And when your sword breaks and becomes useless vs a hoard of Draugers and you find an axe, what then? you picked perks for swords?

You have your rationals, i have mine so long as you realize your jab at attributes still apply to perks as well.

Despite being a diehard P&P roleplayer, I'm not overly sad seeing the attributes go. It's hiding the mechanics, which is good for immersion--the only one I'll miss is Luck, which was kind of unique and cool.

Perks can easily replace Attributes and do the invisible things that Attributes did plus the fact that Attributes were flawed in Oblivion doesn't help it's case. A person who is strong won't be able to swing a Sword Effectively if his Sword Skill is low.

Your rational is a statement on the poor choice of systems used to build a character. The others jab is nothing more than a comment on poor design. These are two very different things.

The tech tree, as a system, is a terrible supplement for the things the previous attributes helped govern. While an overhaul of the system was definitely warranted, scrapping it for something worse just doesn't make sense.

The point isn't to redesign everything. The point is to find what works, flesh out what sticks out at the edges a bit, decide what rough theme your game has going for it, do some rain-dance calculus to guesstimate which features out of what works and what sticks out should stay or go based on your theme, add in some crazy changing inspiration that might be good or bad, shake and stir through hostile office meetings where things are heatedly debated for the 100th time, and then serve to the public.


Well while you'll never see me defending level scaling as set in Oblivion (that really, really, really was a poor design decision), level scaling as a root concept has been in every single numbered ES game. As a root concept, it's not a bad design decision. As an implementation, it can get twisted and turned and pulled and prodded into a huge variety of forms and workings. Some might be fantastic. Some might be absolute flops. It doesn't say anything about the root concept or the idea of redesigning the implementation every title.


Yes, I am using their terms. Is that a problem? It's a very good way to put it for good or bad; folding a piece of paper so that all its critical info is still showing is good folding, while folding that critical info in half is bad folding. No?

Firstly, with the above in mind, the difference between concept and implementation...
If you look at attributes, namely 8 or so static variables that the player increments when they play, as a root concept, then yeah, I can see how that might ruffle the feathers.
But I don't see 8 static player-incremented variables as a root concept.
I see them as the implementation of the root concept of a player's natural-born ability, of which there are plenty of other implementations that can be made to cover the same material that the implementation we're used to does.

Now, you say 'bare bones' with a spit-polish shine. I say that relies entirely on the begging-the-question assumption that they are incapable of reimplementing natural-born ability, because as I've said, this forum has built a list of solutions to problems presented, and as a result it's not so infeasible to think that Bethesda in 5 years' time has constructed their own elegant encapsulation of attributes into another form.

The perk system can't be worse then Attributes. I'm pretty sure that a majority of modders got rid of the way attributes were leveled and just went with +5's. Also Attributes hold back the skills, I shouldn't be penalized because I took Armorer, Block and Heavy Armor as major skills or skills that I specialize in.

I'm 100% sure this will be better...than Oblivion's system !

You are absolutely right, if what you say is correct. A hands-off system that dealt with attributes details behind the scenes would be more realistic. But that would mean attributes are not gone, but they just are behind the scenes and more lifelike. I don't have my intelligence on me anywhere or my strength but they are definitely attributes that work into making my physical body. And these attributes were not pulled out of a hat or a perkometer either.

If my character runs all over the place all the time will he slowly build up endurance and speed over time? Will that endurance and speed slowly dissipate if he stops doing this for a long time? Or will I be forced into buying a perk at the perkometer when I level up to get faster?

The jist that I got yesterday was that the latter is true.

Not really. If you cast spells, you become a spell caster.

BEFORE, it was tougher as you had to carefully plan how you leveled to increase attributes enough so at higher levels you weren't weak.

The way I took it was that speed and endurance would fit under stamina. So you level that up, and there you go... you run faster and longer, hiding the mechanics, just like Zaarin said. Don't know if that's right, but that's how Todd's comments sounded to me.

Health will probably deal with Endurance and speed will probably have a set running speed like Fallout 3 but you may also get a perk that increases your running speed.

Makes sense, but couldn't they have fluffed the names up a bit? It seems weird I'm raising my health instead of say... a broad statistic called Strength, Stamina, and Cognition. Instead of just Health, Fatigue, and Mana like I'm playing a video game. Immerse me. I like the mechanics, just now how they were named. It reminds me I'm playing a game, which is a bad thing.

Well I was close... :hehe: But it was the general idea I was trying to get across. :whisper: That sounds great to me though.

Also, if speed was a legit attribute, doesn't it tend to get too fast? It did for me in Oblivion, so I think I'll like just perking it if that's how it's gonna go. And of course, there will probably be different stages of speed perks I suppose for those that want super speed as it makes sense for some beast races I would think.

What fears? I never had any fears...

That's not an argument against attributes though - that's an argument against the Oblivion leveling system.

All you've pointed out here is that the Oblivion system of majors and minors and the way in which increases in those skills contributed to attribute increases and level-ups was flawed, and that's hardly news to anyone. This says nothing whatsoever about the value or lack thereof of attributes in and of themselves.

neither did i but some people do so i made this thread

Attributes are quantified multipliers that directly relate to real life things (well, luck is questionable). There is no Perkolator out there doing invisible things to me.



Devs has how many years to develop an awesome and novel solution to fix a small problem?



A person who is very strong and skilled in other fighting, like hand to hand, but no skill in swords will be a lot more effective with a sword in hand than one who is weak but equally unskilled. Of course we can go to the artifical Perkolator to give us a perk to handle those situations or....heck....maybe the game could mirror real life and have some mystical behind the scenes thing called Strength to handle those situations. AND- a dual perk/skill system to separate the skilled from the unskilled.

My gosh that sounds too awesome to consider.

Let's see

Intelligence does the same thing as Magicka
Willpower does the same thing as Stamina both affect fatigue
Strength and Weapon Skills both do damage. The Weapon skills can easily pick up the slack and Encumberence can be deal with perks
Endurance does the same thing as Health
Speed is probably at a set number although Perks/Armor effects may allow you to run faster
Archery can easily pick up the slack for Agility and Stamina can deal with Stagger
Personality will probably be replaced with Speechcraft
Luck I have no idea but it was useless in Oblivion outside of betting on the Arena.

The way I see it Attributes are gone but not completely gone they've just been replaced by Perks and 3 basic Attribute stats.

There is a saying that goes: "You can't know anything about the desert if all you've seen what a grain of salt" (or something like that, but it's got the same meaning anyways


And anyways, guess what? Bethesda chose to make it so, and they worked on it and implemented it how they saw fit. IT'S IN! Deal with it

I'm just glad I don't need to deal with restoring attributes that those dang wil-o-wisps damage. I never liked the damage/restore attribute thing.

Don't even remind me of those horrible creatures. Whose idea was it to put some fuzzy yellow gas ball that damages your Willpower and absorbs it as health. Must've been some kind of sick joke :tongue:

I'm just glad I won't be grinding for +5's anymore.

It kinda ruined it, tbh

Umm, Todd said this himself. Health, Magicka and Stamina are our three attributes in Skyrim.

Yup I'm not going to miss it either. I'm doing it right now in Oblivion and it's boring as hell. It'll be very rewarding but I'll be bored to death by the time I get to Level 31.

Oh, i get it now, you just want the old system back so you can do it all on one character. Got it.