It looks to me that Skyrim can have both lush forests grassland areas as well as snowy mountains.
Add some fire spewing dragons and elementals, and we could have some added fun and considerations for defense and spell casting.

* Do you really want to use a fireball spell if you're surrounded by dry grass and forests?
* A dragon or fire atronach is chasing you. What is best place to setup defense? Forest or behind rocky cover?
* Oh crap, I blasted him with a fireball. Now all these herbs will be gone for a month (regrowth time should be same).
* If it's raining, propagation risk is lowered. Finally some effects of weather.
* Fireball vs enemy chasing you on an icy lake - you guess the rest
* You're in a [censored] situation, and only escape is swimming through infested waters. Throw some frostballs to temporarily freeze an escape route.
* Wind is causing flames to close in on you. Use a wind spell to change the odds and surprise the attacker.
* Sabotage an ice sculpture competition by adding some heat to the mix

Let us have some consequences for our actions, other than how we die.

Using the environment and natural elements is something we live for in dice based RPGs. But this is highly neglected in these games.
With a new engine and all, who knows what they put in there. Feel free to toss in the craziest things you can imagine. I mean, in case the engine isn't design locked already

Hopefully we won't have rain when under shelter, like in Oblivion.

Uhm..

Knowing me I'll probably accidentally reduce the whole of Skyrim to one huge blazing firestorm if the fire from my enchantments and/or spells would spread.

It would be a great way to entertain yourself. You are casually strolling through the woods and you spot a herd of deer. So you throw a fire ball at the haystack they are feeding from and they burn to death. :toughninja:

Yeah, but then the forest catches fire so you're surrounded bij a blaze..

Seems like a good idea.

But Far Cry 2 has been mentioned way too much lately. I don't like Far Cry 2.

I never played far cry 2.

I don't know if I want anything as drastic as in FC2, but something along those lines definetly. If I hit someone with a fireball, I want to see them screaming, rolling, maybe jumping in the nearest lake. I want to be able to freeze oponents and then shatter them. Or freeze the ground around my enemies for some Benny Hill style comedy. If an enemy is in the water, lightning spell should take care of them (and half of the water life).
Or maybe some combo-attacks. I cast a frostball on an enemy, his armor becomes weaker and I can shatter it with my hammer or something.
Or we could go Dragon Age style and have some crease potions that we can through on the ground and then set it on fire.

Or we could take it one step further: If it rains heavily, fireballs could extinquish before they reach their target. At the same time if I cast a frost spell ABOVE my enemies, the rain would freeze and the enemy would be hit my small bits of ice. Wet enemies could have a weakness to frost and lightning but bonus against fire.

In all seriousness though, I do not believe this will happen.

The only thing you missed was the awesome way It did fire. everything else about it was crap.

This would be too cool, and really give magic that powerful feeling it should have once you've begun to master it. I think also that a fire spell should always catch an enemy on fire at least a little bit unless they are wet or have some resist fire enchantment active, but if they do, you should see the fire get extinguished in a puff of smoke as their defensive magic takes it out. And this wouldn't be over powered, because I'm not saying a fire ball should set them completely ablaze, but an arm or a leg on fire that they can tap or jump into water to put out would give you a leg up against more powerful melee enemies. Frost could freeze or numb limbs, lowering movement or attack or visibility. For example if you freeze someone's head and they aren't wearing a helmet or anything, they should have a frosty glaze over their eyes, making it harder to get around for a brief period. Stuff like this would be awesome, and make fighting spell casters much more intense as well.

It tried some interesting things.
Like pulling bullets out of the wound, bits of tree and repairing your broken limbs. The animations were random though. So you get shot in the chest and then pull out a bit of wood out of your leg.

Weapon condition was another annoying problem. There was a chance of weapons breaking and malfunctioning. The chance increased the more you used it. The only problem was that i bought several NEW weapons and they all exploded in my hands on the first shot.

And then the evil map system. Which I can't be bothered to explain because it makes my blood boil.

I honestly don't think of fire elemental attacks as being the same thing as normal fire. This just sounds too punishing on caster characters and would probably result in people not using fire much. It's a neat idea though.

I actually really really like this idea

as a hardened warrior, I feel that this would give mages a huge leg up and essentially break the mage-rogue-fighter dynamic
it would be awesome, but would unbalance the game greatly

I like how it was done in Bioshock. You shoot electricity into water, anyone is the water is electrocuted to death. You throw fire into an oil patch, it catches fire. You freeze a piece of machinery, it stops. You throw fire onto a dude you just froze, you melt the freezing effect. You fire a bullet (or take a wrench to) a frozen enemy, it shatters them into a zillion little pieces. If an enemy is on fire, they can stop the effect by going into water.

In Patapon, there are similar effects like this. Rain will decrease the chance and duration of igniting. When it snows, there's a chance your units might freeze for a bit. Sandstorms and fog reduce visibility; wind and rain will dispel those weather conditions.

This.

Drop a torch to light a dark room then realize you just started the wood house on fire.

I agree with most of what's been posted already- particularly freezing (and then shattering) enemies, which would make mage and spellsword types insanely fun to play. One complication -- assuming Skyrim's engine is up to such effects in the first place -- would be how these things interact with the level/ability system; if health/HP works in the same way as in previous games, does a freeze spell + shatter then become an instant death attack? If you can potentially set large objects or areas on fire, how is the damage to creatures & NPCs calculated, or limited for that matter?

Spells in TES would, in quasi-reality, be vastly more versatile and powerful than the games (till now, at least) have presented them to be due to technical limitations, and it'd be a shame if dynamic and fun elemental effects were featured in Skyrim only for an old "hit points" system and arbitrary balancing factors to cause immersion-breaking and glitchy behaviour. I think ruleset/stat design and AI would have to be improved alongside the spell effects for things to work relatively smoothly in gameplay.

With all that said, I still think these would be tremendously cool features. I'd at least like to see frost spells creating patches of ice on surfaces, fire spells leaving small, short-lived flames in their wake, shock spells crackling through water, and so on, even if more dramatic and destructive consequences were too complex to implement.

Fire that spreads, yes! Absolutely! Just imagine, it's dark at night... suddenly dragons attack from the sky, breathing fire that spreads in a field or a city. Everything gets covered in fire... and it burns, burns, burns!

To be honest, it's almost even a must, considering the dragon theme...

far cry 2 is awesome.

I have had many hours of joy on it, sneaking through bushes and shooting people in the back of the head with a silenced pistol.

spending development resources on a trivial aspect of the game like fire spreading in a forest would be a waste, because TES V is not a smokejumping simulation. All environments would need to include information on how they behave when burning in addition to all other aspects of the game (imagine how this would effect game performance during one of the large scale battles that everyone wants).

There is an Oblivion mod doing this. Zero performance hit, but buggy. I'm sure they can do this better.
I think you have too low hopes and expectations... I mean, seriously, just look at other games, like... obviously Far Cry 2? Crysis (destructable objects, and REAL snow)?? They have done this or similar things with no problem.

Fire should burn.

"Oh no, I am drowning!" *pulls rebar out of leg*

Far Cry 2 taught me that swimming in Africa leads to broken fingers, and that the water is full of rebar.

Anyways, yeah, that would be really interesting. It would give mages a certain advantage, and it would be cool to use a wall of fire to escape from your enemies.

I'd only be for it if similar effects could be done with other spells, at least other destruction spells.

My personal favourite was exploding flare gun. Then being pulled out of a lake at the otherside of the map.