It lets me RP better because it forces me to use my imagination, instead of being confined to a class and numbers/stats. It gives pure absolute freedom for me to RP a real character, driven by emotion and feeling rather than a word or class or numbers.
In Daggerfall we had to monitor our bars, non of which regenerated, and you could even die from stamina exhaustion if you collapsed more than three times or so. These are all great mechanics that have implications if you don't play by the rules. These are then rules that I have to play by. All this is gone, probably in the name of not supporting a niche market of role players but instead focusing en masse making everything easier. So the role players are now forced to imagine, make up in their head, all these kinds of mechanics. Now, tell me, would you enjoy being forced to imagine combat and its outcome?
I can evolve my character freely with no limits. If you are a class, you are confined to the limits of said class. With this system, I am only confined to the limits I set, and my imagination.
Why is something that is badly implemented always forgiven when it is removed? Why not improve it? I can see some technical reasoning going on behind some of the decisions (such as spell making), but most of them seems to have a single reason - dumb the game down enough to make it more accessible to more people. Like, some (even me) complained about the directions we were given in Morrowind quests, for being lacking. What happened? Look what complaining about it actually "gave us". Hell, I even used the language skills in Daggerfall from time to time. I've played RPG game systems with literally thousands of skills (dice, so a lot more are to be expected of course), and I got to pick just a few of them.
What you say about classes are also wrong. Sure, the idea was never implemented well in TES, combined with its usually quite faulty leveling system. In (what I perceive as) a good classbased system, the class defines who you are when you enter the world. It defines your background. Daggerfall let you choose positive AND negative traits (again, removed because of exploit level allowed rather than fixing it). From then on, the selected skills may make you advance faster in those skills (because you already have a background in them), but what if you could flip this around and say that skills can be forgotten if not used or you abandon one skill to take up another (at a cost - non economically - of course). After Daggerfall we also left the idea that everyone wasn't equally balanced at all, something that is a fact in real life. There are young gifted people highly skilled in just about anything they do, and there are young people who doesn't have a chance in life at all and not skilled in anything. Now, our start is this: You get x number of points no matter what, assign them as you see completely fit. There is no chance going on here at all. There is no unluckily rolled character, which the GM (game) can help keep alive. Now we have a difficulty setting (Daggerfall didn't iirc). Most (even old) games include some kind of influence on how you distribute your rolls or attempt to increase them after the fact. But in modern games, you get a fixed start.
Daggerfall had 100 features. Skyrim have 100 features (not a lot more anyways). Sure I enjoy the increased focus on combat and magic being more believable than
just numbers. But it came at a cost of reducing everything else. Most of which had some serious design problems. But these many years since Daggerfall, I'd expect Skyrim to have like a 1000 feature (a lot more), where old problems were fixed rather than simply removed. They sure have grown since back then, surely they can't all be content creators? But this growth is also a catch22 situation - in order to pay for it all (content, which apart from some quest design, is very good), they also have to target a broader audience rather than a niche product for the used-to-be-small-fanbase. And in order to reach this new audience, they have to make it accessible to them by dumbing it down. Unfortunately (for me), they can't hope to satisfy both camp, so they naturally (which I agree on from a financial standpoint) choose the camp giving the most revenue. Money talks, I suffer
