Did you miss attributes in Skyrim? How should attributes affect skills, anyways?

[maidenhaver]

If your game's story is meant to be completed over a few months, Skyrim's system is great. Over a year or more? Its worthless.

[Norfleet]

If your game's story is meant to be completed over a few months, Skyrim's system is great. Over a year or more? Its worthless.

As far as I can tell, Skyrim's story is not meant to be completed at ALL, as is typical of Bethsoft games, where the actual story is pretty bland and uninteresting.

[maidenhaver]

Its there for improving your augments/shouts, but the story itself is paced for completing quickly, not for an adventure.

[Rand]

I like the attribute system in general, but I dislike it when the attributes can change normally through levelling or whatever.
The way I see it, you have your initial potential from race and sex, then your individual adjustments on top, and that's your base.
(I'm fine with magic like temporary potions and magic items as boosters, and even permanent magic giving inherent boosts - if it's rare)
Anyway, this forces you to roleplay. You can either play to your strengths, or try to cover for your weaknesses based upon that initial array.
The system where you could level every attribute to 100 and stack layers of magic on top was mad and causes balance problems - for those who care.

There's more to it, but that's the core of it.
(I shouldn't have to say that, but I clearly do.)

[maidenhaver]

I'd need to know how long the story is supposed to be and what sort of encounters we've setup, before building a system. Skyrim's is matched with a forgettable main story and sloppy encounters.

[Roguey]

As far as I can tell, Skyrim's story is not meant to be completed at ALL, as is typical of Bethsoft games, where the actual story is pretty bland and uninteresting.

I thought seeing not-Valhalla at the end was pretty cool.

Oblivion had two pretty good endings as well (main game and Shivering Isles).

[N7Kopper]

To answer the OP's question, no. What I missed in Skyrim was the class system. Attribute leveling in Morrowind and Oblivion was terrible. So terrible in fact that it made me wish it worked more like Quest for Glory, where the distinction between "attribute" and "skill" was purely for flavour, and both were raised in the exact same way - training.

Skyrim paring the attribute level ups down to Health, Stamina/Carry Weight, and Mana was actually quite nice when combined with the added complexity of the perk system. But Skyrim is infamous for stealth archers because it doesn't have classes. All it would take to kneecap stealth archers would be to have your Sneak and/or Archery be miscellaneous skills, therefore making raising them too grindy to be worth it relative to the options you specced into. Just a simple mod where I played a character who was terrible at archery was enough to make stealth archery not be worth it, even before the other mod that improved the enemy's detection AI.

[Norfleet]

But Skyrim is infamous for stealth archers because it doesn't have classes. All it would take to kneecap stealth archers would be to have your Sneak and/or Archery be miscellaneous skills, therefore making raising them too grindy to be worth it relative to the options you specced into.

Stealth archery isn't because of classes or lack thereof. Stealth archery is just the intrinsic nature of Bethesda games. People end up as stealth archers in pretty much every Bethesda game. See all the people who do the same thing in Bethout. Adding classes back would just formalize "Stealth Archer" as a class.

[rusty_shackleford]

Classes are archetypes & archetypes are good. Very rarely does a classless RPG have unique character archetypes — a good example of one would be Arcanum, which was presumably designed to address Fallout's lack of archetypes.

[Norfleet]

Classes are archetypes & archetypes are good. Very rarely does a classless RPG have unique character archetypes — a good example of one would be Arcanum, which was presumably designed to address Fallout's lack of archetypes.

MOST classless RPGs have character archetypes, simply because buildspace, gameplay, or systems constraints end up creating them anyway. See the most infamous character archetype of the totally classless Skyrim: Stealth Archer. The constraints of pure gameplay are sufficient to push you into playing a Bow Rogue. Just because the game doesn't hold your hand and force you to specifically pick a class doesn't mean it doesn't end up having de facto classes anyway.

[N7Kopper]

But Skyrim is infamous for stealth archers because it doesn't have classes. All it would take to kneecap stealth archers would be to have your Sneak and/or Archery be miscellaneous skills, therefore making raising them too grindy to be worth it relative to the options you specced into.

Stealth archery isn't because of classes or lack thereof. Stealth archery is just the intrinsic nature of Bethesda games. People end up as stealth archers in pretty much every Bethesda game. See all the people who do the same thing in Bethout. Adding classes back would just formalize "Stealth Archer" as a class.

Stealth Archers are a combination of the fact that stealth is too easy to maintain, owing to the dumb enemy AI and the lack of classes, the fact that ranged weapons are better than melee in stealth, owing to the dumb AI, and the fact that there's no way to make your character innately terrible at archery, owing to the lack of classes. In a better designed game with classes, Stealth Archers would be hyperspecialised into their niche to draw out its true power, but would be in trouble if they got spotted. Skyrim stealth archers feel like a gradual overcorrection of how insanely underpowered stealth was in Daggerfall.

Actually, Skyrim does have classes. They're used as NPC templates. So the gimping of character customisation was very deliberate.

Classes are archetypes & archetypes are good. Very rarely does a classless RPG have unique character archetypes — a good example of one would be Arcanum, which was presumably designed to address Fallout's lack of archetypes.

The fact that you can play as a supermodel in that game specifically so you can make your protagonist fit the "commander" archetype is quite subtly funny. Did they go with a hardened military vet for the commander archetype? No, they went with a pampered beauty queen

Classes are archetypes & archetypes are good. Very rarely does a classless RPG have unique character archetypes — a good example of one would be Arcanum, which was presumably designed to address Fallout's lack of archetypes.

MOST classless RPGs have character archetypes, simply because buildspace, gameplay, or systems constraints end up creating them anyway. See the most infamous character archetype of the totally classless Skyrim: Stealth Archer. The constraints of pure gameplay are sufficient to push you into playing a Bow Rogue. Just because the game doesn't hold your hand and force you to specifically pick a class doesn't mean it doesn't end up having de facto classes anyway.

The purpose of classes in single player RPGs is to prevent the player from picking the perfect combination of traits to break the game wide open or to allow him to create a specific playstyle template that he will later be punished for attempting to deviate from. The changes to levelling mechanics the old Elder Scrolls class system provides would be enough on its own to discourage stealth archery for a player who did not wish to use it. It would still be meta, but Morrowind's alchemy meta is even worse.

[Norfleet]

and the fact that there's no way to make your character innately terrible at archery, owing to the lack of classes.

All characters start terrible at everything, though. While there's no way to make sure you always STAY terrible, choosing to be permanently terrible at something is, essentially, a personal choice to reject a skill branch, no different from choosing a class that excludes a specific skill. The game kinda already has this: Everything you're terrible at, you will simply get worse at over time since RPG number inflation causes the baseline for adequacy to steadily increase over time, putting your zero start even further in the hole, unless you put on the effort to remedially train your way out of that hole.

Stealth Archers would be hyperspecialised into their niche to draw out its true power, but would be in trouble if they got spotted. Skyrim stealth archers feel like a gradual overcorrection of how insanely underpowered stealth was in Daggerfall.

They already ARE, really. But yes, as you mentioned, AIs in games are generally dumb about dealing with stealth. But that's an example of gameplay driving classes.

[DDC]

I was furious when they took out attributes. Attributes represent, literally, your physical capabilities. Skills represent your level of talent at performing the act. Any system that does not take both of these parameters into account when determining the result of an action is ******.

"Oh look, I'm an obese reddit neckbeard midget, but if I jump up and down in a corner enough times, I'll be able to eventually dunk on a regulation hoop because I'm so 'skilled' at jumping."

No. The jump training only gets you there if you were already a lanky ****** with a lot of fast-twitch muscle fibers--you had the right attributes. Looking at the big picture, the elimination of attributes coincided with the rise of woke slop and also the ridiculous "anyone can be anything they want to be" movement.

I saw it coming a long time before it happened though. The elimination of Medium Armor in Oblivion was a harbinger of the dumbed down slop to come. I vehemently trolled and spoke out about this at the time because I knew where it was going, but to no avail. I'm still bitter about medium armor, specifically. And spears. Nobody else could see the big picture. Same with DLC--I was roasting it since its first appearances with the *original* Xbox, only to be met with a bunch of people insistently saying that it wouldn't turn out exactly as it has.

[rusty_shackleford]

I saw it coming a long time before it happened though. The elimination of Medium Armor in Oblivion was a harbinger of the dumbed down slop to come.

I've argued against this prior, (some of) Oblivion skills ended up having more diversity than Morrowind's despite having less skills overall:

"Not as many armor slots "

This is a good critique imo. I don't consider "no medium armor " to be a good critique if the same number(or more) armors still exist and there's no functional difference.

Similarly, spears add nothing that Oblivion doesn't already have other than spear visuals. Oblivion does have the concept of weapon reach — and unlike in Morrowind, claymores have significantly more reach than a shortsword(nearly double). All long blades in Morrowind have a reach of 1.0, from the lowly saber to the Daedric Claymore. All shortblades also have a reach of 1.0, yet another inferiority to Oblivion which does a much better job of modeling various weapon ranges.
In reality, nothing was lost. Oblivion gained true two-handed swords which functionally perform the same task. Oblivion also models various weapons having different ranges, rather than spears just having higher range and near everything else having the same.

Just mentioning that Oblivion has one less skill is pointless, Daggerfall had plenty of useless skills that were removed in Morrowind, I guess Morrowind is ultra bad by this logic.

---

As a tangent: Light/medium/heavy armor categories are an example of something pulled from tabletop that doesn't need to exist in computer RPGs because computers are really good at doing lots of math — that is, modeling the actual weight of armor.

[Norfleet]

No. The jump training only gets you there if you were already a lanky ****** with a lot of fast-twitch muscle fibers--you had the right attributes. Looking at the big picture, the elimination of attributes coincided with the rise of woke slop and also the ridiculous "anyone can be anything they want to be" movement.

But this doesn't mean anything when all attributes are ALSO just a skill, in that you raise them from 0 to 100 like any other skill.

[DDC]

I saw it coming a long time before it happened though. The elimination of Medium Armor in Oblivion was a harbinger of the dumbed down slop to come.

I've argued against this prior, (some of) Oblivion skills ended up having more diversity than Morrowind's despite having less skills overall:

"Not as many armor slots "

This is a good critique imo. I don't consider "no medium armor " to be a good critique if the same number(or more) armors still exist and there's no functional difference.

Similarly, spears add nothing that Oblivion doesn't already have other than spear visuals. Oblivion does have the concept of weapon reach — and unlike in Morrowind, claymores have significantly more reach than a shortsword(nearly double). All long blades in Morrowind have a reach of 1.0, from the lowly saber to the Daedric Claymore. All shortblades also have a reach of 1.0, yet another inferiority to Oblivion which does a much better job of modeling various weapon ranges.
In reality, nothing was lost. Oblivion gained true two-handed swords which functionally perform the same task. Oblivion also models various weapons having different ranges, rather than spears just having higher range and near everything else having the same.

Just mentioning that Oblivion has one less skill is pointless, Daggerfall had plenty of useless skills that were removed in Morrowind, I guess Morrowind is ultra bad by this logic.

---

As a tangent: Light/medium/heavy armor categories are an example of something pulled from tabletop that doesn't need to exist in computer RPGs because computers are really good at doing lots of math — that is, modeling the actual weight of armor.

I think it's just better gameplay to have some special perks, bonuses, whatever be inherent to the different types of armor categories rather than (I guess what you're arguing) let anyone wear whatever armor they want as long as their encumbrance can handle it. Like it's kind of absurd that in Dark Souls 3, I spend 95% of my time in heavy armor and then when it's time to fight the Nameless King, I go in some little cloth robes and bracers and start rolling around like a ******. I think some restrictions make for richer gameplay and forces the player to deal with the consequences of their build.

[Lhynn]

As far as I can tell, Skyrim's story is not meant to be completed at ALL

Actually its the opposite, you are meant to complete the story before you faff around, thats why its imbued with so much urgency in every step. Bethesda is completely ignorant about why their games sell, absolutely clueless.

[Vaako]

Stealth archery is just the intrinsic nature of Bethesda games. People end up as stealth archers in pretty much every Bethesda game. See all the people who do the same thing in Bethout. Adding classes back would just formalize "Stealth Archer" as a class.

Do you even remember how terrible vanilla archery was in Morrowind? Even in Oblivion it wasnt great and way too annoying to level. Easier to just throw spells with your weapon out and go melee. Only Skyrim really made it possible because of the ridiculous stealth multiplier/stealth detection and you could stack dmg enchantments there.

[Norfleet]

Do you even remember how terrible vanilla archery was in Morrowind? Even in Oblivion it wasnt great and way too annoying to level. Easier to just throw spells with your weapon out and go melee. Only Skyrim really made it possible because of the ridiculous stealth multiplier/stealth detection and you could stack dmg enchantments there.

I remember being a Stealth Archer anyway, because everything killed you there so I would hop up on furniture and crates and shoot enemies to death while they flailed impotently, unable to reach me.

[rusty_shackleford]

Morrowind did not have the concept of stealth archer, enemies just ran at you if you attacked them, not stand around trying to figure out why the guy next to him is dead.

[Oyster Sauce]

Similarly, spears add nothing that Oblivion doesn't already have other than spear visuals.

You undervalue this and overvalue things that don't matter such as weapon range in a Bethesda game

[rusty_shackleford]

Similarly, spears add nothing that Oblivion doesn't already have other than spear visuals.

You undervalue this and overvalue things that don't matter such as weapon range in a Bethesda game

Spears are lame and have been overhyped by redditors!

[Oyster Sauce]

Similarly, spears add nothing that Oblivion doesn't already have other than spear visuals.

You undervalue this and overvalue things that don't matter such as weapon range in a Bethesda game

Spears are lame and have been overhyped by redditors!

You wouldn't get it, bluey

[rusty_shackleford]

You undervalue this and overvalue things that don't matter such as weapon range in a Bethesda game

Spears are lame and have been overhyped by redditors!

You wouldn't get it, bluey

Big two handed swords are all you need

[Norfleet]

Morrowind did not have the concept of stealth archer, enemies just ran at you if you attacked them, not stand around trying to figure out why the guy next to him is dead.

Nah, if you had 100% chameleon, they were just totally lost and helpless.

[N7Kopper]

and the fact that there's no way to make your character innately terrible at archery, owing to the lack of classes.

All characters start terrible at everything, though. While there's no way to make sure you always STAY terrible, choosing to be permanently terrible at something is, essentially, a personal choice to reject a skill branch, no different from choosing a class that excludes a specific skill.

No, not quite. I played a character who started with a 1 in Archery and who took forever to gain even a single point. That's what I mean by terrible. In Skyrim, new characters start out as mediocre, not terrible. You can stealth archer your way through the low-level enemies you fight as soon as you get a bow, because the enemies are equally mediocre. When attempting to archer means that you have a ridiculously low rate of fire, bad ranged accuracy, and don't kill things even if you sneak attack them... well, it's better to be the Restoration-Heavy Armour-Daggers-Destruction specced character you actually created. Save the sneak attacks for a backstab alpha strike if you manage them, otherwise just use Sneak to better position before the fight.

Morrowind did not have the concept of stealth archer, enemies just ran at you if you attacked them, not stand around trying to figure out why the guy next to him is dead.

Nah, if you had 100% chameleon, they were just totally lost and helpless.

If your AI doesn't let enemies be in a "detected you but cannot see you, listen for audio cues" state, don't put combat invisibility in your game. Morrowind gave infinite detection power to AI that got attacked, but Infinity x Zero = Zero, and 100% Chameleon puts a x0 multiplier on enemy detection power. Mass Effect 3 doesn't get nearly enough credit for its AI, because it (especially in the campaign) suffers from the Half-Life 2 problem where you can just end up being too strong for the AI's clever tactics to get any use. It has a sophisticated hate and positioning system that factors in things like the target's cover and current threat to its own position, as well as audio and visual cues to even detect a target in the first place. The Tactical Cloak ability renders the user completely invisible to the AI. (This goes for enemies as well, your henchmen won't aggro cloaked foes)

This is why some Infiltrator players in the story complain that enemies beeline them through cloak - they can hear you, and they have a weighted preference to target pets over players, and players over henchmen. The thing that's most impressive about ME3's AI to me is that it can even miss convincingly, because it updates its target periodically and tries to predict where you're going to move to. allowing you to legitimately juke a hitscan AI. Of course, AI accuracy is overtuned in the original PC release (hell if I know about Legendary Edition) so a lot of people didn't notice. In fact, the only cheat the AI uses in that game is in multiplayer: if you're solo/the last man standing, and no enemies are aware of you, they'll be pinged as to your general map position so that they don't stand around doing nothing. This actually works in your favour, allowing you to kite them.

[rusty_shackleford]

Mass Effect 3 doesn't get nearly enough credit for its AI, because it (especially in the campaign) suffers from the Half-Life 2 problem where you can just end up being too strong for the AI's clever tactics to get any use. It has a sophisticated hate and positioning system that factors in things like the target's cover and current threat to its own position, as well as audio and visual cues to even detect a target in the first place. The Tactical Cloak ability renders the user completely invisible to the AI. (This goes for enemies as well, your henchmen won't aggro cloaked foes)

fellow ME3 AI enjoyer

Playing ME3 on insanity was very fun

[rusty_shackleford]

I remember trying to be an archer in Morrowind one of the first times I played it and all that kept happening was I'd repeatedly miss mudcrabs with every shot.

[N7Kopper]

Mass Effect 3 doesn't get nearly enough credit for its AI, because it (especially in the campaign) suffers from the Half-Life 2 problem where you can just end up being too strong for the AI's clever tactics to get any use. It has a sophisticated hate and positioning system that factors in things like the target's cover and current threat to its own position, as well as audio and visual cues to even detect a target in the first place. The Tactical Cloak ability renders the user completely invisible to the AI. (This goes for enemies as well, your henchmen won't aggro cloaked foes)

fellow ME3 AI enjoyer

Playing ME3 on insanity was very fun

Whereas soloing Platinum difficulty in the multiplayer is very !!fun!!.

[Norfleet]

I remember trying to be an archer in Morrowind one of the first times I played it and all that kept happening was I'd repeatedly miss mudcrabs with every shot.

Skill issue.