Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is shaping up to be a very solid game with the level of anticipation increasing as we approach the game’s release in November. Today we bring you a number of new details on the gameplay, the visuals, the shout system and more below.
There has been a lot of talk about how the visuals will churn out on the three platforms with many claiming that the PC version will have the best visuals. But the studio is aiming to minimize visual differences between consoles and PC.
Bethesda’s game director Todd Howard says:
“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.”
He also talks about the players ability to shout in the game:
“Originally we allowed you to combine shouts but was really confusing so now the game does it for you. There’s about 2 dozen in the game, though there are three words each for these so there’s 60-plus words to collect.”
He also talks in depth about the skill system and how he want it to move away from excel spread sheets like feel:
“Now, every skill affects your levelling. Skill has become like our XP. The higher the skill, the more it pushes you to levelling so you want to use your higher skills and the nice thing is if you’re playing the game for a while.”
“With the skill tree, I wanted to get away from Excel-like spread sheets so I had this idea that if you look to your right, over your shoulder, you’d see your weapons, and then you’d look to the left and see your magic and then you look to the starts to see who I am and that was the genesis of it. The previous Elder Scroll games have always had birth signs and we liked all that stuff so it’s like it’s all coming together. Then one of our artists, Mark Tier, knocked it out the park visually.”
He then talks about the miscellaneous quests that the player will undertake in the game:
“With things that we like to call miscellaneous quests where you go into a town, you want to make friends it’ll generate a little quest that seems simple and it’ll go through the radiant story system. With a bigger quest, we may not know who it’ll choose. We want someone your enemies with and we don’t know why – who’s the closest person that hates the player, let’s make them fill in that role.”
Apparently there will be no level cap and the levelling will be faster:
“There’s no level cap. There’s probably some mathematical level cap but like Oblivion it kind of just works itself out naturally. We do balance this game – the levelling is faster. In Oblivion and Fallout we’ve kind of seen them as 1-25 games where as this 1-50.”
“We’ve just sped it up. It won’t take you longer. There are so many perks – and the power comes from these perks – so we wanted to get it going faster. The more you play, though, the more it slows down. I’d guess the mathematical cap is about 70.”
“The levelling system is very much like Fallout 3’s We pushed it too much in Oblivion – it was like a rollercoaster of pain because the world levelled faster than you. There’s a few tweaks as we want to telegraph to the play that they’re approaching a tough area, like going up the mountains. We’d like to do more than that.”
The world of Skrim will be as big as Oblivion:
“The world is about the same size as Oblivion but the difference is because we have mountains they channel us in different ways. They create less space but they take more time to get across because you can’t just cut across them so it ends up feeling bigger.”
“There are five what we call big cities and they’re all really unique. If you’ve seen the trailer you’ll have seen a couple of them in there. On top of that, Skyrim is broken into nine holds, and a hold is like a county and each one is governed.”
We have seen a bit of dragon action in the game and there will be more:
“The system can time how long it’s been since you last saw a dragon, what your level is and whether it’s time to bring one in. There are, obviously, specific ones as well. Also, all the dragons talk as when they’re breathing fire, they’re speaking. And there are some that speak in English as well. But I don’t want to spoil it anymore than that.”
He also talks about a bug in Oblivion and how they are making sure that such game breaking bugs wont be in Skyrim:
“There’s actually a bug in Oblivion where there’s this one door that has an animation timer and depending on when you open it if you then play for 500 hours that door will no longer open and that breaks the game. How do you plan for that? We found the best way is to test for things, though, so we try and take every variable and let it run for 500 hours.”
He then talks about the Gamebryo Engine:
“We used Gamebryo for a long time, it’s not an engine but a renderer, but with Fallout 3 and Oblivion we were doing a lot of our graphics work but not all of it. Now we do all of it. The freedom that allows us is when we want to change something it happens like that.”
We are very excited about Elder Scrolls V and what it brings to the table later this year. Stay tuned with GamingBolt for more news and updates.