On one hand, this sounds good. On the other hand, the system is abstract for a reason. For instance, if I just use swords (strength) and light armour (speed), does that mean my Endurance should literally never be able to go up? That would be a tad silly, right?
The problem with that I think is the assignment of speed to light armor, which doesn't really make much sense to me. IMO there's no need for separate light and heavy armor skills. What I'd like to see is Armor skill, which raises your endurance, and Unarmored skill, which raises your speed. So if you wear armor, you get better at soaking up the damage. If you don't, you get better at dodging the attacks.
That's the theory, anyway. Obviously without going back to the Morrowind swing-and-miss model, to be able to actually dodge attacks would require a solid combat system redesigned pretty much from the ground up to accomodate such a tactic. Dodging in Oblivion is completely pointless and does nothing.
Also, you're forgetting that you can block with just a sword, and Block is governed by Endurance. Which makes perfect sense to me in light of the above in terms of the choice between getting hit and soaking up the damage or dodging out of the way of the attack.
Then, of course, you have something like Luck, which nothing is explicitly based on and is enough of an abstract roleplaying character thing that I can't even see a way to represent gain through usage.
I think that's where the perk system might come in. Or you could use a spell to fortify your luck, which would effectively be a small-magnitude "fortify
everything" spell. Or they could just get rid of it. Unless they put Fallout's Sniper perk in (talking about F1 and F2 version here), there's no point to Luck anyway. There already are stats that determine the chances of success, they're called attributes and skills. Why have another one on top of that?
Judging by the way these games (and games in general) have been going, you'll probably be able to successfully use skills even at rather low levels. I've heard that's more or less how it was for the Oblivion lockpicking minigame. Basically, things swing towards player skill and away from character skill, to the point where character skill can be effectively overridden (at least to some degree) even where character skill should be the limiting factor.
That wasn't quite true with the lockpicking. If your Security wasn't high enough, you'd simply get a message that "this lock is too difficult". Likewise with speech - the minigame is easy even if your skill is low, but it puts a limit on how high you can raise the NPCs disposition with it. The minigame is there just to give the player something to do, the limit of success is still determined by the skill.
As far as leveled monsters/items are concerned, I don't think any of that should be necessary, even by Morrowind standards. In my opinion, having to scale things to the character's level means that you've failed to provide an interesting world with varied and workable challenges in it. Granted, in Morrowind it was fairly unobtrusive, but you still had things like leveled loot, which I hate; if I have a character who (for an example) specializes in taking high risks at low levels and using illusions, cunning, and sneaky skills in order to infiltrate difficult areas, why shouldn't he be rewarded with amazing stuff instead of punished for it with lousier stuff than he'd get when that area is a cakewalk? The answer, of course, is that game design is haaaaaaard and that would require areas that aren't easy to get into and loot even at low level due to balance and AI issues.
Y'know, I was going to argue for a balanced approach, but about halfway through that I thought better of it. You really do make an excellent point there. But that I'm afraid is just another thing that Bethsoft are too lazy to do.
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Topic: Elder scrolls V: Skyrim (Read 265762 times)