Ok, so as we all remember, one of the "reasons" for the combined armor was for larger/bigger battles and more NPCs on screen and in cities, and I would just like to know, where? Where are these "larger" battles with a bunch of enemies taking place? And the cities seem to be just as populated as OB's, with the cities themselves appearing to be even smaller than OB's. So, what gives? I think Beth has lied to us again...

It's handled really well. Enemies will spawn and despawn (it's really unoticable) so you'll never actually get extreme lag from all the NPCs.

Edit: This is no excuse for the merging of armour, however. And yes, Bethesda have lied to us again, but not here. There genuinly are large battles.

Ok, but is it enough enemies to warrant them combining armor to save space or whatever?

Just edited my post. No.

Regardless of whether the armours are merged or not, there's still the same number of meshes being loaded (or at least the difference is negligable. Takes hardly any power to have the computer compute "Is wearing pauldrons"). Unless I'm mistaken. Which I don't think I am. If anything, not having merged armour would help here. Take the pauldrons from the NPC's and you've cut a lot of rendering without taking away from the look.

I honestly think they merged armor so there was 'less stuff' to worry about for the average, casual, unreceptive, and or neophyte ES gamer.

This game was made for a 7-year old system. Get Total War, a game made for PC. Enjoy "Tremendously large battles".

Bingo.

WTF PANTS AND SHIRT??? TOO COMPLICATED [censored] GAME LULZ! I bet you were thinking something like that. its not the reason.

Is the reason

I REALLY, sincerely hope that that is not the case here, otherwise, that's just lazy and makes me mourn for the future of video games.

*video game in 2020*
"Press A to start "
*presses A*
"Congratulations, you've beaten !"

The larger battles aren't because of merged armor. The games uses a cleanup system to get rid of dead bodies during larger fights. Corpses can cause a lot of slowdown if too many pile up. Really, if merging two armor pieces together would suddenly result in a much larger amount of NPCs, Bethesda's engine would be the most unoptimized piece of junk around.

My theory makes more sense than their excuse.

My toaster is more powerful than Xbox360.. xbox hardly runs oblivion, but try having a fort battle sized battle in skyrim on console with all separate armor pieces. My bets are on it exploding. (nothing happened here )

Its the same number of meshes being loaded. Having different greaves and cuirass wouldn't slow the game down.

It's not the meshes but AI has to remember all the items.. and there would be a lot of items...

Well the civil war quests are "bigger" battles, they werent much bigger then the battle for bruma in oblivion. To tell you the truth, the civil war quests were the lamest questline in the entire game. (still havent done bards so that one could be worse, i dunno) I mean the questline itself felt like the most rushed POS, and actually that questline doesnt really fit in with the game. It feels like it was a fan made questline made by modders(and not good modders like the tamriel rebuilt team, but the [censored] 12 year old modders that learn to mod to add in nudity and a god mode), thats how well implemented the civil war quests are (to me anyway, the other questlines were MUCH much much better).

My theory makes more sense. Like an above poster said, Beth optimization has really gone down hill if merging armors really made that big of a difference, which I don't believe it has, and was merged for the reason I gave above.

Oh well, keep believing in it pal. I bet that you also know how everything in this universe works too. Laters