An Analyzation of Skyrim and Oblivion and their failings in Character Progression

[SajuukKhar]

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-My character in Skyrim doesn't show an aptitude for everything, when I got out of helgen my character had only one skill at 20, three at 15, and the rest at 10. He showed no real aptitude for anything but two-handed, and compared to Morrowind, and Oblivion, where my characters had 20-30 in most major/minor skills from the get go, this is a vast improvement.

-You are wrong, again. A monk class is a monk class form start to finish and you cannot turn a monk into a warrior. There is NOTHING in Morrowind, or Oblivion, that lets you change classes. Just because you raised your combat skills as a monk class, doesn't mean your monk stopped being a non-combtant, it means you forced yourself against the game to attempt to make him one.

-Funny, my level 81 character, with full dragonscale armor, smithed to legendary, hitting the armor cap, with a dragonbone sword, also smithed to legendary, which gives it a 75 damage rating, constantly gets taken to low HP by higher level monsters such as the swarms of Falmer warmongers, Legendary Dragons, and Master Vampires, I encounter. The only way to make your character OP in Skyrim is to abuse enchantening/restoration/alchemy/smithing, all of which require a knowing, and willing, act on the players part. Furthermore, even with 100 sneak, and every +sneak perk, +hiding in the darkest shadows, I have been unable to fire more then three shots before having bandits be alerted to me. Stop playing on novice.

What you talk about sounds more like the generic, and hyperbolic, statements people who have yet to actually play a game say about games in general based off of the overstated complaints of the day 1 players.

-No, grinding is the pointless killing of monsters without any direction or real reward. Killing low level monsters to level up your skills while doing quests is not grinding, because it is not directionless, nor does it have no purpose beyond just killing things to raise your skills.

-No dragon beyond the most low level dragons can be killed by villager, or guards. Unless you nerf yourself to stay at a very low level, dragons should easily overpower any obstacle, especially the Elder, Ancient, Revered, and Legendary, dragons, which I have seen wipe out groups of 6+ bandits, and a group of two giants, +mammoth, easily.

-Mods allow you to do everything for free, thus any and all content Bethesda could provide is bullshit, and they should stop trying period, "BECAUSE MODZ DO IT". Seriously, the "mods do it for free" BS is the most half-assed, BS excuse anyone can use. Also, perk reset wouldn't make sense in any situation outside of Herma-Mora's realm letting you reset it, Bethesda wouldn't just add perk reset in because there is no logical way to justify it in the base game.

-So, by your logic, the fact that you have to beat Alduin to get him to stop raising dragons is also BS? How is Miraaks taking dragon souls ANY form of difficulty, or forcing your hand? you should have like 1,000,000 of them by now already, and even in a new game, he doesn't do it until you go to Solthseim and start the questline there, so there is no rush to go out and beat him, or even start it, until you want to.

-I am not changing my onion on this at all, I said "as some would argue", I am not one of those some as I personally like its inclusion, though I don't see it as necessary. I was merely pointing out a commonly stated rebuttal.

-Good thing 2/3 of the Draugr you encounter AREN'T TRAINING, and remain very low levels. Even at level 81, I encounter more level 13-21 Draugr then anything.

-So you complaining about it being slow to level up, when you wanted to level up, but you chose not to use the stones that help you level up, because other stones have you other powers that were "better", although you dont rally need? That's like complaining that walking to Nevada from New york is difficult because you chose not to use a car that you were offered, and instead took the plasma TV that you didn't need because its a "better value". Its only your own damn fault.

-Who cares, it's singleplayer, do whatever you want, including not making you self OP.

-Many people did

-No, I am familiar with fantasy, are you?

-Bethesda chose Skyrim because that's what they had planned to do for years. Bethesda has had the Elder Scrolls story, all the way to like number 7, planned out since Morrowind. Also, we will most likely go to Hammerfell rather then highrock, that or Alinor.

 

[DoPo]

The thing is that in games where you can play a merchant type, that cash has power, that cash is worth specializing into a role just to become proficient in gaining more.

Which reminds me of an old game I played (old, as in 2004 but it doesn't look that good for a game of that year) - Spells of Gold. Your character can gain three types of levels and has three experience bars - they can get levels in warrior, by fighting, in mage, by casting spells, and in...wait for it - merchant by selling stuff for profit. I thought it was a really fun idea, really. Someone should do something even remotely similar.

Oh, and coincidentally I found the game was sold online at Gamer's Gate and Green man gaming, but for some reason the price is too high. At least it's half price now. I wouldn't recommend getting it unless you have any spare cash you don't know what to do with - it's not that good a game, but it's worth seeing at least, as it had some good ideas. And some very bad ones.

We're still quite limited as to how we can make our characters look .. I wanted to see how far the system could go but maybe in the 6th game they'll add more touches to it.

Related: I made a female Dunmer character and started playing around with the appearance sliders. Got something I thought looked right but she seemed too skinny. So when I went to move the "weight" slider (or width or whatver it was called) I found out that it was 9/10 of the way to the most heavy end. And it seemed that sliding between extremes caused the character to gain/lose about 3 kilos or so.

 

[Silly Hats]

But at the end of the day, Elder Scrolls is about traditional systems, levels, classes, skills, and stats. Dark Souls is about knowing what you're doing.

The Elder Scrolls games are really not about a traditional RPG experience.

Its about exploring a world.

Thank you.

It's about imagination and putting some effort into role playing. Maybe it's just me but every D&D that i've experienced was more about the thrill and experience of a particular quest in a vast world than shuffling from place to place because the game tells me to.

While the developers left some unfortunate gaps in the leveling system, a year ago everyone was getting 500 iron bars and craft spamming daggers then saying the game was too easy. It's an unfortunate aspect of the game but not the objective of the game.

 

[SajuukKhar]

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-Compared to Morrowind where you leveled your skills at the exact same rate, and could get UNLIMITED skill trains per level? Saying it is easier to get to 100 in all skills in Skyrim is easier is frankly BS, Skyrim at least makes you work for trainers.

-no, class systems do NOT, in any way, shape or form, prevent you from becoming a god in everything, all it does it move the list of skills around into categories.
-Yes, it does matter what the sheet says, this is a RPG. Saying what the sheet says in a RPG doesn't matter is like saying the RPG itself doesn't mater. Go up to a D&D player and tell them "what your character sheet says doesn't matter" they would laugh at you.
-No, that wasn't your point, your original point was that class systems dont restrict you into staying what you where.

-Way to ignore the entire point and dodge the issue.
-Yes, I am playing that way on purpose, that's the entire point. The game is meant to be played as you WANT to, not as you are FORCED to.
-But the skills AREN'T supposed to be used that way by normal people, they are meant to be used that way by exploiters, who have the perfectly valid option of exploiting to make themselves better.
-False, many bows in the game are bugged and produce sound when arrows are fired. Despite most bows being silent, not all of them are, and bandits CAN hear you.

-OFC changing the difficulty only increased the health/damage of enemies, that's what its supposed to do......

-I was using the term grinding as it has been used in MMORPGs for years. If you go up on WoW, or Guild Wars 2, and ask people what grinding is, they will tell you "it's killing shit for no reason just to level because there's nothing else, like quests, to do.", where as doing that exact same shit in a quest environment is not grinding. Your "technical" definition means nothing, not to mention its from TV tropes, when most people don't use the term in its technical manner.

-I shouldn't have to mention questing because I figured it was obvious that one would do shit while questing since there's like 500 quests in Skyrim, and its hard to not do something quest related. Also if your trying to switch from warrior to mage, it shouldn't matter that your warrior skills aren't leveling up that fast.

-No? you dont have to fight any Dragons except Alduin, how does anything I said about NPCs being bad at killing dragons have anything to do with what I said about some guy beating the game?

-No company could ever match modders, ever. Game devlopers have a limited budget, and limited time, to make content, where as modders have no budget, and unlimited time, to make, and improve on their content. Modders have ALWAYS been able to make mods better then anything game devs could put out because modders dont have the restraints that game developers do.

Yeah, I am aware of the Unofficial patches, and you what know I am also aware of? that Arthmoor, the guy who makes the paths, doesn't think Bethesda is all that bad, because even HE realizes what I said above is true. Arthmoor has stated many times on his unofficial patch threads on the Bethesda forums that part of the reason he is able to fix the game is because he has no time limit to do it.

-The Jills of Akatosh mend out most changes to the world you make, sometime after you make them. Furthermore CHIM is something that exists way on the sidelines of the game, its there, but most people dont know about it, and its impossible to write something like CHIM perk resetting into the world without it not making sense to most people. CHIM is, for the most part, a joke. It's there in lore, but its only there to explain shit like the construction kit, and why time pauses when you have menus open. Its not meant to be some hardcore game mechanic. You really seem to lack understanding of even the most basic principals of TES metaphysics.

-You never needed the Dovahkiin to kill dragons, that wasn't his job, nor did they ever say it's impossible to kill dragons without him.

-So what? reload a save if you dont like it, that's what I did.

-Not really, since the average build only need 50 or less perks to finish, even if you waste a few at the beginning, that means it should only take, at most, until level 60 to finish your build, and I got to level 60 just by playing the damn game normally.

-Mushrooms, flying jellyfish monsters, and large bugs, are all generic fantasy. Seriously, that IS a list of generic fantasy monsters 101. Hell Alice in Wodnerland had giant mushrooms, and giant versions of bugs, in it.

-I really want to know what you expect the world of Es to be like, because from what you have said, It really seems like you never liked TES's world, or its design, to begin with.

 

[croc3629]

You know what I believe would help with helping a character be more unique at the end game?

Unlockable class based skill trees. They would be made available at a certain level (like say, 20 and 50), you can choose up to two, and they are unlocked depending on the skills that you have levelled up, and provide unique perks changing your gameplay style to fit the class that it represents. Like perks to further define your role as a warrior, mage or rogue. A swashbuckler class tree that allows more effective use of a single weapon in one hand? A summoner class tree that allows you to summon unique daedra not available to those who do not specialise in that class tree? Any of the old classes from the previous games could be used as an influence.

Also, getting rid of stats would have gone over much better if the magicka, strength and stamina stats affected you in the same way the stats used to, without the multiplier nonsense.

This new system could be set up in such a way that your weapon strength will only be affected by the weapon perks and your attributes, health representing strength for melee, stamina for ranged. I suppose increasing weapon skill can influence critical strike rates. Stamina could affect player speed at certain intervals, increasing magicka could increase magicka regeneration and spell power(which should also be affected by perks in the magic school trees), with health representing strength, it could be a more major influence in carry weight, relegating those who concentrate on stamina to either travel light or get some perks in the pickpocket tree. There's a mod out there that makes some of those changes to gameplay, and while not everything I would want, its a step up for sure.

Little things like that making you feel more involved in your character's growth with all of your choices would go a long way to improving the overall feel of the game.

Edit: Also, Shouts needed their own damn perk tree. That cannot be said enough.

 

[Tallim]

Hmm now personally I thought Oblivion was a travesty of a game with awful mechanics and a terribly bland and forgettable world. Skyrim was better but only marginally, the character progression system simply feels like it's geared towards letting people abuse the hell out of it as a feature rather than making builds that make sense.

In that respect Skyrim was a fairly "fun" game but wasn't much of an RPG. It never felt like a natural progression in my character as I ended up doing lots of random things in order to improve stats to get certain perks. Every character I've played in Skyrim has essentially been an entitled sociopath with ADHD. That's simply the way the system is designed and it's pretty lazy mechanics.

 

[Murrdox]

One thing that has always been excellent in The Elder Scrolls series is its basic character progression system. In order to become the most excellent swordsman in the land you will have to actually use swords. In order to become the demi god sorcerer nuker you will have to start with your trusty fireball. In order to become the sneakiest invisible nothingness in the room you are going to have sneak past a blind deformed elf or two.

And this would have worked REALLY well in Morrowind and Oblivion if they'd managed to get the Monster Leveling system right. But they didn't, it was utter crap, which was one reason both of these games were so frustrating for me and I eventually stopped playing them.

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is probably one of the greatest RPGs ever made. It's grace period is pretty much the entire time between levels 1 - 30.

But only if you're perfect.

Seriously though, Oblivion is a very unforgiving game.


... Character progress in The Elder Scrolls is closely related to Character Level. Enemy Levels for the majority of enemies, and especially for the games main story bad guys ... As such, by the time you could begin maxing out skills and stats, it no longer mattered because enemies grew infinitely along with you.

However, the thing that really kicks this into the territory of bad design is that it didn't much matter that the enemies grew infinitely so long as the player did to.

But the player didn't.

In the hardest, yet most rewarding, dungeons, The Oblivion Gates, you would fight anywhere between fifteen to thirty-five monsters. This may not seem like much, but when you consider that most of these encounters occur in groups of 3 - 5 monsters, the fact that even with max armor you can be staggered, the fact that you are defending against physical and magical damage from all angles, and the frustrating fact that you are capped in progress by attack formulas that decided 100 was a good max, despite the ability to go above and beyond that within the basic vanilla game, and its understandable why someone could think maybe Oblivion was designed by someone who wasn't following the above goal statement.

This was my character, a two-handed melee monster that could crush bandits and imps like powder, but any tread into an Oblivion Gate and I remembered why I still had mountains of health potions... because I couldn't survive without them.

I find it really funny that YOUR experience with Oblivion very closely matches my own... but you seemed to forgive Oblivion and keep playing.

After I had done 3 or 4 Oblivion Gates, realized that I was essentially being PUNISHED because my character had leveled up and I wasn't FIGHTY enough, and that ALL THE MONSTERS IN THE WORLD were going to be like this for me, I pretty much wrinkled my nose in disgust at how much time I'd already sunk into the game.

I remember the final straw for me. I had just gotten done with an Oblivion Gate. I fought tons of those Deadre and their Dinosaur minions. It was hard, but I got to the end and I beat it. I was on my way back to town, and I had to fight a Goblin. A stupid little Goblin. As I was fighting this Goblin and LOSING I realized I was having to fight this puny Goblin EXACTLY like I had just had to fight through all those Dremora Knights in the Oblivion Gate. That just seemed really stupid to me.

I played around with a TON of game balancing mods that fixed some of these issues, but at some point decided that the story and roleplaying aspects of the game weren't worth all the time I'd spent trying to fix the combat, so I uninstalled the bloody thing. Really. I tried VERY hard to like Oblivion, and decided in the end it wasn't my kind of game. I'm still perplexed by people who think this is a great RPG. Just go look at that stupid Dialog mini-game you had to play over and over and tell me that's a great RPG.

I gave up on all Bethesda Games after this game and Fallout 3. Then a friend gave me Skyrim and I love it. I modded the crap out of it to get it to a point where I love it... but the correct game fundamentals are there to make the game fantastic.

Yes you can break the game by forging daggers to infinity. Or you can just NOT do that. Or you can install a mod that fixes the crafting system to make it more realistic to leveling up your other skills.

Those are my thoughts anyways.

I'm really confounded as to how you and I had seemingly the exact same frustrating experience with Oblivion, but you loved it still. Oh well, to each his own.

 

[Flare_Dragon123]

I'm really confounded as to how you and I had seemingly the exact same frustrating experience with Oblivion, but you loved it still. Oh well, to each his own.

I think there is something to be said about the world of Oblivion. I had the exact experience you did, and I didn't really keep playing for a while after I realized it. When I realized they were all going to be the same I stopped my initial plans (make armor sets based around the powerful enchantments from Oblivion Gate Sigil Stones) and in fact stopped playing. I only took time to get to the final checkpoint before the story ends and make a save game.

Then after a few months I went back to it. I played it and found myself having fun again. I even wrote a review saying Oblivion was a 7/10 game and held it in spite for a while.

But I went back after Skyrim came out and after I'd gotten bored with it and played it sans Mods and once again found myself rediscovering that original experience.

Whats brilliant about the Elder Scrolls is that before you actually break the game (or the game breaks itself as is usually the case) is that its a damn good game. The amount of effort and detail put into the world are quite staggering... yeah there's about ten million mods that do it all better, but its not fair to point at mods in this case.

See, when someone points to a mod its pretty much the case of, "well yeah, they improved that, because they had something for which to improve on." They didn't come up with the systems, the world, or any of that (usually) and even if they did they usually aren't coding every single piece of information. Its a sandbox, and quite frankly its amazing that Bethesda is able to polish so much based on how much work must go into a single one of these games.

Not that I don't think they couldn't do better, but if it means the difference between a five year development and a ten year development I'd much prefer the first. Unless the difference is really that staggering (and I don't think it would be)