Awww I miss my vault-boy bobble head! My kids broke it some time ago, his little feet snapped right off.
…Actually those same kids are just yet another reason I won’t be dropping $90 on this statue…
But but but. . .it’s Alduin, the eater of worlds!!! Whatever that’s supposed to convey.
Teiman
1924
Thats a really nice Pterodactyl!.
In the storyline, the Earth has been ravaged by pollution and natural disasters of all sorts. To escape this, humanity built vast underground cities in which they lived for approximately 600 years. Upon emerging, the humans found that the world had been reclaimed by previously extinct lifeforms (most spectacularly, dinosaurs).[3] In the new ‘Xenozoic’ era, technology is extremely limited and those with mechanical skills command a great deal of respect and influence.
The dragon mini looks pretty cool. If it was unpainted and of the size and quality it appears, I’d certainly consider paying $90 for it. With or without the game.
The Dunmer on the other hand, kind of looks like a scraggly, starving Chaos Dwarf. I’ll admit I’ve never been entirely sure what they were supposed to look like, but I’d kind of assumed something slightly more elfin & slightly less gnome.
That’s really vague, but it sounds suspiciously like CharDevFail v5.0
A massive problem that has persisted across the TES games, is that difficulty is level-based, while character development isn’t. At most, character level indicates the minimum total amount of skill points a character has spent. It gives no indication of what a given build can actually do.
Oblivion served that bad idea with an extra helping of bad, since it scaled practically everything according to character level. Consequently combat oriented builds were never challenged, and non-combat oriented builds got eaten by everything, every time.
It’s not terribly complicated to solve those problems. Just derive a handful of values from what a character can actually do, and base game balance on those values instead of character level. That approach has the further advantage that it can say something fairly accurate about play style, which can be used to generate random encounters that match play styles. This wouldn’t just make the game better, it would make replays more interesting.
What I can’t readily see, however, is a not absurdly complicated way to level scale, without recreating the problems of the previous games.
You seem to be forgetting the perks. The reason this system might actually work (for the first time in a TES game) - is that your performance will largely depend on your perks, and you will have more of them the higher your level is.
Effectively, this will be the first TES game with meaningful character builds.
Well, in theory that is.
Bethesda always sucked at mechanics and balance, even with Fallout 3.
We’ll likely have to mod it for a truly meaningful challenge, but it still seems miles ahead of Oblivion for this aspect of the design.
Sarkus
1927
I’m starting to get pretty excited about this game. Putting a screenshot as my desktop background probably isn’t helping. ;-)
On the other hand, while I do think Fallout 3 showed Bethesda had grown a bit from Oblivion, what has been revealed about the story so far makes me think we are once again facing a main storyline that we tolerate for the open world aspects of the game. And all Fallout New Vegas did was reinforce (as a comparison) just how far Bethesda is from knowing how to write that main storyline.
Hopefully the interface will be better at least. That stupid shift-left click default to drop stuff (that’s not even noted on the in-game key bindings) gets me every time I start playing Oblivion.
In my mind, this seems like a way, way better system than a big grid of icons. Scrolling through one big list would be bad, but a nested list, sorted by categories? I like it.
Teiman
1929
A possible solution can be a contextual menu.
You choose right hand, and a menu shows all possible items that you can use on the right hand. Terraria have something like this for crafting, and it completelly save you from remembering complex recipes.
You choose the “herbs bag”, and it shows all herbs.
Skipper
1930
An example of previously broken level mechanics was having to put spell groups as untagged skills just so that you could manually increase your level in them enough to get a few good spells (most were tied to the skill level, not character level) before you leveled too quickly. Otherwise you’d end up level 10 able to cast like 2 things to use in combat that were worth a damn for damage. The tagged skills were just broken.
You would also only get a bonus for attributes depending on how your skills were used prior to level-up. That resulted in trying to manually balance all your tagged skills for the last 1/4 of each level in order to get the right bonus for attributes, plus of course, remembering to use trainers for 5 additional skill points allowed per level.
Anything they do would be better than that system in my opinion. It was too noticeable, too gamey, and didn’t sufficiently rate a player per scale in a system where creatures are based on the characters level. I remember hearing of level 2 characters finishing the game, and level 20+ characters struggling in the late game. Something wasn’t right. Amazingly though, it was a fun game to play even despite the level mechanics.
I did indeed, but assuming they’re anything like FO3s perks, what I said still applies.
Again, when the value used as the basis for game balance isn’t indicative of character ability, the game will only be balanced for a minority of the possible character builds.
Say you get a perk every level, but half the perks aren’t combat-related and the half that are combat related may or may not create powerful synergies. If something like that is the case, then character level is only a very slightly better indicator of the combat ability of a given character build, than the weather outside the player’s window.
In other words, the exact same problem I was talking about in my previous post. And the same fix still applies, it just has to account for perks too.
Effectively, this will be the first TES game with meaningful character builds.
Heh, depends on your definition, doesn’t it? :p
- But you might kind of have a point, at least in the sense that TES characters have always been able to be masters of everything. Build differences mostly came down to how badly you screwed your HP, Magicka & Stamina, and whatever differences in skill levels prior to hitting character level “I have 100 in everything.”
We’ll likely have to mod it for a truly meaningful challenge, but it still seems miles ahead of Oblivion for this aspect of the design.
Couldn’t agree more. But the talk about character levels makes me suspect that TES5 will still be miles behind pretty much everything that isn’t TES. Which is a little sad.
I obviously can’t know what Bethesda did with this system, but what I would have done with these perks - is to give the enemies sensible combinations of them.
Meaning, if you’re a level 30 character and you’ve chosen your perks at random with no effort to create synergies - and you encounter a level 30 enemy with a combination of perks that work together - you’ll die.
That’s the ideal version of it, anyway.
We all know Bethesda wouldn’t want to punish players - so the best we can hope for is the middle-ground. Which would still be miles ahead of Oblivion.
Heh, depends on your definition, doesn’t it? :p
Obviously.
Couldn’t agree more. But the talk about character levels makes me suspect that TES5 will still be miles behind pretty much everything that isn’t TES. Which is a little sad.
Well, as long as the series is improving - I think that’s nice. I’m not sitting down to play Skyrim for an intricate/complex experience with amazing mechanics.
I’d love for that to be the case, but it’s Bethesda.
I’ll get a huge freeform game with a lot of immersive qualities. I’m happy with that alone - and everything on top will be a bonus.
What this series needs is turn based combat (ducking)
I thought it was mentioned that regular stats like health, etc automatically go up as you gain a level and the player choice is then to assign a point in whatever perks you want.
How would that gimp someone by not appropriately considering their level? If that’s how it actually works, then I’d think it’d be easier for any scaling to be more appropriate.
DeepT
1935
One thing I noticed in the demo was that his mana regenerated really fast. I hope it really works this way. One thing that has always been a problem with these games is that magery primary form of DPS always sucked. You would blow your mana on a normal dude and he would only be half dead. Buffs and utility worked, but not DPS.
Now if you recharge in a few seconds of not casting spells, then that is a game changer.
A deeply appreciated one at that; always pissed me off how you would cast detect life and, say, a fire spell, and you were forced to melee your way out of trouble.
That’s probably just for the Demo tho.
As I recall mana regen depended on Willpower and at the higher levels of magic use with high Int and high Will you could do decently for yourself. Just never add splash to a damage spell, jesus. That will suck the mana right out of you.
DeepT
1939
I remember in morrowind trying a mage. I had the starter fire ball and went into some cave. There were like 4 guys in the cave. The first guy I killed, but was tapped out on mana. It would take a full day to recharge my manna. I bludgeoned the rest to death with my staff.
I think that is as far as I ever went with a pure mage.
In oblivion, I used it for buffs. Mainly lockpicking or speech craft (so you could convince anyone). The buff only lasted like 3 seconds, but that is all you needed in a conversation tree.
I did try a few fireballs for fun, and it was just like morrowind. You might kill one mob, but your mana pool was toast and would take a good long time to refill. It would really be nice if they solved that problem and made a pure caster really viable.
Well, to be a pure mage you do need to take advantage of the overpowered alchemy in the beginning (which is pretty fun, but damn if I didn’t spend a lot of time clicking on flora.)
