haha, touche. Paraphrased from some old postcantremember toolatetochange

I thought the Telvanni got overwhelmed?
And everyone knows Levitation is dangerous in higher climbs. Numerous Vvardenfellians have been caught in Red Mountain's mighty updraft, ripped through the atmosphere and landing in Akavir. Look at the Nerevarine--abused Stop-the-Moon-Shrine a bit too much


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edit,


you know, I don't believe my old post the more i think about it. Mix of something-I-read and mindless-sheepism (i love grass).
TES3, I remember lots of clever things needing levitation. Quests included, like for the Fighters. Bandits were hidden. Run into their vampire associate.
Oh well. Laziness is a punk.

The biggest problem with levitation is the separated cities. The player would be able to go inside where the city is supposed to be and find nothing but empty ground and placeholder buildings. Likewise, the player would be able to levitate from inside the city and run into a huge empty worldspace without any proper ground.

Levitation complicates job of Dungeon designers, balance designers (being able to fly makes you OP in combat), AI designers (gotta make the AI think of all BS that levitating player comes up with which means much more code... and even at the moment, AI is not at its best), combat designers (must also make NPC's able to fly as well and do all kinds of crazy stuff), world designers... so much troubles caused by one spell... more trouble than it is worth it and the effort, time and budget can be used on something more useful.

And before someone says "But MW did it!" please do remember that this is not 2002 any more. Just like combat and NPC behavior, no non-indie game could just copy-paste it and expect to get away with it these days. Bethesda would need to balance it better, make sure NPC's are able to use it and than program the AI to do all that was designed, balance the combat so that it wouldn't break the game, etc, etc... all that would cost a lot of time, money and effort.

In OB I thought the loss of levitation / jump spells was total BS, and it was, because they did next-to-nothing with the new possibilities. But now, in Skyrim, every other dungeon I'll look around at the massive walk-way strewn chamber I'm in, look up at the skylights, and think, "this is totally worth it."

The loss of Mark and Recall is still totally lame.