Here is what attributes could do:

Strength: Encumbrance, melee combat damage, and some health/fatigue influence.
Agility: Balance, ranged combat damage, and some health/fatigue influence
Endurance: Starting fatigue, health gain on level up.
Intelligence: Total magicka. (Multiplier to magic damage)
Willpower: Magicka regeneration and some fatigue influence. (Multiplier to magic resistence)
Speed: Movement speed.

Adding a couple of multipliers and removing Luck and Personality makes a big difference.

Not according to Pete Hines.

http://twitter.com/DCDeacon/status/59999057111814144

That Lore and design has to be expressed someway yeah? otherwise its just that, Lore, just like its Lore that Woodelves can turn into voracious beasts, Redguard often are exceptionally proficient with weapons and Bretons are predisposed to magicl energies.

ATTRIBUTES portray this, PERKS do not especially when they aren't even availible right from the get go, you have to unlock them.

and do people even know the definition of perks? you know The Perks are incentives that help increase, motivate and reward the player for working hard at something, How is this fesible at portraying core aspects of the player? THEY are supplementary NOT Core factors of the game, they shouldnt be.

Further he said the effect of attributes are covered by perks.. +'s to damage, +'s to skills, etc None of that covers who the character is that you just created except pathetic health+stamina. Again, everyone on earth is just as strong, just as smart, just as ugly just we all have a different starting perk and our health/stamina bars.
Everything attributes did are in perks? At what level am I defined as well as the 8 attributes with enough perks to be as fully fleshed out and defined? 10th level? 20th? And you are completely ignoring the point and arguing a red herring. I am saying reducing starting people to stamina/health/magica plus perk is a gross simplification versus previous starting points if ones uses attributes or anything else than quantifies the character you are playing. I'm sorry but they also said that the level scaling of Oblivion was great too. How did that work out?

This simplification is for the younger console crowd so they can pop the game in and play it just like they can a first person shooter.

Again, while I think removal of attributes is a mistake, I'm not worried about it. I'm perfectly willing to see how it goes, and I'm more excited than ever to get my hands on Skyrim. Just because I am not currently aware of the manner in which races will be distinguished (beyond appearance), I'm not assuming that no method at all will be in place. After all, there is so much we still don't know at this point.

However, this argument about trust is not even remotely sound. These are the folks that came up with level scaling. But I make no assumptions. I'll wait and see.

And I'm stoked!

Off what Greg said,

Strength: Weapon perks to increase melee damage with your preferred weapon and perks to allow you to carry more. Health and fatigue go up at level up.
Agility: Perks to increase your ability to dodge, perks to increase bow damage. Health and fatigue go up at level up.
Intelligence: Magicka can be selected to increase at level up.
Willpower: Perks to increase rate of magicka regeneration.
Speed: Perks to increase running speed and jumping height, though I'm unsure where this perk would fall under.
Personality: Speech perks to allow your disposition to automatically be set higher. Higher your speech and higher level of the perk, the more people will like you.
Luck: I really don't care, luck was broken. Cast an increase luck 100 pts for 2 seconds and enter a dungeon and you get the best equipment in the game in two runs.

There is no reason to be freaking out. Everything you've come to expect will still be there, only there won't be gradually increasing numbers but skills gained over practice and learning perks. It's the same thing, only leveling your character won't be such a chore.

Can we close this ridiculous topic now, so that these fools can stop clamoring and wait until they tell us more?

Connection problem, accidental double post. Please delete.

You're contradicting yourself. You think it was a mistake that they removed the attributes, e.g. the game will suffer for it, but you're not concerned about that?

I don't know what level, and you don't either. Sure you might be more defined at the start with attributes, but you don't spend much time at the start of the game compared to the rest.

Also, attributes only differ by 20 as the maximum (from 30 to 50 in some cases). If the starting skills of each race and six differ more than by 20, it might even balance out, we just don't know yet.

What you need to decide is whether or not having a well defined character at the start is worth sacrificing what Bethesda clearly considers a superior system to the current for the later parts of the game.

EDIT: @Gregasaurus, just because someone thinks something is a mistake doesn't mean they are worried about it. I think it's a mistake that the government chooses to just fill in potholes instead of re-doing the whole road, but I'm not worried about it :shrug:

Attributes and perks are both equally viable ways to differentiate between characters. Characters can have different attributes which make them unique. Characters can have different perks which make them unique. Whats the difference? Semantics, really...

So close everything that doesn't agree with the collective? My point is using your example: Every starting character gets all the attributes at some level which quantifies the individual character. Perks, that you pickup along the way, are picked up by definition later on and without the perks/other defining characteristics at the beginning every character is exactly the same health/stamina/magica shuffle, rinse repeat until you get enough perks.

You presume much. We don't knnow what the character creation process will hold. There very well may be racial bonuses, we might get to pick a few perks to start out with, who knows?

Besides, I would rather have level 1 characters be the same than have end-game characters be the same. The way it worked in Oblivion once you reach max level, every character of every class is basically exactly the same.

The entire point of the system is that when you start you have less predetermination in what kind of character you play, and that what you do will define you. It's simply an extension of the "learn by doing" philosophy behind skill increases to the core mechanic of character progression. The old system was extremely flawed and what I can work out of the new one sounds like it fixes a lot of problems with leveling up. And that's the thing: What you can do at level one doesn't matter nearly as much as what you can do at level 10 or 20.

Stop being such a curmudgeon, and get over your whole "PC gamer master race" schtick already. The "younger" console crowd is composed primarily of men aged 18-34.

I doubt that. I'd assume they'd give certain races bonuses to certain attributes (Orcs had higher stamina, Altmer have higher magicka) and start out with certain perks.

As for making each character unique within their race, that'll probably be settled early when you start out and start picking up certain skills and leveling them quickly. Every character in Oblivion started the exact same in the caves after you chose your race, and it wasn't until 45 minutes of fooling around with sneak, bows, magic, swords and axes and gaining a few levels until you were given the choice to create a class, and then your character was complete.

Now they've said they're doing all of that without holding our hands through it and specifically telling us what class we are. They've stated you level up very fast at first and the first few perks you choose will sort of determine the type of character you are. Sounds awfully familiar doesn't it?

But again, we don't know any of this yet. Give them the benefit of the doubt, they know what their fans want and aren't going to utterly demolish half of character uniqueness.

[edit - this post was directed to VA_Ghost]

Uh..

:lmao:

Reading is fundamental. :shakehead:

Despite the fact that I posted something in a similar in another thread, and against my better judgement...

PEOPLE ARE NOT COLLECTIONS OF NUMBERS. How disappointed are you about attributes not being included? Seven? Twenty-three? The numbers, and the attributes that contain them, are quite arbitrary. That Bob the Riekling has an IQ of 140 means very little, other than that he scored 140 on an IQ test. It says nothing about his ability to perform a particular task, even an intellectual one. He may be a mathematical genius but barely able to spell. Likewise, Bob's ability to run a marathon is, beyond a certain point, unrelated to how fast he can run, or whether he can march long distances cross country with little food or water. Just because D&D said that people who move quickly are naturally good archers, doesn't make it so. When a game uses an attribute ('strength'), it is imposing an arbitrary value on a character. Sometimes this value will be seem appropriate, sometimes less so- but it is quite arbitrary (should 'block' be governed by 'endurance' or 'agility'? What if I want to make an agile but not especially strong character who is a good swordsman, and the game decides that he svcks at blocking because he has low 'endurance'?).

Two points, then. Firstly, I am quite glad that no-one will be stomping all over my Skyrim characters with a bunch of attributes. Secondly, good RPing means using your imagination, not crunching numbers. Characters are imaginary people: they cannot be expressed numerically any more than real people can. I understand the urge to depict everything with game stats, but beyond a certain point, we need to let go. An NPC with a bunch of hidden attribute scores is no more or less interesting, or real, than one without.

I am certainly not saying Oblivion did it right at all! But mathematically, it is unlikely one would get many perks, if at all, at the beginning as the more perks at beginning the less one feels one grows/gets better each time you gain a level.
I started playing Beth games because of the freedom aspects. Seems like freedom of characters is severely limited at the beginning if the only variables are perk+stamina+health+magica.

Racial bonuses to what? A Orc bonus to x,y,z skills and a +25 health and stamina? Whoa I feel so different to every other Orc in existence.
Quantify using health/stamina/magica and skill bonuses:
This guy: http://elderscrolls.com/skyrim/media/screenshots/tavern/ and this gal: http://elderscrolls.com/skyrim/media/screenshots/tavern/
I don't feel like I'm playing different characters at all if one is 100 health and 50 stamina with a perk of extra damage versus her at 100 stamina, 50 health, and a quick on your feet perk.

Try quantifying the two people/characters without describing: how strong they are are, how smart they are, how they look, etc, etc, etc

Also: "PEOPLE ARE NOT COLLECTIONS OF NUMBERS. How disappointed are you about attributes not being included? Seven? Twenty-three? The numbers, and the attributes that contain them, are quite arbitrary. That Bob the Riekling has an IQ of 140 means very little, other than that he scored 140 on an IQ test. It says nothing about his ability to perform a particular task, even an intellectual one. He may be a mathematical genius but barely able to spell. Likewise, Bob's ability to run a marathon is, beyond a certain point, unrelated to how fast he can run, or whether he can march long distances cross country with little food or water. Just because D&D said that people who move quickly are naturally good archers, doesn't make it so. When a game uses an attribute ('strength'), it is imposing an arbitrary value on a character. Sometimes this value will be seem appropriate, sometimes less so- but it is quite arbitrary (should 'block' be governed by 'endurance' or 'agility'? What if I want to make an agile but not especially strong character who is a good swordsman, and the game decides that he svcks at blocking because he has low 'endurance'?)."

"PEOPLE ARE NOT COLLECTIONS OF NUMBERS" No one is saying they are. But to define something one must use some method to both quantify and compare versus both the norm and the extremes. Yes, IQ is not all encompassing but the point is one can better and more accurately define a person/character by describing them by their traits (strength, balance's and coordination, physical endurance, mental endurance, etc, etc by saying are they very strong, strong, average, not very strong, or minimally strong and assigning numbers to those versus:

Stamina plus health pick your perk and begin.

You are very much overstating the difference between starting characters of the same race and gender in prior games. The greatest variance one orc had from another was which two stats he had +5 to in Oblivion, and of course your major skills, which caused another mess of issues, mostly balance ones.

And your example pretty much proves that you don't know what you're talking about. A difference like that is far more pronounced than anything you started out with in Oblivion. Having twice as much health and higher damage vs. twice as much fatigue and higher speed? Those are very different characters.

You're acting like something earth-shattering has been removed from the experience when really it's not that big a [censored] deal in the grand scheme of things. The fact of the matter is that, yes, now two level one characters of the same race and gender will be pretty much the same, but with the new system they can be very different from one another at level 5, which doesn't take as long to get to as it did in prior games.

I don't think this is true at all. Why would you need attributes or anything at all really, to tell you what your character is. That's the point of this new system. You tell the game who you are, not the other way around.

We don't have nearly enough information about the opening hours of the game to just assume you won't be able to immediately adapt a play style you want. It's not like in the previous games you were a "Silver-tongued Breton Mage-Scholar" right away. You had to work on your personality and all your magic skills before you could really be considered a silver-tongued anything... or a Mage Scholar. This new system just lets you craft your character without any restrictions like a menu that tell you that you are a Mage.

I think some people will be eating their words when they pick it up and after two hours have a more unique character than any made in previous TES games.

I really don't get it. The leveling system is taking away from titles and numbers and adding legit RP into it. Not number crunching stuff, but real things you'll notice while playing.

Why is it that there has to be a small group that has to be blind and refuse to open their eyes? Even if that's the case, them choosing to open their mouths instead of their eyes gets annoying fast.

There is absolutely no reason to be freaking out at this moment. You all have explained why you think it's a bad idea but between what we know and what we've yet to learn, it sounds like a real improvement.

[edit - and in terms of character creation, HAVE YOU GUYS NOT NOTICED WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT IT ASIDE FROM THE FACT THAT WE CAN CHOOSE WHAT OUR CHARACTER LOOKS LIKE? Seriously, guys, do you even comprehend how little we know of this game?]

This. Now let's stop the bickering folks.

One ,I'm getting really tired of the "if you don't agree with us you are obviously not using your eyes and refusing to listen because you . Get off yer high horse. We have differing opinions. I am saying why I have serious doubts about the system . I have YET to hear anyone say how the system would result in a better defined character at the beginning. Anyone? Beuler? Beuler? Beuler?
I have no problem with a progression system - great idea! I just have a problem with playing an undefined carbon copy cardboard cutout at the beginning with only three abstract values of health/stamina/magica to differentiate them to appease the younger console crowd because making characters apparently takes too long nowadays.

"Even if that's the case, them choosing to open their mouths instead of their eyes gets annoying fast." thank you for contributing to the conversation... or am I annoying you?

Yeah well this is interesting but I want some magic weapon effects

You know why you've yet to hear it? Because Bethesda is keeping quiet. You know, because the game isn't coming out for half a year and they don't want to let out every detail so soon. We don't know anything about character creation, only that you can choose a race and alter appearance, and we know a lot about how leveling will work.

And even if it just so happens that we enter the world as a cheap template character, unique only by how we look, and my Imperial character has the same stats as your Imperial character... What if, just like in Oblivion's 40 minute tutorial, we go through ~40 minutes of early learn-the-ropes combat and questing, and at the end of it we're level 5, and suddenly our characters are looking very different?

Either way, man, I'm looking at it optimistically and waiting information. If you already have such audible views against the game, you're going to have opinions against it as you start playing and unless you have an immediate 180 turn in your opinion, your experience in such a rare gem of a game will be altered and I'll probably have a better time while first playing.

All I'm really saying is wait for info. Everything you have against this system is based off of "what ifs" on info yet to be released.

[don't take that segment of the post as me assaulting you. I'm generalizing against everyone who's been posting about the topic all day, and it came off with an incredible 'holier-than-thou' attitude. My bad, let's continue the debate civilly.]

Hypocrite. You've done very little to support your case. What examples you have provided are very poor and/or run counter to your argument.