The only birthsign that made for a unique playthrough was atronarch... if more signs had unique stuff attached to them they would have been awesome.

Woah, woah, woah! Can we all just hold the phone for one second? I'd really like to come back to this bit. Have you actually played a Mario game before? Because there are totally several pretty high profile methods of skipping multiple levels all over the place.

Anyways, the idea that a game should force you to go through obstacles because combat is somehow more worthwhile/challenging than avoiding combat is a pretty significant mistake in my mind. Ought we do away with stealth as some players may be able to slip their way around any enemies they might encounter? Avoiding conflict should be at least as viable a tactic and more games should be encouraging intelligent strategy. Combat should be dangerous and force me to consider the benefits of any fight I may throw myself in to.

Levitation had problems, but there are plenty of easy fixes that I think a lot of people would be more than happy with. Honestly, does anyone think there would be any sort of uproar if Beth did implement levitation? Would there be thread after thread detailing how the game must be broken now? Or would the same people defending it's removal in that case assume Beth had solved the associated problems?

False dichotomy. The choice is not between no athletics skill, period, or athletics skill, but you move slow as [censored]. There is a buttload of easy fixes and improvements that would

This isn't really what I mean, but you're right nevertheless. Some of the people in this thread argue so senselessly that I just object out of anger.

I'm not at all opposed to the idea of going around an obstacle instead of through it. I'm just opposed to the idea of a single mechanic being used in all situations to effectively avoid everything the game has to offer, except treasure. That's the kind of issue that needs to be addressed. Levitation and 100% Chameleon come to mind, and even invisibility the way it works, sometimes.



Case in point, I've repeatedly argued for a levitation fix instead of a levitation ban. I really do wish that Bethesda would change more mechanics than they dispose of. The whole point of this thread was to bring light to the fact that Bethesda is changing quite a few mechanics that many think are simply being discarded. To me, this is a good thing.
I would rather a feature be changed and implimented in a new way than simply tossed by the wayside.

The point I http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1195349-a-word-on-things-that-have-been-removed/page__view__findpost__p__17766027, in fact, is exactly that. The new spell system is simply a new dynamic. There will be plenty of ways to explore it, what it can do, and what the new capabilities are. They are even adding new features that previous games never had. However, the simple fact that they are adding some new restrictions along the way is not necessarily a bad thing.

Just because my spells can only have 2 effects instead of 6, I don't see that as negative. I see it as new, and quite possibly even deeper and more strategic than ever before. Possibly.

My only wish is that more would recognize change when they see it and stop labeling everything as "removed."
And of course, that Bethesda would use the tool of change more often than they do now.

This quote was repeated by one of the Bethbots earlier.


So, is my mage that sits in musty old libraries all the time going to be able to sprint as fast as the nimble acrobatic thief that has spent their whole life running from the guards? Will my nimble thief naturally become more swift in the game or will he only become more swift once I pick the "run faster" perk from the perkolator? Should I accept a fake and contrived method of running faster when small tweaks to the previous system (already done in mods) would give a more realistic and life-like result?


According to the devs we are now calling the health bars attributes. Which is complete nonsense but there you go. It is possible they will be able to mash up all of the attributable efffects into the game. It is unfortunate that they cut out the system that was there to organize and link them together. Now we have ???, either a ton of skills and attributable effects that are completely unlinked or we have something they have not mentioned yet.


What you say is untrue or unverified as far as I've heard. Though wiith various options on "hardcoe" mode there would be potential in classing characters at the beginning.


Spreadsheets exist to organize and make sense of data. Cutting out the organizational structure of the attributable effects is just plain stupid. While they may have reorganized these effects into something better we have not seen anything that points to this. There is also the question on whether or not the new organization will be realistic. Attributes attempt to quantify real life characteristics. What does a tech tree do?

Is there an overarching value that links together the various skills that require this real life thing called strength?

How are rates of renewal treated? Can they be manipulated? Do I have to bend over to the perkolator to impact rate of magicka renewal?

There were whole avenues of alchemy/spell casting that impacted attributes, how is this handled?

Does a character have balance? Can they trip and fall or get knocked over? Do weaker characters have less balance? Can a drunk character stumble?

How is sight treated?

Does my barbarian that clubs his enemies that has never picked up a sword as weak and worthless with a claymore as a mage that has never ever touched a physical weapon? Since no one has strength any more that seems to be the case. How ridiculous is this?

There are a large number of interactions attributes handled (or could have handled had Beth ever taken the time to look into it) that are not easily handled elsewhere.


Your comment is nonsense. There is nothing superior to having a character with no intelligence, no strength, no endurance.... There is nothing superior to cutting out the central hub of character building and putting unlinked piecemeal junk in its place. Again, there may be more to their changes than they have made public, but nothing they have divulged has led me to believe they have done anything to attributes but cut the heart out of the organizational structure. A colossal mistake imo.

Bethbot? You're starting with this, seriously? And just because you disagree? What the heck is wrong with education that nobody wants to argue without insults these days?



Why assume that running speed is static, or that the only way to improve it is through perks? Just because it is no longer a skill that contributes to your level doesn't mean it can't be a variable that the game keeps track of. Assumptions are killing these forums. There are ways to handle this that won't crush all your hopes and dreams, but that still don't involve something being tied to your level as a skill.



What does it matter if system X does the same thing system Y does? If the attributable effects are still in the game, what are you missing, exactly? You just want the second layer of game interface for... fun? The only difference between having the attributable effects in the game and then tying them to the attributes is one extra layer of artificial leveling. My "strength" isn't "34." There are many different things that I can do, some that I am strong enough for and some that I am not. My strength in different ways is different as well. I can squat more than most of my gym mates, but I can't press nearly as much. So.. what exactly is my strength?

"Strength" is an abstract number that was only used to represent other things in the game. Examples: carrying capacity and weapon damage. By itself, strength did nothing except exist on a page in the interface. We don't need it, what we need are the effects of it, the carrying capacity and the weapon damage modifier.



What I say are just assumptions about what might be true.


As I've already pointed out, attributes are abstractions that only barely make sense. My strength isn't a number. My endurance isn't a number. I can row better than I can run. Most others can run better than they row. What exactly is my endurance "number?"

That's right, I don't have one. What I have are skills and abilities. I am better at some things than I am at others. This is what the game will give us.



The problem here is that you are looking at the things attributes could have done, or might have done. What I'm looking at are what the attributes actually did. They were just labelled numbers with effects. All anyone really needs are those effects. Effects, skills, abilities. That's what real people have, not spreadsheets.




This, I leave to you. It's a matter of preference whether you want your character to be an excel chart or something more organic.

Maybe it will work out in actuality, but starting off a character with nothing going for them in the beginning seems weird to me. I would imagine your character must be at least 18 years old when the game begins, so they must have had lives before being caught hoping Skyrim's border and placed in line for execution.

How can my character be 18-30 years old and not have any amount of specialization from his/her previous life? Even when the Lone Wanderer grew up in a Vault he had tagged skills that he was above average in and selected S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats. Coming out of prison with an entirely blank slate other than race just seems like it'll be really off.

And I think they said their reasoning for doing away with classes and birthsigns were to prevent gimped characters if you chose really badly or decided you wanted to use different skills. I don't really see why you couldn't just make a new character to play a completely different archetype, you'd find out your preferences early on and can just continue the current save later. I normally plan out a character and what I want them to focus on before I create them, do most people just wing it?

Sorry for not reading through the thread. Just my tangential to discussion two cents worth.

I agree with the OP on principal. That Bethesda know what they are doing and a great deal of the changes will be carefully calculated to IMPROVE the game.

"While spears and crossbows themselves have been "removed," they are not actually gone. The functions that they served will likely be entirely preserved."

However, I disagree about this.

Its estimated that for five million years human beings used spears, instead of an alternative. In some countries, human beings still use spears for hunting, because they are more accessible than high tech modern equipment would be.

Is the originator of that quote telling me, that Bethesda have trumped at least 400,000 years, at most five million years, of human ingenuity, to come up with an in game weapon which is lightweight, easily mastered and allows me to effectively engage an enemy in melee combat without coming into his weapons reach? Because I just don't see it. A claymore has similar reach, but weighs a ton, whereas a bow is NOT easily mastered or particularly effective in melee combat.

To be honest, I don't particularly mind the removal of crossbows, it's implied pretty early on in Morrowind that the crossbows were an artifact of an extinct race and that the present variations were at best, cheap knockoffs, and as such, they really never did have a place in the series. I enjoyed using them, but their removal made sense in the history of the game. But spears? Seeing as they are still in use today and were one of the earliest weapons invented on this planet, their removal is, in my lowly opinion, ridiculous.

The range of weapons available in Oblivion was absolutely limited and passed no resemblance to the range of weapons during the period of Earth's history in which the game is set. I really do hope, by more weapons, that Bethesda are introducing other weapons which have a distinct function, rather than a distinct appearance. Not necessarily spears, I personally would be happy with other alternatives.

So, it appears that all you guys, who all so blindly support Skyrim's new "improved" character build changes, do admit that we are indeed losing something. (Sorry, but this is blind faith at this point, since we still don't know how this is exactly going to work out yet.)

You all seem to agree that we will not longer be able to create a truly unique character at the beginning of the game . . . and that is most definitely a loss, even if you are in favor of cutting Classes, Birthsigns, and most of the Attributes.

Therefore, the statement in the opening post in the thread is not true, that: "There isn't anything lost by removing these things, the function that they were intended to perform is still there, but better and harder to see."

If I cannot still create a truly unique character at the beginning of the game (other than in appearance), this feature which was in previous TES game is no longer there. That "function" is now gone.

Because creating a unique character 1 perk at a time, is not the same as starting out with the initial character build that I want.

For the record, I NEVER even came close to maxing out ANY of my skills in ANY of Beth's RPGs. I used mods that prevented this, because the default rate at which you leveled up was always WAY too fast for me. I never wanted my character to be all powerful (or even semi-powerful). NONE of my characters EVER came out exactly the same.

Oh noes, your characters are the same for the first 5 or so levels. Woe is me. :violin:

Having twice the amount of levels offsets this, you get to build your Character faster in the same real life time span.

No, but there are numbers on those weights for a reason.


Depends on what muscle group you want to know about. You can take your primary ones and average it out if you so choose. If you can bench press 50 pounds and push 60 up with your legs then your strength would be 55. :tongue:

Why are people so afraid of numbers? I don't get it. I don't mind them, and I HATE math.

Well yea... but:

This pretty much goes to my point that these things are better represented by skills instead of attributes. I don't have some universal number that is my "strength." What I have are a whole set of numbers that each correspond to the different things I can do. I can bench "145." I can squat "235." I can row "X" and I can jog "Y."

So.. skills with numbers is fine by me. "Strength" is not. "Endurance" is not.

sorry i much rather have different unique higher lvl characters that all started the same than different unique lower lvl characters that all grow into the same thing....

Mine either. Morrowind or Oblivion. No leveling or skill related mods.

I share your loss for character creation at the start. Hopefully something will replace it, or come close.

Did you guys even read what I wrote?

I admit to having a language disability.
What's your excuse?

Try reading my previous post again . . . slowly this time.

Arwen I love you very much as an adversary, but I have to agree with these two posts. For one thing, I really do feel your pain about creating unique characters from the very start. I love doing that and I often roleplay in Oblivion from the very gates. I do still hold out "blind faith," as you label it, that Bethesda will find some way for this to happen. I also hold that my blind faith is no worse than some of the blind assumptions that I've seen made by posters here and elsewhere.

Secondly though, I really do favor a system, if I had to choose, where characters grow apart out of a homogenous beginning than the other way round. Seriously, given those as the only options, and mods aside, wouldn't you?

But how do you represent an overly agile character?
How can I play a mage character of little intelligence, incredible agility, and very low strength?
I could choose not to raise "health" or "magick" but that doesn't explain how to raise the agility of my character. This character is a mage, so he won't be using stealth skills so that doesn't solve the problem.
In fact, how do you properly make a stealth character of low strength, intelligence, and stamina? Or can you just ignore raising your level like before. But should that be necessary?

Merely pointing out that there are large number of people here repeating Beth talking points and adding nothing to the discussion at hand.



Which is why I repeated at least twice in the previous post that I am talking based on what we know, not what is or what will be.



Is a single value for strength good enough? Maybe, maybe not. There are simple ways to add to it. The one thing strength did was link those effects together. This is a crucial layer and it seems to be gone. Ignore it if you want. I care not.




Your strength can be quantified as a number. You can quantify it many ways. You are free to remain in the dark over this.




There is nothing organic about creating a disorganized mess of unlinked values when in real life they are linked. Attributes created a simple way of linking them together. You can continue to ignore this and repeat the talking points. No matter.

Thanks, but I don't think of you as an adversary. You're just a TES enthusiast who happens to have some different opinions about some aspects of Skyrim. I don't take debates personally (unless someone attacks me personally, when they are only suppose to attack my position . . . then I just ignore them).


No. Sorry, but that is the honest truth.

I've lived my entire life with disabilities, which I've never viewed as a handicap . . . but they have make me pretty unique. Like everyone else, I have my own strengths and weaknesses . . . mine are just a bit more pronounced. So, this is a major loss for me, as I will not be able to begin a Skyrim game with a character who truly represents me, because she will be just like everyone else's starting character. So what's the point? I might just as well just play Tomb Raider, or Mass Effect.

i quoted a specific part of your post talkin about how you like to create unique characters at the beginning of games. i stated i prefer to make diverse characters that started the same rather than starting unique and growing into the same. yes all TES games have had the feature of starting with unique characters but oblivion started the trend of making all characters grow into the same buillds and FO3 did the same, so apparently Bethesda couldnt figure out how to fix that issue so instead of fixing it, they are reversing that issue into something better (imo).

sure i would prefer above anything that we start with diverse characters and they stay diverse even at high lvls but apparently with the info weve been given that seems to not be the case in skyrim.

If you don't mind, I'll comment on these two only. First of all, you're absolutely right. Strength can be quantified. It can be quantified in many ways. However, I maintain that the different ways to quantify strength are better represented as skills and not as an attribute. Seeing as I can do many different things at many different levels of strength, I think it makes more sense to give me various ratings of skill with a particular action than to represent it any other way.

I distinctly sense that we both want the same thing, we just want it represented in two different ways. I prefer skills and abilities because I see that as more realistic, given the many ways we can vary from activity to activity.





I beg to differ, but only on your claim that the various skills are a disorganized mess and that they are, in life, linked.
For one thing, I don't immediately presume that Bethesda will create a tree of perks and skills that are entirely unrelated to one another. I don't, in fact, even see how they could do that.
If they do I will eat these words and probably won't ever buy another tes game again. I only can hope, then, that you are wrong on this point.

Secondly, and more importantly, I find that skills are actually less related in life than you might think. I have a very high LSAT score, I scored in the 97th percentile. Some would say I'm very intelligent.
However, on math tests I'll do well if I even pass. Not so good. Many others are the exact opposite. Stating that someone has a universal "intelligence" number is just pancakes. It doesn't work like that.

Every single thing that we might call an attribute is actually more realistically represented as a whole range of various skills. I still hold that real people don't have attributes, just skills and abilities. To me, the removal of the over-arching attributes actually makes quite a bit more sense.

What about someone who is very strong? Naturally strong? That doesn't mean he is skilled in anything, its an attribute of his body
Intelligence can be seen as a skill for things, such as reading well, but intelligence is an attribute of a person that is often quantified through his skills, but is not defined by ones skills.

I would disagree with that, you do have some universal number that is your "strength". If it doesn't have a numerical value, then it can't be modeled mathematically. If it can't be modeled mathematically, then it can't be compared to anything.

So lets compare it to a gorilla, shall we? You are essentially saying, that if you were cloned, and your clone was to have exactly the same way of life and eventually the same skill set as a gorilla, that your clone would be as strong as a gorilla.

Mind you, I don't feel the need to micromanage such an attribute. I agree with their removal of it, it was always quite silly in that it just represented other values. I only would not agree with the removal if they keep the other values that the attributes affected exactly the same for each character and static throughout the entire game, and they have neither confirmed nor denied that they are doing this.

But part of my previous post (the one you quoted) also included the part where I wrote that "I NEVER even came close to maxing out ANY of my skills in ANY of Beth's RPGs." So, none of my characters ended up with the same build at the end.

Fixing the OB system would not have been all that difficult. All you would have to do is:

1.) Make the Attributes more like Fallout 3's 7 Attributes (the SPECIALs) and keep them as inherent strengths and weakness (that rarely see any permanent increase during your game).

2.) Reduce the number of points that you are initially give to distributed in your Attributes result in an average character (if you spread out the points exactly equally) . . . a point increase above average for one stat, means a point decrease for another stat.

3.) Use a leveling up speed that is ~ 1/4 the rate of Fallout 3's leveling rate, and award fewer skill points for when you do level up.

4.) Use a slower Timescale (like 1:8, instead of 1:30), and have time pass while in the menus (such as when you are trading).

So it's blind pessimism too then, right? Please don't insult me, or anyone else again.

Whats wrong with pessimism about losing something?

All evidence points to having unoriginal characters at start, where as before we could have unique characters at all time. Evidence points to losing something, which isn't too blind.