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Skyrim's leveling up system was pretty brilliant

It's a great concept, poorly implemented. Blacksmithing and enchanting are trivially easy to level, meanwhile Alchemy and Speech more or less require you to pay tutors if you ever want to make it out of the mid-30s by the end of the game.

Similarly, it's very easy to build Conjuration and Alteration skill levels, but good luck with Restoration. And you have to grind like crazy to get Destruction to grow, though you will at least be using that constantly.

Let's not even get into how damn underpowered a mage is compared to a warrior in heavy armor wielding a two-handed weapon. Of course why bother with either when you can just crouch in broad daylight and be magically invisible and shoot the brain dead enemies with a bow and arrow for 8x damage. How the hell do you fire a long bow from a crouching position, anyway?
 
RealityExists said:
Which had a character progression system that I actually enjoyed even more with the way the weapons scaled with your stats. Like I said, I like hand crafting a character as much as anyone else but having your abilities improve for actually using them is something I think more games should utilize.
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I think that building a game around a system that fits works better rather than just shoehorning in a system for whatever reason. Picking and choosing popular ideas/systems/gameplay and then just putting it into a big, inelegant blender means you get a Dragon Age.
 
I liked it too. Sure it had some problems with some aspects, but it was a great way of going about creating a character tailored to what you liked to do. A lot of you are complaining about leveling a non-combat skill and then not being able to fight. Well, what do you expect? If you're crafting your character to be a sneak-thief, then you can't expect to be able to don some heavy armor and wield a longsword like a knight could.
 
It was horrible actually. There were a few cookie cutter builds, the rest was just wasted if you put your points wrong. Also the terrible levelscaling.. so No.
 
Marcel said:
I think that building a game around a system that fits works better rather than just shoehorning in a system for whatever reason. Picking and choosing popular ideas/systems/gameplay and then just putting it into a big, inelegant blender means you get a Dragon Age.
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This.
 
Watevaman said:
I liked it too. Sure it had some problems with some aspects, but it was a great way of going about creating a character tailored to what you liked to do. A lot of you are complaining about leveling a non-combat skill and then not being able to fight. Well, what do you expect? If you're crafting your character to be a sneak-thief, then you can't expect to be able to don some heavy armor and wield a longsword like a knight could.
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Why does picking old ladies' pockets turn the wolves into trolls? And actually, you can wear armor and a sword with no penalty despite trying to be a thief or mage.

The way combat is designed, beating shit in the face with a warhammer is always going to be a better solution than daggers or spells, regardless of your skills in daggers or spells, because you stagger everything and can do it endlessly because normal strikes don't require stamina. Meanwhile, spells need magicka and unlike weapon attacks, magic attacks don't get more powerful as you level up, they just require less magicka to cast.

Combat design is actually staggeringly stupid.
 
phosphor112 said:
Oblivion's system was better. They had main skills progression (called Attributes) and sub-skills to level up.

Subskills were done simply by doing the action. Running/jumping/falling = Acrobatic, Repairing weapons = blacksmithing, using daggers and small swords = Short Swords... etc. Your leveling of the sub-skills would contribute to actually characters level up. And it is after you level up then, is where you get to level up 3 attributes. Stuff like "Strenght" "Endurance" and "Willpower."

It made leveling up your character how you see fit so much better.

Level scaling sucks horse shit though.
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I'm going to agree with the principle of it, but I would say the way Oblivion did it made the game kind of flawed. As you played, you recognized after the first few levels that you would get bonuses to the attributes you wanted to level based on the skills you leveled up, but that quickly led to gaming the system if you wanted those x5's.
 
Time for this.


Fallout/Skyrim hybrid Leveling System Wishlist
  • Classic RPG Leveling XP(kill, quest, discover)
  • Return of stats that only rise on a per level choice
  • Skill Leveling by use and level
  • Integrated Perks

Essentially, I would like a Fallout/Skyrim hybrid system, more Dragon Age in theory. Keep the good from both of the systems, and eliminate the "bad".

So you start with your core modifiers(SPECIAL) which would determine your speed and starting stats of the skills and attributes(Layer 1). Some of these can be modified based on the direction your character takes. It seems only natural that a "Big Guns" would get stronger but slower over time. It wouldn't work for every one of the core 7 but if implemented right could be interesting. Then you would have your attributes. Health, Action Points, etc.(Layer 2). The 3rd Layer is the Skill system which you can directly modify with use of said skill or by leveling up. Every time you level up you will get X points for attributes and X for skills. This would immediately eliminate the two biggest problems with Skyrim's leveling system. Namely the difficulty of leveling up other weapon types once at a higher level, and the horribly simplified attributes. I would also split up perks into 3 categories; Level, Karmic, and Skill. Skill perks are perfect in Skyrim, but it needed some "overall" level perks. The Karma system is a strong personal opinion. I've always liked an inclusion of it when done right. I'd also add in Armor and Wepon crafting to Fallout 4, personally. In the end, I hope Bethesda can refine Skyrim's leveling system and give us something spectacular for F4 but I have a feeling I will be left disappointed.
 
I hated Skyrims personally. Its broke to the point of level scaling. I had a joke character who I power leveled pickpocket to 100 with him at which point enemies had such powerful equipment and my combat stats could not compare to them either.

Same with sneak. If you over leveled that and came to a point where you were forced into combat you were stuck.

I prefered the perk/stat system of the Fallout series.
 
Pyrrhus said:
Why does picking old ladies' pockets turn the wolves into trolls? And actually, you can wear armor and a sword with no penalty despite trying to be a thief or mage.

The way combat is designed, beating shit in the face with a warhammer is always going to be a better solution than daggers or spells, regardless of your skills in daggers or spells, because you stagger everything and can do it endlessly because normal strikes don't require stamina. Meanwhile, spells need magicka and unlike weapon attacks, magic attacks don't get more powerful as you level up, they just require less magicka to cast.

Combat design is actually staggeringly stupid.
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Combat was where the game failed me the most too. Thank goodness I played Dark Souls after Skyrim because otherwise I wouldn't have played Skyrim for nearly as long as what I did.

Now, speaking about just the idea, I'm currently showing a friend the isometric loot genre with co op in Torchlight 2. I've run into some loot that gets better after so many kills with that piece of loot equipped. I think that's a pretty interesting way to make you feel like that piece of loot is yours and that you get better with it the more you use it. So many pieces of gear become vendor trash because of how quick loot drops, but if the loot scaled with you. It might be worth it to hang on to that favorite piece of yours despite the better base numbers a new piece of gear might have.
 
Doing X will improve X works for crafting. Sucks for everything else. Piss poor, IMO. The visual representation was also a pain. Looked nice, navigating was atrocious.
 
Skill based leveling systems are my preferred type, but I also like traditional XP that you can apply. That's why I loved Asheron's Call when I still played it.

Sure you could use your skill and level up that skill, but you'd also earn XP from enemies or quests that would allow you to put it towards skills you don't use as often, but are just as important. the XP cost was logarithmic so at the upper tiers it would cost an insane amount of XP to level up skills, so the return on investment was not as good. You could dump 4 billion XP into one skill and level it up 100s of times. Try that with your primary weapon skill and you'd be lucky to get more than 10 points at it's near max level.
 
ThreePiMatt said:
As far as I'm concerned, this is how a good skill sheet looks.

arcanum-ss_7-700x525.jpg
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Give this man an Oscar.
 
Skyrim's levelling system was a massive improvement on Oblivion and Morrowind.
Skyrim did away with the old stats system that meant you had to level a bunch of minor skills to avoid having sucky stats. It got really stupid, counter-intuitive and metagamey
(e.g. if you picked a lot of strength skills as your major skills, then you'd end up with a very low strength character due to not levelling lots of minor STR-based skills)

Skyrim's system made a lot of sense, but levelling systems run into one of 2 problems:

Skyrim-style means that you tend to do a lot of levelling by spamming spells. Say you want to be an illusionist: There's no way you can reasonably reach level 100 in illusion unless you spam muffle/invisibility while walking around town or whatever.
At least Skyrim removed the acrobatics skill that resulted in everyone bunnyhopping between towns in Morrowind.

XP-based leads to stupid crap like levelling your charisma and speechcraft by hitting orcs with a magic hammer (not to be confused with hitting on orcs who have magic hammers, which would be totally legit).

Skyrim did a pretty good job of preventing skill spam by requiring use in real situations (e.g. no summoning xp untill the summoned monster gets into a fight). There were still a lot of exploits though.

On the other hand, Skyrim did a terrible job of skill/perk balancing (blacksmith >> all).
 
FrontalMonk said:
I'm going to agree with the principle of it, but I would say the way Oblivion did it made the game kind of flawed. As you played, you recognized after the first few levels that you would get bonuses to the attributes you wanted to level based on the skills you leveled up, but that quickly led to gaming the system if you wanted those x5's.
Click to expand...

Which is why Daggerfell's leveling system was better, they didn't force you to go through bullshit just to efficiently level up your attributes. Just had a random luck-based chance to get between 4 and 6 skill points to distribute amongst your attributes. Not to mention the fact that practicing magic was a lot easier since you could just queue up a shitton of spells instead of having to spend an hour slowly casting one spell at a time.

Skyrim's leveling system was jank in nearly every way though.
 
I liked it, and I also like the "You do a skill, skill gets better" concept more than "You do random shit and improve random skills" concept. I sneak a lot, so I like how I get rewarded for sneaking a lot, and then become sneakier. I like that.

I liked the presentation of it as well but had a hard time getting around the tree. It was laggy for me and didn't often do what I wanted it to. It never interrupted my game, but it was annoying.

A bunch of the complaints about the leveling system are exploits... If you don't like how an exploit effects a game, don't do the exploit...
 
It would be best if investments in one skill would not impact any others. So don't have an overall character level, but simply skill levels.

Also, no level scaling.
 
I can't see it being anywhere near brilliant. The game doesn't even have attributes. Not to mention level scaling and the console interface.
 
Idea was good but it could have used some more refinement, some skill trees are completely useless, some perks completely broken and so on.
 
RealityExists said:
I guess the rest of the Elder Scrolls series (I wouldn't know, Skyrim was the first Elder Scrolls game I played) used a similar system and I'm sure there are other games that follow this line of thinking in terms of progression.

Aside from the gorgeous UI, the idea behind doing ____ will improve ____ is simple, organic and mostly an intuitive way for someone to play and progress through a game. Sure there is a bit of grinding along the way and this is where the system needs to be refined a bit but the idea behind it is sound.

I love the idea of character building and putting in stats where I most see fit but it's kind of antiquated right?

Anyway, let's discuss character progression in games. This is not a "skyrim is awesome" or "skyrim sucks" thread.
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The mechanic of leveling up and gaining experience in the traits you use the most is brilliant, yes. I have always found that balance is not a strong suit in the Elder Scrolls series. My characters are usually overpowered about 7-8 hours in the game which leads to boredom and me wondering if the game will ever "pick up". Being able to one shot most enemies when you are around 15% of the way through the game is definitely an issue in both Oblivion and Skyrim; Morrowind was much more difficult and more rewarding in my opinion.
 
I think the idea of "getting better at something by doing it" is amazing and basically what RPG is about. However, Bethesda really needs to tweak it. It's way to easy to exploit.

I never had any problems with it though as I just played the game. My Xbox Live buddy grinded on the smithing and ended being god basically, killing dragons with 2 hits. I told him it's his own fault. I never grinded on any skill and ended up having loads of fun and never being truely overpowered.
 
RoboGeorgeForeman said:
Which is why Daggerfell's leveling system was better, they didn't force you to go through bullshit just to efficiently level up your attributes. Just had a random luck-based chance to get between 4 and 6 skill points to distribute amongst your attributes. Not to mention the fact that practicing magic was a lot easier since you could just queue up a shitton of spells instead of having to spend an hour slowly casting one spell at a time.

Skyrim's leveling system was jank in nearly every way though.
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Daggerfall...that takes me back. Man, now that I'm thinking of old janky systems that were broken...I will say that the one thing I hated about Skyrim was the fact that they took out spellmaking. THAT was an awesome system and I loved how broken it could get. :D
 
Rockandrollclown said:
I missed athletics/acrobatics too much to like it. I loved in prior ES games getting faster and jumping higher as I leveled.
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Yeah, I miss that too. But I guess there are mods for it on the Nexus. Everything is one the Nexus, even things that hurt my eyes when I look at them.
Nude Khajiits :X
 
I became a grandmaster blacksmith by making thousands of iron daggers and then crafted the best gear in the game for myself.

There's two big problems there.
 
Pyrrhus said:
It's a great concept, poorly implemented. Blacksmithing and enchanting are trivially easy to level, meanwhile Alchemy and Speech more or less require you to pay tutors if you ever want to make it out of the mid-30s by the end of the game.

Similarly, it's very easy to build Conjuration and Alteration skill levels, but good luck with Restoration. And you have to grind like crazy to get Destruction to grow, though you will at least be using that constantly.

Let's not even get into how damn underpowered a mage is compared to a warrior in heavy armor wielding a two-handed weapon. Of course why bother with either when you can just crouch in broad daylight and be magically invisible and shoot the brain dead enemies with a bow and arrow for 8x damage. How the hell do you fire a long bow from a crouching position, anyway?
Click to expand...

Yeah I rolled Mage.. You can get dual conjuring and destroy most things but you never get xp for it.
 
I like how easy it is to change your combat style and focus on other skills at any point. Makes the game last a lot longer and allows you to take advantage of all of the weapons/armor you find in the game.

Ninja edit: Plus, making iron daggers was pretty fun as far as grinding goes.
 
Skelter said:
I prefer Vampire the Masquerade much better. Then again the way the two games handle it is very different but Bethesda really needs to shake up the mechanics.

vampire%202007-07-13%2022-31-56-95.jpg
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The first time I made a character, I discovered the exploit that let you cheat through the game. THe one flaw in Bloodline's character creation.
 
I liked it, could have used some more balancing because some things took too long to level up, but it was an elegant way of handling it. Only problem is it makes it a real pain if you want to change your play style. For example I didn't bother with archery for most of the game, so by the time I got round to experimenting with it it was completely useless compared to my other options. Would help if enemies didn't scale, that's something I don't like about the game anyway.
 
Skyrim's concept of being classless and letting you be whatever you want to be was pretty good. I think they could have slowed down the leveling overall, maybe balanced it better, and not done level scaling, but the concept was fantastic, and I'd love it if more people ripped it off.

Payday: The Heist featured 'challenges' which, when complete, gave you cash to help level up, which I liked. A lot of them taught you how to play the game better, like "take cops hostage X times." Not all of them were good, but many were.

Yuripaw said:
This. I understand some parts of a game might get too easy if someone grinds their way to a super powerful level very early, which is why some games do these level scaling systems, but fuck that. Why can't a player have fun if they want to that way? Not everyone is gonna play it like that, and even if they did, so what? Sometimes I WANT to play a game and feel like a complete overpowered bad ass, and take my revenge on the weaker enemies that used to be difficult.
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Far Cry 3 nails that sense of increasing badassery and power... but doesn't make you feel overpowered to the point where there is no challenge, either.
 
Lord of Castamere said:
Time for this.


Fallout/Skyrim hybrid Leveling System Wishlist
  • Classic RPG Leveling XP(kill, quest, discover)
  • Return of stats that only rise on a per level choice
  • Skill Leveling by use and level
  • Integrated Perks

Essentially, I would like a Fallout/Skyrim hybrid system, more Dragon Age in theory. Keep the good from both of the systems, and eliminate the "bad".

So you start with your core modifiers(SPECIAL) which would determine your speed and starting stats of the skills and attributes(Layer 1). Some of these can be modified based on the direction your character takes. It seems only natural that a "Big Guns" would get stronger but slower over time. It wouldn't work for every one of the core 7 but if implemented right could be interesting. Then you would have your attributes. Health, Action Points, etc.(Layer 2). The 3rd Layer is the Skill system which you can directly modify with use of said skill or by leveling up. Every time you level up you will get X points for attributes and X for skills. This would immediately eliminate the two biggest problems with Skyrim's leveling system. Namely the difficulty of leveling up other weapon types once at a higher level, and the horribly simplified attributes. I would also split up perks into 3 categories; Level, Karmic, and Skill. Skill perks are perfect in Skyrim, but it needed some "overall" level perks. The Karma system is a strong personal opinion. I've always liked an inclusion of it when done right. I'd also add in Armor and Wepon crafting to Fallout 4, personally. In the end, I hope Bethesda can refine Skyrim's leveling system and give us something spectacular for F4 but I have a feeling I will be left disappointed.
Click to expand...

Marcel said:
Picking and choosing popular ideas/systems/gameplay and then just putting it into a big, inelegant blender
Click to expand...

Build the game around the system that works, not just borrow a bunch of ideas and hope they work when thrown together.
 
I thought it was rubbish, but I can see why people liked it. I kind of have a bad habit of never using my points in systems like this until I know exactly the skills I want, and then end up using almost none of my points. That and navigating through it was a huge pain.
 
At first I'm gonna post "you serious" gif when reading the title, but after I actually saw your OP, I'm going give you a comment with a tought in it rather than just oneliner reaction gifs response.

The only thing I can agree with you is that the levelling system of Elder Scrolls games in general. I really like them when I'm first introduced to it back in 2006 when I'm played Oblivion. It is neat, and somehow make the sense of progression more appling compared to the traiditional EXP system. Even though the leveling up is limited by main skills, it still great and I understand the limitation have purpose only as gameplay mechanic.

Then we have Skyrim leveling system, nearly as much as same with the older games except this time there is no class, no main skills, no limitation. Sounds great? Yeah, total player agency for the win! No more stupid limitation that hold me from creating dual-wielding-enchanther-alchemist-archer-fire mage-rogue now. But that is exactly the problem. The removed limitation of main skills and stats strips away the sense of agency, and immersiveness from the game. There is no oppurtunity cost from pick one skill over another because all you need to do is just grind hard enought to get them. You bored being two-handed warrior? Try cast some spells and see yourself suddenly able to match an archmage in just few days! This is why I always regard Skyrim as medieval-life simulator, and not RPG anymore.

I've read some of your response that what you like actualy is the skill progression. That is ES system, not Skyrim alone. Skyrim by far have the most terrible leveling system. You should direct it to leveling system of ES in general, not Skyrim.
 
It was certainly the most intuitive system, especially for the combat skills, that I've experienced.

Once they find a way to make some of the crafting skills less grindy it will be even more ideal. But that aside, just playing the way you want to play, and growing into that role, was tremendously liberating. It also got me really role playing in ways I haven't before, as I felt much more vested in my character's behavior.
 
I don't get what the point of no leveling is in a free roam game.

If you literally cannot roam very far without being killed, it's hardly "free" roam.

/puffs pipe
 
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