[WIP] Perks n' Skills Advanced (PSA)

[KorJax]

What is Perks n' Skills Advanced?

 

Perks n' Skills Advanced aims to redesign the combat skills and skill trees in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, without completely altering the vanilla system. I had a few big issues with the new perk tree system in Skyrim, but I loved the idea. In theory - it could have been the deepest and most interesting RPG system used in an Elder Scrolls title to date, but the excecution was so poor and some skills were so useless in how they worked compared to other skills, that it was more of a gimmick. Some issues that the vanilla (default) Skyrim perk tree and skill system has that Perks n' Skills Advanced (PSA) aims to solve:

 

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• Most perk trees were hardly trees at all, such as heavy armor which literally only had about 6-8 perks total, with almost no branching.
  
• Many perks are completely throw-away bonuses that don't do anything relevant or force you to "perk into" useless perks to get to the good perks. Such as, to get Conditioning for Heavy Armor, you first had to pick a completely irrelevant and "useless" perk like Fists of Steel, which made you do more unarmed damage.. even if you weren't fighting without weapons. And why is a perk like that, in Heavy Armor anyways?
  
• Instead of the skill itself having the power, the perks took all the power. A level 100 user of two-handed with no perks deals less damage output than a level 60 user with perks. This is all due to poorly made starter perks like Barbarian, which just boost your damage with two handed by 20%. The game is balanced and expects you to get these perks too, completely removing the "point" of what a skill and perk tree is supposed to do - let you customize and specialize what the skill itself is for.
  
• Some perks totally broke the role of the skill, completely ignoring what makes certain skills unique. Such as Conditioning for Heavy Armor, which made it so armor is weightless and doesn't slow you down when worn. Why would HEAVY armor do that? With that perk, Heavy Armor functions and works exactly like a much better version of Light Armor. Certain skills as such suffer from an identity crisis - they don't feel all that unique from the other skill's opposite.
  
• The new system was made in a way that encouraged players to NOT specilize, and try as many skills as possible, to prevent players from "starting over". However, because in order to be good in a skill you HAD to get perks, you basically needed to specilize in order to survive later levels. At the same time, the perk trees didn't let you specilize very much within the skill you wanted to use, because the perks they used were very simple and tended to just do basic damage increases. When in fact, perk trees could have potentually been increadibly deep, letting users who are good in (for example) two handed to use all two handed weapons rather effectively, but if a player would "perk" into and specilize twords axes, they would have increased ability and bonus to using those weapons. Instead there was no specilization, just simplified perks, that required players to perk them in order to survive later levels. This punishes both players who don't specialize their perks (underpowered) and players who want to specialize (because they really aren't specializing all that much).
  

 

PSA aims to address all the above issues. Skills will be tweaked in ways that make the skill more unique to use. The skill level will also be the most important factor in determining how good you are at a skill - perks will only augment, enhance, or add bonuses and abilities, sometimes at a cost, and let players specialize in their "major skill".

 

Perk trees will encourage sticking to a "class" through the new Major Skill system, and will often feature multiple branches or avenues one can perk into within a skill.

 

Estimated release date for PSA s unknown, currently it takes about a month or so to fully complete a skill and a perk tree, but it may go quicker as time goes on and as I become more skilled at implementing my designs. Especially in the summer, when I'll have more free time to work on it

 

What about Magic PSA or Thief PSA? I plan on doing those, but to ensure that SOMETHING get's released reasonably soon and to keep things modular, I'm going to first focus on the skills associated with the combat perk abilities and then release that (Heavy Armor, Block, Two-Handed, One-Handed, Archery, Light Armor). I'm not planning on touching crafting skills though - partially because there is a TON in my opinion that needs done there (to the point of being a separate mod), and partially because there's already some excellent modders out there who are dealing with redoing the craft skills.

 

 

Video Walkthroughs

 

UPDATE 8/27/12: Two-Handed Skill and Perk Tree Redesign:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8-8ibpd4Qw

 

Heavy Armor Perk Tree, and Skill Redesign:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1OlbMwykMY

 

 

Screenshots

 

Heavy Armor's new and improved Skill Tree: http://i.imgur.com/mytx4.jpg

Two-Handed's new and improved Skill Tree: http://i.imgur.com/IX0NF.jpg

Edited August 28, 2012 by KorJax

[KorJax]

Bump

 

EDIT: Fixed the links

Edited August 28, 2012 by KorJax