I bet you feel above such people because of that, but that don't make any sense, because it's a word with the clear definiton. Well at least for me it is clear, I've met such people, I know who I call that way).

Thing is, that's the same kind of elitism I'm complaining about in the first place. >.>

Which rounds it all off nicely with http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdHominem: Attacking the arguer or the argument's presentation instead of the actual argument.
The new patch is out on PC so I will be too busy roleplaying in a great roleplaying game, namely Skyrim to post.
And there was much rejoicing. Heh.
Have fun, take care, be awesome.

If you take Skyrim and replace every so-called action element with a probability check modified by the character's skill levels, perks, and attributes, the amount and quality of role playing would change not a bit. Your modified Skyrim would be neither more nor less a role-playing game than it is now. Likewise, if you take the original Fallout and change all of its probability-based character actions into Skyrim-style, player-executed actions, Fallout would remain just as much an RPG as it is now.

In games like Fallout, the only thing the player does is make a choice each turn. It is in the choice-making that the player role-plays. The action part of the game in Skyrim is separate from the choice making. The action is not in place of the choice making, but is in addition to it. Action does not exclude role-playing, and role-playing does not exclude action.

If you take live-action role-playing into account, you see that role-playing can even include action. In an action RPG, the action is not necessarily in addition to the role-playing, but may be considered a part of it.

Basically, you all worship TVtropes as if it was Ten Commandments. No one could speak anything against, especially not in the form described in it. People please try to think with your own heads, come up with conclusions of your own. All you do is just quote the site and feel good. At least don't be so obvious, and make it as if it were your thoughts.
And yeah, have fun in play-pretending that it's a full-on RPG.
Except that there's little to no "choice" in Skyrim, especially compared to Fallout. Unless RP for you is all about combat.

If the character's success or failure hinges on your ability to control him then you are not roleplaying, you are showcasing your hand-eye coordination in an action game. If, on the other hand, the character's success or failure hinges on the character's stats then you are playing the role of the character. The decision as to whether to take action and what the action should be are always going to be made by the player, otherwise you are running a simulation.

If you remove the ability for a spell cast to fail then the character's skill at casting is no longer relevant and the only thing that matters is where the joystick is pointing. That is an example of an RPG element being removed in favor of the Action element.

Unless, of course, the effectiveness of the spell is determined by the character's stats. Just because the spell doesn't outright fail to cast doesn't mean it relies solely on the player and can't still be affected by the character's skill in other ways.

Effectiveness is a separate concept from accuracy. All they did was remove one RPG function from the equation and told us to be happy because they left the other one in.

Also, it should be pointed out that if you cannot fail then you never actually made a decision.

Although having spell failed from time to time is better than having an always good spell and making it even better.

So does that mean this is an RPG?

http://payday.wikia.com/wiki/Upgrades#Upgrade_trees

As I gain experience in the Assault tree, the damage/accuracy/reload times of my guns improve. It's certainly an RPG element, but I wouldn't classify a game as being an RPG because it has said elements.

I prefer enjoying my games for what they are than belabor how closely they fit under a certain genre. A genre, might I add, that everyone seems to have their own different definition for, including developers.

Skyrim lets me do what I want in a functional and fun way. It's not that complicated.

That wasn't my point. I was responding to the assertion that removing skill-based spell failure means magic is turned into an action element, by pointing out that it can use skill-based spell effectiveness to keep it as an RPG element (which is what Oblivion/Skyrim has done).

But it's still an action element with a hint of RPG.
(So are all the TES Games to varying degrees)


Someone who is terrible at FPS games will miss quite frequently despite his characters "skill" as it were. The spell's chances of success are now nearly totally reliant on player skill. All the damage up in the world won't matter if you can't hit the person you're trying to aim at. Combat and Magic are action based elements of the game. Their success is almost entirely determined on how well the player performs.

But Morrowind and Daggerfall were no different in this regard. It doesn't matter if your strength and long blade skills are at 100 and you're using a Daedric longsword - if you as the player don't aim correctly, the game will never even initiate that dice roll. All Oblivion and Skyrim did was make it so there's only one check against accuracy rather than two, and shift the effects of skill/attribute/perk increases to the damage formula.

Frankly, TES's first person, real-time gameplay is a terrible format for "pure" RPG mechanics, and I personally find the approach of the earlier games to be a "worst of both worlds" situation. In order to truly emphasize character skill over player skill, they'd have to go back to linear, tile-based dungeons with turn-based combat (http://youtu.be/_HnTeQFBIq0 is a good example of how you could do such a game in today's market with today's production values; just imagine if the Nordic barrows had looked like http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Legend_of_Grimrock_screenshot_03.jpg). While I like those kinds of games (Etrian Odyssey is another good recent example), that's certainly not the kind of gameplay I expect from TES.

You just stated what I said.

I never said I disagreed with the change, but that it isn't an RPG.

If you remove all of the RPG elements, then how can you justify calling it a RPG? All that's left is an Action game with a fancy RPG label on the box. TES hasn't gotten that far.......yet, but it's definitely moving in that direction.

Stats alone don't make an RPG out of a game, and decisions that are not made based on the character's background, skill set, and viewpoint aren't roleplaying, unless you're roleplaying yourself. You can roleplay in an action game, but that doesn't necessarily make it a RPG. When the game gives you little or no feedback to support your character, and all that's left is how well you move the controls, then it's an Action game, with or without a few trace RPG elements.

Early TES games (I-III) were a blend of RP and Action, but the RP elements took a back seat in Oblivion with the removal of spell failure, the removal of missed attacks, "always succeed" alchemy, and mini-games in place of speechcraft and lockpicking skill checks. There were a few places where the character's stats were "under-used", such as having no possibility to even attempt a spell that's 1 point above your 25-point skill band, but having a 100% chance to cast it as soon as you gained that one point, or by triggering the next "autoperk", whether it made sense for your character or not. Weapon skills served mainly to boost damage, rather than making the character fight BETTER. A complete novice at melee combat fought just about identically to a master swordsman, except for the damage and a few Perk-granted special moves, so it really didn't give the sense of improvement outside of the numbers getting bigger. To me, that's a poor excuse for a Roleplaying element, but typical for an Action game.

Then what are we even arguing about? The semantics of the thing?

EDIT:
I don't think you entirely understand what "damage" as a numerical value is meant to represent.

It's always been like that in TES, in Morrowind and even Daggerfall. It's never had lock-on attacks, so if your aim svcks you will miss.

Go take on a Giant at low levels, and without cheating or abusing the AI, tell me how well your performance as a player determines your success.

The hit success depends on how well the player can aim, yes, but just being able to hit doesn't guarantee overall success. If your character skills aren't high enough to be effective enough, your enemy will have a clear advantage and be more likely to kill you before you can kill them.

Yep.


Its like you completely ignored the previous post.

Your example still notes that your skill as a player determines the outcome. I'm not saying you're wrong for liking the action oriented focus. I'm saying you're wrong for calling it an RPG element. I challenge you to do the same thing to a giant. It's not as hard as you might think. The player character is rather nimble if you know how to control it. To make it even easier, use a bow if you like.

Removing the chance for spell-casting failure is a good example of what some players call dumbing down. There may be cases where a chance of failure might be so annoying that it is better to remove it. For the most part, though, I find that automatic successes contribute to boredom.

Something to note about action elements is that an element common to two different games might play differently in each game. In Batman: Arkham Asylum, the player does not take a particular course of action because he is playing Batman. He merely acts. Skyrim is different. In Skyrim, the player chooses a particular action because he is playing a particular character such as a reckless warrior or a cautious one, or an amoral rogue or an non-violent mage. In Skyrim, the action is decided upon through role-playing. In Arkham Asylum, it is not. The difference is in the rules. The rule set of an RPG is different from that of an action game. So, even though a game may be chock full of action elements, if the game is meant as a role-playing game, then those elements will be played in a manner unlike the manner they are played in action games.

As I understand from your insistence on the character's stats guiding the outcomes of the character's actions, you believe that role-playing requires that you have the character act in accordance with his abilities. I agree. My concept of the character's ablities is different from yours, though. In Skyrim, you see a novice lock-picker easily opening master-level locks (thanks to a player's knack with the minigame), and view it as a thief acting beyond the scope of his abilities. I view it as a thief acting within the scope of his abilities, because I recognize the game design as the thing that dictates the laws of the universe in which the thief lives.

The reverse situation is worse: how do you "roleplay" an experienced thief character with 90+ Lockpicking if your reflexes aren't good enough to get past the mini-game. In essence, you're forced to play a "Master Thief who never learned the basics".

The game needs to have some player input to keep it from being a boring grind, but needs some reasonable amount of character skill input to give the character's differences a purpose.

As for previous misleading statements, Morrowind's and Daggerfall's combat gave a fairly wide angle to hit a target in melee, as long as you were within range. In fact, I ended up adding a "reduced combat angle" mod to Morrowind to avoid accidentally hitting passing neutral NPCs during occasional random fights with mod-added bandits in towns. Archery was another matter entirely, where the hit-box was sometimes fairly small, and you needed a bit of player aim to even have a chance to make that die-roll based to-hit attempt.

The earlier games gave you the freedom to ATTEMPT difficult tasks at the edge of your abilities. The later games were "yes/no", where you either had the requisite skill level and always succeeded, or didn't and couldn't even try. It made for a much more boring and predictable experience. Where they're complaining about the possiblilty of failing, I'm complaining that I'm not even allowed to attempt it unless I'm guaranteed to succeed. To use the "Fast Travel" response, "if you don't like the possibility of failing, don't try it"; that argument is just as stupid there as here.

To my mind, the games are dumbed down to a degree, but I don't think it's the things that a lot of people are talking about. 

 

1. there's no thinking needed in too many dungeons, quests, and interactions.  Let me explain that a bit.  Levels in Skyrim are dull for a very simple reason -- there's no reasoning needed to figure anything out.  You cannot get lost (even without the arrow) because other than a few cubby-holes, the dungeon is a curvy line, they may as well have put Dovahkiin on a train or something.  The "puzzles" where they exist are pretty simple.  The answer is more or less in the room, somewhere, usually in such an obvious form that it's more like figuring out the President's luggage combination in Spaceballs.  The puzzles in more actiony games are actually better -- in Zelda, for example, you'd have to figure out exactly what the question was before solving it.  You pushed a block onto a switch after realising that standing on it opened the door, but stepping away closed it.  I'm not even opposed to clues, provided it's not something too obvious -- but when you write the combination to a door lock on the key, it's not freaking security. 


2. There were skills that the game itself removed the need for.  For example, speech is negated every time it counts.  there was no "Hides His Eyes" type quest where choosing to ask the right people the right questions and having a high speech skill was used to solve a problem.  To solve the "Hides His Eyes" quest, you had to get half of a town to love you, ask the right questions of the right people, and get the clues to figure it out.  Had the same quest been given in Skyrim, you could go into that town, go to the slaver's office, punch him out, and have him tell you everything.  Not only is it removing the need to have speech skills at all, you don't even need to see the wizard for brains to solve it.


3. There's very little in required skills to do anything.  Not just in the guilds, which I agree with, but even in combat.  For example, Oblivion made ghosts dangerous by having most weapons useless against them.  (yes, silver ones worked, but most iron/steel did not unless enchanted)  This meant that you had to plan ahead somehow to deal with said ghosts.  Either you learned a spell that would kill them or you took a silver weapon, or maybe a staff.  Point being that you had to be prepared to solve the problems the game threw at you.  Everything in Skyrim can be killed with any weapon.  They aren't immune to magics either, which means that your current equipment is always "right" whether the enemy is dumb as rocks trolls, necromancers, ghosts, or dragons.  Dragons, in fact would have been better had you been required to somehow MAKE THEM LAND, you don't it's scripted, and it's scripted so that you don't have to worry about having some means to get the dragon to where you can hit him.  I suppose the two brain cells that it would take to make the player think "flying thing, maybe shoot it" is too much. 

The worse thing is how NPCs react to your "solving the puzzle". Ohh that's so smart, blah-blah.

The game is oversimplified. There is constant hand holding, mindless puzzles, follow the marker fetch quests, very little character responsibility, and less character customization. I don't understand how anyone could think TES has been overall "smarting up". Someone please enlighten me.

RPG of TES is no longer on a board, in the imagination, and molded around a lot of numbers/ lists.

TES isnt a Role Playing Game. Its moving towards a Virtual Reality Game. So, yeah... you no longer require RL statistical intelligence to play the game. You are going to start needing IG intelligence (How to actually use your sword AKA perks and reading skill books). Though admittedly, the puzzles are garbage and the directions/journal in the last 3 vanilla games each were garbage. Hand holding I only found an issue in major quests. Walk away on your own for a while and the game doesn't do much to stop you, there are still dungeons with stories and things to explore.