Well,it's actually something I learned from the people here.It's often said these croppings make the game more appealing to larger groups,so...

I think alot of people are getting spell EFFECTS and spells in general mixed up. Oblivion dident have many spell effects most were just the same thing with different colors put on them. Skyrim has 80 some specific effects while oblivion was closer to 30 I believe is what someone said (they checked the CS) Oblivion had 111 stock spells not effects.

Why were there so many unnecessary skills in previous games?

It's often said by people who don't like the changes and who are looking for someone to blame for them. It's almost never said by people within those larger groups and it's rarely said by people who understand the design decisions that drive these sorts of changes.

If you look here http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Spell_Effects you'll see that there are many different spell effects. Many had similar looks when casting, but they were different.

Alchemy, Illusion and Alteration are confirmed in.

They were separate. Not so much different though, and a lot of them had nearly the same effect but applied to something different (like having a huge amount of the spell effects devoted to "Summon [X]"). It's going to be pretty much impossible to tell whether or not Skyrim has more spell effects until we know what kinds of changes they've made to how they handle those spell effects (things that influence stats may have been rolled together as singular effects that you can apply to separate things at spell creation, for example).

I know that, it is just with the lack of info that I am getting worried about it. If they grouped all summons and bounds like they did with fortify skill then that would be great, but I am just worried that they might not have. It is the unknown that is scary which is why I want people opinions on it.

Well they are "streamlining" and "doubing down" the game to attract more customers and get more $$$$$.

I'm not especially worried. I wouldn't be surprised if they've removed the drain/damage/fortify/restore attribute spells since the GI article implies very strongly that attributes in general don't exist anymore. That frees up a fairly large range for other spell effects even if they haven't streamlined bounds/summons.


I do so hate it when developers doub my games.

As long as its fun I dont care as much

I like the simplification actually. Less useless skills. I imagine the reason why they got rid of spears and short blade skill was because they weren't able to make them useful. In Morrowind, they were frankly got useless. Maybe in Skyrim they will become useful.

When you actually think about it its not a bad idea

27 to 21 in oblivion was a bit rash, but this is more of a house cleaning thing

Mysticism apart from soul trap and detect life was useless. So I imagine they will get moved, not gotten rid of
Acrobatics and Athleticism are almost the same, so combining them makes sense
Mercantile and speechcraft - again, the same thing, so combining them makes sense

Is this a fact? They're actually cutting skills again?

I started the ideas and suggestions threads pretty soon after Oblivions release, and the main point in my post was the amount of skills.

There are 35 skills in my suggested skill list, and I was expecting Skyrim to have something between 25 and 30.

So, they are actually unable to implement anything new into the games? They can't even bring back the old skills that served well in Daggerfall and Battlespire? Not even skills from Morrowind? They EVEN cant fix the existing 21 to get them serve the purpose?

If it turns out as bad as it seems, my duty as an old time TES fan is boyqoting the game. Dumbing down from Oblivion seems impossible, but if they pull it through they deserve to be bankrupt. I'm just a one guy, so I'm sure they make millions no matter how bad game they push out.

Wow, I don't want to be around when someone tells you about attributes...

It's an echo-chamber effect. It's not true at all.

It's true that things like fast travel makes the game more appealing to the "masses" (not because of any lack of complexity, but because the masses don't have time to walk everywhere) but it's not true that the average gamer can't handle complex ideas. Even Call of Duty players can do math. The only real difference between the more casual target audience and us is that we have enough free time that we can afford to be forgiving, patient, and accepting of a game that doesn't offer a lot of entertainment up front.

There are valid game design reasons, totally unrelated to mass consumer appeal, to cut down on extra skills. Every human being in the world has a limited capacity to track things. Video games have more luxury than tabletop games with vast spreadsheets of data, because the game won't break if the player can't cope with it, but it's still bad game design to put too much pressure on the player to track lots of abstract numbers. You shouldn't add a skill for the sake of adding a skill, you should add it because making that a separate skill has benefits that outweigh the cost in player memory-space. Furthermore, skills are inherently a poor way of adding depth to a game, because all they can do is act as a multiplier - they can't actually enable the player to do anything new, just old things better. Progression is important, but progression that unlocks new ways of interacting with the world is more interesting than progression that just makes you better at the old ways.

Long story short, "less skills" is a sign for concern, because it's certainly possible that Bethesda has made a poor design decision. But it doesn't necessarily mean they've "sold out" and cut skills just so they can laugh maniacally.

What attributes?

Seriously though, I don't mind if they have removed/combined some skills. I'm sure that these perks can make up for it and add an even greater depth and variation than skills ever could.

So what if we don't have Short Blade, Long Blade, Axe, Mace, Spear, Staff and such anymore when there can be perks that enhance specific weapons. Fancy using an axe as your primary weapon? Improve upon your fighting potential by choosing perks that enhance that weapon.

Exactly!

Perks will add a layer of depth and customization that skills could never achieve.
And combining redundant skills is a good thing, It makes them more valuable imo.

You can just play Morrowind then.

Somehow I missed this silliness. A 35 skill list? Really? That seems like you'd be stretching the mechanic well past it's breaking point.

They implemented quite a bunch of new systems opposed to just deleting 3 skills. Read my post on page 1.




I'll bump this when it gets all around AAA from just about every review source.

In TES X there won't be any skills, just options on how you play and everything you do including resting and retreating will level you up.

As a general rule, nobody respects the opinion of game review sources (for good reason; all you have to do is check Metacritic and you can see that game review scores always skew much higher than film review scores, and it's not because games are just better than movies).

Really, though, I'm not really sure I'd trust his opinion on what constitutes a bad game in any case, as a 35 skill list sounds like something you'd see in a parody of bad game design.

Like TES4 did?

I think the number of skills is not the more important, but the number of possible character actions and the overall skill system coverage. I mean if all you can do is fight, I see it as a very limited system, even if we have 50 combat related skills. Now if having 18 skills allows us to craft, manage survival, have more complexe social interactions, climb, disguise, lie, set traps, investigate... while still allowing us to perform as in previous TES, it would be a better system.
It may shock some people, but I see no problem with having a single melee weapon skill. I see no problem with less magical schools. The massive use of perks, the diversity of weapons, of spells (building a good spellbook should be real challenge and where a player will choose to put his specialisation (think of a big spell that requires that you first manage two simpler ones...)) will allow the player to craft some very different characters.
I do not have any clues weither the new system will be like this or not, but I think that having a smaller set of general skills with an extra layer of specialisation through perks is possibly fine.