Well to be honest we can't really say that. We probably know 1/1000 of what Todd and his employees do.
Perhaps removing it entirely would be the only good solution; if it would otherwise mean you have a flawed or incomplete version of spell making. We don't know for sure, really.

I don't know what Todd meant with "too spreadsheety" either. But as I said, we know so so so very little compared to him. We don't see it from his enlighted point of view
We see it from an unknowing, heavily partial and uncertain point of view.

My guess is that it could be like with horses.
Todd said something like that he wanted to go all the way; to make them really good. Else, horses wouldn't be added. Perhaps that's the same case with spell making. They'd rather have no spell making at all, than have a flawed or incomplete version of it. This is my speculation :rolleyes:

I suppose 'too spreadsheety' means soulless.
I hope they are at the point where they are thinking "that's the hard stuff out of the way, let's put in the easter eggs, amusing conversation options, interesting details, and now we have a spare moment or two, LET'S WRITE LOADS OF EXTRA BOOKS."

Change? Nothing. Tweak? Everything.

I think they will be adding easter eggs, another mace of doom (Somewhere!!) quests and carefully placing books on shelves :drool:

Well so will developers remove thats horrible speechcraft minigame now?
About "too spreadsheety" magic can we still combine spells in CS? for example like in TorchEd (Torch Light editor) I understood thats new spells similar to Midas Magic so it spelleffects combined with scripts, not like completely predefined spells without ability edit them or create new ones?

I imagine the CS is how they created the spells, so you should still be able to make spells with the CS.

This. Probably. If spell making does not exist in-game. It should exist in the Kit (I mean they can't create spells from thin air.. lulz), so those who so badly want it, can mod it in.

In game spell creation isn't that big a deal for me, since it is far too easy to seriously unbalance the game. However, I am hoping there is some way to enchant existing spells onto existing items. I haven't heard anything about enchanting as a skill, but I'm hoping that if they pulled it, they at least left in enchanters who can do it for you.

I'm not sure I would want to have to choose between my favorite armor, or my favorite enchantments.

I could see a weapon type being added, esp with the lack of specific weapon skills.

Make models, make animations, write a few perks, 10 minute dump of items into drop lists.

I just want a cosmetic Backpack that is shown on my Character, and a bedroll that I can sleep rough with. This seems to fit my wanderer character, and even more so in Skyrim

oh and gloves lol, just plain and simple gloves for my mages characters

At this rate I'd believe they're doing two things in this development state.

1. They're tweaking and refining the already in game features

2. They've setting a list of priorities for things to feasibly make it into the game at this point, and what won't.

In Oblivion, you could activate spellmaking through the console. Maybe they could include a console spellmaker as a compromise.

Why?
We haven't seen what magic is like yet. From the sounds of it it already sounds better to me.
To me spell making was boring,it did not interest me what so ever!
If others like it fair enough,but it's not make or break to me.
It's just added numbers on top of the same spell effect,hows that good exactly?
I still hope they try and do something with it,just to please those that miss it,but not like in oblivion,it was plain dull.

Moustache.

They could easily add some sort of travel nexus throughout Skyrim, because I made my own Oblivion mod for it and it took me..hours?

You know, I really -really- despise that argument. Taking an already finished product and all the tools in front of you is completely different from implementing a game feature in an unfinished game.

You don't get the point of my post;

They're pretty much done with the major stuff for this game since they've been working on it for 3 years. So, for the next couple of months, they're just going to be polishing up the game, like adding better details to shadows At least that's the general assumption one can make.

The developers use exactly the same (if not more powerful and versatile) tool to create their product as the one they provide to the modding community when the game is released.

Implementing additional features like the one specified would be exactly the same as someone creating a mod. The only difference is that it would take a Bethesda developer even less time to implement because they are more familiar with the Creation Kit.

I hope this clarifies things somewhat

Correct answer: Almost anything they want. Borderlands changed their entire art direction, and I mean the entire look of their game and almost every art asset, with like 4 months to go. They have nine. The ridiculous notion that "they can't change X because it's too late" is pretty much a fallacy.



With that said:

More suggestions, because I can't help myself. Oh, any why snark? You have your super fancy weather effects and tons of polls thanks in part to me.

Not only should there be an animation, and subsequent “time” hit for drinking a potion; it might also be worth testing out not allowing people to switch weapons from their inventory during combat. Now before there's any complaints, let's say you'd have a small collection of “sheathes” you could buy. Maybe up to four, one for a shield, one for a two handed weapon, two for one handed weapons.

You could “equip” weapons to each of these sheathes, which would be a quick slot. You could switch between spells and any of this equipment, but not stuff solely in your inventory. This does indeed limit your decisions, which is good. “Good gameplay is making interesting decisions.” Is the axiom first stated by the pretty much legendary Sid Meir, and one that follows very well into gameplay. By limiting your weapons selection it gives you another route for upgrading your character visa vis buying more sheathes (lets say you start out with three or something); and it forces you to think ahead. “What weapons are most important for me to access.”

Come to think of it spells and other quick items might work well in the same way. “Spell slots” could increase the higher your intelligence/willpower or whatever. Similarly “potion/poison/(smokebombs?) could fit into a pouch you could buy. Just something to make gameplay more interesting and add yet more way so level up/gain loot/differentiate players. Of course this could lead to overload or missed concentration on other things if not cautious. While AC Brotherhood might work all of these things fine in terms of controls, the combat is so laughably easy its actually easier to kill twenty guards in a row than escape them.

Secondly, not allowing people to block with a one handed weapon is bad game design. Another game design axiom, this time from Blizzard, is essentially “reward rather than punish”. By disallowing something arbitrarily the player is being punished for not using a two handed weapon or shield. “But it all balances out!” Doesn't matter, that's not the point of the axiom. The point is that the player should be rewarded with something cool for using a shield, like say being better at blocking or etc. Or using a two handed weapon, by having it do a lot more damage or etc.

What should not happen is the appearance of the player being punished for not using those, by “taking away” blocking from one handed weapons. Don't believe me? The perfect example is from the WoW beta. Initially rest (not playing the game for a while) worked by giving you 100% XP, and then the more you played in one sitting the lower it got, until you'd only get 50% XP. Players hated it, it sounds stupid right? So they doubled what it took to get to every level, then made rest give you 200% XP which would slowly go down to 100%. Anyone that graduated fourth grade and can think for a moment can see it's the exact same thing, they didn't really change a thing. Players loved it.

And of course, please have player movement, especially sprinting and dodging (add dodging!) be dependent on the weight of what they have equipped (and sheathed?). Giving players who want to play a “light/agile” character an actual incentive to do so.

And now for Roleplaying, which I love!

If races are now going to be “really different” from each other, then I'd love to see some sort of logical seeming physicality play into that. i.e. Have the biggest races, Orcs and Nords, get bonuses to walking/running speed (long legs), carrying capacity (duh), reduced stagger/knock back/whatever (they're big). Meanwhile they should probably get penalties to jumping, swimming, stealth (for being seen), and should be easy to hit. Sidenote, it would be awesome if enemies randomly missed once in a while, make them seem mortal. The smallest races, Bosmer and, I don't know? Should of course be the opposite.

Of course the largest part of “roleplaying” is often choices and there consequences. I'd love to see you're characters reputation be more interesting. First I'd think “fame” a better stat the “fame/infamy”. The more famous you are the more you're recognized for doing whatever it is that you do. A famous criminals aren't necessarily murderers, and vice-versa. “Adventurers” are necessarily charitable/do gooders. It would be neat to have a more specific reputation than just “good or bad”.

Players love to play dress up, even the guys (though they're generally less inclined to admit as such.) So having the ability to dye clothes, designers pay more attention to the design of the clothes, and etc. can only lead to another way to “play” the game. Some players want to cross dress, for whatever reason. It could be considered hilarious (Dead Rising 2, British people) or whatever the reason, I see no reason to not let them have at it. Similarly npc's reacting to how the player dresses is also a way to “play” the game in such a manner. Fancy clothes, rags, cross dressed, nvde, shining armor or etc. People judge others on the way they dress all the time, so having it in game can pretty much only be interesting.

And finally graphics, because I love research into this subject:

This is the best, fast, water simulation I've seen. It's deceptively simple and can be seen http://www.gamedev.net/blog/715/entry-2249487-ocean-rendering/ (link).

Secondly, the indirect lighting used seems a bit simple right now. Oddly enough the Toy Story 3 game and it's developers have an interesting and extremely fast way of generating good looking indirect diffuse. Thinking about that and metallic materials, a greyscale environment map, with it's color modulated by the spherical harmonic term, and of course normalized and etc. should provide a fast way of making metal look metallic, and match environment lighting/material.

“Atmosphere” is something people on here keep talking about. Of course “God Rays” http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch13.html come from “Atmosphere”, but little details add a lot to this as well. Rockstar uses a neat trick for fog that looks to be a “soft” particle set on top of lightsources with a transparency modulated by whatever fog they want for their weather. Assassin's Creed Brotherhood pulls some neat tricks with wind blowing leaves and the occasional cloud of bugs hovering around a place (are there any swamps in Skyrim? A lot northern territory in real life seems quite swampy). Fallout 3 even did a few neat things with the blowing dust and etc. Though for Skyrim I would assume it would be blowing snow and breath steaming out when it's cold enough.

Of course Audio plays just as much a part in “atmosphere” as any visual. Which leads me to ask why there seems to be only one guy doing all of it on a 150+ person team. Audio is around 40% of a games ability to engage players (I'd say controls/rumble might be 20%). Give the guy someone else to work with, and where are the echoing caverns and etc.?

it is written somewhere , that skyrim is still in pre- alpha , so i guess there is more to do than polishin'

I guess there is still a lot of scripting to be done - but dunno

Might also be that the new magic system allows for more control of the spell depending on how you cast it. aim at ground in front of you to make a trap, hold down button for a beam/ flamethrower effect, I can see that this would be hard to integrate with a spellmaker.

However as enchant is a skill they have to have a enchant system. The spell maker is pretty similar to enchanting in Oblivion and Morrowind, you add spell effects and select their properties. Yes it's possible to do otherwise and lots of games do, but it would nerf enchant horrible compared to Oblivion where it already was nerfed compared to Morrowind.

Not really, except from the bureaucracy of reserving a place just outside a city for the coach station or similar. However they also has to make it fit in the game and make sense who is why I said a coach station, who has to be made