Anyone who knows a little bit about graphics programming knows that merging the armor will indeed help performance, but it's not enough to warrant this design change. It's more about how they didn't want to fight clipping of different armor meshes and make them all work together. It's a lot of work and it inhibits the design a lot. What they SHOULD have done was make some armors take both slots and be "together" like the are in Skyrim, and others separate pieces like in Oblivion. Some of the armors in Oblivion took both slots up, most people would be fine with that. So if you equip it, it removes greaves and the shirt. Oh well, hopefully the slots are still there in the editor so modders can break stuff apart, but who knows.

As for animations, it has nothing to do with that. When you build a set of armor you put it all on the character and rig it all at the same time. Then you export it in pieces separately into the game data files. But the current method does make it easier to keep things looking nice, but it's not impossible to make armors work well together, I was a rigger on Dungeon Runners and about all I did was make sure armor pieces worked well together from various armor sets. Eventually I came up with a master rig and script that loaded the weights to the vertices of the models and all of the armor worked identical after that and it was easy to make everything work together.

A lot of Gaels and Picts did fight bare assed, and some fully nvde. Throwing severed heads dipped in lye.

Fight clipping? then i fear from that basis we'll move into one piece armors since Imperial Gaunlets clip like a bat out of hell, same for boots and hoods.

it is PART of the console limitation. At present time we have computers that cost less than a grand that compared to the hardware in a 360 or PS3 it looks like a supercomputer. To make the game look better on outdated POS's they had to cut pieces soemwhere to make it look great on console so they can get their money from that market because honest theres no way the way us PC hardware can make and shoulda had the game looking liek when it came out would u be able to have it look that way and stay stable on outdated unupgradeable hardware. They couldnt spend time and money to make a SEPERATE complete game file to maximize the 360 then the ps3 then the PC for the simpel fact as someone stated the market/economy svcks right now so they went from the lowend then ported it to PC for the simple fact they know that modders will do thier work for them on making the game look amazing on PC. So ya, Bethesda and Console u can svck it, Buy a PC support the market and platform this is suppose to be played on. Im really tired of everytime i buy a new game and see that its been "toned down" to comply with the console market...wtf did i spend this hard earned money of the beast of a machine if these [censored] companies aint gonna take advantage of it? i thought that was the norm for pc games to have to update their hardware every what year or 2 to stay on top of the gaming..................................................................................... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u9ext9yysY&feature=related
No im not flaming on bethesda, unfortuantly i see thme as the younger bro whos smart as hell but getting and doing all these [censored] [censored] ideas and u gotta break some skulls with ya brother at times, u love them but know that at times for being so damn smart and creative they can be soo damn stupid.

drunken rant off ran outta beers bbl..

The civil war quests had like 20 npcs on the screen with no glitch/lag on the ps3

That was actual historical Knowledge I learned while reading actual historical books. However please direct me to those movies were naked Scotsman fight the Roman empire. Might be a good show.

I suspect that memory is more of an issue than anything else.

And yes, it is basically a console limitation.

I'd like to teach the world to game
In perfect harmony
I'd like to buy the world a PC
And keep it company

No, no it isn't. It's a developer-imposed limitation. Question... why is it that when we get better hardware and/or better optimization techniques that more and more armor slots are removed? This is not an inherent fault within any platform Skyrim is on, it's Bethesda willingness to further sacrifice these things for the sake of a bit more graphical fidelity. Following Morrowind, with new, more powerful hardware, why cut armor slots? Following Oblivion, with the same hardware but better optimization techniques, why continue to cut armor slots? This is not a matter of "blame a console", this is a matter of "blame the developer". It is a developer that chooses how to utilize given hardware, not the hardware, and it is their decision to do this. In any case, it still doesn't matter much. Yes, the RAM of these things is a bit limited, yet it's still simply recognizing a separate mesh. That can and will take a tiny bit of performance, but not much and one just needs to shorten a draw distance or reduce something else a bit to allow the armor slots. It really isn't that demanding that the game's graphical settings be reduced to garbage or noticeably weakened from before and this is simply Bethesda's decision.

I'm just amazed that we've got a 3 page thread over armor slot reduction. Yes, I read it, so i'm no better, but... It appears any change is a bad change to many of the people who have played previous TES games. There's more than enough to micromanage in this game; one more armor slot isn't going to make a difference. And the time that would have gone into making pants separate went into other areas... like 1/2 mile view distances in realtime, and improved combat. If you're going to complain, at least complain about something that matters, and/or something we can do something about.

You've got that right!

By that definition, everything in the game is developer-imposed limitation (i.e., "If they made the game look like Minecraft, they'd have plenty of space for armor slots!") - but that definition is so over-broad that it is effectively useless.

We can assume that the developers had a lofty target for their vision of the game, and that they ultimately had to adjust their goals to more accurately align with reality. If we assume that armor was unified for performance reasons and not for cosmetic ones, we can ask the question, "What was limiting them such that they had to make a choice between performance and separate armor?" It is reasonable to say that the limiting factor is the lowest common denominator - in this case, the consoles.

I like the armor merging. Armor looks way better now and as someone else said, slapping orcish pauldrons (or whatever you want as the armor piece) over an ebony piece, it simply won't work very well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PaHcZUHI00

your forgetting that oblivion uses higher res textures and more complex meshes so any gains made by merging the armor were lost with the increased character detail. unfortunately because consoles are so ancient now and bethesda insisted on designing around the xbox were left with this.

Huh? I don't get what you mean?

Cheers

Stop making threads.

Yes... how does that disprove my point? Everything is a developer-imposed limitation. It is not a useless definition, it's a true definition and nothing you've said disproves it. It is their limitation and sacrifice of the game's design elements to free up some additional memory for other minutely better tasks... graphical tasks. It's pure fact that these consoles are not the limiting factor. The original Xbox could run Morrowind and all its armor slots with open cities, even (not that I prefer open cities... I'll gladly be rid of those)... so why are vastly more powerful consoles afterwards limited in ways people cite as "console limitations" when they are in fact perfectly valid on consoles as evident by even past games on weaker consoles doing more than these current games in certain areas supposedly limited by consoles. Everything is a developer-imposed limitation. That's the point. We get more powerful consoles and better optimization techniques and instead of using this new, more powerful hardware to at least maintain something like the number of armor slots, they reduce it and utilize the new capabilities for even shinier graphics. Within the same console generation, they did the same thing, but this time with supposedly better optimization techniques.

This is the fault of the developers of the industry, not the platforms that are perfectly capable of running these games with decent, albeit very minutely lesser, graphical settings and maintaining the features that the same hardware or even far weaker hardware managed to maintain. There is nothing with the SDKs of these platforms saying "you must do this in return for slightly faster rendering"... nothing. Instead of using better hardware and/or better software design techniques to improve on game design or at least maintain it, they're cutting said game design for slightly better performance. In what logical mindset does this make sense?

Better hardware capable of maintaining the old design with better graphics becomes better hardware that cuts the old design for slightly even better graphics... better optimization techniques meant to render the same game designs with more efficiency are intentionally used to render cut game designs for even more efficiency (for graphical rendering). This is not a platform's fault and I doubt they'll even reverse it once we get the next-generation consoles as they certainly didn't reverse it in the jump between the Xbox and the 360/PS3 nor did they even maintain armor slots, city size, NPC amount, etc. in the jump from DOS to Windows/Xbox (of course, in the case of armor slots, they never really needed to be rendered in Daggerfall, but the point stands... Morrowind could have had the same amount as Daggerfall, but it was shunned for slightly better graphics), Oblivion could have maintained what Morrowind had, but it was shunned for slightly better graphics. Skyrim could have maintained with Oblivion had, but it was shunned for slightly better graphics. So many things have been streamlined and cut over time and not just in this series when better hardware should be an avenue for progressive game design, not regressive game design. This is not the hardware's fault and as evident by previous great platform jumps with Bethesda, they still cut regardless of better hardware for slightly even more efficient rendering. This is a developer-imposed limitation, not a hardware-imposed one.

Armor merge is fine, imo. Ofc, we could all use more item slots (another ring slot, maybe).

Lack of NPCs... definitely. So, how many guards do you think are actually in the game? How many do you think should be in the game? How much larger would the cities have to be to hold just the guards, and how much larger would the world have to be to hold the cities?

And how long do you think it would take for those updates to be possible on consoles?

My point is that if the game didn't have to function on consoles we could have both graphics and greaves.

I tried to read all of the replies. I really did. But honestly, it's just another "I want my toy back" thread. You have enough pieces to enchant as it is. Why do you want one more? What you should be griping about is actual game issues -- backwards flying dragon (Oh yeah, we know!), PS3 freezes / crashes (Oh yeah, we know about that too), elemental and magical resistances not calculated correctly ( Um, yep. We know). .... C'mon. Do you have a real issue? Something that is worth reading and replying to?

Your point is flawed. The same possibility can and has happened with them on consoles (If you don't play on either console, why give a crap about slightly lowered graphical quality on either, anyway?) and the same unfortunate thing happening now can still happen even with only better hardware (see the past correlations... Bethesda do not use better hardware to even maintain the options, they cut them anyway). Without consoles, you have an entirely new problem... very little to back up the budget costs of the game or, if in this ideal world of yours everyone played on a PC, the average gaming PC would be much weaker and companies would aim for those. Pick your poison, if you really think it's all worth it for a historically-proven-untrue gamble for an armor slot. This is a developer-imposed limitation. This is something they've always done regardless of hardware (cutting more supposedly "intensive" features as we get BETTER hardware... what an oddity) post 1996 and something I would bet money on them not reversing even when we get the next-generation consoles. This is not an inherent limitation of any hardware this game is on and that's that. This is Bethesda's choice and they've chosen the unfortunate path they've chosen... from Daggerfall to Morrowind, Morrowind to Oblivion, and Oblivion to Skyrim. It's a historical trend.

Fixed

"Real" issues? What about that turd of a port on the PS3. Sloppy ass LAG is inexcusable.

Lag is glorious.