meaning if you want to cut wood, simply head over to a tree and swing at it with your axe as you would when fighting an enemy.

I dont want some tacked on mini-game which is just lockpicking on tree branches. I want it to be seamless and keep immersion.

thoughts?

Makes sense. Though I doubt they would make a minigame for wood cuting anyway.

Tetris!


More seriously, has it been said or suggested that this will be handled with a minigame?

True that it shouldn't be a minigame, but I still think that it should be done properly (ie. not with the hammer).

no.. just sayin' hopefully mr howard will read this topic and take heed.

No job (or similar activity) should be a mini-game. There should be no mini-games at all.

I hate mini-games
:flamethrower:

aint that the damn truth!

I'd love for the game to have breakable trees. So far I haven't seen any interaction with trees by dragons and the player in the gameplay footage, maybe they are waiting to show breakable trees until later in the year?

No, I wouldn't really want a mini game for woodcutting...
I'm also curious if the trees grow back after a while, or if you will technically be able to remove all forests from Skyrim?

Yea ok...you're going to be severely disappointed if you think there's even a chance of that happening.

Well one can wonder. It could be done in a way that you leave and when you come back some time later they're just back.
On the other hand i'll guess there'll be enough trees to not turn skyrim into one big clearcutting at the end of the game,
and of course I know they won't make anything advanced or fancy.

Says who? I mean, ingredients reappeared in Oblivion, so why not have the meshes for trees reappear over time? Even ones wit progressive forms?

I expect it to be like woodcuting in fable. Its just an animation, and you get something afterwards, probably money.
I'd love to be wrong, I'd love to be able to cut down any tree. And i would love to be able to just swing my axe at a tree and watch it fall.
Maybe my mage can have a spell powerful enough to do this!

If this were in the game, it would make using an axe far more attractive than using swords like every other playthrough I've done...



What about with Stendarr's Hammer? I think that ought to do it...

Wholeheartdly agree. Mini games tend to be as immersive as musical film, where characters sing for no apparent reason other than to obey the script.
Down with mini-games!
Long live seamless immersion!

If this were in the game, and similar things (real-time and animations) for every other job, it would probably be the best "job"-experience a game has ever had so far. Am I right?
Destructible environment isn't some magic after all. It has existed for years. Now adding that to the right things, and it can make something bland and otherwise boring to something very cool and more fun.

Though there are those musicals where people sing for reasons unknown, and people look at them like they're clinacly insane....


But, I would love for woodcutting to just be *Walk up to tree* *Take out Non- blunt, Non- Daggery weapon* *Start chopping down tree* Or something like that.... I dunno....

I'm hoping that Bethesda has figured out by now that most people positively hate the mini games.

I think its just about acceptable for lockpicking, but not for persuasion and definitely not for crafting (inc. woodcutting). In fact I think I can say that if woodcutting is a minigame then I definitely will not be indulging. I mean, I'll probably try it once - just to say that I did - but it won't be something I'd care to do regularly...

I would prefer mini-games for any activity not suitable for the player's basic controls; Wood cutting falls into this category ~as any wood-cutter would likely agree.

While I don't like minigames in RPGs on principle (in this case, the principle being that its not directly PC skill), I don't really have a problem with them in general. I thought the speech craft minigame in Oblivion was silly, but I did understand the meaning and utility of it.

**When it comes to the Lock Pick Game though... I see no need for it, and its an obvious exploit. If my PC has no skill with locks, then the game should not expect or allow me (the player) to pick the locks for them; and if my PC is an expert with locks, then they should not need the player's help or be be hampered by their lack of skill with the mini-game.

I don't like mini-games in Tes. They can be fun for a short while, but on the long term they are boring. I want to cut the damn wood fast and clean.

The lock picking minigame was alright - at first. But, for me it soon grew boring so i used the console command "unlock" on any object requiriing that mingame.

Simarily, I would be woodcutting for a lot longer if it was seamless, and not a minigame - however, I do recognize that Skyrim comes out in a handful of months, that bethesda has limited resources - so they might have to slap a minigame in there to free up time to perfect some other, more important aspect of Skyrim.

No offense to you, but I hate it when people say things like "they might leave that feature out so they can focus on more important things".
If we went by that kind of thinking, Skyrim would be a hell of a crappy game. Almost every game would be really bad then.

Features like this... real-time woodcutting with animations, together with other "smaller" features, really build up the foundation of a game, I'd say. Especially a TES game. Together, they can make a weak game a strong game.
If wood-cutting would be a mini-game, I'd rather not have it at all.

It would seem to me that having wood cutting actually done realistically would be rather hard to do, especially using the standard controls. I mean, it would look pretty strange if you were just swinning an ax at a tree like you would an enemy, it's a freaking tree, not a dragon. But the main problem I think is really handling how the tree would be chopped down to produce wood. To do this in a seamless fashion while still making it an interactive proccess would seem to require destructable environments, at least for trees, which we've been given no indication Skyrim will have. Really, the simplest way to do this would simply be to make it so that if you have an ax in you're inventory, you just activate a tree, and then you chop it, and get logs, the tree then gets replaced by a stump. If you want this to feel like actually chopping a tree and not just magically making it dissappear and turn into logs, you could have a short animation showing tree cutting, kind of like how skinning animals was handled in Red Dead Redemption, except make it possible to skip it. In the above mentioned game, the animation was nice at first, but got pretty annoying after you skinned several hundred animals, if you're going to do that sort of thing, you really need to make it possible to skip it.

That sounds horrible, no offense to you of course. Sounds like something we'd expect in 2002 or so.

And btw. I underlined something... in your comment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSRtYpNRoN0&feature=player_detailpage#t=80s

There is destructible environment for logs. Don't see why it wouldn't be like that for trees as well. Destructible environment isn't that hard to accomplish you know. Almost every single game have it, one way or another.

This seems completely reversed to me. If every game cut the chaff, and focused on refining the essentials ~then every game would be far better off IMO.

I cannot see the improvement for adding real-time wood cutting over a minigame ~or better yet, a simple menu choice that lets you choose to cut (and collect) wood for X number of hours. :shrug:

***BTW games that had realtime wood-cutting, had players that would sit a screwdriver on the keyboard whilst they went out for lunch or turned in for the night.

By realtime, I don't think they mean in a realistic amount of time. I'd like to see it take 3-6 chops, depending on weapon and skill.

That way, you can just have the keys locked, but the tree will fall down and you'll be chopping at nothing after a few seconds.