Or how about the "follow my own dragon shout through the hazy mist until the camera pans up to view a scenic mountainside vista" perk?

This is how I see it (as others have)

He was sprinting, and if you come to a abrupt halt while sprinting you put your hands out to balance yourself. Like people have said even Mario 64 had this feature and it is realistic. If I'm running top speed then for some reason I come to a stop I'm going to slide a bit and catch my balance. If when you run out of "stamina" or you let go of the "sprint" button and you're still pressing the stick all the way forward you will shift from sprinting into a regular run. It's simple really...

When will people understand that "rendered in-game" =/= "gameplay"?

There were a lot of animations used that definatly won't be in the game (kneeling on the cliff's edge and looking up at the dragon), because they just aren't possible from gameplay perspective. This includes some of the animations when he swung his sword and when he almost fell off the cliff.

I take it none of you people who are saying it was all cut-scenes have never once used the free camera mode in Oblivion? You do realize it's not overly difficult to accomplish this sort of thing with a free camera and 3rd person view enabled? Go look at the screenshot threads and tell me these people all took still shots of their action cut-scenes they spent ages in with their video editors and just happened to get exactly right to the point where you can't tell where the transition was.

Seriously, all this talk about it having been faked and scripted and not real sounds like some kind of vast conspiracy or something to deceive us all, when it's probably as simple as a new quick-stop animation combined with some very liberal use of free camera mode.

I don't really see why you're all arguing over whether or not the trailer was 100% in game, "what-the-player-will-see" footage. For one thing that's not even what the thread is about. Also, it obviously wasn't all that the player will see, but just like in the Oblivion trailer, you'd never see a bunch of guards standing ready in front of a castle from a birds-eye-view, but that doesn't mean it wasn't in game. Most likely what happened was the people who made the trailer used a mod for the birds-eye-view when the dragon is chasing the guy, and some unique camera angles and cinematic animations for the sake of entertainment, but still used in-game first person footage for Dovakhiin's POV.

It's not a conspiracy, it's the obvious fact. Saying that all of those animations are real gameplay is like saying that the dude sticking his sword in the ground http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXWYWfFqlSw is also gameplay. Game trailers always have scripted scenes.

except your example is clearly not in-game because it doesn't match the game's general graphical quality at all, and is in fact quite jarring in comparison to the gameplay footage in the trailer, whereas the only thing in the Skyrim trailer that does not quite match up with the graphical quality of the rest of the trailer is the scene of the player rising and shouting.

i mean seriously Occam's [censored] Razor.

ed can somebody with twitter just [censored] ask Pete already so this topic can die.

huh it would probably be one of the best ways to limit the world. i hope this is one of the types of invisible walls that there are in the game.