Just to reduce the vagueness and ambiguity of some of the summaries of the Podcast we've been seeing, and just so those who don't have decent connections can see the information revealed without having to wait forever for the podcast to stream. Note: this is NOT a magazine or paid site transcript. It's a transcript of a freely available audio Podcast.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/podcasts/archive/2011/02/03/toddhowardse.aspx

TODD HOWARD Game Informer Podcast:

4:30 Are there going to be spears in the game?

"There are not spears in the classic spear sense. I am sorry. There currently are not."

"Something like spears is really cool, but with where we're putting our time with the other weapons, it just didn't make the cut."

5:00 Are there any other kind of hints you can give us about the directions of like the types of weapons people are going to be able to play with?

"The main thing that I can say is that, they go back to, we had X weapon types in Daggerfall, then X weapon types in Morrowind, and Oblivion had its own, and Skyrim had its own. And any time there's something that we stop doing whether that's spears, having a skill for that, or crossbows and things like that, we tend to each time start over. And we want to find weapon types with this game that really yield gameplay. So those skills are separate.

There's a two-handed weapon skill, there's a one-handed weapon skill, and there's an archery skill. Because those really are playstyles. I'm going to use a one handed weapon and then either cast magic with my other hand, or I'm going to use a shield, or I'm going to use a two-handed weapon, where it's going to fill both those slots, obviously (two-handed.)

Within each of these skills, there are perks. They're perks, but they're not like Fallout, in that each skill has its own perk tree.

Take one handed for instance. You have a one handed skill, and then you can perk that. There's a skill tree underneath one handed. And within that there are separate perk areas for maces, and then axes, and then swords. So as opposed to having say an axe skill, that is a part of the perk tree within one handed. It gives us a better balance. You can say "Well I like one handed stuff," and then you can start specializing as you raise that skill."

8:40 Are you able to be a werewolf in Skyrim?

"We're fans of that stuff as well, and we're currently messing with all that. I don't want to commit to, 'here are the things you can change into and what they're like right now.' Not because we're not doing it, or not attempting to. I just don't know honestly where that's going to end up and how deep we're going to get into that.

We will try things, and if we don't feel it's helping the game, there are other areas we'd like to spend our time on in the game."

10:38 People are curious about mounts. Are we going to see a return to mounts?

"Something we're messing with, and we don't know where it's going to end up. There were things with the Oblivion horses. We liked having them. They weren't the greatest implementation of horses. And now you see things come out like Red Dead. There are more horses in games, and we feel like just the basic implementation we did in Oblivion isn't going to be good enough. We are currently attempting things with that, and I don't know where it's going to end up."

10:45 When you were looking at the Oblivion mounts, What were the things that stood out as being kind of problems for you that you wouldn't put into Skyrim unless you could fix?

"Mostly I would say controls and the feel that you are not in some sort of battlefield jeep. You are riding an animal. Just the feeling of doing it. But a world without them feels a little weird. We definitely want to have them. We don't know yet what you're going to be able to do with them and to what level."

12:55 Are you going to be able to craft spells, potions, and other items?

"We do have crafting within each discipline now. We do have smithing, enchanting is back as a skill, and then alchemy we're sort of treating as - it doesn't matter that much anymore (stealth/magic/combat categories) - but it's sort of in our stealth category now. We have a blended skill list, so alchemy is sort of the most magical of the stealth skills. And then we have lots of other things that are NOT skill based that you can craft, like cooking and things like that.

There is a lot of that, and more emphasis on it this time around."

13:50 One thing that when I was down to see you guys at the studio was stuff related to how spells would interact with each other and that kind of thing. And I would suspect that the results of your experimentation on that would have an affect on whether you have anything like spellcrafting, right?

"Yeah, spellcrafting is a real wildcard. Something that we've done a lot. And there are pluses and minuses to it. We'd like to find... we have some ideas that we really like on how to solve that, and I don't know where that's going to go. But the thing that we DON'T like about the previous systems that we've done, is it becomes very "spread-sheety." It takes the magic out of magic. You got to see the game, but your listeners haven't. There's a bigger emphasis on how the magic physically acts. Just a spell like fire; there are different spells for how the fire moves. Like putting down a rune that explodes when you walk over it. Or fire you can spray that lingers on the ground, like you're spraying a wall, and you can spray the ceiling. Or fire that travels like a flamethrower out of your hands. Or a fireball that you charge up and throw and it explodes at a distance. So our main goal is to make magic feel like this arcane powerful thing. And once it goes into a spreadsheet in the game where you can just say I want something at this distance and this power, it removes the illusion of like how this stuff actually works. So we have some ideas of ways around that, but we don't know where those are going to go yet. We do have the benefit of, we're really, really happy with how the magic plays in the game, both visually and mechanically. And then being able to do it with both hands. There are opportunities there for combinations and things you can do without getting into the spreadsheet aspect of it. Which I do know some people like, but it does take away from the impact of the spells that you're finding and mechanically how they work."

16:12 Within the one-handed skill tree you've got these different perks for maces, and axes, and swords and so on. Within the magic system is it kind of similar, is it by school that you're perking up, or is it individually like I've got fire spells, and I'm going to perk fire spells?

"Well there's the school Destruction, so that covers like a category of spells, and then within Destruction there are perks for fire based spells. So people see we've removed Mysticism, but that's just a label right? Those spells go into other skills. And then it gets deeper within those skills. The easy thing for us is to just add more skills. That's actually easier. Because in the old games there was just a skill and a number, there wasn't really a progression. We really want you to feel that you're getting better in this particular skill. And perks are the main way we do that now. And I think the game right now has like 280 perks if you include the ranks. So even a character that raises all their skills to 100, and they're playing and they're level 50, they've only gotten to pick 50 perks. They're very different characters. And a lot of the power is in the perks as opposed to the raw number of the skill. There's still some power in the raw number of the skill, just not as much as there used to be. All that stuff has been moved into the perks."

17:53 How are races different from one another?

"So the main decision you make in the beginning is what race you're going to be. You no longer pick class. You basically pick what you're going to look like, and obviously the race is a big part of that. And that comes with certain skill increases. So certain races have certain skills that are higher to start with, and then they also have either spells - depending on what race you pick - and/or racial abilities."

19:15 On the lack of class and the new leveling system:

"You just play, and your skills go up as you play, and the higher the skill the more it affects your leveling. It's a really, really nice, elegant system that sort of balances itself. People would play and the general pattern would be, they played for like three hours and then, 'oh, I picked the wrong skills, I'm going to start over.' They weren't necessarily upset about that, but to us it's 'is there a way we can solve that? Is there a way we can make this better' And we think this is it."

20:36 Facial creation:

"There's an all new face system we did. On the one hand you have less control than you had in Oblivion, but what you're doing looks cool. Our joke was Oblivion would have been better if the Random button was renamed the Ugly button on the face creator. So we've redone that completely with really, really nice results. Something simple like a nose, we have a lot of prebuilt shapes you can pick from, and then you can adjust the size and position of that, as opposed to lots of fiddly sliders. It lets us hand craft a lot of options that you can mess with. If you just start messing around, you're not going to end up with something that looks bad."

21:49 What are the dragons going to be like in the game?

"If you're a fan of fantasy you see a lot with dragons. They've been a part of classic fantasy that we've never done. So we wanted to do them in a way that they were part of the world, and put them on screen, and fight them in a way that you conjure up in your head when you read fantasy that you haven't really seen in a game. And that's what we're trying to pull off, that they are these fierce beasts. They do become these kinds of boss fights, like a mix between a Big Daddy and a Helicopter in half life 2. These things that you see coming and you're like, 'Oh. Oh NO.' They are really difficult to kill."

23:15 Are they the enemies you end up fearing the most?

"Definitely. Oh yeah."

"We had a lot of back up plans for them when we were developing the game. Because when you deal with a creature that big and its AI and how powerful it is. You know, how much can it fly, can it land, will it be able to do this? We made a little team of people to work on dragons and put some of our best people on it. They worked on it for two years. They really came out like... We got to go past the list we had and then more. We're ecstatic with how they came out. They can dive bomb and breathe fire down a street. They can get on the ground and march around now. They can pretty much go anywhere. So we can call them and do random encounters. When they come, they generally now just work. We can throw multiples of them in a scene. They just, you know you just... like... when I get bored in the game I just summon dragons now and they can terrorize the town. It's always cool.

There are multiple types of them. As far as riding them, I would not expect that. It's not something I see happening. It's kind of not how we're approaching them, first of all."

24:42 Jumping up on one of their backs might not get the best results.

"No."

25:10 Companion characters. That was a really fun and really cool part in Fallout. What's going on with that?

"We are approaching it in a different way. I would not expect the deep personalities and uniqueness with a low number of companions. We are aiming for a much, much higher number of companions that you can hire or they become your friends and they come with you. The general direction is to make it a bit more dynamic, and have more people that you can decide to have come with you. And in that we sacrifice them having a lot of depth or personality or individual stories. And there still will be some like that. But that's kind of the direction we're headed right now. We don't know the exact number of NPCs in the world that could become your companion, but we're hoping it's a big number."

27:15 Radiant Story:

"We want to be careful to not oversell it. It's a tool that we use to make quests. We started the game by making them all very, very random/dynamic. You do see the holes in that. It doesn't tell a good story. Good stories are still told by good writers and we do most of our quests that way. Radiant Tool is the tool you use to make any quest. And you can make all of the roles in that quest, you can hand craft all of those roles, or you can take any part of the quest and conditionalize it. So what it allows us to do is to take parts of a quest or an activity, and conditionalize it, without having to hand script conditions.

Example: You come to town and there's a guy who has a child that's been kidnaped, and they're in a dungeon nearby. We can write that as a quest template, fill out the roles saying it's a guy in town who likes you, who has a child, and then the role for the location is a dungeon that fits this. We can pick a dungeon that you haven't been to for some reason that's nearby. You walk into town and the game just says 'Oh, there's a guy in town who likes you. We're going to kidnap his kid who you might have met, and put him in this dungeon for some reason you didn't go to. And that dungeon happens to be a higher level dungeon and so we think you could use a challenge right now. And the reward is going to be this other thing that your character can use.' Doing that before was impossible. But we have that opportunity right now, and so tend to be using it. The more dynamic quests tend to be like little favor things that people ask you to do, not full blown quests. But if you were to play a quest, it's very hard for you to tell. It's going to seem very hand-written. You'd really have to compare notes with friends to figure out the parts that that particular quest decided to make dynamic. Because some quests have no dynamic elements, and some quests have more."

"When we're going to send you to do something, we can tailor that, a bit to the things you've done."

30:43 Will we see factions?

"We're doing factions. That's definitely something we're going to be talking about later. Not because we don't know, but because we decided that's a good thing to talk about later."

"Different than what we've done before in what they are. But definitely we're going to have them."

31:25 Are there some that are returning, or it's all new ones?

"There are some that are returning, yes."

31:35 11.11.11. How committed are you to this number?

"We actually tend not to announce release dates until later in the process. We're very confident about it. There's still a lot to do in the game. But we wouldn't have announced it if we weren't really confident."

32:42 Why do characters always start as a prisoner?

"It started that way in arena. We did it again in Morrowind, then Oblivion. It's sort of become a tradition. We like this idea that there's a little bit of conflict in the beginning with you being a prisoner, and we never say why. So you immediately in your head tell a story of why you're in prison to yourself. I kind of like that about it. It's part tradition, and part it lets you in your head tell a quick little story to yourself."

34:10 What aspects of Skyrim are going to appeal to a gamer who wasn't a fan of previous TES games but was a fan of Fallout?

"If you really, really don't like Oblivion, I don't know that this is suddenly going to switch you over. One of the things that Fallout 3 does well is there's a certain tone of the world, there's a certain uniqueness to it, it has style. Oblivion, for what it is, can be very kind of classic, traditional fantasy. There's not a lot of unique style to the world. Whereas Skyrim I definitely think has a unique style. We got better at that, and we push it, like what is the culture of these people? So it has its own flavor. It's definitely grittier. It's lower tech. The world's lived in. The ruins feel ancient and thousands of years old. We're also careful in Skyrim of the various ages of, 'when was this built?' Where Oblivion everything can feel like everything in this town was built on the same day. There's a more unique and a better flavor to the province of Skyrim and the game Skyrim than we had in Oblivion and Cyrodiil."

36:18 Is Skyrim going to have multiple endings?

"I don't really want to answer the ending of the game questions, yet. So I'm going to pass on that question."

37:07 How expansive will Skyrim be? Is Skyrim sort of a comparable geography to Oblivion?

"As far as actual landmass, it's ABOUT the size of Oblivion. It's different in that a good portion of it is mountainous. And mountains you can't just walk across. So they kind of inflate your game space. If you have this large mountain, getting up and through that and around that, and then the dungeons that are on mountains, you spend more time there. When you're walking around it, to us it feels a bit bigger because of the mountains. We were really pushing to have it not just be this big snowy mountain game, so that we do have a lot of different regions. They all have a really unique look while still being a part of that province."

38:33 Is there any particular ESRB rating that you guys are aiming for.

"We never aim for a specific rating. I'm sure it'll be M. But we never aim for a specific rating. I would be surprised if we did not get an M. Our assumption is we're getting an M, so we are doing the content that we think is appropriate for Skyrim. There is more violence to the combat just in how it looks. Not like Fallout violence where it gets really over the top. It's more a realistic level of violence for what it is with guys with swords and axes and those sorts of things."

39:38 Is there a HUD, and if not how will the health system work?

"There is a HUD. It comes and goes as needed. There is a small compass bar at the top that right now is always there for direction. Your magicka, your health, and your stamina, or other things, come up when they need to. If you're just walking around the world and you're full health, your health bar isn't on the screen. As soon as someone hits you and your health drops, it pops up."

41:02 Will there be an X64 version for PC players? High resolution textures (will they have to be modded in?) Do you have a dedicated group for the PC version?

"We work on it together. The main thing for people to know is our background is PC games. The game is authored here on PCs. That's what we work on. A lot of the team is playing the game on PC all day. We do want the platforms to each have a really, really high level of fidelity. I personally play a lot on the Xbox. It tends to be my preferred platform. We do a lot of graphics development still FIRST on the Xbox, just because it's smoother. And then a lot of that stuff does go over to the PC. We tend to do as much as we can as the project goes on, because we want to support as wide a range as possible. We also tend to do that stuff late, because right now we want to work on the main game and how it plays and getting the graphics fast everywhere, and then as the project gets closer to release we start supporting all those other things. You'll definitely be able to run the PC on a much higher resolution. All of our games that we've done so far - Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout - the PC versions have higher res textures they ship with by default. A lot of times you don't notice that, because when you play a console game you're sitting six to ten feet away from the screen. Whereas on the PC, you're sitting a foot, two feet away from the screen. Those kinds of differences in texture resolution, you don't notice unless you're looking at two screenshots on a computer and flipping between them. We are gonna support that stuff. I can't say how far. But the same thing with the interface. We do a lot of PC interface stuff. There are uniquenesses [sic] to how we handle it on the PC."

43:45 Your philosophy towards achievements and trophies. What do you think about those systems and how do you want them to work in Skyrim?

"We love them. We definitely do them with all of our games. Our general approach is to have a mix. If you look at the mix in Fallout 3 between specific quests, and leveling or collection, that kind of balance was pretty good. We have to do it differently this time because we have a lot more quests. We like to have a balance of specific quests that are important, or quest lines, and then just general gameplay stuff."

44:52 Is there any chance that you guys are gonna do Kinect support, Move support, 3D, etc.?

"I don't think that's gonna happen. 3D I would be surprised. Both Kinect and Move. They're fairly new systems as of last year. There might be something that we end up doing that we think fits, but at this point it would surprise me, because we do want to keep our focus on the main game."

46:02 MAJOR spoiler (But one that is incredibly cool imo. Wish I hadn't heard it. But since I did... it is awesome imo.)

49:14 Explain how the leveling system works, particularly in relation to the maximum level. What your philosophy is toward that, how long can you level in the game, when does it become basically impossible to level, etc.

"We don't code in a maximum level. There is a theoretical maximum depending on what your skills are. The one change we've made is that you level faster. We've sort of balanced Oblivion and Fallout 3 in some respects to like a 1 - 35, 1 - 30, so if people play for a long time that's the kind of high level with creatures and whatever. This one is balanced like 1 - 50, but that isn't longer in gameplay. You do level faster, a lot faster, especially in the beginning of the game. Because of the power in the perks, we wanted to be giving them out at a higher rate. The actual maximum depending on your particular character how it works out might be 75. I don't really know. I'm just saying we don't code in the maximum level. It will end up whatever it ends up."

"(Perks being more fun) It's the thing you're always shooting for. Even 1 - 50 it slows down a lot as you play. If you assume there's 200 hours of content, you can sort of figure out, 'how often do I get to level?' We think we can balance that with the perks. That's what happened. We did the perks, and we figured out quickly, 'oh, to make these work, we need to be leveling faster.' And it is more fun."

Wow, thank you!

Wow, good job! I can't imagine how long it took you to do that.

Very nice thanks for posting this. I can't imagine how long this took you... I transcribed the magic part and it took me all morning

Thanks for taking the time to do this. The only thing that would have made it better would been to have had timestamp of the questions for people that want to go back and relisten to a specific question.

Damn. Wish I'd thought of doing that during the 4 hours it took to transcribe LOL. Sorry, people. Hopefully the info is still useful, though.

I did go back and fix typos, though.

You did well regardless.

Hey thanks for doing this good job! I had already listened to it but it was nice to read it.

I hoped to hear anything about how easy the game will be to mod and if they will not hard code things like attributes, skills and perks allowing us to add them to the game. If we can, things like the lack of spears will be easily corrected by the community.

And thanks to the OP for the great job! :goodjob:

Thanks for posting, I really appreciate it! Not too excited about a lot of the info though. First of all it sounds like they still aren't sure the direction they are going to take for a lot the aspects. That doesn't bode well for a game that is supposed to be released in 9 months. Anyway, I see some positives and some negatives from the transcript:

Negatives:

1) Mounts sound unlikely
2) Face creation is more limited than Oblivion? Pre set faces rather than sliders? C'mon, where is the real customization. What if I WANT an ugly character that doesn't have one of 3 perfect noses?
3) Alchemy is part of stealth?
4) Sounds like they are focusing much more on how magic looks, rather than plays.
5) Radiant story sounds like it will turn out exactly like Radiant AI. They started development using it much more, but found it had too many holes. Probably won't even notice it is there.
6) Less playable landmass than Oblivion. Same size landmass minus lots of impassable mountains = smaller playable area.

Pluses:
1) large number of recruitable companion allies sounds great!
2) He sounds really confident in the release date.
3) M rating and realistic (not over the top) violent combat.
4) Really like the disappearing HUD idea. Only shows up when in combat or something changes.
5) Atmosphere of the game sounds great. Glad it is more unique and less generic than Oblivion.

Overall, I am trying to keep low expectations for the game, but it is hard to do. Although a lot of these sound like negatives to me, I'm sure the final product will be amazing!

Thanks! It's quicker to reread than to relisten, so this is very helpful.

Just one suggestion: where you've got the info hidden under the spoiler tag, maybe just make a little note that it is MQ/Dragonborn related info? Some people might click it not realising what they might be revealing...

Woah, fair play. Thank you for your effort.

Funny needing to spoiler tag the spoiler tag.

Excellent - thanks very much for doing this :foodndrink:

ok, they said you may pick a preset nose, probably going to be WAY more than 3 by the way, and then after picking on you may alter it, with sliders and such, how you want.

Thank you very much for posting this.

My god those questions were terrible.

They seem to be implying that you cant pick what skills your (more) proficient in and your stuck with what your race starts out good at. That's lame.

Addressing your Negatives:

1) I listened and he said they're currently playing around with it, but not committing. You can't say whether it's likely OR unlikely.

2) They didn't mean "ugly" in this way. Ugly meant basically "non-human". The facegen is notorious for creating horrendous looking faces. It's like the uncanny valley effect, but the opposite end. The faces could vary so wildly they allowed for features outside human(-oid) variance. I'm actually excited what this means for beast races. This sounds like it allows for them to not bind the beast races to the same facegen templates as the more human races. Maybe then the beast races will look more exotic. Take a look at Tamriel NPCs Revamped to see what lots of laborious facegen tweaking accomplished. I'm not sure if that mod improves the emperor, but there is another mod which does. The emperor in the vanilla game looks like a freaking monkey in comparison.

3) This is a negative how? They simply had to group this craft into one of the 3 major skill areas. There are 6 skills per area for "The Mage", "The Warrior", and "The Thief". Each one apparently gets one craft. I wouldn't put Enchanting or Smithing in Stealth before Alchemy.

4) How are those two separate? In an action-oriented game it'd be hard to have mechanics without visuals or vice versa. But in any case they actually were talking about mechanics. You can use a fire spell as trap, as a bomb, as a wall of fire, as a flamethrower, as a stream of fire that spreads around the environment. Those are all mechanics definitions, which in turn define how they will look. If you lay a trap, you're certainly going to see something on the ground, if you throw a bomb it's certainly going to explode on impact, if you want to be able to burn the environment, you certainly need to show it.

5) I didn't read the whole transcript the OP provided, but if you're going on that alone, you should listen to the podcast. His intonation may honestly be necessary to really get what he says. It's not "all or nothing" with Radiant Story. They still use it to conditionalize at least some part of the majority of side quests. Your interpretation of it sounds wrong based on what I heard him say. They're not using it any less because they found it was "broken". If that were the case they'd scrap it or fix it They never once said that. He said first and foremost that he didn't want to oversell Radiant Story. He then said the system with the randomness turned way up was a problem. This isn't a fault of the system, it's a fault of randomness. Total randomness doesn't logically make sense in this system anyway, you inevitably want items/rewards to advance your character... not something you can't use. I think his anecdote was meant to highlight how random the system ISN'T, and how much they have improved upon the idea since its inception, and also how much the system as it stands improves the gameplay experience. It's still present in almost all the side quests in some way, and it's an extremely useful tool to allow them to do quests they could have never written by hand before, and in this way it tailors some of the quests to better fit your character. He said it would be hard to pick out the hardcoded parts of the quests vs the dynamic parts without comparing stories between friends. I don't know about you but this is a GOOD thing, and certainly makes multiple playthroughs much more enticing. It's like, why would I want the same reward every time I ever play, or the same person to approach me without fail about a quest every time. Why would I want to fetch the same item for the same person every time. And so on. After hearing his explanation I no longer have any qualms about it. This is overall completely unlike the Radiant AI "fiasco". This time they never began by overselling it, so it's already disqualified from being anologous.

6) Yes, but more obstructions. Thus traveling can take longer, and not being able to see all the way to the other side of the map like you can from Bruma in Oblivion is a large plus, in that it makes the game world feel bigger by having these obstructions. Especially if they don't include mounts, and it seems from other sources that the running mechanics will be more like Fallout as well.

Thank for this transcript!

My pc has no sound, so I cant listen to all the videos, and something like this really helps statisfy my curiousity bug.
I really want to play Skyrim now

Sounds like we won't get pole-stab polearms, but maybe swing-heave polearms like halberds.



Looks like we should not expect a huge difference in appearance.



I rather get two or three fully developed loveable funny character than 20 peons and mules.



Compass, lol.



Most developers do it on high resolution first then scale them down for the consoles, they are doing it in reverse...

They've said the exact opposite about appearance. Races are more distinct. This sounds like to me that their facial and body customization has not only several general presets to choose from, but they are possibly unique to a race. I'm even hoping for different body meshes by race. It seems like Nords have very huge bodies (this may even be customizable) but Dark Elves are more slender from screenshots.

As for it being in reverse... Yes, they admit to developing for the lowest common denominator. But this is logical. They shouldn't max out the game on PC and then figure out what to cut on consoles. Also, they don't create higher res assets after making lower res ones. That would be stupid. They obviously keep very high resolution, lossless originals, then export these all to a format suitable for Xbox. When generating the assets for PC they choose higher quality. It's that simple. They're not "reinventing the wheel" when adapting things to PC.

Thanks for the transcript

Those were just my initial impressions after reading the transcript. The game could turn out flawless like you suggest, or not so perfect. Either way, it will be amazing. Anyway, let me clarify a bit:

1) The reason I said unlikely was just his tone with the comment. By stating that there was such a high bar set by Red Dead and others, and the fact that they were "toying with the idea" of mounts over 2 years into development, sounds like it is not likely to me. He made it sound like they didn't want to do it if it wasn't up to the high standards set by other games. Creating nice looking and fluidly animated horses that fit well in the environment and do not create balance issues would be a very time consuming task. I'm not saying they won't be in, he just didn't sound like it was a priority.

2) I totally understood what he was going for, I was just being sarcastic about the ugly character thing. Anyway, my gripe is about replacing the sliders with pre set facial components. I'm sure their pre made faces will all end up looking very nice and realistic, but sliders allow for the most customization. I love spending hours just tweaking the facial features of characters I will spend hundreds of hours playing as, so for me it just isn't as involving to pick nose 4 and eye set 15. Not a huge deal, but I always believe that more freedom is better.

3) This wasn't so much a negative as a......huh? It just seemed like they were set on dividing and decreasing their skills, and when things didn't divide out evenly, they just said "meh, throw alchemy in with stealth". Just seems kind of weird because I always play a stealth character, but very seldom use alchemy at all.

4) That was just the impression I got from reading the bit about magic. He said they wanted to take the spreadsheet feel out of the magic which imo means eliminating spell crafting. He goes on about how the magic effects look and behave with all their pre set spells, but that is only part of playing a magic user character. Crafting spells and having to think was a lot of the fun involved imo.

5) The fact that he prefaced the conversation with "we want to be careful not to oversell it", tells a lot. They made Radiant AI a big focus of Oblivion, and I didn't notice one thing in the game that didn't appear to be fully scripted. Originally everyone believed that Radiant story would make for some very dynamic gameplay, but that was probably our fault for hyping it. At least now we know it is basically just a quest tool that adds some randomness to the quest parameters. It still sounds good, just not what I was envisioning. Again, my fault not Bethesdas.

6) Ok, some things I can understand you trying to justify, but this? I can't really see justifying a step backward in game size just by saying that it will take longer due to the possible lack of mounts, and having to walk around all the impassable mountains. I also don't think having a massive draw distance made Oblivion seem smaller. As soon as I started walking somewhere, I could tell right away it would take forever to get there. Now if they justified it by saying the game is much more detailed and explorable that would make sense, but it seems to be quite a bit less explorable with all the mountains. I am just afraid of the game world feeling small. I just got done playing Just Cause 2 which was absolutely massive, and I'm playing Two Worlds 2 right now which is pretty immense for an RPG as well. I just don't want Skyrim to feel small.

Anyway, not trying to sound negative. I am looking forward to this game more than any other. I just want it to be perfect, and those were some of my concerns. For every minor concern I have, I must have 50 things I am incredibly pumped for.

Two Worlds 2 is not as large as OB, that whole continent to the north only about %15 is playable.

Like other games with cliffs and mountains(Gothic 3 come to mind) the game will seem larger, Todd said and we already knew anyway that the world is the same size as OB, but with mountains, so there will be more surface area(there was a neat graphic that showned this). This was the issue with OB you could walk any were in a straight line, not in Skyrim I am quite please to here this.

And there was lots of cool not scripted stuff in OB, the battles between people/beast come to mind, I love being out in the woods and seeing some dude fighting a bear. Or in fallout seeing laser beams at night from a battle in the distance, great stuff.

2 - Face creation is not more "limited". if you read it through, they give you presets that you then can adjust anyways. and who says there's only 3 noses? there's probably around 60!
3 - who cares? it's just basic grouping, your mage won't feel more stealthy if he uses alchemy, same for warriors
4 - they're focusing on making magic more immersive actually, and more varied. Excuse me, but I think throwing a fireball at a tree without any of the fire spreading through it just kills it, and screams "hey, it's not real!"
And honestly, it can't be that tough to beat the past ES games when it comes to magic and its effects...
6 - They didn't say the mountains were impassable. What they meant is that you can't just run across them in a straight line. you'll probably have to walk your way through some twisty roads to climb them, which makes the world feel bigger in fact.
They won't make it like other [censored] games that just go "oh... there's some elevation in front of you... you can't go on the other side! it's our excuse for an invisible wall!".
You'll just have to find a way to climb it