Here are some links for your reference, plenty more interviews to be found on the internet:
http://www.vg247.com/2011/06/08/console-version-of-skyrim-bethesdas-lead-sku/
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/08/31/todd-howard-on-skyrims-worthwhile-glitches-mmos-and-when-big-i/
Here are a few I found most noteworthy:
"In Oblivion, we did ... maybe nine big cities? And here, we decided 'let's do five, and make them more unique.' There are fewer of the really large cities, but the ones we have here ... there's more to them," he said.
I'm having a hard time feeling like the five cities are substantially more unique than Oblivion. Certainly not so much so to justify a need to have less cities. The Imperial City in Oblivion was pretty impressive. I feel like I could describe Solitude in a few sentences. Inn and three shops by the entrance, check, a spattering of merchants, check, a district of private houses, check, bard college, check, player owned house, check, obligatory castle with a ruler in it, check and to wrap it all up a barracks on a hill.
“We knew we wanted to make the user interface a little bit more open and available … get away from the stats and things like that."
I guess they did deliver on this promise, hardly any stats anywhere in sight. Aren't stats what separate a role playing game from a first person shooter though?
"So we develop towards the consoles and then porting to PC is usually not too bad actually .”
This was was fairly obvious, but interesting to see it confirmed so openly by a developer, usually they try to keep this sort of thing hush hush.
Any other thoughts?