From the fan Q&A -

So they're saying not having to worry about levitation and mark & recall spells afforded them opportunities for great gameplay and level design, but I don't actually remember any. Examples?

What I did miss in Oblivion was having places you couldn't get to without levitating.

Having teleporting and levitating spells that are barred from specific locations is silly. It would mean every quest location that would be broken by this would have to be some magical location that for some reason restricts specific spells.

The only way around this is to have the spells work only in specific locations rather than having them NOT work in specific locations. (there is a difference)

Well, Levitation would have made the Oblivion gates super easy, and it didn't work with the cities being separate cells.

I don't really see why mark/recall wouldn't work though. Maybe it would make some quests feel too easy because of the fast travel system.

Go into a cave, kill one necromancer, teleport away, rest for an hour, fast travel back to the cave, repeat.

Kvatch. You went through all those scripted scenes with your army buddies instead of just flying over the rooftops and past the raised drawbridge. Kvatch as a whole was really exciting, action-packed fun.

Exactly. Levitation can bring level design onto the Z axis and thats a very good thing. I think it would be epic to see a cave with this massive chasm only cross able my magic or some clever use of grappling hooks.

And really, when you're creating a quest or situation where mark/recall can break whats going on, then just make it so that the magic of the situation is blocking it. Take for instance Mannimarco's dungeon in Oblivion. It would make PERFECT sense to block teleportation there. But if I want to recall out of your run of the mill bandit fight or out of some deep dungeon why shouldn't I be able to?

If I want to push the easy button and just levitiate over that mountain, why shouldn't I be able to? If I want to skip out on content let me. Thats kind of the point in Fast Travel isn't it yet that hasn't been removed.

I'm thinking they are talking more of a literary sense. Ambushes would mean little if you could just recall out.

Levitation and teleportation allows you to get away from tough fights rather than fight. It also allows you to travel far above wilderness rather than actually exploring it. It makes the world seem much smaller. NPCs are not smart enough to know what to do against a floating enemy. Teleportation isn't that bad, but I could see how they thought that about levitation.

People complained so much about the invisible walls and "You cannot go any further, turn around" message in Oblivion that I really doubt they would respond well to invisible magic barriers and a "You cannot cast that spell here" message popping up with any sort of frequency

I have always hated Levitating in Morrowind. It's cheap, it's annoying, I hate switching to my Levitate spell every time I go to a Telvanni tower, and it svcked. Sure, it was neat every once and a while when I found the few areas that required Levitating, but Oblivion had secret areas in dungeons too that used other methods of concealment than Levitation.

Also, do you really need examples of how Mark & Recall or Levitation could have ruined the whole point of a quest or broken a quest? Caught in the Hunt, any Oblivion Gate, the Floating Bowl quest where you get taken to sea, Paradise, the final area with the Oblivion gates inside Imperial City, the list goes on and on and on.

I agree with you here. In Morrowind, the ability to levitate actually enabled some very interesting level design, and also rewarded players who used levitate to explore thoroughly.

I loved the Telvanni Towers that were only accessible through levitation. It told us a lot about the mages who lived in them.

A lot of the treasure that you could only access through levitating wasn't easily visible from the ground either, so a player who could levitate might not have even noticed unless he/she was paying very close attention.

One thing that I can think of that would make levitation difficult to do in Skyrim is that they would have to make a bunch of new animations for the dragons so that they could fight a flying opponent. I imagine that would be a lot of work.

Kvatch was a terrible chore, as were the Oblivion gates. They forced you to slog through encounter after encounter with little regard for the kind of character you were playing. If we could skip chunks of those areas with levitation then so be it, that's the kind of freedom that made Morrowind so fantastic and Oblivion so mundane.



Oh I have no doubt that it would break the game in certain places, the question is whether the resulting gameplay and level design is so amazing that it's worth removing such features.

Kvatch, the quest with the gravedigger, the quest where you are locked into a death match on an island, the Bloated Float, the Arena, the mage isle with the staff, many of the thieves guild quests, the quest inside somebody's dream, Vaermina's quest, Peryte's quest...

The point though isn't in turning off the ability to use these spells frequently, but only where it would make sense or where doing so would break the action of what you actually want to portray in the game. It would be kind of silly to just recall out of the Temple of the One at the end of Oblivion's main quest and miss out on what happens but if I want to levitate and get a better view then why not?



I don't think so. It would probably just be a "biting" animation during mid-flight or a stop, hover and fire off a fireball sort of thing that would be needed.



Let them break then, or when appropriate block the magic. Simple.

Remember the E3 vid where he is in the dungeon and exiting but looks up and there is a massive hole pouring light into a Casm?


perfect place for levitation, or is that an oooh awww, ok moving on now because there is nothing to do here.

This makes me wonder if they axed invisibility too.

They don't want to test the user recalling/levitating everywhere for every quest and would risk letting a bunch of reproducible bugs slip through.

I don't really care because these things are easy to mod in:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSaWHXYl8jY
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10985

Because those spells could be used in dungeons as well. Some quests could easily be broken that way. Like the one where you're trapped inside a fort on an island. Or the one where you pick up an item for the Mages Guild and run into a mage from the guild on your way out who tries to kill you. You have to kill the guy there or the quest won't continue, the quest is built around the fact that you find that guy on the way out. Or in Mankar Camoran's paradise.

They could've added 100 exceptions for when mark&recall suddenly wouldn't work with no good ingame explanation, just to ensure quests aren't broken, or they could simply remove the spells. They were nice in Daggerfall/Morrowind but they're really not essential.

Levitation was nice but also caused balance issues because enemies couldn't reach you in the sky in Morrowind. If Bethesda would add levitation to Skyrim they would have to ensure that NPCs would be able to levitate as well. Imagine if they had to ensure good pathfinding in the sky everywhere for everyone.

Levitation could have been unlocked once the main quest was over, some forgotten spell in a mages guild, a long forgotten dragon shout, even a chat with the local head vampire could have led to a flight quest once the game had finished, even if levitation was a somewhat unpolished feature in Morrowind it was also FUN, that should count for something with regard to game design.

I think its rather a weak argument against levitation and mark/recall.

Morrowind already saw ways of dealing with that, in that you could not teleport out of the final fight with Dagoth Ur, nor levitate in Mournhold.

Levitation, mark, and recall are 3 of the most overated spells there is in TES. Easily made the game too easy and no fun at all.

Fix'd.

~ tcl

I did that for all the oblivion gates

yes it's game breaking. Don't like it, don't use it. I don't really see the issue with it

Sure, if losing your horse, your wagon with most of your gear and supplies and any companions you had with you permanently, as well as failing any quests which requires you to hurry or which are tied to those companions being alive mean little for you ...

I think it was a good idea to remove Levitation, even though I did love it in Morrowind and I did love the special locations that required it, like the Telvanni towers or the Ministry of Truth, or certain dungeons where the item of interest was only reachable with a flying potion or the spell. Seriously, the first time I went to Vivec I was like "wait... can I actually go up there to that moon?! there are walkways on it!!"
But Oblivion often made use of the fact that you can't fly over some obstacle. Pretty much every scripted encounter. It would have been way too complicated to regard Levitation in all those situations. Not to mention the AI that will probably never be able to properly respond to flying actors.

Mark and Recall is a different thing, though. You have to be in a location already in order to cast the Mark spell, so there's no way to skip anything. Mark and Recall wouldn't have helped at all in Oblivion Gates, or in Kvatch. First of all, the only logical implementation would be that a Mark gets destroyed if the location is destroyed; since that's always a scripted event, this would have required simply an additional line. Second, you don't get to travel between worldspaces; this is only logical as well, you can only teleport within a world.

The only situation where Mark and Recall could help you when it's not supposed to is in situations where exits are blocked and you're supposed to be stuck until something happens. As mentioned earlier, a teleport block is often a very reasonable answer for this. There weren't that many situations like this in Oblivion anyway, and often they involved wizards, or they could have involved wizards. For example the island where that orc lets people kill victims in a dungeon for fun. He's obviously putting some money into this, why not hire an evil wizard who makes teleporting impossible? Or the Whodunit quest in the Dark Brotherhood; it would have done nothing but add more depth to the DB if it was explained that they have a department of wizards who made a teleport block around the house.

I really can't remember one situation in Oblivion where Mark and Recall would have been an obstacle that would have ruined the quest. Actually, I enjoy a series of fantasy novels by Steven Brust where teleportation is possible, but right from the start he introduced teleport blocks as well, and it just doesn't feel very contrived, not if it's explained and in fact used as a way to give the world more depth.
By the way, teleports in that world also leave an aura for a couple of days which makes it possible to trace someone who did a teleport, so that teleporting in order to escape from the guards or things like that are just a stupid idea - it would be easier for them to find you that way than if you escaped by foot.