You seem to favor 'crunchy' character creation, where every number can be manipulated and finely tuned. As an engineer, I find this type of control extremely satisfying as well. But I think there's quite a bit to be said for making advancement intuitive. I don't think they duct taped on the numbers in other places; I think they were always there implicitly. Now, instead of worrying about which attributes feed a skill, and in what efficiency, I can just raise the skill. As long as they balanced advancement with this in mind, it seems that the simplification is an improvement.

You can call it selling out if you want, or laying waste to character development, but neither of us truly knows if it's going to be a negative, positive, or neutral impact on the game. Given that we're willing to discuss this on a forum before the game even launches makes me question the validity of either of our opinions; we're obviously not neutral parties, nor the largest piece of the pie in terms of market-share. I wonder if any of the new players to the franchise will notice or miss the missing attributes?

Simplifications seem to be some sort of "new trend" these days. Perhaps this is something only the developers know(?)
Many RPG's are simplified now. Old complex stats seem to be an abandoned old tradition.

Still imo, it's too early for such verdict. If it turned out to be bad after all, then Bethesda will know how hard I can nitpick.

Lolwut? for consoles? You sir, are quite silly. They did it because it works much better. If you want more info there's only 1001 different places to find it.

The purpose of attributes is to provide an area of character definition that shows general competence as opposed to specific competence given by skills. You can reduce the number of stats but there comes a point where they start losing meaning because they cover such a wide range of things that they no longer make sense in the are a of helping define your character. Skyrim basically removed the idea of general competence, I think that was a bad choice, but it doesn't break the game or stop it from being a functional RPG. It does limit the areas you can define and customize your character even if perks opened up new areas.

So, somebody who spends time every level making sure they get exactly the right number of skillups in a specific skill - so that they can get the maximum benefit of levelling up every level - and who probably keeps an out of game journal or spreadsheet going in order to make sure that they've min/maxed properly, is mystically a more faithful roleplayer than someone who actually spends all of that time in the game?

*siiigh* This argument again. I've been playing RPG's since Baldurs Gate, and I'm happy that someone is at least trying something new, attributes in RPG's are as old as old can get, at least try and change it up a bit. Geesh

So you think that console users are too dumb to use attributes or that the consoles can't 'handle' it? Your an F-ing idiot and a PC eletist.

Because they can

Ok, How is this thread even still going? lol
We all have our opinions but I still have yet to see a valid arguement for wanting to keep old meaningless stats?

-It helped define a character:
So you are "defined" by having a magical personality stat that somehow makes people instantly like you? And you are defined because your character has a higher agility stat then speed? I don't really see that as defining at all. I see it as meaningless. You are defined by what you say and what you do and how you fight. Where your skills themselves are.
How differently did your character actually play? not different at all. You can still be the weak mage, just invest all into magic and avoid health and stamina. Viola! you have achieved the same effect! wonderful.

You can still be the burly warrior, invest a lot in your health bar and shirk the other two.

I never enjoyed the stat balancing of the other games. All I cared about was deciding weather to be better at magic, have more health, or have more stamina. Those were the only things that really translated into an actual gameplay difference.

It was the same choice in the others anyways just bogged down by meaningless other stats. Again, if i wanted to upgrade magic id upgrade int and will. If i wanted to ugprade health id increase endurance.

And if i wanted to upgrade stamina...well, im still not even sure entirely how that worked out since stamina in oblivion was affected by like three stats it was a chore trying to decifer how to actually level to have a meaningful impact on stamina. The two ones I always stuck with were speed and agility for that type of character.

Strength and agility were completely unnecessary additions since damage is already effected by skill anyways.

So taking out the meaningless and redundent skills you are left with int, will, speed, and endurance. Since damage is fully affected by skill at said action and personality and luck were universally useless.

Hmm this looks like a familiar list doesn't it?

It seems to directly corrolate to magic, stamina, or health. Funny how that works out.

This completely takes out the metagaming slog that was the previous games. You no longer have to make charts just to track if you are leveling appropriately. We can now just play and look forward to leveling knowing that we aren't going to skew our characters just because we had a +4 and not +5.

Your argument has no bearing on whether or not attributes should exist. The type of player you describe will just use the evil spreadsheets and journals to map out their perk progression...

Because they svcked. Bye bye attributes and shall you never return

I listened to Todd Howard's explanation, and it was not done for dumbing down. He said that it felt superfluous to the game. I was annoyed with them being gone, from a RP perspective, it was nice to think in terms of having attributes like you do in D and D, but I am with-holding judgement til I play.

Speak for yourself. As an engineer you should be able to see how bad the SR character design is. I am sure you have taken the time to map out systems before.

Let's map out character development.

ADn
Sn-An-SKn


Draw a line between the A and the AD above. Draw a dotted circle Around the whole thing and write Pn.

S - Stat bars
Ad - derived attributes
A - Attributes
SK - Skills
P - Perks
n - any number of letter above

This would be the base character development system had they not ruined attributes. That very simple and robust system is infinitely expandable. Add n number of skills? No problem just add linkages to appropriate attributes.

Let's now map out SR character development:

S1
S2
S3
SK1-P
SK2-P
....
SKn-P

S - Stat bars
SK - Skills
P - Perks

No lines except certain perks to certain skills. Nothing else is linked.

The design is beyond bad. They scrapped simple organization and replaced it with garbage. Used perks to try and simulate the simple general character values like strength and ended up with tons of redundant perks because nothing was linked together....then were forced to toilet bowl skills into the ridiculous one-hand and two-hand monstrosities, remove mysticism, etc....

This whole argument has been pointed out hundreds of times now. Beth screwed up this portion of the game big time. Oh well. Only those that are interested in this or have the ability to see how much much potential has been cut away because of poor system design will care.


Doubtful. Given Beth's poor treatment of attributes in OB there are many that have been turned off of the whole thing anyway...

That is until "we" start charting out "our" perk progression.




Oops...

Never mind.

I played rpg's for many many years and all of them had different system, (sure d&d is very stright) but I wont call this a bad decision before I actually tried the game etc.

So I will gladly return after the weekend and give you my opinion.

^ This.

Sad, but true.

Bad design and bad decisions are different things. The bad design is obvious. It is easy to determine the glaring weaknesses in the design and trace the fallout from saddling the game with crappy character development. There are many things that may have been in play for them to settle with a subpar system. Who knows? Maybe they tried to do something awesome, screwed up, and ran out of time to fix it?

All that said, perspective is important. This is an issue for me as it ruins expectations I had in Bethesda moving forward in this area instead of regressing. Rather than being a leader in the gaming industry for this style of character development they chose to not even match what they've done in the past.

But, this is one weakness in what will likely be an incredible game. So....

That makes no sense what-so-ever.

1. COD has nothing to do with TES. In fact both have totally different primary markets (multiplayer shooting, fantasy rpg).

2. Simplifying is part of it, but the real reason is to do the exact same thing but make it less cumbersome.

The removal of attributes isn't as bad as you think. Instead of effects like +10 Speed, it will change to a more direct effect of +5% movement speed, or a disease might affect you for -5% health or -5% damage, instead of -5 Strength and Endurance. I'm a little bummed, but it's really not that big of a deal. And it allows us more control over our characters and how they play, because there is no limit on how much of each you can get other than how many levels you can gain.

Every one just settle down. We PC folk are just a little touchy because of a little thing called Deus EX: Invisible War. It was the sequel to Deus Ex, one of the crown jewels of PC gaming. DX: IW ended up as a streamlined/dumbed down game that was designed for a console and ported to PC, and my fellow PC snobs have not forgiven or forgotten.

So please, be mindful that when we rage at consoles, this is likely the reason why. It was a long time ago, but some wounds never heal. Next time somebody bashes you for playing on console, just apologize for Invisible War.

In some ways it may be better, since you don't have to worry about major and minor skills anymore and thus you don't have reason to freak out if you make a mistake while making your character.

And you don't have to hit exact levels of certain minor skills to get the most bonuses... which is nigh on impossible to do regularly just playing through the game.

Having major and minor skills doesn't really have anything to do with having or not having a functional attributes system.

As for making a mistake during character creation...there have been dozens of threads started on the site of people wringing their hands over wanting a way to reset the perks they have chosen. Not sure if there will ever be happy medium for that...

I don't see how this demonstrates that one is better than the other. How is having attributes linked to skills better than just having a particular skill linked to perks? I see no reason why an attribute should be able to effect every skill that might seem related to it. Having high strength or dexterity shouldn't automatically make you better at using swords. Having high skill (aka perks) in swords should be the only core defining characteristic. Why is a strength attribute necessary? How does it make it better?