Is there a perk-cap? : V - Skyrim

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 6:03 am

Well when large numbers get factorial'd, things generally tend to skyrocket.

My eyes did bug out a little when I saw the results of the calculation.

And then you have to take into account "real math" versus "game math," too. Out of all those possible configurations, how many are actually useful and how many would result in a character that was great only as long as you were roleplaying a theoretical researcher so socially gimped they couldn't survive 10 minutes outside a class lecture hall much less outside a city's walls?

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:09 pm

50 perks, that's a lot because if each perks you choose is powerful, you're pretty godlike at a very high level.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 8:47 am

50 perks, that's a lot because if each perks you choose is powerful, you're pretty godlike at a very high level.

You get alot of power but you also don't know how strong the higher level enemies are as well. One thing that is continual in the TES universe, if you can get a certain skill or something from leveling, so can your enemies. So it's safe to assume that enemies will have perk bonuses too.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 11:16 am

My understanding is that we will be able to choose as many perks as times we level up, but the number of levels we gain is limited by the numbers of skills we raise each level and which levels we choose to level up with and stuff like that. So it will be a soft limit(Oblivion) as opposed to a hard limit(Fallout)

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 11:55 pm

Ok i did it. I tweeted Pete Hines asking him this, if we get an answer I'll post it here. Also, getting some info on what we will see at PAX this year. Here's hoping for Gameplay or more screens!

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 11:43 am

Actually, in terms of pure choice, we have...

280 choose 50 = ( 280! / ( 50! * ( 280 - 50)! ) ) =...
71,077,889,363,964,271,283,684,343,950,838,998,128,149,871,121,723,976,480 different possible maximum perk configurations.

:P

EDIT:
And to project the combo # for the alternate interpretation, assuming a raw level cap of say 80,
280 choose 80 = ( 280! / ( 80! * ( 280 - 80)! ) ) =
297,149,965,708,674,792,509,136,871,675,892,284,059,750,252,596,044,007,787,603,699,214,237,140 different possible maximum perk configurations.

This is an accurate calculation only if the 280 perks are completely independent. But it sounds like some of them are upgrades to perks. So, for instance, if perk #112 is an upgrade to perk #98, then it's not the case that you can combine #112 with 49 (or 79) other perks not including #98. So the number of possible combinations is somewhat less (how much less is difficult to say, without knowing more about what the perks are).

Nevertheless, it's still almost certainly going to be an extremely high number.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 8:39 am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfRe16V3YA8&feature=player_detailpage#t=46s

/thread

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 11:00 am

Seems pretty obvious from the info so far that the perks get capped at level 50.Seems like wishfull thinking to think otherwise.The incentive to keep playing after level 50 is to increase your skills and to boost your health,stamina or magicka.

If you could still continue to choose perks after level 50 then people would just keep grinding out that character until they have all the perks and all the skills maxed,which would not make your character unique at all,which was the problem with Oblivion.By the end of the Oblivion it did not matter which race or class you were,because once you maxed all out all the skills,every character was virtually the same.
Bethesda realized this aswell and capping the perks at 50 is a great way to resolve this issue.Make's the replay value of the game go way up.The bottom line is to choose your perks wisely. :thumbsup:

Did you read the other posts? There is a hard cap around 75, that would mean 75 perks out of 280.

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:26 pm

Well there is a perk cap, pete just said so. So that is 50 perks per game(without mods).

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 4:56 am

As of right now its a hard 50 Confirmed.

@Badprenup Currently planned to be capped at 50. You don't get Addt'l perks once you hit 50

http://twitter.com/#!/DCDeacon To get to my question just click on my twitter account

Edit: You're welcome btw

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 12:09 pm

As of right now its a hard 50 Confirmed.

http://twitter.com/#!/DCDeacon To get to my question just click on my twitter account

Edit: You're welcome btw

You gave the link, but I ninja'd you on the info. :ninja:

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 6:03 am

It had already been confirmed several times that the perk cap was 50 before now :pinch:

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:36 pm

Did anyone even read the podcast quote someone posted on the very first page of this thread?

Yes, there is no firm level cap, but there is a limit to the number of perks we can take. (This is distinct from the "perks" which are really just ranks.)

16:12 Within the one-handed skill tree you've got these different perks for maces, and axes, and swords and so on. Within the magic system is it kind of similar, is it by school that you're perking up, or is it individually like I've got fire spells, and I'm going to perk fire spells?

"Well there's the school Destruction, so that covers like a category of spells, and then within Destruction there are perks for fire based spells. So people see we've removed Mysticism, but that's just a label right? Those spells go into other skills. And then it gets deeper within those skills. The easy thing for us is to just add more skills. That's actually easier. Because in the old games there was just a skill and a number, there wasn't really a progression. We really want you to feel that you're getting better in this particular skill. And perks are the main way we do that now. And I think the game right now has like 280 perks if you include the ranks. So even a character that raises all their skills to 100, and they're playing and they're level 50, they've only gotten to pick 50 perks. They're very different characters. And a lot of the power is in the perks as opposed to the raw number of the skill. There's still some power in the raw number of the skill, just not as much as there used to be. All that stuff has been moved into the perks."

Raising skills are how we level. If all of your skills are at level 100, you can't level anymore. Ergo, you have gotten all the perks you can get.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 10:08 am

Raising skills are how we level. If all of your skills are at level 100, you can't level anymore. Ergo, you have gotten all the perks you can get.

This part isn't quite right. You won't have all of your skills at 100 at level 50. Level 50 is just the last level you will get a perk. When you have maxed out every skill you will be in the 70s and you would've struggled horribly to get there. The new leveling system makes it where anything above level 50 will be horribly long and difficult to level effectively making it not worth leveling past that to max out all your skills unless your really wanting to max all your skills, which is going to be a very long journey.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 2:38 am

This part isn't quite right. You won't have all of your skills at 100 at level 50. Level 50 is just the last level you will get a perk. When you have maxed out every skill you will be in the 70s and you would've struggled horribly to get there. The new leveling system makes it where anything above level 50 will be horribly long and difficult to level effectively making it not worth leveling past that to max out all your skills unless your really wanting to max all your skills, which is going to be a very long journey.

He said, "So even a character that raises all their skills to 100..." The level 50 part I assume was just an example, because he clearly said later that he doesn't know where the soft level cap will fall. He said it would be around level 75.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 1:04 pm

well thats good to hear, only 50 seems reasonable.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 3:25 am

This part isn't quite right. You won't have all of your skills at 100 at level 50. Level 50 is just the last level you will get a perk. When you have maxed out every skill you will be in the 70s and you would've struggled horribly to get there. The new leveling system makes it where anything above level 50 will be horribly long and difficult to level effectively making it not worth leveling past that to max out all your skills unless your really wanting to max all your skills, which is going to be a very long journey.

He get's an A for effort though. But wait... I just stumbled onto a mathtastrophe. We start at level 1, and the last perk is level 50. Does this mean we choose a perk when we start the game or does this mean we actually only get 49 perks? Quickly! Back to Twitter so I can have my answer ninja'd and we will circle into an infinite loop of pointless questions and answers. Everyone ready their calculators. On three we divide by 0.

One...
Two...
Three!

Oh SH

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 10:39 am

This part isn't quite right. You won't have all of your skills at 100 at level 50. Level 50 is just the last level you will get a perk. When you have maxed out every skill you will be in the 70s and you would've struggled horribly to get there. The new leveling system makes it where anything above level 50 will be horribly long and difficult to level effectively making it not worth leveling past that to max out all your skills unless your really wanting to max all your skills, which is going to be a very long journey.

He said, "So even a character that raises all their skills to 100..." The level 50 part I assume was just an example, because he clearly said later that he doesn't know where the soft level cap will fall. He said it would be around level 75.

Guys, guys, he also said that it would be different for different characters depending on how you play. The numbers he gave were relatively arbitrary and he said specifically that they would be a little different for each person. Because of the all the different multipliers present you will be hard pressed to max all of your skills and successively max out at the same level every time.

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:46 pm

He get's an A for effort though. But wait... I just stumbled onto a mathtastrophe. We start at level 1, and the last perk is level 50. Does this mean we choose a perk when we start the game or does this mean we actually only get 49 perks? Quickly! Back to Twitter so I can have my answer ninja'd and we will circle into an infinite loop of pointless questions and answers. Everyone ready their calculators. On three we divide by 0.

One...
Two...
Three!

Oh SH

I love sarcasm, especially bad sarcasm. For all you know you get your first perk when you finish the tutorial. Seeing as how you get a perk everytime you level, I would assume you would stop at level 50 with perks when level 50 was announced as the cut off in the GI article also.

» Fri Feb 18, 2011 10:44 pm

From what I have heard Todd say, 50 is not the cap, but about the levels that in a normal play-through a character would get.

He said the maximum is not knows, but if you get all the skills to 100, depending on how you specialized first and then developed other skills, or you raised all the skills together, the highest possible level is something about 70-80 levels, maybe 75.

So we would say in most games, the players would gain up to about 50-75 levels which would result to about 49-74 perks from currently 280, which would leave a lot of room for specialization and replay-ability.

It is great.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 11:52 am

From what I have heard Todd say, 50 is not the cap, but about the levels that in a normal play-through a character would get.

He said the maximum is not knows, but if you get all the skills to 100, depending on how you specialized first and then developed other skills, or you raised all the skills together, the highest possible level is something about 70-80 levels, maybe 75.

So we would say in most games, the players would gain up to about 50-75 levels which would result to about 49-74 perks from currently 280, which would leave a lot of room for specialization and replay-ability.

It is great.

Read up, we got confirmation from Pete that 50 is the current max # of perks.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 6:29 am

Think about it, if we can only have 50 out of 280 perks each playthrough, think of the number of combinations! Practically billions.

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 11:13 am

He get's an A for effort though. But wait... I just stumbled onto a mathtastrophe. We start at level 1, and the last perk is level 50. Does this mean we choose a perk when we start the game or does this mean we actually only get 49 perks? Quickly! Back to Twitter so I can have my answer ninja'd and we will circle into an infinite loop of pointless questions and answers. Everyone ready their calculators. On three we divide by 0.

One...
Two...
Three!

Oh SH

Maybe each race starts off with a different perk?

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 1:03 pm

Maybe each race starts off with a different perk?

I personally wouldnt mind that,but I know some people would make a stink about not being able to choose all 50 perks(which the dev's probly already thought of,not to mention each race already comes with their own unique abilities and skills)so for that reason I doubt it.

Maybe you start off at level zero?
If not,maybe you get to choose 2 perks your first level up?

» Sat Feb 19, 2011 7:18 am

hopefully we can continue to get perks. I don't see why not. If it dramatically slow, why not reward players for sticking with that character by letting them get some of the actions from other specs too? After all in the long run the game is supposed to be fun and while most people can get their kicks by sticking to inividual charcaters for their 'class' (I know I sure did, I loved having muliple characters to pick from everytime; from my cunning assassin to my righteous Paladin) I think the ability to be able to improve on a character (and essentially turn them into an unbridled god of wrath) would make people happy.