The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Magazine Preview Tidbits

France’s Official PlayStation Magazine is one of the many to have a cover story on Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and a poster on the BethSoft forums shares the details.

-dynamic shadows
-if a weapon and a shield or two weapons are equiped, you cannot cast any spell (quite logical indeed)
-it seems that smithing can only be done in forges (you cannot repair your equipment everywhere like in morrowind or oblivion)
-incredible level of detail such as : blood vessels on skin, modelling, animations, clothings (not sure what “clothing” means here))
-meteorological effects : clouds are gathering in real time around mountain peaks (sounds pretty cool), snow affects textures (so again pretty much confirmed that this isn’t 3d accumulating snow but I’m fine with that anyway).
-a major inspiration for snowy landscapes seems to be artists like Brom and Frazetta.
-Matthew Carofano (artistic director of Skyrim) : Dwemer ruins (we know that already) and a Dunmer city!!! (yeah you heard me : Dunmer :celebration: ) ;
-again from M. Carifano : “after Oblivion where every place looked alike, in Skyrim you’ll find once agin the excentricity of Vvardenfell. Here every Nord Clan has its own colors, its own identity.”
-For consoles : the “block” action is performed by pressing both trigger buttons at the same time. Each separatly correspond to the action of what you equipped in one hand or the other.
-80 spells among which some are entirely new (the journalist might have picked a rounded off number since I remember GI said 85 or so?)
-spells confirmed : Detect Life, Fury (force ennemies to fight between them), Circle of Protection (hurl ennemies outside a magic circle), Snow trap (triggers only when an ennemy walks on it), Lightnings, Fireballs.
-Concerning finishing moves we’ll see stuffs like : Axe blade planted in the neck, dagger in the chest.
-Concerning skills : Athletics (they surely meant Acrobatics) doesn’t exist anymore (to prevent the player boosting this only by jumping on stand)
-AI : NPCs have day and night activities like cooking and brushing the ground in front of their houses.
-dialogues : most “inimportant” NPC like simple villagers won’t have any dialogue tree (instead they’ll directly comment on rumors or on what they’re doing) ; only important NPCs will actually exchange dialogue with you, you CAN cut short the dialogue simply by walking away.
-Every city and town is bound to some particular resources meaning if you burn their mill or mine, you affect their economy and they’ll be forced to buy flour or mineral somewhere else and when you’ll want to buy these resources here again it will be more expensive. (good thing for evil characters 🙂 and maybe desctructible environnement?)
-the Dragon Shout key on PS3 is R3 (don’t ask me more since I’m a PC player)
-archery : when aiming at something, you can hold your breath (consuming stamina) and the action is slowed.
-Dark Brotherhood mentionned as might be in (the reason beeing that the devs had a lot of fun developping it in Oblivion)
-Dragons can be unpredictible in their behaviour, they will fly in the air, crawl on the land, they can crash when wounded.
-On the favorite menu: “Cliking on a key, the screen freeze and a list of weapons or ‘favorite’ spells is shown next to each hand”.
-Todd Howard Interview :
-“a cause-consequence tree for each mission”,
-each mission will be a bit different from the same mission played by another player who has done other quests. Also can be different depending on which mission you did before.
-If you meet a Giant on the road he might totally not attack you unless you attack him.
-it seems he says that when most NPCs give you a quest, they’ll give you precise directions or accompany you to the road showing you which direction to take to go on on you quest.
-the player should be excited when discovering a new place, or overhearing rumors spoken by NPCs between them.
-the testers mark the most beautiful landscape, so they should have things like temples, stuff that will entice the player to go and check by himself.
-in Oblivion there was only 1 guy working on the dungeons, this time for Skyrim, 8 devs are working on them.
-120 dungeons (again might be another round off number, cause we already heard 130+)
-Speaking of jobs : woodcutting, weaponsmithing, sells stuffs you made to the forge or to the mill…
-he insists on the importance of activities they thought apparently useless before Skyrim, but they found that was surprinsingly important for immersion after implementing them into Skyrim.