Lifted from the bethsoft forums, where people have been analyzing the leaked Game Informer scans for the last 48 hours with no sleep:
Confirmed Features:
-18 skills. A couple skills have been removed and their requisite abilities/spells have been merged with others. Enchanting is back, and there is a new skill, 'Smithing' that lets you create your own weapons, probably in a similar way to how Fallout used workbenches. Blade and Blunt skills have become One-Handed and Two-Handed.
-Perk picking at every level-up, each skill lets you branch off in perk selection as you get higher up
-Finishing moves, unique to each weapon and enemy you fight.
-Dynamic Shadows on damn near everything
-Kids
-5 Major Cities (BIG)
-Improved Faces/Improved Models Example: Faces have been dramatically overhauled. Characters now exhibit more emotion show of distinctions between different races and just plain looks better.
-Updated Engine Snow falls dynamically (not as a basic texture on the ground) From the mag: it piles on objects based on their shape
Trees and branches move independently with the wind
Water flows and huge draw distances ! To use an example, there is a mountain called the Throat of the World the player has to go to on a quest and climb 7000 steps (to put that in perspective, the Empire State building only has 1400 or so), and this mountain is visible from pretty much anywhere. Gone are the days of distant hills having low-res textures with a few billboarding trees. Skyrim is a slightly smaller providence than Cyrodiil, but still pretty damn big. Turns out overall scale is bigger even though it's a smaller province. World boundaries are handled a bit better than before, partially because much of the province is lined by mountains. Other than that, pretty much every visible area in-game is traversable.
-The Hero has a mentor: His name is Esbern and Voiced by Mark Von Sydow (Surviving Blade) MAX von Sydow, geezus
-The game takes place 2 centuries after Oblivion
-Initiating a conversation between a NPC no longer zooms and stops time: Quote (Conversations aren't done in a zoomed in static shot anymore. Start a conversation with some and they will act like someone would in real life, looking at you occasionally and walking around a bit and also continue doing a task if they were doing one while talking.) Other NPCs in the area continue moving about while you are talking to someone else
-Sprint is added and is based on Stamina (Fatigue's new name)
-Beards
- Dialog will pop up when you approach an enemy (as in, they'll talk to you while they're attacking you instead of pausing combat)
- You can't run backwards as fast as you do forward. This was done because they felt the third-person backpedal looked dumb, and also balanced the combat so you couldn't just strafe away at normal speed as a side effect.
- 10 races to choose from
- confirmed creatures: zombies, skeletons, trolls, giants, ice wraiths, giant spiders, dragons, wolves, horses Elk, mammoth, saber-toothed cats, Draugr (pissed off Nord mummies)
- presumeably open cities (as dragons can attack)
- cooking/farming/mining/woodcutting/blacksmithing
-Hud-free first-person view and improved third-person perspective
-very unique landscapes! Also unique dungeons! In other words, lots of uniqueness! Skyrim is not just snowy mountains; there are tundras, beaches, deciduous forests, etc. Dungeons have much more variance
-Plot: The plot is that you are possibly the last Dragonborn, a group characterized by their ability to hunt dragons. The Septim line was a prominent Dragonborn line protected by the Dragonguards which eventually became the blades. After the death of the Septim line, the Blades were hunted down and killed one by one and now are almost completely gone. The return of the dragons was foretold in the Elder Scrolls and was ushered in by the destruction of the Staff of Chaos, the creation of the Numidium, the events at Red Mountain and the Oblivion Crisis. The last event to unfold before the dragons return was the people of Skyrim turning against each other which is happening at the beginning of the game. Dragons start to appear in greater and greater numbers as the game goes on and will eventually culminate with Alduin possibly coming into the world, but we have no idea yet.
-Combat: The combat system has once again been overhauled. Now you may choose what you place in each hand, whether it be a sword and shield, dagger and sword, two swords or even a weapon in one hand and a spell in another. Assaulting with your shield is now apart of melee combat, being able to shield bash them to stagger them to give yourself an advantage in combat. Spells can now be dedicated to a certain hand meaning you can fight with your left hand aflame while your right hand is charged with lightning. Spells can be combined to greater effect. Ranged combat has been improved by increasing the damage bows deal significantly, so much so that it is possible for one to one shot an npc from stealth but also so the draw time of your bow has been increased. Ranged combat shouldn't be able to be abused from stealth like in Oblivion due to the fact that NPCs are FAR more intelligent than any TES game ever and possibly any game to date, we shall see.
To elaborate a little bit because these giddy fanboys have a habit of repeating things they like and leaving out other details (I've also added some stuff in bold to the quotes):
-Dragons roam the land and will attack the player, nearby settlements, etc.
-Radiant AI is back; if you drop a sword in the middle of a village, someone might try to give it back to you, others might fight for it. This expands to 'Radiant Story': the game collects a log of everything you've done and will begin to generate quests that take you to locations you haven't gone to yet and populate them with level-appropriate enemies. If you kill a shopkeep who was offering a quest, a relative will inherit the shop and continue to offer the quest begrudgingly as well as probably raise prices. Also, their daily activities actually have an impact on local economy as opposed to just being 'do this at x time, then do this' in the previous games.
-Menu overhaul: opening the inventory pulls up a compass overlay with inventory, skills, map and I forget the fourth option. There is also a 'favorites' menu where you can add frequently used weapons/spells/armor for easy switching (requiring the same amount of effort as hotkeys to use but lets you have more ready than just 8 )
-Each item you can put in your inventory has a fully viewable 3D model (alchemy ingredients, armor, everything. Books are actual books that you turn the pages to read). To use an example, there might be a puzzle in the game that requires you know the order of a few symbols.
-Perks are handled in a constellation grid that when you open in the menu causes your character to look up to the heavens
-Dragons have a manuscript wherein they use claw-marks to depict syllabic sounds (there was a riddle on the back cover of the mag using this). As a Dragonborn, your character can speak these sounds and learn new 'dragonshouts' that have special abilities such as a force push affecting those in front of you, slow time, calling a dragon by name to fight for you, a whisper that lets you teleport forward a short distance, etc.
-Much improved animations. Seriously. You can't really tell from magazine scans other than that the stances used in some of the screens suggest better posing
-Speaking of magazine scans, I don't want to post them but the game has a more definitive art style than Oblivion and looks effing gorgeous, y'all should check them out if you get a chance
-For the systems nerds, here's how leveling works: attributes are GONE. You don't level up based on how much a willpower-based skill increased. Instead, leveling is driven through skills. To paraphrase a quote from the article, leveling a skill up from 34 to 35 will cause you to level up as a whole faster than going from 10 to 11. This encourages specialization of skills, as higher skill levels cause faster level ups. You can level up a bunch of skills, but it will take longer because lower skill levels contribute much less to leveling. Also, the level cap is 50 and is a soft cap, meaning you can keep leveling at a much slower rate. When you level up you get a health boost, and can pick an additional boost in health, stamina or magicka. This system essentially makes so that you drive the character based on what you do, not by what you selected at the beginning. No classes, everyone is an 'adventurer' with their own organic skill set instead of being jammed into a predefined role.
So yeah...I knew I was gonna buy this as soon as I heard about it.
Everyone else can commence dismantling it and interpreting as many things as possible to be a negative change.
Some parts removed since they're not public knowledge yet