fail-

and, this unknown complexity that us effortless simpletons can't comprehend from skyrim is......

Well yes.

The combat in Skyrim is better. With weapons anyways.

Ok, let me try to put it another way, then.

In a badly designed, complicated system, you have a lot of parts. It's difficult to understand or grasp readily and it takes a lot planning and thought.

In a well designed complex system, the guiding principle is that of emergence. The interaction of these simple parts results in the emergence of a complex and intricate system. That can produce a great deal of variety and options.

The past systems I would say are complicated. Between having to pick major and minor skills and the way attributes were handled. It took a lot of planning to figure out your character ahead of time. In fact, it was often beneficial to choose major skills you WEREN'T going to use. And then the way attributes were handled was not always consistent.

Skyrim's system, on the other hand, has a lot of simple parts that are easy to understand. It allows you to quickly grasp the system and go. However, there is very little real interaction between parts. Most are stand alone and don't really influence anything else. Because of that, it lacks complexity. It's a very simple system.

god bless you.

A very good post, its hard for some people to understand complexity being in a werll designed system can still be deep and give us options and variety.

Honestly you don't have to explain it, I understand what you're saying. I was just interested in this separation between complex and complicated.

What Skyrim (and arguably most games) lack is layers. The cards are laid on the table and it never progresses from there, there are maybe a few extra ideas thrown into the mix but it never becomes anything more than a few numbers increasing.

A lot of this has to do with the lack of community in the TES series. There are few build threads, and even less min/maxing. Granted this is due to a lack of metagame that persist within the series, which is reliant upon game mechanics having layers that suit different skill levels, but it still lacks such a thing. My favorite thing was reading build guides for WoW and seeing how different each build played despite it being the same class. With TES there were always ideas for builds.... but that was it, the builds never progressed, they were never any more interesting. The lack of abilities and skills is what ultimately killed any sense of depth to the series.


It follows that with a complex system you have depth and options. The problem isn't "Can we make a complex system", it's can we create a complex system that appeals to an audience? A lot of the time a complex system underlines a more simple system that allows for more advanced control if the user chooses. Systems like that generally don't happen on purpose and are often spawned from accident, or "metagame" in a sense.

The system is not what draws people in its the flash and fluff. The dragons alone could have drew in huge numbers to Skyrim. If a systems parts opens up with a few simple layers we have depth and more options within the game, like the post above emergence creates an interaction of simple parts. The interaction is simple but deep and everybody can grasp it. Then a complex system is the foundation for a simple system could work as well but let it unfold that is essntually what Mitheledh proposed but they said let it unfold, that would give us our advanced control and our depth.

Unfortunately you have it backwards. The complexity is never the foundation. The foundation is the simple parts. And that is the part that the casuals can attract and keep the "casuals." The complexity is produced by the simple parts and that is what keeps people who want a little more, since you have to delve into those complexities to really draw out the fullest potential of the system.

I would say, though, that it is certainly possible to purposefully set up such a system. Back when I was in school, I did more than one case study on firms that work with the idea of emergence in architecture. I even dabbled a little with it, myself, but my scripting skills were never good enough to do it well. So the system can be set up intentionally, but it can be hard to predict what will emerge.

There is only one example of emergence that comes to mind for Skyrim. That would be the interaction between the crafting skills. Unfortunately, what has emerged from their interaction is, arguably, not a good thing.

I see what you mean, sorry a little tired but I understand, let the simple parts unfold and draw us people who want more depth in with the simple parts interacting with one another and that creates the depth and hopefully a good scope of content and options. I see where I misinterpreted, the simple parts creates the emergence. The crafting does need to be retooled some by expanding on what is there: I think your alchemy potions should be duration based, I liked that better.

Jumping back a bit...

> I think things like mysticism and unlock spells and acrobatics were good and didn't need to be removed -- they gave
> players other ways to do the same thing and that actually adds to replayability in ways that simply adding quests doesn't.

What if these sorts of effects were implemented differently, in a way that doesn't render entire skill sets redundant?

For example, "Unlock" is now a passive perk in the Alteration tree. It does not bypass the lockpicking minigame, but it does give you a benefit while playing it (such as by reducing the difficulty of the lock based on your ranks in the perk). Likewise, "Chameleon" is now a passive perk in the Illusion tree that improves your chances of success while sneaking.

These effects work synergetically with your skill value and talents in the appropriate skills though: being fully perked in both is better than being perked in either one alone. The main skill would still need to be the strongest in terms of overall impact (because it's a valid point that an entire skill should not be negated by one spell or perk), but now you'd have a way to enhance your efforts by magic, and maybe this would be enough for your purposes.

Unlock is already in the lockpicking tree and chameleon is already in the sneak tree. They do not replace the spells, however they make sneaking/lockpicking more powerful by not allowing you to replicate those skills via spells.

The spells added a different build and we had the choice to manipulate the lock with alteration or use a lockpick. Chameleon should be about blending in with your surrounding maybe in the dark or something.

I've tried to get back into Skyrim but I only lasted an hour. Might try the same thing with Oblivion and see what happens. Skyrim may have a lot of content but that's just it, it's just content and not good content. Some aspecs are good but others will get old after a while like the Dragons. I doubt if I'll ever do Skyrim's main quest again unless I'm true roleplaying.

COD is the most successful game. I guess you like them shooters son ^^ best game evah!

> They do not replace the spells, however they make sneaking/lockpicking more powerful by not allowing you to replicate those skills via spells.

Yes, but the complaint seems to arise (at least in large part) due to the fact that they're in the middle of otherwise non-magical trees. Putting them into magical trees allows mage-themed characters to have an option that improves their ability in that area without negating the nonmagical skill in the process.

An alternative approach would be to institute multiple skill requirements on certain perks ("Chameleon requires 50 Stealth and 50 Illusion"), but that heads back toward the 'spreadsheet' design that the devs wanted to avoid.

That is asinine of them it was not spreadsheety. I do not know why they want six of each skill staying within one feature set.
Mages should have chameleon and open lock back as a spell in the magic system in the game. If they take out the spells that is removing them they are two of the cut spells from many others within this game. Sure a thief should be harder to detect when sneaking, and a mage should be able to fade away by bending light around his body or blending in with the background. Mages should also be able to manipulate a lack open with a spell, they can do these things because they are mages that use that certain magic school.

Streamlining is the act of cutting out redundancy/unnecessary things in order to reduce the time/effort/cost in getting something done. Calling Skyrim streamlined is a joke. An absurd statement meant to mock the developers who called the ridiculous things they did to the game "streamlining."

Here are some examples:

Reducing the number of clicks to get to the UI screen - Skyrim fails on this account as you are always at least three clicks away from any menu screen in the vanilla UI. Previous versions were generally one click or two clicks. The most often used menu screen, the item menu, was generally the last one you were on so you usually popped right back to it. One click.

Reducing the time it takes to look at/process data - Skyrim's UI/HUD fails on so many levels on this point it is mind boggling. It is possibly the worst UI I've ever seen in a large-scale game like SR.

- Skill menu - want to know the most inefficient/unstreamlined skills menu you can create? Look at the Skyrim menu. There it is. It takes forever to rotate your way through the entire skills list and then ten times longer to navigate through the horrendous perk lines. Sure it looks pretty, so did the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, it's still a fail.
- Item/Magic Menu - want to make the worst item and magic menu ever? Don't bother. You will never be able to design something as absolutely horrendously clunky as the Skyrim menu and still be able to call it a functional menu. Endless alphabetized scroll lists that take up a minute amount of screen space (90% of the list is unseen), have to click on each individual item to see any information about it while gigantic and pointless pictures take center stage and tell you nothing (except for the couple minutes during the hundreds of hours you play the game where closer inspection of an item is necessary).
- Getting rid of paper dolll - Streamline fail - this is an example where adding redundancy is beneficial! - now in order to look at your character you have to make selection, back out of the UI, hit the 3rd person view, look/rotate/etc, three clicks back to UI, scroll through long list, etc...
- HUD fail - previous games had the stat bars in one spot so your eyes could look at one out of the way spot and see everything. Now your eyes have to travel at least 4 times the amount of screen real-estate in order get the same amount of information. The disappearing bars make me cringe as it adds even more time to process the information. It takes even more time for your mind to process that you are A looking in the right spot, B not seeing anything, C ok that stat must be ok then.....
- Ok - enough - I'll get off my horse before I start rambling about how the systemic reduction of attributes was the reason why there are so little skills in the game....

This and earlier things you have explained brings up excellent points about complexity and design of game mechanics. To use examples from board games: Agricola has simple mechanics, but has a high degree of complexity in how the parts combine and are used by the players; Monopoly has simple mechanics and no complexity, because there are almost no elements that depends on the player's choice.

In my opinion TES does not require, or benefit, from complicated mechanics such as those in Daggerfall or Morrowind. They could be fun in a different type of game or setting with more strategy, social simulation and economy, but with TES basically coming down to aiming and shooting/slashing at enemies a lot of the parts are very out of place and the mechanics become cluttered and contrived.

Do we really need a mechanic for defining prices and haggling with the end result being that I may be 10% richer? In a game with a highly complex economic system and simulation, it would make sense that a 10% higher profit margin is very desirable, in TES, who cares? In this case a bit of streamlining and removal of the clutter makes for a better focus of the mechanics (which is why the perk trees in lockpicking, pickpocket and speechcraft also need a big makeover from the state they are in right now since they are only flavour and a bit of noise on the side of the real mechanics).

I agree that the complexity of the current design could have been greater, but it adresssed a lot of the basic design flaws from previous games and made a design that translates better from the character sheet to the gameplay.

It`s not that simple. `Streamlining` is political Dev game speak for dumbing down, m8.

There many things `streamlined` that took away from gameplay and immersion.

Streamlining is term used to describe an engineering principle. The fact that game developers use it as double-speak to rationalize taking the "intelligence" out of games because the bread and butter of their audience are simpletons.......is unfortunate. But, it doesn't change the definition nor change the fact that mocking the developers is fair game. Particularly since the points I was attempting to bring up would annoy anyone that actually took the time to think about them.

Let me guess, i'm "just being nostalgic" for thinking that?


Maybe not, but removing skills such as Climbing, Athletics, Acrobatics, and Hand-to-Hand does have a big impact on the game. Someone who never used them in previous games might not care - to them they're worthless - but then, I could say the same thing about magic. I never play as a magical character, so perhaps Destruction is obsolete. Just use bows instead for ranged attacks.


There have been improvements, you're right. Just look at Morrowind's character creation with it's incredibly limited number of preset faces to choose from, compared to Skyrim's.

It's certainly not one big decline with every last aspect of the series getting worse and worse. Some things have been dumbed down, while other aspects have become more complex. The problem for me and many others though, is the aspects of the game that are constantly getting dumbed down are more important than the aspects they're improving. I think as a general observation it's fair to say that TES is getting worse and worse as an RPG series, but better as a sandbox action-adventure series.

The character development isn't particularly streamlined either, leveling up in previous game involved looking at one menu and picking your bonuses, it now involves two menus, first to pick your bonus and then to pick your perk and selecting your perk involves a lot of scrolling and reading. So, yes, when the developer speaks of streamlining anything, it is complete BS.

I smell a console user.

Yeah, lets not focus on any on the improvements, and base our opinion only on what your subjective standpoint on what an "RPG" is.,, totally makes sense for a debate.

This isnt pre-2000 anymore. Dont define modern RPG to what used to be. Simplifying is the video game industry evolving, whether you like it or not. I don't need dice roll combat and skills affected by numbers. That never made an RPG an RPG for me. I always found it cumbersome. RPGs, to me, is the element of building a story behind your character that you created, exploring another world, finding and crafting unique items and content, and befriending friends and foes, and overall believing that character is real. Skyrim does all this for me better than any RPG Ive ever played. I've played top down, side scrolling RPGs, graphics arent important, and at the same time, never have I once felt that I need more numbers/attributes to tell a story or define my characters for me to be immersed or role play.

And you realize, all TES games character creation basically have the same cause and effect. Daggerfall only had 8 attributes that each had its own selection of a handful of governed skills. If you put points in those attributes it would only raise those handful skills it governed, and you would be weaker in other attributes/skills. (No matter how often you used those other attributes/skills, so it never made sense really RP wise.) It really wasnt that deep before. Skyrim has just simplified it into just skills which has a handful of governed perks. Sure, they substituted a couple skills from previous iterations, but nothing worth changing your emotional balance and cause you to be judgemental over each new development.

I know what streamlining means.

I`m simply bringing the true meaning of the word in this particular case or context. I don`t like watching people being deceived by smart words. I`m sick of seeing people say things like `It`s better because it`s streamlined`

Why is it better?

`I don`t know; because they say it`s streamlined.`

The Devs or Todd are hardly going to say we `dumbed the game down`, are they?


That said, streamlining is not a bad thing when correctly and honestly done Something can be streamlined to be more efficient, yet still keep its complexity. the difference is that the complexity is efficient and only shows to the user where it needs to to avoid overload.

Military equipment are often streamlined, but never `dumbed down`. They are made better, but the User always has all the options he needs from the original design.

Streamline something means getting rid of stuff that`s not needed; it doesn`t mean throwing out that stuff that made it good.

So those of us wary enough need to be able to see beyond the obvious and interpret the reality. I have played many games, Morrowind included and, oh boy, is Skyrim dumbed down. The evidence is clear to see.