Thats your opinion of someone that doesn t build specific character and probably doesn t understand the meaning of RPG.
RPG aint looking in a glass monitor in FPS.

RPG is about creting a character mindset and characteristic and sticking with it until some reason in the character life make it change ways.
Actually without attributes, how are you going to do an overall weak character ? And overall slow character ? How are you going to do a dumb character with spell deficiency and low magica, so you have to work him to surpass his deficiency ?

There s an enormous diference between badly implemented system and some tool being unusefull.
Horriblivion has the worst ever seen system, Morrowind was Ok but could be bettered,

@mungri magic box : If you think that Morrowind was a micromanagement nightmare good luck at life.

Technique is nothing more than your implementation of Strength, Intellect, and Dexterity

Also, speed and precision aren't as important as you think they are. We are talking about fighting combat between objects that stand at least five feet tall, and weigh in excess of 150 lbs. They tend to use weapons that add an additional 3-6' of damaging surface. Speed and precision start to get devalued when trying to hitting large targets with large objects.

This. I should have distilled my response to this. Also, Perks are cool.

I like what they're doing here. I genuinely don't mind the old leveling systems, though. I do absolutely abhore the level scaling system.

The variance in attribute gains per level is absolutely okay and fine so long as nobody ever tries to pretend level means something. Oblivion and Morrowind failed on that condition. Oblivion moreso.

- Overall weak : do not take any generic damage bonus perks for your weapon skill. You can take bonus damage perks that are specific to a weapon type though
- Overall slow : character based speed bonuses seem to be underfavored and it's not really linked to attribute removal but more to gameplay balancing. You can somewhat emulate it by not taking stamina at level ups
- Dumb : you could NOT make a dumb character in previous games. You could make a low magicka character though. How to do it in skyrim? Don't take magicka at level ups. It was all that taking a low Int in previous games did anyway.


Sooo, what is your problem exactly?

Actually I found personality incredibly useful and many quests much harder with a low personality and speechcraft. I think its delusional to think some customization hasn't been lost but it looks to me liked we've gained more. There are builds like my superswift runner build that may not work anymore but I'm certain there are new builds you couldn't do before

Why?

To try something different instead of the giant meta-gaming "I need to get three +5 attribute modifieres each level" fest that Oblivion was.

Yeah, they could have tried a bunch of different ways to do it differently.

They chose this one.

Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing how it works.
(which apparently makes me dumb, and not an "RPGer", and a bunch of other things. Even though I've played PnP and digital RPGs, in many forms, for over three decades.)



Apparently, to be a "true RPGer" is to embrace complicated number systems. The more complicated and the more numbers, the better.

Attributes are, in Skyrim, totally redundant.

Strength: Stamina, perks.
Endurance: Health, Stamina, perks.
Agility: Archery, Stamina, perks.
Intelligence: Magicka.
Luck: pointless (luck is an ability? I mean, come on xD).
Personality: perks.
Speed: Sprinting is an active ability, which has far more gameplay value.
Willpower: perks.

No idea how idiots are taking the removal of attributes and attributing their removal to consolers.

So lets propose something that has no evidence for it and just rage about it hmm?

Real smart. Same with the morons who are saying that the game will be watered down and linear.

What fools.

how could it be due to consoles when oblivion had attributes and was on xbox 360 & PS3. i dont know why they didnt add them, but i'm quite glad they didnt.

That's my thought also. After all speechcraft is still there.

I find this entire argument a little silly. The original purpose of attributes in RPGs was to allow for accurate modelling of complex behavior. I don't see the negative impact of allowing certain aspects of the model to be implicit in the final number. Yes, this new model is different from the archaic throwback from decades ago to which you've become accustomed. We still have control over the final number, and that number fully encompasses the available actions of our character. You've lost nothing except the use of your old spreadsheets. What's the problem?

Actually, they did. Attributes were in to begin with, and later removed because Todd thought they were just not needed.

I'm willing to give Skyrim a try before passing judgement on this issue. After all, Mass Effect 2 was 'dumbed down' in the opinion of many hardcoe RPG fans because it removed features that every RPG absolutely has to have in their view, but I personally thought it was far superior to the original and utterly wiped the floor with it.

Maybe the same will be true of Skyrim, only time will tell I guess.

It was a really bad design decision.

Its the classic response. They said the same about Diablo 3 LOL, makes no sense.
No, it is rather lazy devs that remove complexity because it is too hard to balance (even though games 10 years ago managed to).
Now, i'm not calling Bethesda lazy, but in that particular regard, yes.

Why is it that so many people instantly blame console gamers for what they consider "dumbing down"?
Do some people genuinely believe they are more intelligent because they play games on a PC? Because that's one of the most absurd notions I've ever heard.

The complete lack of understanding of what is possible with a functional character development system is a large part of what gives us comments like the one above. While it would have been nice if Bethesda actually took a step forward in this area and develop an attributes system that actually moves beyond what is possible with paper gaming, it would have also been nice if they just fixed the bugs in what they had.

Instead, they lay waste to character development and over rely on the perks system to poorly mimic what an attributes system can do better. Perks are great for unlocking skills, abilities, etc. They are stupid for plus ups or general stat items (like strength).

While the commenter above is partially correct that the "numbers" are likely shoehorned or duct taped in there somewhere....why settle for half-@$$ed when they could have just had attributes in the first place?***

Oh well....hopefully mods will fix what they broke.


***and for those that have The Fear of spreadsheets. A well-developed attributes system could be mostly hands-off. No need to be ascared.

Morrowinds system was great, whatever you leveled was a point to increasing your skill on level up, and there was no limit to training per skill/level and only one one skill level for each point in an attribute if I remember correctly. As long as u had money you were good. Then in Oblivion it was horrible, you needed to level a skill twice for one attribute and could only train a certain amount per level. I loved the morrowind system and thought the obliviOn one was very bad. I was mad about the removal of so many attributes In the beginning but got over it the more I thought about how crappy a time I had playing Oblivion because I am a perfectionist and was maximizing my levels and just had no real time to enjoy the game. But they could have just done it like fallout and had it go 1-10 instead of 1-100. IMO they took the ez way out and I'm still disssapointed they didn't just go for a better way of doing attributes since attributes has been such a big part rpg games for so long. I think Reckoning is doing the same thing, prolly going to be the new way to do things in the future. If it happened to the next fallout then we know it's all over.

Because they hate me.

Fro My Perspective, they are the same thing.
Anything that overly complicates or gets in the way of roleplaying my character is a bad thing IMO.

Actually, take out your Morrowind rose tinted glasses. Morrowind and Oblivion attribute systems were identical except for two points :
- Oblivion capped paid training to 5 per level up
- In Morrowind, you could improve an already obtained level up by training more skills after which wasn't possible in Oblivion

Morrowind still required you to increase 10 Str based skills to get a +5 in Str at level up, same as in Oblivion. Same as in Oblivion you'd level up after 10 major skill increases and same as in Oblivion you'd be given the choice of 3 attributes to improve. They were identical. Only the attribute effects and the skill/attribute relations were different.

I think I understand the logic even if I don't agree. The idea that you spend 10x as much on your platform that also allows almost infinite customization indicates to some a greater commitment to the game. The feeling is the console means you have less commitment and deep interest in the game. As I said I don't agree this is true and there ae lots of other even extenuating factors involved

Persoanlly I think everytime someone calls someone a"PC elistist" it just fuels this thought pattern.

The fact that I could use the massive amount of money I was not using for anything anyway to "guarantee" I would go 5 pts in each attribute instead of going to the same areas over and over and getting beaten by mud crabs because I can only train so much, made all the difference.

Firmly attached to my cranium, thank you very much. But MW, OB, and SK are all different games.

Yeah, Morrowind system was as broken as Oblivion, except there was a broken exploit you could use to get over the tediousness of the thing. When you start pilling up bad features on top of bad features to make it palatable, it's time to scratch the thing. And the tediousness wasn't the only bad thing about the system either.