Oblivion question for MSFD

[Seboss]

At least it looks good, we can't deny that.
C3PO looks more expressive than those Khajits however.

 

[Vault Dweller]

If anything, I would argue that choices that only affect events / storyline are cosmetic, since story, like visuals, is really just part of the presentation.

One can (or should be able to) change a story as easily as any other gameplay aspect. A story in RPG should be flexible enough to allow you to make your own story within the given parameters as you go.

A real gameplay choice should be something that affects how the game itself is played, such as affecting your strengths and weaknesses, your arsenal of abilities for overcoming obstacles, and the like.

That's character system and how a game reacts to it. I'm talking about which faction to chose, which quest to accept and how to handle it, whom to kill and whom to spare, and most importantly, how all those choices affect your gameplay.

 

[Chefe]

Just to clarify something, I talked to MSFD (via PM). He gave me a reason for not being here, and it's got nothing to do with that stupid meteor comment that was a long time ago, btw or not being able to handle some heat.

Is it because he's secretely in love with me but cannot jeopardize his marriage?

 

[Pr()ZaC]

Yes, that, and because he found out of the "bad quality anal sex" (or in your case I should call it TENTACLE SEX) episode you had with another guy :drool:

 

[whitemithrandir]

I don't think people using "pussy", "fuck" 10 times a post are older than 20 otherwise I feel sorry for them.

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GG I WIN

 

[LlamaGod]

lol canadians

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

I don't think people using "pussy", "fuck" 10 times a post are older than 20 otherwise I feel sorry for them.

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http://web.mala.bc.ca/davies/letters.im ... ficate.jpg

GG I WIN

He was talkinga about mental age, probably

 

[galsiah]

galsiah:
You do know that Oblivion is using an exponential leveling system, right? Maybe they are using your idea? They say that you will be able to max out all skills, but it will take a very, very long time.

According to MSFD, the formula for skill increase looks like:
( skill * constant1 ) ^ constant2

This is a reasonable system, and an improvement on Morrowind. It is not exponential in the mathematical sense though. Bethesda have used the word exponential a few times (unfortunately) either because their maths is rusty, or because they want to use a word that most people recognise (even though most people don't really know what it means).

A formula is exponential in a variable when that variable is used as the exponent (i.e. the power). In the above formula, all powers are constants (editable, but still constants). That formula is not exponential.

Something like this would be exponential: constant1 * (constant2 ^ skill), but it wouldn't work too well. Either the learning curve would be too flat to start with, or too steep later. What they are using is probably better, though the arbitrary cut-off at 100 still annoys me. Personally I'll probably change the constants before I start playing the first time. If skills are limited to 100, then I'd rather never reach that limit.

As for the Morrowind skill increases being "linear" - what does that mean? Either it can mean that skills go up linearly (with time), or that the difficulty of a skill increases linearly (with skill value). In the first case skill increases at a constant rate, in a straight line over time. In the second case it increases in a quadratic curve. The second case is accurate for Morrowind. However, the fact that skill increase depended on successes rather than uses meant that the rate of learnging increased with the rate of success, which in turn increased with skill value (linearly?). The result was that when both factors were combined, skill increased at about the same rate throughout the game.

The Oblivion skill increase rates should certainly be an improvement over Morrowind. As others have said, though, this is only one aspect of the problem with the whole system. I don't think much else has changed, so the following problems will still exist:
All characters can eventually end up masters of all trades (though it'll take longer).
The attribute multiplier system encourages the player to think about which skill is best to increase next, which skills he should concentrate on for this level...
Natural play is discouraged, since a character increasing skills in the best order will do significantly better than one who increases skills naturally.
Balance is negatively affected, since game difficulty is based on player level - not on player stats.

The whole system needed to be redesigned. At the very least, the multiplier system should have been changed to reward natural gameplay as highly as min/maxing gameplay. It seems that Oblivion's system will be a slight improvement, but unless much has changed that we haven't heard about, it is still a badly flawed system.

As it is, Bethesda has left us an open door. It's open only a crack and the hinges are rusted, but at least it's open.

True, but it's very hard to change the game in interesting ways with the Morrowind CS. Adding extra objects / creatures etc. is fairly easy - once you've got the meshes / textures / animations -, still time consuming, of course, but it couldn't be made a lot simpler.

Doing anything very different with the general gameplay is hard though. It's not possible to change the behaviour of menus significantly. There are no pointers, and no way to access references without either having a unique script on that reference, or refering to the reference directly (only possible if it is unique). If you want an example of the kind of stupidly complex, code duplicating, maintenance nightmare workarounds required, take a look at my pool table resource [at the bottom of this page: http://uk.geocities.com/galsiah/]. The CS wasn't designed to make pool tables, but if it were possible to store pointers, things would have been a whole lot easier.

 

[Drakron]

Only 21 skills sucks, I agree. But the difference is now each skill has 4 perks, and I think it is gonna change the role-play. when you will be good at blocking you will be able to disarm your opponent or stuff like that. I found this an excellent idea.

But perks are linked to the skill, they are not linked to level with makes then irrelevent.

Its not WoW talent system ...

 

[Blahblah Talks]

You want to try me. Here you are: I'm French. Do your worst you regressive soggybottomed American redneck

French people are French.

 

[Excrément]

Only 21 skills sucks, I agree. But the difference is now each skill has 4 perks, and I think it is gonna change the role-play. when you will be good at blocking you will be able to disarm your opponent or stuff like that. I found this an excellent idea.

But perks are linked to the skill, they are not linked to level with makes then irrelevent.

Its not WoW talent system ...

?? I didn't understand your point.
I didn't play WoW.

 

[Drakron]

WoW have a system similar to Diablo were you get a talent point to by a talent ...

In essence it makes characters of the same class diferent based on its talent tree ... a hunter can be a swordman, a beastmaster or a acher based on its talent tree.

TES:IV Oblivion perk system is based on skill and not level and WoW talent tree is varied (about 10 diferent talents per branch with classes having at least 3 branches), Oblivion just offers 4 perks per skill and I assume they are automatic awarded by reaching the required skill number requirement ... making then more a add on to the skill that a player build choice.

So as WoW talent is a support for character build variation, Oblivion perks are nothing more that special abilities granted upon reaching x level on skill, a warrior with 60 in bladed is always the same.

 

[OverrideB1]

?? I didn't understand your point.

Essentially, you are "given" a perk upon reaching a certain level. As far as I understand what has been said, the perk you get a level X is the same perk you will always get at level X - you cannot pick a perk )) from a list, or choose to have perk B before perk A.

So this "freeform" game is shoe-horning you into a specific character role depending on what major skills you pick - which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a role-playing game if the developer is pre-defining your role for you.

 

[Levski 1912]

Obviously new to this forum- I would have expected tubgirl from anyone else.

 

[galsiah]

I see the perks as a step forward, but also as another opportunity missed.

Skill perks would have been a good way to provide more choice - having the choice between various perks at a given point. It was also a chance to make individual characters unique - i.e. don't make it possible for one character to gain every perk in every skill, or even every perk in one skill. Both these opportunities have been missed it seems.

The Oblivion perk system gives all characters the freedom to be identical.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

?? I didn't understand your point.

Essentially, you are "given" a perk upon reaching a certain level. As far as I understand what has been said, the perk you get a level X is the same perk you will always get at level X - you cannot pick a perk )) from a list, or choose to have perk B before perk A.

So this "freeform" game is shoe-horning you into a specific character role depending on what major skills you pick - which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a role-playing game if the developer is pre-defining your role for you.

That doesn't make sense Override. In fact it reinforces the character choice you make in the beginning. Nothing wrong with giving the character choice a little more impact if anything MW had too little. Since when is that suddenly bad - since Oblivion is doing it?

 

[Solik]

Some mild counter-points, which admittedly are speculation, but not really to a greater extent than the original points were:

All characters can eventually end up masters of all trades (though it'll take longer).

While this is true, the fact that it takes longer should make it irrelevant for natural and casual gamers. This is basically a nod to the powergamer crowd that doesn't really harm the standard game like it did in Morrowind. I don't expect your average character played through one of the primary stories (or a timed equivalent doing random stuff) would really become good at everything. It seems like something you'd have to really focus on and work toward. In that respect, it's really not more of a problem than the console is. If they implemented it really well, then it should be faster to make several characters good at specific things than to power one character to be as good as the others combined.

The attribute multiplier system encourages the player to think about which skill is best to increase next, which skills he should concentrate on for this level

This was true in Morrowind, but the level-based cap significantly reduces how much you'd want to think about that in Oblivion. If you're increasing skills naturally, then the stats that are improving will be the stats that you use most often, and you won't miss out on extra multipliers like in Morrowind. One possible gotcha here, though, would be if it's possible to get higher total modifiers by increasing skills in the right way each level. If that's the case, it's possible that it'd be even worse than Morrowind, because now you have to keep other skills from increasing to maintain the maximum bonus per level. I really hope it doesn't work that way.

Balance is negatively affected, since game difficulty is based on player level - not on player stats

Why is this a negative effect? Stats don't increase nearly as significantly as skills do. In fact, I would think that player level / skills should be a much bigger factor than the stats you roll up at the beginning.

For the record, I'm not a big fan of the system either, but that's mostly because I hate treadmills. To me, the best systems are the ones where you improve in power by completing quests. It's why I've always liked the experience system, as long as there's still some point-buy system for skills to go with it. Quest experience rewards are fantastic.

So this "freeform" game is shoe-horning you into a specific character role depending on what major skills you pick - which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a role-playing game if the developer is pre-defining your role for you.

This makes no sense. The developers are not choosing your major skills for you. Choosing 7 skills from a total of 21 to define your character equates to 116,280 possible character builds, excluding race and birthsign options.

 

[galsiah]

...Nothing wrong with giving the character choice a little more impact...

But it doesn't. It gives character skill levels more impact. Since every character can eventually get any skill to any level, initial character "class" has little long term effect. It's true that you'll start out with a re-inforcement of your character choice, and continue with that for a while (depending on skill increases), but everyone still ends up the same.
There is nothing that a fighter can do that a mage can't do if he starts acting like a fighter for quite a while.

A character's "class" would be equally re-inforced if the perks were based on skill level, but you had a choice of which to learn, and were limited in the total amount of perks you could choose for a skill. E.g. perhaps you could eventually learn four out of six perks for each skill, in any order. Characters would have their class re-inforced (since perks are unique to skills), be given choice (in the order of learning), and would be given long term individuality (since no character could learn all six for any skill).

All this could be achieved even with the current (idiotic) "Every character can get to 100 at everything" model.

 

[Drakron]

Because perks are skilled based, not class based or even level based.

There is no character choice when your character choice is to be indentical to everyone else ... sure you can argue that characters might have diferent skill levels but Bethsoft made it so all lv 15 "fighters" will be about the same.

The issue is that Bethsoft is not clear on what they want ... a class system or a skill system.

If Bethsoft wants a class system they have to ditch the "master of all" skills and enforce restrictions as if they want a skill based system they have to adopt something like the SPECIAL system and ditch the idea of classes.

Hybrids do not work very well, the best class/skill system I seen is WoW.

 

[Nog Robbin]

?? I didn't understand your point.

Essentially, you are "given" a perk upon reaching a certain level. As far as I understand what has been said, the perk you get a level X is the same perk you will always get at level X - you cannot pick a perk )) from a list, or choose to have perk B before perk A.

So this "freeform" game is shoe-horning you into a specific character role depending on what major skills you pick - which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a role-playing game if the developer is pre-defining your role for you.

That doesn't make sense Override. In fact it reinforces the character choice you make in the beginning. Nothing wrong with giving the character choice a little more impact if anything MW had too little. Since when is that suddenly bad - since Oblivion is doing it?

True - but it was another option to add variety to characters. For example, a "warrior" may take "Blade", a "thief" may take "blade". When they reach level 60 in that skill (for example) they both get the same perk based on the skill - not a choice based on how they want to develop their character.
For example, if perks included special moves, an arena fighter could have selected the showy and crowd pleasing spin attack, wheras a thief may go for a targetted blow, and a mercenary could have gone for some kind of stunning blow. Instead, they will all get whatever is predetermined.

It IS an advancement over MW in that the skills actually bring something new to the character - but it could have been a point at which characters with the same skills could still be different. Instead, as with everything, it will be one character able to do/achieve/receive everything eventually.

 

[Solik]

Why impose artificial limitations? If you started out as a mage, then chose to focus on developing your martial abilities, well, you should become good at it eventually. The question is how quickly this actually occurs. If it's slow enough, you'll never get good at everything when playing a remotely normal game, which means characters will remain different based on your original choice of 7 skills, resulting in true 116,280 potential character builds.

One change that might be nice, though, would be if you could only get the perks for the seven skills you select in the beginning. Wonder if that's simple to mod in.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

...Nothing wrong with giving the character choice a little more impact...

But it doesn't. It gives character skill levels more impact. Since every character can eventually get any skill to any level, initial character "class" has little long term effect. .

I agree with what solik said above, while it CAN get all to the same level, it doesnt HAVE to nor does it have to be a problem, because its something that happens at very high levels. You already know that I think that way, and that I didn't even see this as a problem in Morrowind.
It's really only a problem for a certain type of gamer that feels the need to play the system, which for me is a non-RPGish way to play a RPG. But to each his own.

 

[Chefe]

This thread is boring.

 

[Drakron]

Why impose artificial limitations? If you started out as a mage, then chose to focus on developing your martial abilities, well, you should become good at it eventually.

But level is always based on the "Mage" class and that is a artificial limitation ... why in order to raise my level do I need to raise the major skills?

And so my argument that TES system is flawed by forcing a class based system on a skill based system.

The question is how quickly this actually occurs. If it's slow enough, you'll never get good at everything when playing a remotely normal game, which means characters will remain different based on your original choice of 7 skills, resulting in true 116,280 potential character builds.

Idiot.

When the game forces leveling in the a class system and lacks something like d20 Feat system or WoW Talent system you end up with exactly the same type of character on the class they selected at start.

The way to get away is raise skills that are not directly involved in the "level up" of the class but those will be raised anyway to reach the x5 multiplier.

So in the end we get about the same "master of all characters".

One change that might be nice, though, would be if you could only get the perks for the seven skills you select in the beginning. Wonder if that's simple to mod in.

Spoken like a true TES fanboy ... "the modders will fix it" without a) a cluse if that is even possible and b) once again depening on other people to correct Bethsoft mistakes and oversights.

I venture that no, you cannot mod perks for the reason they are tied to the skill point and so they cannot "read" if the skill is major, ninor or misc and they are likely hardcoded into the game.

 

[OverrideB1]

Sorry Ghan, but I see "perks"- as they currently stand - as being a major retrograde step in character development - precicely for the reasons given above. That a thief with a major skill of blade will get exactly the same perks as a warrior with the same major & skill level because Bethesda have tied the perks to skill rather than class. It will result in even more characters being exactly the same as every other character than the munchkin system in MW.