Seen him running around thought he was a quest giver once. He was a bollocks to chase down.

Yeah, that bugger is fast. I forget how I caught him.

If I decide to do an update on the front page, what kinds of things do you guys want to see on it?

The concept of dragons will be interesting...Also curious exactly how they are changing leveling and such!

Dragons will come in multiple types, and will have unique abilities and attack patterns that will involve attacks from air and ground, melee and ranged, mundane and magical. It's likely that they will be difficult fights regardless of level, and can appear at any point, be it as part of a story event, or when you exit the tavern you stayed in last night and find a raiding party reducing the other side of town to cinders (this was confirmed to be able to happen).

Leveling is (as always) based on experience. Finding locations and leveling skills grant experience, and unlike the previous game, leveling ANY of the 18 skills available to you at the beginning of the game grants experience, be it a skill that you use constantly or one that you might dabble in once every 10 hours of play. Increasing a skill to a higher number grants more XP than a lower, so a bump from 67 to 68 will grant significantly more XP than a bump from 1 to 2, regardless of the fact that both are a net bump in one skill level. When you level, you gain one perk to choose from of about 260 (if ranks are included as individual perks), and an expected level maxima (not cap; you can level until all skills are maxed out) of 50 means that while anyone can be good at anything, every character is also forced to specialize to a degree.

There are 18 skills and 260 perks as of the writing of this post, which means that each skill will on average have 14 to 15 perks assigned to it. This means that over 50 levels, assuming that you get a perk at level one, you will be able to acquire about 3.6 complete skill trees, which means that you'll be able to gain every perk of three given skills with eight left over to dabble in other fields. Or, if you want to be a pure generalist, you could put two to three perks into every single skill.

Does that help?

Stop helpfully providing good info, Omega!

It makes the wait intolerable...

I was the Oblivion Guru when it came out. I shall maintain my title with Skyrim!

And yes, the wait is horrendous. Thats why I scour everything for new bits of info every few days.

EDIT: I was wrong about the number of perks. Its 280, so that means that each skill's perk tree will have 15 to 16 perks, allowing a 50 perk character to have 3 complete trees and three perks left over to put into other skills.
Its also worth mentioning that this number is in no way set in stone, and comes from Todd Howards interview with Game Informer; its also worth mentioning that the trees are diverse in their contents, so you won't need to take every perk in a tree if you only plan on specializing in part of it. For example, you won't need to take every perk in the one hand weapons tree if you only plan on using bladed weapons like short and long swords (daggers are placed under the stealth skill), and a fire specialist will only need parts of the destruction tree.

I'm looking at all my games and thinking "Dag-nabbit I need a new elder scrolls game sooooooooon!"

Trust me, I know the feeling.

Did anyone here write about the additional effects that some of the damage types have recieved?

Also, this:

Have to say its looking good. Just hope its as advertised.

I have little doubt that this game will cause our families to miss us.

I wonder what fighting the spiders will be like.

I'm actually quite disappointed. They've thrown out all the attributes. Now it's just Health, Magicka, and Stamina. Big change in the name of streamlining.
Hoping I don't pull a Mass Effect 2 and go in expecting an RPG only to find something else.

Wonder how they'll handle things like carrying capacity without Strength?

I can't say that I disapprove of this. The fewer offscreen numbers and calculations, the better.

I prefer a medium amount. For example, playing Baldur's Gate, I had the damage dealt and taken show onscreen, as well as a few other rarer things. I like being able to easily tell if what I'm doing is actually having an effect. If I get the Awesome Sword of Greatness +5 I want to be able to really gauge just how much better it is than the Cool Sword of Uberness +5.
This also dispenses with a huge number of enchantments and spell effects. Personally, I like to be able to design a character's stats to go in a certain direction.
Guessing customization will have to be almost purely through Perks.
This isn't something that will spoil the game for me, but I do hope it works out alright. The tendency to streamline for casual audience accessibility is far too prevalent nowadays. Casuals want to play, that's fine. There's an Easy setting (or Difficulty Slider, in this case). But at least require a minimal amount of understanding and skill.

I suppose they might allow you Bags of Holding for you inventory. That might compensate for the lack of a Strength attribute.

I foresee this game taking up a LOT of my free time when it comes out. Probably gonna spend my whole Christmas break next semester with this one.

NO MIN-MAXING FOR YOU!

CobaltMonkey wrote:

I suppose they might allow you Bags of Holding for you inventory. That might compensate for the lack of a Strength attribute.

Same as with Dragon age? Buy a capacity increase?

That, or related skills (like stealth and potentially whatever athletics became) will have weight limit increases as perks.

Bring back Final Fantasy Item bags.

As long as they leave out the Final Fantasy grinding.

Since you level simply by playing the parts of the game that you enjoy, I don't think that grinding will be an issue.

If the player has to repeat any action long enough it'll begin to seem grindy.

Although real-time games' elements tend to take a lot longer to do so.

You seem to be misunderstanding how you level in this game. Its not like most RPG's, were experience that contributes to a level up is only gained through fighting and defeating enemies; its not like oblivion, where you only leveled by using one of seven skills repeatedly, while the the other 14 were just nice to have. If you use ANY of the 18 skills in Skyrim, it contributes to your level.

Did you hit an enemy with a one handed weapon? How about a two handed weapon? Or did you use a bow to fill them full of arrows? All of those can help you level.

Did you harvest the items necessary to create new items, like potions, poisons, weapons, and magic? Did you actually use those items to manufacture new ones? All of that contributes to your level.

Did you sneak past anything with sentience? Did you stab them in the back, then pick the lock on the chest that they were guarding? Each of those will help level you.

Did you cast a spell? THat will level you.

Did you try to get a better price from a merchant for what you're buying or selling? Did you convince someone to do something that they may not have done before? Those will increase your level.

Did you sprint? Did you fall from a great height or jump? Did you swim? That levels you.

You level in Skyrim simply by doing whatever you please, nevermind any sort of grinding; the only way not to level is to not play the game.

Well, keep in mind that I'm basing my viewpoint on what I experienced in Oblivion. What I'm saying is that it's a good thing that Bethesda are taking great pains to not have this game's level-up system end up being more of that.

The class system from Oblivion is what caused the leveling/grinding issues in Oblivion, at thats been cut for Skyrim. I agree that thats a good move.