Skills

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• While controlling your character and walking down a road, you notice a crystal and pick it up. "This would look perfect for an amulet!" you think to yourself...
  
• While fighting an enemy in melee combat, your health is very low and you might not survive the battle if you don't incapacitate him/her in some way...
  
• You scour the world collecting all of the necessary ingredients for a pie, having flour, strawberries, and other things already in your inventory, and a stove in your home...
  
• You attempt to go into a royal ball, only to find out it's for the musicians, the dancers, and the guests. You've been role-playing as a bard...
  
• During your adventures, you assume that you're aware of most of the things around you. Your character would be able to smell a rotting body if there was one...

All of these things could be answered by one simple and easy solution. And yes, it is "Skills".

Skills are something we use in real life every day, whether we think of it or not. The reason you do so well in "X" is because you're skilled in it. But we also use skills to do things that we wouldn't normally consider skills. Things like investigating an area, dancing, cooking, and even our different phrases and words that we use. All of these things are skills that we've acquired in the journey of life.

Now, it's easy to say that creating skills in a video-game can't mirror real-life. You can't have the ability to do everything, because everything would require far too much time for the game to ever be released. But sometimes when too little is done, it shows as well. Or, more importantly, it seems like wasted potential. Things that you should logically have an option to do given a situation.

To pick randomly from the scenarios above, assume that in-game you walk into a cave that at one point is full of rotting zombies. Any normal human (or Elf/Orc/Khajiit/Argonian) would go "It smells like rotting flesh in here.", but you, not actually being physically in the game, go "Hm, looks creepy, I wonder what's in here." But what's a videogame developer to do? You can't smell what your character smells, or feel what they feel. It can, to some extent, be represented by things like sounds of flies and visuals. But over-all you had no clue when you entered that there were 50+ dead bodies rotting 10 feet below you, which is a problem that's hard to solve...

Or is it?

If we were given a skill to get a general feel of an atmosphere, it could help us tremendously. A big text-box popping up on the screen and annoying us by freezing time isn't exactly what I mean. Imagine if there was a skill, perhaps the icon looks like a magnifying glass, that you could increase passively to increase your level of awareness, and would give you small, but important text prompts like "You smell a distinct troll musk in the air." or something as simple as "Something doesn't feel right..." Sure, they aren't a full tactile, olfactory, gustatory, kinetic, and internal imagery of what's going around, but maybe it would help you really get into the game.

Another example of a skill is one that would be used in a much more direct way, Knock-Back attacks. Yes, sometimes while charging forward we'd paralyze somebody, but why not have a specific move that we can put in our hotkeys that allow us to actually attempt to hit somebody over? It's not too hard of a concept to grasp, and would help tremendously in battles where you could actually form battle tactics and work on skills that you need to improve.

Other examples of melee combat skills are: Shield Bashing, Jump Attacks, Grabs/Throws, Counters, Kicks, and Charging.

While on the topic of the Trinity of TES (Stealth, Combat, and Magic), why not go into the topic of stealth for a moment. Stealth skills would help us in more ways that we would have thought, given that Speechcraft, Acrobatics, and Marksman are all in the "Stealth" category. You could have social skills, like calling people to you from far away or having open displays of emotions (a higher speechcraft skill could allow you to show more emotions). Speechcraft could also be a creative outlet for many unique actions such as playing instruments, dancing, performing, doing tricks, and other things. You could clearly have Acrobatic skills like backflips, jumping off of a wall (or wall-like object), and ducking (combat or otherwise). With things like Marksman you could do moves that would increase your precision (less swaying), let you shoot multiple arrows, select vital points on the body that you'd aim for and hit based on a percentage chance, etc. With Sneaking you could get skills for doing many things, such as ducking and hiding behind objects, blending into large groups of people, being able to swipe something small even while an NPC is watching you without them noticing, etc.

Magic is a topic hard to cover, as to make more skills in magic you simply just have to make more spells. However, there could still be many more useful spells and things that you could to with magic,mostly using them to combine them with other skills. Pure Magic arrows, spells combined with powerful attacks (a sword lighting on fire and creating a wave of fire as you swing), and maybe in a social standpoint being able to do spells that make people go "Oooh" and "Aaahh" that entertain them somewhat and raise their disposition a little.

You could also include miscellaneous skills that simply wouldn't fit into anything else, such as fishing, animal taming, crafting, etc. which would help on the level of the "Little Things" that the world seems to lack.

It isn't hard to imagine a game with all of these things, and from a development standpoint these things are, indeed, possible. The hard thing is finding games that include these sort-of options, and I think Bethesda's a likely candidate to deliver these things. Although I think the probability that they've actually done these sort-of things is very small.

What do you all think of the place of skills in TES:V?

And thank you for reading.

Hmm. More skills and perks for skills would be nice and I especially like your first idea of the magnifying glass thng with text. One problem for this is remember that for console players like myself, there aren't too many buttons for all the perks you listed, and tricky button combinations imo take away from gameplay partly, it would lead to just button mashing in combat.

It would be very interesting to be able to smell, it would help the alchemy in general

And not forget to mention that as a Kajiit i should be able to track my prey from a long distance

Special abilities based on your specialization and major skills would be nice.

Combat specialist with destruction as a major skill = elemental damage added to power attacks? with Alteration it would make armor lighter and weapons heavier so you have more mobility and greater weapon effectiveness? stuff like that would be swell and I would not mind limiting spell effectiveness for people who choose stealth or combat... likewise the skills related to any specialization give greater benefits for picking them as major skills... learning something faster is nice, but lacking.... flavor.

Excellent post, and I agree with the lot of it. However, with anything else, the more detailed something becomes, the more time it takes to develop, and the more other traits suffer if the development time is limited. Keep in mind that the devs would love to include every little neat mechanic and idea that the community comes up with (provided that they fit together), but for the restrictions of time and money, they cannot.

As for shield-bashing, though, I thoroughly agree. A large part of the fun of Oblivion was the combat; expanding on it (so long as it is done properly!) would be beneficial. Given that the shield-bashing mechanic already exists in Oblivion, it wouldn't be difficult to implement...say, a quick double-tap of the attack button while holding the block button. The tactical applications are great, and the ability to break the Oblivion shield-versus-shield standoffs back into dynamic swordplay (and a reason not to just walk forward into a target and wait for them to hit your shield and stagger) would improve the fun of things.

On the other hand, those shield standoffs did give you a good opportunity to see your opponent's http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&source=imghp&biw=1600&bih=773&q=war+face&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=g4g-m6&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=.

More simple to pull off, increase the relation between stat values and skill effectiveness.

With major/minor skills, I'd like to see some sort of power or ability that makes it worth selecting skills you actually use. Right now I only pick major/minor skills according to how I plan to level, rather than selecting which skills I intend to make most use of. Simply making them more effective in a visible way would quickly change that.

Maybe you could only do it out of combat, or it just works so that when you click the "Use" button while pointing at nothing it might investigate the area. Or, more specifically, you could do that on objects to get more clues as well.

What I'm thinking is that skills like that could be used in the slot for Magic, or there could simply be a "Skills" slot and then a "Spells" slot. So you can have 1 skill and 1 spell ready at any given time, with hotkeys as well if you wanted to do that.


That'd be nice, but would require that all enemies have specific paths that they've gone on long before you entered the cell. That'd be hard for a game engine to do.


I wonder if they could simplify it by adding "Do "X" type of damage" spells that slowly drain your magicka "X" amount of magic per... 10 seconds or so, that cast onto all other attacks besides magic. So you could cast a spell that makes your attacks have fire-damage for a short amount of time, against a Troll that dies quickly with fire, and then switch to Electricity to deal with a Fire Atronach. What really gets me is imagining the visuals for this stuff...


I'm thinking that I may work on adding many skills like the ones I've mentioned to the game if they include a CS.

But, you could still have stand-offs, especially if the NPC is equal (or even better) to your skill level.


But at a certain extreme standpoint, it doesn't make sense to have a character not be able to do the same damage (or even hit) with a sword, while they can with a mace because their mace skill is higher but their strength is nearly maxed out.

My opinion: if they arent going to make Enchanting cool and worth it, leave it out. It was just OK in MW, and almost completely useless in OB.

Wow, we should totally have a 'cooking' skill in Skyrim, now that'd be fun,
Apologies if this isn't related to your post, but I have a very short attention span.

As long as the skills are all useful, I don't mind having the same (amount) of skills oblivion had. For example, security wasn't useful at all. But maybe limit novices of security to average locks or lower, and don't let them pick more difficult locks. Then apprentice and journeyman have the perks for hard and very hard locks respectively. Expert level makes the breaking of lockpicks silent (to help you out when stealing that jewelry from the nightstand) and masters don't break lockpicks. This (along with making thieving rewarding) would actually encourage people to specialize in security skill.

Same goes for speechcraft. Just limit the amount of times you can attempt the minigame. Let's say that after attempting four times, you can't start the minigame anymore. Then every 12 hours you're allowed to try one more time (so after 48 hours it's back to 4 times). And maybe have new conversation possibilities like getting free training sessions that depend on speechcraft skill. Then maybe being an imperial with speechcraft as major skill has some decent perks again. A more advanced speech system like in fallout games is still way better of course, but this is just an example of a simple solution for an oblivion problem.

If there's 21 skills that are all useful to have as major skill and to raise to journeyman, expert and master rank, then there's easily enough variety in the game.

How would it be worth it and cool? If you don't mind me asking?

I'm asking in a genuine way not in a sarcastic way. Personally, I've never looked for much in Enchanting so I didn't really care that much in Oblivion. Unless you mean that actual enchantments? Like... the different types of enchantments you could have?


It's fine, I've got one too unless I try to focus.