Oh, come on, Bethesda!, Closed cities AGAIN? Options

[Thomas Kaira]

May I ask exactly why? Oblivion could take open cities in perfect stride. The only reason the cities got closed at all was because BethSoft panicked about the console support.

Granted, they did have an excuse then, as they only received the Xbox 360 to do actual testing over the last three months of dev. time, but here... not so much. The current excuse is that the consoles can't handle what they are doing. Trouble is, the industry always manages to surprise us with exactly what those consoles CAN handle.

So long as the NPC count in the cities goes up by at least twice what we got in Oblivion, I will be understanding and shall complain no more. If not... well... then I will KNOW you are just being lazy. I want to see progress in making these games the best they can be, I don't want Skyrim to simply be Oblivion HD.

Source

In other news:

- Alchemy is becoming a stealth skill. (Approve! Approve!)

- There will be no minigames involved with the crafting skills (Thank you!)

- Giants, Draugr, and other creatures will receive a bit of culture from the AI engine (Looking forward to this.)

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: May 3 2011, 07:07 PM

[Destri Melarg]

First off I need to stress that I am not a Bethesda apologist here. I have the same concerns about the future of the games as the rest of you. I just don’t understand the negativity about all of this. Can’t we at least try to give Bethesda the benefit of the doubt until we have the benefit of seeing the game?

Classes are no more because the class system tied directly into the leveling system and both were flawed. Maybe they should have fixed it to give us something better, but they chose instead to try something new. Something new does not automatically equal ‘dumbing down’ for all you PC snobs out there (ok most of the time it does ). I give Bethesda kudos for scrapping a flawed system rather than just recycle something that didn’t work properly.

Attributes . . . this one just floors me. Other than overall magicka and encumbrance (both of which are better addressed with perks), what did attributes really do for you in Oblivion? The base weapon (silver does more damage than iron for example) plus enchantments determined weapon damage more than character Strength or Agility. Mastery of a particular school of magic determined spell cost more than Intelligence, Willpower, or Personality. Health gains per level were a static ten points plus whatever your Endurance rating was, meaning that you would still have decent health even if you never touched Endurance.

As for the argument that attributes helped to make distinctive characters, I would ask one simple question. How? Most players max their character’s attributes. I have several characters in Oblivion. My Bosmer is just as strong as my Orc who is just as intelligent as my Altmer. Race, clothing/armor, weapon choice (if any), and faction affiliation did more to make characters distinctive than attributes. I think that we all have a tendency to panic whenever we feel that we are losing something from our beloved Elder Scrolls, no matter how ridiculous that something is. I won’t argue that the games couldn’t benefit from an attribute system that worked properly, they absolutely could. But that isn’t something that we have ever had in a TES game, and whatever we think we are losing in the absence of flawed attribute progression is being compensated for by (count them) 280+ perks.

Open cities would have been nice aesthetically, I suppose. But in a region rife with Giants, Draugr, and other hostile wildlife (not to mention warring factions/clans) it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. To create such only because the technology allows it would feel cheesy to me.

Just my two cents.