Many of the perks should just be part of raising your skill. For instance, Power Shot under the Archery tree, that should just happen as a result of being more experienced in Archery. Why all the sudden am I able to knock my enemies back? That kind of action would be based on how powerful your bow is or your draw. Or how about Hunter's Discipline? What, my arrows break less because I unlocked the perk?

Eagle eye or Steady Hand are great examples of a perk. Perks should treated as something like a realization your character comes to. You're more skilled in Archery, now your character thinks to him/herself, "how about I look down the shaft of the arrow to get a better aim?" or "maybe if I hold the bow more steady, I can aim faster".

Except that's part of Archery 101...

Try Daggerfall, as Seti18 related to. The faction system there could be tweaked at character creation time, and had =consequences=. If you wanted to, you could set your rep with the underworld to 0 and throw it at the nobles.....meaning you had thieves and assassins after you, while kings would talk to you easily. Or you could just play it; take hit after hit, or steal constantly, and it got harder and harder to talk to the nice folks, as you had the rep of a scumbag. Push that rep low enough, and you couldn't get quests from a certain faction....which required more than one quest giver if it were more than a side quest. That system existed in 1996, and could have been enhanced, debugged, and expanded. Instead it was gutted, and there was no more real consequence in your actions vs. dealing with the population. The X era games may have been getting prettier and prettier, but they have also suffered from FPS-itis. Eye candy over substance....

Easier said than done. When I practice archery IRL, I don't look down the shaft of my arrow all the time. It requires quite a bit of strength and discipline to hold a bow fully drawn and a lot of practice to make a good shot in that position.

A friend of mine took up archery for hunting when he lived in Texas. He told me it was drilled into him from the very start to always look down the arrow when aiming to get the best shot.

But he learned through a structured class. I've been practicing archery on my own time for a few years, so for me, I taught myself how to aim better through experience. That's what I imagine your character to be doing as he/she does it more often.

Maybe there could be a system where you can access perks quicker when you train through NPCs then?

I don't believe in it myself, but you can't give up hope, am I right?

Hm, if I get the last part of the discussion, it seems that we all can agree the perk system has it's good points, but that many of the perks should have been done simply by increasing the skill, like all the +% perks?

Would have made it possible to get a godlike character in every direction while still being specialized.

Which is why you don't fully draw the bow while aiming. You draw it just enough to keep the arrow from fidgeting, aim using the shaft and point as your crosshair, and once you have the shot lined up, bring the bow to full draw and fire while keeping your hand as steady as possible (holding your breath helps steady your hand, and quickly exhaling can give your arm a boost). You don't want to spend any more than half a second in full draw, because as you said, it requires a lot of strength.

But attributes did a lot more than just influence Magicka/HPStamina. Strength and Agility influenced melee damage and bow damage. Strength influenced carry weight (independantly of stamina). Agility influenced pickpocking. Agility also made you more resistant to stagger in melee combat. Willpower influenced magicka regeneration rate, which you cannot change by increasing magicka on level up in Skyrim (and the restoration perks available for this in no way compare to what you could achieve with high willpower in Oblivion). Speed and atheletics had a much bigger influence on movement speed than racial choice (although racial choice also affected movement speed in Oblivion).

Taking out the attributes vastly simplified the character development process. Not to mention going from 28 skills in Morrowind to 21 in Oblivion and now 18 in Skyrim. At this rate they will eliminate skills entirely, just like they did with attributes by Elder Scrolls VII.

Actually he was taught by his dad.

I would have loved actual training exercises, not just "here's money, yay a level!" because such things could have taught you specific perks through use of them.

I'm sorry but in my mind skyrim is actually in a new genre it isn't rpg, it is fantasy. it's far too restrictive on what you can actually do in terms of "roleplaying" to be an rpg

Sorry for making that assumption.

You're right. Maybe NPC training would allow you access to different moves/perks, not just, or only just, increasing the number of your skill. Perhaps having something like magic vendors who only sell certain spells, you could have NPCs who have certain perks to learn? It would give the player a benefit for using NPC training, but they're not restricted to using it.

There are two ways to aim in real life archery. There is instinctive (the method preferred by many who use recurve and long bows) where you look at the target and instinctively know where to hold the bow to hit the target. And there is some form of "gap" shooting where you look down the arrow and mentally measure the distance between the tip of the arrow and the target and account for how far you are away from the target (the gap). Modern compound bow users tend to favor this method and even go so far as to install sights on their bows, with different colored crosshairs for different distances to eliminate the need to calculate the "gap".

In Skyrim, I prefer to turn off the crosshairs and use an instinctive form of shooting both for bows and ranged magic. It is a lot harder to hit things but way more immersive not to have a crosshair in the middle of your screen.

Given enough time Bethesda will "streamline" the Elder Scrolls Series until it's as deep as the Fable series made by that no-talent hack Peter Molyneux. As long as they don't shaft the Mod community, the games will always be good since no game developer has the courage to make as good of a game as indie developers. Don't get me wrong, the ENGINE for the game is brilliant if not over simplified and deteriorated to something unrealistically action-game oriented as opposed to RPG oriented. The voice actors do a much better job of conveying the shallow excuse for a story. LOD for terrain looks great and I can't wait to see it in custom worlds that are less redundant and don't revolve around a weak sauce center-of-the-world character story.

I guess the next thing they'll probably want to do next is trim back spells. If removing spellcrafting seemed like a good idea then maybe they just need to follow that skewed logic the rest of the way and cut spells to 2 or 3 spells per school. Hell, get rid of one or more types while your at it. Then let's change the names of the magic for the demographic these changes are for. Change "Destruction" to "Hurty Magic", Restoration to "Helpy Magic", and Illusion to "Sneaky magic", then get rid of the rest and make any spells they want to keep fall into one of those three categories.

I can see the sales people at Bethesda seriously believing that this will pull those young teens away from Warcraft and make them come over to another game that feels like it's statistical systems where modeled by Fisher Price for a "My First Adventure Game" feel while shafting real hardcoe RPers.

Lemme explain, I have Role-played Pencil and dice style for over 16 years now. I have played dozens of different game types and have mastered the concept of creating a statistical basis for a RPG. In fact creating the underlying statistical systems for RPG's has been a hobby of mine for nearly a decade. (If you want a fresh one PM and tell me what you're looking for, I probably have something you'll like for dice or comp) As someone who has mastered the mathematical notions of such, I am grievously disappointing in the direction Skyrim took away from Oblivion and Morrowind. Simplicity is a horrible trait in a computer RPG. Once you have a computer processing the character sheet, it is no longer needed to keep the math easy so your players can understand it. A simplified "Top layer" is a good idea; easily understood base statistics so even the most noob player to the genre can at least make an intelligent guess as to which way to go. Skyrim does not do this, it makes one simple, shallow, blanket layer with (hopefully) a little bit of hidden depth and math to preserve that arcane and distant sensation you're supposed to feel from a statistical System.

Basically, assume the Elder Scrolls series like many others will change however needed to attract more trend following kiddies away from Warcraft even if the cost is alienating intelligent advlt fans.

Well past closing time folks.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1332156-constant-removal-of-features-pt-2/