Alcrin

Oblivion was the same way, actually. The Construction Kit included many additional sliders for designing faces that didn't exist in the actual game's chargen. Most of them however dealt with facial asymmetries, like making one eye higher than another.

I will murder every bard in Skyrim. Their singing is *terrible*!

Yes yes yes I know everybody wants to see how much better it looks on a maxed-out PC, but according to the video card chart in the general discussion forum I'll be able to run it on Low at best. (Radeon HD3450) I'd like to be prepared for what kinda graphics I'm gonna have to deal with.

What are R, Shift, and / for?

Welp, I'm boned. Won't be able to play Skyrim for a few years when I'll be able to afford an upgrade. So long folks.

I've got a bad feeling Bethesda has no idea what made the Dark Brotherhood so popular in Oblivion (hint: the great characters to interact with) and will instead assume that people just like going around killing people. The DB in Skyrim will be filled with faceless characters with zero personality and there will be no missions like Whodunit, instead all of them being like Bad Medicine.

On Christmas we STILL won't have the PC specs. :/

Certainly. The way to keep the challenge level consistent without making leveling just feel like a treadmill is to increase the complexity of encounters, not just the numbers. Oblivion did this very poorly: The only time enemies get more complex to fight is at the high levels when they get annoying spells like invisibility and spell reflection. Character progression needs to give the player new options and the new encounters need to provide exploitable opportunities for these options. And that's probably the most difficult problem to deal with in TES's Open World style: How do you really let the player go anywhere and do anything they want at any time while keeping the challenge level consistent AND keeping the game interesting by introducing new mechanics over time? Unfortunately Skyrim's not using this answer but here's how I would solve the problem: Perks are the right way to go here, but the perks need to be about the player's interaction with the environment. Probably the only decent example in Skyrim is the zoom perk for Archery: Suddenly, sniping from a distance becomes much more reasonable. All parts of the environment need to be designed to give exploitable situations with all perks (for example, all encounters need to have good sniping spots), but no individual perk should ever be necessary for completing anything, and the player should be equally versatile with any combination of perk choices (this is definitely the hardest part of the design). Provide progression in the form of enemies by designing them such that the basic tactics available from the beginning of the game no longer work and the player has to use the new perks they've chosen to use the exploitable environment designs. As the challenge level of enemies increases to match the player's level, give them more and more new powers that obsolete the player's old tactics forcing them to explore new possibilities.

Hey, I've been away the past few days. Do we have the system requirements yet?

So what? Why should there be distinctions between different characters at all?

I won't be missing any games because of Skyrim. The only other game I'm interested in getting right now is the new Professor Layton and Dark Souls looks like it would be cool to try, but I'm not blowing money on a whole new console just for one game.

I think a game with time limits on quests could very well be interesting: Making a choice between doing one thing and doing another because you don't have enough time to do both. It's a fantastic way to set up internal conflict. I think it could only work though if: A. All quests are timed and there are no indefinite quests. Why? Because the player will always feel rushed to get the stuff with a strict time limit done first and will always feel like the stuff with no time limit can be pushed on the backburner. Except stuff put on the backburner like that tends to never get done. You see this all the time in real life, how many people do you know who have dreams they want to fulfill "someday" but never work toward them because "today is more important"? B. The player needs to have a legitimate motivation to refuse a quest other than a lack of time (or a lack of fun). Otherwise, there's serious risk of the player getting frustrated due to thinking "Man, this game would be much more awesome if only I could see all of it instead of having to skip at least half of the stuff I'm given to do." The solution to this is to give the player a reason not to partake in the quests they refused even if they were given a second opportunity to do them so that this can be justified away. Probably the best way to do this is permanent death: The player dies once, they return to the beginning of the game. But this is a very tricky thing to handle well and thus comes with its own plethora of problems.

I can understand the objection to DLC in principle. Certain awful game publishers demand a game be broken up into pieces then sold as DLC. Like that thing with needing to use a code to activate multiplayer (and paying 10 bucks if you didn't get the game new). Yes, this practice is bulls***. Yet, I can't agree with the writer because Bethesda doesn't do this with DLC. Bethesda's DLCs are basically official mods that you have to pay for.

Good news is, the bound armor and weapons spells are long-lasting: The Bound Mace spell lasts a full 5 minutes from a single casting. Here's hoping they just have "bound armor" instead of a separate spell for every armor piece...