You can gain levels past 50 - but Todd has stated that 50 is the last time you get a perk. You can keep raising skills and upping your health or magic or stamina each level but no more additional perks after 50 and he stated it was slow going after that as well. So each level up till 50 you get to chose a perk., but can keep upping your level after that albeit more slowly (not sure how much more slowly, he just said it's a lot slower) and keep upping mana, health or stamina each of those levels. They'll be fewer and farther between and less significant to gain (they have emphasized as perk/ability path choice as one of the key ways you specialize improve your characters capabilities at each of the earlier levels. So when someone calls that a soft cap they mean that it's more of a practical limit of significant level based improvement to your characters abiilities. You can keep gaining levels but they won't have nearly the same significance and will take far more time to acheive.

Beyond leveling and perks though the other stated ways of growing your character's power and abilities involves killing dragons to devour their soul/essence/glowy magical dragon light as well as discover word walls and gleaming additional words of the divine language from them (that's what dragon shouts are - the language of creation or Thuum (sp)). Those are accomplished by seeking out dragons and discovering ancient writings/murals respecively. Not sure if there's other ways to obtain new words besides that but there might be one or two that you glean at plot points. Anyways those can be obtained regardless of level - assuming you survive the trip or fight to obtain them.

I hope I am allowed to "store" perk choices in Skyrim. As in, delaying making choices in perks until later even as I keep levelling up.

It would make the game harder for sure, but I would like to have a chance to consider what playing style is best for me as I play, before I do anything permanent/irreversible to my character.

Can you link to the quote in bold..

Pretty sure this has been linked to once already, but in case it hasn't.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfRe16V3YA8

He says a character who has raised all their skills to 100 will still have to chose 50 perks. A character with all skills at 100 would be level 70. He said skill progression continues even when you hit level 50 and he clarified that you can still gain levels past 50 in another article. Still he had stated that a character with maxed out skills - having long since reached 50 and beyond, would still have to chose only 50 out of 280 or so perks.

I don't understand why anyone would want to delay levelling and gaining perks, seems to me this will detract from the game in the same way as getting +5 strength in Oblivion.

What I'm wondering - will we get to choose a perk at the beginning of the game? The only other options I see are only getting 49 perks, perks stopping at level 51, or players starting at level 0.

I guess the somewhat inconsistent nature of the statements and non-helpful clarifications might be partly because they're still balancing skill gain rates and things like that. Despite some articles covering his clarification state there was nether a hard nor mathematical level cap at all. This would only be true if skills had no cap. That would be a new one though so unless each skill keep improving past 100 then there's a real level limit that is calculable by the the max number of skill points you could gain throughout it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfRe16V3YA8

He says a character who has raised all their skills to 100 will still have to chose 50 perks. A character with all skills at 100 would be level 70. He said skill progression continues even when you hit level 50 and he clarified that you can still gain levels past 50 in another article. Still he had stated that a character with maxed out skills - having long since reached 50 and beyond, would still have to chose only 50 out of 280 or so perks.

Also vallen and I were saying keep leveling up, but choose perks whenever we're ready.

Actually he says: "even a character that raises all their skills to a hundred, and they are playing and they are like lvl 50. They only got to pick 50 perks out of that 2(breaks himself off but i guess 280)they are very different characters, and alot of the powers in the perks, as opposed to the raw number of the skills, there are still some power in the raw numbers of skill, just not as much as there used to be, that stuff is moved into the perks."

So i see your point... Still i would like to say that he does say lvl 50 = 50 perks. He also say "all skills to a 100" which whould mean the maximum lvl possible. So as to which of his statements are wrong(being if he meant to say lvl 50 or lvl "70" - taking that as the maximum for now) is for Todd only to know.

The only real issue I could see is that you also choose Health, Magicka, or Stamina at level up, so unless you can put that selection off as well, you're going to get a menu anyway.

It's also possible that the actual level-up won't happen until you rest, like in previous games. In that case, you could just not rest. I'm not sure how it would work if you skill up enough for two level-ups without resting, though... what do MW/Ob do in that case?

Todd might not have said it directly, but http://twitter.com/#!/DCDeacon/status/36644224258539520. Maybe the "currently planned" means it could change, but I doubt it. Shouldn't be hard to change with a mod for pc users though.

sorry, you stop getting them at level 50 , you can still level but thats it , it's been put in so you cant have one player with all skills and perks , it's to make each character unique --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfRe16V3YA8

I find it crippling stupid that inherent features of. Weapons , wounding, knocking down, etc etc need perks to all of a sudden give them permission to do what they should already be doing from the start of the damn game....