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Editorial 10 Things About Skyrim That Might Suck

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Shannow said:
Jung said:
Bluebottle said:
Jung said:
Mastermind said:
Jung said:
You couldn't even jump over a fence in Morrowind.

No, YOU couldn't. I could jump over half of Vvardenfell with the right magic.

I'm talking about jumping, not flying.

Yeah, sorry but Mastermind is right on this one. Buff your acrobatics skill and you can easily jump a house, add enchantment in to the mix and you can cover half the island (assuming you've also got a slowfall to prevent the inevitable pavement pizza).

If you say so. I just remember selecting acrobat as a skill and only being able to jump 3 inches. I was rather disappointed.
There was even a joke where you found a dead body with some flasks and a journal in the wilderness. If you drank one of the potions your jumping skill would be boosted to over 9000! (actually 3000, IIRC) for a few seconds. If you then jumped you could cross half the island in one jump. Only the effect would be lost before you landed, thus killing you. I found that funny...


Scrolls of Icarian Flight, you got three of them.
 

Wyrmlord

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Third-person view slo-mo ‘finishing’ move videos
I’m not sure why I haven’t heard anyone mentioning anything about this, but in that now-mythical 14 minute gameplay video seen below, it clearly jumps to a slow motion ‘finishing move’ when he takes out the last wolf. Now I hope to all of the gods in Skyrim that this is optional. Please, for the love of Akatosh, let me skip these or turn them off entirely. Maybe it was a demo thing.

Seriously? Damn!
 

DraQ

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Jung said:
You couldn't even jump over a fence in Morrowind.
That's what acrobatics skill was for. With acrobatics at 100 and low encumbrance you could pretty much hop back and forth between the roofs and street level freely.

What is it with all the clueless oldfags lately anyway?
:decline:

Teepo said:
On reddit, some person says "in those previous games, the extra skills were just useless clutter. It was a pain in the ass navigating everything in morrowind."

I wonder if that's true.
If you consider any stats at all useless clutter and only play cRPGs because you don't know of CoD, then yes, it's true.

Otherwise it's a tell tale sign that someone needs their 'sentient being' status revoked.

It was partially true for Daggerfall as language skills contributed relatively little to the gameplay, but created significant bloat, still, they could have been refined rather than streamlined away - DF skills were pretty fragmented, but potentially very interesting and versatile set.

Morrowind skills, OTOH, were pretty much consolidated to the point where further consolidation would result in skills making no sense.

I would actually remove as much as six skills from MW (which *would* result in as many skills as in oblivious - unless some new or old skills would be introduced or split-off) - four armour skills, making different types of armour (or unarmoured) suited for different builds based on attributes and playstyle by the way of protection/mobility/encumbrance tradeoffs, as well as athletics and acrobatics integrating their full functionality into attributes, since those skills were pretty much doomed to rise rapidly regardless of build.

Generally I'd remove those skills that have no way of introducing reasonable failure mechanics that could be used to regulate skill gains.

Too bad beth's cuts weren't in the least bit similar to what I had in mind, opting for complete removal of the only possible option to make the use-based skill gains balanced, and nonsensical unions of skills.
 

Spectacle

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10 Things about Skyrim that might suck:

1)The plot
2)The combat
3)The quest design
4)The writing
5)The character system
6)The graphics
7)The AI
8)The voice acting
9)The world
10)The journalists attached to Toddler's cock.
 

Xor

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Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
In a use-based system like the TES series has, no skill is truly useless. The only thing stopping the player from maxing every skill is time. Removing skills only limits player freedom and showcases Bethesda's lazy design.
 

Machocruz

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Navigating skills? You pick some in the beginning and then they take care of themselves through use. Hardly a chore.

And what is navigating EVERYTHING? This vagueness shows they have no real argument against the criticisms, and they are being an apologist because they have already decided the game is great, or have some naive notions about positive thinking.

And who determines which are the "extra" skills and
which are the proper skills? Some low expectation having mother fucker who didn't even hear of TES until Oblivion?
 

malichaixx

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villain of the story said:
Jools said:
Won't be able to play it until next summer anyway, and by then the modders will have fixed it. :)

Like that time they fixed Morrowind and Oblivion and Fallout 3, right? :roll:

That is unless what you mean by "modders fixing a game" is nudes/rape/prostitution mods :M

I'm over at TESNexus. There's TONS of outstanding mods for Oblivion and Morrowind--my partner has made several of them--that have nothing to do with those things. I don't think there were tons of these for Morrowind, other than the defunct Hellfire Club mod and Cenobite's skanky whore armor. I am sure similar things exist for Fallout 3.

The problem, though, is that these get all the attention. "Hurr hurr, real girls are scary, smut mods will fill the gaps!' *downloads and faps*
 

ortucis

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I enjoyed Oblivion but the levelling system fucked it all up for me. They fixed that problem in Fallout 3 so I am not expecting a levelling system fuck-up to ruin Skyrim at least. I don't really give a shit about TES lore or amount of pointless skills filling up the character-creation screen, so that's not a problem for me.

I will probably have fun playing Skyrim as long as it doesn't ends up as Dragon Age 2.

Also, I just want to say that I am looking forward to dragons in an RPG. I am surprised that such magnificent flying turds of enemies haven't been featured prominently in games like Divinity 2, Witcher 2, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Fucker 2000..

It's like developers refuse to acknowledge their existence. :o
 

Teepo

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Messages
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I submitted this article to reddit because... I am a shameless karma whore. Well, it has been perpetually at 1 upvote because every time someone upvotes it, it gets downvoted.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... _pure_sex/

Some gold in here.

"TL:DR This heathen is the Anti-Christ of Elder Scrolls fans and needs to be purged from this world with fire and baptized into the Faith of the Scrolls."

"Im tired of people analyzing every aspect of a game. No game is perfect. Shut up and play it, or dont."

Also:

"That swap from first to third person is actually a manual one. The person playing the game swapped the camera mode for the finisher, it's not something that's forced by the game."

Machocruz said:
Navigating skills? You pick some in the beginning and then they take care of themselves through use. Hardly a chore.

And what is navigating EVERYTHING? This vagueness shows they have no real argument against the criticisms, and they are being an apologist because they have already decided the game is great, or have some naive notions about positive thinking.

And who determines which are the "extra" skills and
which are the proper skills? Some low expectation having mother fucker who didn't even hear of TES until Oblivion?

:salute:
 

sgc_meltdown

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Who are these people to judge a game before it's released

little facts like this don't tell you anything about a game like skyrim, instead of imagining how these things work together you should play through the actual game first before criticising it
 
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catfood said:
One of them is mysticism, that much I know. There will probably be some that are combined such as acrobatics and atheltics, but I'm not sure.

Mysticism's effects were distributed to other schools. They already made it kind of useless in Oblivion by removing Mark / Recall and turning the Absorb line into Restoration magic.

Machocruz said:
And sorry, there is no defense for streamlining these skills. Who is this, or any asshole to say what skills are pointless or not? If a player used it and had fun with it, then it wasn't pointless.

Indeed, I still remember how cool it was when I raised Athletics by moving around
 
Self-Ejected

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Clockwork Knight said:
Machocruz said:
And sorry, there is no defense for streamlining these skills. Who is this, or any asshole to say what skills are pointless or not? If a player used it and had fun with it, then it wasn't pointless.

Indeed, I still remember how cool it was when I raised Athletics by moving around
:lol:
 

Qwertilot

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Well it still made a big impact on how fast you were at a given character level. In fact the most fun I had with Oblivion (w'out heavy mods) was when I took to running through dungeons and not killing anything. Which could be taken as a comment on the games design :)
 

Shannow

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Clockwork Knight said:
Machocruz said:
And sorry, there is no defense for streamlining these skills. Who is this, or any asshole to say what skills are pointless or not? If a player used it and had fun with it, then it wasn't pointless.

Indeed, I still remember how cool it was when I raised Athletics by running around and draining my stamina thus being less effective in combat on the rare occasions a cliffracer decided to suicide attack me.
Fix0red.

As an aside:
Some issues I see with Morrowind's skill system:
The effect on levelling up. Stats should simply rise with the use of attatched skills. The hybrid thingy they did was half-assed.
Don't show progress, it leads to obsessive behavior.
Make progress random: Successfully use skill 10 times. Afterwards a use has a 1 in 100 chance of leading to an improvement. The next a 1 in 99, the next a 1 in 98 and so on.
I also don't see any reason to max out at 100. (I don't like fixed max levels in general...*shrug*)
 

RK47

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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
The lack of challenge for one. I remember spending 15 minutes using the Daggerfall char gen and get two shotted by an imp in the first dungeon. I did not save my game.

Fuck. There's just no middle ground in there.

Contrast that to Oblivion where you had to make an effort to die in early game. And things either got easier or stupidly harder depending on what skills did you pick as primary skills. Sorry man, the game is just messed up on balance. Daggerfall had challenge and the feeling something can fuck you up behind every door in the dungeon. Skyrim won't have that.
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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Genma:TheDestroyer said:
Shannow said:
Jung said:
Bluebottle said:
Jung said:
Mastermind said:
Jung said:
You couldn't even jump over a fence in Morrowind.

No, YOU couldn't. I could jump over half of Vvardenfell with the right magic.

I'm talking about jumping, not flying.

Yeah, sorry but Mastermind is right on this one. Buff your acrobatics skill and you can easily jump a house, add enchantment in to the mix and you can cover half the island (assuming you've also got a slowfall to prevent the inevitable pavement pizza).

If you say so. I just remember selecting acrobat as a skill and only being able to jump 3 inches. I was rather disappointed.
There was even a joke where you found a dead body with some flasks and a journal in the wilderness. If you drank one of the potions your jumping skill would be boosted to over 9000! (actually 3000, IIRC) for a few seconds. If you then jumped you could cross half the island in one jump. Only the effect would be lost before you landed, thus killing you. I found that funny...


Scrolls of Icarian Flight, you got three of them.
Those actually inspired me to make a more effective locomotion spell.

Combine a high end but extremely short-term (only two seconds at most) Jump effect with a low power Slowfall effect that lasts for a long time, and voila, your have a cheap spell that allows you to cover vast distances quickly.

This is due to the fact the initial jump gets you to a considerable height and speed, while the Slowfall actually increases your velocity and jumping distance.
 

DraQ

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Jung said:
DraQ said:
Jung said:
You couldn't even jump over a fence in Morrowind.
That's what acrobatics skill was for. With acrobatics at 100 and low encumbrance you could pretty much hop back and forth between the roofs and street level freely.

What is it with all the clueless oldfags lately anyway?
:decline:

GET OFF MY LAWN!
It's my lawn now, grandpa.
Also, you're senile.

Shannow said:
Clockwork Knight said:
Machocruz said:
And sorry, there is no defense for streamlining these skills. Who is this, or any asshole to say what skills are pointless or not? If a player used it and had fun with it, then it wasn't pointless.

Indeed, I still remember how cool it was when I raised Athletics by running around and draining my stamina thus being less effective in combat on the rare occasions a cliffracer decided to suicide attack me.
Fix0red.

As an aside:
Some issues I see with Morrowind's skill system:
The effect on levelling up. Stats should simply rise with the use of attatched skills. The hybrid thingy they did was half-assed.
Don't show progress, it leads to obsessive behavior.
Make progress random: Successfully use skill 10 times. Afterwards a use has a 1 in 100 chance of leading to an improvement. The next a 1 in 99, the next a 1 in 98 and so on.
I also don't see any reason to max out at 100. (I don't like fixed max levels in general...*shrug*)
True, but the worst culprits were:
- lack of link between skill up and difficulty of the task
- skills that cannot fail (armour, athletics, acrobatics) and thus incompatible with the notion of difficulty of the task (should be fully integrated into relevant attributes or, in case of armor, removed - I might want to keep unarmored, though, to balance uncapped weapon skills).
- implementation of training

I agree about not having ceiling on skills but attributes definitely need one, otherwise you could have a character capable of dualwielding mountains (and that's another reason why acrobatics shouldn't be a skill but one of the aspects of agility). Attribute cap should not be static but determined by the build.

Also, HPs would definitely need a cap. Stamina/fatigue should be implemented in Daggerfallesque manner.


Vaarna_Aarne said:
Those actually inspired me to make a more effective locomotion spell.

Combine a high end but extremely short-term (only two seconds at most) Jump effect with a low power Slowfall effect that lasts for a long time, and voila, your have a cheap spell that allows you to cover vast distances quickly.

This is due to the fact the initial jump gets you to a considerable height and speed, while the Slowfall actually increases your velocity and jumping distance.
A refinement of mine:
1s 1pt levitation, 2s max jump, with feather, fortify speed and such. Re-cast prior to cratering (use enchantment for faster recasting).

Slowfall seems to actually limit horizontal velocity.
If you want to use slowfall (and are a person of wealth and taste) you should probably consider enchanting some item with negligible capacity with CE 1pt effect.
 

Metro

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ortucis said:
They fixed that problem in Fallout 3...

Not by a long shot. They tried but -- unmodded -- it's still laughable.
 

Claw

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DraQ said:
Jung said:
You couldn't even jump over a fence in Morrowind.
That's what acrobatics skill was for. With acrobatics at 100 and low encumbrance you could pretty much hop back and forth between the roofs and street level freely.

What is it with all the clueless oldfags lately anyway?
:decline:
Well, I don't know about Jung but I spent a significant amount of time running or jumping on my seemingly endless journeys with little effect. I guess a trainer is the best way to increase Athletics and Acrobatics, but if I could be bothered to try Morrowind again I'd simply figure out a way to increase my Speed and those skills permanently with the CS.
I actually didn't want to "cheat" when I was younger, naive fool that I was.


athletics and acrobatics integrating their full functionality into attributes, since those skills were pretty much doomed to rise rapidly regardless of build.
Really? Somehow they didn't seem to rise rapidly at all when I played Morrowind. I hope that with the removal of the Speed attribute and these skills, it will be possible to move around Skyrim at a decent pace unlike Morrowind.

It's funny though how Howard manages to sound utterly inane even when defending a sensible change. I guess "sounding smart" is one of the things he just doesn't do.
 

DragoFireheart

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My name is DragoFireheart, and I will not judge Skyrim before it comes out. It's unfair to the developers and it's completely impossible to speculate what features the game will have/flaws the game may have. Nope, completely impossible.
 
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Shannow said:
Clockwork Knight said:
Machocruz said:
And sorry, there is no defense for streamlining these skills. Who is this, or any asshole to say what skills are pointless or not? If a player used it and had fun with it, then it wasn't pointless.

Indeed, I still remember how cool it was when I raised Athletics by running around and draining my stamina thus being less effective in combat on the rare occasions a cliffracer decided to suicide attack me - unless I just used a potion of restore fatigue, conveniently made from ingredients available everywhere.
Fix0red.

Fixed again. Man, those things break so often, I can't even leave this place. Say...would you be interested in bringing scrap metal for me? I'll pay you 10 caps for each one.

 

DraQ

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Claw said:
Well, I don't know about Jung but I spent a significant amount of time running or jumping on my seemingly endless journeys with little effect.
Then your experience is pretty much at odds with this of most everyone else.

Athletics and Acrobatics tend to raise a lot, because you can't really help running and jumping when getting around and there is no reasonable way to make you fail your running or jumping attempt. As a result, those skills simply increased regardless of whether they were actual part of the build or not.

Additionally, should someone get around to fixing TES use-based system by factoring difficulty of an action into skill gain formula, effectively preventing grinding trivial tasks over and over, those two skills would be unfixable. They simply shouldn't be skills at all.

I actually didn't want to "cheat" when I was younger, naive fool that I was.
Unless you played as furfag or scalefag, you were pretty much bound to stumble upon the infamous BoBS which made you speed around like a fucking race car. If you did play as a beastfolk (like I tend to), there were many workable conveyance spells and enchantments to create, so lack of BoBS was hardly a problem.

Additionally, going for the Steed sign, naturally speedy race, speed as favoured class attribute and keeping your encumbrance percentage low did wonders to your movement speed right off the boat.

85 speed is pretty impressive and not just for level one ex-convict loser.

I hope that with the removal of the Speed attribute and these skills, it will be possible to move around Skyrim at a decent pace unlike Morrowind.
Except one doesn't follow from the other. Speed stat simply means that there is a range of possible speeds, not what the top and bottom movement rates are. Removal of stats controlling movement simply means that everybody will move just the same, which is pretty big fail in a series that used to have classes like acrobat.

It's funny though how Howard manages to sound utterly inane even when defending a sensible change.
That's because the change is retarded, not sensible.

Removing a possible and workable way to develop one's character is never an incline in anything resembling an RPG. Mobility can be an important advantage and valid focus to build your character around, especially in an open world RPG.
Todd ditches mobility stats removing main focus of multitude of roguish, monkish and guerilla character archetypes, Claw proclaims incline.

Codex, I am disappoint.
:rpgcodex:
 

Claw

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DraQ said:
Athletics and Acrobatics tend to raise a lot, because you can't really help running and jumping when getting around and there is no reasonable way to make you fail your running or jumping attempt. As a result, those skills simply increased regardless of whether they were actual part of the build or not.
Yes, I recall. Didn't seem to make a huge difference though, especially since my low speed didn't rise by more than maybe three points per level-up.

However, it's possible that I actually spent less time playing Morrowind than I thought and it just felt like an eternity to me. That would certainly explain why none of my skills seemed to amount to much.


Additionally, should someone get around to fixing TES use-based system by factoring difficulty of an action into skill gain formula, effectively preventing grinding trivial tasks over and over, those two skills would be unfixable. They simply shouldn't be skills at all.
Wait. When I say that I approve of removing those skills, you complain about it, but then you say they shouldn't be skills at all? What?


Unless you played as furfag or scalefag, you were pretty much bound to stumble upon the infamous BoBS which made you speed around like a fucking race car. If you did play as a beastfolk (like I tend to), there were many workable conveyance spells and enchantments to create, so lack of BoBS was hardly a problem.

Additionally, going for the Steed sign, naturally speedy race, speed as favoured class attribute and keeping your encumbrance percentage low did wonders to your movement speed right off the boat.

85 speed is pretty impressive and not just for level one ex-convict loser.
Well, isn't that sweet. Too bad maximizing my speed didn't factor into my character creation choice, and the somewhat higher content density around Sedya Neen did somewhat conceal my error in the beginning.

Maybe Vogel was right and you can't expect a player to make good decisions before he has played the game. Wait, nevermind. I just remembered: It's actually shitty design that's to blame here.


Except one doesn't follow from the other.
No, but it's likely.

Removal of stats controlling movement simply means that everybody will move just the same, which is pretty big fail in a series that used to have classes like acrobat.
Yeah, because an "acrobat" is someone who walks around very fast. I would love to see a good implementation of stats, but I prefer removing them over a Morrowind implementation, and I wouldn't expect actual improvement from Bethesda.

That's because the change is retarded, not sensible.
I don't know any other RPG where a lack of skill negatively affects my travel speed, so it was a dumb idea in the first place. If "no skill whatsoever" allowed for a decent playing experience and you could gain an advantage by improving your character's abilities, it wouldn't be an issue. But in Morrowind, the movement speed with low Speed and Athletics is atrocious.
The design of areas like Vivec didn't help either.


Removing a possible and workable way to develop one's character is never an incline in anything resembling an RPG. Mobility can be an important advantage and valid focus to build your character around, especially in an open world RPG.
Todd ditches mobility stats removing main focus of multitude of roguish, monkish and guerilla character archetypes, Claw proclaims incline.
You assume incorrectly that I either care or saw even the slightest chance of Bethesda making anything resembling a decent RPG. Besides, "being able to walk at a decent speed" isn't interesting character development.

Maybe with the removal of RPG elements, Bethesda can at least make a decent Hack&Slash action adventure. I'm not holding my breath here.
 

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