were greaves ever that important? i used them solely for the extra enchantment slot in ob and morrowind. Most likely it was to help with balance, or maybe bethesda can't stand people with mix-matched clothing and armor

I really wish Sony and Microsoft would come out with next gen consoles already. I'm tired of PC being held back by console inferiority.

If you read the post you'd realize I'm not bashing Skyrim, Kthx

I'm less bothered by the combining of armor than I am by the fact that anyone wearing much of the armor in the game would freeze to death in Skyrim's environment. I really am looking forward to a mod that will change this. In my opinion, an ideal method of solving this issue would be to allow wearing clothing under armor, a la Morrowind. Oh well, this comment is barely even relevant to the OP.

Off topic, but what mod is this?

In Scotland (very cold) the natives fought the Empire completely naked and painted blue.

Console gamers are not ruining gaming. Console makers are. They are the ones making the decisions. Of course there is a relation between the two. Gamer keeps giving Maker money so Maker does not want to release a new console and wants to extend the life of the current console. End result. PC gamers and console players both lose out on better graphics better games and everything else that can be done on better systems.

I don't know but something has happened to the gaming market. There used to be console developers and computer game developers. Now they have merged into one. Maybe the bad economy in general has forced these two to merge to save resources for making games. All things being equal there was no reason that both console games and computer games could have improved and developed independently. Console limitations have really hurt PC gaming, and just being able to turn up the resolution or add in a few Direct X features certainly does not fix the problem that the core game was designed to be played on old hardware with a handheld controller.

I couldn't spawn a 50 vs 50 fight in oblivion as I can in skyrim. Obviously SOMETHING is helping. Maybe not merged armor, maybe it is, we can't tell, but clearly some optimization has been done.

First off.
The combination had far less to do with NPCs than it did animation issues. You'll notice that the current system =looks= better in motion than anything Morrowind or Oblivion had. I haven't seen any sectional clipping, and I've looked for it. Altering something for improved game mechanics is a much different thing than dumping huge swaths of game mechanics because it only confuses Bubba.

Second.
Lighting and shadow are not important.....?
Lighting and shadow are -everything-. Without them, you would be looking at.....well, turn your monitor off. That's what you see. Or don't. Without the shadows, the illusion of dimensionality is totally gone.

Some people need to learn a bit about figure rigging and weightmapping and render engines before talking about them........

I suppose you may have a point there. I still find it doubtful that, in an environment mostly covered by snow, one would go adventuring in armor that essentially left the upper body completely bare. Presumably, we are talking about freezing temperatures throughout Skyrim.

Yes Optimization has been done, extraordinarily so. merging armor has 0 to do with it. and Armor variety? where is this armor variety. do you see how many pieces of Fur/Hide armor exists? please. and they merge them into 3 types? I hope the folks behind Tailor maid take a massive whack at this.

That was Beth's own words Dale B. Read the Fan Q&A. They said the merge was to have more NPC's on screen at once.

I'm outside now (mobil) wearing only my underwear and boots on my family's properity in Maine. Though for adventuring i agree. But for bandits I can see it. I mean all they do is run out, pillage or do some other bandity [censored], then run back home to some cave/fort.

You're absolutely right. Warrios of days past only used complete suits of armor and din't mix and match whatever pieces they had. For instance, you can't equip a left pauldron unless you have a matching right pauldron and if your cuirass is made of steel then the fashion police will shoot you on sight if you're sporting plain iron greaves.

And since we're talking about the ease of smacking different armor pieces together, please consider that you can pause the game mid-combat and switch from one suit of heavy armor to another. "Hold on, fellas! Yeah, I know we're supposed to be killing each other and stuff, but can you please give me 30 mins to unstrap my current suit of steel armor and strap on a suit of Dwemer armor? Please?"

In other words, please don't use any kind of "realism" excuse. Just don't. gamesas streamlined the armor pieces so they could simply design entire suits rather than work with so many individual pieces that would have to fit together and probably suffer from clipping issues. The end result is prettier, at the cost of player choice. Removing choice = streamlining. And I guarantee you that it wasn't a hard choice for the gamesas executive who made the decision, since most of the 15 million people who have bought the game thus far don't give an honest [censored] about the depth of player choice or possibly even prefer not to scrounge for all the parts in a full suit of armor.

Steamlining makes sense from gamesas's perspective and it's not inherently negative, even if it's a pain in the ass if you're into complex games. It's a giant piss down the back of the old TES gamers but they're an irrelevant minority at this point. If they like the game, great. If they don't, they can get stuffed and jump off a bridge. They're a dinosaur segment with a very limited appeal and they're deluded if they think they'll get "deep" gameplay, since it costs gamesas development time and thus money. Money they can not spend (and thus keep) if they simply shift focus to a different target segment. I understand that reasoning, even if I don't like it all that much, what with me being a member in that "irrelevant minority" segment.

Edit: Sorry for going off on a rant, mods. Happens on occasion. By the way, I rewrote the deleted sentence part after the comma, just to make the sentence end properly. Hope it's okay. Cheers.

This.

Keep it on topic folks. And Warrior431, your neighbors called, and they said to put some pants on please - before you take an arrow in the knee.

The casuals didn't make this game, did they? What you're saying is like blaming 14 year old girls for Justin Bieber, rather than blaming Justin Bieber for Justin Bieber. It's hardly the casual gamers' fault they're a hugely bigger target segment than old and grumpy RPG nuts.

Yes sir!

Serious business.

I do agree with that. I've been out in freezing weather with minimal clothing without a problem, either when it is for a short time or for performing a laborious task. However, I wouldn't go camping in the winter in Minnesota wearing only my long johns and boots. Anyway, it's not like it is really much of an issue, just something about the game that I will appreciate mods for changing. My dog can survive and even be comfortable in the cold, so seeing as we are talking about some sort of fictional alien beings here rather than humans (none of the TES races are supposed to actually be humans, right?), perhaps they can survive somewhat colder temperatures than we can (the lack of any obese characters does suggest a higher metabolism). Anyway, I think I am geeking out too much; that is quite enough discussion about armor in Skyrim.

I don't see why it matters. At all. The daedric leggings and briastplate are not 'daedric armor'. So? Do you really want to wear a pair of short-shorts with your briastplate?

This is not a "console limitation" as some put it and quite frankly, a simple additional slot per character would not magically drop the framerate much, if at all. The hardware needs to only recognize that there's one more separate mesh per character and that's it... it doesn't need to render any additional polygons, texture pixels, effects, or AI routines, just recognizing, simply, that it is a separate object... and there aren't even physics on worn armor. The "extra NPCs on screen thing" is bullcrap.

Well Nords have a passive 50% cold resistance, so it makes sense they could run around with their arms showing in the freezing cold, but maybe not the rest of the races.

If you ask me this didn't really need an excuse (because it's one). At least personally, I never mixed and matched greaves and chestpiece. Gloves, yeah, helmets sure, boots sometimes, but having golden armor and red/black glorified trousers looks silly as hell. I completely fail to see how merging two meshes in a bigger one instead of hacing two different meshes would make the game run better, however. Shadows? Please, it's not like it has less work to do because my greaves are a bit bigger and have a bit less spikes than the others.



Don't base your historical knowledge off Hollywood movies.