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[Sordid]

I want lances.

Not much point to those without mounted combat, and you can forget about that. Just play Mount&Blade.

-Something vague about wanting to make Enchanting feel magical rather than something you can statistically gauge.

Translation: It's going to be more random. Not good.

Went on to describe different ways fire magic could be used - as a fireball, a flamethrower, as a kind of fire trap when cast over a rune on the ground, as a wall that can be spread over the ground or ceiling.

That sounds kinda cool, question is if these different applications will be worth it. Spreading it over the ground to make a firewall sounds super useful, but I've never ever played an RPG in which the AI would take a firewall into account and try to avoid it as a real person would. Usually they just run straight through, taking minimal damage, and proceed to hack my squishy wizard to pieces.

-Alchemy described as the most magicky of the stealth skills...

Sounds kinda weird, but then alchemy isn't really magic, is it? It's just mixing stuff together. And stealthy characters can really use some of them poisons. Hopefully they'll throw in the ability to make poisons that deal instant damage, rather than spread it out over several seconds during which the target alerts his buddies to your presence before he dies.

-Less choice when making faces (i.e. pick from different types of features and then tweak them rather than messing with a lot of individual sliders) but they will look better; there was an example of this on the podcast page but the image (originally a female Nord) seems to have been replaced.

Yes! Good. Oblivion's facegen was terrible, I get an urge to punch whoever came up with the idea that moving one slider should interfere with the other sliders in the nuts whenever I go anywhere near that thing. It was like they looked at the facegen in The Sims 2 (which is just about the best facegen ever, as evidenced by the fact that in S3 all they did was up the polycount) and thought: "How can we make this worse and more annoying?"

Now off to listen to that podcast...

[G-Flex]

Yes! Good. Oblivion's facegen was terrible, I get an urge to punch whoever came up with the idea that moving one slider should interfere with the other sliders in the nuts whenever I go anywhere near that thing. It was like they looked at the facegen in The Sims 2 (which is just about the best facegen ever, as evidenced by the fact that in S3 all they did was up the polycount) and thought: "How can we make this worse and more annoying?"

I can't speak for Oblivion's, but the face generator in The Sims 3 isn't that bad, or at least shows that you can do complex face customization well. It's hardly perfect, but it's much more than I expected.

-Characters will start out as more or less a blank slate, since character creation will be mostly aesthetic. Choice of race will make certain attributes higher than others to start out with, and grant different racial abilities.

Ha! I said I'd bet money on it, didn't I? ... If I do it now, will people retroactively owe me money?

-The level of each skill will matter less, with the emphasis placed on perks spent when you level to define your character.

Expected something like this. Like I've said, the emphasis these days is on player skill, not character skill, so it's expected that they'd go the route of giving you more distinct abilities rather than just making you
abstractly better at things.

-There will be around 280 perks in the game. Each skill has its own perk tree, which will allow for further specialisation, e.g. one-handed weapons has perks for swords, axes and maces.

This is interesting, but I'm afraid of it, because I'm scared it'll turn characters too hyper-specialized. I don't want this to turn into something like Diablo 2, where your special wacky abilities are so important that straying from, say, axes to maces makes you utterly inept because you don't have abilities that apply to them. You know, like the transition from Diablo to Diablo 2, where in the original game you could branch out and even hit things with a sword as a sorcerer or rogue in some situations successfully or cast spells as a Warrior if you had the stats (because class/attributes just made you somewhat better at using certain things, rather than locking you out of their usability totally), whereas in Diablo 2 you rely so much on specialty skills that veering outside your class's/build's norms at all meant you were insane. I don't want to see Skyrim go the route of "you're an idiot to switch to this particular mace for this fight, because you went the Sword Perk tree instead and you'll get killed in half a second".

On the other hand, it at least means there's still some specialization to weapons, although I still think "one-handed" and "two-handed" is a really braindead distinction.

[ECrownofFire]

"One-handed" and "two-handed" is braindead, but the distinction between a sword and a mace isn't?

[Shadowlord]

See, it (weapon variety) was great in Warband, that's why I'd like to see it in an actual RPG like Skyrim. Problem is, they're running in completely the opposite direction.

Of note, however, was that warband's weapon skills were "one-handed," "two-handed," "polearms," "bows," "crossbows," and "throwing." Note the lack of distinction between swords, maces, axes, etc. That wasn't that much of a problem, but actually having polearms was nice.

[Sordid]

This is interesting, but I'm afraid of it, because I'm scared it'll turn characters too hyper-specialized.

Heh, a few pages back we had people complaining that all characters tend to end up being the same fighter-mage that goes around backstabbing people. Now it's the opposite.

[DeKaFu]

Well, spears are out and werewolves are worryingly ambiguous...

So I might as well bring out the third thing I'm hoping for: Bringing back the digitigrade feet on Argonians and Khajiit. It made them so much more interesting and exotic. There's no reason they can't do it, except that it'd be more work. Which was also true for spears...

[G-Flex]

"One-handed" and "two-handed" is braindead, but the distinction between a sword and a mace isn't?

Erm. Yes? How is a distinction between blunt weapons and swords "braindead", exactly? I could see lumping them together if you had to, but the idea that there's more of a difference between a one-handed sword and a two-handed sword is greater than the difference between axes, swords, maces, daggers, and whatever else? That's the weird part, to me.

So I might as well bring out the third thing I'm hoping for: Bringing back the digitigrade feet on Argonians and Khajiit. It made them so much more interesting and exotic. There's no reason they can't do it, except that it'd be more work. Which was also true for spears...

Who knows. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't, because the same reasons they didn't in Oblivion still presumably apply here.

[GamerKnight]

What reasons were those? I loved that way of walking. I would run around as a Khajiit or an Argonian just so I could see the funny way they walked.

Morrowind was the first RPG I ever played, and I find it hard to enjoy others apart from the Fable series, because I got so engrossed in the TES lore. I hope it comes back. In Oblivion they went with a more narrow range of crappy storybooks, which was different from Morrowind were I spent almost 12 hours just searching caves and ruins for the whole set of necromantic books which were like an instruction manual. I also loved the indecipherable Dwemer tomes and schematics, which I kept in a special library in my Telvanni tower. Then Oblivion raped the idea of enjoyable in-game books. I couldn't find a thing that interested me exceept those books on vampires in the Vile Lair, and I had all of them in thirty seconds. Not like in Morrowind were you could find a book that interested you, and spend hours searching for the rest of the series.

[LoSboccacc]

See, it (weapon variety) was great in Warband, that's why I'd like to see it in an actual RPG like Skyrim. Problem is, they're running in completely the opposite direction.

Of note, however, was that warband's weapon skills were "one-handed," "two-handed," "polearms," "bows," "crossbows," and "throwing." Note the lack of distinction between swords, maces, axes, etc. That wasn't that much of a problem, but actually having polearms was nice.

but in warband you also had weapon speed and weight and character strength and relative movement effecting damage, speed, sequence speed, recoil and such.. the difference in weapon was not only in skill but in the weapons themselves. oblivion has only skill, and an hard coded speed for weapon classes.

[G-Flex]

What reasons were those? I loved that way of walking. I would run around as a Khajiit or an Argonian just so I could see the funny way they walked.

Easy: They would have had to do more work animating them. One general rule in any programming/engineering/math problem is that the more you can assume, the easier things are. If you're animating player critters and can assume they have the same skeletal structure, then you have to do less work than if you have to work on animation for races that, say, walk differently.

Morrowind was the first RPG I ever played, and I find it hard to enjoy others apart from the Fable series, because I got so engrossed in the TES lore. I hope it comes back. In Oblivion they went with a more narrow range of crappy storybooks, which was different from Morrowind were I spent almost 12 hours just searching caves and ruins for the whole set of necromantic books which were like an instruction manual. I also loved the indecipherable Dwemer tomes and schematics, which I kept in a special library in my Telvanni tower. Then Oblivion raped the idea of enjoyable in-game books. I couldn't find a thing that interested me exceept those books on vampires in the Vile Lair, and I had all of them in thirty seconds. Not like in Morrowind were you could find a book that interested you, and spend hours searching for the rest of the series.

That is pretty disappointing. I like the Sermons of Vivec, because they really do feel like millenia-old folk stories, including the weirdness and cultural strangeness/incomprehensibility-to-the-outsider that you'd expect from such a thing.

[GamerKnight]

Yeah, the Sermons were great. However I could never find them all. They were the only set not included in my library.

[Africa]

-No spears. Just the expected one-handed weapon, two-handed weapon and bow skills. Grouped around playstyles rather than actual styles of combat.

Remains to be seen how this will go. I assume crossbows and throwing weapons are still out...

-Something vague about wanting to make Enchanting feel magical rather than something you can statistically gauge. Went on to describe different ways fire magic could be used - as a fireball, a flamethrower, as a kind of fire trap when cast over a rune on the ground, as a wall that can be spread over the ground or ceiling.

Both of these could be cool. Enchanting...well, anything's an improvement.

-Alchemy described as the most magicky of the stealth skills...

Interesting. I wonder if they'll fix how broken potions are...mainly the fact that you can pause the game to pick one, drink it in an instant and have its effects hit you instantly. I've always thought it would be cooler to do potions as something that takes time to drink. So higher alchemy skill would produce more concentrated potions that you can down instantly, like a shot, whereas a poorer potion would have the same effects but take time to drink. Then the effects would be ongoing instead of instant. Instead of a shot of health, you'd bet a constant healing effect over some period, or protection or what have you. If you want to heal instantly, you already have spells and items, so why not have potions be a different mechanic?

-No confirmation on werewolves/shapeshifting into other animals.

I wouldn't be hugely surprised if werewolves were (again) an expansion.

-Horses/mounts should differ from Oblivion in how they feel to be controlled - less like tanks, apparently. Dragons will not be mounts.

Just lift the system from Mount and Blade, tbh.

-Characters will start out as more or less a blank slate, since character creation will be mostly aesthetic. Choice of race will make certain attributes higher than others to start out with, and grant different racial abilities.

Very interesting. No idea if this'll be good or not.

-Less choice when making faces (i.e. pick from different types of features and then tweak them rather than messing with a lot of individual sliders) but they will look better; there was an example of this on the podcast page but the image (originally a female Nord) seems to have been replaced.

Thank baby Jesus. All those sliders in Oblivion were a headache.

-The level of each skill will matter less, with the emphasis placed on perks spent when you level to define your character.

If they're going in the direction of leaning it towards player skill more, this could be a really interesting way to it. I'm interested.

-There will be around 280 perks in the game. Each skill has its own perk tree, which will allow for further specialisation, e.g. one-handed weapons has perks for swords, axes and maces.

Ahh, so it looks like they're making up for the loss and condensation of skills in an innovative way. I like.

-Faster levelling than in Oblivion, because of the perk system. No hard cap on levels - designed for up to level 50, but if planned out beforehand a character could perhaps reach level 75.

I assume raising skills still raises your level?

-Dragons have special AI that dictates how they act when two or more dragons meet each other (presumably won't happen normally but can be modded to happen). They can attack from the air, dive bombing and breathing fire, or from the ground. There will be variation among the dragons.

Awesome. Fighting dragons has a lot of potential...to be good or to be disappointing.

-Played down Radiant Story - simply a tool used to tailor parts of random events and quests to each specific character, e.g. rescuing an NPC with a good relationship to the character from a cave they haven't already explored, along with a quest reward to suit the character.

I dunno how I feel about a quest reward to suit the character...I think knowing you'll get a good item every time reduces the fun of the game. People are more likely to keep doing something (i.e., it's presumably more fun to do) when they're rewarded unpredictably and sporadically; when you know every time that you'll get something good, the fun wears out a lot quicker.

-From the sounds of it, the player's character will start in a prison once again. They will then discover that they are one of the dragonborn, and be summoned to High Hrothgar by the Greybeards. Nothing else said on the plot for obvious reasons.

I was kind of hoping this game's plot would involve any kind of predestination - no ancient prophecies or people marked at birth to fulfill some role. I mean, when I heard about "this one guy who fights dragons" I figured it would be cool if he was just that, not some reincarnated hero, but just a badass dude, and the main quest involved not your character fulfilling a prophecy, but just deciding you want to be badass too and going to learn from him or something.

-In addition to snow and mountains, expect tundra, volcanic tundra, glaciers and pine forests too.

As long as there are alien and unearthly landscapes like in Morrowind I'll be happy.

-Area of the world around the same size of Oblivion, but mountainous terrain should increase the time taken to travel around it.

That's good. Morrowind used mountains to create the illusion of size, to great effect. The thing is, MW also "used" lack of view distance to that same effect. Once computers got good enough to use graphics extenders, suddenly everything felt much smaller. I hope this game feels large.

-Dungeons/caves will look better, as will the architecture of towns (i.e. won't look as if all built at the same time). Think Howard mentioned Skyrim having a more primitive feel to the world.

I don't care about dungeons looking better, I care about having more variety in them. As for towns, yeah, I hope there's some variety and creativity there. I like the idea of a more primitive world.

[LoSboccacc]

I'd like a proper alchemy system, alchemy should be the hard way for commoners to do magic.

also, I wonder if it's a good way to specialize characters having perks. perks were used (pre bethesda) in fallout mainly as roleplay enhancers, not as skill boosters, and they were great at that.

I'd like some more meat to the specialization system, not having a character specialized because it has no more perk available to chose. skill decay, for example. or skill gain speed influenced by total skills, or something

[GamerKnight]

I wonder if we will get to ride giant wolves. Its a cold, northern area filled with people who think a good time is dry-humping a battleaxe so it would be good to see giant wolves.

[Virtz]

-Dungeons/caves will look better, as will the architecture of towns (i.e. won't look as if all built at the same time). Think Howard mentioned Skyrim having a more primitive feel to the world.

200 years in the future and more primitive! Reminds me of FO3 (where it made no sense).

-Something about there being changes to guilds. Not sure if that just means new ones or how they work. Did say some from previous games would reappear though.

Could mean no more being head of all guilds at once. Could also mean you can no longer actually join and rank up in them, though.