They had to appeal to the CoD crowd. Unfortunately im not 12 years old anymore and have an attention span longer than
10 minutes.

Only way to do that is make the game for idiots and completely shallow. Its basically an arcade FPS game
trying to pose as an RPG, but is nowhere near a real RPG.

If they arent focusing on totally free character customization, what ARE they focusing on? Because everyone can tell the
graphics are 6 years outdated along with all the combat being a total joke consisting of pressing 1 button over and over.

The only thing that ever made TES great was the complexity.

TES is officially terrible now, its a shame really. Guess I'll play Bioware games from now on, Bethesda has completely ruined their
games.

This is where we get to redundancy though, burden and damage strength were redundant spells, damage strength just happened to be superior for obvious reasons. Damage strength was also just cheesy.

Can you honestly say that they should've kept both burden and damage strength in the game? Why are these really so different than just paralyze which is the same concept without all the nonsense?

Because of choice and diversity, every different version has different effects.

Burden is likely to stop your enemy in his tracks for a long while but it will be casting spells at you or shooting arrows at you without remorse.

Damage Strength may slow down your enemy a little and make it do less damage for a while but it's still quite functional.

Paralyze will completely lock down your enemy, no spells, no sword swinging, your enemy stops. However the bad part is that the spell is expensive and generally lasts only for a short while, a lot shorter than the other two spells.

I prefer not being burdened with the responsibility of balancing the game for myself. Call me crazy but I like the devs to create a balanced game in the first place, so I can just play it naturally without having to try to abide by all kinds of self imposed rules in a vain attempt to make the combat challenging in spite of overpowered, flawed, broken mechanics of various sorts.


Good luck with that, Bioware is owned by EA now.

As for the rest of your post, I can't say I agree with any of your assessments. Skyrim has the potential for a much more diverse and unique assortment of characters, it has superior character customization to both Morrowind and Oblivion. The perk system makes your characters unique at high level, whereas in previous games you ended up with an increasingly less defined character as all your skills and attributes got closer to 100. Skyrim is in no way dumbed down compared to Oblivion.

The problem with Spellmaking was that anything you made was always better than anything you could ever find out in the world. No matter how long someone was at wizardry, how much research and time they put into it, or how ancient the lore, the PC could make a superior spell in five seconds.

How is that a problem??????????
You will loose the joy of buying it from a vendor?
Also remember you needed to have the effects in order to create them.

And Odd Hermit? You haven't answered to my replies.

I actually have to agree with that in a way and it is partially the reason I wasn't all that concerned before the game was out.

However I wasn't concerned because I expected Bethesda to make up for the lack of spell creation by making more buy-able spells than ever before. But instead we got only a handful of spells, some of it ranked properly and some of it ranked improperly, and amongst it all some spells are only cast-able in one specific way when it should be possible to use them in more ways.

I wasn't really expecting 1500+ spells this way but at least 600 - 750 or so.

However while it may seem unreal that one mage could make better spells in all schools of magic than the current masters of said schools if it was up to me I'd still just go for spell-making in the end.

Yeah, and how hard is gathering the effects, exactly? The only problem I ever had with that in OB is remembering which guild branch had which school.

As for the first, exploration. Warriors get neat armor and weapons, thieves get armor and weapons, but mages get..er..staves and robes? All I'm saying is there should be worthwhile spells out there somewhere that does something you just can't just whip up in two seconds on the Create-A-Spell box after you grab a few spells from an NPC.

It's also kind of why Smithing makes Daedric less special. The other armors I'm okay with, but I'm really not sure you should just be able to create your own Daedric gear after grinding Iron Daggers for an hour.

Customization?

Armor basically consists of 2 pieces.

Theres like 1/5th as many spells in this game as Morrowind had.

What super exciting perks change combat from being "press left mouse button over and over while the enemy autopilots towards you"?

Basically, burden did nothing, and was a "lite" version of damage strength.
Damage strength shut down melee completely while being somewhat less effective vs. ranged enemies
Paralyze worked on any type of enemy excluding some special resistant types, and had a more balanced duration and cost.

I'll take the spell system with just paralyze over the one with all three, personally.



It was an immersion breaker and it was imbalanced. Kind of stupid that for all the intense studying of many incredible wizards over hundreds of years, the PC can figure out more effective spells no problem in a single day. And then the PC, even at low levels, can kill anything in the game easily.

You're talking about what it "did" in Oblivion. I'm talking about what it "could do" and "should have been designed to do" in Skyrim.

Yes, Oblivion got it wrong but Skyrim could have gotten it right.

Armor is 4 pieces, learn to count.

4/5ths of the spells in Morrowind were worthless, redundant, imbalanced, etc. etc. Quantity alone doesn't mean anything

Personally I like the controlled shield bashing w/the time slow on power attacks, the stagger perk for archery, the bleed perk for axes which keeps damage going while you're dodging out, healing up, blocking, etc.

How does that change in Skyrim..? With a few quests you do for the end-game spells? Because everything else is sold by every vendor.
Also to do that in Oblivion you had to be very powerful already.
Besides that, mages are meant to research magic themselves too, and even every mage in Skyrim mentions that.



You are a wizard yourself - can't you study like all the other npcs? Is that not immersion breaking? Everyone "experiements" and actually tell you to be careful with your experiments and share results and yet you have nothing to "experiment" on. The PC at low lvls could kill anything easily with spell making? Where did you hear that? Had you really ever used spell making or just trolling? It was perfectly balanced. Mana costs depended on each of the spell's characteristics.

Helms nobody wears, gloves and boots. Really noticable.

Wheres my chest, my pants, my shoulders my rings, my earrings, wheres my second weapon at when i sheathe it? Oh
right there isnt any.

And what chest pieces are there? Like 6 max? ROFL ok.

Thats zero customization.

BF3 has more in depth combat than this game does.

Try again.

That is one less piece of armor than Oblivion. I personally wear my helm most of the time, might take it off for screenshots every once in awhile.

I'm also sure BF3 has more depth to combat gameplay than every Bethesda game, it's pretty hard for Bethesda to make AI that's going to compare to actual people.

Oh so BF3 has more in depth combat.

Skyrim has no depth in character customization and as you said has no depth in combat.

So where exactly is the depth in this game?

Care to enlighten me?

Apples and oranges much?

A FPS that consists of pressing left mouse button.

Last i checked thats all this game consists of in combat which is "gasp" in first person.

Um, could we keep this discussion to the spells please ? Locked topics aren't allowed to be re-created and I spent quite a while working on the two spell lists. I'd hate to see this topic locked for going off-topic.

Oh and Bleak does bring a point about all spells being sold at vendors except very specific high end spells. I quite liked the specialization of places in Oblivion, it made me favor some mages guild halls over others even scorning some such as the one that focused on Conjuration. A touch of flavor that understandably doesn't really work with Skyrim as it just has the college. However perhaps the court wizards of the thanes could have their own little love of specific spell schools ?

A lot of arguments being made against spell crafting seem to be this "balance" crud. This is a single player game. There isn't a need for "balance" of this manner. Makes it even MORE absurd given the current state of smithing/alchemy/enchanting. One can easily say that is overpowered and needs balance, but once again... Its a choice. You had every right to use only vendor sold spells in Oblivion. Well some people like to craft their own spells. Just because I don't like melee does not give me the right to claim it should be removed. Same thing with spell crafting. They even added back enchanting and started smithing but removed spell crafting. No matter how many arguments you make against spell crafting its only going to be "I don't like it so it should be gone". I know modders will fix this mistake in the future but I don't see why Bethesda didn't just include a feature that has been a part of Elderscrolls for a long time.

I rapidly exhausted my interest in magic already. Oblivion entertained me for years. What they did to magic was a shame. The same could even be said for melee with the removal of all the separate skills from Morrowind but that is a whole new discussion on its own.

I can understand the loss of some spells but why can we not summon weapons of every type? why the lack of dagger summon for starters.

The same is true for smithing, alchemy *AND* enchanting in Skyrim.

So what was the problem?

Also gave up on my pure Mage char and now playing Battlemage build. It was all great in the beginning but around level 25 it became comatose inducing to play.
I actually loved the new system and didn't have any gripes with it, though mourning the loss of a few spells, but now I have to agree with the OP and others here.
The fact that I liked the magic in Oblivion better is really something coming from me as I personally found it to be the least compelling TES game.

Yes

I never said Skyrim has no depth in character creation or combat, nice straw man.

I believe I answered this already when I gave you some examples of improvements via the perk system. Not having greaves separate from my cuirass for some strange reason isn't bothering me too much and I'm enjoying the more visceral and involved combat with various special attacks, bashing, dual casting spells to get more powerful effects on the fly when needed, and using methods of staggering and slowing NPCs to interrupt, avoid damage, and kite. All adds up to create obviously superior combat to Oblivion or Morrowind. It's certainly got a considerably number of flaws and has a long way to go still, but it's the best of any TES game to date. And as for character creation, again as I've already said, the perk system allows for much more unique and defined characters especially at higher levels.



This is one complaint I agree with. Especially since there are perks specific to daggers, maces, axes that will have no effect on bound sword, while the sword talents will. Same goes for having only the 2h axe.

All of these things could have still been implemented with both spell crafting AND all our classic effects. No reason to remove them.