in the Neverwinter Nights Toolset people have the ability to re-skin creatures and monsters and make them look like all new, brand new creatures and monsters via "Haks" and does the Skyrim Creation Kit has this ability???

and much, much more

In the Creation Kit, people have the ability to create new creatures and make them look all new. Because they are new. And not based on anything. Even give them their own AI, and much, much more.

MnM

The CK itself will be considerably more powerful than NWN's Aurora. In terms of adding new assets to the game, there's no real difference between the games, save in the technical specifics and the technologies available. TES uses a plugin-and-directory-structure system comparable (but superior) to NWN's hak/tlk system.

With the exception of multiplayer, if you can do it in NWN, you can do it in Skyrim and then some.

New creatures, new people, new weapons, new spells, new buildings, new worlds to explore, plus change almost anything you want if you have the skill.

It's hard to compare the two toolsets cause they use completely different approaches. NWN (talking about NWN2 here as I haven't touched NWN for ages) heavily relies on inheritance. You pick a base for your new content (an item, npc or whatever) and then modify it based on your needs (change model, change name, etc.). For TES (Oblivion experience here only) you work a lot more "from scratch" by creating completely new stuff. This has both its pros and cons though. As for possibilities TES is more powerful by far IMO. Anything you can do in NWN2, you can do in Oblivion and Skyrim; plus due to the way the games handle content it's a lot more easy to extend the TES games, esp. applying more than one mod. In NWN you're able to play different adventures, but just adding a new dungeon or quest to the main storyline is very complicated and not really mod friendly.

I guess it would be real nice for variety if you could just apply new textures to existing creatures, items and tilesets in the CK without having to make unique meshes for them. I haven't used the previous kits enough to know if that worked, but I'll assume it didn't.

Really? In a few hours time u can test it for yourself

You won't be able to add new reskinned creatures with just the CK, because that requires changes to textures. Which have to be made with a different program, like GIMP or Photoshop or whatever. But once you've made those textures, it's easy to add a reskinned creature in the game with the CK.

So you're saying we can take something in the CK, make it behave unique and apply a new texture without affecting the original? Seeing as I would like to make dungeons with some reskinned tilesets that would certainly make the process easier.

You will need an image editor to alter textures, but yes, you can apply them in the CK using a thing called Texture Sets. This allows 1 model you can skin with many different textures, unlike with Oblivion which needed individual model files for each variation of a single mesh.

Yeah, the former is a given, it was the latter I was wondering about. This is great news.

This, pretty much.

I haven't touched the Aurora toolset in almost ten years, but I will say that Eclipse is more powerful than Bethesda's toolsets simply by virtue of so much less being hardcoded. Almost EVERYTHING is scripted, and those scripts can be edited at will, everything from how combat works to how loot is distributed.

I've to admit that I prefer how Bethesda games works on the assets workflow, but I still prefer the power of NWN2 scripting, it allows to do a lot more on every aspects of the gameplay from simple things on what happen when you die or adding new set of weapons with proper animations and behavior.

The NWN Tool Set is more modular, and piecing together the various tile-sets is nice and easy.

But for complex world building not suitable.

NWN2 Tool-Set does things better than NWN1 Tool set.

But still no cigar!°

To answer your question :
http://www.nehrim.de/startEV.html

The Skyrim CK has more depth into it, according to the Devs.

I just hope they have script templates because I'm going to be SOOOOO lost.

Every since Fallout, the CS includes inheritance.

You can also do an inheritance type set-up by duplicating the form you want to modify.

When the original Aurora Toolset was released with NWN 1 it was pretty much the best modding tool ever to be shipped with a game, it was much better than the Construction Set (Morrowind version).

It's pretty outdated today though so it's not really fair to compare it to the Creation Kit.