They'll cut stuff people wanted then add crap nobody asked for like auto health regen and Dwemer GPS.

I still don′t see how the part where you have to step away from the story and go out and jump for 30 minutes makes a game MORE hardcoe RPG???

In Skyrim I can stick with the story or whatever my character is currenly working towards without the need to spend time on repetitive grinding in order to develop my character. I just do what I believe my character should be doing and the development and skills follow naturally with the path I choose.

The so acclaimed previous titles that the so called "hardcoe" rpg fans want to retain as much as possible of were so much more powergaming than Skyrim.

sad but true

Dude, have you even looked at EVs? There is a ton of a content in Pokemon that requires actual thought, it's just under the surface so that it can appeal to the kiddies as well as the hardcoe crowd. Skyrim does not have this, unless you want to imagine it.

Yes, text-only dialogue (or part text) would make it much, much easier for a large open-world game like Skyrim to actually create a lot of dialogue and quest options. But they would be flayed alive by the critics if they went down that path. The expectation these days is that everything is voice-acted.

I had a look and Skyrim's voice-file is about the same size as Fallout:NV's one. They probably crammed it with as much as they could working with a file-size limitation.

RPGing is about playing without a purpose. It's not about following the main quests or even side quests, it focuses more on immersing the player in a living breathing world and lets the player be the narrative. If you want to be an investor or bard to get more gold and gain influence among townspeople, you should be allowed to do that. If you want to go bash people's brains in with a hammer, you can do that too.

A good RPG lets the player make the game as complex as he/she wants to. There's nothing wrong with hack n' slash, but there shouldn't be anything wrong with playing a monk or agent class who goes around and solves problems through speechcraft either.

so many people complain about the same line again and again by the guards yet they also complain that the quests aren't deep enough because they focus to much on random guards, one or the other damn it!

You can still repetitively grind if you choose to. Your example is ridiculous and intellectually dishonest. By the same frame of thought you must feel it necessary to cast Soul Trap on a corpse over and over until it hits 100 to level Conjuration?

Athletics and Acrobatics were best levelled by playing, more fun, levelled slower, and made sense. Your character rauns back and forth across the province, hunting fighting, evading, running and jumping. He gets better at running and jumping. Put yourself on a 6 month program where you run and jump over gaps, puddles, low obstacles for hours on end every single day and you WILL get better at running and jumping. You can also just set up a box in your driveway and jump up onto it and off of it over and over for hours on end fo months and you WILL get better at jumping.

Pretty much. Practice is practice. If someone wanted to stand in the corner and jump for hours on end, that's their prerogative. Funny how people care how others play their game. And then there's Oblivion, that basically told you to 'grind' practice, with the whole "Some mages make destruction spells to cast on themselves..." line.

Which is truly truly sad yet true. I jumped right into games as complicated as Morrowind when I was a child, they can as well.

I tried breaking up your post and I still have no idea what the heck you're saying.

A multiplatform game will always have bugs, in office testing cannot account for thousands of people playing their game in a multitude of different ways.

As for the removal of features I don't mind. Games evolve over time what once was seen as a good idea is likely to be cut out to remove some of the fat. My only problem with this becomes when I have less choices. For me the opening scene has become a metaphor for the game (this being that my hands are tied). The world is open, and has a possibility for unlimited options. However the smaller scale interaction has little to none. In a fight if a human wants to yield (most of the time begging for mercy, which works easily on me) I cannot sheath my weapon and walk away because they will attack me. There is no other option other than killing them. In fights I cannot avoid detection with non lethal abilities as there is none (that I know of) in the game. In quests I do not have an option of taking a different route. This is especially annoying in the guild quests where I am forced to (spoilers) become a werewolf, or in the Thieves guild when I have maybe 1-2 guests where I can take a somewhat different approach to completing the objective. I cannot sway the opinions of other (or at least not regularly) and in essence I have very little paths to follow. The character you build becomes either a thief, warrior, or mage there that kills... there is no other option.

As a moderate pacifist this bugs me as I'd like to not be a killing machine because as it would seem over the course of the game I have killed more people than all the dragons in the game.

I started oblivion when I was 8 and loved it, then again I am a scholar. (sorry think I accidentally turned on italics(awkward))

They're not going to go back to text-based dialogue. If they did, America would say 'Ew, reading,' because reading hurts the brains of the majority of the gaming market(younger people).

See, but many don't want a complicated game and that's just fine. What Bethesda should do is make a game that can be played casually if wanted, but still have the depth of something like Morrowind.

People under 18 are not the majority of the market.

This. My nephew was nine when he started playing oblivion on his xbox and did just fine. People that are advocating that skyrim NEEDED to be simplified from oblivion are publicly admitting that they are dumber than my nephew was.

wait, how old are you?!

separating words don't make them easier to understand, I'm saying that if you look on the forums there are many posts on the arrow in the knee for example, whilst others say that they want deep quest lines, the majority of the latter say they spend too much time on the npcs whilst the first complain of the opposite (keeping up?) I'm saying that they should choose one or the other, and that they don't realise Bethesda went even in terms of amount of lines, I prefer quests to npcs but that is me (did this help?)

My example is not ridiculous, because if I didn′t want my character to miss out on the attributes that made the character into a unique, developed character, I had to constantly monitor the skill progression and avert my attention from the in-game motives of my character in order to raise certain skills before I level up - that IS powergaming. Roleplaying means I am actually trying to act as the character would in-game and develop the characters traits and skills to match my vision of the character, Skyrim does this MUCH better since I can pick the perks that define my character without grinding out certain skills every time I progress in level.

I got it when it cam out do the maths, I'm smart is the simple answer

I rarely (if ever) had to "grind" in Oblivion or Morrowind, so I don't see your point.


so you're 13 or 14? anyway, i myself am only 15 i just didn't expect such inteliigence from other young(er) members around here, most of which seem to be keen on blindly defending skyrim

And yet this thread isn't about either of those. Its about cut features.

For what? Elder Scrolls? When I said younger I didn't mean just kids. Young advlts are more stupid these days too.

Of course, to counter the argument of why there should be text-based dialogue in the game again, one can say that it kills the immersion, especially for a game with this kind of technology.

Hey. younger people to me means "under 30". Sad to say, reading to most of them means "UGH! Who would do THAT?", Harry Potter, or Twilight. Of course, it's a bigger problem among the young men, and I'm dealing with the lowest common denominator, as a rule.