Birthsigns are out? But... But... :cryvaultboy:

In Skyrim you will have constant choice. This means much more freedom!

Also, nothing will be assigned to you - imagine that beginning part of Oblivion being the whole game. There is no way you could be unhappy with your resulting character, because it is entirely based off your actions.

I don't have anything against attributes, but I can see this system working just fine with what TES is meant to be about.

(@ Arwen) About the character creation, do you concede that if we can pick a perk at level 1 this will effectively be the same as a birth sign?
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I'm not saying they're too complex, simply that they are not necessary for a game to be an RPG...

I don't know Todd. I know you, your blog. Your ideas are far more important for me than a distant game developer.


After character creation, the game gets back to "you are what you play" mentality and this time it doesn't let you to scratch that. So game will still decide your skill point distributions based on your play style just like the beginning tutorial. So if you're unhappy with this then you're unhappy with Elder Scrolls games but I seriously doubt that.

That "beginning part" didn't seem to work very well in Oblivion, since very few players seemed to be happy with what the game decided their Class should be . . . which makes me very skeptical that it will work that much better in the entire game. There are innate character traits (attributes) that I would like my character to retain throughout the game (such as strength) . . . yet in Skyrim I am going to be stuck with the game's point distribution. The ONLY way that I can retain some of my character's innate traits, is by carefully limiting my game play in those areas . . . which I do not see as having more freedom, but as less freedom.


Not unless they are much more fleshed out than want FO3's perks were. If there are specific "class" perk, that are like FONV Traits, where there are both Bonuses and Penalties . . . then it might work. But Traits have not been mentioned yet


Thanks, and sorry . . . I took your post the wrong way completely . . . my apologies.


As I just replied in the part above, I feel that this system will limit my freedom as far as my game play goes, as I'm going to have to be really careful to only use the skills that I want to have increase, or my character will develop in ways that I don't want her to.

Yes I agree. But how is the game going to decide a class for you when there are no classes? All those people who were unhappy with their suggested class would have been perfectly fine if they were never told what they were playing as.

There are still classes, because all a class is is a predefined point distribution of your stats . . . you just don't get to select your class any more, classes are now invisible, and therefore have no names.
And, no . . . I wouldn't have been. The name of the class meant nothing to me. I had in my head what I wanted my character to be like and how I wanted to play the game. It suggested class assigned my skill points and attributes in a way that was contrary to that.

How about allowing players to build attributes at the start and that's it, kind of like fallout, but you can't edit the attributes afterwards.

Ok, but consider that over the course of the whole game your 'class' would be much more accurately represented than the 30 minute intro in Oblivion. Also in that time, you were encouraged to try out different things which would inevitably lead to an inaccurate final class. Then after doing all that, a lot of people would just choose the custom class anyway...

Well it seems that in Skyrim, you will always play the custom class - except it will be ever evolving based on your choices and how you play the game.

No, they are middle men. A character with low magic skills will have low Magicka and be a less-efficient mage as well. There's no need for that middle stage at all.



And that's exactly what skills do on their own.



If I open up my inventory screen I can see exactly how much weight I can carry. I don't need to consider my Strength score at all. That value means absolutely nothing to me, so why is it even accessible to me? The same applies to all the attributes. Looking at my Willpower, am I going to determine that my Magicka will regenerate x point per second, and have that value be something meaningful to me? No, I'll just be watching my Magicka bar and seeing how it fills up. Same with Intelligence and Magicka, or Endurance and Health. I don't need to any of those values, it's only the thing that they influence that are meaningful to me. And since those values are simply derived form my skill use anyway, there isn't even a point to having them in the game at all.



Almost every player already has an idea of how they want their character to turn out. So they're going to steer their character towards melee or magic on their own, because that's how they already envision them to be. They don't need a bunch of number in order to determine that, they already have an idea as soon as they start the game.

You have absolutely no idea how character creation is going to work in Skyrim so please stop with the assumptions. You said yourself that the Skyrim will have similarities to Fallout, and since it had the GOAT, then it's not inconceivable that there will be some way to distribute some starting points as well in Skyrim. In fact I would be highly surprised if it didn't.



Which were determined by the skills you used. Cast Conjuration often enough and you can raise your Intelligence by 5 points. Which in turn raises your Magicka pool. That was the only effect Intelligence had, so why not just get rid of it altogether? There's only a couple of abilities that can't necessarily be affected directly by skill use.



And your point here is?



In other words a perk. You'll be able to choose 50 of those, out of more than 280. So how does all that choice make for hand holding exactly?



And the end result was that you got another perk, and a division between Major and Minor skills.



No. Just like race selection, you don't have any direct control over those functions, they are predetermined based on the class you choose.



And aside from giving them that early perk, how many player need to have some pre-defined class in order to determine how they want to play their character? I like playing Spellswords, a nice mix of magic and melee. But I really don't need to have some class in order to tell me to play that way. I'm just going to do it regardless. And as I go along. I'll unlock perks that will help reinforce that play style and make my character more effective at it. But since my effectiveness will be determined more by perks rather than by some mathematical formulas, I'm going to end up having to make more choices than I ever did before. So I ask again, how does all that choice make for hand holding exactly?



And what exactly is the drawback here if there are no classes to begin with? You choices will come up as soon as you level up and have to decide on a perk to use, and also how you want to distribute your H/M/S points.

We like it you dont... its as simple as that and all the why and what of these agruements wont change the basic fact we like it and you dont.

We got lucky.. we like what the devs seem to want this time. You were unlucky .. Thats it.

From my perspective I just see a bunch of people who are so stuck in the past that they're unwilling to consider anything new. I'm no fan by any means, I won't even be buying the game on release day, I'll be waiting for the GOTY edition. But I certainly see a need for change from the mess that Oblivion used, and the ideas that Bethesda has put forward so far makes sense to me.



No it was just one small part of it. Essentially it was nothing more than a perk that boosted certain areas of your character.



And what makes you so confident that we won't have any means to have an effect on it when starting a game? Like I said, if Fallout had the GOAT, and Oblivion had Birthsigns and clasees, then it's pretty certain we can expect some sort of mechanism that will allow us to make some changes to our skills in order to get a start on shaping out character. You're carrying on like we'll have no control at all, and that simply won't be the case.

The point of the OP that has apparently been lost on the rabid, over-zealous blind faith fans is that from the current information given (no more attributes/birthsign) there will be no difference in starting characters of the same race aside from appearance. IE at the start of the game (with the exception of cosmetic differences) every Imperial is a clone, every Argonian is a clone, every Nord is a clone, etc. etc.
And that kind of svcks.
Before the salesman among you say "but you get a Perk!", know that there is no evidence to back up that claim. In FO3/NV You don't get a Perk until leveling up IE no Perk at level 1.
Not that a single Perk does much to make a unique character. A completed Perk tree, sure. 1 Perk, no.

My "assumptions" are based entirely on what we know about the game so far . . . and on Bethesda's past history of making TES more and more "streamlined."

Your assumption is whatever Todd says is gospel . . . and that perks are a miracle cure for anything that you felt was wrong with Oblivion's character builds and leveling up . . . ie: too hard or that you didn't like having to bother with, because it got in the way of your fun.

Perhaps they should just remove all the Races, Armor, Weapons, and Magicka . . . and just base the ENTIRE GAME on which perks you select . . . because you seem to believe that perks are the answer to everything.

BTW: the perks in Fallout 3 made the game play totally unbalanced . . . since many just led to a totally overpowered player. My Realism Tweaks' Hard-Core module changes 95% of the default perks, in order to add restrictions and restore the balance in a way that help keep the game challenging. It looks like I'll be making a Skyrim Tweaks overhaul, based on what we know about the game . . . I'm still hoping that I'm wrong, and that the default game will not require heavy modding to make it playable for me.

I give up with this thread! :banghead:

There are WAY too many fans here, who don't even know what they're talking about...

Classes were used in TES for two things.
1)A head start, you get bonuses for certain skills at the beginning, but you can always just ignore it.
2)A limitation. Only by raising these skills would you be able to raise your overall level. Thing is, it was a rubbish limitation, as it still let you raise certain skills without raising your overall level, making you even more powerful, if you done it right.
Now we have perks, which are mainly used to differentiate between characters, you only get a limited number of perks, so you can make different characters.

Tag skills in Fallout 3 did even less! It only gave you a head start that you could easily ignore later on! That's not a class!

You won't get assigned to a certain class because THERE ARE NO CLASSES WHATSOEVER, hell, I would say there were no classes at all ever since Daggerfall in TES games.

The system is not that different. In Oblivion you could start out as a Mage, but you could still play as a thief, by raising those skills, in fact it was considered a more optimal way of playing...

Exactly. So why do you and the few others bother? We don't tell you that you're wrong to like it. We simply state that we don't like it, and then, just like clockwork, the exact same handful of posters descend on the thread to try to tell us that we're wrong to not like it.

We don't like it. Tough. If you and Belanos and Bukee and Jaomet and the lot can't handle the fact that we don't like it, then don't open the thread in the first place.

It's really not at all complicated.

Being a console gamer I will only get the game as is sans mods, so if the game svcks as a RPG due to all the action gamey, antinumerical sentiment appeasal, I will be sad.
At this point, without better info, it's going to be a rental before I decide to purchase.

Can you not see how that is a massive jump in logic?

Why not simply say although we do not have all the information, you hope starting characters will have more variation than just the aesthetic. And leave it at that.

From the current information, you are in not in a position to suggest there will be no difference between starting characters. Stop making a fool out of yourself...

I tend to argue about things, because I don't think most people see the whole picture and jump to conclusions way too fast.

Yes, everybody will be similar at the start. It svcks, fine. But will it make every character the same later on? Does it make it any less of an RPG?
NO!

I understand that you want your character to be more developed at the beginning. What I don't understand is why would this also mean that the game is dumped down, and it's suddenly an action game with a single playstyle?
(This isn't about you, don't take it personal)

I want TES, not a Fallout/Crysis hybrid with TES name & story slapped on.

Post limit.