainly the faction quests I love DB and MG are great in this game

I feel the same. Why take the time to create the look of your character if you can't even view it? I really like the look of the armor in the inventory, but I would like the option to see it on the character too. Apart from viewing in 3rd person perspective, which I hardly ever do, there is no other way to see the awesomeness of my Khajiit.

That's a

good one! Very true. i get to see Lady Saga every time I make a post, at least.




And that's fine for you. Glad you've found what makes you happy. But for me, it would be like saying it "doesn't make me worried because I have Dungeons and Dragons". Know what I mean? If I really wanted to, I could still be rolling dice! I like trying new games. I like exploring new places, seeing new creatures. I need new challenges. It's what keeps me out of trouble, keeping my mind active. Plus, for every thing I've docked Skyrim for, there are at least a dozen new features I feel are improvements, or features that I simply like.

STill though....lack of attributes?!??? Argh!

I played Skyrim once, about a month ago. The main thing I miss is the user interface (PC player here). The new one is so clunky and unwieldy that it completely breaks any immersion I had, forcefully reminding me that I am playing a video game made for a console.

The other things I missed were:
The vibrancy of the colors in Oblivion. Everything in Skyrim is dull and grey.

The options in creating your character's face. Starting with FO3, Bethesda has been removing more and more of the sliders that control what you look like. The end result is that characters seem more generic.

Dunmer actually looking good. They look like goblins in Skyrim. In fact, I think the models and textures they used would be perfect for orcs.

The other races looking good too. Except for the Khajiit and Argonians, the appearance of everyone went drastically down in quality. Mostly it is the textures Bethesda used, which make everyone's skin looked like leather left out in the sun for a hundred years. Thankfully this has been fixed with mods. Likewise with the greasy, unwashed hair plastered to everyone's head.

Having to kill dragons to do the main quest. I like dragons. The serpent is one of the oldest symbols of women's power, and the chthonic forces of death and rebirth. The dragon is an extension of this. Fighting dragons is like fighting my own strength and wisdom, and subverting my own destiny. Thank you no.

I miss the attributes too. Everyone being just as strong as everyone else, just as fast, just as smart, etc... makes everyone less individual. I like deciding if I want a character who is quick and nimble, or one who is strong and dumb, or smart and weak. It is part of what makes them a skinny mage or a beefy fighter. Now my skinny mage can bench press the same weight as the biggest orc. And that nord scratching his butt and then licking his fingers afterward is just as brilliant as my valedictorian Altmer.

OTOH, I don't rabidly hate Skyrim either. I have been watching King Coin's videos of Aravi in Skyrim, and I often see things that are done so much better then Oblivion. The way the heather sways in the breeze, how dust kicks up in the wind, or how shadows crawl across the walls. All are just fantastic. The new lockpicking system (basically the same as FO3) is two big thumbs up for me. I hated it in Oblivion. Being able to talk to people without stopping time and zooming in on their face is great. Some of the new gear, like glass armor and weapons, are also far better in design from Oblivion's. So too is the art design on the nordic settlements, down to the little things like the horn-shaped candles.

I miss all the argonians and khajiit. ...Mostly khajiit.

A lot of things that I would pick have already been said. The only thing I can think of to add is the straight-forward thousand yard stare your playable character has in Skyrim. In Oblivion the pc has emotions on their face and looks around their environment.

Traveling through Cyrodiil seems like a walk in the garden after Skyrim. I definitely got that nostalgic feeling returning to such a clean, pretty world. Even the orcs and dark elves come in candy colors.

The thing I missed is the characters. The NPCs that we know so well, but mostly my own and other players.' Cyrodiil is where they live, so I’ll just wear sunglasses while I spend time with them. And try to get them all to move to Bruma.

I wouldn't call Skyrim's "improvement" over Oblivion a fact. It's an opinion. Mine is that Skyrim is in some respects better, in some respects worse, and generally reflects gamesas's inability to come to grasp with problems that arise in its various games, instead preferring to sidestep them in successive products rather than find solutions. As to Skyrim's snowy terrain: this wasn't necessary because the developers chose Skyrim, as they could have created more extensive temperature valley eco-systems, seacoast areas, etc. Even within the snowy belt, they could have shown far greater variation: northern Finland is not Antarctica is not southern Denmark is not Switzerland. They chose not to spend their time working on this.


And completely, utterly unbelievable. They built this huge, immersive game environment where you can interact with so much--and blew blew it completly when any two NPCs open their mouths. To me, it's the ultimate turnoff in Oblivion. Each to their own.


It's a matter of opinion, of personal taste--can't fault others for not caring, or preferring a lack of numbers, but I enjoy them a great deal. I like envisioning my character's relative strength, agility, will power, etc, and knowing too how these will affect both NPCs and combat. I enjoy knowing who my character is, what they've done, and how they grow. Without visible attributes, it's just very difficult to envision this, and the lack of so many useful attribute/skill/gender/race checks among NPCs during conversation with you (something gamesas has never had an interest in) makes it only worse. Going beyond roleplaying, I find it also part of the customization experience, the idea that I can craft a character the way I want. gamesas has taken some of that away, and given no satisfactory reasons for doing so. (The PR-based "we've done away with those horrible, dirty old numbers" nonsense is just the reverse of the way they marketed the numbers in previous ES titles, which leads me to think they're not quite serious about this.)

What did Strength and Intelligence (to pick two that have been brought up) ever actually DO though? Strength just dictated how much you could carry and had an effect on how much damge you could do with weapons, but not as large an effect as your skill with those weapons did. You can still increase your carry weight and weapons skills. Intelligence didn't do a single thing aside from determining your total magicka.

It's not like more intelligent characters could understand complicated books better, or come up with cunning ways to solve quests. And it's not like strong characters could smash down doors while other characters might have to go hunting for a key. "Strength" and "Intelligence" were just labels that applied to how much you could carry, how much damage you did with your sword and how much magicka you had. All those things are still in the game as variables, but are just given different labels and a different system for improving them all.

What faactions I'm in and the journal.

I miss a UI I can use.
I miss NPCs that I actually remember.
I miss being able to fight slaughterfish when I encounter them.
I miss guilds where I actually knew my other guildmates.
I miss the horrible, horrible people in the Dark Brotherhood. They were so much fun until I was paid to kill them all.

I miss having spells I want to cast.
I miss jumping down the street.
I miss my attributes.

I miss my Oblivion disc... which is probably in my Arkham City case, but I've swapped discs about 800 times since Skyrim came out, and not for games, mostly.

You are right about improvement being a matter of opinion. I just use the words 'the fact' a bit too much sometimes .

In this thread I mentioned things I liked in Oblivion, but can, with a bit of regret, live without in Skyrim. An example is the friendliness of the Cyrodiillians.
In Cyrodiil its just a fact of life to see Argonians walking on the streets, even having influential positions, despite them being as different to man and mer as they can get. In Skyrim they are looked down upon and mistreated. This makes me a bit sad, but I also understand that its part of the setting.

There are also things I miss that should have been in Skyrim.
An example the inventory UI problem that many people mentioned. Therefore I use a mod that makes it more orderly. I decided to not dedicate my thread to these things, since that would turn it into an 'Oblivion>Skyrim' type of thread, while both games have their good and bad points.

You've mentioned encumbrance, but Strength also affected fatigue and damage. And if you state damage wasn't affected as much by Strength as by Skill, the point is that you have a single attribute that helps all three factors: encumbrance, fatigue, and damage, to a considerable extent.

Intelligence was admittedly more important in Morrowind, where it affected both Alchemy and Enchanting. But in Oblivion it's still a huge factor in terms of your character's basic magicka amount, and through that affects magicka regeneration, too. If you're a mage of any kind, you want a high Intelligence.


By that logic, both race and birthsign are just factors that affects damage, magicka, etc, so no need for them to be shown as such, either--or elemental differences in spell damage, since they're just differently colored attacks and resistances that could as easily be represented by A, B, and C: simple variables. We don't need "elven" armor or any other kind of armor: it's just a term for a form of resistance to attack. All weapons are meant to yield damage: we can replace them with Generic Attack Item A, etc.

The ES series are roleplaying games. I can't speak for you, but for myself, I like to have many different types of weapons to choose from, and different spells--and by that same token, one character who is perhaps very strong, of a certain race, and a specific birthsign, etc. By taking away attributes and their numbers, I'm losing elements that let me tailor my character, just as much as the rest. That you don't care about this, I get. I have no problem with your preferences, but I'm not convinced that they are any better than mine.

Given that gamesas has reversed its previous PR spin on the numbers with Skyrim to play up to a different audience, I have to wonder: why couldn't they have provided the attributes and numbers that you agree are still there to those who want them, as a visible option, while leaving them out for those who don't care? Programmers are so linear. The idea of giving players the option to choose either way doesn't seem to have found favor--if it ever arose in development discussions.

We all do. It's called being a member of Club Human.


Skyrim's simply a different game from Oblivion, as both are from Morrowind. Each aims at a different player. There's nothing wrong with this, though each of us has his or her preferences. What I don't like about Skyrim most, however, is a certain laziness I perceive in development that is now relying upon modders to remedy issues. Getting one-shotted by enemies that look just like the rest around you, but are twenty levels higher? Let the modders deal with it. Don't like tiny, dirty towns? Let modders handle it. Hate the UI created for consoles? Oh, modders will pick up the slack.

I'm thinking Beth dropped a lot this because

1. They thought a lot of us wouldn't notice or care

2. It's easier to be lazy. Getting attributes to work behind the scenes (as your character is developing) takes lots of programming work, and I'm thinking they just decided to gut this stuff...

3. It's considered old-world thinking, and perhaps the new, younger programmers and a lot of gamers coming up simply don't see this stuff as valid anymore. They're satisfied with the dumbing-down trend (or in the case of lots of younger gamers, they dont' even notice it). That's why I'm thinking the next TES could perhaps be so dumbed-down in this regard, numbers will be a thing of the past. It'll just all be purely visual. And we'll have to start "roleplaying" when our characters get stronger and smarter and more agile.


...I'm speculating, though. I don't know any of the real answers. And my speculations are bumming me out.



I disagree here a bit. There in fact were occasionally enemies who could "one-shot" the Player Character in traditional RPG's. If it's possible for us to become super-powerful over time, why can't the enemy? I'd rather have this than Oblivion's leveling system.

I dont' see the "tiny dirty towns" as being something to "fix", either...this is just how it is in Skyrim.

Agree on the UI bit, though. Though I dont' have a major prob with how menus work on the PS3, I really dislike the Favorites system, in comparison to Oblivion's hotkeys. Yes, you can place a lot more than 8 favorites, but using them is clunky as hell. I'd much prefer 8 hotkeys that work fluidly as the game is going, rather than pausing and unpausing Favorites to change spell effects (for instance), during a battle.

I know exactly what you mean. I just love exploring new grounds and discover new things, but I′m so used to Cyrodiil′s landscape now. Plus my Dunmer is living his life to the fullest and I have serious trouble letting him go

I think we all miss the huge "Imperical city" or something like that with many districts and people and stuff to do.

But the leveling system is better in Skyrim. If you plan out your character in Oblivion you can easily max all attributes and skills and at that point you can no longer improve melee damage. In Skyrim, I can always invest points in two-handed and enchant stuff with improve two-handed damage, and not have a huge amount of magicka at the same time. OTOH, creating a master character is one of the charming points of Oblivion

I must admit now, I do miss seeing White Gold Tower from the majority of the land. You can look up and see it, and know exactly what it is because there isn't anything else like it in game. Skyrim doesn't seem to have an equivalent.

This. So much this!

I was shocked they took that out. There seems to be so much space for it, too. I end up turning the camera in Skyrim, to see my character while I try on new gear, but it's not the same.

Some other things:
* The opening music, and the music in general. I like Skyrim's music, love some of it, but there was something about Oblivion's music I like a bit more.

* The fact that we could save at the sewer exit and quickly make new characters from that save. Even speed-running as fast as possible, having to sit through the execution speech alone is annoying, and then we have to do the run through burning Helgen and its caves ever single time we try a new character out. I really wish we could have a last chance to customize our character appearance at the exit point of the Helgen cave. Would make trying out new characters much less annoying.

* I miss the way quests were handled in Oblivion. There's a great journal system that, in text, explains your understanding of the quest in good detail. The Skyrim quest log is overly simplified.

* I prefer the Oblivion map, though I've grown fonder of the Skyrim map over time compared to how I felt about it first.

* Ayleid Ruins

* The way underwater worked in Oblivion

* The way we self-corrected for distance and the curved nature of an arrow's flight manually


Having said all that, I like both games a lot. My two main Oblivion characters (Olaf and Maia) still have unfinished business in Cyrodiil, and I'll be back, one day.

I know that strength had an affect across multiple things (I forgot about fatigue to be honest), I was just saying that those things it affected are still in the game just handled in a different way. But yes I know it's not the same. Having said that, I still never felt when I had a high strength that I was playing a "strong" character as such, just one who had a larger inventory space and could do a lot of damage with his sword (but then with a high blade skill that would have still been the case anyway). I couldn't punch a mudcrab 50 yards, smash doors down or lift heavy boulders out of the way.

And Intelligence basically WAS magicka. Unless I'm misremembering then it didn't do anything at all other than get multiplied by 2 and called magicka. Well... you're either missing what my logic actually was or just doing in on purpose all I was saying was that what was called "Strength" and "Intelligence" didn't have some of the main effects on your character that the words would imply. If you were intelligent you weren't actually a brainy character who could outsmart people, you just had high magicka. If you were strong you couldn't do anything particularly "strong" as such, it was just about doing more damage and carrying a lot, but you couldn't force your way through rockfalls that weaker characters couldn't or tear a bear's arms off or anything interesting like that with it, though that's obviously just because the engine wasn't set up to offer that sort of gameplay.

However, it's no way "logical" to infer from this that I'm saying all forms of all customization should be removed from the game, that's just silly. I'm just saying it's no big loss to lose things called "strength" and "intelligence" when all they ever really were were modifiers for other factors which are still in the game and can still be modified. I admit Strength did add a little bit more into the mix though, but just I don't think it was all that much. As for intelligence... I really don't see how getting rid of a number that's sole purpose was to get multiplied by 2 to make the actual number that was important is any great loss, when the actual number that's important is still in the game in exactly the same way. Yes, it's not so good that everyone now starts with a magicka of 100 and there's no initial variety there, but that's a separate issue.

Very cool. Keep on keepin' on, then, or whatever that saying is.


The cool thing about White Gold Tower is when my Cyrodiilic characters would sometimes get lost out in the forest or whatever. I mean lost as in LOST. I refuse to use the map, so I'd be relying on the way shadows face, and where the sun and moon is. But as soon as I saw WGT, YES!!! I know which way to go again!

Oblivion will always be the prettiest game I have ever played.
I love Skyrim. It lacks some things, but makes up for other things. Just a different game.
I get very nostalgic though when I play it for a long period. I miss some of the architecture in Ob. I do NOT miss the main quest, but I confess I did like Martin very much.
They are different games, and sometimes I wonder if they are connected in any way. Hard to explain.
It's also hard to log into the OB forums and not see it being very active.