Morrowind, as with Daggerfall before it, has skills improve through use, which then generate level increases that provide attribute points (not skill points, which increase from using that skill, and there are no experience points). The only substantial difference between those two games is that in Daggerfall each level up provides a few attribute points that can be spent freely, whereas in Morrowind each skill is tied to a specific attribute and on level up the player selects three attributes to increase where each has a modifier from x1 to x5 depending on the number of skill increases associated with that attribute since the last level increase. Unfortunately, the Morrowind system encourages the player to game it, since it is ideal to group 10 skill increases (but preferably no more than 10) in skills associated with one attribute between level ups in order to obtain the maximum x5 modifier.
Oblivion was unchanged from Morrowind, keeping the "learning by doing" skill system that existed since Daggerfall and even maintaining Morrowind's attribute/skill modifier system. Skyrim still has a "learning by doing" skill system, but it eliminated attributes, instead asking the player to select one of health/magicka/stamina to increase on level up while also giving the character a perk point to spend on the new skill-related perk tree system, inspired by perks in Fallout 3/NV but substantially different in that each skill has a series of related perks, with dependencies forming a tree-like structure.
Yeah, that's how I remember it too. I remember being a little annoyed with
Morrowind's level-ups for that reason - I felt like the punishment was too severe for using suboptimal builds, i.e. those that didn't focus on skills grouped by attribute. Didn't Morrowind and Oblivion have "perks" too? I feel like when skills got to 25, 50, 75, 100 there was a little bonus. Maybe just in Oblivion?
Anyway, when Todd announced that
Skyrim was doing away with attributes, I was outraged like everyone else. When I actually played it, I realized not only did I not miss stats at all, but I actually had
more control over what my characters became good at. I wasn't sacrificing xp efficiency if I developed skills previously governed by different stats; now it was all about the LBD. There were now
more builds available, many more, not fewer.
Moving on to
Fallout 4, Bethesda necessarily took a step backwards - they couldn't break from the series format of "just get xp, who cares how". Kill 50 raiders to get better at lockpicking type of play. Obviously I'm not a fan of this, and anyway the game in general feels much more constricted in a much more W+LMB style of play. I didn't feel I should hack more computers to get better at hacking when it was so much easier to just shoot stuff.
Which brings us to the actual thread topic,
Starfield and what is good, or might be good, about Bethesda games. We haven't seen the
Starfield progression system in action yet, but my understanding is that once a skill is unlocked, as in
Skyrim it is increased "by doing", but in a more elaborate and engaging way than before: by overcoming specific challenges. Instead of "shoot 50 guys for +1 Pistol skill, then shoot another 100 guys for +2 Pistol skill", it might be "shoot 50 guys for +1 skill, then hit 50 pistol headshots for +2 skill", with stuff like this driving not only the character to get more experience, but the
player learning more about the game as well. I see a lot of this kind of thing in games lately, where achieving specific things gives you not only a little flag on your Steam profile, but an actual in-game benefit as well, and driving towards those goals teaches you more about the game. Example, in
Shadow of War there's a thing called "Ledge Takedowns" where you're if you're hanging by your fingers and an unaware orc walks above you on the cliff edge, you can get an instant stealth kill. The game showed me how to do those but it seemed hard, so I never really bothered with them until the game put a little bonus objective to a quest, so I revisited the controls and learned to do them, and now I've added it to my bag of tricks. Will this type of incentive be fun in
Starfield? I don't know yet, but I can easily see how it could be. And I like the idea of earning my grandmaster skill level by pulling off all kinds of weird scenarios, not just repetitively shooting 10000 guys.
