Skyrim’s Interface, Crafting, Leveling and Lock Picking Explained
Destructoid had exclusive access to Skyrim for an hour, and subsequently asked Bethesda many of the questions we’ve been thinking. First on everyone’s mind, of course, was the game’s inventory system.
“Our philosophy is that in a game like ours you spend a ton of time looking at your interface, looking at your inventory, going through your items,” Peter Hines, Vice-President of Bethesda explained, “and so, we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to make that a more fluid system.”
“You find these cool things in the world and then they become tiny little icons in a list when you’re not using them,” Hines continued, saying the new interface will allow you “to interact with those more, creating favorites so that you can pull up stuff on the fly without having to switch to your inventory.”
Hines also clarified how leveling will work with the use of constellations, a system that appears similar to Fallout 3.
“The idea is that you look up to the heavens and you have a different constellation for each one of your skills, and those constellations are actually made up of perks that you can pick, so the way leveling up works is you just use skills – whatever you like doing you keep doing it, and you’ll get better at it, and the more you increase your skills (any skills) the more you’ll move towards leveling up, and when you level up you get to pick a perk.”
The similarity to Fallout 3 continues with the lock picking system, which Hines confessed is “almost kind of sort of exactly like Fallout.”
More details about the crafting system were also revealed, such as smithing, which will allow you to use ore you have mined and animal hides you have skinned to create and reinforce weapons and armor. Other crafting skills mentioned were alchemy, enchanting and cooking.
The time required to complete just the main quest line was declared as ranging between 20-25 hours, though it was insisted that that would not do the huge world justice.
It seems this huge new world will not feature the same level of environmental repetition as its predecessors, as Hines explained they have a “several times larger team working on Skyrim level design than we did on Oblivion”. He said this will make dungeons “cool and unique and different”, with “all kinds of different traps and puzzles and stuff”.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will hit shelves on November 11 for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
Fricken awsome. Can’t wait for this game !!!!!
Old news, this is a terrible piece of writing….rehashed info again and again…
Thank you.
shut the hell up dude this article isnt just old news, its informative. this guy did a good job. gtfo
@Tarod Agreed, i saw all this information the other day in a youtube video, all old info.
Who cares if it’s old news….. especially from a day prior to his post, are you guys f#$%ing seriously making a big deal about an informative post which exists probably in a thousand other blogs on the internet? shame on you, go read a book if you’re THAT bored.
Well, I actually appreciated this article since I’m at work and can’t watch the Destructiod video.
80 more day’s till It’s released!!!!!
SOOOOO excited for this game!! I still wonder how the dueling weilding is going to work though… Like how do you pick which hand a weapon goes into? And the lack of being able to have a sword and shield, and use a spell upsets me =(
When you are looking at an item in your inventory you will pull either the left or right trigger to equip it. As for dual wielding, my guess is that holding both triggers will block. If held for long enough, maybe you will do a flourish attack. Thats just speculation, im in no way sure of it, but it makes sense. Also it keeps you from being able to just hold block, which they fixed with the shield(as they said) by letting you shield bash your enemy if you hold the block long enough. Also, not letting you use magic while using a sword and shield balances the fighting. In oblivion people would often just cast fireball or heal constantly which was quite overpowered.
No blocking with dual wielding. It was in a recent Q and A I believe.
Nah, this really is basically the same info that’s already been released again and again. But honestly, instead of TELLING us how great the UI is they should finally release a little footage or images of it or anything of the PC version. Bethesda has a bad habit of giving the PC the same UI as the console, so I’m really going to hold a grudge if they don’t follow through with all this talk they’re having about their new menu system.
Also, I hope that the lockpick system isn’t the same as Fallouts. I liked oblivion’s because it involved skill and it actually felt worth it to level up the security skill whereas in fallout you could have anything between 26 and 49 but you really saw no difference in it until you hit 25, 50, 75, or 100 in which case you could unlock easy, medium, hard, and very hard locks. At least in oblivion if I had the patience and skill I could take the time to eventually unlock higher level locks and walk away because it was actually too hard instead of the game SAYING it was too hard.
I think when they say the lockpicking will be in the “style” of Fallout they mean the actual minigame, and process of lockpicking..not the limitations the game brings based on ur level as u were refering too