Topic.

You should be able to equip bellows, hammer, tongs, etc. to your hands, then use them accordingly as you would any weapon. Just imagine the sheer, banausic thrill as unleash one last mighty hammer-swing to finish shaping that red-hot sword of slayage then dunk it in a bath of water. A cloud of steam shoots up, obscuring your vision momentarily before dissipating and...Ta-Da! You behold your beautiful neonatal blade in the grip of your tongs, wide-eyed and eager to be plunged headlong into deserving troll-bellies.

I agree, but how do you choose what type of armor you make?

I agree i hope the crafting is a little more hands on, this is the perfect genre for it.

To smithing you go to town and find a forge and click on it just like you click on the crafting devices in fallout new vegas. They already showed us the alchemy workbench and in the trailer that one town looks to have a forge in it.

Is Smithing going to be an actual skill in Skyrim? If so, I oppose OP. If not, I support OP.

Reason being skills develop as you use them. Using them like this is fun the first few times, but then gets tedious. If it's not a skill, you probably wont have to do it that much, and it'll just be a nice little feature.


Of course, if there is no skill for it, it makes Skyrim less of an RPG since you can smith, but its success and power is not based on your character's skill.

Yes it is. There will be no more repairing weapons and armor in the field (Something I am not too happy with, as I usually have a character who wanders the wilderness and never enters a town), and the ability to craft custom weapons.

This is a nice dream.
But we could be more realistic and hope (and fight?) for some animations this would be a great improvement upon:
What you want to do:
1) a dagger
2) a Kris
3) a kukri
only.

I hope also there are several "recipes" for working various metals and materials. A dream would be cross breed material, but thats a dream like you really spanking some iron piece and being able to give it shape in a digital world.

I think I care more about the ability to break down a set of Iron and get the ore from it.

wait so the sword is "wide eyed and eager to be plunged headlong into..."

you gave your sword eyes???? you sick bastard!

In the trailer that one npc is chopping wood in Solitude so maybe we can do some actual smithing.

something like risen's would be good but make it more interactive

Then how do you manage to pick up quests ?

I like the way they did it in the Gothic games and in Risen. If you want to make a sword for instance you have to have a piece of metal and a hammer. Then you have to heat up the metal in the furnace and after that you have to pound the hot metal on a forge. Then you cool the weapon and lastly you have to sharpen it. Atleast that's how I remember it. You really felt like a smith when you did it and it surprisingly didn't get tedious, but that could be because I would only make like at most 4 or 5 swords at a time and then sell them. Would be awesome if Bethesda did something like that instead of the usual instant creation in their previous games.

You could wait until the Amazing Blacksmith game comes out on the kinect... Because that would certainly be a hit.

Adding incredibly labor intensive monotony (which is the essence of smithing) to a game is unlikely imo.

I could see something like the potion making screen being introduced. Where you have choices for types of minerals to mix and add to the process (and maybe some soul gems and magicka for some power wrought swords!). gamesas maybe would add an animation sequence to go through the process after you select the attributes to put into the item (one that can hopefully be skipped!). If there is any input into the process itself it would probably be reduced to a mini-game of some kind like lock picking or the personality wheel from Oblivion.

It's a nice idea so long as you are making choices every time you use a tool or pick a ingredient. EX: You wouldn't have all weapons use the bellows just some. That way using the bellows is not just an extra click with no meaning. A system like that would be fun for exploring with different combos of items and steps. "Oh what do I get if I mix iron with copper?" "If I cast ice on this sword, will that do something?". It wouldn't be so fun for grinding the same item out over and over, so I would add a peg board that shows all the items you already crafted. You would just have to click on the picture to re craft that same item.

Wild crazy idea, They could reward smiting EXP for making new types of items and not for making the same item over and over.

Yeah.

Having a crafting system? Interesting.

Having a crafting mini-game? Not nearly as interesting. (Yeah, for a small subset of players, it might be an improvement. Versus how many people might be turned off from the crafting system because of it.....)

Definitely agree.

This goes for smithing, cooking, wood-cutting, mining. Everything.

It should be in real-time and it should be in either 1st or 3rd person, depending on what you have at the time.
Real animations for what you're doing.

Otherwise this smithing, cooking, wood-cutting, mining is a huge huge huge let-down to me. I mean, seriously. It's 2011. Not 2003 or something.

I really hope this is the case - the game engine of the new call of duty does a really good job at visualizing first person tasks, a big part of this is camera movement complemented by hands (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9nb9ll9d1g) I hope bethesda makes this a priority for their game. If there needs to be a menu, make it radial and make it quick.

Hmm, I can't imagine having to actually smith ourselves by pressing buttons on the pad/mouse on keyboard, with arm animations and items in-hand(s). I think it'd be like Runescape, but of course, with Skyrim's engine and whatnot. :teehee:

I'd be content with the menus for navigation to forge what you want followed by an animation sequence showing what you've requested

I do not think menus could be gotten rid of completely. I mean, you should have a menu for choosing type, shape, etc., and then use hammer, tongs, etc. in first person. Once you have chosen shape (straight, broad, curved, etc.), then you could use a hammer to take a more active role in shaping it.

I totally think this same concept could be applied to alchemy also.

You don't need a menu for that stuff. You can just include molds. Ex: The forge could have a large rotating drum with different molds on it's faces. If you want to make an axe, you just pull a lever and the drum changes the mold. It's basically a menu, but it's in the world not in the UI.

In Arx Fatalis you could craft weapons, and the process was pretty cool and realistic, but they did
n't have menus.

Lol, you're right. Didn't think of that.

It would be completely badass if we could forge our own armour and weapons.