this

A lot of people are bashing your play style. Now, i for one enjoyed in oblivion having a character that had a minor case of disassociative identity disorder. My well rounded Breton started off skyrocketing up the ladder to head of the mages college. This secured my ambitious position. I grew there. As dean i grew bored and wandered aimlessly growing wary of the moral grayness of the world. This grayness became more fully seen as i hapahazardly joined a dedicated brotherhood of arms. And rose through thier ranks learning the powers of steel to accompany my summonings and firestorms. I rebalanced the powers of good and righted wrongs with a heavy hand by day and by night combed the country side closing gate after gate after my run in at Kvatch. As i saw the fighters guild thrive under my authority and my social empire grow i converged my resources more fully with the Bastard Emperor. Together we ended the crises and both recieved statues in our own right. This power might have gone to my head because i saw what i gave to the empire and saw what every worthless county seats had with thier posh lives and comfy castles... So i saw a new ally the poor and trodden of which i related to niavely with all my fame. So once again i retired my battle armor and picked some lighter garbs. As a welcomed guest among the royalty i pilphered them without warrant, and gave to the poor as i deemed worthy. As i became more adept at stealth i became more brazzen, til i was caught... i never have i spent a night in jail. I felt fallen though my highblood cronies forgave me instantly i still felt confused. i didn't know who i was. Til a mysterious note hinted at who i could be.... organized crime suited me fine. I knew the in and outs of every chamber maidens quarters which helped. And rose to guid these miscreant thieves on a new path. And recieved as my reward a mask to hide me from the world. Something happened with that mask. where as before i hide behind a smile now i hide behind a new name, new face, something that was willing to go further darker on the road of shattered enlightenment. The night mother found me running from a kill going from town to town i avoided by brother thieves and before i knew it she envoloped me, took me in and i became her arrow and her dagger... time went on i fell to madness stumbled among the shivering isles. etc. etc, etc,...

sorry for the long post but the freedom to redefine yourself is a good thing. And the character becomes potentially flatter without that option.

An open world rpg where you are forced to take one specific direction in how you build your character is not an oxymoron at all.

What? It's completely the other way around! You can level up all the skills you want and that makes your level higher! So you can very much be jack-of-all-trades.

Redguard. You're a dedicated redguard swordsman on a main quest. I really don't like it because of it.

Okay, so OP's and others' complaints boil down to a fear of not being able to do literally everything in the game on a single character, and are upset at the thought that making specific choices will restrict them from certain quest lines.

I have to ask; how does it make any sense that my OB character, who is usually a very thiefy type, who has no magical ability, should be able to become Arch-Mage of the Mage's Guild? Normally, wouldn't it be save to assume that organizations like that would have aptitude testing before allowing admittance?

Of course, then we have the jack-of-all-trades character, which is a valid playstyle, I'll admit. But the argument is boiling down to the JoAT characters should be just as good burglars as specialized thieves, just as good at melee combat as dedicated fighters and, at the exact same time, be as apt at slinging spells as the dedicated mage, with no consequences to your choices.

From where I'm sitting, this line of reasoning looks a lot like "Beth won't let me play as a pink and purple poka-dotted elephant who lives in space and eats dragons for breakfast. Damn you for taking away my choices."

I applaud Bethesda for making player decisions meaningful beyond the stat sheet.

I don't understand why you believe there would be any sort of penalty to creating a JOAT character.

You say that you enjoyed playing one character for thousands of hours in Morrowind. It may take a long time to max all your skills in Skyrim, but you will certainly be able to do it.

It's a double edge sword, on one hand choices matter more and specialized characters will be stronger but on the other hand your locking players out of choices that they could make. I'd need to play Skyrim 1st to see what's up, so far it sounds great but sounding great only gets you so far.

Wait, mutually exclusive options make this a linear game? So F:NV is linear? Wut?

As an aside... didn't Morrowind have several mutually exclusive options? Couldn't join all Houses, couldn't join all Guilds.... don't think you could join both Temples? (It's been a long time since I played, so I might be misremembering....)

^^No, you remember correctly

Not being able to have all the perks will probably not prevent you from doing any quest in the game.

Also the one aspect that doesn't get brought up is that organizations such as Guilds not allowing you to experience everything if your joined to another or NOT letting you join if you are is that more interesting stories or situations can be crafted. Such as tensions or backstabbing between guilds.

Also by cutting back specializations to a few fields things get more interesting for your character and the world around themself aswell.

End of the day if you really want to make a jack of all trades character OP you can. All skills can be raised to 100. But you can only ever get 50 things in the skill Tree+Additional levels of the hypothetical level cap.

Why would I want to be able to do everything in one playthrough? I hated that about Oblivion, it really kills the immersion. You could do the entire mages guild questline in Oblivion only casting a handful of spells. There should be requirements, to both joining and advancing. And they should be very strict.

I like specializing, maybe because I'm a big RPer, it makes me feel as if my character is a character with a unique skillset and set of weaknesses, rather than just a Mary Sue type character. And it encourages multiple playthroughs, which let you come at different quests and the whole game from a different perspective, both RP wise and gameplay wise.

I did the same for my characters. This time I'll probably stick to a certain skill type, though they don't officially classify now.
I'll be playing a Dark Elf probably, and they are supposed to be efficient with a sword and magic, but I also want to be a lithe character.. (Thief)
Maybe by the release I will have made up my mind and just play multiple characters differently.

Simple. He is just bored of sneaking around dark corners for the rest of his life and decides that blasting doors open with a fireball spell would be much more fun for a while, so he works hard to learn magic. Also, since he is a thiefy type, maybe he just pretends to be a skillfull caster just to plunder the treasures of the guild?

@Kiralyn2000: Yeah, that is partly correct, only the houses were restricted, but at the same time it specifically offered you the choice of becoming head of both the fighters and thiefes guilds. Wich is the correct way to do things. Fighters, Thiefes and Mages Guilds are all about skills, they offer their services to paying customers, so it is mostly skill that matters, while the Houses were about politics and not so much about skills even if they had their preferences. You can be a boxer and a judoka at the same time, but you can't be a Nazi and an antifascist at the same time. Joining multiple religions is also not so far off, since Tamriel is a polytheistic world, so you can pray to as many gods as you want.

Not being able to join all houses was sad, since you could roleplay to be a double agent or a traitor (joining another house after being expelled from the first and so forth), but i had no interest in joining Redoran or Hlaalu as they were to boring anyway. But that does not mean you should not be able to join them all under certain, hard to achieve circumstances, wich could be a questline of it's own.

I'd love a source on this. Sure life would have been more difficult what with disease, back breaking work and a largely uneducated populace, but to say JoaT died faster than everyone else...



No, not at all. You pick a role, but you're not stuck with it, not in my experience with any TES game.


Little more OT : They may lock you out of certain factions based on what faction you're currently in, like Morrowind, or not. Though I doubt your class and skill set will have anything to do what quests/faction are available to you.

I fail to see how Oblivion is any more linear than Morrowind.

In Morrowind, you are released from prison, told to go meet a contact, and then set free. You can choose to go to the city and meet that contact (thus starting the main quest), or go wandering off and exploring. There are guilds for you to join and progress in. You can start the main quest and stop it and do something else. You can do the main quest alongside any number of other quests. Or you can not quest at all, and just goo off exploring. There are tons and tons of caverns, Dwenmer Ruins, outposts, and Daedric Shrines to go exploring in, as well as a wide open world full of cities and wilderness to find. You are allowed to define your character yourself by 1.) choosing the skills that define you and will level you 2.) the factions you do (or dont) join 3.) the choices you make in the world.

In Oblivion, you escape from prison, given an amulet and told to deliver it to a contact, and then set free. You can choose to go to the settlement to meet that contact (thus starting the main quest), or go wandering off and exploring. There are guilds for you to join and progress in. You can start the main quest and stop it anytime and do something else. You can do the main quest alongside any number of side quests. Or you can not quest at all and go off exploring, where tons and tons of caves, abandoned forts, Aylied Ruins, and if your far enough along on the main quest, Oblivion Gates, will await you. There is lots of wilderness to explore as well as a handful of cities. You are allowed to define your own character by 1.) the skills you choose to define your character, playstyle, and leveling 2.) the factions you do (or dont) join 3.) the choices you make in the world.

I imagine Skyrim will be the same.

I wish there were more factions where joining one locks you out of another, also choices that have a permanent effect on the game world. An example would be Megaton, it was pretty awesome blowing it up and thinking "damn, I just wiped a city off the map". Or helping the powder gangers take over good springs in New Vegas. Feels like your actions are shaping the world and you should have consequences/advantages for your actions. These are the kinds of games you play through multiple times anyway.

OP, I'm the same way. I just hope that if I have to play through many times to see all of the content, that each playthrough is different enough that I don't get bored. FONV got boring once I saw that I could play most of the content in the same way regardless of who I chose to side with.

Morrowind restricts you from content depending on the choices you make and factions you join. Oblivion doesn't. In Oblivion you can do everything with one character, in Morrowind you can't. That's why every playthrough ends about the same in Oblivion, but doesn't in Morrowind.

RPG players have been conditioned to specialize their characters, and that's reflected in most of the responses here. It certainly makes sense in party-based RPGs, where you would want to have a high-level mage (DPS/healer), warrior (tank), rogue (DPS), etc., versus a bunch of JOATs.

I think single-player RPGs like TES are a somewhat different animal, though, and thus are more lenient with JOAT-type players. I played Oblivion with a Dark Elf who split his skills between magic and edged weapons. I only played the game once, for about 170 hours in total. Now to some, that's barely scratching the surface of the game, but it's all some people have the time and energy for, so I respect the fact that Bethesda creates games that actually allow you to experience just about everything with one playthrough if you so choose. Their credo, after all, is to let the player play however they want to, not the way that they dictate. And not the way that other RPG players think you should play.

That doesn't make the game linear. The player still makes the choices.

Disclaimer, I prefer a system like Morrowind that requires you to be of certain skill to join certain guilds, and you cannot join rival factions.

But I wouldn't join the Thieves Guild, because my character is not a thief. He is an arcane warrior, a Shadow Knight if you will, so I joined Fighter's and Mage's guilds. I am also in Dark Brotherhood also, but haven't done any quests, and am contemplating creating a new character for DB because my character isn't stealthy.

If I want to join the Thieves Guild I will create a stealthy thief character. While the game allows it, I dont want to be a thief as a hulking brute of a warrior.

Yes I prefer Morrowinds system, and I believe I heard that its back in Skyrim, but that doesn't make a game linear. The playthrough is still entirely player choice to join those factions or not.