I've noticed worse clipping in Skyrim compared to previous ES games. This is a post I made last week about the issue, it really seems worse:

Except we have less choices and variety, and still clipping.
Not that I care about clipping, but I do care about variety.

Obviously they've removed it because the stupid console peasants cannot understand the depth and complexity of having different pants


... or how about the actual reasoning of characters and animations taking less space, making the game smoother and being able to draw more actors on screen...

Nah they're obviously lying

I can't be bothered to read three pages of replies right now, so I'll apologize if anyone has said this, but:

They stated two official reasons for combining legs and chest armor. The first is that their art designers can make better looking tops because they don't have to cut their design short at the waist. A lot of Romanesque armors had a skirt-like extension over the thighs, and it makes sense for designs in the game to include something like that. It's simply much easier to make cool-looking armor when you can design the whole thing as one piece than if you had to try and break it in two. Besides, armor in real life is often assembled in dozens of pieces, but it won't work unless you keep the set together. You very rarely find any sort of effective armor that can be mixed and matched.

The second, and less obvious, reason is that equipment slots actually cause FPS drops. Every NPC on the screen takes up a certain amount of memory and processing power, the fewer armor slots per NPC, the more NPCs they can animate on the screen at a time. Thus, in situations like the civil war quests, where a couple dozen NPCs are all fighting each other at once, if we had 1 extra ring and a pants slot for each of them, we may not have been able to have such "large" battles.

Again, sorry if this has already been pointed out, but hey. I think if it truly is a question of trade-off, we got the better end of the deal.

I don't really think it was the slot merging that made these larger battles possible. If you notice, during the large battles, dead corpses will disappear extremely quick. Corpses could cause a significant amount of slowdown in Oblivion, and they likely implement a cleanup system of sorts during these battles to prevent slowdown.

agreed. the fallout games techicaly had MORE body slots than Oblivion yet there was no noticable drop in performance. (even though armors were 'one peice' they were made up of multiple 'slots')
I think they just didn't want to put in the extra work, wich is funny because look at the two versions of 'fur' armor. One is basicaly the greaves on it's own (for males) while the other is greaves + cuirass

Tes 6 one piece body armor.

More like they've removed it because of faster modeling of suits of equipment.

Oh well character KF files from Oblivion hardly weight more then 20 MB of space, all Skyrim animations weight 40 MB, besides of this weight of combined upper and lower bodies in Skyrim almost same as weight of sum of upper and lower body equipment pieces, details on Skyrim equipment wasn't done with meshes but with better normal maps, as modder I can say making the game smoother and being able to draw more actors on screen with reducing of equipment slots is [censored], most of load comes from actors AI not from their visuals.

I like the change if it is good. I enjoy Skyrim, and hate Halo Reach. Both games attempted to change and only one succeeded in my opinion. Humans don't always hate change, that change just has to be good enough to justify itself.

Funny how Spears are so effective underwater....but they removed those too.

BTW- I really don't like that they merged the Greaves and Cuirass, but at least the erroneous "name" for greaves is gone. Real "Greaves" cover the shins (below the knee); CUISSES cover the thighs. Many real sets of armor were designed to be used as "partial" sets, with interchangable cuisses and greaves for mounted and foot combat. Some armor types were entirely seperate items, while others relied on each of the other pieces for support and stability. I thought the variety was fine in MW (although rather haphazard both between and within sets), and not that terrible but too "linear" between sets in OB. Skyrim sounds worse.

My MW characters frequently wore a mix of armor, and you'd have to be extremely unfamiliar with the game, or just stupidly stubborn, to claim that wearing a combination such as Imperial Chain, Imperial Dragonscale, and some heavy leather boots was done mainly for their higher AV. As usual, making unjustified claims about the MW players seems to be the standard answer to any criticism. Personally, I had different characters do entirely different things BECAUSE I COULD. Now, we don't have much choice. Somehow, I have trouble understanding how this is "better".

WHERE'S MY DAMN PAULDRONS

I'm wearing them as a hat..
As for the underwater combat, the only thing that kills slaughter fish quickly is a storm cloak I have found.

I hate not being able to go bare-chested with only pants and a Dwarven helmet on.

It's like Bethesda doesn't want me my character to express my his flamboyant party-goer sixuality.

/lawsuitforthelulz

Yeah. It's a bit of a bummer as I quite liked having more variety that was possible from mixing and matching armour and clothes. Not really sure why they did it; the system worked well enough in previous games. I suppose at least we weren't left with Fallout 3/New Vegas' system where the boots and gloves were also (largely) attached to the armour too, unless you modded the whole bloody lot to change it (which a few people did, myself included; I gave up trying to separate the tops and bottoms, though.)

At least there's one advantage which is we no longer have the incongruous situation where trousers/bottoms were described as "greaves" when the greaves were usually attached to the boots.

Back in my day, when we had armor it was one entire set..and we liked it that way!

Seriously, it's not the end of the world. It's not being "dumbed down for console/Call of Duty/people that have trouble putting their shoes on the right feet/forum trolls/forum whiners/etc."

Armor is - strangely enough - made to work with other pieces of the same make. I'm fine with not being able to use thirty different parts from thirty different armors at the same time and look like a clown thanks to all the gaps. (The arm gap in Morrowind's armor bothers me to this day. I don't know why, it just..does.)

The point is that it gave people choice. You didn't have to mix different sets if you didn't want to and Skyrim encourages use of matching sets with the armor perks.
The difference is that we used to have a CHOICE to make a rather unique appearance, wich has been diminished due to the combination/loss of armor slots.

I would have liked to have the mix and match option back again. It was one way in Oblivion of really giving my character a unique look. My thief was decked out to look like a thief with different types of clothing.

But it is what it is, and I'm still happy with my Elven armor thus far. I can't wait to see the Glass armor.

I know next time they should just make one armor slot and be done with it. And just call it armor since they cant be bothered to make heavy armor any different from light...I mean we used to have medium and unarmored. Pretty soon this game will so stupid and dumbed down the game will ship with a sticker that says WIN on it. Xbox players can stick that sticker to one of the buttons on their controller and just mash it until they beat the game.

next game everyone will have a choice of either having a blue full pajama set (bootys included) or a pink full pajama set. Hoods will not be optional.

Wow, I didn't know this. Makes sense now. I agree, I'd rather have more NPCs. I can always play Oblivion if I want mis-matched armor sets. Another reason for me to go back to Cyrodiil every now and again.

This lack of leg armor must explain why so many guards wound up taking arrows in the knee.

But.. we have more NPC's on the screen now, right?
No more towns that are made of two houses, right?

Have you met my father, he advises the thane.
Have you met my father, he advises the thane.
Have you met my father, he advises the thane.

Ad nauseum.
Big improvement.

I want my greaves back.

You just noticed the lack of something pants-like in the game?

Yeah, I have some days like that, too.

I call them 6-pack days.