Focus meer op verhaal in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

Bethesda focust met de productie van Skyrim meer op het goed vertellen van één verhaal dan een boel mindere verhalen. De sidequests zullen nog wel aanwezig zijn maar veel minder vertakkingen hebben dan in voorgaande delen. Verder wordt er meer verteld over armour en de verschillen tussen PC en console.

 "We've focused on telling one story well. There are decision points in all the quest lines that can change things, but overall it's a single story. Because the side quests are smaller stories, they are more likely to have major branches. For example, you can decide to save or betray someone, which changes the whole end of the quest. Overall the quest structure in Skyrim is closer to Oblivion than Fallout 3, in that there are many more quests, but they have fewer branches."

Verder werd verteld dat Skyrim een 'one-piece-body-armour-systeem' gebruikt in plaats van het 'two-piece-body-armour-systeem' van Morrowind. In plaats van een verschillende body armour zal er nu één geheel zijn. Dit is gedaan om een bepaalde look te kunnen creëren die hoort bij het spel.

"The armour system is very similar to Oblivion's. The main difference is that the upper and lower body armours, the cuirass and greaves, have been combined into one piece.

This helps create armour styles that have the look we needed for Skyrim. In most of the Nordic designs we created, the upper armour would completely cover the lower armour, making it unnecessary.

We get much better visual results combining those pieces, and it renders a lot faster too, so we can put more people on screen, so that was an easy trade-off for us. We can also make a lot more armours now, so the number and variation types are more than we've ever had."

Als laatste wordt er nog wat uitleg gegeven over de verschillen tussen de PC-versie en de console-versie. Het spel zal op de PC stukken betere textures krijgen onder andere, mits je systeem dit aankan uiteraard. Verder zullen ook de controls heel anders zijn dan op de console-versie.

"64-bit specific exe? Not at this time. As far as UI, it visually looks the same across the platforms, but the controls are entirely different. There's also a lot of 'power user' stuff we do with the keyboard from how favourites work, to quick saves, and more that is similar to what we've done before in that area.

We're packing a lot of info on the screen and the whole interface is much less 'look at giant fonts!' than, say, Oblivion. The PC version also gets higher res textures, larger render modes, and a bunch of other effects you can scale up if your machine is a beast.  

Last but most important, is the Creation Kit we'll be releasing for the PC. Modding the game and making it your own is very important to us and our fans, so we're going to keep doing whatever we can in that area."