"As you do things you just get better at them"

In other Elder scrolls game you had to specialize in order to achieve the high level skills or spells. How will this be compensated for in skyrim?


Will there be more rounded characters vs. specialized characters.

There will be sets of stones that will boosy either warrior skills, mage skills, or stealth skills. I don't remember what the stones are called.

There is no real difference. You raise a skill if you want to do it well. I think you are misinterpreting the changes.

guardian stone!

Guardian stones I believe.

If you watch the video again I believe Todd said something about giving you power I think they are like the Birthsigns they give you powers and boosts in some skills.

Naturally, you'd be better off favouring a few skills, but it looks like with the guardian stones combined with the correct use of perks can let you be pretty powerful in, say, one-handed, destruction, and marksman if you please. But I doubt you'll have much sucess creating a character who is decent at everything. But it at least seems we can be decent at a couple of aspects of all three archtypes at once.

In previous games you choose specialization and primary skill at character generation.
Both increased the rate skills increased, however you could raise any skill to 100, it would simply take longer.
in Skyrim you have no specialization at startup but some guardian stones who increase the rate skills increased. This can be changed during gameplay, say you feel you has to focus more on magic skills and you switch from fighter to magic specialization.

I don't really think it'll change much. you'd get better at your non class skills in the other games aswell. Here they all simply also help you level up.

The main hiccup to rounding is you have 49-50 perks to work with...

Rolling as a warrior by using guardian stones to compliment my game style

by the time you reach the sort cap you will probably have maxed out the skills you worked on in the beginning and will be building other skills to keep leveling. I imagine that at some point most of your skills will be extremely high making most of us playing one character into seventy or eighty levels very powerful and well rounded characters.

There really isn't any way to tell without the game in hand to test this. Ask again a year after the game is out and I'm sure you will get a very clear idea where people are skills wise.

In Morrowind and Oblivion you could raise any skill to 100. Same with Skyrim, but they've scrapped the major/minor skill system and added other incentives for specializing.

- The higher a skill is when you raise it, the more experience toward leveling up you get. Focus on a smaller number of skills, and you will level up faster (especially at higher levels). So a warrior will get much closer to a level up when he raises One Handed from 70 to 71 than he would if he raised Destruction from 30 to 31.

- Perks have skill level requirements. The lowest perks in a perk tree have very low skill requirements (the lowest block one was 20), but they keep growing from there. I'm sure every skill will have at least one mastery perk, requiring you to have 100 in that skill.

- You will most likely stop getting perks after level 50, so you can't get ~230 of the ~280 perks. Since the perks are necessary for getting the full benefit out of the skill, you need to specialize and think about which perks/skills you want the most. Even if the perks don't stop at level 50, you will max all of your skills and therefore stop leveling in the 70s, meaning you'll still miss out on ~200-210 perks and still need to specialize. Otherwise you'll end up being a jack of all trades, master of none.

In Skyrim, skills are no longer the most important choice, and they work almost like a foundation for us to gather our special perks.

For each skill, the perks form a hierarchical tree of related perks, and in order to make a special character, you need to select special perks for him/her, and in order to choose higher level perks for a skill, you need to have the perquisites for that perks which are the lower level perks of that particular branch and adequate skill level.

And with the help of those perks we can make specialized characters, and if we try to select perks for all our skills, we can only select the lower level perks for them, and the end result would be a weak jack of all the trades.

But if we focus our skills developments and perk selections mostly to 4-5 choice skills, then we would have a powerful and highly specialized character, because one would assume that the higher level perks would be the most powerful ones, if the games like Diablo 2 are of any indication.

I actually wish you were rewarded slightly more for specialisation. In most of the TES games, but especially Oblivion, its alarmingly easy to become the master of all the guilds. I'd really like this to be a hell of a lot harder, and perhaps require master level skills in a number of related skills.

You should be able to create a rounded Character - but not one who is great at everything.

Rather than setting in stone at the start of the game what you are going to get good at, you do it over the course of the game, naturally as you're playing.
Why is that in any way shape or form bad?

You have to specialize to achieve high level skills or spells, here too...
You just don't get a head start in some skills.

It's really not that different...

I think they have made a good decision using the perk system, because it forces characters to be more specialised and less rounded than in oblivion. Say you made a stealth character, and then at level 50 you started to try out magic and combat. Well, you wouldn't be able to become as good at those as you are at stealth, because you wouldn't get many perks for them. They said that the higher the skill, the more it affects levelling. If you decided to level destruction from 0 later on, you wouldn't gain any levels because it's so low and thus no perks, meaning it is not as effective as oblivion at creating that all-rounded super character later after you've reached level 50 (for example).

No matter what your opinion on attributes and their removal, there will be an improvement to levelling in Skyrim as regards not chasing +5/+5/+5 increases. Seems you will just be able to use the skills you want to use, and get on with the game.
Of course you will be able to level faster or slower deliberately if you want to, by specialising or using a range of 'minor' skills, but previously you were forced to either make a class contrary to your preferred skills, get a levelling mod, or risk a gimped character. Not a feature I will miss.

This is something I agree with entirely. The chasing of the attribute bonuses was something that badly needed to be fixed, and hopefully the new system will do that. It may not be perfect, we will see, but its an attempt to correct something that was a problem to me.

Yes how much who is put into skill and how much is in perk will be interesting.