The face creation sounds a bit like Mr Potato Head.

I don't think we have anything to worry about in terms of mountains being traversable. They may be less traversable than in past games, but they are still traversable.

He said, "getting up and through that," with "up" being the operative word. We will have to, and will be able to, "get up" into mountains, and go "through that." He also talks about dungeons on mountains, so that means there will be some means of climbing them. (Paths, roads, whatever.)

P.S.

Finally added the time stamps.

:rofl:

Yea.. but it does http://static.zenimax.com/bethblog/upload/2011/02/skyrimpodcast.jpg a little better!

2. Yes, but he said "on the one hand", which is an important connotation to pay attention to. He's saying essentially that if you look at it one way there is less control. On the *other* hand, you actually have control to make good looking characters, which is new. And I don't mean "attractive" necessarily, but for that matter it was impossible to get attractive characters in Oblivion, since you couldn't even get ugly-but-realistic characters. The converse of this is "On the one hand, you have less control in Oblivion than Skyrim. You can't really make them look good/realistic, but you have tons of sliders to control the degree of ugliness."

6. I think you're still interpreting this wrong, which is odd considering the parts you underline in the quotes. He's not only saying the game space "feels" inflated, it IS inflated, due to the fact that from a top-down view, yes the game maps may appear to be the same size, but in Skyrim you have a lot of inclinedl surface area that needs to be taken into account. The mountains may be "impassable", yes, in the sense that you cannot walk in a straight line through them. He doesn't say anything about not being able to go up and around them. If you make a height map of the game, and then attempt to flatten it by pushing down on the mountains, allowing the areas surrounding them to expand outward to make way for the additional area, you'll notice in this flattened view, the Skyrim map becomes a lot bigger. This "verticality" also means that things like dungeons and such can be stacked on top of each other, making use of the additional vertical area, and this is hinted at in the transcript. You're literally using up the volume of the mountains to insert dungeons and other areas in, like ruins, etc. So it's not just that it "feels" larger, there is literally more surface area because of the mountains. Not sure if it's transcripted in the OP, but he also says something like "I'm not sure if you'd say the world is contracted or expanded", which sounds kind of weird without this context. He meant that the world is literally larger because of bunching up some of the playable area into the mountainous regions.

This of course depends on how much of the mountains remain completely impassable versus the areas they make playable, but going up into the mountains, on foot, in the snow, up windy paths is certainly going to help make it "feel" bigger as well.

This person sums it up quite well:


Though I will say I doubt that 100% of the mountains will have playable surface area. Mountains should be very treacherous. I certainly don't want to be able to zig-zag up impossibly steep slopes like in Oblivion. On a horse. If I was riding a mountain goat, maybe.

It was far from impossible. But I think if their new system involve a large number of possibility (by example in mass effet 1 or 2 this system is really weak) it will be better. Because to make a good-looking character in oblivion it was terribly long and difficult. And if the possibilities are numrous, it will still be easy to make an ugly character even with beautiful parts of the body (and ther wont be only beautiful I mean try to do 20 beautiful nose which really are different...)

So with the information he gave, I don't think we can either put it on the good (it can be screwed-up by not making a sufficient amount of body parts in which case it will be worse than the oblivion system) or the bad part (because it can beat oblivion system by allow to make numerous, beautiful or ugly, character easily)

For the "alchemy on stealth" part, even if it's a joke I would say it's totally irrelevant. There won't be combat/magic/stealth distinction like in morro or obli simply because the game won't need it. The only reason skill was divided like that before was because "classes" existed and could gave a bonus. It's irrelevant in skyrim since there is no classe.

For the mountain part, since the fact that there will be inaccessible area is opposed to the fact that mountain grandly increase the area. Since we absolutely don't know which one is the main factor, there is no way to tell if it's a larger or a smaller playfield than in oblivion.
On the other hand, the mountain will give the impression than the field is bigger and will increase the duration of travel by winding a lot.
So I don't see any good reason to put that in the minus part, the more pessimistic attitude toward this is doubt.

The part of the magic is wrong also since the change of shape obviously imply a change of gameplay (be serious... A flamethrower with exactly the same effect than a fireball launched at 150m?). It's mainly a gameplay change to make the magic more interesting than before (one damage effect for all the destruction with just a little change in speed depending on the element... That was ridiculous)

For the mount, if they do it, it will be better if not, they won't do it. Honnestly, seeing how oblivion handled that I think it's a good point but I understand you can not like it nad put it in the bad points.

And the radiant story. I don't think judging someone on mere intent is relevant.