Skyrim Q&A with Todd Howard from GameInformer

Took me a week to find time to listen to the 1-hour podcast. It was more interesting than expected, and while you should probably listen to the whole thing if you’re trying to track everything about what’s going on with current TES V: Skyrim development, I’ll try to collect some of the more interesting points together in this post.

So, what new things did Howard tell to answer a selection out of 1600+ comments with questions asked on GameInformer?

- More details on skills and perks. There are far fewer skills than in previous games: for instance, only three actual weapon skills are in place. One-handed weapons, two-handed weapons and archery. Within each skill there are multiple perks for various types of weapons and various actions. Howard says that there are about 280 perks in the game! A lot, but that does count perk tiers, so it remains unknown how many different perks we’ll be getting, but number is going to be impressive.

- Dragons were in development for 2 years with a dedicated team. It seems that those creatures will be one of the key attractions of the game, and key adversaries, definitely most dangerous ones. They can walk where they want, fly where they want, “divebomb, breathe fire along the streets”. More to it, we can call them whenever we like. Get bored? Summon a dragon!

- Werevolves are Bethesda’s favoured material, but they aren’t sure whether vampires or werevolves will be in Skyrim.

- UI will stay on the screen only when necessary. The compass will always be there, but health bar (and probably mana bar along with stamina bar) will be present only when player loses health or uses magic et cetera.

- Radiant Story is described in better detail. First of all, only part of missions will be created randomly, which is inspiring cause well-written static missions are more interesting anyway. “Some quests have no dynamic elements, and some have more”. That sounds great.

- Game world is about the size of Cyrodiil, but Howard says that it feels larger because the regions are split with massive snowy mountain regions. In general, Skyrim won’t be one snowy landmass that some of us could imagine; it will have diverse regions, like forests and glaciers. Volcanic tundra is mentioned as well. Seems that the world design is a huge emphasis, for Howard mentions things like us being able to tell how aged each building in the game is, so that a newly built one will look different from one built long ago. Todd also compares Oblivion cities with amusement parks. Couldn’t agree more, slicky streets of some of the TES IV cities were some of the worse locations I’ve seen with Bethesda games.

Anyway, let’s trust Bethesda on this one: who would doubt they got the best world builders in the world?

- There will be companions, and many characters in the game world will be able to accompany player with his/her adventures. However, no elaborate storylines for each companion will be created.

- Ugly faces are gone. Really? I’ll have to see the game myself to believe that, but I was always far more tolerable about default Bethesda faces than most other gamers: never used face mods myself. Fact that only a small portion of faces in the game look real pretty is quite realistic. As for ourselves being pretty… that’s challenging to be pretty, right? Anyway, we’ll see what they’ll make, but they definitely want more versatile races and better faces.

A personal message from myself is: Bring Back the Tails!

- Howard talks PC version having higher-res textures than console versions. In Oblivion it wasn’t really enough when the game was released, so hopefully for Skyrim we won’t have mods coming out in 1-2 weeks from the game release that replace textures with much better ones without much impact on performance for 90% of systems. Cause that’s what happened with TES IV: Oblivion.

- More on game’s story: while Todd Howard didn’t answer any questions on the game ending, he did further elaborate the beginnings. It’s mentioned that starting as a prisoner has become a good tradition for The Elder Scrolls, and it’s likely that in the beginning of Skyrim our character will be a prisoner as well (although it’s not confirmed yet). Later, the game contains an event where player encounters a dragon and learns that he is dragonborn, which is not known to the character (not to those players who follow the pre-release information of course) when the game begins.

After player learns he’s dragonborn, the Greybeards from High Hrothgar learn that as well, and call the player across the whole world - “they shout ‘Dovakiin!’ to the wind, and it kind of rumbles through the world, you know, like a mountain shake when they call you”. To get up to the Throat of the World where the Dragonborn, player will have to take 7,000 steps to their hideout high in the mountains – and they say that all 7,000 will be present in the game. Dragonborn are masters of the Voice, the dragon language which you will have to learn while playing, and they’ll probably play a prominent role in the storyline as your mentors, quest givers and so on.

Last but not least: they aren’t sure if horses will be there in Skyrim. They want to have them in the game, but Oblivion implementation wasn’t good enough compared to other modern games, and they want horse riding to become much better. What’s for sure is that, according to Todd, horse armor is going to be in it, even if there are no horses at all :)

TES V updates on GameInformer: combat, menus, and more

Several new Skyrim articles were posted to GameInformer last week.

The first and most interesting is the update on building the combat system. While the weapons and corresponding skills remain similar to what we got used to in Morrowind and Oblivion, using defensive and offensive moves became more dynamic and complex than before. Along with making fights more brutal with effects and finishing moves, the goal of Bethesda was to make each serious encounter a life-threatening experience.

In addition to various weapons, players will have a number of options to actively defend themselves. Both shields and dual-vielding weapons allow both to block and to execute a bash move. Shields can also offer elemental protection from spells.

Spells will be equipped much like weapons were in previous TES games. According to Todd Howard, the concept was inspired by plasmids from Bioshock. It is not yet confirmed whether player will be able to combine spells, but magicians won’t feel short of variations: about 85 different spells will be availble. A good tactic against another spellcaster could be keeping a ward spell in one hand and attack spell in another.

Using ranged weapons and stealth tactics was also improved: power of arrows is now much higher, but player’s capability to carry multiple ones is limited. Approaching enemies undetected will help to deliver deadly blows with daggers and other silent weapons.

The article on Skyrim user interface contains the first details on how the menus of TES V will work and how they will look. Interface of the game was fully overhauled; the menu system for Oblivion is referred to as “a cumbersome medieval equivalent to Excel documents”. The functionality of Skyrim menus was clearly designed for convenient usage on consoles: initial navigation is performed by a 4-direction compass. Todd Howard says that the studio drew the inspiration from the recent UIs designed by Apple for products like iTunes.

From one screenshot that we now have, it’s clear that the menu looks much more beautiful than before, but I have doubts on whether it’s an actual improvement over Oblivion. The simple and informative one-screen game menu of Morrowind that was very convenient for use on PCs is now a thing of even more distant past.

A video with Matt Carofano, the art director for TES V: Skyrim, contains details on how the Skyrim art is being created: lots of concept work on landscapes, monsters and characters is shown. We’re promised a singnificantly better character creation (and NPC customization) system than TES games had before, and racial differences will become even more distinct. Overall, the art direction approach is to make the world look whole, natural and unique, and screenshots of game’s wilderness areas show a lot of promise in this regard.

Last but not least, GameInformer provides everyone with an opportunity to ask Todd Howard about Skyrim. Right now, the article has nearly 700 comments with questions, and you can still add your own if you wish so.

More Skyrim on GameInformer: Skyrim technology, time-lapse video

I apologize for certain factual errors on information sources that occured in some of the previous posts. The posts were edited to fix the info. Thanks to those who reported the problem. The site is still very much work in progress, and we will need quite some time to convert the contents of the old site into the new format, as well as to finalize the design which will probably change not once and not twice in the near future.

Back to Skyrim news now.

Two more GameInformer Skyrim hub posts appeared within the last few days. The article on Skyrim technology covers the specifics of the new graphic engine designed with vast open spaces in mind and complex environments in mind. The engine was dubbed Creation Engine and Kit. Havok physics engine used in Skyrim is explained, and Radiant AI is detailed, along with yjr Radiant Story, Bethesda’s brand new invention that helps to randomize and enhance the experience for side quests.

The time-lapse video demonstrates the process of concept art creation, as well as the end result. A new piece of music composed by Jeremy Soule is used to accompany the footage.