First off: Gameplay ≠ Lore

What are some of you getting on about waterbreathing? I have a waterbreathing spell. You are aware it is in the game, right?

if there was stuff in the water to find water breathing would be cool
slow fall would be ok
levitation no thanks

1:
2: It is still a thing to considered since it is a game. Yes, open cities are better and do-able but they most likely did Closed Cities for lagged reasons on the Xbox and PS3.

3: Melee Fighters run away. The Majority of Bandits, and other common enemies, only have Melee Weapons thus they die easily VS stuff the flies, like Dragons. So the player levitates to get away then they can easily win. Thus making it too easy.

What would a dev do in those situations in a game world where levitate exists? Design a defense or pretend the game world does not exist and ignore levitate?

Whether cites should be open or closed is a nonissue with regards to levitate. There is no point in bringing this up again.


Against this one character type. So what? And in a world where levitate exists, what self-respecting bandit would go about without the means (or friends) to take down all types of opponents they will come upon?

1. Make a Levitation spell then try to make it so it cannot be used for the hundreds of things you don't want it be used for, basicly.

2. I have nothing more to say since this is a topic I truly disagree with (Open Cities that is)

3. Script them to do something smarter and tell me if that works out for you.

Better design: Make levitate. Balance it to your liking. Make it so that becoming really proficient in levitate takes a ton of perks. Make so that getting hit by an arrow or spell while flying knocks someone from using the spell. Have a recast time. A slow spell cast time. Have burn rate / speed / max height inversely proportional to skill and perk dependent.

All of that above is variable.... THEN, don't design a game world that forgets to take the game world into account.


Not interested. In fact, I think it preferable that there exist hard-counters for builds. Makes things more interesting and gives more of a reason to get partners for character builds that specialize. Archers, for example, could be a hard-counter for flying mages.

Possible but will take a long long time. Scripting isn't easy.

That is easily fixed. Have any damage taken to you instantly knock you out of the sky. In Morrowind, the AI probably couldn't have handled that, not to mention all of the spells moved too slowly (and there was nothing like Flames or Sparks).

With today's technology, it would have been easy to program the AI to shoot Sparks or something at the player when levitating and have it knock you out of the air + damage.

The main problems had to do with cities being in their own cells and it made dungeons "too complex". Gamers want entire dungeons to be accessible to all character builds now, so nooks reached only by levitation are a thing of the past. The latter is a ridiculous assertion, but that's modern day gaming for you.

So your idea is to spend a huge amount of time designing a spell, another huge amount of time adapting the WHOLE world to the mere existence of that spell, all that for a tiny feature.

There's a reason making games isn't your job. The Levitation feature is NOT worth the dev time making it work which is why it was cut.


And it's not only a matter of dev time, adapting the game world to take into account levitation would be a bad idea. All the neat ideas the game designers put have to be weighted against the effects of levitation. Did you just make a complex dungeon which hinges on a retractable bridge to complete? Sorry Bob, do back to the CK and replace the bridge with a door. In fact, you can all go replace your retractable bridges with locked doors! Who needs variety? We got Levitation in, that's all the players want!

What? That's just dumb. Why does it matter if someone chooses to get across a chasm without pulling a lever to make a bridge appear?

there's no point to levitation, acrobatics had more use then levitation.

I must be the only person that doesn't miss levitation. In fact it kind of annoyed me you had to use it to get into the Telvanni towers in Morrowind. I think the animations kind of turned me off plus levitation on that scale has never been in my visions of fantasy. Now if yoy could turn into a bird or bat etc and fly , that would be kind of cool but really no big deal to me

The problem is it literally forces every character who isn't magic to resort to a bow or destruction, which is quite an advantage for you.
Perhaps if they included Levitation but made it impossible to do combat WHILE levitating? It takes your characters full concentration? Then it would work...

You're not alone.

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re: main topic - "Why no spell, but mentions in books!?!?!"

Gameplay and Lore do not always overlap. (And there are any number of examples in history of games that got messed up trying to match the lore too much)

Some people apparently want everyone to have to use the bridge.. eliminating variety in how players navigate dungeons. I prefer variety. With my mage, I'd levitate. With my thief/warrior, I'd use the bridge.

I agree...kind of. The point of levitation is RP and fun, BUT it would require a lot of tailoring to get that one spell in. And if you can't fight while levitating, it is pointless.. other than RP and navigating (in some situations).
That's the way I'd go with it, BUT as I said, it's a lot of effort to add the spell. As much as I miss some of the old spells, this is pretty low on the list of priorities and for good reason. That time was needed elsewhere.


WHOOPS: Sorry. Double post.

Water breather, night eye, mark/recall, and open are the ones i miss the most.

Before I will miss Levitation (because of the constraints with separate cells), I will miss the sound spell. Srsly, when they add it via Throw Voice, they can easily add it as an Illusion spell as well. Since most shouts even are variants of spells found with the exception that even a pure warrior can use them without conflicting his lore, this one can be a spell as well. Other spell effects, which could be added without breaking the game imho include:

Burden, Feather, Elemental Shields, Open

Blind, Night Eye, Silence

Reflect, Spell Absorption

I bet I could add six to ten more effects, but Mai'q is tired now. ^^

//edit

I do agree with Cy however, it would be fun, but to much hassle for a single effect. The ones I listed wouldn't be that hard to implement.

Water breathing is in.

All of you Morrowind and Oblivion lovers don't know what cut content is until you look at what happened between Daggerfall and Morrowind. Sure, Skyrim is a joke, but the sheer amount of RPG content abandoned from Daggerfall for the sake of polygons, consoles and target audience is astronomical.

Edit: Hell, Daggerfall has first person horse combat and levitation. That's with open cities in a true open world.

I think you don't understand what the "Sound" spell did in Morrowind if you suggest the "Throw Voice" shout is similar.

Alteration really took one to the chin this round.

Damn, had that confused.

My mind seems to be playing tricks on me, I can remember something like the Throw Voice, but I don't even find it on the uesp. Must have been another game, or maybe even pen and paper houserule... ^^

Make a mod for all of us that has a working levitation spell.

Well, you do have a point, sort of.... Considering how crappy the vanilla spell system is in SR, having to take a few minutes to think about adding a new an old spell (that already exists in the world) must seem like an enormous feat.

Oh, it was not worth their time...so it's not that celled cities made it impossible and they WERE too lazy to add it in! Just what I have been saying all along. If making the TES game world, that they themselves created, is too challenging a task for the TES staff then perhaps they need to replace a few people on the staff?


Such a myopic viewpoint. Just because levitate exists does not mean it has to work everywhere. Also, why would a designer be so stupid to design ONLY a bridge as a static defense knowing full well people could just zoom over it? Sounds like a poor designer to me.