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

[Feralikazam]

I think closed cities..or holds I should say are alot more realistic. Mainly because closed gates keep unwanted visitors out. It's not that big a deal. Mod it out if it's really that bad.

[Thomas Kaira]

I think closed cities..or holds I should say are alot more realistic. Mainly because closed gates keep unwanted visitors out. It's not that big a deal. Mod it out if it's really that bad.

I've had plenty of time to mull things over about the changes being made to Skyrim, and really, closed cities has dropped down to very low on my "must be addressed" list. The only reason Bethesda is really doing that is because the consoles simply can't handle those cities being open, and I can understand working under severe hardware constraints.

I've made a lot of revisions on my stances for some of the changes being made, such as the new leveling system. I never really cared for the previous major/minor branches, and in fact completely obliterated the leveling system for both Morrowind and Oblivion in favor of something more in line with what Skyrim is doing (save for the 'got no class' approach). Every skill has a bearing on your level, major skills (specialized in Skyrim's case) increase your level faster, and the player never deals with attributes at any stage (the mod handles them automatically). I'm still not happy that Attributes got cut (mostly due to the 'missed opportunity' factor), but I do see why they were. The only key difference is that Skyrim is injecting a more level-based approach to the scheme, whereas the mods I refer to actually try to stop your level from really mattering that much (aside from scaling encounters and loot).

So, the new leveling system, after a more thorough analysis, gets my stamp of approval. I like.