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]

Yeah it was a topic of debate on the forums about how only one guy managed to beat the first dungeon and that was because he basically rush the character system, ran past all the enemies and felt his way out using past TES experience. Every player got 45 minutes to play, so it takes at least 45 minutes, maybe an hour.

If you think it sounds horrible to spend an hour on character creation, remember, it's really just a classless dungeon.

Yeah, rob, that sort of puts a hole in my inference. I don't want destruction to be the magic skills used to give me votes in favor of being a magic user though. I want skill majors in mysticism and alchemy, and those are the only magic things I want, so it's questionable how they do it.