It could work. Consider what Fallout 3 did with weapons - you could customize them and add extra functionality. You don't equip anything new, but you set up a new weapon rig out of parts and you get a weapon with different properties than the one you had before.. If armor was made to work in a similar way, where you get a suit of armor and can bring it somewhere to have modifications made, it could explain why two characters are wearing the same suit of armor while one of them has a little something extra on his shoulder. Maybe it boosts a certain stat, or adds extra armor, or perhaps even serves a story-related purpose, who knows?

But right now, I honestly have no idea what to expect. On one side of the argument, you have people showing evidence that armor is simplified even more, while on the other side people are showing evidence that indicates armor is more customizable than even Oblivion had. That excuse I stated above is the only thing I could think of to explain a scenario where both parties are correct to a certain extent, but if that is not the case, then someone is very wrong.

But thats not the same thing since we never carried more than one weapon. This would be like instead of dual wielding two weapons, we have a 2 weapon item that we put the two different weapons into, and htne apply the two weapon item. It just adds another step to it

I hate to say it, but in the same article doesnt it say that both clothing and armour have been simplified so that you only get full sets?

For a start I'm not really questioning why those topics were there, just highlighting the disparity between the two. I'm pretty sure you can't say that the screenshots provide more convincing evidence than the text... even though the screens look promising that there might be more pieces of armour than the single suit, the differing pauldrons etc. could be due to any number of reasons and a screenshot can't really confirm anything either way.... I'm saying that either the text or the screens could prove to be right, just don't count on anything until its properly confimed...

Ofc not confirmed, but it is 100% better evidence than pure text

I'm not sure I really understand what you're saying. You can carry as many weapons as your weight will allow you in Fallout 3. But let me explain this to you.

In Fallout New Vegas, you can get a Hunting Shotgun. The shotgun has its base stats, and it's like all of the other shotguns out there. You can also find a Hunting Shotgun Long Tube, which is essentially a larger tube for the shotgun. You can take the base shotgun and the shotgun tube to a working table and combine the two to make a Hunting Shotgun capable of holding 3 more shots. When you equip it, the under-barrel magazine tube is shown as being longer than normal, to give a visible distinction to your modified weapon.

Let's switch settings to Skyrim, and imagine how this could work on armor. One day, you find a set of leather armor. It has its usual stats, and it is the same as most other leather armors out there. Along your travels, you happen to find a bear skull. You decide to hold on to it, and take it and the set of leather armor to the leatherworker in town. One thing you can do is combine the leather armor and the bear skull, and you get a variant of leather armor that has slightly more armor bonuses than the usual sets of leather armor you come across. The bear skull is harder than leather, and it offers more protection. To keep things consistent, the bear skull visibly shows up as part of your armor when you wear it, and is placed upon one of your shoulders.

It really doesn't matter whether or not it's armor or weapons. It has the same customization possibilities for both.

For all we know, the armor pieces slot might comes in:
- a helmet/cloak
- a pair of gloves/bracers
- a pair of boots/shoes
- a full-body robe, or: a suit that will be consisting of a single piece of cuirass, greaves, and individual parts of pauldron (left and right separately) — all of these can be combined together as you will, but tied with how much smithing skill that your character currently possess (or an NPC smith can assemble them for you, for a price).

Just an assumption from comparing the last few screenshots with the earlier ones (particularly the bald guy with the "spider vs hero" shot, which feature the same body armor but the latter wears a pair of gloves), but who knows?

I ment carry, as in having one equipped. ANd what I mean is that you're already basically customizing one suit of armor. You just armor to wear it as it becomes the suit ie your equipped armor. What I'm saying is that limiting us to suits of armor, and then letting us customize those preset suits of armor is completely counter intuitive.

With weapons I made sense to add this kindof customization because we can only wield one gun anyway.

Now if they were to add customization is each PIECE of armor in a morrowind style slot system, that would be beyond awesome

You call it counter-intuitive, Bethesda calls it streamlining, it really doesn't matter.



That would be the most annoying thing ever.

How on earth is adding MORE steps to customization streamlining in any way?



And how would that be annoying? I fail to see that

It's streamlining because instead of having 20 slots for you to stick who knows how many kinds of armor on, you get a full set of armor with a limited number of changes to it you can make. It's the same idea that went into slimming down the number of stats and eliminating attributes. They want players to do less number crunching and spreadsheet-ish activity. If you're left managing multiple pieces of armor, you need to keep track of the bonuses of each. With a single suit of armor, you get a single number that is then given a buff if you put a modification on it. Whether it makes sense is up to one's own interpretation, but it's more possible than the two very different arguments going around the forums right now.

It would be annoying to be able to modify every one of Morrowind's armor pieces because there are so many of them. And to add a system where you can visibly see the differences would probably require a lot more performance to display.

Yeeaaa.. but defining each set to how you want them through customization would be slower than just equipping different armor pieces. Unless you mean each suit would have close to no customization, which would of course svck. I very much doubt they'd do anything liek that though. Considering that beyond the level scaling issue, one of the biggest complains in OB was the stuff they took away from armor customization.


And yea it would prolly take quite a bit to run each item customizable, and I'm certainly not asking for such a system. I just think, as a creative person it would be sick to have it. And it's not really annoinyg at all. I dunno if you've tried APB reloaded open beta, but if you have, that game has sometihng like that

It does say that apparently, but after reading this tweet from Pete just a week ago... http://twitter.com/#!/DCDeacon/status/73475846656098304 ... I'm more inclined to believe that it was miswritten in the article. Or, as some have suggested, that the armor will appear in sets in your inventory to reduce clutter.

It was New Vegas that did weapon mods, I don't remember moding weapons in Fallout 3, creating them sure but moding them no.

I'm not sure of this was mentioned, but it seems the guy in the pic you linked only has on pauldron on, and the armor seems to have two already attached like in OB.

We've seen a ton of variation with the same pieces of armor mixed with different pauldrons, different undershirts, etc., but it's foolish to draw much from these images.

For all we know, this may be part of the smithing system. For example, you could customize leather armor to give it a unique look, but it may still be a single inventory item.

great! more evidence that skyrim has separate armor pieces similar to morrowind

That's entirely possible, but unlikely, but that still means more customization which is what we wanted.

I want more ways to customize my armor, aesthetic changes to the armor would be great to mold the armor in way you want it to look with the smithing option.

i know your not gonna say where you found this pic but if anyone else knows that would be great :yes:

It's not hard, just gotta scour the net.

Kinda of off topic (well alot off topic) but that characters face looks incredibly super duperly awesomely real. I can't wait.

Now to be on topic:

I'm pretty sure separate pauldrons and separate armor pieces are in the game. So does this mean we can have separate gloves too?

it DOEEES say that it has been simplified, but it DOESS read like one of those irritatingly stupid things that journalists say without thinking (or knowing that it will cause a shizstorm on the forums for the next month)

I hope so, cause that would be dumb IMHO if we could have separate pauldrons but were stuck with the same set of gloves.

It actually looks like the cuirass has small pauldrons as a base, on top of which new pauldrons can be equipped. You can still see the base pauldron of the cuirass underneath the pointy one.
I'm still not completely sold, since Fallout 3 had Raider armors that all looked the same except for some slight variations, like different pauldrons or one pauldron less etc. But it does seem like good evidence, and for now I'm pretty excited too. Also, the pauldron actually looks very different than the rest of the armor, like it's made from another material. That also points to customizable pauldrons.