Good post. I agree very much. Want to say I'm a big fan of player skill > character skill, if only because it's funner.
There's one thing I want to bring up. Is it possible too much abstraction can make a system shallow(er)?
Actually, that's pretty much inevitable.
If there was such thing as lossless abstraction, we'd never get the detailed model we try to abstract from in the first place.
The thing is, unless you have your own dedicated universe, abstraction is inevitable, so basically the game is as follows:
- disregard anything past boundary conditions (make sure they are actual boundary conditions)
- simplify within boundary conditions as long as overall behaviour stays close enough
- pay special attention to interesting corner cases and control - you don't want to smooth those over as the former are likely the most relevant features of your system and the latter determine what *player* can do with it
The last point in particular has around 100% failure rate and it's something that can kickstart a neverending spiral of bad design - take everyone's favourite - HP systems. You start with ripping a HP system from a wargame,
units characters have around one dice of HP, which means that pretty much any attack can potentially one-shot them although more powerful attacks have better chance of doing so, so do repeated hits. It's a good system for a wargame, but oops - it turns out that you have locked the control over not getting hit on the wrong side of your abstraction. This means that player can't really do anything to avoid getting hit so survival becomes a game of chance which you can't have in a game about a bunch of characters rather than battlefield with expendable units. So you start working around your initial mistake with more retarded design - by introducing HP on level ups and HP bloat - HPs lose their original meaning as statistical measure and become some sort of retarded not-dying shield, which in turn leads to retarded reinterpretations of HP or gameplay further divorced from reality - the retarded spiral keeps turning.
I'm not saying that perks are bad, but they are added detail, not abstraction.
Correct me if I'm wrong but actual cutscene paralysis (getting paralyzed because of cutscene and cutscene alone) still doesn't seem to be much of a thing in Skyrim.
It's not, and in some other type of a game you probably wouldn't even notice it. When the game lets you move around completely freely for 99,9% of the time, that 0,1% can suddenly feel pretty jarring. Anyway, it was just a response to your Oblivion example, as cutscene paralysis wasn't much of a thing in Oblivion either as far as I remember. Or maybe I just didn't notice it, and in Skyrim it somehow stood out more.
I'm not saying it was frequent, just that when it did happen it simply locked some or all of your controls away with no explanation or warning to keep you from interfering with awesome scripting. It was *more* grating than anything in Skyrim and the simple fact that they bothered with actually introducing mechanical or plot-wise constraints when it happened in Skyrim indicates that it was a problem in OB.
To be fair he's got a point. Skyrim had only a few quests that went beyond the GO TO DUNGEON, KILL STUFF, FIND THING. The Sheogorath quest comes to mind, and some of the master level magic quests.
Oblivion on the other hand had a quest where you sleep in an inn which is a ship, and as you sleep it is hijacked by pirates and sets sail. You have to beat them in order to save the crew and get back to shore.
Comparing some of the Oblivion's best to Skyrim's baseline doesn't really prove anything, besides, even if we want to play this game, this quest exemplifies key problems of OB quest design - themepark of "cool", tightly scripted quest ideas functioning in vacuum without regard to making sense or respecting player's agency.
And how the fuck did they sail past Leyawin?
The perks actually do a very good job of making you build an actual class and character type. It's much better than the cluster-fuck Elder Scrolls was before, where you could be the master of everything in 10 levels if you wanted to be.
I don't agree that they do that good of a job in vanilla but mods like Requiem should be a good enough proof of what can be done with this system.
My opinion is all the Elder Scrolls games from Arena to Skyrim have unique things about them which are good features.
In oblivion, for example, this good feature was uninstaller.
I don't know, as much as Oblivion was a worse game overall.... if they transferred over the story content of Oblivion into the Skyrim engine, I would prefer Oblivion.
Except the content was one of THE things that sucked massive balls in OB.
Hilariously awful level scaling was just the cherry on top of the cake.
For me the main thing that ruined Elder Scrolls 4 was level/item scaling completely destroying all sense of progression. Honestly the dungeons wouldn't be so bad in Oblivion if there was something, anything unique to fight or find. I guess I preferred the story of Oblivion gates and a cult trying to wipe out the emperor's line over the eating dragon souls BS of Skyrim.
Except any political aspects have been cut out, metaphysical ones mostly followed the suit and all that's left was running around and closing obivion gates. Ok, the infiltration of the cultists' hideout was kind of neat, you could even choose your approach, but everything else about the MQ was shit.
Not to mention almost all of the guild quests were superior as at the very least it wasn't always go to dungeon x and kill everything. From the Warrior's guild druggy competition to the sneaking into and around the blind moth monks abode.
Nah, they were awful. TG was the only one that was OK, DB had ocassionally well designed, but tightly scripted, without room for creative solutions, individual quests, but as far as the questline goes, you were dragged along with a bunch of edgy morons and an idiot ball forced up your face, both FG and MG dealt around fight against stupid evil antagonists that only existed for the sake of being antagonists and arena was about as fun as you could expect from repeatedly duking it out with different morons in the same circle of bloodied sand.
He aced it so hard you had to spend half of it with idiot ball rammed up your face.
Also had to hang out with an embarrassing bunch of retarded goth sociopaths, because the writer's brain has apparently blown a fuse when trying to come up with characters for assassin guild
This. I'll never understand why people liked the DB questline in Oblivion. A couple of the dead drop assassinations were actually fun to carry out (but none of them had anything on some of the creative shit you could pull off in the Morag Tong writs in Morrowind). The rest of the quest line was completely, utterly, irredeemably retarded. The only guild quest line that had some redeeming value was the Thieves Guild, and it wasn't because of the storyline, but because the actual quests were among the best the game had to offer. Which may not be saying much, but that's Oblivion for you.
This.
And creative shit in Morrowind was systemic rather than depending on carefully scripted solution - you could be as clever as you managed to (unfortunately that didn't apply to the AI).
I think that one of the reasons TG was relatively ok in OB was that it was the only questline (apart from the Arena, but seriously now) the esteemed devs didn't manage to cram derpy antagonists into. It still suffered from some massive derp moments, like lack of penalty for killing those blind monks (or them starting to see thing due to ale abuse) or that giant hourglass near the end where they were evidently recycling props due to having run out of ideas, but at least it was refreshingly to the point.
Even the College of Winterhold main questline in Skyrim, which left you with the vague feeling of mental discomfort and pointlessness, was immeasurably better than any of the questlines in OB.
faces morons talking about mudcrabs.... it was game which made 
Mainstream in RPG genre. If they did Morrownind in Skyrim engine with perks system and fun to play melee I would be happy Imperial. Played Skyrim with some mods and when you don't touch main quest (by not retrieving stone tablet) but instead doing only Improved by mods Civil War, Companions, become thane of all holds and put Thieves guild behind the bars not to mention slaughtering foul cultists from Dark Brotherhood from vanilla its Good game; not as vast as Morrovind when it comes to content but close. Oblibion even modded to hell and back was 
cause Commissar never enjoyed role playing criminal scum which are two best guild quests lines Blades are 
