I think it's because too many people complained that carrying around 50 hammers with you everywhere you go so you can repair your weapons and armor after every single battle was annoying. Instead of improving on a system that wasn't broke to begin with, but was in need of improving, decided that they would just scrap it altogether.

I for one would love to have degradation come back in an improved form. Smithing is already in game, so it would make sense to tie repairs to it, but can only be done out of combat and at a workbench.

Putting upgrading and degradation hand in hand would have been a fine feature.

Being able to upgrade a sword to Legendary for instance, however depending on how often it was used and the amount of Armor an opponent had it could actually degrade down to the lower levels which would simply require the player to re~upgrade them to keep them in perfect shape, but they would never break.

I don't. my daedric armor however...
It's not that it's 100% realistic. It's how your weapons lose their quality over time. If you use your sword a lot, it will get dull over time. I sure as hell don't want it to break indefinitely like in real life, that would not be fun. But I like being rewarded for caring. For example, Taking care of goldbrand makes it that much more fulfilling when I'm 2 shotting everything. idk, it's just my opinion.

It was completely offset by the fact that bandits wore the best armour in the game, and were around every other corner.

I recall discussions, prerelease, about Smithing, improvements and degrading. It was thought, at the time, your weapons would degrade to normal when used, once you improved them. Thus needing to improve them again. That is obviously not what the game reflects.

I would love something like this, perhaps even should you neglet your weapons and armor long enough, they would degrade to the point of breaking. That of course is a bit extreme, and not everyone would enjoy that sort of degradation.

I didn't mind it in the other games. It's just the insane rate at which it degraded. Even with a stupid hammer, just one would be good enough. But Hell, even they broke after three uses. It's a good thing...it was just too much of it.

EDIT : Pending where you left the gear, I could see a static degrade happening.

Remove the breaking part and you have a much better system than Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim.

Then make Smithing more like a combination of Alchemy and Enchanting (i.e. needing recipes, being able to break down gear) and you have the best Smithing system money can buy.

Kingdoms of Amalur does Smithing better than Skyrim.

Oh, you're thinking of Oblivion. Yes, that was [censored] [censored]. Weapon quality means nothing when you can simply find a new one in your nearest marauder fortress. Money also meant nothing when you could make tens of thousands of gold for spending 5 minutes hunting bandits and muarders.

If you're playing Morrowind, however, there was literally up to 2 full sets of daedric armor in the game. Also, maybe you're like me and love hunting down all the rare artifacts. Unique equipment is all I use.

Really wish you couldn't craft gear until you had the recipe for it, either buy finding it, buying it or breaking it down. And really wish said gear, say above Elven or so, was very rare, even on enemies.

Maybe there wasn't enough memory on console. They could have just added it for PC but Skyrim was another lazy port...

So you don't have to carry hammers around with you everywhere. The armor and weapon degradation system wasn't fun at all. It wasn't anything that made the game more immersive, more fun or more interesting. It was just a pointless roadblock that was easily bypassed by carrying a bag of hammers with you. Although, it would have been nice if they put in the thing where the upgrades would degrade over time.

I agree. Either that, or you could pay an exorbitant amount to unlock the ability from a blacksmith. You could get a lecture from the smithy about that kind of gear.

This could allow you to not need to use perks to unlock the ability to craft gear, and give you a couple quests from various blacksmiths (granted they're little more then fetch quests, but still). The perks would still allow you to improve weapons beyond what you can do naturally. It doesn't make sense that you need spend perks to be able to expand your smithing abilities. You don't need to do that to cast Master level spells, so I don't see why you need to do it to learn how to forge Orcish daggers.

I would very much like to have seen NPCs who do commission work and in some cases that would be the only way you could get gear. It could have added a great dynamic to the game.

Some would use the term "dumbing down"

For me it is unrealistic that armor and weapons don't degrade in combat. I regret that was removed from the game. But I guess Bethesda felt that it didn't really add much and was tedious. I disagree.

I guess I am in minority then. I really liked the concept of being able to break enemies armor as well as their shields during combat. On the other hand, the degradation rate was not right, especially for both meele and ranged weapons. The people above made some great points about improving that system.

A while ago there was a topic where someone made an excellent point: how about making indestructible items more rare? They could be either artifacts and/or enchanted items. I think this could please both sides of the community. You could still obtain an unbreakable gear, if you want to, and keep the possibility of breaking enemies' stuff during fight.

I agree. Carrying repair hammers was burdensome for such a mundane skill such as 'Armorer'. In Oblivion, if you werent skilled in the craft, but happened to wear enchanted gear, you could easily be stuck with damaged gear mid-way through a long dungeon or oblivion gate crawl. If you have a quality weapon would it really be destroyed all the time so quickly? I think Armorer is well replaced by smithing. Just pretend your character is fixing a few nicks and there you go

I think they should have had armor degredaion in skyrim, maybe not make armor break so fast. They could have easily just taken out repair hsmmers and only allowed you to repair armor at a blacksmith table the same way they did with blacksmithing. Problem solved and that way you dont have to craft many many items you'll never use.

Thats the issue: why even bother with such a worthless boring skill if its going to be every so often you have to repair stuff. Something that you may have to repair every few days can be left just to the imagination

This

Repair is too similar to charging enchanted weapons and staves. They would be duplicating a game mechanic if repair and enchanting were both in.

Skyrim duplicates mechanics fairly often.

Does removing features "add" to gameplay? Does it "add" to gameplay to have all these blacksmiths in the game who cannot improve gear nor sell improved gear?
Does a knife dull with use? Does a hammer head eventually loosen on it's handle over time? Yes, yes and yes. You most certainly do sharpen a sword forever. You sharpen it until the blade is beyond repair or until you die... then your successor sharpens it. If this is how tools/weapons work in the real world, why not apply the same logic to an immersive video game???

Its a game, fun is the primary focus not realism. Thats where gameplay mechanics that put you in a position where after every combat you need to stop and repair just to remain effective falls down. Its simply not fun to play the game in a "stop-start" fashion every few minutes as it detracts from the immersion and flow of the gameplay. When a mechanic doesnt work, or is badly implemented its either reworked or removed. Smithing was reworked and the gameplay flow was improved by doing so, thus while it did not "add" anything to remove it, removing it got rid of a huge detraction meaning that it had the intended effect of improving gameplay. Which is what we all want at the end of the day.

Now you can argue semantics and postulate scenario's all day long, but it wont change the fact that degredation is gone and wont be coming back in Skyrim without a mod. And I for one think that removing degredation was a welcome change to the gameplay flow that encourages more play rather than discourage it, for fear of losing gear.

Yes!!! Do not mess with my next Fallout experience!