NOTE: this thread is in response to the class debate and is more or less based around the PAST games, not specifically Skyrim and Skyrim only.


Ok, so I've been basically lurking around here watching all the topics go by, and I got particularly interested in the classes issue today. So I thought I'd give my own responses to some common arguments against them that I saw. Sure I could go post in those topics (note that the ones I've been looking at are a little old) but due to this boards rate of posting, so to speak, it would likely get drowned out and pretty much go unheard. Plus, its a big post, so why not give it its own topic.

But anyway..

#1 - Defining yourself as you go

So, the basic argument here is that, when starting the game, you are forced to decide what you're character 'can' and 'cannot' do. You are forced to take up a class and decide on what skills you want to use for the rest of the game, when for most players who haven't already been through this situation a hundred times (as is the common thing for ES players to do) you don't even know if you'll end up using those skills or if they'll even be useful mid to end game, or even at all. Subsequent playthroughs more or less dissolve the problem but for those who use this argument the problem for them is still there.

Now, my response to this is that people who think like this have missed something very big about character creation. Character creation is not meant as a mechanic with which to limit your character with, but to give them a boost in a range of skills that you select, which due to the fact that all characters start out as advlts, we can reason to be that set of skills we spent our lives up until that point training, which comes to form our class.

Our characters start out with a significant portion of their lives already passed and unless you're trying to play a character that starts out as a simpleton who has all skills at level 5 (which is what Skyrim seems to be doing, but the same effect could have been had by the simple option of "No Class" and then letting us define our class as we go, giving us the option to change class names at will) , then you're naturally going to have a specific set of skills trained up until that point where you the player take control, and as such defining your class in the beginning not only serves a significant roleplaying (where was your character going? What did he do, why did he do it, for who or for what? Etc) and realism (even simpletons have some sort of skill) purpose, but also for gameplay purposes with the aforementioned boost mechanic.

In pure gameplay the class means nothing more than a simple boost in skills you think you will most likely use throughout the course of that character so that you don't have to spend time getting them up to such levels. And if you decide that you want to drop Long Blade and go for Blunt, but you only selected Long Blade as a Major Skill, then not all is lost. You simply sit and train blunt up to a comparable level to your Long Blade skill. The same thing is going to happen in Skyrim, but now we only have two (stupid) weapon skills. If you want to forgo one handed weapons for two handed weapons after having already maxed one handers you're going to fall in the same boat as if you decided on the same thing in Oblivion or Morrowind.

No matter what, you will always spend the same amount of time getting the skills you want to use up to usable levels whether theres a class system in place or not. So, I think, this issue of 'defining yourself as you go >> defining yourself in the beginning" is really just missing the point of the class system in the first place as no matter what the same amount of time is spent if you decide to use different skills compared to what you started out with. Truly, the only real problem with the class system is that it is fixed in the name area. And this is a simple matter of allowing Class Name/Descriptions to be changed at will.

The same arguments here can also be said about Birthsigns. True though it is that you shouldn't be able to change that at will, and thus this creates a problem of having a useless birthsign for your character, this issue can be more or less avoided by the fact that there are plenty of generic and less class specific birthsigns to choose which can benefit any character as equal as possible if you're one to be changing what skills you want to use on one character.

This brings us to another common issue:

#2 The Stat Grind


Now, the argument I sometimes see here is that the class system exacerbates the issue of the "stat grind", where a player tends to be overly focused on making their character be the best possible thing ever by end-game so that they don't die in five seconds. The reasons should be obvious as to players who worry about such things, choosing the right Majors and Minors can either spell disaster or bliss.

This issue was most apparent in Oblivion, due to its terrible level scaling, among other things, and was only slightly an issue in Morrowind. However, on the assumption that level scaling is fixed (as it rightfully should be), then the only problem that persists is the issue of health. Non-warriors, or at least those players who do not bother to train endurance to max as early as possible, have a very high possibility of being gimped out of having high health due to how the health system works.

But the thing is, non-warriors by tradition don't need to have high health to cope with taking damage. Mages have multiple abilities at their disposal, including the ability to raise health to astronomical levels, to deal with damage and stealth characters generally are not supposed to even get hit, having put the time that could have been spent on being able to absorb damage on avoiding even being hit altogether. And melee characters obviously deal with damage by just absorbing it. And even disregarding that, those players that still want to have high health for their character (even though they may be some scrawny mage or thief or whatever) can still just train an endurance skill (or skills) up early alongside their other skills. And if you decide not to do so (and on the assumption that you knew better. Newer players should naturally fall into this issue once or twice) then thats your own fault. You should have other methods of dealing with damage at this point and if you don't, too bad, because you probably tried creating a character that shouldn't even be fighting anyway.

Now, Skyrim's answer to this issue is by allowing you to just raise health up directly regardless of what skills you train. And not only is this massively unrealistic but its also removes a fairly core gameplay mechanic for no good reason at all other than to appease the great mass of players who all yelled "HEY BETH OBLIVION svck SFIX IT ASDRHA;ESRHAESIRASDRIAESNF;ASDIHF1". Problem is, they fixed the wrong thing. In Morrowind, I hardly ever worried about grinding out my health stat except when I was taking on monsters which were naturally out of my powers to defeat anyway. Even on higher difficulties I only worried about it ever so slightly and even then I wasn't obsesssing over it. I felt no need to max Endurance by level 10 or some such nonsense. But in Oblivion, I most certainly had to because by level 20 monsters were going to start hitting harder than I could to them, and if I didn't have Endurance already maxed 10 levels ago I was pretty much screwed. Even on characters which I reasoned didn't really need health to such a great degree had to worry about it, which is sad, as I shouldn't have to worry about maxing Heavy Armor with my Thief.

The problem here was level scaling and a great lack of other methods of dealing with damage. Not the health system.

But those are the two issues I thought I'd give my 2 cents on.

I envision a lot of TL;DR

But I completely agree. It's not about limiting your player (although that IS important) but about making him decent at a few things right off the bat.

It kinda svcks that ALL characters (like in Oblivion) are going to start out with a decent melee, magic, and stealth skills. If I wanted that, I would just play Dark Messiah of Might and Magick.

I want to make a Nord whose awesome at going unarmored and wielding a big axe. Then an Imperial who wears heavy armor and uses swords. Then a Dunmer fire mage...but there will be no difference when they start the game. They will all have a 15+ sword skill, and all will start with a heal spell and a fireball spell. No thanks.

I basically think if someone has to say TL;DR they don't have any worthwhile responses in their heads anyway.

But yes, it is nice to be able to start out right from the beginning being what I want to be right out of the box. In Skyrim it would seem that we have to work towards where we want to be, WHICH ISN'T BAD, but I think the option of "NO CLASS" would have been better for it.

I couldn't agree more. But at the same time, there is nothing wrong with traditional classes either. But I really, really like the new system: brings something new to the table, at the same time as it removes a lot of prblems and grief later on.

You don't know that yet. There are almost certainly perk/skill bonuses for each race, as well as powers exclusive to each. Beginning spells too, might start off differently depending on other factors

one word

GOTHIC

Well, and what about the traditional system? You get 20 skill points, and 10 skills. You can give yourself 2 points in every skill, or 10 points in 2 skills, and any combination in between.

What they need to get rid of is "major skills level faster." There is a natural "learning curve." If you such at picking locks, its going to take a long time to get good, because you fail 9/10 times. But if you do get better, and can do it 5/10 times, you then will start getting better fast, and will soon be doing it 9/10 times.

THEN, however, you have to increase the amount of "success" it takes to improve. Or maybe not.

Very nice thread, completely agreed on both points.

You don't actually know that. None of us have played Skyrim and experienced how fast our skills will level. I suppose you don't know about the Guardian Stones yet? They were revealed at E3 yesterday (in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9RlZIXAv2c at 2:25) and what they do is increase your EXP rate by 30% for either warrior skills, mage skills, or stealth skills. So it seems pretty safe to say that we're going to level at a different pace from Oblivion.

Your second point confuses me a bit, you say there's a problem with health but you never really explained what it is. Are you suggesting that its not fair that a warrior who didn't raise his endurance doesn't have much HP? It's a choice the gamer has to make.. I could make a mage with low INT if a want, but you won't see me calling the game flawed because my low INT mage doesn't have enough magicka :confused:

I agree. But I don't think you have to increase the amount of experience you need to improve. In my experience, minor skills level up slowly enough in their own right and once it gets to that point where slow turns into fast you start running out of targets to actually use. Excepting alchemy, which could actually do with a decrease in the amount of time it takes to level it up.



Yes, I actually do, because I wasn't talking about Skyrim. I was talking about its predecessors which is what I was basing my arguments around entirely. And I was acting on the assumption that the leveling rates will at least be similar. And even disregarding that, if we assume all skills in Skyrim level up at more or less the same action to experience ratio as a base line (ie no extra factors like the Guardian Stones nor being able to execute more actions for particular skill compared to another) then yes, no matter what all skills take the same amount of time to level up.

And the skills that may or may not level up quicker (looking at something like Alchemy or Smithing, where high amounts of actions might be able to be executed in a shorter amount of time compared to leveling Destruction or One-Handed weapons) aren't necessarily that big of a deal because the problem here is mostly to do with combat skills, not relatively passive ones.



That was my point entirely actually. People who complain about the health system tend to use the argument that you can gimp yourself by not training endurance to max as early as possible. And my points in response to that basically expanded on that simple point you said that I quoted above. It is the gamer's choice and if he/she screws up, too bad.

The levelling in Skyrim will be at a different pace, though, being as though there are the already mentioned Guardian Stones, and also because Todd said that they designed this game to be a 1-50 game (instead of a 1-25 game) which to me sounds like you're going to level up a bit faster over a similar time period (even if only a bit). We agree on the second point though, Oblivion actually did a fairly good job at giving you alternate ways to deal with tanking damage (I always used conjured creatures as my tanks, up until I learned Paralyze anyways). But upon rereading your second point was really about how they botched the level scaling, which pretty much everyone agrees with anyways so I don't have anything to add to that :whistling:

Err... not really.
It worked this way in Fallout 3, but not in Oblivion or Morrowind... in Theory anyway.

Thing is, by selecting your major skills you also select the skills that will contribute to your overall level. And here lies the problem, if you would raise another skill outside your major skills, those wouldn't contribute to your overall level, and this is how you can trick the system, creating a character way too strong for your level, and with level scaling this is even bigger.
Yes, you could concentrate on a non-class skill if you want to, and if we forget about the overall level, major skills would become kinda useless to keep track on differently than the rest.

Personally I wouldn't mind if we could choose a few skills we could start with a small bonus, like instead of starting with 10 on everything you would start with 30 on the selected ones.
But Bethesda seem to go with the "be who you play" thing more seriously this time, and tries to make choices at the beginning minimal, making most of the choices for the rest of the game.

Except Dark Messiah didn't really give many options in possible end-game character types, and most character types played similarly.

All characters should start out roughly the same in Skyrim, because you're a level 1 nobody who just spent Akatosh-knows how long in a prison cell. The idea is to differentiate your character by playing, not by checking off questions when you start a new game.

I am verry hapy the way this is going. I can now make a true hybrid class. It will be verry cool imo.

To be honest, this thread is moot

We simply do not yet know how the interactions of the skill progression, the perks, the guardian stones and - who knows - maybe other factors, are going to work in practice.

Its interesting to speculate of course ,but there are too many unknowns to make a definitive assessment

Definitely wish they had classes/custom classes still. I like defining my character at creation. I like inherent strengths and weaknesses. Our builds were not born in that prison. Nor do I like Todd's quote from the E3 demo where he said "Now if you want to be a battlemage you can just do it and not have to worry about the skills you picked etc."

Plus you just get more out of ES when you stick to who your build is.

Class systems in D&D were about limiting your characters abilities to a specific archetype, outside which your character had very little ability.
TES has had a much looser class system than that since Daggerfall, but class still affected the rate at which you gained skills, not just the skills you began with.
Personally I'd have preferred if they replaced classes with a background/prior experience system but I can live with the blank slate approach.

Ahem:



Just thought I'd repost that.



This is true, and I think we should get rid of Major Skills leveling you up while minors mean nothing to that regard, while retaining the same kind of boost system that a class can give.



That ruins roleplaying for me personally. What if I was a powerful sorcerer who managed to get caught by that young naive mage at the wrong time no more than a year before the game starts? Does my sorcerer have to lose his powers over the course of a year? Of course not. Same with any kind of character really. And thats what the class system allows for. But if we also introduce the option of no class then you also have the option of starting out as a simpleton or someone whose been in jail for basically ever.

This is a single player game, and at that a ROLE-PLAYING game. There should be the option to start out already well endowed in a specific role or as a simpleton who knows nothing. Not every character needs to start out the same. Thats just stupid and restricting.



As I said earlier, this thread is in response to the class debate and is more or less based around the PAST games, not specifically Skyrim and Skyrim only.

Meh.

So you have to play as a custom class instead of a pre-set one with 50 skills you'll never use. Sounds like a good idea to me.

You didn't read the topic much did you?

You are talking as if it is added because it is better feature or because they want to improve the system.
While I do like this system more, the main reason this was done was because Bethesda wanted to try something new in this field, they liked the basic idea and decided to take it. Which idea is better does not even matter.

I like this post, and I like the OP

I did, and it mostly boiled down to "bawwww, I want my skills to be high right away instead of having to level up!"

I mean, if I choose a melee class, odds are I'm gonna sneak and use restoration magic at some point anyway. So why not just let me do it instead of restricting me for no good reason?

You can't just dismiss Guardian Stones and the faster 1-50 style gameplay and then say "no matter what all skills take the same amount of time to level up". Guardian Stones do matter as they are part of the gameplay and they give a 30% EXP bonus, which means you'll level those skills a third faster than normal. And Todd said in one of the earliest interviews that part of the reason they went with a 1-50 approach was because levellling up and selecting perks is fun so they want you to get a decent start of customizing your character early on.

I can say that "no matter what" Skyrim will have faster levelling. You cannot say that "no matter what" Skyrim will level at the same speed as the older ES games, because my position is supported by the evidence and yours is about specifically omitting it

@ Akul Given Todd's rather stupid excuses for dropping the previous system, I doubt its just because Beth wanted to try something new. Its obvious pandering to a notion of simplicity that was not needed and if they wanted to really revamp the system they should have fixed the issues that actually made the system seem "bad".

And naturally there was the massive **** storm that Oblivion generated which I think has clouded the Dev's judgement highly.



So you didn't read the topic, right? Because I already responded to this issue.



As I said, my argument there was relying on not having any extra factors be involved. OBVIOUSLY with the extra factors involved leveling will go faster but thats the gamer's choice if they want to use them. I don't need to use the Guardian Stones. I don't need to hoard ingredients and spend and hour grinding out potions.

And even with these extra factors taken into consideration theres still the fact that if you have already maxed one skill and then decide you want to switch to another, then you're basically going to spend the same amount of time more or less raising the new skill to a comparable level to the old one. The differences in the time it will take with these extra factors added in will be obvious yes, but unless you take them to their extremes, the differences will not result in a difference of one hour of gameplay. (Most likely)