When you look at real life there's much more things to a skill than there has been in any elder scrolls game. Skyrim is the worst in this.
My perfect elder scrolls game would remove leveling all together and add many, many more layers to every skill, add more skills and just generaly expand upon them. I don't feel at all that I'm the best blacksmith in skyrim when my blacksmithing is at a hundred. And how can I get to a 100 while I only know how to make steel, iron, hide, leather and elven armor? I can't make daedric, dragon, ebony, dwarven or orcish but supposedly I can't get better at smithing? I don't have the feeling that I'm better at fighting when I'm high level than at the beginning. Two handed weapons are freaking slow. And that would be fine if I'd get faster as I level up. But only damage seems to increase. There are so many lost opportunities in skills. Both in Skyrim and Oblivion. And most of all in Fallout 3. And it's not that there's not enough to them, I just don't feel like I'm uncovering mysterious power and becoming a grand wizard when I get higher magic skills in any Bethesda game. Not that any other game does them right, It's just that in bethesda games I feel most that skills are lackluster in both their expansiveness, realism and that feeling of growing stronger and better.

HI Thanatos! How's your day shaping up to be?

I like your ideas. It makes sense to have qualitative levelling up as well as a more limited quantitative one. Perks mitigate the problem but still too much emphasis is placed on damage increase, which currently is rather excessive. I think you may be on to something.

That's also one of the reasons why a lot of people are still playing Daggerfall and Morrowind. You started out weak and got better compared to most of your surroundings. Granted, it was still too easy to reach 100 both in skills and attributes, which should have gotten progressively harder as you approached the limit. The levelling mods like GCD and MADD removed the 100 cap and put less emphasis on level (none, in the case of GCD), as well as scrapping the awful "multiplier" system.

Adding several small branching Perk trees (not the auto-perks of Oblivion) to the Attributes and Skills of the earlier games would offer the ability to specialize above and beyond the "100" mark, and distinguish a "fencer" from a "smasher", etc. At low skill levels and with no perks, you'd be a "generic" novice at the skill, but you could not only "improve", but choose a direction for your abilities.

The use of damage nerfing in place of meaningful stats is adequate for a basic combat game, but a major step backwards for a RPG/Adventure game.

My Problem with the skills in Skyrim that there's really no class distinction anymore, no matter your play style, if you want to level up more you end up almost like every other character being a Jack-of-all-Trades.
Although in Oblivion leveling up minor skills didn't help you level which kind of supports my idea, but not completely.
there shouldn't really be a max Skill limit, getting something to 100 just deprives you from the Importance of using it anymore to get somewhere.
then again even leveling things past 100 would be hard people would still be even more over powered
maybe at the beginning you could choose what skills you could have exist and have some type of benefit if you don't choose every single one.
I'd rather not be a Mr. Perfect who can do everything better than anyone else o.o

It's not so much class distinction that's missing, rather it's the possibility of failure that's missing from Skyrim.

Ever since Daggerfall the series has always been notable for leaning away from class molds and allowing the player to create and develop his own character the way he sees fit, but the difference between games like Daggerfall and Morrowind and games like Skyrim is that in the former you will svck hard at almost EVERYTHING in the beginning, whereas in Skyrim you can do pretty much anything you want right from the get-go. In Skyrim, skills just apply minor bonuses to your already-potent and innate abilities.

I think the big problem is the lack of failure in the skills. In Skyrim, it literally doesn't matter if you've taken a perk in a skill, because they've removed most of the need to ever use the skill. If I need to find out something, I brawl, and it always works. There's no reason to level Speechcraft because a high speechcraft doesn't get you anything better than what brawling gets you. And brawling itself doesn't even have a negative side -- I've never lost a brawl, and brawling doesn't cost me gold like bribing used to in Oblivion or Morrowind.

I could say the same kinds of things about other skills -- if you have good timing, you don't need sneak or block perks. Shield bash is the same whether you're 100 or 5, and sneak works fairly well even if you're a novice. Duck and you won't be seen most of the time. Lockpick works no matter what your level is -- provided that you can find the right positions on the lock face -- I'm picking expert locks without a single perk. Why take a perk that could make me bash things harder and put it in lockpicking if I can pick the lock without any perks

The other problem is the design of the quests -- you don't need to have a certain skill to do a given quest. You don't need to be a good sneak to do most TG quests, you don't need to be a good mage to do MG, nor do you need to be a good fighter to do FG quests. You just need a decent set of reflexes, not the perks, and you don't even need to take the right perks to make it all work.

That's why so many people are calling the new installments "action games", instead of RPGs, because you are no longer playing the role of the character, you are playing an alternate version of yourself, using your OWN skills.

When player skills have minimal importance compared to those of the character, the game is more of a RPG, but less exciting. When character skills have no importance compared to player skills, it's potentially more "exciting" at first, but loses its replay value because every character will end up with the same basic skill set: YOURS. Mini-games are "valid", as long as the difficulty is directly related to the character's skills at that action, unlike the lockpick game where your reflexes entirely trump the character's skills and perks.

A modern Action/RPG needs to have aspects of both, and needs to make the character's skills relevant while allowing the player to influcence the outcome in a major way through their choices (dialog choices, faction affiliations, accomplishments), and to some degree through direct interaction (combat, mini-games, etc.).

Removing faction requirements, skill checks, and other character-based elements leaves the new games as "barely RPGs", since the character is all but irrelevant.

Great replies everyone. It seems like discussing things is done better in this forum than the individual games' general/spoilers discussions. I'd like to add something but I don't think I have anything to say with all that you've added other than to say that I dislike it a lot when Bethesda (and a lot of other developers) revamp things without adding much to it instead of user friendliness, instead of expanding them and making them more deep.

My biggest issue is how the majority of the skills in Skyrim have little to no affect on your actual usage of them.

The potency of spellcasting is arbitrarily increased in 20/40/60 percent steps through perks. Instead of a gradual progression as in past games, where spellcasters could sit anywhere on a wide spectrum of differing prowess, everybody in Skyrim effectively falls into one of the four perk categories. As western RPGs the statistics in TES games have always dealt with (relatively) low numbers, to the point that inflicting an additional 2 points with your spells never really made much of a difference. But it's about the principle. The variability was still there, and it made the game feel a bit more organic and unpredictable.

A better example would be weapon damage. I miss having ranges, being able to miss in combat and all of that. Progressively becoming both more hard-hitting and more consistent in your combat abilities in Daggerfall and Morrowind is what added to that sense of accomplishment you felt as your character developed. In Oblivion, it had degraded to a matter of always knowing that I could dispatch of monster X with the exact same number of hits, and maybe after levelling up a few times I'll notice being able to kill them with one less hit than before.

Levelling up doesn't feel even remotely rewarding to me in Skyrim since we're just increasing our health/magicka/stamina by lump-sum values, and suddenly becoming ##% stronger at certain types of spells out of the blue. Why is it that we need smithing perks to be capable of working with stronger materials at the forge? You may spend a few in-game days just pumping out stacks of iron daggers, but each is just as insignificant to your skill progression as the last. And then you can work with steel, and the cycle repeats.

Why not simply allow players to attempt to work with all materials (perhaps within a certain cutoff at least, like lock difficulties in Fallout), but with a percent chance of failing? It'd initially be extremely high, granted, but that makes your improvement far more apparent. I think this is the root issue with the skills system in Skyrim - the skills could have had far more incentives to improve if they were actually more complex to master, and had more effects on what you could do in the world. What happened to being able to fail in RPGs? One had to think further ahead and account for more possibilities and variables.

One thing that annoys me heavily about Skyrim's writing is the format in which quests are presented to you. Many of the NPCs approach you with a request, and then you're given the "sure!" dialog response and the "what's in it for me?" one. There shouldn't even be a point to having the two lines as optional from one another, when at the day you get rewarded anyway.

Bethesda could have used a speech check, the player's perceived reputability (fame/infamy/bounty), or even how intimidating they look (level/combat strength) - ANYTHING - to produce more variable quest rewards. Arrogantly asking for a reward upfront, without the proper composure, could cause an NPC to completely dismiss you as undeserving of a reward to begin with. Or conversely, perhaps a desperate NPC would be willing to pay you a little extra feeling that their task would be in good hands.

But no. There's none of that. The dialog branches are but mere flavor text. The speech skill continues to be prove relatively useless just as in Morrowind and Oblivion. It's good to improve, but outside of roleplaying purposes few players feel truly compelled to master it because the potential rewards aren't dynamic. It's a binary succeed/fail on a few diplomatic confrontations now and then, and if you fail you can just punch the NPC's face in and continue with the quest anyway.

Most of the skills are like that - linear progressions and restrictions on what you can and can't do, until you happen to grab a perk. It's always been like this with some skills, even back in Morrowind, but Skyrim has now brought this fate upon weapons and spellcasting, so it's getting worse. It makes you wonder why we even level skills in the first place if so much is governed by the perks. Bethesda may as well could have just have had you pick those upon levelling up. The way Bethesda designed their world leaves so much potential still untapped as to how variable the player's actions in it can be.

Yep. As stated, it's not the streamlinig of the skills themselves (as they are organized and utilized by the player) that upsets me so much as it is that they're becoming increasingly less impotant as a whole.

So, we're to believe that the ripped Redguard, the one who spends his life doing what it takes to make himself a warrior, the one with the inclination to seek out dangerous men and beasts and deal with them bloodily, the one who might also have the real know-how of picking complex locks and casting spells, isn't really a ripped Redguard, but is instead the stay-at-home dumpy guy who plays video games and who claims that the ripped, adventurous, and daring Redguard is him.

It's an interesting assertion, and the English language certainly allows you to make it, but there is no truth behind the words. Language can say that walking on all fours makes you an elephant instead of a guy just playing an elephant. Language can say that playing an elephant makes the elephant you. Language can say all kinds of absurd things.

OBVIOUSLY it's not based on your own skill with a sword or axe, but with a controller or rodent, your reflexes, etc. If you're quick or adept with the controls, things will play out a lot differently than if you're less dexterous, no matter how good or bad the character is at the various in-game skills. In effect, your skills matter more than the character's, not necessarily that the character's skills are totally irrelevant in all categories (yet! Maybe in TES VI?).

When your "ripped Redguard" keeps losing to easy opponents because you're just too sluggish with a rat, or your powerful but uncoordinated Orc fighter is able to pick the hardest locks despite having the absolute minimum skill possible, simply because you personally find the mini-game easy (not because you personally have any clue how to pick a lock), it's not a RPG. In effect, the character's skills are too heavily dependent on yours.

The (admittedly disputable) definition of an RPG has changed greatly as the genre in the west has shifted to more single player, sandbox affairs rather than the older party-based style. A lot of people simply regard an RPG as a game where you "play the role" of the ingame character, regardless of whether the character's backstory (if any), skills and proficiencies are completely detached from the game world and derived wholly from your own choices, or if they're extremely rooted in the conventions of the game world (racial bonuses, starting equipment, classes).

To me, the role in role-playing means creating a particular identity for your character in the game world and, ideally, sticking with it. I find it incredibly how all the characters in Skyrim begin with only the most inconsequential of skillbonuses. I want my characters in RPGs to be more than the sum of what I do with them whilst playing the game. Rather than arriving in the province as an already established adventurer well-versed in ___ however, all characters are effectively equal. It makes it more difficult to me to form an idea as to how they existed in the game world prior to me starting Skyrim.

Again, I feel that most of the skills in Skyrim are too binary. Your example of the minigame is perfect - one will hardly notice their character gradually improving in the skill, if the player is already extremely skilled with handling the minigame from the moment they start the game. At the very minimum, there should be restrictions on which lock levels your character is capable of attempting. At least then we could say usage of the Lockpicking skill in the game has some actual initial check against your character's abilities to make sure they're competent, before letting the player mess around with the lock (which could be regarded I suppose as the "random" factor to the entire procedure).

This is also why I wish your character could still miss in combat. Because aside from perks, there's no variability to the matter of combat, and the game is effectively just checking to make sure that there's a warm body at the controller. If you enter Skyrim already well-versed in player controlled combat, or you put down your level 50 warrior and create a nightblade who occasionally uses a dagger but has a preference for magic, you'll hardly notice a distinction in the respective characters' abilities in battle, save for what their equipment affects.

My smithing is up to 100 and i have got the ebony skill where you can imporove twice as good as what the weapon actuall is but it still wont let me ake any of my weapons up to legendary damage help?!

I don't mean to argue against your point that character skills are too dependent on the player's, or against your definition of an RPG. I was only trying to say that character skills are a combination of both game-stored character skills and character skills derived from player skills. I was thrown off by your wording, but it looks like we both agree on the importance of game-stored character skills. Referring to game-stored character skills as character skills but referring to player-derived character skills as player skills gets confusing. The words don't account for the fact that player-derived, player-dependent character skills are the character's skills, not the player's. In Doom, a game where all of the character's skills are derived from your own, the character remains a space marine using his own skills, skills you don't have.

If your character is poor in combat because you yourself lack the desktop athleticism to successfully work the action elements, then your character is a poor fighter. It does not matter that some arbitrary in-game numbers would seem to show otherwise, for your fighter is quite demonstrably bad. Until or unless you change him by bettering your own skills, your character, and any future character, remains a poor fighter. Once you become good, your character is a good fighter, and any new character you start in the game will also be a good fighter. By becoming good yourself, you lose the opportunity to play the role of a green, untalented fighter. All this is just restating a problem you already stated when you said "every character will end up with the same basic skill set: YOURS."

In Oblivion, your character's Blade skill (aside from any perks) represents only how much damage he inflicts when he hits. Blade is not the indicator of a character's overall skill in wielding a blade, though it does indicate at least some of a character's potential. Likewise, Security doesn't function to make your character a better lock-picker, but only to make locks more forgiving of slip-ups. These two skills could be viewed as examples of skills that aren't done right. Although they are called skills, their function is that of perks (or what Skyrim might classify as perks), not skills.

I agree with your earlier comment that reducing meaningful stats is a bad move for RPGs.

That's a good way to state the importance of character stats in general.

I wish I was a badass magical dragonslaying werewolf who can swing a 7 pound sword like a rolled up newspaper. But unfortunately, I'm not.

But I know what your getting at. There needs to be more weight to the skills in the game. More restrictions, and more rewards for levelling them.

Don't we all.....

Unfortunately, the game doesn't seem to care if your character is an alchemist and part-time poet, or a hardened member of the Fighter's Guild and a regular in the Imperial City arena, they end up fighting in the same manner, with the same odds of hitting. The only significant differences are a few dubious special moves and the amount of damage they do when they hit, since that alchemist will swing that 7 pound sword just like your proverbial badass magical dragonslaying werewolf, but will get the effect of a rolled up newspaper.

I also want to be able to play a character that's inherently DIFFERENT than the last, not just have them take different directions from the same generic starting point, and have their abilities and INABILITES have in-game effects.

Speechcraft is the one that been done poorly:

Daggerfall - Two skills (Etiquette/Streetwise) that add a chance the random people in towns might actually say something useful when using Polite or Blunt mode.

Morrowind - Let's you either adjust disposition or taunt NPC into attacking you first. Mostly good implementation, except for the fact it's all based on unreliable dice rolls.

Oblivion - Same as Morrowind, but changed to a nonsensical mini-game where you must boast, intimidate, joke, and flatter in some magic order.

Skyrim - Reduced to certain dialogue options in quest conversation, where it is mostly just an alternative to bribery or brawling. Also merged with Mercantilism.

The one thing that they never tried to with Speechcraft is let you try to parley with hostile NPCs or to manipulate them with words. Those bandits you see have the same mentality as monsters; it's always a fight to the death with no regard for their own survival. Not once can speechcraft be used to convince them to stand down, trick them into giving you their loot, or turning them against each other. By their own design, there's simply no way to use this skill outside of the cities. This is bad because if Speechcraft were set as a major skill, it affects level scaling of enemies....which is unfortunate because the skill can't even be used to talk your way out of hostile bandits or daedra.

The unreliable dice rolls become more and more reliable as your skill improves. Unreliability is a good thing, because NPCs are supposed to be thinking people, not appliances. They should always be unpredictable to some degree. Risk-free, guaranteed success is not fun (at least not for me most of the time).

I remember others suggesting this back before Fallout 3 was announced. It would be nice to see Bethesda at least trying think of ways to bring speech and persuasion up to the level of gameplay as combat, stealth, and magic. With Skyrim, they did do something fun and new with speech in dragon shouts. A similar approach might work well with human speech.

That's one reason missing and variable weapon damage rolls ought to come back. There's simply less marvel to combat in Oblivion and Skyrim when your only sense of martial progress is noticing you can now reliably kill Draugr in exactly 3 swings instead of 4. It's a very weak method of feedback for fighter characters compared to the gradual improvement of your consistency and prowess in combat in Morrowind.

I think a lot of the complaints about Morrowind's rolls came from them not being balanced well, more than a problem with the system itself, but unfortunately it seems like the general theme in the series that if some feature doesn't work well, to remove it instead of fix it. Often there was too much failure at low levels, not because you shouldn't svck at something when your skill in it is 10 or something, but a lack of applicable uses. With magic, you compensated for low skill with weak spells, but there was no low-grade application of Speechcraft. You didn't really have any indication of how difficult a "target" any NPC was, or what your odds were. Likewise, many skills started scaling too fast at high level, with equally few high-grade applications. There was no speech-related obstacle you could overcome extremely easily at, say, skill level 75, so what's even the point of the last 25. Plus, not every dice roll needs a 100% failure or success result. A weaker result instead of no result at all. A zero-failure system doesn't really allow room for any of this.

There are lots of ways they could improve speech application, and it wouldn't even need to be confined to dialogue. If they gave the character basic "emote" commands for followers, general orders like attack, flee, defend me, regroup, etcetera, higher speech skills could improve the effectiveness of those commands. You could have more of a leader-type character who's good at getting people to follow them, and be effective in combat with those skills. Of course I could go into a whole giant ramble on emphasis toward non-combat options, but that's not really here nor there.

I would definitely want to see Bethesda move more towards finding other solutions to problems than combat, and also finding ways to incorporate your non-combat skills into more situations. The talking bandits out of attacking you is good, but how about returning Acrobatics and adding in more areas that you can only access through being able to jump higher, or use a jump spell? The only reason to eliminate skills isn't that they're useless, it's because Bethesda didn't have the time or desire to make those skills useful in interesting ways.

Also, don't lightly discard the attributes and skill values that make an RPG. These and other qualities of a 'traditional' RPG need to be there, otherwise the distinction is purely subjective. Skyrim is as much an RPG as Call of Duty is - you control a person who isn't you, going through a story. If that's all it takes to have an RPG than the genre is dead. This 'moral relativism' towards the definition of an RPG is obnoxious, destructive, and without any real use.

In several Morrowind games, I played a high-Personality Imperial, and managed to get within talking distance of a few normally-hostile NPCs before they initiated combat. In a rare few cases, I was able to raise Disposition through the Admire option, and in about half of those cases, was not attacked afterwards. Unfortunately, the 3-4 times it was possible over the course of encountering several hundred bandits was hardly worth the effort, but it was POSSIBLE even with the poorly balanced systems as it was. Expanding on that, and giving you more options to either persuade or outwit potential hostiles, would have been awesome. Instead, the later games simply made Speechcraft totally pointless, and then gone.

That's pretty neat. Just yesterday I started an Imperial with personality as a favored attribute, and The Lady as my birth sign so I had a starting personality of 85! I was also able to wrangle up a starting Longblade skill of 45, so I could be the incredibly charming Imperial with an amateur's skill with a blade.

Conversely, I started a Skyrim character and all of his skills were at like 20, so it had the odd feeling that though my character was good at and could do everything, it looked like he was bad at everything based on his character sheet. I guess when all a weapon skill does is increase damage done and give you the ability to unlock perks you need to start out lower.

Without chance to hit and quality degradation, weapon skills in Skyrim are utterly pointless. Even moreso when the only real distinctions in terms of martial prowess are arbitrary 20/40/60 percent modifiers - versus the broad spectrum of fighter types you could encounter in Morrowind.

Combat and magic in Skyrim really do remind me of the old Heretic/Hexen games. They're effectively just attacks (in the case of magic, pretty, glowing missiles) with no real ties to your character's development. In a trend that has become all-too-common in newer games (see Civ V as another example), developers are getting rid of penalties/disadvantaged characters altogether and simply having everybody start at a well-rounded baseline - with the opportunity to reap some shallow multiplier bonuses and perks, yes, but without any real penalty for those who don't seek them out either.

...and even the Ordinaters say "How can I help you, citizen?", instead of "We're watching you, scum". I love it, just because it's so different.....due to an Attribute that's "useless".