Determining Character Class, through gameplay Options

[RobRendell]

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

[DoomedOne]

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.