Now Pokémon, on the other hand...

One thing I probably will miss from the old class system is the class name. Now how am I supposed to flaunt my credentials to the guards, peasants and unfortunate accident victimsnobles, like the true Mr. Credentials would?

Which is the only thing I'll miss. I can limit myself, I wont "switch classes on the fly", or whatever silliness Todd was going on about in the E3 demo. Never used a set class anyway, but being able to create my own class, with its own attribute/skill/major/minor history will be missed. It goes with Beth's new direction of : 'No choices in the beginning except race.'

Nothing to add. Just wanted to say that I enjoyed your post, starting from a reasonable premise, and watching that premise evolve into an equally reasonable but surprising conclusion.

Math. Permutation or combinations? :sadvaultboy:

# of character builds possible in Skyrim?

Hold on, let me call up my buddy whose...

Combinations, with a twist and 100% more rage FUS ROH DAH!

With the lack of spell creation, perhaps a linear H2H mechanics, perhaps no speed or jump variables, it looks like Skyrim will actually have less build types.

This.

-DL :chaos:

Don't waste your time. Unless you know exactly how many perks (1) there are, how many perks one can aqquire (2), how the perk-trees are defined (3), how many levels each perk can have (4) it's impossible to callculate.

Besides, there's no need to know. The game has enough room for choice, I think.

Wasted? No, the entire [censored] point of the system is character differentiation. How can they be wasted if they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do?

Skyrims new system gives more customization, hands down.

The amount of perks wasn't cut.

http://twitter.com/#!/DCDeacon/status/106033869836390400

I remember an old show called Tiny Toons, where Babs Bunny would say, "Do you like my ears up or down?"; I think that an alarming number of those character permutations are so close to each other as to be insignificant.

I also remember Todd Howard mentioning Fallout 3's 200+ endings.

I think your initial concerns might be more valid than you think (in practice, as opposed to theory).

Perhaps, but even the change in just 1 skill choice can make a difference in overall gameplay style and RP. My characters are so specific that even such a small chance does make for a completely different character.

For instance, of my 10 skills, well, the 7 core ones are in my signature. But I may also want to do a bit of leveling with Alteration, Sneak, and Marksman (all additional skills I'm considering)

If you take my 10 skills of 1-handed, Heavy Armor, Conjuration, Destruction, Restoration, Enchanting, Smithing, Alteration, Sneak, Marksman, and take out even one of those skills to replace with something else, it could possibly have a significant change on how the character plays.

An attribute will not add the ability to stagger an enemy specifically with two handed destruction magic, or any other cool perks that don't just directly increase your efficiency with magic by reducing magicka cost or increasing damage, in a non-linear way. You could make a poor substitute by tying "perks" automatically to skill increases, which would make skill progression rather boring and linear, like OB. The new skill tree system ( "perks") increases player choice and adds diversity to each character you make, so much to the point that two characters that train the exact same skills can still be very different depending on the "perks" you choose for each. What you are describing is boring compared to what BGS is supposedly doing.
The "perks" in Skyrim are no longer those lame text boxes that pop up at 25 skill level intervals in the middle of your screen informing you that heavy armor only weighs half as much now that you have reached the appropriate skill value. They will now define your character's play style (if you do not make a JoAT) more than attributes and your skill values, unlike earlier TES games. They are skill trees, not "perks", even though Todd likes to call them that. They will be similar to Fallout 3 but have more of an emphasis on the linear aspect of progression inside of that specific skill(one handed, two handed, etc.) This is made evident by the fact that you can view the trees at all times and they are visually represented the way you will progress through them, with branches. This in and of itself offers more choice than having your effectiveness with a skill tied singularly to your skill value. This is indisputable fact. It is opinion, however, whether or not complexity implemented cleanly and interestingly is a good thing for TES, I guess. If you want Morrowind, you will have to play MW, if you want OB you will have to play OB. Because YOU don't like Skyrim doesn't mean it is dumbed down, catering to the lowest common denominator, or not an RPG.

If you used combintions and permutations to calculate the number of possible character builds for WoW you would also arrive at a vast number. Try convincing anyone who has actually played WoW that it is easy to create a unique and distinctive character.

The whole premise of this thread is flawed because the maths takes no account of permutations which are impractical or bear no meaningful differences from each other.

...they're not suppose to . An attribute isn't a skill, or a perk, its an attribute. Attributes, skills and perks are not mutually exclusive, and having all three would have made for a more fleshed out character creation system and gaming experience.

It also takes time, and time is money.

If they have/had both, and still didn't go for it, then perhaps they feel that some just aren't capable of handling it?

I hope to jebus the new CK will allow for these types of mods to be added.

The bold is what it is, not some time, or hardware limitation. Its becasue not having attributes, or having to make more than just a race choice at the beginning of the game, appeals to more people. Allowing them to appeal to a lower common denominator. Hopefully we will be able to mod in attributes, especially since Beth said that they originally did have attributes in Sky.

I would say thousands upon thousands of combinations just for SKILL CHOICES alone (which directly influence play style) does bear a meaningful difference.

That's before perks are even taken into consideration.

Even a choice of Heavy Armor or Light Armor could drastically alter the difference between gameplay - a damage absorbing tank vs. a more nimble DPS'er.

If you thInk that is crazy think about this...

Shuffle a 52 card deck of cards and record the outcome, then shuffle up and try to get that outcome again. The statistical propablity of it happening is so close to impossible that of you could shuffle the deck 100,000 times a second it would take you more than onehundrid trillion years to see that same outcome again. Now those are some impressive numbers!

Well, that's all fine and dandy unless Skyrim turns out to be like Oblivion and Morrowind, where there was almost no reason to choose most of the skills and most players ended up using the same 5 or 6 useful ones in every build. It's not directly forced on the player, but the design and mechanics essentially indirectly forced the majority of classes into an same mold. Granted, we will probably be coming to rely on the modding community to give us more variety later on, and I suspect mods will be even more important and relied upon in Skyrim than any previous TES title.



Oops, Chryseis already made my point, but in a better way.

Hopefully skill levels are now like dice rolls. My skill with an axe is what determined IF I manage to connect the blow. My strength and the axe weight and build combined with selected 1H perks is what determines how much I hit for. My ability to hit, since it looked awful in Morrowind, would be the opponents ability to avoid getting hit. Also, any weapon would have a huge number of stats associated with it to determine its abilities and effects on the player.

I really don't like the complete removal of the stats system, to me they are essential to any role playing system. I don't even like the current "use skills to gain in them" approach, as it promotes spamming. Instead use of skills should enable them to be assigned skill points during levelup (similar to FONV, but only skills you had used enough). At low levels, you do like two swings to gain a skillpoint in 1H, and during levelup you're allowed to increase one skill level.

Actually, there's an entirely different reason why Skyrim will reward you for making a specialized character. In every elderscrolls game with any sort of level scaling, you have been best off maxing as few major skills as possible, keeping your level low and your abilities high. It was possible (nay, easy) to be a level one character with 100 in destruction, 100 in alteration, 100 in restoration, et cetera. If you didn't want to completely break the game, you were encouraged to do something like select acrobatics (or another skill that was mostly useless and unlikely to get accidentally used) and jump for twenty minutes after leveling up other skills enough to get x5 increases in the attributes you cared about.

This time around, every skill is treated as a class skill, and there are no farming skills like acrobatics. If you're gonna be a warrior, you're best off using either two-handed or dual-wielding, selecting an armor type, and (depending on how the system works) either alchemy or restoration (probably alchemy). Then, only use those skills, thus avoiding unwanted leveling. Whatever you want to be, you'll want to just be that, unlike in oblivion where, after selecting the core skills (I shoot fire and summon magical shields!) you ended up filling the remaining slots by process of "what's marginally cooler", or, if you were a minmaxer, you just decided to "focus" on all the skills you weren't going to use.

I cannot believe we have to keep repeating this.... :confused: