As T. Howard himself pointed out, this game is inspired by the world of Conan the Barbarian.

Movie quote: The Children of Doom... Doom's Children. They told my lord the way to the Mountain of Power. They told him to throw down his sword and return to the Earth... Ha! Time enough for the Earth in the grave.

Remembering Morrowind, it was actually possible to play a good part of the game without killing anybody and still leveling your skills - because it was possible to abuse the barter system and level up via trainers. Oblivion on the other hand, disabled such schemes and the only way to level was to go out and kill stuff.

After seeing the pics and reading the magazine, I would say that this game is going to be a pretty bloody game, without options for peaceful problem solving.

In my opinion, the Skyrim mantra shall be like the following dialoge:

Mongol General: What is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

Oblivion was very combat focused. And combat in Skyrim seems better, more tactical.

Potentially. I mean, if your character used speechcraft a hell of a lot, they MIGHT have the quests generated to work like that. But I have no idea.

I'm certainly hoping for a non-lethal way around most situations. I doubt it'll happen though.

You could level just fine without doing any fighting in Oblivion. You just needed to choose non combat main skills, or grind alchemy to get cash to use trainers. But then you got your butt kicked because you had no fighting experience and a very high, very useless Speechcraft skill :biggrin:

U missed my point. I wrote that in Morrowind you could level up by using trainers in any skill, including combat skill without ever entering combat.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand the whole "let's be friends" thing in a game about dragons, magic, and big ol' maces.

Well, being and ARPG, some of us really want an RPG part too, not just blood and sweat.

You know if there are finishing moves, there must be mercy moves too. TES doesn't work with experience points. If the combat ends with one yielding(Oblivion has this for PC, you can unlock this for NPCs and creatures too(both Morrowind and Oblivion has AI qualities like yielding but disabled)), the skill progress wouldn't be hurt. It is a matter of selecting worthy opponents. Since we can be challenged (and challenge) in Skyrim, everything will work fine.

A marvelous game is coming.

Well, let me enlighten you.

If you have a rpg game in which you can choose to use only certain skills, and if you choose to use only non combat skills because that's the kind of character you want to play, the question is will the game support that kind of gameplay as well as a straight forward kill bash smash kind of gameplay.

For instance, I might want to play as a mage/diplomat that is very good at crowd control spells like command or dominate spells, invisibility spells, charm, personality and speechcraft. So I'm just wondering if that kind of gameplay will also be possible.

Let me remind you that Morrowind had the most stupid combat system ever and that game was totally not about combat, but it still cleared the way for Oblivion which was much more mainstream and combat focused.

you could use trainers in Oblivion also, they just got 5 up instead of 10 every level

I agree, if you want to be a diplomat go right ahead. It just seems silly to me is all.

No... No I did not. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Trainers
Yup, all 21 skills are available for training.

The article was mostly focused on combat prolly because thats what appeals to most gamers. Im sure the game has pleanty more going for it other then just combat(the crafting n such proves that to me) I think the article was rather decieving as to what to expect in total.

Sorry but you did because you could only level 5 points every level via trainer.

"Why not smash? Smash fun! Balthazar like to smash smash! and kill, why does OP not want kill? Rawrrr!"

Just paralyze everyone! Or put a boxing glove on your arrows.

Well actually, Oblivion wasn't focused completely toward combat. It was just an improved combat system and they wanted to make sure you actually DID fight when you leveled instead of abusing the trainers. It wasn't really focused on combat, they just didn't want you ignoring it. As for Skyrim, they really pushed toward the tactical side of combat in this game and made it more punishing to you if you don't try while fighting NPCs/creatures from Todd Howard's comment about they wanted the combat in this game to be more brutal than before. But don't think just because the combat is made more exciting and heavily improved doesn't mean that it took away from content from the rest of the game, mainly being as how they had over 100 people on the game which is a MAJOR development team. With a group that size, 5 years is more than enough time to make a large world that is populated with realistic people and creatures, have deep side quests and main questline and still have an amazing combat system. Thus is why I have great hopes with this game.

I think combat is going to play a huge part in Skyrim and IMO this is a good thing.

However, in FONV there were a lot of opportunities to use the speech skill to find peaceful solutions to quests. Actually in that game I thought it was a bit overused and you were at a serious disadvantage if you didn't focus at least a little on speech.

I think we will see some options to solve problems peacefully, but I am sure that most quests (and especially the MQ) will require a healthy amount of bloodletting.

Ah, I understand. This is a much better description of what I thought you wanted. I thought you wanted to be like just a miner or farmer that runs for dear life when anything tries to attack you.

Didn't say it was completely combat-focused, but not really focused on speech. Skyrim should put a bit more emphasis on that. The fact that the team has about 100 persons working on the game does not say much. We still need to hear from them what the game is like.

Far as I remember, he mentioned Conan only when referring to the visual design, saying that there would be "some of that" (or something similar). It's not the only inspiration for the overall game or the game world, and isn't necessarily even the main one.


You can level in either of them without killing things. Doing so in either game still relies on exploitation - they're both primarily dungeon-crawling affairs and they're both reliant fairly heavily on combat. You're not expected to beat Morrowind without killing anyone, and doing so without huge amounts of exploiting would be pretty much impossible.

Not a single game in this series is built on the assumption that you should be able to play through it without combat and without killing. Don't expect Skyrim to be an exception.

Honestly, the only reason combat was over bearing in Oblivion was that the level scaling made it so that those who focused on non-combat skills would get wrecked (which, as we all know, was silly regardless of what kind of character one played). Fight a bandit, win, enter a town and stay for a few days while practicing your smooth talking, walk out, fight a bandit, lose badly to his glass longsword.

Do you actually believe that 100 people were building this game for 5 years?? Of course not, they started after FO3, and only a small group worked on TESV from TESIV onwards.

Well don't get me wrong, I would love a game with a great combat system, but I'm just wondering about other options.

I certainly hope that Skyrim will be less combat orientated than Oblivion was - I mean most of the time Oblivion had nothing else to do... If killing stuff was all I wanted to do I woun't be playing an RPG. If we have cities let us have quests that have nothing to do with fighting - how about some puzzle solving, detective work and politics&diplomacy stuff? While I like going out and "hunting" I'd like to have a more "civilized" pastimes as well

Oh, and good old "let's cast 1001 spell on the wall" method worked in Oblivion just fine, you could level a mage without fighting anything all you want. And I'm sure there are plenty of "training dummy" mods out there. Non combat leveling was always a part of TES and personalty I rather like that

This.