Skyrim Streamlining Removes Confusion, Says Bethesda

[Therumancer]

I'll be blunt, the satisfaction of making the right desicians and builting a good character is greatly reduced if there are no wrong desicians comparitively speaking, and ways of a person to build a bad character for themselves.

What's more, part of what makes "Elder Scrolls" kind of cool, is the abillity to replay the game while choosing deliberatly ineffective combinations of skills to see how far you can get, what you can accomplish, and how much you can build that character up.

All of the reasons mentioned in their explanation basically amount to streamlining, and demonstrate that Bethesda misses the point entirely. Those characters that people play for a few hours and decide "this doesn't work for me" are part of what illustrates the depth of the game, and part of the trick is that the game is good enough, and deep enough, to make people want to try again. On a lot of levels those failures contribute to the overall success of the game, and the game series itself.

 

[Plurralbles]

so instead of balancing the game they threw their hands up and made it easier on themselves.

Just say so, guys and move on. I'm still getting the game, just wondering if the console version will be worth a damn.

When I get hte game I'm going to deliberately make the worst character I can.

 

[k7avenger]

The fact that they removed stats doesn't bother me. After all, they did really just boil down to damage you do, damage you take, hp, mp, and stamina. Nothing lost.

That they removed classes doesn't disturb me one bit. Once I realized what "custom class" was in Morrowind, I never used a premade class ever again. And now we can pretty much just use what we want to use. Once again, nothing lost.

They removed even more skills? Eh, well mysticism didn't really go away, it just got redistributed to other schools. There was nothing wrong with hand to hand, but...okay I guess. I never really used it.

But you removed greaves...really? I guess combining the top and bottom pieces could potentially be beneficial, but do we really need to give up some character customization? I don't know what it is, but this really irks me. If its to complex to figure that you might need to wear some pants with that shirt, I fear for our future. I mean, I have no problems with change, but I just don't see what we stand to gain from losing this one.

 

[Signa]

This all reminds me of how Nintendo has handled their business since the Wii. Nintendo used to make the best games ever, but now they only want to cater to the casual market. Fuck their fans. Their fans don't have enough money.

 

[k7avenger]

They stated it was a technical decision, as one piece armor rends better. And that it did in fact allow them to build more armor models.

Well, I guess if they do look better I can't complain. Suppose we'll just have to wait till it comes out.

 

[k7avenger]

I was never really big on wearing no pants. It was more like, "Boy, these daedric greaves sure are nice, but I like the look of those glass ones better. I think I'll wear those instead, even if I'm not a light armor user." Same thing could be said for pauldrons as well. Ah well, so goes nostalgia.

EDIT: In other words, screw the stats, I want aesthetics. Your character would end up godlike regardless of the armor you wore.

 

[Zydrate]

EDIT: In other words, screw the stats, I want aesthetics. Your character would end up godlike regardless of the armor you wore.

Fable 2 did a good job of this. Lots of customization, but you were more hardy depending on your stats.

Buuutttt... I don't mind armor-stats in TES because I don't want them taking out MORE stats. They already killed Medium Armor.

 

[flagship]

Glad they did this, Oblivion had way to many skills and skill trees to the point where I restarted multiple times trying to get a good balance, especially with a leveling system that promoted use of on demand skills for maxing out attributes each level. Also starting a fight barehanded because your weapon was sheathed always annoyed me.

 

[k7avenger]

Well there never was enough pieces of medium armor to really warrant it's own class. There was bonemold and maybe one other set, but the name escapes me. The only reason I ever had a character wear it was because maybe I thought a piece here or there looked cool.

Some of the skills they removed I can see where they are coming from. To a new player, having to pick seven skills from a pool of twenty something is a rather daunting task, especially if you really aren't sure what exactly they do. I'm looking at a few of the magic schools in particular. Athletics and acrobatics from a game play perspective really just seem to be stat-pads if you will. But then, from a role play perspective, could very well be central to your character (think a thief or something of that nature). Maybe if we had some potions or spells that could do the same thing, but I doubt we will. Mysticism isn't really going away, the spells are just going to different schools.

But hand to hand has me worried. As far as melee weapons are concerned, we only have blades and blunt weapons left. I'm well aware that blunt includes axes, but even so, we are still down to 60% of the choices we could have had. We USED to have spears. Now we USED to have hand to hand. What did we GAIN by giving up these two? Is it really worth sacrificing the customization options for streamlining? I admit that I never used hand to hand in any serious manner, but I can't fathom how NOT putting these into your game is making you any fans. Who in the world said, "Gee, if only all these spear wielding warriors and Bruce Lee clones were gone from TES, THEN I could have the best game experience EVER!" Are they that hard to balance?

 

[k7avenger]

I think you can blame the poorly implemented level scaling for the level 1's beating the main quest. In oblivion, there really was NO incentive to level up, because it never felt that you were making any real progression when you did. If you didn't try to min/max your character, you would probably fall behind the curve. If everyone is gaining strength at the same rate or faster than you are, you're just another face in the crowd. Who needs a knight in shining armor when the bandits could beat back the forces of oblivion with their ebony armor.