The skill and attribute system has been rethought to make it more streamlined yet offer much more varied character builds. We’re down from 8 attributes and 21 skills to 3 attributes and 18 skills, which will probably cause gasps of horror in some camps, but actually the aim is to make character builds even more diverse while getting rid of redundant levelling.Acrobatics is gone, for instance – “who makes a character that is like ‘I am someone who doesn’t run?” Each skill unlocks a series of perks, which add multiple new abilities – such as a slow-time mode for arrow shooting. Each perk has certain requirements, not purely having unlocked the one below it. “You see a perk you like and say ‘I’m going to start using my sword more because I want that perk”, says Howard. The attributes, meanwhile, are distilled to Health, Magicka and Stamina. “What we found was those [old] attributes actually did something else. For instance, Intelligence just affected Magicka. They all trickled down to some other stat.” Again- this will cause gasps of horror. Maybe those will be justified, maybe they won’t – we won’t know until we play. Conceptually speaking, however, I dig the idea of your character build now being more about your actions than about strict segmenting into what were in some cases multiple attributes with similar effects. It does mean it’s more a game of actions than of numbers, and that’s always going to get backs up, but in this instance I’m fairly sure they’ve genuinely done it to increase engagement with your character and what he/she/it gets up to than to stoooopidise matters.

its not about needing some thing to define my character for me, its a stat I have controll over that I don't have to keep track of it in my head. you try juggling around the stats of 19+ role play characters in your head. I use attributes as a reference to how my characters compare to my other characters. having perks that do these things that are already done before are not only waste of perks but also don't do any thing for comparing my characters. how is having the third level of a perk tree define my the intellegence or personality of my thief compared to one that has only a level one of that "personality" perk? its is stupid to say this thief is two charisma better than that thief. it doesn't work, not for me at least.