Didn’t Oblivion have a thing where unknown effects wouldn’t actually combine or take effect unless you had high enough alchemy? So you level up, and a nice convenient boost damage potion you were making suddenly becomes a double-edged sword with poison attached.
Correct, the potions you created in Oblivion only had the effects from its ingredients that you knew at the time you created it. Said potions don’t gain those effects once you know them, but the same recipe will add new effects once you learn them, and thus you might need a different recipe to make the potion you’re trying to create.
I agree. And so did the programmers at Bethesda, apparently in hindsight, because that wasn’t true in either Morrowind or Skyrim. I don’t know why they implemented it that way in Oblivion.
Skyrim is a totally different beast because the ingredient effects you know about don’t depend on your Alchemy skill anymore: instead you simply discover the effects by successfully making a potion with them. So there’s a sort of minigame of trying different ingredients together to discover what kind of effects they give to potions, which in my opinion is neat because it matches up with how you might do this in reality.
I think the developers didn’t like the “surprise” extra potion effects you could get in Morrowind, so they changed it in oblivion.
Didn’t Oblivion have a thing where unknown effects wouldn’t actually combine or take effect unless you had high enough alchemy? So you level up, and a nice convenient boost damage potion you were making suddenly becomes a double-edged sword with poison attached.
Correct, the potions you created in Oblivion only had the effects from its ingredients that you knew at the time you created it. Said potions don’t gain those effects once you know them, but the same recipe will add new effects once you learn them, and thus you might need a different recipe to make the potion you’re trying to create.
So alchemy has a psychological component? I don’t like it.
I agree. And so did the programmers at Bethesda, apparently in hindsight, because that wasn’t true in either Morrowind or Skyrim. I don’t know why they implemented it that way in Oblivion.
Skyrim is a totally different beast because the ingredient effects you know about don’t depend on your Alchemy skill anymore: instead you simply discover the effects by successfully making a potion with them. So there’s a sort of minigame of trying different ingredients together to discover what kind of effects they give to potions, which in my opinion is neat because it matches up with how you might do this in reality.
I think the developers didn’t like the “surprise” extra potion effects you could get in Morrowind, so they changed it in oblivion.