I'm a theorycrafter. I love planning characters and stats even in games I don't actually play..
Lately I've been thinking about the class system in Oblivion and lack of it in Skyrim.

Let me say, that I think the new leveling system is perfect or at least almost perfect.

Now onto business..
I don't have the exact quote but the classes were removed because ppl realised after X hours they didn't use a skill or two and rerolled another class.
I totally understand that..

Lets have a look at the Spellsword (a class that I came close to playing in Oblivion)
- destruction, alteration, restoration, illusion, blade, block, heavy armor were its major skills
So why didn't I play the spellsword?
- I don't wear heavy armor (rp ftw) so the skill was obsolete for me and that is why I created a custom class with 1 difference: light instead of heavy armor.
Where is the problem with old classes?
- The problem is NOT the boost you get..

The problem is the classification of skills into major, minor (and misc in Morrowind) plus the specialisation (magic in this case).. This and not the bonus starting points was what made classes restrictive in TES. In my spellsword example I don't wear heavy armor.. That meant that if took the class it would forever take a place of something I did use (light armor) for all purposes of leveling it. The spellsword would forever level those 7 skills faster than any other skill, so when people realized they didn't use some of them, they realized what a huge waste it was for just one of those skills to take the place of a major skill and not ones they did use and to be accelerated.


So that hopefully answers why classes were flawed..
But what about "they didn't need to be removed".

They didn't.. Beth could have kept the classes in the game by simply removing the classification of skills into major and minor except for the initial bonus.
So my spellsword would level all skills (including his special skills) at the same pace..In that case I would have no problem in beeing a spellsword in Skyrim. Yes I would get a starting bonus to heavy armor but I could easily ignore it and use light instead without the need to form a custom class..
And all those ppl who down the road realized they didn't use X or Y?! In your own words, the system was build in such way that they could have picked up the weapon they liked and leveled the skill associated with it without needing a restart..

The question now is: will we get any boosted skills at the start? Or will we start completely blank 8besides the racial bonus)..
I'm guessing you do plan to give us "tag" skills in Skyrim just like in Fallout and that's not bad.
But the class system would fit into TES much better than a "tag" system..

This isn't a plea to return the class system to Skyrim.. No.
It's just a rational look to understanding why they were removed.. And a comment that maybe it wasn't entirely necessary..

Well maybe a little..

I wouldn't be surprised if during character creation you get to "tag" some skills like in Fallout. This would allow two Male Redguards to be distinct from each other at level one. It may not be the same number of skills as the Oblivion Major skills, but I could see it being 6 this time (+5 or +10 to each of them).

Having classes but not having major and minor skills is kind of a waste. If I could choose, say acrobat, it would make me no different than a witch-hunter. Classes would only be a name, and it would make more sense to remove classes and you can call yourself whatever you want. I think Beth did good in removing them. It's like a change from DnD to GURPS.

This. Also i think you might choose a 'type' i e Warrior,Mage Thief. This will dictate your starting spells and equipment.

At first my sensibilities were affronted at the idea of no classes. But after thinking about it for a while, I've decided I don't care.

TES has always been semi-lifelike in that "you are what you do". So if I got off that boat in Morrowind and declared myself a mage, then picked up a sword and started whacking stuff, then what am I? Well... I have some of the hallmarks of a mage, so perhaps I WAS one... but what I'm doing right now is fighting like a warrior. Perhaps after a few months of this, my character goes back to his spellslinging origins. Now what is he?

So to me, "class" is a somewhat arbitrary identification of "what I thought I'd be" at the start of the game, and may or may not have anything to do with what you actually are.

You get the bonuses. It may not be much later in the game, but in the starting it will help to make sure you can specialize the way you want to.

Classes could get specific perks instead of skill bonuses, unless this would collide with racial-specific starting perks (assuming that racial-specific starting perks are in the game).

Classes would help you with your starting identity. Help define who you were. Think of it as a job.. Lets say you are an Acrobat.. So what? You focused on some skills for a part of your life.. But that does not define you for the rest of your life. Lets say you join the Imperial guard. While you are in the guard you train in weapons, armor, athletics (I know its out). When you leave the guard you choose something else.



That would lead to the same problem as with classes in Oblivion.. Down the road you would decide you'd rather have perks for speach rather than armor..

A starting skillset is not a class. A class is something you keep with you until the end of the game and it would limit you on what can you do.
Classes in TES were only a head start and a way to level up, but you could easily raise your other skills as well, ignoring your class skills. So yeah, I would say TES games haven't got classes ever since Daggerfall...

You create your "Major/Minor" skills by perking into the skills. That effectively creates your class.

That's no different than what you're proposing. Supposing later on you don't like the skills your class tagged, it would be the same thing. It's better to have no classes at all and just let the player figure everything out as they go along.

Bethesda have already said that all you can choose at the start of the game will be the race and then be able to detail the physical look of your character.

So the actual skill levels you start with will only be effected by the race you choose (eg orc's 2 handed skill will start higher than a Bosmer's, but a Bosmers marksman and sneak skill inturn will be higher)

I like the way they have done this, as this means that you are what you play. I want to start with a clean slate, and then decide how I go about using skills to level when I have had the chance to use them for a bit, and get to know how I feel about each one.

Yes I will have an idea of a character and what skills they will use before starting the game, but this allows me to change Mid-game if i feel that I would enjoy actually using a different mix of skills. Instead of having to start a fresh character or playing the skills I want and grinding out levels from my unused Majors.

I think this is a step forward for TES, and could be the change that RPG's need. Just like when they changed from point allocation on level up's to actually increasing skills as you use them.

i like the idea of not judging a book by its cover.

I've been keen to the idea that instead of capping skills at exactly 100, they're capped at a specific number (say, 85 points) above their starting number. This means that a character who starts with 20 in archery (regardless of whether that number is arrived at by picking major skills, specialization or racial bonuses) would be able to raise it to 105, whereas someone who starts with only 5 in archery would max it out at 90.

I just want to hammer on a point that you made here, because it's pertinent not only to the flawed arguments against classes, but to the flawed arguments against many things -

"The problem is the classification of skills into major, minor (and misc in Morrowind) plus the specialisation (magic in this case).. This and not the bonus starting points was what made classes restrictive in TES."

This is exactly true. The key problem with the leveling system has always been that division into major and minor skills, and more to the point, the fact that major skills increase at a much faster pace than minor skills. THAT is the reason that classes were as "restrictive" as they were - not simply the fact that you picked some number of skills on which you thought you might want to focus, nor even that those skills were granted bonuses, but that from that point on, throughout the entire game, those skills were going to increase relatively quickly (and sometimes dangerously quickly) and every skill you didn't pick was going to be effectively crippled.

This is (in combination with level scaling) the reason that people had to "grind for +5s" in Oblivion. Since your major and/or specialization skills increased at an accelerated rate, any build with a few too many non-combat skills was just an invitation for frequent death, since those non-combat skills, if used a bit too much, would force a level-up, exposing the character to new dangers before he'd had a chance to gain sufficient combat skills to handle them. So the solution (whether through effcient leveling or a most-used-skills as minors build) was to go out of one's way to ensure that one gets as many skill increases as possible at a particular level, before that tenth major increase vaults you up to the next one.

Now - regarding classes in particular, I'm ambivalent at best. I use most-used-skills as minors to get through Oblivion, and have become quite skilled at putting builds together that level at a nice even pace and with absolutely no metagaming necessary. But that means that those builds generally have almost nothing to do with the character - they're done the way they're done solely to compensate for the broken leveling system. So the combination of skills assigned to a particular character - the "class" - is already meaningless to me. It's just a contrivance. That said, I do like the ability to give a name to the class - to call a character the . It's not a big deal, but it's a nice touch. That though could be handled by nothing more than a box you fill out in chargen and a word inserted in the character description.

However, it is certainly true that the mere existence of "classes" wasn't the problem, and that it was in fact the majors/minors leveling system that was the problem.

We'll just have to see how the new one works out. I'm heartened by the removal of majors and minors, but I'm wary because, as near as I've seen so far, if the new leveling system is also broken, there's not going to be anything like grinding for +5s or playing most-used-skills as minors that players are going to be able to do to get around the fact that it's broken. We'll just be stuck with it.

We'll see.....

I think it's pretty simple why classes are flawed. They're restrictive.

"Classes" are defined by a set of major skills.

If one treats the base amount of experience necessary to gain a skill increase as that necessary to gain one for a non-specialization minor, then a specialization major only requires 40% of that amount. That means that you need 2 1/2 times as much experience to increase a non-spec minor than you do to increase a spec major.


This is therefore false.

Hadn't considered this before. Good thing I stopped playing before it bit me.

I'm not going to miss them. Only thing I ever did with "classes" was to custom pick 7 majors that 1) were spread evenly among the 7 attributes, and 2) I was never actually going to use (except when I wanted to "force" a level).

But, as gpstr said, that's more due to the leveling system in Oblivion - the need to control your levels to get those +5 bonuses. (Of course, since I played the game using my Minor skills, I'm used to how slow they leveled. So, I don't consider them "crippled". Oh, and this was with Francesco's scaling mod slowing down the leveling speed of a number of skills. To be fair, I rarely got characters above the teens in levels, and didn't get skills above 75 very often. :shrug:)



edit: "normal" leveling for me - I'd play the game with my Minor skills, keeping track of skill gains as they happened. When I had enough points for the +5 bonuses I wanted, I'd go back to my house and "train" one or two of my Major skills 10 times to make the "level up" happen. At higher skill levels, this could take awhile (bracing down the Cast key to continually cast a 1pt Alteration/Illusion/Resto spell, for instance. At high skill levels, this could take up to an hour or more. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing how the no-attributes & no-major-skills system works.)

It's so common that I can just about sleepwalk through threads about it on the Oblivion forums. Somebody will show up and say, "I keep dying! What am I doing wrong?"

I can predict - first, they're at about level 9. Second, they've got major skills like sneak and alteration and alchemy and speechcraft, and they've made the mistake of actually using them, so the skill increases in those things have leveled them up, while their combat skills have languished. And the solution is always either efficient leveling or most-used-skills as minors (or turning down the difficulty).

It always comes back to the dramatically lower experience requirements for major skill increases, which, if any of those skills are relatively commonly used non-combat skills, just means that players level up faster than their combat skills increase. That is, undeniably, the flaw at the heart of the system. That is what makes classes "restrictive" and that is what makes grinding for +5s beneficial.

Me too, and probably why my gut reaction was disappointment to lose them (classes/specialization even more than atts. and birthsigns). I had my playstyle and Beth decided to revamp it to please other players. Fair enough. Hopefully I will have as much fun fiddling with perk trees or some other new system as I did fiddling endlessly with builds.

As far as classes being flawed, I never really struggled too much with builds in TES3 or 4 (only have 1 "full" playthrough on OB) nor worried much about efficient leveling. So, changing the system doesn't necessarily address my needs, but hopefully it will be replaced by something equally satisfying for players like me. Dragon fights and shouts won't do it I suspect.

As far as for those criticizing classes for being too restrictive or game breaking, if they are the same people who criticize being able to max all stats and become master-of-all skills, please explain to me how those arguments do not conflict. Thanks.

Yes, this makes for very stilted gameplay. I'm hoping the new system will be more organic, not forcing you to constantly check your skills and practice them in contrived manners (and holding back the major skills you're actually "supposed" to use the most), in order to get the most out of each leveling. This is of course tied in with the loss of attributes, which I'm not sure what to think about yet...

I like this system. you end up with a more unique character unlike Oblivion (100 in all skills)

I think you can get 100 in the skills (which I'm happy about), but you can't get all the perks available for all the skills.

I think Beth did the right thing, but I'm gonna miss the classname though.