Sorry complainers, but no one says it better that the Rolling Stones:

You cant always get what you want.

If you want a game to have everything you ever want, you'll have to make it for yourself. Good luck.

I don't know about you guys... but five years seems like plenty of time to me. Particularly for a video game.

I can care less if spears are in...and it isn't what I want it is what TODD WANTS. read the Q and A he said he wanted them in but he doesn't have enough time.. thanks though

I doubt initial development time had anything to do with lack of spears. Most likely they just never thought about adding spears in the first place and didn't even consider them until the game was announced and someone asked if there would be spears. Anyway, what category in weapons would spears even fall under in the new rules of this game? Most would be unhappy if they were just used as two handed weapons with no throwing capabilities... people would be also unhappy if they couldn't use them with one hand and a shield. By choosing to limit weapons to one hand, two hand category they've basically severely limited what weapons can be used within the game. If they added throwing as a skill it would open up a whole new realm to weapons.. but as it is we won't be seeing it at launch.

well all i can say is if spears aren't in elder scrolls blackmarsh there will be hell to pay! :swear:

There is nothing they could do about spears now its all playtesting they need some serious patches after all millions will be playing this games for weeks on end. collectively this gamer will have tens of thousands of years of playtime.

You guys complaining about spears are aware there was a game in between Morrowind and Skyrim, right? The one without spears in it? Why does it always seem like people think OMG SPEARS ARE GONE NOW! When they've been gone for 5+ years already.

There was an opportunity for its and several other weapon types return.


it didnt happen.

Another month... for spears? Screw that. Were there other cuts due to development time? Well, obviously if they had more time they could put more in, that's just common sense, so if you look at it that way, the obvious answer is yes. But at the end of the day, you can't do everything... you've gotta draw the line somewhere. You realize the game's been in development for 5 years? They purposely didn't even announce it until they were far enough along to set a solid release date.

They didn't cut anything because of the deadline... They've been comfortable with the release date since they announced Skyrim. They're merely designing the game how they wish...

They've 2 years of planning and 3 years of dev time.


nothing was impossible....within reason.

Well i doubt they would do it now any way they've already given a date so to set the game back would get a lot of ppl angry and i really dont care in a mage any way

I think that extended combat options are always good but it must have been so hard to perfect duel wielding I think we got more than I expected

Hows about we set a few definitions, hmmmm?

What, exactly do you people mean by 'spear'?

Just a long, pointy thing?

Or do you mean something that the PC can -throw-?

If the former, just use an extra long sword and you have the reach. If the latter, tell me exactly how you intend the thing to be thrown. Full implementation of flight physics (and I suggest you actually check how complex those can get, and how far into floating point math you will be)? What about collision detection? Bounding box or per polygon ( the latter being capable of bringing a desktop to its knees; a console would vaporize. The former could work.....assuming you don't mind the thing hitting the collision boxes, which would =look= like it bounced off thin air; or struck to the side, so it looks like the thing missed completely.....but the NPC drops dead regardless)? What mechanism do you use to keep the thing embedded within the target mesh without crashing the collison system with a divide by zero error? What's your targeting mechanism; is it all computer controlled, so you hit regardless of your aim? Do you have to learn how to aim and throw? What's your striking scale? Does it stick into trees? Get caught in branches? In Dragons? How do you recover it when it gets caught out of reach? Do you recover it? How you do handle the fact that a projectile can pass through multiple cells? Steal the arrow code(assuming said code isn't just an optical illusion to -avoid- multi cell issues)? Write new code? What kind of animations are you planning? How much time does the mocap take? How do you deal with getting through an opening that would require leading or trailing with the spear to avoid collision issues? Force the PC to equip and figure it out, or have an animation that locks out and overrides any control you have....leaving you open to being attacked in that area and unable to defend yourself, unless you intend to put a flag on every passage like that so you don't get clobbered (otherwise known as the chicken flag)? Do you have different weights, depending on the materials involved? How do you handle the physics there? Do you factor in wind variables, racial strength (and hence distance and force) variables? Gender variables? How do you deal with differing lengths? Do they break? Are the pieces useful for anything?


How's that for =SOME= of the questions that would have to be asked and answered? And this doesn't even begin to get into balance issues......

Wii was never proper... It was for children and big middleaged women trying to lose weight... You are thinking of Xbox... Xbox 360 is still as beast as ever... Thwy wont be replacing it till 2013... Same for PS3! They are epic consoles... The dull stupidity of what you are saying is unbearable... You don't know about the Xbox or the PS3 so I wouldnt be talking about them like that...

One thing that irks me is when they use "Not enough time" as an excuse for cutting things out when I clearly remember Todd saying in an interview that he likes to focus on making quality games instead of just meeting deadlines.

Just don't give an exact release date until you are sure you know how long it will take to get everything you want in there. Not say things like "we don't have enough time to include this" and then boast about your sense of quality > quantity.

Exactly! The great quality on the game is due to the removal os some weapon types... Such a spears! They have a quality game, a reasonable due date, and quality animations! So before you go babbleing about the stick with pointy thing... Note how long it would take to make it!

^Above.

Believe me, I will be the first to lament about things being cut from Skyrim, but this isn't it. So my answer was no.

They did. I'm 100% confident that since they'd already dropped spears with Oblivion that they didn't even think twice about them not being in Skyrim either. So they DID have everything they wanted. Only after all the ridiculous hype over them started coming up did they even start talking about it, and Todd is 110% correct in saying they don't have time NOW to put them in.

The release is in ~4 months time. We're WAY past the alpha stage folks, the game is well into beta and would be long since considered feature complete. There's no new stuff going in between now and November (though I'd love to be wrong here) so I wouldn't get any hopes up of seeing genuinely new stuff until the DLCs start rolling.

I don't care about spears, I do however believe developers need to stop worrying about the date they set to finish the game and more about making the game perfect. I believe they shouldn't tell the release date until a month from release.

Nowadays this can probably added at a later time via additional content downloads.

i think that anything they cut they must debate over it

the merging of top and bottem armor pieces for example

i for one dont care one bit but they must have had a tough time picking that over something else

but hey at least its better than doing something completely stupid like cutting magic altogether

I'm probably a little bit off on my assumptions, but...

With stuff like this, time literally is money. There are people making this game, and they all have to get paid. Like in the movie business and similar media - this generally comes out of capital that is received beforehand by investors for an expected return on investment. Looked at from that view, the "deadline" is simply when that money runs out, and there's no longer any money to pay these guys to work on the game any longer.

Obviously, that's on overly-simplistic view of the business. There are companies that have a reputation for delaying release of a game until it's "ready." (Blizzard comes to mind, for example.) But generally, it seems like most companies have to struggle more in balancing between monetary concerns versus quality.

(That being said, that's really no different than any other media. A writer can spend ten years writing one novel - but they're not going to be making a living doing that, and no publisher is going to advance them enough money to be able to do that independently. Even the most "indie" of movies has to get finished at some point. Coming from a classical art background myself - and taking "videogames as art" as a given - all art stems from striking a balance between practicality, perfection, and creativity. I can't remember who said it, but there's a famous quote something along the lines of "no great painting is ever finished - only abandoned."

That's likely true of videogame design, as well. You're only ever going to be able to do so much. And the end result is always going to be better if you set a goal that exceeds your practical limits, and pare back from there. If you end up creating something that's actually exactly as good as you'd intended - then you probably weren't really trying hard enough. )

ya not everything makes the cut look at some of the earlier borderlands creature.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mF865v14Zqs&feature=related

They will have worked on it for 5 years. How much stuff do we want. They have to make choices because one more month to include this and then one more to include that then another for something else they would love to do or we would love to see...keeps adding up month by month and year by year. Personally I think 2006-2011 is plenty long to call it enough. Sooner or later they must start work on a next gen game.