this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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I love Bethesda, but putting TES6 on the back burner to make Starfield for eight years was an idiotic decision. They also took the wrong lesson from Skyrim, believing that streamlining the game through stripping of features was the reason for its success. They've done this same with each successive game since, and each has been more poorly received than the last. Go back to your roots and make a good, deep Elder Scrolls game. Continue to leave the shitty +5 modifier leveling system out, but at the very least restore attributes and birthsigns. Restore spellmaking. STOP FUCKING IT UP. You're on your last strike here and I don't have a lot of faith that you're going to make the right call.
I don't even know, if I would normally truly agree that simplification isn't at least aiding their mass appeal, but Starfield did get absolutely stumped by a traditionally complex RPG (Baldur's Gate 3)...
I think the sweet spot is finding a way to make tradition mechanics a bit more casual friendly without removing them outright. I don't think Morrowind or Oblivion's attribute and skill system was difficult to grasp, but the leveling system was pretty bad. You either played the way you wanted to, using the skills you believed your character should be using, and received low modifiers as a result, or you meticulously selected and planned out major/minor skills that weren't reflective of your actual playstle, just so you wouldn't blow your chance at earning +5 modifiers.
You couldn't just comfortably advance to the next level. You had this paranoia that it would be a weak and wasted level-up because you didn't spend enough time jumping or something. It poisoned the gameplay with this annoying meta that was purely about exploiting the leveling mechanics so you wouldn't be at a huge disadvantage. They remedied this in Skyrim, but at the cost of making all characters feel generic. The heart was taken out of your character and who they were. You no longer had a class identity. Everything was just kind of same-ey.
If they could at least restore attribute points so I could give my character a deeper identity and allow more dialogue checks related to said attributes so these identities mattered, we'd be heading in the right direction. They don't have to be so impactful that casual players are put off by them, but c'mon, man.. I want to feel like there's a deeper system at work here. I want to measure my character in more ways than "Good with sword" and "Good with heavy armor".
Did I mention how much I miss skill checks too? Fallout 3 and New Vegas handled these superbly.
I agree with you but the silliness of the leveling system did have its own charm. As a kid I spent so much time jumping around and putting points into getting those athletics skills high enough that it became a bit game breaking.
There’s a certainly a balance somewhere in there but I don’t think the game was ever difficult enough, playing on medium difficulty, to feel like you’ve fallen too far behind the curve. For context I’m thinking mostly about oblivion.
I probably played through oblivion more times making builds that weren’t optimal and had weird stats than I did trying to min/max my attributes. I think, for me, leaving room for that kind of gameplay is part of what made the older games so special.