Wednesday 10 January, 2007

I'm probably about 10-15 hours into Oblivion now, and I have barely scratched the surface of the game. My character is a custom class that is basically a cross between a rogue and an archer. I spent this time today working on my speechcraft skill and doing a Fighter's Guild quest (retrieving a journal from a cave near Skingrad). I finally discovered how to use the speechcraft wheel to always work for my advantage, which is both good and bad. I am only an apprentice (skill ~30) in speechcraft, but I can easily get any character's disposition over 80, but I still feel like I'm at the beginning of the game, and I want to advance my character evenly.
Speaking of advancing in this game, it is entirely based on increasing skill levels, not gaining experience, which makes for an absurdly complex attribute system. Every time you gain 10 points total in any of your seven major skills, you can rest on a bed and level up. In order to gain those 10 points, all you have to do is practice your skills. For example, to raise marksmanship, you shoot your bow. When you level up, you get to choose three attributes to raise, which can be raised by up to five points instead of the normal one point if you have significantly raised the minor skills that are governed by those attributes. Therefore, in order to obtain the maximum attributes in the game, you have to start planning out you plan for raising your skills for your entire game before you even start your character. I guess that is a challenge that another person would welcome, but it's not for me.
Next session I shall continue the Fighter's Guild quest line without being so sidetracked by speechcraft and such things.

The Oblivion skill system. I hate it like I hate windows...because I could almost fall in love with it if it weren't so...

I really like the idea of what you do effecting what you become. I don't like the nessecity to plan out your character from the start. It bothered me in Diablo and it bothers me in Oblivion. It's almost as if the game is in a perminant training mode until your endurance hits 100 and then if you want to start another charcater its "Oh, this again?"

I mean, I think it's a really cool concept. Bethesda just hasn't nailed it yet.

So, how would you do the skill system?

Here's the idea I had:
1) Don't actually have levels...or anything numerical. So there's no way to tell how close you are to level 100 on a stat or something. Have some more vauge way of telling the player how adept they are.
2) Have all skills slowly drain with time. At first its one of those things that sounds 6 kinds of lame...but think about the implications. Whatever you want to do anyway, you do. And that will always be high. So...thats cool. Also, suddenly theres no point in powerleveling your stats, if you don't plan to heavily reinforce them anyway.

But that's just my idea. What's yours?