TES - What I commonly see currently are peolpe barking We don't have attributes anymore, they were holding me back, Classes too! so now I can roleplay my character how -I- want them to be yay :celebration:


Im going to list 2 "rpg"s and I'd like for people to discern this do you know how to roleplay


Gothic series: your character already has a name, a face you can't change and a history you can't alter you -roleplay- that individual -no one else, your telling me this isnt a RPG?


Mass effect series : your character has a name, a face and a history -you- define, but beyond the classes in the game -you- are roleplaying that characters limited background and can't "pretend" your own thoughts effectively because the games already clear on who you are same for NWN, Kotor etc etc.


and those aren't RPGs?


do you see the difference between I can role play whom ever I want -but- the game doesnt recognize my perceptions and I am roleplaying this predefined character as I see him/her and everything they do the game recognizes.

hmm?


who roleplays how is subjective and different among games and barking because numbers are visible in a *GAME* is some kind of Backwards, you are to be informed what your character Can and cannot do, what you want a message bar to say "heya your super strong" or "Heya your a bit stronger than the average dude" ?


Attributes reflect what your CHARACTER can do and why within the parameters of the game, your "thoughts and perceptions" are not dicernable by the game, there is only so much a game should leave to the player.

the amount of Bs Im seeing thrown around here about attributes being limiting and arbitrary is cripplingly stupid, and I bet no one would go and hop onto a text only based game and "role play"

perks and the removal of attributes are not related at all. it was never an either or situation. the devs said they wanted to change the allegid issue of having to start a new character because they made poor choices when picking attributes or skills, removing the possibility of having failed characters. so pretty much making character design a no fail system, which is incontravertable evidence that its being dumbed down so that any person can make a successful character without thinking about it.

so again we have had both perks and attributes since OB, so its a misguided arguement that attributes were removed so that we can have perks.

Yeah, but do you? Apparantly not. Without numbers/stats, there is no RPG.

Roleplay = Playing a role. That's it. Some games make you play a more predefined role, some (like TES) give you more freedom. It's still a freaking role. Where did I say they weren't RPGs? They are, and at least in the original Gothic, an OLD game, I might concede that numbers are necessary, like in Pen and Paper games. I don't like them, I don't agree with their use, but with limited resources there's so much you can do.

THIS is not the case. I don't want a message that says I'm strong. I don't want anything to say I'm strong. THAT'S THE POINT! I want to know it when I crush my enemies skull with my fist, when i lift a big rock. If I can't do it, I'm not strong enough. Not being able to see this only shows me that YOU guys are the ones dumbing down the genre in a way that you have to have everything cleared out to you. "How can I know what my character can do without numbers?" is the perfect example.

This skill and perk system is a step in the good direction. Still not there, but it beats the previous attempts, immersion-wise, by a long-shot.




Did you even read the whole post before replying, or was it too advanced for you?

Rofl...but...


Skills still have numbers


You see the number of health you have

Magicka

Stamina

Perks add damage dealth, subtract damage recieved, increase/decrease abilities.....and you see this through numbers....

your still being told in numbers, how good you are in a skill, or how much magicka needed for a spell, or how much health you have before you die.

hell your very existence and effectiveness in the game is a number, your level, and the level of dungeons in the game and the amount of damage weapons do, I don't see people complaining about those either, effectively just bandwagoners.

the fing game is run by numbers, think that before claiming people are dumbing down anything.... and then consider your ....weird stances against numbers and ask whats really dumbing down.

if -numbers- bother you in a game then something going on, numbers never got in the way of me enjoying a game but they do make me aware of my chars status and what I can do and not IN THE GAME, lest I have some silly thought such as I believe my character is a god at level one and cannot be triumphed..


ops...mudcrab killed me.

I read it and it made little to no sense.

We need the numbers to show us a representation of our skill/stats. We are not our Avatars, we dont know where they are in their progression. Our world is nothing but numbers, therefore any type of interactive, alternate reality we try to create will be defined by numbers as well.

That's true, but those numbers actually have some value in the game. The problem with attributes is that they served such a minor role, and were so easily replaced by other mechanisms, that they really didn't serve any purpose other than adding another layer of psuedo-complexity. Not to mention that their relationships to the various skills were so convoluted that how they were derived just didn't make any sense half the time. Like Light Armour raising my Speed attribute for instance. So why not just simplify things and get rid of them, using some other mechanism that already exists to fulfill the role that they played?

which brings me back to the one instance I have been advocating since day one January when we found out.

Not against Perks perks are fine.

Not wanting the old system, I am not resistant to change, change is good sometimes and bad others

attributes weren't the root of all evil in Oblivion, but they werent the model of existence either.


so my one statement.




FIX THEM MAKE THE MATTER

The hell they had it in initially and then took it out and yet, they go through annoyances to make everyone killable because "thats what people were begging for"?


Perks are for skills, the Mags and interview say this and only this, there are 280, thats the number no higher no lower, and 15 assuming all perks are distributed equally for all 18 skills.

They are not for Attributes, the only "attributes" are H/M/S as todd stated, no there isnt anything under the hood and the only input in H/M/S is leveling up and picking what you want to raise. Intelligence wasn't only for Magicka raising, it helped Alchemy, Expand on that, make it deeper theres nothing wrong with Attributes/perks/skills dancing together....there are over a hundred people at Bethesda this solution could not be by far the best to just axe them out and tout that the same bars we've seen since (censored) Arena are all of a sudden what 8 attributes were in past games now for Skyrim.

I thought it made pretty good sense. I take your point (at least one of your points) to be that the player needs to see some numbers so that they know their character's abilities and how the game will respond when you try to do certain things with your character. Zetro's point was a pretty straightforward response to that: there are other ways the game can convey this information to the player, and then Zetro gave some suggestions for how this might work.

And I don't think defending your point by appealing to some sort of Pythagorean worldview ("our world is nothing but numbers") will help. It's obviously false that the world is nothing but numbers. Sure, in a lot of respects we can use numbers to describe the world. But (i) it does not follow that the world is just numbers, and (ii) it does not follow that we can only use numbers to describe the world.

Edit: Just to add an aside. There is a little bit of confusion floating around (I don't think you are guilty of it) about the "we need numbers" debate. No one thinks that we don't need numbers in one sense - the numbers are needed to program and run the game. But it's one thing for numbers to be needed to run the game, and another for numbers to be needed to convey relevant information to the person playing the game. Sometimes in these threads I've seen people happy with the removal of attributes being ridiculed for thinking that the game could work without numbers. But those people are not happy with the removal of numbers in both of the senses just mentioned.

And that doesn't indicate to you that they probably did try to make a useful system from them, but decided it just wasn't worth the trouble?

His suggestion:

Your view: "I am powerfull. With my 100 Strength and maxed out Blade skill, I did more damage, after accounting his Weapon resistance, than the number of hit points of that dragon, killing him."

The more organic view: "I am powerful. With my mighty strength and strict training with my sword, I was able to pierce that dragon and slay him."

so what makes him more "mightier"? Numbers do. his other comment was about how you had to do complex math or somthing to play ES. That's entirely not true. Without stats that are derived from numbers there no way to see what you are and are not good at. Do I see my carry capacity by counting the veins on my arms?

Edit: Face it, unless you have virtual reality imposing the in game limits on your person, there will always be a need for displayed stats. In conclusion, he made very little, if any sense.

No, numbers don't make him stronger. Having certain anatomical and physiological properties makes him stronger. That the character has these properties can be described using numbers. But Zetro's point was that it need not be. He's questioning your claim that there's no way to see what you are good or bad at, without using numbers.

Your last point is a better one. It might be that the sort of information the player needs is so fine-grained that numbers are the most effective way of conveying that information. Pictorial or other non-linguistic/non-numerical representations might be too imprecise or too ambiguous to give the player a sufficiently good idea of their character's abilities.

And what are those? Its a game, they are numbers. Now people apparantly dont understand how you make an RPG. You have to have stats for variables. If some of those stats are not displayed then everything is trial and error, which is not only going to be a terrible game, but its going to be an action game, not an RPG.

Having a thousand visual clues to see your stats is more complex than having the actual numbers.

It boils down to what he thinks "immersion" is.

I know how programming works. I know how games work. They have numbers, yes. By the way, you do know that world and all also has numbers. Hell, might as well show the damn code, numbers and statistics are all that matter here...


I am no number anarchist. I like numbers, I love math. I just like it where it belongs. Yes, I know that numbers are still being shown to me. Yes, I know that, currently, numbers are the only way you can see your progress, your status, etc... So what? That's not my point. My whole argument was to counter your ... weird stance for numbers (see what I did there?), trying to reason that an RPG has be based in numbers. It doesn't, it shouldn't. Numbers, stats, whatever, should not interfere with my immersion in my role. Having to do math to decide which skill I have to level to know which attribute I'll be able to increase KILLS immersion and I'm no longer playing a role, just a game. Yes, this perk system also damages my immersion, but less than the attribute system. In the next game, the leveling method could be even more organic. And the next.

There are numbers, just don't force me to interact with them, force me to interact with their results...

@Xarnac

Yup, you clearly didn't even made an effort. I explained our progression in our skills could be show in a way that brings more immersion. And you're not your Avatar? Then what are you roleplaying? Yes, the virtual world is made with numbers. A car has gears, do you prefer to drive or interact with the gears?

Apparently my last statement went way over your head.

I think here you are lapsing into the confusion I described above.

Yes, the game is a computer program. In one sense, the character's properties are numbers. But no one is saying that we need to get rid of numbers in that sense. No one is suggesting that we need to revolutionise the way computer programs in general work.

But while the program itself may just be numbers, it does not follow that the best way of conveying information to the player, so that they can fully enjoy playing the game, is by presenting those very numbers to the player. (Indeed, your argument here may prove way too much. If the player should be presented with the very numbers that constitute the game's code/program, then why stop at attributes? Why not get rid of all the graphics and just give the player a massive text file containing something written in a computer language? After all, that will be the character, her attributes, her skills, her perks, etc.)

There are ways of conveying information to the player which do not essentially involve numbers. Or perhaps I should say numerals to emphasise here that the issue is one of how information is conveyed; or how facts about the game-world and your character are being represented. It is not at all a debate about how character stats should be implemented within the code of the game. And there is no straightforward and direct connection between those two questions.

Now read the rest of my post, I clearly show how a bunch of visual clues to your stats, would actually be worse than having them displayed in a menu etc. Basically he wants an action game where he doesnt have to think and can just kill stuff.

By the time I answered you made almost three posts...


I agree with one point you made. My Utopian game is impossible given the current tech. Doesn't make your claim that we need more numbers valid. The less we have to interact with numbers and more with actions and playing a role, the more this will be, well, a Role Playing Game.

And why would a game without numbers be an action game? Most action games don't possess a sense of character development despite the "You got a new weapon", "Power up!". RPG's do. This is an action RPG by the way, so your point is kind of moot.

Your proposition is impossible because it would make a terrible game that even you wouldnt like, because you'd be reading the rules and game manual for a month to see what all of the visual clues represented and what their variables meant.

No, it need not be trial and error. If the game has a way of telling the player that their character is good at X and not so good at Y, then trial and error is not involved in working out whether the character is good at X. The game tells you that the character is good at X, you don't need to try it out first.

As for the second point, I think that's more persuasive. But it is not obviously true. (But it is a curious fact that now it's being admitted that getting rid of numbers would be more complex than keeping them. So this hardly seems like a concession to the knuckle-dragging console action gamers ).

The other stuff about action vs. RPG games, and immersion, is just a distraction. This is really just a debate about the various means of conveying relevant information to the player: what the options are, and what the various advantages and disadvantages of those options are. No more, no less.

Again, a thousand visual cluse to tell what your character does is redundency. It can be displayed and represented by a number for ease.

Hmm, do the eight veins on my arm represent that I can kill a troll in four hits, or that 180 pounds will encumber me. Gee, I wish I had some representative that would just show me this plainly that I could understand in a glance. Oh wait, those are displayed stats.

It seems like you want to have it both ways. On the one hand, having the visual cues rather than numbers would make for a game where you don't "have to think and can just kill stuff", but on the other hand "you'd be reading the rules and game manual for a month" (which sounds like it'd require a good deal of cognitive work, and you couldn't just kill stuff).

Which is it?

Thats sounds more like they was lazy to fix it since too much "troubles" need to fix and better axe feature.
The same goes to Mysticism what was striped from many spell effects and then become "superfluous", to equipment variability because too much "troubles" lets remove "superfluous" equipment, to enchanting what become gray shade of past but still have the same problems, to guilds thats was simplified and mostly boring and so on.
I think best features from previous games must be keeped for next game flawed one must be fixed and improved as well new features can be added, not need remove them thats wrong way of fixing something, such decisions to remove troublesome feature instead of fixing and improving speak of lack of time during developing.

No, youd be thinking all the time, what this or that visual cue meant. When all youd have to do is quickly glance at a menu stat. if you just played it like an action game, like he wants to, then you woldnt have to think at all.

TES ain't a math test, a quizz, a sudoku. If you believe that you can only think mathematically, then damn, life must be hard on you. I want an intellectually stimulating game as much as the next one, but I in which I don't have to make MATHEMATICAL strategies, but SITUATIONAL strategies ("I'm here, I'm good at x and y, there are z number of enemies kind of good and x and some a y, WHAT WILL I DO?") and STORY WISE strategies ("These guys hate me, but they have political power. I want that power, what do I do?").

Where in this I just want to kill stuff?