Some weapons didn’t make the cut either because of ”priority and development time”. Levitation was booted for ”better gameplay spaces and scenarios”.
A fan interview with Bethesda has been posted on the official Bethesda forums. ”They are not in Skyrim for the same reasons we didn’t include them in Oblivion,” replied Todd Howard, speaking of items and features in Morrowind.
”First spears, the truth is we’d love to do them, but it becomes a priority and development time thing for us. We feel it’s better to spend our time right now making sure the gameplay for the other play styles is really solid.”
”That includes sword, sword and shield, two-handed weapons, and bows. You can also add magic to that list. Getting those all working well together, while feeling different, is our priority.” One issue upsetting fans is the lack of medium armour.
”As far as medium armor, that’s not a time or polish thing, it’s a design choice to focus on two armor types and making sure those feel different and the player appreciates them.”
”We try to make your character move and feel different between light and heavy and having a 3rd one in the middle just muddies it up in how it plays, as well as visually. And even now, we still have to tweak those two armor types so they feel different, while remaining fun.”
”Every time we slow down heavy armor more, it feels bad, but it’s the main way of balancing it. We’ve added other ways of balancing it that feel right—like different stamina drain rates when sprinting and such,” continued Howard.
”Mark and recall is one where it’s a lot of fun, but like levitation, was removed so we could design better gameplay spaces and scenarios. We were really limited in Morrowind because the player could recall or levitate out of many situations and break them.”
”There was a lot of good gameplay and level design work that we just couldn’t do and now we can. Back then it seemed like many good ideas we had were shot down when another designer would say “oh yeah, I just levitate or recall away.” So we got rid of them.”
Skyrim is a pulling a Fable for NPC relationships. ”You make friends with people by doing things for them. Friends in the game will treat you differently. Some of them will even agree to go with you into dungeons and on adventures. You can even get married. If you own a house, your spouse will move in with you.” Let’s hope they aren’t all fetch quests.
Armour in the game has also been combined more. ”The armor system is very similar to Oblivion’s. The main difference is that the upper and lower body armors, the cuirass and greaves, have been combined into one piece,” explained the Bethesda executive.
”This helps create armor styles that have the look we needed for Skyrim. In most of the Nordic designs we created, the upper armor would completely cover the lower armor, making it unnecessary. We get much better visual results combining those pieces, and it renders a lot faster too, so we can put more people on screen, so that was an easy tradeoff for us.”
”We can also make a lot more armors now, so the number and variation types are more than we’ve ever had.” Check out the full fan interview with Bethesda.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC November 11th.