MSFD on Bethesda's uber next-gen skill system

[Twinfalls]

Major skills START at a higher level than misc skills, but they advance at the same rates for a given skill level. To advance any skill, you have to use it a specific amount -- and that amount increases the higher the skill level. That's true for both misc and major skills. So if you have a major skill at 45 and a minor skill at 45, it'll take the same amount of skill uses to advance either.

If you advance Major skills 10 times, you can level up. Minor skill advancement does not contribute towards leveling up, but advancing ANY skill in between levels contributes towards increasing the bonus multiplier for the skill's governing attribute. So both majors and minors will contribute towards stat increases when you do level up.

Or put differently - "The key word is re-invention. We looked at the skill system, which encourages jack-of-all-trades munchkinism and discourages specialisation, and decided to RE-INVENT it - as the same idiotically simplistic system, but with LESS SKILLS to choose from!

Don't worry about those pesky 'decisions' you had to make when choosing 'majors' - get those minors up (which you'll do at the same or even faster speed as your majors) kidz, and a big fat multiplier bonus is YOURS, you uber MageKnightThiefDiplomats!

Link

 

[Vault Dweller]

Wow, that's really fucking stupid.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

In this case I don't have anything to say in Oblivions defense. I thought the armor penalties on spellcasting and sneaking were going in the right direction, but this goes in the opposite direction.
While the system will probably still work OK with proper self-discipline, I see no advantage to it over the previous installments. They got a bit carried away with the streamlining, I think.

 

[Zomg]

I liked a lot of Morrowind, but the character growth system was as obviously trash as the balance and economy (and a parsimonious description of this Oblivion system is, "It's exactly like Morrowind."). I had some hope that a designer had quietly fixed some of the elementary problems of the game and his work was being passed by in the PR, but apparently not.

It's another broken sub-system that a modder will have to to fix by hacking around hardcoding with kludgy script work two years after the game is out.

 

[MrSmileyFaceDude]

For every skill advancement -- 5 to 6, 20 to 21, 60 to 61, etc., a formula dictates the number of uses required to advance the skill. This formula is exponential, which is a change from Morrowind's linear progression. When you reach higher skill levels, it begins to take longer and longer to advance the skills.

The curve starts out pretty flat. It's fairly similar to this image.

So while your miscs will advance slightly faster than your majors at the start, it's not such a huge difference that you'll "catch up" to your majors unless you really, really work at it. And because you're significantly better at your major skills to start with, doing so isn't really in your character's best interest. Class is much, much more important than it was in Morrowind.

Like I said in another thread -- we have a lot of people playtesting the game. This has been tweaked and tested, balanced and rebalanced, and we've received a lot of feedback about level progression. We're pretty happy with it -- it's a much better system than Morrowind's.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

It still seems to me that this curve means that skills I use little will quickly increase to mediocre levels, while it is very hard to increase something beyond the mediocre level. So how is class more important if its only defined by your starting skills, when the initial difference is quickly depleted as the game progresses?

 

[Micmu]

OMG I'll be able to powergaem like in no game before! Minor skills STILL raise your attributes. With a mage I can do a few rat-hacks with a blunt axe (they are all successfull - no to-hit rolls) and up the strength goes. And there will be very few hits required at a lower skill level!
Way to balance.
Not to mention like... ATHLETICS. It will increase by itself! Simply NOT choose it as a major skill so you get MORE free SPEED.
What a hell...

 

[Zomg]

This formula is exponential, which is a change from Morrowind's linear progression.

That encourages unspecialized characters even more, then, since focused skills will simply run into an exponential cost brick wall. And that's saying nothing about how the system is basically designed to punish players who don't care to micromanage multipliers.

 

[Whipporowill]

This formula is exponential, which is a change from Morrowind's linear progression.

And that's saying nothing about how the system is basically designed to punish players who don't care to micromanage multipliers.

Or rewards those that DO. Isn't it all rather a matter on which side you take?

 

[MrSmileyFaceDude]

It still seems to me that this curve means that skills I use little will quickly increase to mediocre levels, while it is very hard to increase something beyond the mediocre level. So how is class more important if its only defined by your starting skills, when the initial difference is quickly depleted as the game progresses?

It's balanced so that that does not happen. We're not sitting here in a vacuum, plugging in numbers and hoping they work out -- we've had a lot of people playtesting the game for months, providing lots of feedback. We've tweaked and balanced the system based on that feedback and are happy with the results. It works very well.

 

[callehe]

your miscs will advance slightly faster than your majors at the start

that doesn't make sense. what's the logic in being able to learn level the misc skills FASTER than your specialized skills? that model isn't neither rewarding roleplaying nor based on reality - it only encourages "powerplayers".

 

[MrSmileyFaceDude]

callehe, at low levels you SUCK. If it took the same amount of time to advance from 5 to 6 as it does to advance from 55 to 56, why even give the player minor skills at all? You'd never get any better at them.

 

[Micmu]

It's balanced so that that does not happen. We're not sitting here in a vacuum, plugging in numbers and hoping they work out -- we've had a lot of people playtesting the game for months, providing lots of feedback. We've tweaked and balanced the system based on that feedback and are happy with the results. It works very well.

Ok I believe you.

 

[Zomg]

This formula is exponential, which is a change from Morrowind's linear progression.

And that's saying nothing about how the system is basically designed to punish players who don't care to micromanage multipliers.

Or rewards those that DO. Isn't it all rather a matter on which side you take?

Of course, but in this case taking the positive/negative wording interpretation isn't the point. There are actually a few interpretation-free underlying problems.

What rational reason is there to insert a breakpoint for this, when there's no particular reason not to simply use a continuous model? Why should massaging all of my, say, miscellaneous mysticism improves into the same time frame that I was getting better with a major-skill axe end up making me a stronger (higher-statted) person all around? Why not just accrete stat improvements with each skill improvement, like the Galsiah's Character Development mod, which is obviously superior to the stock system in every respect?

Secondly, the multiplier system fucks balance in the ass sideways, and even more so in a levelled-list system. There is a profound difference in Morrowind between the power of a multiplier-optimized character and a naive one, and if the general balance problems in Morrowind weren't so severe as to wash out the difference a game balanced for an optimized character would render an unoptimized one useless, and in the reverse case the optimized character would be completely unchallenged.

 

[MrSmileyFaceDude]

It's balanced so that that does not happen. We're not sitting here in a vacuum, plugging in numbers and hoping they work out -- we've had a lot of people playtesting the game for months, providing lots of feedback. We've tweaked and balanced the system based on that feedback and are happy with the results. It works very well.

Ok I believe you.

You don't have to take my word for it, but balancing this sort of thing has been a major, major focus of the last few months of development. We've spent a significant amount of time making sure systems like this work well. We're happy with it -- and hopefully most of you will be, too.

 

[callehe]

callehe, at low levels you SUCK. If it took the same amount of time to advance from 5 to 6 as it does to advance from 55 to 56, why even give the player minor skills at all? You'd never get any better at them.

yeah sure, but shouldn't your major skills at least follow a less steep learning curve? otherwise, what's the incentive to actually specialize in them? for instance, you could employ a system like this:

specialized skill: xp points = 1.5^(current level)
misc skill: xp points = 2^(current level)

it'd still be an exponential learning curve but rewarding specialized skills.

 

[Twinfalls]

Well, here's an update from the Meister-meister:

Picking a class is *MORE* important than with Morrowind because ONLY your class-related skills (your majors) contribute to leveling up. You only get 7 of them, instead of 10 (majors & minors) like you did in Morrowind. 7 classes that start at a higher level, 7 classes that contribute towards leveling up.

Of course levelling up does mean everything else levels up as well, but I can see his point in relation to MW. My problem is that there's no further class effect than the initial boost, so your big dumb Warrior can progress at clever Alteration magic just as swiftly as your clever Mage. While I suppose it mimics real life that one progresses quickly at new skills from the start (since you're going from complete inability), it won't feel realistic when you find yourself getting good at anything you turn your hand to, at the same rate, no matter how you've identified your character's role. And you'll have to pretend you don't know about the multiplier effect.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

It still seems to me that this curve means that skills I use little will quickly increase to mediocre levels, while it is very hard to increase something beyond the mediocre level. So how is class more important if its only defined by your starting skills, when the initial difference is quickly depleted as the game progresses?

It's balanced so that that does not happen. We're not sitting here in a vacuum, plugging in numbers and hoping they work out -- we've had a lot of people playtesting the game for months, providing lots of feedback. We've tweaked and balanced the system based on that feedback and are happy with the results. It works very well.

But we don't know who your playtesters are or what their views on RPG's are, if they even care for specialized characters etc. What criteria have been set for them to judge the game on? If its just the game getting to difficult or too easy for a certain class, then that is easily remedied by making all classes equal jack of all trades... So by itself thats not all that reassuring.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Well, consider this: learning a difficult skill in real life like medicine would take a long time, but first aid would take you no more than a few hours. It makes sense that the simplest versions of the skill would be easy to pick up and learn, but incredibly difficult to master.

There's no reason why Joe the Wannabe US Marine should take a longer amount of time to learn about first aid than John the Wannabe Doctor. John might have a keener grasp on anatomy than Joe, but learning the practice and knowing the theories are two different things. Given that neither John nor Joe know anything about medicine in practice, at the beginning, they would both learn the skill at the same, quick pace. Their differences in aptitude towards learning a certain skill would only be more evident in the longer run, with John actually specializing in medicine.

 

[Micmu]

...But we don't know who your playtesters are or what their views on RPG's are...

What other "RPG"s are there for xbox?

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

But we don't know who your playtesters are or what their views on RPG's are, if they even care for specialized characters etc. What criteria have been set for them to judge the game on? If its just the game getting to difficult or too easy for a certain class, then that is easily remedied by making all classes equal jack of all trades... So by itself thats not all that reassuring.

To add to that, we were told before MW's release that the testers assured you that the combat system was a lot of fun - that impression wasn't really shared by a majority of the customers, I think and on hindsight not even by Bethesda, hence the new and improved combat, I suppose.

 

[Vault Dweller]

It still seems to me that this curve means that skills I use little will quickly increase to mediocre levels, while it is very hard to increase something beyond the mediocre level. So how is class more important if its only defined by your starting skills, when the initial difference is quickly depleted as the game progresses?

It's balanced so that that does not happen. We're not sitting here in a vacuum, plugging in numbers and hoping they work out -- we've had a lot of people playtesting the game for months, providing lots of feedback. We've tweaked and balanced the system based on that feedback and are happy with the results. It works very well.

But we don't know who your playtesters are or what their views on RPG's are, if they even care for specialized characters etc. What criteria have been set for them to judge the game on? If its just the game getting to difficult or too easy for a certain class, then that is easily remedied by making all classes equal jack of all trades... So by itself thats not all that reassuring.

Excellent point. Reminds me of some Bloodlines playtesters who gave great feedback:
http://www.rpgcodex.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=5481

 

[Drakron]

The multiplyer was always viewed by the players as a exploit ...

So we dont get Mark/Recall because its a exploit but the multiplyer exploit is still in?

 

[ExMonk]

Did it ever occur to some of you here, that the bedrock of American jurisprudence, "innocent until proven guilty" might be a better method of proceeding when judging games not yet released--rather than the reverse? And why not make sure you understand the full ramifications of something (like skill progression) before you pronounce it anathema and excoriate it? Doing it your way, you often prove yourself ill-informed and end up embarrassing yourself.

 

[Chefe]

YES! MUNCHKINS WILL REIGN SUPREME!

ALL YOUR STATS ARE BELONG TO US!!!!

Bitches! This is going to ROCK HARD TOTAL ASS NOW! Yes! Yes! Yes!