That's the point, your character is supposed to specialize in one categorie, or sread their skill set, but not be as good as someone that solely focuses on one skill

Perhaps , but I won't play skyrim for any where near that long if it means that I might miss out on some other cool games , or if I just get bored with skyrim ... it could happen...

Different strokes for different folks? It's not mandatory to play the game for 300+ hours last I checked. Furthermore, if you already hadn't gotten the hint, Skyrim doesn't have an expiration date. It still boggles my mind how you pretend that it does.

Considering all the new gameplay features, I'm sure we will see some truly ambitious Skyrim mods to rival Neherim (60+ hours of content) and Andoran (not sure but probably a lot of new content).

I agree. I think by having 280+ perks, each individual perk is diluted and doesn't really motivate me to level up. I think 50 perks per character is plenty IF each perk is cool; something like a small damage booster just isn't interesting enough to justify spending a perk on...

I think Skyrim will be worth lots of time in replay, so I'm sure I'll get to use all the different perks.

I still haven't even finished Oblivion yet, and that game came out in...was it 2006?

I plan to finish Oblivion's main quest on 11.10.11, just before starting my first playthrough of Skyrim. :foodndrink:

I actually played Oblivion for more than 350 hours , but never finished every quest in the game or discover every location .

Funny, that's exactly when I plan to finish Fallout New Vegas. I've never finished it because ... well it ends. That, and I've reached a point where there is no acceptable path forward. Every option entails doing something I simply don't want to do. And I probably still won't, but I plan to. You know how plans are, they must be followed through, right?

I've played many hundreds of hours in Oblivion, I've still never done the thieves guild or all of the assassins guild. Walked away from the assassins guild when I was ordered to kill off my guildmates.

thats farting around. if your level 8 and you havent started the main quest and you have hundreds of hours im not sure what else you can call it. killing and looting the same enemies and locations over and over again does not count towards the game time. with that logic any game could techinical last for infinity if i just keep reloading and killing the same guys over and over again. i can run around in circles in any other game as well. if you just start doing all the quests and explore all the ruin you are still not going to get anywhere near those hours unless you are just messing around. ive explored every nook and cranny of obliivon and morrowind and did all the quests and never got hundreds of hours off of one single character including all the quest mods i used like dungeons of ivellon and gates to aasgard and the tamriel rebuit mod. id love to believe that 300 hours is the norm but historically they pad the numbers. how many games have claimed 40+ hours and you can end up finishing it in around 20 side missions included.

skyrim will have way better replay value since you are limited to around 50 perks per character and the dungeons change based on your character archetype. (something i hope can be turned off with mods). the only thing im worried about is if the radiant story is going to be a let down and the random stuff ends up only being a couple of different options and gets predictable after a couple of playthroughs.

They should write this on the back of the box...haha

ive almost cumulated enough information to plan my first character and if only they will reveal the start location so i can plan the back story grr

meh
1A breton mage /empire duel spell caster and conjuror , alchemy and sneak as secondary tlc perks will make coin on selling all melee weapons regardless there power and or occupation spouse
1B bosmer stealth ranger thief light armour archer single hand blade secondary block enchanter perks so lonely
1C argonian warrior assassin brother hood listener light armour smith duel blades ,secondary single hand ,cursed entity scaly werewolf lizard beast if such creature exist companion pawns

Well, you play who you wanna be ... but the caveat is, you have to want to be something, not just "Eh, now I want to try this and totally dominate at it. Now I'm done with that, now I want to totally dominate at something else".

If you wanna be a fireman, you can develop fireman skills, but then you can't be an astronaut. Sounds like you want to be a fireman/astronaut/traqeze artist/brain surgeon/rock star. Ehhhhh I don't feel bad about suggesting that that's not very reasonable. Pick something that you want to be, commit to it, and be it.

I think you and I must be playing entirely different games.

I haven't entered any of the same dungeons twice. I've been continually completing quests and absolutely not "farting around."

300 - 500 hours is extremely common for a playthrough of Oblivion and Morrowind and many here on this forum have mentioned numerous single playthroughs lasting over 1000 hours each.

By the time I switch to start playing Skyrim, I estimate I will have played about 3 playthroughs of Oblivion for a total around 800 - 1000 hours. And I will only complete the main quest with the last playthrough. For Skyrim I'm estimating 5 - 10 playthroughs considering the greatly enhanced replay value.

There are somewhere around 200 different dungeons in vanilla Oblivion and probably 100 or more Oblivion gates. Even the smallest dungeons for me take a few hours to complete. There is no way I will ever even visit all the dungeons, oblivion gates and POIs. And I haven't even tried any of the expansion mods like Neherim and Andoran which potentially add hundreds of hours of gameplay.

I almost always take longer :confused:

you must have a very very slow playstyle then. even my stealthy rogue characters can beat all the games quests in around 30-40 hours and explore all over the place. my speed playthrough of the main quest and all the side quests and the factions quests (except for the last daedric one cause i couldnt find that stupid crab guy) took me less than ten hours of course i cheated on that one and used fast travel all the time.

there needs to be a distinction from normal gameplay (which is what they are referring to) and completionist playstyle where absolutely everthing is looted and/or picked and sold or stored somewhere. most people dont do the completionist route and had it not been for mods like OOO it would have been pointless for oblivon anyways since their dungeons are all the same and the loot is levelled.

Of course, the hours you build up also depends on play style. Fast travel trims a lot of hours off total play time. I don't use it (except escorting Martin to CRT), so for me even simple quests can pile on the game hours. Don't think I've ever had a 500 hour game, though. Seems like by the time I get that far my game has become unstable (probably from installing and uninstalling tons of mods throughout the process... constantly fiddling with my game).

From my understanding the 280 perk figure derives from 4 different potencies of 70 unique perks.

This is actually quite a bit different from the FO3 system which had a majority of unique perks as well as a smaller amount of perks which could be developed over a series of increasingly more powerful variations (provided that your attributes were at a sufficient level).

It also differs from the Oblivion variant where we were given different powers at each 25 point margin of skill (up to a total of 84).

If my initial paragraph is correct then it means that you'd only be able to develop 12 perks to their maximum efficacy. As I generally tend to have TES builds which last several hundred hours of gameplay (particularly taking into account the many mods I add), this seems a little on the light side. As I'm quite happy to use mods which change the system to what I think is 'correct' it's no great drama for me.

I can, however, understand that those players who are playing 20-40 hour builds before moving onto their next character would be more than happy with the 50 perk limit. :shrug:

It would be interesting to see what the average playthrough length is, but from participating in many discussions on this forum, I get the sense that at least among forum members there are a lot more playthroughs of Oblivion and Morrowind in the 200 - 500 hour range, than the speedy playthroughs like yours in the 20- 30 hour range.

In my view if you finish the game that quickly you are missing out on 80% of the game. TES games are not like Bioshock, Mass Effect, etc., where it's a race to the finish. Those games last 20 - 30 hours or so, but Oblivion and Morrowind are truly massive games. I'm on my third playthrough of Oblivion and I'm still discovering all kinds of new stuff. I have never even completed the Thieves' Guild questline, the Fighter's Guild questline, the Knights of the Nine or Shivering Isles yet (obviously not the main quest either).

The "completionist" playthroughs you mention are more in the 1000 hour + range - those are playthroughs where people are actually visiting every dungeon in the game, etc.

I don't know; I still think classes would be better.

thats precisely why i stopped playing oblivion over a year ago. i ended up spending far more time fiddling with mods and while its fun it gets to the point of diminishing returns. no matter what i did i could never get oblivion to be "my game" i got it very close but just couldnt get it right. so i stopped playing and havent looked back. im having far more fun with NV because its a much better game and i dont need nearly as many mods to fix it. i use project nevada (same people that made FWE for Fallout 3) and texture replacers and mods that increase spawns and add npcs. and thats pretty much it. with oblivion i had over 200 at times and the lowest i ever got it was around 150.

as much as i love mods i will be a happy camper if the only mods i have to use for skyrim are graphics mods and a UI replacer and obviously a mod that increase enemy spawns.

@bootysweat.......i might agree with the first playthrough if you do everything. ive done the quests so many times now that its pretty much rote at this point. my characters are specialized and if i say joined the mages guild i made a point of not joining the fighters guild and i had other restrictions as well such as keeping my leveling super slow. ive only done 2 or 3 playthroughs doing all questlines and by the time i did those i pretty much knew everythign so that might have had a part in it. im still doubtfull but i would love to be proven wrong if i do infact get 300 hours on my first playthrough of skyrim cause i didnt get nearly that much on my first playthrough of oblivion.

I expect Skyrim to be like Fallout 3 in length , not like oblivion or morrowind , I finished EVERYTHING in fallout 3 in 80 something hours , and by everything I mean I got all weapons , finished ll quests and discovered all locations , and they claim that Fallout 3 has more than 200 hours of content .
At the lengthy podcast made by game-informer , todd claims Skyrim has 200 not 300 hours of gameplay , the same claim they made about fallout 3 , which I fully completed everything in ,in 80 something hours .

How long was your Oblivion playthrough?

I think you said above it was 350 hours and you had not completed every quest or discovered every location, correct? or was that several playthroughs?

Here is an interesting thread with some Oblivion playthrough lengths listed by various forum members:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1183763-how-many-hours-on-a-single-character/

6 people have no lives at all. i kind of wish he had broken it down a bit more under the 500 mark though. id rather see something like 40, 80, 120 etc.