Most of the top tier perks are useless. You don't need to move past two or three lower tier ones.

The perks are, in my opinion, an epic fail at defining a character at all. Is my character somehow more unique for taking "more damage in primary damage dealing skill" than someone with a different primary damage-dealing skill? No. If I take decapitation, am I more unique? nope. I just get access to extra broken cinematics. It's all just checkmarks, because there's nothing behind it all. Nothing my character does matters. The journey goes from nowhere to nowhere, no matter what I accomplish. Whether my character is really helpful or a complete jerk, it's all the same, because in the end, no one cares. If I take a perk, or not, I'm still an empty shell on an endless trek from nowhere to nowhere.

Maybe if I head to earn perks, or if anyone cared about them, it would make me someone. It would define me. My path would go somewhere.

I just want to say this...

I read alot of people saying that compared to oblivion, skyrim is set up to allow (i'll quote OP here) "It `s the kid thing of wanting to be good at EVERYTHING" But infact its the complete opposite. And here's why
In oblivion you gain the perks automatically when your skills reach 25/50/75/100 which by completion allowed a player to obtain 100 in all skills which in turn allowed you to gain all perks in the game.... 100% master of everything

Skyrim works differrently... skill number only counts to roughly half of a skills potency. Which means if you got all skills to 100 you would actually only have less than 50% maximum potency. Add on the limited number of 80 perks and considering thats out of 251 brings you up to less than 70% total maximum potency in all skills. So this means you will never be able to become "master of all" as most of the effictiveness is in the perks.

But all of this can change drastically with the enchanting/smithing/alchemy bonuses which basically improve the potency of any skill you choose. but my argument is still valid as we are talking about classes and not exploitation.

Also i'd like to add, just as others have said. You don't need a box ingame to determine your class. All of my characters have a predetermined class before i play and i know what skills/perks i'm going to use. the main benefit of this "classless" system is for those players who are more spontaenious. It makes it easy to start as one class then decide later down the line they'd like to change to a slightly different class. its like building your class the more you play. this was completely impossible in oblivion because only major skills counted toward level up which means you HAD to use those skills if you wanted to level up.

i think that covers my thoughts on the topic

Did classes ever mean anything in oblivion? It is just a label, my Mage is exactly as strong as my warrior at max level.

Even the arena champion title is more meaningful.

Exactly. The way they have it now is a huge blow to roleplaying. You may as well have been born the day before you were put on that cart in the opening video. Whether my character spent his entire life studying magic, or instead scorned magic and studied the ways of the theif, makes no difference at all. They will have the exact same proficiency in their skills (not counting different races of course). This is just another decision that shows the series moving away from being an RPG.


I did that just fine in Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion.


This way actually has less freedom.


That's wrong. Once you spend your perk points, they're spent. You're locked into it.

Which really just underscores the whole pointlessness of the class system. It was a completely superfluous inclusion to character creation that had no effect on the narrative. NPCs recognized you by your race, by your deeds, and by you skills. Your "class" was absolutely meaningless.

Of course you can. Skyrim is a role playing game so there's nothing restricting you from playing the role of someone that the mental ethos of his profession actually restricts him from using some skills. The game itself doesn't though and it's a lot more realistic that way. There's little reason why a Warrior cannot even try using some magic as long as he knows the spells after all. Learning to be a Warrior doesn't include some sort of weird ritual that completely and forever prevents him from using magic does it?

So, if you consider that your profession has a taboo on some skills, it's not up to the game to prevent you from using them. It's up to you the player role playing that Warrior and respect your profession ethos, to be tempted into breaking them instead of having the game hand hold you into respecting the "rules".

*points to his last post* Roleplaying should never be pointless in a supposed RPG. Your class represented what your character did for the entirety of his life up until the beginning of the game.

My problem with classes is this : you are a warrior. Presumably you were raised to be a warrior, and have been a professional soldier, mercenary, pit fighter or whatever up to the start of the game. You get a few skill bonuses, ten years in the legion gets you from 5 to 25 or whatever in weapon and armour skills, then a year of adventuring gets you from 25 to 100. What do they teach these soldiers these days?
Anyway, that's kind of a philosophical point; as far as game mechanics go, personal preference and opinion : restrictive classes are an important mechanic in a party based game, where your choice of which characters to take is part of the gameplay, but I really can't see the point in a single player game, where anyone, not just those with a previous career/upbringing as a thief can learn to pick locks.
Skyrim has taken it a little too far perhaps, maybe a few tag skills would be nice (oh no, he said tag, that means Fallout. No it doesn't). Just a touch of preference, but previous careers in a game where the whole ethos is do what you want, and maybe a few things you don't even want to but have to to survive, can't see the point myself.

Do you actually play oblivion? Do you know that, training your major skills from your class actually hurts you because enemies scale faster? Do you know that a fair number of people actually choose skills they DON'T use as their major skills to avoid leveling?

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Under_Leveling

There was definitely something wrong with the class system in Oblivion, since the intuitive way of becoming better in the game by practicing your class skills actually made you WEAKER when combined with level scaling. So instead you end up creating a fighter that chooses only magic skills as major skills, because I will be a much better fighter compared to the world I am interacting with by having all of my fighting skills as minor skills.

It wasn′t broken with Morrowind or Daggerfall, but level scaling broke the class and attribute system and when the decision was made to keep level scaling in Skyrim, those had to go and be replaced with another system that actually made sense when interacting with the world.

There were never really any classes to begin with, classes were just an extra word on your character sheet.

I don't need a pointless class-designation system to allow me to roleplay. That's what my imagination is for. Had Oblivion's character creation system came with entry fields for "Turn-ons" (e.g. humor) and "Turn-offs" (e.g. bad breath), then there'd doubtless be a contingent of players here lamenting the loss of that feature as well, regardless of how meaningless it would have been.

Because most of the "serious" RPGers here (and I use the term "serious" advisedly) demand labelling of their character, no matter how arbitrary, and, let's face it, within TES, it's always been pretty arbitrary.

Of course, as opposed to the "casually serious" RPGer, or the RPGer-lite, as I think of them, real old school RPGers have realised, many many moons ago, that CRPGs will never, can never, replace a human DM (that stands for DungeonMaster for all the RPG-liters), and that sometimes, you just have to RP within the game mechanics.

Computers, eh. Still not as smart as people. I was as shocked to realise this as you all were....

Not being able to be a master of everything is why I like the new system. In Morrowind my character would end eventually up being good at everything (unless using mods to counter that) and therefore quite similar.
It does not happen in Skyrim because only the perks makes you better, and they are limited, so you can't maximize everything.

I don't know, why you think this has something to do with classes, in Morrowind (at least) you could choose a class to define your starting skills, but this class would eventually cease to matter as you level up, so you can be good even in your misc skills. You don't have minor and major skills in Skyrim, but you don't need classes for that (in Morrowind I rarely choose as predefined class, since they never had exactly the skills I wanted).

Not all the new skills seems useful to me though (why choose lockpicking perks, when I can pick a master lock without any), but the idea of the perks will make my characters unique, since I will only have 4 or 5 skills, where I can fill most of the perk three.

In reality, a Policeman can switch profession to Fireman if he wants. You could also start learning taekwondo and after having a good level in it, choose it doesn't suits you anymore and spend the rest of your life practicing archery, winning cups and all.
The class system is basically forbidding you any change. And what's terrible is that IRL it's exactly the problem of labeling people. Take the ex-footballer Eric Cantona (English people will know). He paints. Of course all the medias took it ironically, and everybody says "ah ha, a footballer who wants to be a painter!" With the class system, that kind of short-sighted vision of the world is set to rule. That's horrible.

And never anything wrong with starting a new game and having to choose skills you don't know for the rest of your character's days, for the whole game?
When you start a TES for the first time, either Morrowind or Oblivion, when you define your class, what do you do? Do you pick skills saying "hmmm Illusion that sounds nice, Conjuration I'm not sure let's toss a coin..." or do you pick a premade class thinking "Ok devs are giving it as an example, it must be balanced"?
Sure a great thing. As you like to link it to reality, did you choose your profession in the craddle? Did you really take the first profession you wanted to be as a child?

Those are rhetorical questions. The players asking for classes are often those stuck in the D&D system, speaking about paladins, cleric, etc. Never evolved and fear to lose their comfortable drawn path, even if it's totally absurd. Be a good wife : don't work, cook and raise the children. Outside is full of germs anyway.

You do realize that in past games, even if your character "spent his whole life studying magic", he still started at level 1, and was totally incompetent in his skills, correct???

Just another baseless complaint about Skyrim that has no actual validity in reality.

Personally I find having to pick a class more then just labeling your character. It tells me what I am good at, who I am/was and where I would fit in concerning the world, it's factions and politics.

In skyrim I can choose to be a thief, a warrior, a mage or a hybrid with no restrictions making my character feel like a bland sheet with nothing to really relate myself to.

This, so hard.

Your whole post, really, but this part specifically.

Instead, now you tell the game what your character is good at, just by doing it and developing it.

You want to worry about who your character was? Pull up a word document and write your character's backstory. It's as simple as that.

Yeh... Cuz in Oblivion, when I picked "Assassin" I was immediately much more deadly attacking with a dagger than a mage...... oh, wait....

I had to level and improve my skills.

Pretty much the same "starting as a newbie" in every TES game.

Only in this game if you use your dagger you improve that skill and that skill only. Like it should have always been.

^This, exactly.

I'd be fine with a class-based system if it actually had an impact on the game's narrative, but Oblivion's certainly didn't. It was just an arbitrary designation system that governed nothing but skill-building/leveling. If you were a "Barbarian", that distinction existed only in your own mind. So, if you want to be a Barbarian in Skyrim, then go ahead and be one. What's the difference?

Except...that it doesn′t...it only tells you all these things inside your own mind, I can pick any class in any previous TES game and then decide to be master at everything else but my class. A roleplayer has imagination that fleshes out their character beyond the numbers and labels, and don′t need them for other purposes than to interact with the mechanics, and then I want something where these numbers and labels actually have an effect on this interaction.

A gamer frriend of mine not only wanted to see them get rid of classes, but also get rid of leveling up entirely. Just pure progression through play style. no artificial labels of how powerful you are. Skyrim's classless system is a very close step towards no artificial labels whatsoever. your character is almost custom built to your play style.

Now if only they didnt make ceritan skills so important that if you didnt take those skills, you would never progress. thats the only problem with this game...how much it forces your character to progress a certian similar way every single time.

How does it force you into similar ways of progression?

I have 3 characters that have completely different skills, different attitudes, different viewpoints, and have done things a lot differently than one another.

You apparently have locked yourself into a certain play style.