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 is a tough one. i really cant say how they would do this and im very interested to find out.

perhaps at one point they have something like you have a sword, a staff (which are now magic casting) and a robe or somethin that raises your illusion and you choose one of them and your choice contributes to the "votes"

Perhaps stealth characters have to actually open the fight with a sneak attack? That immediatly puts off the axe charging fight, or starting a fight with a fireball.

I've been wondering how they were going to do this, also.

If i remember it right the final guard only suggests a class you can change from his suggestion(sp?)

that is (thankfully) correct.

Yes, you can cast spells or rush with an axe in the beggining but still be a thief char in the class selection.

the game will probably give you three options of beating obsticuls, but you only able to do one. for instance, in your rat example, youll be able to sneak by, one sword strike, or one firebolt. it makes sence anyway.

what if you snuck by it then killed it with an axe/fireball?

it would be horrible if you HAD to be a thief jsut because you used stealth

ANd what, amy I ask, is wrong with stealth?

like i said youll only have one option. i think once your past it, it will register sneak. in my opinion anyway.

nothing it would aslo suck if you had to be a mage jsut becasue you used magick or a warrior because you used force

As I told you it's not gonna be like that. You can do whatever you want in the tutorial and become whatever you want after it. The guard just SUGGESTS what to become.

Yeah, that's what I'd expect - Arena and Morrowind both had an option to answer questions to determine your character class, but both gave the result as a suggestion only, and you could easily override it.

So, I fully expect that it'll be a suggestion only. That doesn't change my fascination with how they're going to determine what they're going to suggest, mechanically.

I hope there aren't too many tests like "which of these three items are you going to pick?" I mean, come on - everyone will take all three of them, kleptomaniacs that CRPG characters seem to be

Also, something else... before you've determined your class, you don't have any skills (or at least, the game doesn't know which ones are your major skills and which aren't). So, I wonder how it'll handle the player fighting, sneaking and casting spells, when it doesn't know what skills you've got?

Also also, in MW I believe that the list of your starting spells was a function of your skills; I didn't work out how it worked exactly, but I presume that there was a list of "starting spells" in each school of magic, and you started knowing any whose casting chance (which is based on the appropriate school's skill) was over a certain threshold. So, what list of spells does our as-yet-undefined character use in the pre-class-choice gameplay?

All food for thought...

I know it would suck if it wasn´t like that

It's more thorough, you see, from what I've been able to infer from the articles, it works like this.

Throughout the dungeon you'll be able to gain new weapons. You start with a katana, and therefore to start off you can only use a katana, then you to try out the magic system for a little bit, then you get a bow and you get to do some stealth work. After you figure out which one you like the best I think you'll get one of each type of weapon (so you'll probably get an axe or something after that) and you work your way through difficult obstacles where you have the choice of which one you want to do. There may be options all over the dungeon for every single skill, and if you choose to go with those options (say jumping to a higher platform to escape monsters) then that'll put more pressure on that skill.

Each class is really just a combination of skill majors, so instead of it being voted in favor of cunning, valor, or lore, it's voted in favor of skills.

Again, this is only an inference.

i hope it's like that so you can try the revamped magic, stealth, and combat before you actually decide on one rather than creating a character for each skill.

Yeah it is. I looked it up, the first dungeon takes a whopping 45 minutes.

For the first 5-10 minutes you will be exploring the different styles, for the rest of it you'll get them all at your disposal to try and figure our which style will work best for every obstacle. I think it serves more to figure out exactly what you want to do as opposed to trying to tell you what to do.

Ok, that's clever, and makes a lot of sense.

They've already got the system in place to increase skills as you use them... so it would be easy to say at the end of the dungeon "the 7 skills that have had the most use are their major skills". Although, will they have a class name for every possible combination of 7 from 21? That's 116,280 class names

However, I'm still uncertain about starting spells. It would be odd if everyone starts with the same fixed spell list, so they have the opportunity to use spells (and thus skills) from every magic school, but if they choose not to use any of them, they suddenly forget them when they leave the dungeon and decide that they're a 100% combat character. Maybe everyone starts knowing no spells, but there are opportunities to learn some in the starting dungeon, if you want.

It might be a bit hard to give you an opportunity to use every skill in a dungeon environment, too... mercantile, speechcraft, alchemy, armorer. I also avoided having Athletics and Acrobatics as major skills in Morrowind, since it made levelling up too uncontrolled, so I'll probably want to do the same in Oblivion, but they'll no doubt be used a lot during the initial dungeon.

Hmm, 45 minutes of character creation... while it'll be good fun the first few times, how long before the first "quick character generation" mod comes out, do you think?

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.

Well, I think it's a good speculation, Doom (mind if I call you that?).

But, I'm confused:
The only thing is, is this dungeon-creation-place going to affect your experience in those skills? Like, will it add points to my Destruction skill if I accidently used a fireball or something? Or does it add up to the use of magic skills in general?

Suppose I want Speechcraft and Restoration skills... How would I do that? Talk to a random live/dead NPC/creature in the dungeon? Do I find a magic scroll for the healing part in the dungeon and use it?

I'm still very confused on how this dungeon supposed to work.

Well, the good thing is, it's just a suggestion, and we can form our own custom classes or at least choose our classes. If it's like that, then I guess it's like answering those moral questions in Arena or Morrowind--I'm not forced to take their advice.

Interesting... thanks for the pointer, because I don't read the official forums any more... too much noise.

However, their search function works so here's a thread that collects the discussion of his run through the initial dungeon:
http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.p...howtopic=169688
He didn't dwell on the character creation aspect, but it's interesting reading nonetheless. I found his write-up really worthwhile, even including the things that he was less than thrilled about (he stated later that he was being conservative and understated, and WRT the graphics he was comparing Oblivion with the other soon-to-be released FPSs for the XBOX present at the event, where the graphics are the primary focus of the game, so read his write-up with a grain of salt).

holy moly. lots of words..... don't want to read it

Yeah, also remember most of the stuff outside the sungeon was incomplete, they're still putting the finishing touches on everything so a lot of aspects were not put in the demo.

In one of the E3 videos where you can hear people in the background and questions that were being asked by viewers the screen showed for a second or less the characters personal screen and the class was "Adventurer" which as anyone who has made their own class in MW would have noticed is the custom class default name, so you can definitly make your own class as you prefer and pick out what 7 major skills you want, and your prefered stats (thus a class is a little more than "just a combination of skill majors") Also I love to name my own classes like firefighter....or whatever sounds good at the time for the skillset. SO....everyone can 99% likely quit being worried about whether they can get their class they want or not the first run through....now from a game mechanics point of view in reference to what the game will "suggest" your class be I would love to get details...but one way that hasn't been meantioned that they could do it is as follows: For every amount you use a skill you get a % of use history in the background mechanics and when you finish you could have somthing like 5% blade, 2% blunt (I think that is the second str. stat), 0% hand 2 hand, 20% sneak... and so on and when you have completed the trial period before selecting a class, these are tallied and you get suggested the class that most closely has the skills you used most as it's majors...this would probably be a fairly simple way to perform this from a programing side of things, just save skill use in the same manner as for increasing skills (ex. ".002 per second sneaking", i think that is a quote from someone, I apologize for lack of ability to recall who at the moment). The hardest part would be associating the skills so that if you had a tie there would be a resolving method...like suggesting 2 classes or similar, you could assign a heirarchy of in a tie pick this over everything else then that, then that...and so on. Sorry for being a little long winded but I wanted everyone to be able to understand what I meant.

It doesn't randomly chose youre skills, it's the same pre-set classes from MW, but... hyped! So, if you go for brute strength, you will be given Knight or Barbarian. If you use magic/logic you will be a Mage or something. Magic and a Sword? Spellsword. etc. But you can override it and make a custom class, as usual.

I don't know how it might work but I bet it will work because they got a lot more tecknology in gaming then they did on morrowind.

[speculation]

I figure the beginning part is to give you a hands on approach to the different gameplay styles available. So you have the option to be stealthy, use basic magic scrolls and also hack away at an enemy (for instance, use a spell to open a door, use sneak to bypass a bunch of tough rats and then use combat to deal with an assassin)

The character is a basic template at that point, and once you have finished the 'tutorial' the player then has the opportunity to start their character creation based on their prefered playing style. In essence, the character they use before creation is not actually altered by the tutorial actions, it is simply a cookie-cutter character employed to allow the character the chance to explore the gameplay styles.

[/speculation]

What Darkwing says makes sense, as it is trying to appeal to new players. But, I suppose it's the character creation too, as if you like the look of the spells when you first see them, you'd use them more often and therefore get a suggestion to become a mage, etc.
I'm probably still gonna grab the shiny sword!

I don't think it's going to be that complicated, basically you get a starting set of skills (you are equaly good/bad on all three branches) and then it measures how much of each branch skills was used and calculates similar to MW with percentages. So if I solve 60% of the dungeon using different spells I would probably be suggested to become a mage-like proffession. Then at the end the skills are rearranged to suit your chosen proffession.

Considering spells I hope you don't get any spells to begin with, thats to.. oldfashioned, how come a prisoner like me knows magic and hasn't escaped yet? Hopefully you'll learn them depending on how you solve the initial puzzles, maybe a guard notices how you handle a situation mage-like and gives you the option to learn a simple spell and so on.

It's going to be intresting to see how they handle this, but then again, a "quick-char" mod has to be released as soon as possible.. I tend to create tons of chars on my first playing-day on any RPG.. 45 minutes for each char will leave me playing the char-gen dungeon for hours...