I would like to join the discussion, too bad there isn't one to be found in this thread.

dis·cuss?
–verb
1. to consider or examine by argument, comment, etc.; talk over or write about, especially to explore solutions; debate

So far each side has talked it over and writen about it, and some solutions have been explored. Better yet, each side has actually be halfway civil with each other, more or less, more so than what I can say for a lot of other threads. Now, shall we get back on topic?


I like the idea of perks. I also like the idea of skills and sub-skills. Maybe next game we'll get some subskills to go along with all our perks. The idea of swimming, running, and jumping all going under athletics makes a lot of sense to me. Perks for each of these sub-skills works as well...however I think subskills would allow players to get a better hold on each of the skills. That, and It makes sense in my head. The more one swims, the more athletic a person is(larger lung capasity is a big part of this, along with muscle growth), and that would translate into faster running. However, swimming itself doesn't make a faster runner.

At any rate, I really want to see this perk system in action. It looks very interesting, and I'm looking forward to seeing it implemented.

:stare:
How dare you crack wise about the perfectly correct and awesome things that are impossible to disagree with, because it's all just so clear, but if you side with those other people there will be heck to pay, I tell you, heck.

Ah, clever. I especially like how you point out how some people are just entering the thread to be disruptive... Oh wait. That's you.

Again, if you want to lay out your arguments in an intelligent discussion, with personal opinion and history like KCat has done, feel free. Otherwise, why are you here?

But we are talking about video games. It wouldn't be the same if we were talking about pen and paper RPGs. But in the case of video games, you need stats and skills to define your character. Games like Far Cry 2, whilst immersive, are not RPGs because your character will always be the same guy no matter how you play. If you decide to impose restrictions on yourself they are outside the gameworld designed by the devs.

That was actually pretty unbiased, and he didn't point that bit out (the disruptive part).
If I had to guess I would say the joke was on how polarized this place is, and Robo damn near hit the nail on the head.

I think it would. Assume you become really good with an axe, and someone else never touches anything weapon-related. Now you both pickup claymores. Who has the advantage? In Morrowind/Oblivion, you'd both be equally crappy. In Skyrim, you'd have the advantage, and I think that better reflects how skills should work. As I said, I doubt this will be the most realistic approach (or even the best implemented), but IMO it's still better than the everything-is-seaprate method.


Right, but you have to agree that some skills were even worse off than others in that regard. In some skills, you could see an improvement in a couple levels, other skills may take several levels to see any appreciable change. There's also some skills that almost everyone used all the time (like Athletics, since almost everyone runs all the time), which made levelling in it trivial regardless if you wanted to be an athletic-focused character. By moving the benefits into perks, it allows a player to (not) specialize their character in athletics as they want.

Also, since we don't have major/minor skills anymore to determine what to level up by, there was a strong incentive to cut out skills that auto-level like that.


Indeed. The point of a debate isn't to "win", ie. make the other person share your view.. it's to exchange ideas/reasons. A good debate should have everyone "win" by nature of learning more, even if no one drastically changes their view.

Daggerfall is the worst game in the series.

I think what people are missing is, Gameplay > Realism.

So what if it's more realistic to seperate the combat skills into individual skills? Beth just wants to facilitate the best gameplay possible. And I believe that, if they spent the time on one-handed and two-handed combat skills, then they believe that its the best way to do it.

And 280 perks? That is ridiculously good. Players will be much more specialized than in Morrowind or Oblivion.

Let me try and say it another way. Lets say skills and atributes are invisible in Skyrim. They may be there, but we don't know about them and we can't see them in the video game we're playing. As you level up in the skills, you'd gain perks, moves that you can physically see yourself doing. Wouldn't it be the same thing?

Or if there were no skills at all, period. I'm not sugesting that mind you, just an example. As you gain experience and finally leveled up, you could choose a perk that would give you a cool new sword attack, or allows you to wield your sword better. With that move or ability, you'd be better than the average swordsman, but skills wouldn't be involved at all. Wouldn't that still be an rpg?

I agree, skills need to be there somewhere, especially for a video game like TES, and I really like how you level up each skill by actually doing them. But skills in general don't necessarily make a game an rpg.

All TES games have advantages and disadvantages, Daggerfall just don't have tools to be improved, Daggerfall was gigantic step forward after Arena.

I know it must sound like I'm being stubborn, but I sincerely believe that given my time with an axe, put in to an arena wielding a claymore, versus someone who'd never swung an axe also wielding a claymore, you'd see no appreciable difference (Save, perhaps, for a slight advantage in strength). And I do respect your opinion, I just believe differently. I see a trend of games (Not just Elder Scrolls, but the industry as a whole) towards simplicity, and I hate it. So when I see my most beloved franchise possibly wandering in that direction, I panic. Like I said, I had concerns about Oblivion that held the game back for me personally, and while I'm acutely aware that what I say here will not affect the end product in the slightest, the discussion at least helps distract me. And in some cases, eases the blow somewhat.

Oh, and of course, and you're right in listing off speech craft as the worst culprit. However, it does beg the question if that was an issue of speech craft, or rather the method of using it (That little 'mood wheel'). Speech craft in Morrowind felt fine, and seemed to gain usefulness as quickly as the other skills did. As for Athletics, again, I think it was more an issue of implementation rather than a fault of the skill itself. A sprint function, married to a nerfing of overall speed would've made the skill far more tolerable when peaked out.

And I must say, while I normally crave intellectual/complex components, I don't mind the loss of classes (And with the, the loss of minor and major skills). By the end of the game, one's class was completely irrelevent anyways.


To each their own. I enjoyed Daggerfall moreso than Arena, and about as much as Oblivion. In fact, if I look at the series as a whole, so far it seems like a little mountain that apexes at Morrowind, in my opinion. I'm expecting Skyrim to at least meet Oblivion's enjoyment (And thus destroy my little trend), and deep down, hope it may approach Morrowind's quality.

I can see where you're coming from. And realistically, maybe you're right. But ultimately, for Skyrim, it'll come down to gameplay and the "feel" of it. Perhaps Bethesda will be more forthcoming with their reasons for the changes in the coming months.


Simplifying is not always a bad thing. And depending on how you look at it, this may not even be a change for simplification. Like in Morrowind and Oblivion, levelling certain skills never had a disadvantage. It got you stronger in the skills you levelled, while still not preventing you from using other skills. With the skill+perk system, while the skills work the same way (for the most part; levelling slows drastically after 50), you'll only have limitted access to perks.. about 50 to 75 out of nearly 300 per character. This means the perks you select are important, and the power is in the perks which makes your character's development differ depending on the skills and perks you focus on. You have more options in how to uniquely develop your character without all paths leading to the same uber-god character.

In theory, anyway.


The implementation in Oblivion was pretty bad, yeah. Morrowind's wasn't that bad, though it works on the random-failure principle that Bethesda seems to be getting away from (which I personally am glad for; failure is fine, but random failure gets on my nerves). Though I think the core problem was that there's too little change level-to-level, which made levelling in it not exciting. If combined with Mercantile, you have a little more cause for excitement.. you can haggle for better deals with some people. Improving your persuasive abilities over several levels wouldn't be so ho-hum since you're still getting benefits. But in the end, we'll have to wait and see how it'll play out.. we don't know what the relavent perks will be like or if Speechcraft+Mercantile are actually combined (it's just a likely guess given how similar they conceptually are).

Ditto for Athletics. We don't actually know for sure that it's gone.. it's just very likely that it's been merged with Acrobatics since Todd mentioned how silly it was to level in Acrobatics. Plus, it'll be using perks to help make it a bit more dynamic, in place of its always-on status as in Ob.


IMO, it was really just a place for exploitation, when combined with racial and birthsign bonuses. If Attributes are really removed, then the race (and possible birthsign) boosts will make the class boosts mostly redundant and/or overpowering anyway. I really hope that we'll start with much lower skill levels overall -- the previous methods felt rather meta-gamey, trying to boost your important skills/attributes as much as possible, or boost them all evenly, and not having a real advantage for role-play (you can still role-play as a battlemage born under the sign of the mage, for instance, even if you don't get the skill boosts from it; you're level 1, earn those skills, and if you don't use the skills of a battlemage, then maybe you're not really one).

It seems like the entire speech about perk-trees missed your gaze. They allow specific weapon specializations in a single skill - to the point where weapons behave differently as opposed to just looking different like in TES3/4.

280 perks > 3 merged skills in an rpg and customization sense. No questions asked.

That's particularly accurate... RPG players do.

I think the addition of perks might be a good thing--depending on implementation. What worries me is that perk-type systems in many games are the opposite of gameplay depth, Where, ideally, skills are about cost/benefit trade-offs and creating a wide range of diversity through the mix of all those choices, perks are frequently implemented in an increasing "which flavor of win" manner. Perks in this sense are superficial and about eye-candy rather than gameplay (or even candy instead of gameplay). And technically, if there's a hierarchy with skills at the bottom and perks branching out, you get more return by widening the skill options at the base than by increasing the number of perks in the branches.

All of the above depends on implementation, obviously, and if you end up with maxed out stats and skills in a game, then it's not really going to matter.

I don't. Stats and numbers are only there because nobody has figured out a different and more innovative way to represent your characters qualities. If there was a way to get rid of all that completely and still somehow represent your characters attributes, skillsets etc. then that would be great.

Still, I hold to the opinion that roleplaying is not about stats, skills, menu browsing or anything like that. Roleplaying is making choices that change the world around you and defines your character in a certain way, it's all about personality and interaction with other people and the world around you. It doesn't matter if your character has 10 strength or 10 intelligence if you can't influence the game by making decisions such as talking people into doing something or choosing how to resolve a situation which would then have an impact on the rest of the game, that's what roleplaying is.

If I have to choose between killing someone and reaching my goal quickly, but being hunted by the law as a result, or sparing them and taking a much more convoluted and/or dangerous route to reach my goal, that's where roleplaying comes in. Making choices and having consequences for them, influencing the world and the people in it as well as their perception of you is roleplaying.

If you can't do that then you can have all the stats in the world and you still wouldn't have an RPG, or a Roleplaying game.

True, stats are necessary for determining your characters skills, attributes, traits etc. They are not however necessary for a game to allow roleplaying.

Different and more innovative than numbers? Granted, math is thousands of years old, and may not be as fashionable as it once was...


I agree with your post in general, but following your definition, any video game that has characters is role-playing. Frogger? Roleplaying. GTA? Roleplaying. Civ? Roleplaying.

I may be missing your point, but to me this sounds like diluting the definition and making the concept vague to the point that there's very little meaning to RPG, other than "not a puzzle game".

from what we've heard I get the complete opposite vibe from Skyrim perks.

All of those people saying that someone who is an axe specialist would have the same combat ability using a sword as someone who never picked up a weapon are completely delusional. If you are a specialist in melee combat that means you KNOW what the strengths and weaknesses of all weapon types are because you HAVE to counter them. While you may know their capabilities, being an axe master, you do not have the hands-on practice with the weapon so you will not be near as good as a blade master, but still worlds better than someone with no melee combat experience at all. Honestly, I think you guys need to play WoW or some other MMO where players in similar classes usually do pretty darn well with similar ones and not so well with completely different combat methods. That is a REAL comparison of player skill, not some arbitrary mathematical model on how people develop and behave.

I like where skyrim is going with skills, because I always hated the old DnD/TES method of "Using more than 1 weapon type on a character makes you a weaker combatant." That old model is complete bull.

YES. I totally agree. Why do they want to simplify it!? People who play games like Elder Scrolls love depth... so why take away from that?

Because the skill system was incredibly flawed and dated.

(Lol, hug, gotta love the community) ^_^

I agree though, no one can complain TOO MUCH as NO one has actually played the game yet and seeing what's what. By all means discuss, of course, duh, but to get upset over things at this stage is somewhat premature in my opinion.

[censored] IT! CANT YOU UNDERSTAND THAT EVERYTHING THEY TAKING OUT, DON'T MATTER HOW BAD IT LOOKS ITS GOING TO MAKE THE GAME BETTER IN SOME WAY, THEY ARE TAKING SOMETHINGS OUT AND ADDING NEW ONES, IN THE END SKYRIM IS GOING TO BE A COMPLETELY UNIQUE GAME THAT NOT ONLY ME BUT EVERYONE SAYING THAT "ITS GOING TO svck NOW THAT I KNOW THE TRUTH BLAAH BLAHH BLAH!" ARE GOING TO ENJOY AS HELL!!!! [censored] it i hate people who keep trying to find bad things in cool games, relax! it is going to rock! they are not [censored] it up, they made it pretty clear that the R-P-G thing its going to be there...and well. at least its going to be better then oblivion, and oblivion was a pretty fun game to play, i played thousands of hours lol maybe it can be even better than morrowind, lets see, its not going to be anything like morrowind or oblivion, thats for sure.

Frantic, i have an idea.. stop hating on a game you have never played.