Talking to Game Informer in a recent podcast, Bethesda’s Todd Howard explains that they’ve done away with explicit character classes in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to basically preclude players making decisions they’ll regret a couple of hours later. RPGs – like real life, but better.
“What we found in Oblivion is people would play, and even though they played for a half hour and then they picked their class, it’s still – in the scheme of the games we make – not enough time to really understand all the skills and how they work, he says. “So people would play, and the general pattern would be they’d play for like, three hours and then ‘oh I picked the wrong skills, I’m going to start over.’
“They weren’t necessarily upset about that, but to us, someone who’s making a game you’re like… ‘is there a way we can solve that? Is there a better way of doing it?’ And we think this is it.
“You just play, and your skills go up as you play and the higher your skill, the more it affects your levelling. So it’s a really, really nice elegant system that kind of self-balances itself.”
Of course, Skyrim won’t be the first game to chuck character classes – Black Isle were doing this with Fallout back in 1997 already, and Troika did the same with Arcanum a few years later.
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