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.

[RobRendell]

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.

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?