"Gone is the restrictive class system of earlier games. In its place stands an elegant leveling system that rewards experience for every thing you do in the game and has safeguards in place to limit exploits."

So no initial class, and they let us define our class later in the game, just as I hoped for, and suggested in http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1144150-character-development-and-you.

"The main thing is that you don't pick which skills are important to you in the beginning."

You develop them as you like and get skillful in some of them, I hope similar skills boost the growth rate of each other so that you are "advised" to get specialized, and the more specialized you get the easier it becomes to advance the related skills, and I hope the races have some lasting effect on your character as well.

"As any given skill increases, it contributes to your overall level growth. The higher the skill, the more it contributes to leveling. Thus specialization in a few key skills is advisable but not required. The more skills you choose to advance the more you delay your progression to high levels."

That's great news, as it removes the need to power game to micromanage those additional attributes, but I do not know how they are managing those attributes, and if we can increase them by advancing our skills or not, as both can result in interesting game-play, if different ones.

"Those ever ascending levels are highly desired", and some really interesting stuff, regarding how leveling is highly desired, and the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1107940-perks-they-can-make-each-play-through-a-unique-experience, as it seems that they have finally hit the sweet spot on leveling.

I wished that we had to learn skill perks from their related masters, and the price for such lessons could have been increasingly steep for higher level perks, thus in later stages of the game, we had goals about how to spend our money as with greater power comes increased rate of looting and gaining money.

But this is a great step ahead of Oblivion's perk implementation, and really a welcome touch.

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On the other hand at some place they told that quests are dynamically arranged in dungeons that you have not met yet, which is great, and are tailored you your character's strengths and weaknesses, which is not bad if implemented correctly, but do we have quests that force us to retreat and come back when more powerful and prepared?

That's the question that is very important, because if we do not have such scenarios of initial failures and final conquers, advancing in levels would be meaningless, like in Oblivion, unless gaining new perks and skills for our specialized character in higher level, change the game-play so drastically to keep it interesting for us to want to advance to higher levels, in order to gain those specialized perks.

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In the whole I'm really intrigued and excited about what I have read, and the only fear is about how the level scaling of those dynamic quests is implemented.

What is your take about these details?

I typed a large response, but then accidentally refreshed my browser, and lost it all.

So in my frustration, I will summarize my epic post. (R.I.P)

- I agree with all of the above
- I assume that, even if level scaling is still in the game, it will be implemented differently. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Wait till we get some more info.
- I am also excited about perks.

i hope by the quests being "scaled" they mean in terms of the kinds of quests you're approached with. it would be neat if at lower levels people would come up to you with quests like SOME BANDITS STOLE MY RING THEY'RE IN THE GRIM CAVE OF DARK TERRORS and at higher levels you get quests like NECROMANCERS HAVE DUG UP MY DEAD HUSBAND'S CORPSE AND CARRIED HIM OFF TO THE DEN OF PRETTY AWFUL THINGS.

i'm curious as to what they're doing as far as skill/stat overhauls. i'm expecting some streamlining for combat skills (i'd like if they compressed melee into just one-handed and two-handed since honestly it would make a lot more sense than the current divide) and i've seen people saying that they've cut mercantile and security, though i haven't actually confirmed that.

i wasn't expecting them to ditch classes at ALL, though. hopefully the next step is levels~

ed regarding actual core game level scaling, they've said it's going to be handled similarly to how it was in Fallout 3, which was a massive step up from Oblivion's.

My impression was that there are no classes, and that from the sounds of it, I could pour points into one skill and level up that way, as impractical as it would be to do so.

I only quite you because of the clever dungeons names lol. Forced a chuckle out of me.

Edit: The den of pretty awful things...that's the one that gets me...lmao

I like having "restrictive" classes, so I'm not really sure how to feel about this development. I'm definitely going to give it a fair chance though.

My only experience with classless RPGs is the Fable series which, while fun, really seems to force your character to become good at everything. I'm pretty sure that this isn't going to be the case in Skyrim, but I feel that I need to hold onto my skepticism until I see more.

Sounds to me like instead of picking a class, you're developing it and settings it's traits early on. I think I read that early levels would be even easier to achieve than in OB (which was ridiculously easy), before slowing down. Maybe levels 1-4/5 can be considered class selection phase? Seems there will be a starter dungeon again though.

I'm a little skeptical about the 'no classes' thing but it might turn out ok in the end. However, when I heard some dungeons will be tailored after the player character's strenghts and weaknesses my first reaction was instant dislike. I don't want the world to be tailored for my character. Maybe they mean it in a different way than I imagine it but I want to be able to accept a quest and find I'm in over my head and I need to come back later. I get that some NPCs might not give you a quest if they don't think you can do it but not every single NPC should be that moral. If they restrict it so it only applies to miscellaneous quests I can accept it, though, so hopefully it won't be with every quest in the game.

I never cared for the class system, I just picked "warrior" and moved on.

Damn that smells like an upcoming easteregg

I think the new system sounds awesome. It rewards players for specializing in fewer skills, and actually give you an incentive to level up via perks.

Huge improvements without a doubt. This will make me more excited about replaying the game with different character builds.

this

Yes, I'm really excited about it, and hope they result in more unique characters in the game, not the jack of all trades characters we ended up with, in previous games.

If Perks meaning like Fallout Style where each perk has a unique use such as "Animal Friend" which could help if somewhat changed in the real game so that selected animals did not attack you then all the better

Please answer this, someone:

Does this system mean that it's akin to Oblivion's in that if I use blade I level blade, if i use alchemy I level alchemy? I want it like that

No doubt about that!

Hopefully level-scaling will be more like in Morrowind/FNV.

I agree that there should be a limited range for enemies and their equipment to scale to the player, but there should always be enemies that either wipe the floor with you or vice versa no matter what level you are.

Sphagne, from what you can make out from the magazine, will we be able to level all skills to 100 then still?

You must play Munchkin. Now.

Be sure to don your spiked codpiece and slimy armor and avoid dastardly foes like the large angry chicken.

Oh, and with respects to Skyrim, it only sounded to me like certain specific things would be tailored to our character, which doesn't seem too obtrusive to me.

I think, I found a nice solution for this:

Some areas/places, can be marked as newbie areas, and some low level areas, mid level areas, and high level areas, so id we happen to have a quest in each place from those areas, the enemy placed there should be tailored by our strengths and weaknesses but influenced by area difficulty as well, and then a bit of randomness as well, so in the end, some places might end up as too much for our current character, and we are forced to retreat to return when more prepared for the place.


I did not see any comment on skill level cap, so I don't know about them, but there would be no hard cap over character level, and it only slows down in later stages, so much that it would be really hard to gain level much above 50s.

How does that not sound terrible? What are we lacking the most for Bethesda games? Oh right, a world that seems to be even more centred around the player and his/her progress, in a way that makes it seem like the world exists solely for them. I realise that this is the case, but it wrecks immersion something terrible when you, as a player, feel like the world is MADE for you and doesn't have a purpose or a cycle on its own.

I really think its no biggy. You know what? Restrictive classes, turn based combat, damage/hp based on level/stats, all that stuff, was implemented because a real-time simulation-based game was impossible when RPGs first started getting made, the only reason people want them is because they want to play the old games that were out when they started gaming. Why not move on? Why not try new things?

"Because then its not an RPG!"

Screw that. To me, its an RPG if you're playing as someone else, and you progress, and story is a big thing. CoD isnt an RPG because you play mainly as some nameless person online, or in a pre-defined story, and the only gameplay mechanics are around combat. An RPG is an RPG to me when you can make your own way, when you can interact in meaningful ways with NPCs, and when you can advance without pulling out your sword, but no matter what you're doing, you're improving.

Looking at the page showing the skills screen in GI cover, I saw that each constellation representing a skill has a three-like structure for star formation, with the skill represented as the root of the tree, and the stars apparently as each node of the tree structure, representing each perk for the skill.

So hopefully perk collection for each skill defines a small hierarchy of inter-dependent perks that has 3 to 4 main branches and some sub-branches after that.

I hope that we can only select the higher level perks if only we had selected their lower level required perks, so we could specialize in branches that we like, bur could not be able to select just higher level perks and be done with it.

From what I gather each skill has 9 perks, so in total we would have 9*18 = 162 perks to select from, added to that each character can select 50+ perks, we know that at most each character can acquire a third of the all the skill perks available in the game.

Hopefully the lover level perks are lower powered ones and only the higher level perks have significant effects on the player, so this system would not result in overly powerful characters, but help us make quite unique characters for our games, that would not be like copycatted jack of all trades that our previous characters tended to become.

From what I understand, it would be quite easy for us to change our play style and formed "Class" in the beginning of the game, if we have a change of heart, but as we specialize, and form our character, like a carving on the rock, it would become increasingly harder to change the style of our character, in the later stages of the game.

Just like the real life, and I like it! As I said before in this thread, it seems that they finally nailed it down, in the right place.

If Bethesda can do the perks correctly and I can still Grind some skills like Illusion then I don't have a problem with them overhauling the class system. It's still early though but it sounds like a good idea in theory.

I did not understand your meaning, but from what I see till now, we would have a great character leveling system compared to the previous titles.

And it they supply us with the script function, that could change the rate of skill progression as we like, and let us remove some perks from the level-up sessions, and learn them from their respective expert teachers, I can alter it a little bit to make my dream of character leveling.