It sure seems a shame that skyrim has more mountains than any game i've ever seen, but it's both extremely difficult and immersion breaking to actually try to climb them! In fact, unless you exploit bugs(horses, cross-jumping, etc), many mountains are nearly impossible to climb.

What this mod will need:

Most basic level:

*A new climbing animation. If you combined an animation that pushed your character flat close to the ground, and then disabled gravity for your character, you could climb up anything without any problems. This would be the least ideal solution, but the simplest, since it wouldn't involve any hand-hold coding or anything like that. Personally, i could settle for this.

At a more advanced level:

*A rock climbing system similar to that in Colossus, combined with something that makes all sufficiently sharp angles usable as a grip. This would require a climbing animation, as well as a leaping animation and possible a "Scrabbling for a hold" animation. It would also make rock climbing much more difficult and immersive.

Even more advanced:

*A rope/anchor system, including an animation of a rope moving from your character to a nearby cliff surface. You would be able to fall a certain distance beyond the rope before you are stopped by it. I have no idea how you would pull this off, but it would be awesome.

the biggest issue with such mods is collision. and its not going to look like it was ment to be in the game either. it will look like your character is belly crawling up a surface and will continue to untill he gets to where he can walk. also other mods like in Oblivion that did this required the surface to be a 90 degree angle up and flat.

I think this is a great idea!

Maybe have a pair of climbing picks and you hafto push m1 then m2 and so on to climb up it!

Would be great

Morrowind had a mod like this believe it or not. Allowed you to scale virtually every rock side in the game based on your acrobatics skill. The higher your skill, the higher you could climb.

Yeah, too bad theres no acrobat skill anymore


Dont you love it when great game franchise's dumb down there most recent release?

+1

You could always base it on sneak, or one-handed, or something like that. Actually, you could have one skill from each focus, and it bases your ability on whichever one is highest. Lore-wise, it would make sense too; a warrior will obviously have stronger arms than a normal person, so they can climb better; a theif/assassin Needs strong muscles to remain quiet when walking around, and magic...well, it's magic. Make magic handholds!

Alternatively, you could just base it on your stamina level, though that seems a bit unfair to mages and other people that don't use stamina as much.

As for how to activate it...seems like a simple toggle would be the best way to do it. Just press one or maybe two buttons at once to switch you to rock climbing mode. That would be the simplest way, of course; if you could make it so when there is a good enough angle a prompt to hold onto it would pop up, that would be excellent.

ever been rock climbing? or hell ever climbed a tall tree? it takes a lot of energy. I say base it off of your stamina, as in it slowly ticks it down. the more stamina you have the higher you can climb. of course when it runs out you character cant hold on any longer and falls.

i was thinking about this myself, and i am gonna go on a limb here and say that its not impossible to do it well, but not in the ways you suggested.
if you played witcher 2 you will see a good effort at using vertical terrain. that game had small climbable surfaces that gerralt could walk upto, activate, and a climbing animation would begin. in a fight if he got hit the animation would stop and he would fall. same with the ladders.
THIS is what i think could work, and it could look quite smooth.

Well, ideally(to me) you'd do it like how it was done in Shadow of the Colossus; holding on and climbing takes a small amount of energy, holding with just your hands/arms takes a bit more energy, and holding on while being hit/being waved wildly around takes the most energy. Run out of stamina, and you fall. Level your stamina a few levels, however, and the basic climbing cost is countered by your regen, and if you get enough stamina it becomes nearly impossible to fall unless actually die.

The other skills could be multipliers, however, to make it use less stamina to do each of those activities.

I am still a bit miffed that they removed acrobatics, I loved being able to jump over small houses....

Ha me 2! It was great having pogo-stick legs! Being able to jump onto the roofs of buildings and such was great fun...lol


Perhaps it could use stamina for warriors/assassin types and magic for the casters?

I just use the console command "setgs fjumpheightmin 250" to jump really high. 250 is about where it is lots of fun, so that is what I use. You can set it to anything really. I wish it would carry through to each gameplay session though, have to put it in every time. I also use "player.setav speedmult 200" (200 just being what I chose) to run really fast, cause that was another thing I had fun with in oblivion. again, doesn't save though.

I was thinking about this one too. Separate surfaces for climbing animations are the best way to avoid those out of place moments where the immersion gets broken. These vertical pathways could be somewhat rare but useful addition while trekking the mountainsides. I don't see that the idea of climbing everything could be very well implemented.

this is gamebryo and i doubt it would look good. maybe in TES VI

I would be fine just being able to scale simple rocks in first-person, no animation required. Just get me up there!

What all of you who are worried about the immersion are forgetting is that currently, there is ZERO immersion in the current system for rock climbing.

To me, a chunky, but working, climbing system is better than standing on nothing on a nearly vertical rock face.