People will take it as more proof that consoles are holding back the PC version, since PCs have separate video memory and won't see any significant performance gain from merging armor.

I'm probably the only one who read the whole post and understood it.

TL;DR: Combining them = faster loading/rendering speed.

Can someone PM me the jist of this thread. Is armor one piece like in Fallout or are they seperate?

EDIT

Okay I get it now, it's not like FO where it is like Cuirass, greaves, arms, and boots merged but more like just cuirass and greaves while gauntlets, helmets and boots are seperate. I don't mind this at all, I don't 100% support it but it will be a minor flaw (0.00000000000000001%) in the otherwise great looking world of Skyrim

What if the savings is not meant to be graphical/hardware based at all, but rather for one-click simplicity? You scroll through inventory, there is your armor, click the armor and you're good to go... you look cool, and its all set... Streamlining the process of it and removing the 'bother' of having to equip all those minor 'time wasting' component pieces. :shrug:

I am sure that some players out there wonder why they should have to do all that just to go kill stuff. when the armor could all be handled with one click, and the next click they are back in the action. It could be the result of applying the same / similar thought process used on skills & attributes; for now we have less stats to worry about and micromanage. Just as some players wondered why they should have to do all that when several stats effects could all be handled with just three stats and a few perks.

(Its smoother and minimizes the time we are out of the world and 'stuck' in the menus :yuck:).

*Just a theory of mine... I wondered.

Do we know that? If the merged parts need never be shown removed or swapped... couldn't just they delete anything underneath or behind? Do we know if the new engine doesn't just use a solid torso mesh instead of a layered one (now that the arm guards & chestplate are never seen apart)?

that is what happens when you cater to casual gamers and try and widen your audience to the extreme. only an idiot would have had trouble figuring out oblivion. even if they never played video games before it shouldnt take someone long at all to figure out a TES game. these were already very simple games to begin with, how much simpler are we going to make them? pretty soon we will play are character and every couple of minutes a quicktime event will pop up but to make sure its not to hard for casual gamers it will always be the same button so dont worry casual gamers you wont actually have to do any thinking. after you beat the quicktime event by pressing your button 3 times in a row withing a minute you will get an achievement that says your awesome cause some people need achievement to let them know they have actually done something worthwhile. gaming is just getting more pathetic as time goes by.

That it has, and one of the reasons was that it increased performance, they however did not explain why it does, not that I expected them to do so, I doubt most players want to hear about the tedhnical details behind the game, they want to hear about how it will play, look and feel, not how and why it works the way it does. And I don't doubt that merging cuirasses and greaves offers some small performance increase, but I'm skeptical as to whether the benefit is really enough to actually be noticable unless you have a very large amount of fully armored characters on screen, larger, that is, then we're likely to see at one time in the game.



And yet you still need to equip the boots, helmet, and gauntlets seperately (I'm not counting the shield as you might instead want to dual wield or use a two handed weapon.) so in the end, there's still the supposed "extra hassle" of needing to equip multiple armor pieces, there's just one less piece than we had in Oblivion, so it's not that much simpler. if streamlining the gameplay was the intention here, I see no reason why Bethesda wouldn't just go all the way instead of doing it piece by piece.

One piece at a time. :chaos: (wait 'til TES6)

*But who knows really. :shrug:

For me personally. I rather have it this way instead. I never mix and match my armor set.

Todd Howard said himself that they can have more NPC's on the screen this way at the same time. In addition, they went for a completely new design for cuirass and greaves.

I've created a few armor pieces of OB in my time and the 'only' thing i can see that would affect performance is the reduction of NiNodes in the NIF. And 'that' would be extremely marginal. If what BGS says is true there are other 'unseen forces' at work. Now I agree with the merger of cuirass and greaves for appearance sake alone. I 'am' still amused by the arguments that BGS is somehow 'ripping off' the fanbase by reducing equipment slots. Get over it! I'm still upset that BGS reduced the playable landmass from Daggerfall's 219,654 km2 to MW's pathetic 217.1852 km2.

Since I'm gonna start studying computer and video game designing this year, this was a helpful little post! Though I use the word "little" very liberally. Now I don't just have to take Bethesda's word for it, now I understand why it works. Thanks!