All Bethesda games probably including Daggerfall had a problem with health gain at high levels. You get to much health as you gain health every time you level up while the enemies does not increase damage enough to balance it. As your endurance raises the health gain at high levels increase.
Quite possible to finish Oblivion with 30 in endurance if you are an archer or mage, a little harder at medium level but no problem at high level.
Fallout also had this problem, ended up having to tank for stupid Clover against albino radscorpions as she died far easier even if she had better armor rating than me. Yes my endurance was low and no more health perks.

Linking health directly to endurance and not to level would avoid giving the character to much health at high level while still letting the barbarian take more damage than a glass cannon mage.
Without attributes you would had to link health to blade and blunt skills who is stupid.
if only linked to level the mage and barbarian would have identical health who is more stupid.

What are you talking about? The current system mentioned in the GI lets you choose whether to recieve more Health (apparantly all level ups give a small health increase reguardless of your choice), Magicka, or Stamina per level. A pure Warrior is going to choose to have Health to not get blown up when he gets in melee range and Stamina for sprint and weapon swings, and a pure Mage is going with Magicka to fuel his spells.

Did not know, yes it should work but don't understand how stamina should work, sound much like fatigue in Morrowind and Oblivion where it was most useful for melee fighters.

:rofl:

I'm sure Bethesda knows what they're doing.

The main difference between Oblivion's Fatigue and Skyrim's Stamina is the added ability to sprint, or at least that's what I got from the GI article. Everyone is going to have a use for Sprint every once in a while though, everyone needs to move, melee focused characters are just probably going to rely on it more than others since they need to be in an opponent's face immedietly unlike ranged characters.

I always thought that leveling up the attributes was pretty wierd anyway, so I don't mind if that's out.

I hope the attributes themselves are still there in some form, for use in dialogue skill checks and such. They could either:

1) evolve with your skills naturally - this seems very Elder Scrolls-ish and would be fine by me, OR

2) are set in stone at the start of the game, like Fallout. I would prefer this: at a realism level, stuff like 'strength' and 'intelligence' always seemed to be very basic physical / mental parameters that change slowly or not at all over a person's life. Sure, you can train and get stronger in your arms or whatever, but this is kind of covered by weapon skills and such - 'strength' could be interpreted as your physical stature and tendency to grow muscles. At a gameplay level, it's interesting to have a structure to build your character around.

In New Vegas it really makes a difference what SPECIAL you pick, mostly due to dialogue checks.

I said a similar thing about lack of attributes, when confronting the idea that if TES dropped attributes it would no longer be classed in the RPG genre.

Apparently I'm wrong. :/

the term RPG is misleading to say the least. I could call Call of Duty an RPG, because I'm playing the role of the protagonist. I think Oblivion is the best modern "RPG" out right now, the freedom to choose what and how you play is unrivaled in this game market. Skyrim will not be a traditional D&D experience and to hope for that is silly.

I don't think you can call CoD an RPG.

RPG is not only about playing a role. The requisites are also character development through story elements, some sort of character skill system where some measure of skills or stats are gained are you progress through the game. Not to mention CoD is purely a battlefield shooter, there is nothing that's up to scratch of a rpg type world space.

My particular point at the time was that skills increasing as you play is directly in the general view of RPG. The attributes are part of that same RPG mechanic. If they dropped both the skills and attributes, then I'd be :confused:

The thing that always bothered me about attributes was that all characters had the same maximum values regardless of race. Both Orcs and Bosmer would reach the same maximum strength, but the Orc would reach it faster. Due to this, choice of race didn’t matter very much except for maximum Health (depended on when you gained Endurance), Magicka (innate bonuses for Bosmer and Altmer) and running speed (height acted as a modifier). If they really want to make race matter more, they need to fix that, either by making maximum attributes race dependant or giving races bonuses that are difficult or impossible to replicate by magic. From what I've read, they seem to be going for the latter.

As was mentioned, you get a choice of Health, Stamina, or Magicka when you level up. With that, most of the attributes can be cut without affecting anything. Attributes have been getting less important throughout TES history. When they changed the combat system in Oblivion to a more player-skill based system (you hit if you are in the right place and pointing in the right direction, and if you aren’t you don’t), attributes became mere modifiers for damage in a lot of cases. Intelligence is sometimes linked to unlocking dialog options, but when was the last time you saw that in a TES game? Really, I'm curious as that role seems to be relegated to Speechcraft and Personality. As it is, Intelligence is pretty much linked only to your amount of Magicka and so can be dropped. The only 'derived' stat (encumbrance) that seems difficult to determine without an attribute to tie it to could either be constant, or possibly tied to maximum Stamina.

I, too, am of the opinion that a game can be an RPG without focusing on numbers so much. Dialog choices and branching paths are more important in my mind than the amount of numbers given to describe my character. Also, I welcome no longer needing to strictly control what my character does in order to get the most out of the game. According to UESP.net, in Oblivion, when NPCs leveled they got +9 attributes, meaning that in order to keep up, the PC has to get at least that much in total modifiers.

I guess I'm just old-fashioned, but I would like to see the attributes remain. If the system doesn't work, don't just scrap it - fix it.

Exactly. They are already making so leveling any skill goes towards total level. Why not make so each of the skills fall under attributes like previous games, and leveling the skills makes those attributes increase? Just like Oblivion but everything follows an algorithm and it never cheats you.

The problem is not specific for Skyrim but for any RPG game system, be it computer of pen and paper. The problem is : Attributes are more or less always badly defined because they are too general and generic while skills are simple and effective.

Think of it that way : in Oblivion you increase your Blade skill thus you do more damage with blades. You also get STR bonuses at level up so you again do even more damage with blades. And then you cap your Blade skill and so you cannot raise your STR. What you'd do at this point is ... Train your Blunt skill! As you level your Blunt skill you'll be able to raise your STR furthermore which will get you the last missing increases in damage for your blades. You are a master of Blade but in order to further improve your blade skill you have to increase your blunt and/or hand to hand skills.


From a gameplay perspective, asking the player to drop his blade at higher levels because he capped on that one to pick up the other two combat skills that govern STR is bad. You were strong but if you want to get stronger, you have to GRIND your other combat skills, and worse, it means you have to fight strong monsters with skills you are very bad with.



Without attributes, system is simple and flows much more naturaly. As you level in Blade, you get stronger with blades. The only way to get even stronger with blades is to use them and level your skill more. Or find a stronger blade, or use some magic to buff your Blade skill. System is simple, works and doesn't force you to grind skills you have little interest with as Oblivion forced you to.

The main reason Oblivion game system svcked was that : you got the "major" skills you were interested to use but you were FORCED to level unrelated minor skills you didn't choose because without this skill grind you'd not get your attributes at a good level and so it would have a negative effect on your performances. Getting rid of attributes and minor skills solves all issues perfectly.

okay i didn't read this thread but i did a ctrl+F on each page and didn't find any references to it and customizable body types are confirmed for Skyrim and Bethesda's publishing it so

BRINK.

in Brink, when you create a character you choose their body type - light and agile, average build, and big and buff. light characters move faster than other characters and can jump higher, but have less health and can't use superheavy weapons. heavies move slower than other characters and can't jump as well but they've got mad health and can use heavy weapons. (this is based on recollection of a preview posted a while ago so i might be a bit off but THIS IS BASICALLY HOW IT WORKS I THINK.)

i wouldn't be surprised if it worked more or less the same way in Skyrim, which other than people going "oh i'm a skinny little elf dude why can't i dual-wield claymores [censored] YOU BETHESDA" is a neat approach. i mean it might work a bit better in Brink with the whole SMART thing, but.

as for intelligence etc. all that stuff's very likely been handed off to the related skills but i'm sure somebody's already gone over this as a thing so i'll end it here

also i've never liked the idea of your blade skill being higher meaning you do more damage with swords, that always struck me as super dumb (especially since in vanilla your weapon skill had more of an impact on your damage than your strength did). i'm hoping that this time around weapons all have their own damage ranges that don't vary (apart from maybe perk bonuses) and your one-handed/two-handed skill controls attack speed and ability to recover from staggering. things would be a lot faster and more fun (unless you're bad at games).

I'm a bit late to the party, and I can't be buggered to read past page 2, being that these threads are basically speculative debate, but if no one has said it before:

Couldn't it just be that they're balancing attributes? Figuring out what to keep, how to change them, etc?

TOOOODDDD did say that they were looking into omitting some skills, and combining a lot of mechanics, maybe they just didn't have a solid list, or didn't want to show it, so as not to incite rebellion?

I am a bit worried by all the simplification coming in Skyrim, but then again, I've always been a svcker for games with learning curves like a cliff face, and ludicrous amounts of complexity.

EDIT: Really, I just miss the system in D&D, what with the attributes actually mattering for basically the entire game, and not being overshadowed by skill.