I dont know how many of you would agree, but I detested the variety in weapons and armor in Oblivion, in terms of design. Unlike Morrowind, where you could potentially visit a distant city and find in the shop an armor model you had never seen before, in Oblivion the choices were pretty narrow, even more so than in Morrowind. Oblivion went as far as having bandits and highwaymen dress in elven and glass armor at higher levels, since those were the only strong light armor types.

Game developers are always pushing for visual realism, and I think this issue is as important, or even more so, than graphics. Even if they wouldnt want to bother making more armor types, at least they could give the existing ones more variety.

It'd be cool to have dozens of different designs under, for example, "Iron Sword", "Steel Cuirass", "Elven Bow", "Leather Cuirass", ect. So even at the beginning, where every bandit has leather armor, you would still feel there's variety and not everyone is a copy of everyone else.

If they are gonna have bandits wear glass and daedric armor...at least make it look different on them >_>

I think the issue of bandits in glass or daedric has already been adresses quite a few times already.

but as for armor variety within the same type, yeah that's an awesome idea.

Well... I completely agree. Hopefully they will make the top tier armor and weapons actually rare this time around, the somewhat fixed level-scaling should help with that a lot.

I like that idea. Bonemold in Morrowind had like 3 or 4 variants. It would be pretty cool if a few other armors had that type of variety too.

Couldn't agree more. Just remember how many types of bonemold armor there was in Morrowind. I loved that!

I fully agree. Moar variety. There isn't much to add. Let's hope the better types of armour will be much rarer. In no way should multiple commoners in a town have anything better than basic gear like fur, leather and such.

it kinda made sense that marauders had deadric though, there were plenty of Oblivion gates to supply them

Idea: Proceedural generation for the meshes and textures of armor, much like that implemented in kkreiger, and given some leeway in the parameters to make every piece of armor unique, (And with each having its own consistant seed, you don't get the issue of the suit changing shape every time it reloads)

This sounds like a good idea, but I have no idea what you're actually talking about. Can you explain more? I had to look up kkreiger to even know what it was.

I honestly think this is too much. Is it really necessary for there to be several different textures to the same armour because it gets tedious to see them wearing the same thing? I don't see why not to do this, really, but it's not going to affect gameplay a great deal. I mean, sure, the attention to detail would be cool, but wouldn't attention to detail on new puzzles be cool, too?

It uses proceedural generation to create the meshes and textures using a set of parameters that ensure they don't do anything stupid. If the parameters have enough leeway, each piece would also have a truly unque shape from the semi-random creation. And, because generation seeds and parameters are just script and numbers, they're much smaller on disk space than textures and meshes.

I wish they'd use a similar tech to procederal texture generation for Khajiit fur.

Bonemold variety was more of a cultural thing as different types embodied different Great Houses. You could say the same for each town guards using a retextured set of chain in Oblivion. I'm sure Skyrim will have an equivalent.

I liked the fact that every major trader in the game had something of unique quality to sell in Oblivion. For instances, Nord Winds in Bruma sold a unique dwarven cuirass called Dondoran's Juggernaut. The names were very personalized, giving them a feeling of uniqueness beyond that of a simple enchanted item.

Sounds good :thumbsup: if they can do something like this.

Oh, I see what you mean now. That sounds amazing. So long as it doesn't create a bunch of silly-looking armor, that would be pretty much ideal for the random armor found on Bandits and most encountered NPCs in dungeons and wilderness. I think you'd need some strict formulated armor for, say, Imperial Guards so that they all appear in matching uniforms. Blacksmiths and things like that would also probably be creating and selling the same exact looking armor over and over as well.

Define "too much".

The game is not being made by two people. The guys working on dungeons are not the same working on art and design.

If the graphics are uber important, to the point where you can even see your character's veins, arm hair and other details like that, why wouldnt this be? Its more so Id figure, since even with poor graphics it could be done (and it has been done, like in Neverwinter Nights).

I just like leather, and it bothers me that I grow powerful and instead of there being a more powerful version of leather armor, I can only use glass and be practical. Its all part of customization, and not simply me being capricious.