I was happy with the skills, but not with the way that they were raised. Rather than having a "difficulty threshold" that you had to exceed to gain experience, you could just do the "demented frog" routine everywhere you went, or play the entire game at a run, and rapidly level up your skills because of it.

My characters in MW went up occasional levels in both Athletics and Acrobatics, but it was generally from taking a quick run and a jump off the side of a platform, atop a rock to get a good view, or other "rational excuses" for running and jumping. I never had a character hopping down the middle of the road just for the sake of boosting their jumping skill. I'll be glad to see the "rewards" for doing that removed from Skyrim. On the other hand, not being able to create an "Acrobatic" character would be a limiting factor.

From a lore perspective, a case like Ida Vlinorman in OB climbing the Chapel just to jump off would make perfect sense with a minimum "threshold" that changed with your skill level, so a novice character COULD just hop down the road, but would quickly exhaust that and need greater challenges to improve. A Master acrobat would have to make some pretty spectacular leaps or moves to gain further skill.

It's a good idea to merge athletics/acrobatics, and its a good idea to merge mercantile/speechcraft, and it's an alright idea to merge light/heavy armor. It's a terrible idea to merge stealth/security... those are nothing like eachother.

If they keep lockpicking a player-skill game like oblivion, then they should get rid of security all together IMO.

Well, in morrowind, who really needed athletics anyway....all you had to do was get yourself the Boots of Blinding Speed and then dispell the blindness.

Also, in Oblivion, I only ever tried to raise my acrobatics skill to 50 so I could do the flips....and now that I think about it I remember how much time I spend hopping off the tiers in Bruma to level my skill up....ugh, never again.

Are they merging the skills? or just eliminating them? Does this mean that all players will have the same speed and jumping abilities? And when/where was this confirmed?

The overall thought process for the new levelling system doesn't seem very coherent. From the very first article it didn't really look like they'd worked out a lot of stuff yet, if you drop attributes and several skills, what determines how much you can carry? How long you can hold your breath? Dropping variability of that doesn't make sense, unless "less rpg!" is really a huge selling point.

Not that the perks actually make much sense to begin with. "It was fun in Fallout so we're adding it to TES!" But, it was fun because you had a wide open array of choices that gave you a direct benefit. But since all the perks are locked to their own skills in TES, and don't benefit any other "skill" area... you don't get any particular choice other than "which skill that I levelled up already should I further level up?"

Really, perks should be skill independent and affect certain types of actions. You could get "ambitdexterous" perk and have both hands cast spells/wield weapons equally rather than having one "off" hand, or "two handed knock" or whatever and have any two handed weapon power attack knock (appropriate) enemies back. Unfortunately while I see this as clearly better, and I'd predict most people would enjoy it more, it would probably have to wait and be modded in.

It was said that they combined them into one skill if I'm not mistaken.

I am all for the changes to the melee skills. Actually changing the skills to one handed and two handed is the only mod I tried doing for Oblivion. Made more sense to me..
The merging of the Athletics and Acrobatics skills is not a big problem in light of the perks system that will make you able to specialize in whatever areas you need. I can imagine they can even go further than the scope of the original two skills. As someone said, developing those skills should impact stamina. In that light I suppose that each will come with a skill level and attribute requirement. For instance a skill to improve jumping instance would require high agility a skill to improve running speed would require higher quickness. One could imagine a perk to reduce stamina costs based on constitution.

Skyrim's perk system sounds to be an improvement of the Fallout system for the exact reasons they chose to tweak it. Fallout's perk system made characters less unique, you could make a stealth character with a smattering of non-stealth perks. You didn't have to focus or character build using that system. Also, since it was a free-for-all system they couldn't tier perks in order for some to be stronger aside from level restrictions, which meant you had to take a bunch of perks you didn't want. Skyrim's system seems almost akin to Diablo-esque skill trees by description. If you want to build perks for a certain type of combat then do that, you specialize your character. If you want an 'all around' character then just choose a bunch of different perks. Fallout's system just wouldn't make sense. You could be a pure brawler with 0 magicka and take your pick from magic perks instead of being limited to only the most basic ones for 'novice magicians'.

Also, you should note that, to my knowledge, perks are NOT tied to skills. They are tied to even more specific things. A perk about blunt weapons/maces effects blunt weapons/maces regardless of weather they are 1-H or 2-H. A perk that ups your fire spells does not help out any other types of spells from the destruction school of magic. Your proposed "ambidextrous" perk would work with this system

They could probably remove them both entirely. It's already been mentioned that jumping all the time to raise acrobatics is something silly they wanted to get rid of. And what are the only ways to raise your Athletics? By running or swimming. Swimming isn't something you do often, and who doesn't keep the run button mashed down (or toggle-on always run) 99% of the time?

The truth is that both of these skills are almost entirely passive. You raise them just by doing the stuff you're going to end up doing anyway, no matter what type of character you end up playing. There is no way you can get through the game without performing an action that raises these skills, unlike all the others. The simplest thing is just to remove them and base them on your stats.

Athletics can be made a function of your endurance, slightly affected by your strength and agility. Acrobatics can be made a function of your agility, slightly affected by your strength.

Badda-boom, badda-bing, no more need to trouble yourself with these skills.

How are perks not tied to skills? You pick a perk within a "skill tree" of perks. Obviously though, if you pick one within one of your really low skill, it won't be very useful.

Perks.

The skill sets are gone, but I'm betting that you can get these perks in tiers so you can have "running, level 2" or "reduced fall damage" or other perks. In a way, it does make sense because of the way it has been exploited in the past. Also, I always found that after I got to around level 18 in Oblivion I was moving around WAY too fast just because of all the walking I had done. Putting this into the perk category allows you to increase your physical power as you see fit.

That said, I beleive that if they have perks for these things, they will still be limited, because they talked a lot about the balance in combat movement where you can only move so fast while fighting.

i am fine with their removal from the game, as long as there are perks that replicate some of athletics' and acrobatics' effects. i consider ridiculous jumping height and speed to be necessary when making an assassin or ninja type char (as i make tend to make those types of chars glass cannons, so stick-and-move tactics are a must).

EDIT: Yea, you're right. I got confused by the whole "mace/sword" description. I guess there are separate perk trees for 2-H swords and 1-H swords :shrug:

I had always some problem with those two skills, because I was always hopping around to improve Acrobatics, and Athletics was a skills that was always improving constantly without me wanting it and adding points of Speed in levels that I did not focus on it and resulting in loss of efficiency in attribute build up choices in level-up sessions.

Personally, I hopped EVERYWHERE not because of Acrobatics, but because hopping just felt like it was faster. It game me something to do other than just pushing the joystick forward. I loved hopping all the way since Morrowind. The fact it increased Acrobatics was just an added bonus, and I would make this a major skill so that I could level up faster. That was my choice though.

Honestly god knows whats going on with the skills and attributes. Im still going to hop around in Skyrim....and to me personally its kind of shame that now it may do nothing. To me it always made sense that there were these kind of skills. I mean, the more I do something, the better I get at it, right? Removing attributes in skills seems like fixing things that werent broken. Even if some people didnt use it, like it, or whatever. Many people did and you were never forced into using these skills. So whats the deal?

Anytime a skill or attribute is removed or merged, to me its just limiting the players choices and customization. Eventually we will be down to 3 skills, Thief, Mage, and Fighter. EVERYTHING will be generalized into only 3 categories, and skills will mean nothing. Simple? Sure. Depressing? Very.

Depends on what they're doing with perks. What you described was the same as Diablo (a very successful franchise), in which essentially you just have 3 classes with perks. Acrobatics provided a huge issue for the leveling system in past games because generally it raised whether you wanted it to raise or not and could easily ruin your attribute distribution.

Not entirely sure why you'd complain about them combining skills but not mention them adding skills, especially when the skills removed/combined weren't skills at all (running and jumping are hardly skills) while crafting (an added skill) IS actually a skill

Well TBH, acrobatics and athletics are absolutely 'skills'. You arent simply born an acrobat or a world class runner. Im not really too concerned about them being removed, combined, or whatever the heck happened to them. I just want to see what the end result is.

The leveling system may have been an issue, but some people dont even think attributes are returning. Plus I doubt the system is going to follow Oblivions after all of the complaints. There will be a more logical way of leveling IMO whether governing attributes return or not.

What I meant by the 3 skill classes was instead of lockpick, stealth, marksman and other skills you will simply have a 'Thief' skill. Instead of armor and sword and block skills you will have a 'fighter' skill. I meant it sarcastically and I dont think TES would ever do that. I just feel like the more skills, attributes, and so forth the more chances you have for customizing your character. Im really interested to see what happens with attributes in Skyrim....something has changed and nobody knows for sure yet what it is.....I just hope its for the best.

How about this then?

It was [censored] boring.

Wait....?

What was boring?

Yes, but being able to jump or run is something that the great majority of healthy individuals can do competently while swordplay or smithing is not.

It would probably be an even bigger issue for the new leveling system, considering acrobatics/athletics practically raises itself and higher skills contribute more towards leveling (instead of major/minor) it is realistic to see acrobatics forcing you to level repeatedly when you don't want to.

Yes, I understood what you meant. Functionally it would be the same as Diablo. You have a "Thief" skill then inside that skill there would be perk trees for different abilities (such as lockpicking and sneaking). I doubt TES would so fully tread such a beaten path but it is not necessarily the worst road to take. I agree that more skills are good but not if they aren't that functional; Raising Acrobatics didn't really change how I played, neither did raising Athletics. I'm much more enthused about the addition of FUNCTIONAL skills like crafting.

I also am intrigued as to how the implement attributes or handle their absence. Without them how will encumbrance be determined? Knockback? Speed?

Who knows. Some people like to say "Attributes are gone. Its perks now". I dont really get that argument but hey whatever.

It may be a S.P.E.C.I.A.L type system like Fallout.....though I hope not. My beef with that is that my character stats stay relatively the same throughout the entire game and every level. I loved it in Fallout, but I dont want that type of system in TES unless you can actually keep increasing the stats throughout the game.

I kind of hoped that each level you got a certain amount of 'attribute points' to distribute but that system has its own flaws.

I dunno...its just a big mystery at this point. Attributes have to return in some way shape or form (Right?) I just hope that they are increasable like previous TES games.

Any talk of leveling was absent mention of attributes so who knows. Maybe they raise constantly and not at level :shrug:

That is possible. I wouldnt mind like I said as long as they dont stay the same throughout the game. They should be a skill that you increase just like skills are IMO. In Fallout 3 and NV, there were very little options of increasing these attributes. Or, you had to use a perk to do it.....and it was on a scale of 10 rather than 100 like TES. I dunno personally I loved the attribute system in the previous console TES games, and that is much more important than acrobatics and atheletics.

My problem with the old attribute system was that it almost forced you to grind if you wanted it to be as efficient as possible. I didn't have a huge issue with this in Morrowind cuz you could just pay trainers to grind you through levels. It was a HUGE issue for me in Oblivion cuz you were limited to training 5 skill levels per character level so I'd have to waste hours upon hours grinding and I just couldn't play the game normally because I didn't want to waste levels with sub-par attribute increases.

Yea I think that was everyones main gripe about it. I think there are better ways of fixing it however. Im sure we will see one when Skyrim releases. :wink_smile: