I'm not sure if this is a worthwhile topic of speculation, but I guess the moderators will let me know if it isn't

I'll be really interested in seeing how they do class choice through game-play. I only recently worked out how the question-based character class choice in Morrowind worked, because I started playing Arena.

It was much more apparent in Arena that each of the three options to each question corresponded to "cunning", "valour" or "lore", and your class suggestion was a function of your resulting levels in those three traits.

In Arena and Morrowind, you have 10 "votes" to distribute the three traits, so it's fairly easy to see how they could map that to the various classes. 100% cunning is a thief, 100% lore is a mage, 20% cunning, 40% lore and 40% valour is a spellsword, etc.

However, in Oblivion it's apparently going to be determined by your actions through the initial escape. So, how are they going to do that? There are (say) 10 obstacles, and the game checks how you take them on? What if you sneak for a bit, cast a spell at a rat, then run up and whack it with a blade? You've used all three behaviours on a single obstacle...

It all seems much more analog and difficult for them to classify. Any ideas or thoughts about how it might work?

This post has been edited by RobRendell: Oct 7 2005, 11:00 AM

this is a tough one. i really cant say how they would do this and im very interested to find out.

perhaps at one point they have something like you have a sword, a staff (which are now magic casting) and a robe or somethin that raises your illusion and you choose one of them and your choice contributes to the "votes"

This post has been edited by ShogunSniper: Oct 7 2005, 12:05 PM

Perhaps stealth characters have to actually open the fight with a sneak attack? That immediatly puts off the axe charging fight, or starting a fight with a fireball.

I've been wondering how they were going to do this, also.

If i remember it right the final guard only suggests a class you can change from his suggestion(sp?)

that is (thankfully) correct.

Yes, you can cast spells or rush with an axe in the beggining but still be a thief char in the class selection.

the game will probably give you three options of beating obsticuls, but you only able to do one. for instance, in your rat example, youll be able to sneak by, one sword strike, or one firebolt. it makes sence anyway.

what if you snuck by it then killed it with an axe/fireball?

it would be horrible if you HAD to be a thief jsut because you used stealth

ANd what, amy I ask, is wrong with stealth?

like i said youll only have one option. i think once your past it, it will register sneak. in my opinion anyway.

nothing it would aslo suck if you had to be a mage jsut becasue you used magick or a warrior because you used force

As I told you it's not gonna be like that. You can do whatever you want in the tutorial and become whatever you want after it. The guard just SUGGESTS what to become.

Yeah, that's what I'd expect - Arena and Morrowind both had an option to answer questions to determine your character class, but both gave the result as a suggestion only, and you could easily override it.

So, I fully expect that it'll be a suggestion only. That doesn't change my fascination with how they're going to determine what they're going to suggest, mechanically.

I hope there aren't too many tests like "which of these three items are you going to pick?" I mean, come on - everyone will take all three of them, kleptomaniacs that CRPG characters seem to be

Also, something else... before you've determined your class, you don't have any skills (or at least, the game doesn't know which ones are your major skills and which aren't). So, I wonder how it'll handle the player fighting, sneaking and casting spells, when it doesn't know what skills you've got?

Also also, in MW I believe that the list of your starting spells was a function of your skills; I didn't work out how it worked exactly, but I presume that there was a list of "starting spells" in each school of magic, and you started knowing any whose casting chance (which is based on the appropriate school's skill) was over a certain threshold. So, what list of spells does our as-yet-undefined character use in the pre-class-choice gameplay?

All food for thought...

This post has been edited by RobRendell: Oct 8 2005, 02:57 PM

I know it would suck if it wasn´t like that

It's more thorough, you see, from what I've been able to infer from the articles, it works like this.

Throughout the dungeon you'll be able to gain new weapons. You start with a katana, and therefore to start off you can only use a katana, then you to try out the magic system for a little bit, then you get a bow and you get to do some stealth work. After you figure out which one you like the best I think you'll get one of each type of weapon (so you'll probably get an axe or something after that) and you work your way through difficult obstacles where you have the choice of which one you want to do. There may be options all over the dungeon for every single skill, and if you choose to go with those options (say jumping to a higher platform to escape monsters) then that'll put more pressure on that skill.

Each class is really just a combination of skill majors, so instead of it being voted in favor of cunning, valor, or lore, it's voted in favor of skills.

Again, this is only an inference.

i hope it's like that so you can try the revamped magic, stealth, and combat before you actually decide on one rather than creating a character for each skill.

Yeah it is. I looked it up, the first dungeon takes a whopping 45 minutes.

For the first 5-10 minutes you will be exploring the different styles, for the rest of it you'll get them all at your disposal to try and figure our which style will work best for every obstacle. I think it serves more to figure out exactly what you want to do as opposed to trying to tell you what to do.

Ok, that's clever, and makes a lot of sense.

They've already got the system in place to increase skills as you use them... so it would be easy to say at the end of the dungeon "the 7 skills that have had the most use are their major skills". Although, will they have a class name for every possible combination of 7 from 21? That's 116,280 class names

However, I'm still uncertain about starting spells. It would be odd if everyone starts with the same fixed spell list, so they have the opportunity to use spells (and thus skills) from every magic school, but if they choose not to use any of them, they suddenly forget them when they leave the dungeon and decide that they're a 100% combat character. Maybe everyone starts knowing no spells, but there are opportunities to learn some in the starting dungeon, if you want.

It might be a bit hard to give you an opportunity to use every skill in a dungeon environment, too... mercantile, speechcraft, alchemy, armorer. I also avoided having Athletics and Acrobatics as major skills in Morrowind, since it made levelling up too uncontrolled, so I'll probably want to do the same in Oblivion, but they'll no doubt be used a lot during the initial dungeon.

Hmm, 45 minutes of character creation... while it'll be good fun the first few times, how long before the first "quick character generation" mod comes out, do you think?