The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Commentary Round-up

These details can all be gleaned from the recent deluge of TES V: Skyrim previews, but it’s worthwhile to highlight several of the more important tidbits out there. MTV Multiplayer provides a good overview of the upcoming RPG’s character system.

Despite the same terminology, perks work differently than they do in “Fallout 3” or “Fallout: New Vegas.” When you character levels up in “Skyrim,” you’ll be able to select a skill perk which is specific to an individual skill. For example, you could select a perk under Marksmen (the bow and arrow skill) which would allow you to zoom in and slow down time when aiming. Or a perk under Blade weapons which adds a chance to cause bleeding damage.

Perks have certain requirements, though, so you may need to get Blades up above level 50 before you can select the bleeding perk. The perks are also in perk trees, so there may be pre-requisite perks to unlock before you can choose the one you want.

Remember, you can only select a perk when your character levels up, not when you level up an individual skill.

Eurogamer explains the leveling and level cap.

“We do balance this game,” he said. “The levelling is faster. Oblivion and Fallout 3, we think of them as 1-25 games. This is a 1-50.

“But what that means is we just sped it up. It’s not like it’s going to take you longer. There are so many perks and the power really comes from the perks, we wanted to get it going faster.

“You level faster in the beginning and then it slows down.”

Xbox360Achievements talks about mounts being a possibility.

(We wanna make sure it’s a gameplay addition, you know, they’re not just like there and feel like klugey… Horses have come a long way in games,) Howard notes, clearly referencing Red Dead Redemption, (So we want to make sure we’re paying off on that. As I say, it’s looking good right now, but if we feel it’s not adding, we’ll probably yank the feature if we think it makes the game better.)

AusGamers gets a clarification on DX11 support and mods.

In the very same Q&A session that Todd answered our question above, he also confirmed the game would offer full mod support in much the same model as their previous games, and that he was hoping to have it ship day and date with the full game, but offered no other details.

Edge has some speculation on mods becoming available on consoles.

(It works on all the consoles,) he said. (As far as the 360 and PS3, right now there’s not an avenue for us to make that available, but we’d very much like to find a way. We have talked to Microsoft and Sony, and so there’s a chance it might happen one day, [but] I don’t see it happening for release.

(We’d like to see it happen, because it works, it’s how we made the game. I think it’s something really cool about what we do, but 90 per cent of our audience is on the consoles, so 90 per cent of our audience can’t even see this thing. So if we can solve that we’d like to.)

And finally, CVG has notes on PC versus console graphics, and while the article’s makes it sounds as if Todd Howard claims they “look the same” on PC or console, the actual text makes it clear it should look better on PC.

“All of our art’s really high-res. There are little things we do with all of our games on PC and the PC texture sizes are going to be as big as you can make them and you can pump the resolution up obviously.”

“But most of that… What we want at the end of the day is that the game looks the same. The benefit you get is when you’re playing a PC game you’re playing this far away [demonstrates a short distance], when you’re at home on your console you’re usually sitting about six feet away so the game looks the same.”