Perks. This time characters will end up more specialized and different.


So in sense, you the exact opposite of your concerns is happening. This game can't have Jack of All Trade like Oblivion and Morrowind unless you reach level 280.

I doubt anyone will be persuaded by hearing how many combinations there is. They are most likely not upset there are fewer choices but that some characters they would want to make involving acrobatics etc. can't be done.

For most planned character i have in mind they will only use 4 or 5 skills. Some chracters I orginally planned to have Acrobatics and Athletics for, but they wheren't what defined the character. For example my female dual-sword wielding Altmer who will smith and enchant her weapons. Those are the 3 core skills, to add on that i have alchemy to make the weapons more powerfull. possibly give one blade poison weakness and poison the other, and possibly Light Armor, but I will more likely choose something that looks good and feels fitting between clothing and armor. She'll use shouts but no magic, as she can shouts without having to unequip her swords.

I think im pretty much limiting each character quite much, for example my spellsword will most likely only use 2 schools of magic, Destruction and Restoration. And in that only frost spells.

I have some conjurer build in mind to that i havent quite figured out yet, aswell as my argonian assassin, that seems he have to compensate not having a spear by either something similar 2 handed weapon or dualwielding dagger and staff. Going to play a pure mage aswell and most likely either start with the nord spellsword or an pure nord warrior. Ofcourse I'll also have a thief to make the thieves guild with. I'm also unsure if my argonian assasin would join dark brotherhood so i might make an aditional assassin to join them. And lastly another character that will use a bow but not neccesarily stealthy. Someone using bound weapons too...

Basicly have general idea of atleast 10 characters that probably will use 4 to 7 skills and im sure ill get more ideas in the future. Way more then I did in Oblivion, but sadly alot of my time playing Oblivion I powerleveled, I even have some characters i leveled 100 in all major and max in atributes but havent done anything else on them.

All in all, I feel like there's definitly enough customization, as i have basicly 10+ characters in mind from skills alone, with perks i might even make more characters thats similar in skills but different perks.

About the mathematics of this..
Have the results that are the same, only in a different order been trimmed out?

Also, while technically different builds, how different are builds with nine of the same skills and one different tenth really?

Etcetera.
While I do not question that there are quite a lot of radically different playstyles possible, I doubt its seven thousand.

Without exactly knowing how the perks are distributed, which ones have their own trees etc. it's impossible to get an exact number of combinations. But I doubt order matters there since if you have three perks they're still the same combination despite the order.

That said, the number of character combinations in Oblivion is roughly 1.9 billion. That's taking race, gender, specialization, favoured attributes, major skills and birthsigns into account from CC.

Think that's what the poster was saying. If that was a straight math calculation that didn't take into account order not mattering, the result would be higher. Obviously any combination of Skill A, B, C and D - whether it's A, C, B, D or D, A, C, B - will not be any different, and therefore should not count as another valid combination.

I don't really mind the new system in this regard, it's seems plenty adequate.



I sorta care about this, because, I have to work harder to get where I want to be, if I chose a mage setup in DF\MW\OB, I would already be strong in that regard, seems like with Skyrim, we will be more generic, and have to work towards whatever type of character we really wanted to be from the start.

Maybe it'll be a good thing, but it's hard to tell without having played the game.

They're not. They give you nice medals to wear on your chest and plug some chips in your brain that make you able to do something from one moment to the next that you should justly have developed gradually - which is precisely why attributes and skills handle character differentiation much better - they are far more fine-grained. The fact that you can boast that you acquired a shiny gimmick says nothing about character differentiation and everything about player ego. All the various capabilities that perks bring could have been integrated into a skill system, if Beth actually is serious about making people believe that only axes cause bleedings and swords don't (not to speak of internal bleedings from blunt weapons)

Perks are gimmicks. They don't serve any purpose other than being a marketing ploy to reel in folks who love collecting achievements, perks and all other kinds of medals that they can brag about in forums and real life. And unfortunately, it seems to be working...

Well, that depends on their implementation, and to be fair, some are looking pretty bad, however, there are 280 of them, they can't all be awesome incarnate.

Fallout 3 had some pretty good perks that allowed for a decent level of customization on top of your standard build. So, if they took that, and made it bigger and better, then this could be a pretty good system.

So, I'm giving them a chance here.

I literally created my account just to reply to this!

I'm tired of people whining about the removal of the class based system. Sure I will miss the extra label you can add to your character which is easily resolved by allowing more characters in the name section. However, it makes the game more realistic.

RPG stands for Role Playing Game. There's no such thing as rigid classes in real life people. Warriors, thieves, etc... of the past did not have set classes they couldn't diverge from. They became the way they were by practicing the various skills they wanted to improve in. Nothing says being smart excludes you from being strong. The same applies to switching careers an alchemist could become a swordsman in real life.
This new organic system is far more realistic.


Kudos to the Skyrim Team, I've never been so excited to play anything. It's the first game I've ever preordered.