The class system has a long tradition going back to D&D and essentially has the purpose of balancing strengths and weaknesses and encouraging complementarity in parties. The past, however, can sometimes be tyrannical, and people come to expect all rpg's to use D&D patterns even when those games might be moving in another direction.

The Elder Scrolls has been abandoning true class at least since Morrowind. Class choice eseentially gives you initial stat bonuses and may influence patterns of leveling, but doesn't create real restrictions. You can use any skill, wear any armor, use any weapon. In Morrowind and Oblivion, class also gave you a character concept that you could pursue or abandon as you went along. Nothing in Skyrim prevents you from having such a concept, and stronger characters specialize in some skills more than others. But the apparatus of class just doesn't effect gameplay. It would merely be window dressing (like the attributes people reminisce about).

Perhaps the next thing to disappear will be Level. At present, it is arbitrarily every ten skillups. I suppose it helps with the leveled lists, but perhaps there are other ways to conceptualize progress and advancement. D&D's numerical system laid the groundwork for computer rpg's, but do we have to slavishly stick to that model and churn out more cookie cutter games that merely change setting and graphics? I like Bethesda's approach. They respect the past, but move forward and abandon elements in their game design that are merely vestigal.

Again, classes are just fossilized factions. We don't need classes. We need factions that have membership requirements, that teach specialized perks and provide specialized spells. If you use factions instead, you could design them so that the best perks are only available after the player has risen through the ranks, but the player could also choose to abandon the faction if they decided they didn't like it. Therefore, you have the best of both worlds.

That is what they did, the tried the attribute system for 4 entire games, and their conclusion was that it didn′t fit the design they wanted. They didn′t want a system where the character was supposed to ignore his pre-made choices in order to develop, a system that rewarded the player for using those skills that his character was supposed to be the least adept in. I don′t believe that it was their intention when they designed the class system from the beginning that if you want to be a good thief you should pick or customize a class as far from thief as possible, but that′s what the design encouraged you to do. And a game IS it′s mechanics, no matter what people say that you could just ignore this and stick to your main skills. If the game rewards a certain action and approach, that is what I am drawn to do. It dangles a desirable reward (progression) in front of me saying "ignore your class skills, and you will grow more powerful!". A person with proper knowledge of game design and how players function finally looked at it and decided that it was a flawed design and they replaced with a proper design that steers the player in the direction of making the proper choices the designers wanted to see in the game.

Guardian Stones add exactly as much "specialization" or "customization" as starsigns did in previous games. Nothing more and nothing less. The difference is that they can be changed dynamically and they now act as further rewards for exploring, which I personally prefer.

I like the perk system, particularly because it reinforces a need to focus on certain skills. You can't just master everything.

I also really miss the fun of putting together race/birthsign/class builds in previous TES. I feel like the system in Skyrim is a little too inconsequential and behind the scenes.

RPGs aren't really about challenge. The only challenge in an RPG is story puzzling, and the quest journal system makes this not much more than clickspam. I have quests to "unravel the mystery of..." but all I need to do is look for the arrow. Of course, I can turn that off, I know. But the game is built around it. We don't have the step-by-step detailed journal like in Morrowind, so you can review what you've done so far.

Keep in mind that role-playing is at least as much in the story as it is in your stat sheet and perk tree. Rather than the game forcing you level as a particular class, I'd rather the story mechanics force you to play through the game as a particular class. Remember in Morrowind how it was impossible to finish both the Fighters and Assassins questlines? Each one required you to kill an "essential" in the other. IIRC, you couldn't belong to more than one political house, either. I'd like to see more things like that. Not just quest-breaking decisions, but also some perk-tree-breaking requirements, too. Like maybe you can't join the Thieves Guild until you can demonstrate a level of skill that, while it shouldn't take 100 hours to achieve, should nevertheless break off the possibility of you maxxing out as a battlemage later on. And several perks ought to be unavailable unless you are a member of a certain guild. Maybe a quest early in the Assassin's line forces you to accept a criminal reputation that bars you from joing the Companions... who are the only people who can teach you higher level block or two-handed perks. I'm not saying each play-through should be severely restricted in this manner, but some amount of trimming the "quest tree" ought to occur.

The only problem I have with Bethesda's approach is that progress, advancement, and specialization have been hampered or truncated. I made a pretty little graph to show the problem with Skyrim:http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/4200/skyrimchart.jpg

What this shows is that because itemization tapers off early on, perk investment stops having an impact, and your character becomes more and more powerful, enjoyment level goes down. This happens way earlier than it should. We should see this occuring at the level cap or when everything has been accomplished - not when there is still content to be completed. That is the problem in Skyrim.

I agree. I like that system. I am only a fan of classes for what they do. If factions or a different system provides this in a better manner I am all for it.

Sure as a substitute for birth signs, they are a good substitute. They could be infinitely better than what they are and have more variety, but how they work is great.

In my opinion, that's the biggest lie ever. But if you honestly feel that way, good for you.

It is a lie, and doesn't even have anything to do with classes. There are less build types viable, or even possible in Skyrim than in previous ES games, namely Morrowind, Daggerfall, and even Oblivion.

+1

It seems this problem has been eliminated. I for one, always chose a custom class. Even in good old D&D you could choose to be a Fighter/Cleric/Mage. You would just level up at a 1/3 of the rate of every one else. I feel that Skyrim has liberated us from the the preconceived notions of classic fantasy "classes".

As far a "viability" of character builds... ANY build is viable. Period. If I want to run around in my underwear, punching people with one hand, casting restoration spells, picking pockets, and blocking with a whiterun guard shield all day. I can do that. That is what the difficulty scale is for. It may not be "viable" in the power gamer sense, but I for one enjoy the beginning moments of wimpy-ness more than the "I win" button endgame craft grind dude.

"There was never anything wrong with the class system" is a pretty bold statement, and one which is easily disproven. There was always something wrong with the class system. For example, Arena had rigid class definitions with no customization and huge penalties. Not a mage? No magicka. At all. Not a warrior? Chain only, at best. No ebony, ever. You want to be a thief?:
"It never made sense to us that a thief became a better thief after killing a troll, but he would never become better at lockpicking, no matter how much he practiced, until he killed another troll."

Daggerfall was the pinnacle of the class system, and the last time it made a meaningful difference. The default classes had the same limitations\penalties as Arena, but the option to create a custom class reduced them to templates as usual. Everyone customized their characters to min\max, to fix the main drawbacks of their favored class, in the effort to find one that felt comfortable. In the end, all skills could be maxed and all benefits gained. The only limitations which persisted (insurmountably) were magicka multipliers, prohibitions against equipment types, etc.. None of which have been class traits ever since. There is really no reason to make it impossible for player A to ever do X or Y because player B wants to deliberately handicap themselves and needs the game to enforce it for them.

I find it amusing that everyone is complaining about the class system now instead of 10 years ago. The only difference has been what skills determine your 'level' - which is already a completely arbitrary measurement when a level 1 with maxed combat\crafting miscellaneous skills can utterly destroy a level 20 who majors in Security, Speechcraft & Mercantile. "Level 20 what?" becomes the all-important question, but that makes the measurement entirely useless for even conversation, let alone scripting. Oblivion keeps being used as a comparison, but it didn't care what you were level 20 at either. Skyrim makes the "level 20" part slightly more accurate by making "what?" become "in general."

The reality is, Skyrim has more class definition, not less. Yes, all skills contribute experience to level up. However, skills will be used in proportion to their relevance to your playing style. In turn, skills which are used more frequently will gain more levels. Increasing higher level skills contributes more to level-up than lower level skills, and higher level characters require more points to level. In the end, an Archmage who gains a point in his marginal lockpicking ability is not going to get significant experience to level up until that skill becomes proportionately higher. In contrast, he will gain much more experience when his magic skills increase. You also have limited perk selection, making it impossible to get all of them as you could in Oblivion. Since the perks increase the effectiveness of the relevant skill, and since skills increase in proportion to the impact of their use, you'll gain skill increases somewhat faster for skills you've invested more perks into even apart from the fact that you'll be using them proportionately more. It will always be less efficient - maybe even prohibitively so - to use skills you are not proficient with as your primary means of overcoming challenges. Odds are it will also feel unnatural and uncomfortable. That is what defines a class, and it has always been that way. Skyrim just does what all TES games have tried to do from their very class-generating star sign prototype: It allows you to define your class through responses.

Er, that was level scaling, not major/minors, classes, or attributes problem. No one complained about it until Oblivion level scaling. People try to use attributes and classes, etc. as the scapegoat, because Beth wants them to, they don't want to acknowledge they screwed Oblivion with level scaling, nothing else.

Skyrim hasn't done this. I could make a Custom Class in Daggerfall and call it whatever I wanted. The weird leveling was fixed and Attributes were dealt with nicely, but you still have problems namely that there isn't enough dept in character creation or advancement - but hey there are a lot of pointless dungeons and stuff.

Carefully planning out your perk investment due to a limited amount of perks acquired takes more "brain" power than selecting 7 skills at the beginning of the game, and never doing anything else to develop those skills.

A wrong perk choice, or the desire to master a different set of skills is totally an incentive to start over and play a new character.

the old system was flawed but added to the character build substantially- and that gap has not been filled by perks.

Yes, by all means let the perks be erased ala Two Worlds. It really doesn't matter. The spine of the Elder Scrolls is broken; what you do with the arms and legs hardly matters to the corpse.

See, and that's the mentality I don't like from the apparent "hardcoe" RPG'ers.

As far as I'm concerned, RPing isn't about treasure hunting and collecting gear, it's about developing a character.

I get a sense of my character from level 1 - as long as I have 2 swords, a piece of heavy armor, and a necromancy spell, I am "in character" - because that's who my character is; a Heavy Armored, Dual Wielding Necromancer. As soon as I get into Riverwood, buy my Raise Zombie spell, along with my Oakflesh spell, and possibly a heal spell, I am "in character". That is the beginning of my character's story, the journey of my character as a young and inexperienced mage / warrior, and the journey of growing and becoming more powerful.

And that's why to me RPG's aren't about numbers, RPG's aren't about treasure. Those things are a -part- of it (and even though Attributes aren't in the game as we know them, numbers still exist in the game in a necessary fashion), but that's not what an RPG is about.

It's about developing a -character-. And a character is more than just skills. A character is morals, values, goals and ambitions, social interactions and relationships, as well as skills and equipment.

Skyrim gives me the freedom to create a -character-, and have full control over all of those elements. Yes, Morrowind and Oblivion did as well, but I feel that Skyrim improves upon that and gives a superior character development system by giving me more choice, more options, more possibilities to make -MY- character different from someone else - even someone who may select the same style archetype as mine.

Like people said, as you leveled in past games, you became more and more like everyone else - you became more and more of a "Jack of All Trades - Master of All", even if that isn't your character vision. In Oblivion, just through natural playing (barely over 100 hours, main quest completed, getting into the meat of the Mage's Guild, and various side quests completed), I watched as my character entered "God mode" because the Attributes that were the focus of my character were all maxed out, and now I had to put Attribute points into -other- Attributes that I -didn't- want.

In Skyrim, as I level my character, he becomes more and more unique. And it doesn't take until level 25 to get a sense of who my character is. I have a sense of who my character is from the very beginning, when I have a vision for him, and I play to that vision.

Once this happens to the Elder Scrolls series, I'm out.

The entire reason why I'm drawn to Elder Scrolls is because there are no classes, I create my own character in my own vision with no limits imposed by the game mechanics.

The minute the game limits me to "classes", and tells me how I can and cannot play, I'm out. The game will cease to be Elder Scrolls for me, and the RPG genre will officially be dead (I'm sick and tired of pre-defined classes that dictate to you what your character can be)

Really...


Yes, the only thing classes or birth signs did in previous games was make levelling up your class-defining skills easier. Guardian Stones, function similarly. You gain perks by levelling these skills/spells, enhanced by a Guardian Stone, and then you gain specific abilities through perk points. That you would not get otherwise.

There is an argument for depth, but the class system still remains and has gone nowhere. Indeed it still functions in the same way.


Beth wants them to, no one complained about it until Oblivion.


Agreed. MUD's do this, you can dual in and out guilds for a penalty and your effectiveness in skills/spells drops significantly.
So were birthsigns. Standing Stones are the physical representation of birth signs, and carry many of the exact same bonuses that birth signs did.

You are making my case for me.

So, none of the "serious RPGers" here want a proper class system? One that restricts the skills you can use, or even one that restricts what classes you can be based on race/alignment? Just a gimped naming convention that gives some stats a minor fillip upon first starting the game. Meaningless, pointless and transient.

Serious my backside.

Telling you man, its all about the title.

Maybe they should name thier saves after the archetype they are trying to make.

Because classes have gone absolutely nowhere.

We are discussing a problem that does not exist.

So basically you want the game to hold your hand and give you things for no effort?

And you accuse other people of being "dumbed down" and not wanting to use their brains??

Imagine this: Skyrim's leveling system as is. You raise 10 skills, you level up. Any skills. You pick a perk. Any perk.


Then add this:

At character creation you select from a list of classes where you get a +5 or a +10 bonus to 7 different skills associated with that class. Or you can create your own using 7 skills and name it what you want. Starting attributes are a base of X, with race giving Y bonus at creation, and each time you level up you get a flat +3 to your choice of two skills.

That keeps character creation from oblivion with the way leveling is now in Skyrim. Oh, it also re-introduces attributes without the min-max game of trying to get +5s.

It's not always about game mechanics. Sometimes, things are requested to add to the Role Play experience of an RPG.

Your knee jerk reactions become more hilarious by the day.