Ever since Morrowind, I have wanted Bethesda to add scary underwater monsters. (Dreugh/Slaughterfish are not very intimidating) I am talking about very rare, giant, dangerous, possibility of swallowing you whole type of monsters. Have you ever been exploring deep underground & see a large body of water (Blackreach for example) in a cavern & at first tell yourself:

"Oh h*ll no. I am not going in there"

Only to have your inner metagamer kick in & say:

"Bethesda was to lazy to add underwater monsters silly".

I'd like that to change. With so much diverse life on land I find it highly unlikely such life could not exist in Tamriel. Why couldn't there be a massive Mudcrab or Giant megalodon/kraken guarding a sunken east empire ship or something to that effect?

well you wouldn't be able to attack it since you're underwater

*Looks at Oblivion*

The irony, for me, is that we could defend ourselves underwater in Oblivion but underwater areas in that game were so barren and uninteresting there was little reason to go underwater at all. Bethesda put back a tiny bit of Morrowind's interesting underwater environments when they made Skyrim, but took away our ability to defend ourselves if we chose to explore it. Two years later I still do not understand why Bethesda chose to remove underwater combat.

So unless Bethesda gives us back the ability to defend ourselves I think adding more creatures to underwater areas is pointless.

Definitely a missed opportunity especially for the Argonians (who, according to the books at least, are quite handy underwater).

Perhaps the next generation of consoles will finally allow Bethesda to up their game a bit for the next TES.

I think underwater monsters and combat was left out because 11/11/11, seems like it was left out on purpose as a result of 'running out of time' which imo is a rubbish excuse.

Even games like WoW and GW2 understand the importance of being able to explore underwater (including underwater combat) in an exploration game.

Well the lack of underwater combat wouldn't make much sense, unless there was something that could kill us in the first place.

Yeah, it would have been nice to have had sea serpents and other nordic-style creatures.

As to why they took out combat to defend against the slaughterfish, I have no idea.

Having said that, it wasn't the focus of the game - realistically the larger bodies of water that could home larger creatures would be too cold to swim in, and Bethesda went in other directions.

I suspect they'd be saving underwater combat and focusing on developing it for where it makes more sense - when they get around to doing Black Marsh, whether that's TESVI,VII or VIII...

An underwater dungeon would have been pretty cool in this game, not to mention maybe an expanded bestiary with more water creatures. Of course, as others have stated, they'd need to let us be able to fight underwater as well. Morrowind had a lot of underwater areas....not sure why they decided to go away from that

An Argonian at least should be able to use weighted nets, spears and daggers underwater, similar to how island people on earth fish.

Oblivion had a huge slaughterfish but I think that's about it for underwater content.

Morrowind had a whole sunken Dwemer city with a unique artifact in, and a Daedric quest started at a sunken shrine.

I miss underwater content.

In Skyrim luckily the slaughterfish aren't that dangerous so a cloak spell takes care of them the few times there is something interesting in the water, the few times it isn't only ankle-deep, but there isn't really much to explore underwater. It's a shame.

I know why.

Its because of Skyrim's excessive realism and the lack of time and resources to duplicate the combat mechanism for the underwater effects and physics.

In Morrowind, when under water, you could do exactly the same things that you could do outside of it, so you could throw a lightning ball at that slaughter fish, and you could swing your sword just like when you where surrounded by air.

But in Skyrim, it would seem incompetent, and because the combat mechanism had to be almost duplicated for that environment, they chose to completely ignore it and add "No underwater combat, except for fishes" rule to keep a bit of realism in the game, which is a pity.

I still miss my Morrowind's exotic adventures in the depths of the ocean and grottoes.

So we're blaming everything we wanted but didn't get on that now? I don't remember anyone saying there were going to be underwater monsters or anything at all when they talked about the game.

Pretty much this.

People go on and on about the 11/11/11 release date. But all games need a release date. All games start off with brilliant ideas that are gradually refined, changed or cut before they are released, for design, budget or other reasons. If you just kept working until everything was implemented, the game would never be released.

This was discussed to death a few weeks after release.

Underwater anything is just..left with a lot to be desired.

*sigh* Seriously, why is everybody so obsessed with that date. Have you seen what the OP suggested introduced by DLCs? Nope. They didn't want to do it because they're probably lazy.

Only beth knows, but I don't think it had to do with the date. Underwater, I would see as "knock out the easy thing first" type resource. I don't think it was meant to have a lot of life.

Or they didn't want to, just because they didn't do something doesn't mean they were being lazy. We are not working on the game, we are not entitled to have our ideas placed in the game, Bethesda isn't required to meet every demand we have for a game.

Funny, I replaced 'because they didn't want to' with the lazy part. Don't know why.

Is that suppose to prove a point or something? Now if you can find me something that says the original idea of skyrim had epic underwater battles but they stopped because they officially said "Nah we're just too damn lazy" otherwise you don't have a point, by using your logic we can say every studio is lazy for not putting into a game.

Seriously the logic you are using is "Bethesda didn't do something I want? [censored] LAZY DEVS AND THEIR 11/11/11 -INSERTFANRAGEHERE-"

Are whales supposed to be in the Sea of Ghosts. I don't mean in-game.

Don't know, we don't have any source saying there were whales in the sea of ghosts as far as I know, skyrim use to have snow whales that flew in the sky but they all either died or left skyrim.

They could have atleast had a ghost of a snow whale in the Kyne's trials quest. That would have been great.

Flame cloak is great against slaughter fish.

Any idea on what percentage of skyrim is water? That percentage is 90% wasted space. There's only a handful of shipwrecks and only 1 quest that takes you out into the deep ice. Such a waste

Yeah, I get not being able to properly attack underwater by swinging weapons and such. The swing would naturally not be as fast or strong. But perhaps they could've added a special type of weapon, which is made for underwater combat? Or a magic spell that temporarily allows you to swing a weapon underwater as if you were on land? I don't think either idea would be far-fetched.