TES is not set in the late middle ages, is this not obvious? It is set in a fictional world, one that does not necessarily follow our timeline and one that seems to experiance very few technological advances.
And if you dont want to outline the "other side of the argument" dont state that you did already.

Edit to apologize to the OP, me and Swarley are going off topic, dont want to derail the thread.
My opinion on the matter of less skills is that it isnt good, combined skills or not. And its not just the reduction of skills its that its another reduction to skills.
Less skills = Less choice, Less choice = Not good.

yeah from the Skyrim article they said they wre going for a more a Fallout style approach with skills, this time around you're not a mage or a warrior right from the start, but instead you hone whatever skills you want and the game determines from the ones you use what class you're unofficially leaning towards.

I'm not peeved at the moment, so long as all the abilites from previous TES games exist I don't care, for example if they got rid of Speechcraft and Mercantile, but in its place made a skill that combined both skills that would be okay.

You and me alike I think with the perks its great!

Just thought of it, but if necromancy isn't one of the 18, and I think it isn't, it should be since there is no more mage's guild to ban it.

Why should we care that there are a few less skill types? This is a slightly inane concern because the overall number of spells, abilities, actions, and jobs has increased, the number of unique spell animations has gone way up, and the ability to quickly swap abilities and weapons in and out during battle has been added (without pausing in a complicated menu and scrolling everywhere).

They said that Mysticism's spells have been redistributed to other skills.
It is likely that Athletics and Acrobatics have been combined.
I would not be surprised if Speechcraft and Mercantile have been combined.

Those all sound like improvements to me, because despite the fact that those are all useful skills that should be used, the benefits to training each one individually were too low to make them worth the effort. You simply didn't use them enough to see improvement without intentionally spamming them, and thus they actually decreased the growth and customization of your character. Combining them is a clear improvement.

Athletics and Acrobatics were essentially the same thing, both leveling at about the same speed for most characters, but they were not broad enough in scope to make item boosts or class/race bonuses worth having. It's easy to combine them and decrease the rate at which jumping and running contribute to skill increases. It's exactly the same for Speechcraft and Mercantile. It always seemed like Mysticism was full of random spells that could easily have been tied to other skills, but I didn't raise it enough so I never used a few of the skills I would have found helpful.

As a result, these modifications to skills do not decrease the variation possible for characters, rather they balance the growing abilities of your character to benefit your increased skill in a variety of little tasks that you'd use all the time if they hadn't been put into redundant categories all this time. I know that there are fans of practicing your skills here, but I thought spending hours before each level up trying to get +5 by using different skills I didn't actually need, while ignoring increases of skills that would have been useful if they were not too nerfed, was bad gameplay. Smoothing the leveling system and streamlining the skill types feels like a breath of fresh air to me.

It could tie in a round about way with conjuration I dont see why it would not.

I'd say you're absolutely right it could easily tie into conjuration. I hope they do that. Bone wall's, daggers, javalins, just nothing like in Kingdom under fire. Where the bone spears had nacked fat people on spears. That was just gross.

They make you wonder why something was considered useful enough to be considered a skill of course!


Wondering why the hell they included athletics when the attribute speed does the exact same thing probably raised my IQ a full 2 points!

Mages' Guild banning it should've been irrelevant

I think with perks, it's going to be just fine.

yeah maybe, but mercantile wasn't about being good at numbers so much. it was about CONVINCING PEOPLE to give you a X% discount, or buy your stuff X% more expensive. I'm sure even the most brillant person about calculating wouldn't get good results at mercantile.

Exactly, what do you think is gonna help make you character more unique and different 3 skills that which govern over stuff that is possible just moved to other skills, or 50 perks....50 perks. Really all we know is that we get to pick 50 perks, there's gonna be more perks then that.


EDIT:

Let's see the pics in the mag show skills having about 10 stars each, I betting my ass those are the perks that can be unlocked.

10 perks * 18 skills = 180 perks, and you can (possibly) only pick 50 of those for one character. That is awesome, and kicks jack-of-all-trades in the balls.

Same here really. Can't say much until we see the connection to perks. But I'm worried that we get generalized perks and not perks related to the skills we practice in. Li,e I swing my sword a lot, and on level up I get to choose better stealth? If it turns out to be a skill tree, I'll be much happier. Like, body development is a skill, where you can choose running and swimming (and more). If you picked running, you can further specialize it into sprinting and marathon running, or generalize more and choose swimming instead so you can do both reasonably well. I'm now an athlete good at both running and swimming, but I am expert in none.



We'll still be able to become jack of all trades, but we'll most likely not be able to become master of all trades like we used to (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades,_master_of_none)

As for Mysticism, that is lore, not game mechanics. It's no problem moving it's spells to other schools, it's just not something you would do. It would be a better solution to move some easy teaching low level spells *into* Mysticism and keep it (Light is an obvious and useful training candidate if you ask me, if changed to be a magical torchlight that NPCs could also react to).

I wouldn't put my champagne in the cooler over the perks just yet. If Fallout 3 is any indication, too many perks given too often and too freely poses a serious danger of lessening their individual effects and overall impact&importance.

tes x will be about special ops guys with heartbeat sensors on their guns saving the usa cyrodil from russia skyrim (nords will have russian accents) with the occasional trip to somethingstan hammerfell and south america the jungle reaches of cyrodil



i am fine with the ones being cut. but 4 being cut and one being added- equaling 18 means that we dont get additional skills (spear is the one that comes to mind- i wouldent mind medium armour either so long that it is made usefull )

Poll is a little too biased. Where's the "Don't Know, Don't Care" option?

My opinion is that I'll wait and see how it's implemented. If it's anything like the transition from Daggerfall to Morrowind, it may be for the better. I'm currently playing Daggerfall atm, and I personally think there's too many skills, most of which are just skill checks with different types of enemies to have them not attack you. Not to mention Morrowind actually ADDED some new skills that Daggerfall didn't have (like Light, Medium, and Heavy Armors, Unarmored, Spear, Alchemy, Conjuration, Enchant, Armorer).

So yeah, I'll wait and see what the skills are and how they work before I jump to conclusions like "OMG SKYRIM IZ 4 CAZULZ NAO".

Well at least with the current progression we will see Archery + Blunt + Blade merged, will be great fun to swing a dagger around and suddenly be a master with a large war-hammer and a bow.

Just like how you could swing a hammer around in Oblivion and be a master with a slicing weapon such as the axe.

Well there are less skills mainly because they just took out some of the more useless ones like Mysticism and I think they combined some skills like the armor skills(It was a pain to choose between Heavy or light)

You wrong about everything. That is all.

I keep seeing the slippery slope fallacy.

With each new game, fewer skills are lost or merged. From Daggerfall to Morrowind, eight skills were lost. From Morrowind to Oblivion, six skills were lost. From Oblivion to Skyrim, three skills were lost.

Amazing! The slope is not as slippery as people claim.

"Going console" How mature! Thank you for automatically assuming those of us who are unwilling/unable to spend hundreds (or upwards of a thousand) dollars on upgrading (or a new PC) to run Skyrim puts us in the LCD crowd with Call of Duty, Halo, and all those other things that are popular to hate on the net.

- Multiplayer: I wouldn't mind co-op, but I get the feeling Beth isn't exactly experienced with net coding.
- Athletics and Acrobatics: No big loss here. Just derive them from your Speed and Agility stats. Makes loads more sense, and doesn't screw over the leveling system.
- Block: Replace this with a "Shield" skill, and give me some actual offensive options, too.

The only case I don't like the removal of skills are in the weapon category, where something always gets the short end of the stick.

Even Morrowind didn't do this right - you could use Short Blades and be able to use daggers and short swords. Long Blades had long swords and two-handers. Somehow, a person skilled with a long sword would be unable to use a blade a few inches shorter without being totally inept, but was able to use a giant honking claymore just fine. Huh?

Marksman? You could use anything from Long Bows to throwing stars in one heading. Was anyone complaining about that as badly as Oblivion's "Blade" or "Blunt" skills? People generally just seem to ignore this, except in Oblivion..and that's only because the thrown weapons got sliced.

Polearms always get no attention - Morrowind had spears and halberds, but that's about it. How many fantasy games that aren't D&D derived have them at all?

IThis is hard to fix, though, without inflating the skill list and messing with the balance.

I voted for the third option because I'm sick of these threads.

They don't.


Do elaborate.


Also, why are we talking about possible multiplayer here?

What was so painful about choosing between Heavy and Light?
The choice is fairly obvious, speed at the cost of defence or vice versa...
If i had it my way we'd have to choose between Heavy, Light, Medium and Unarmoured.

It's better than FO3's change from 18 to 13 skills... <_<