@Gez: My reasoning is this:

Morrowind felt larger than Oblivion because of the inability to go in straight lines. A lot of Skyrims landscape is mountains and if you could use levitate, the world would instantly feel smaller.

That being said, I agree with your points about the level design in Oblivion, but that has been confirmed to have been improved with dedicated level designers. I'm also thinking that since it exists fewer 'pure' classes, only warrior, mage and thief/assassin, it would be easier to do leveldesigns to accommodate the advantages of each of the three classes. I'm thinking in the lines of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which did just this.

That example kinda defeats your argument since Morrowind had levitation and teleportation.

The inability to go in straight line in Morrowind was because, well, "a lot of Morrowind's landscape is mountains".

Gah, even early starting Morrowind i was able to climb or fly-over mountains and Morrowind felt a WAY bigger than Oblivion.

"Inability" was probably the wrong word, but ask yourself this: "How often did I use teleportation and levitation in Morrowind?"
My guess is that it happened from time to time, but not all the time. I.e. you didn't walk in straight lines nor shortcut areas most of the time. Therefore Morrowind felt bigger and therefore it's no big loss if you remove them, since they only subtracted from your experience.

(There's probably lots of other things that made Morrowind feel bigger too though.)

How exciting is the dangerous trek through the dark forest, to the castle at the top of the mountain, if you're getting there with a 30 s levitation and then running through the castle, grabbing the item you're searching for and recalling to safety before the 20 enemies you've been outrunning catches up with you?

I never thought of levitation and teleportation as subtracting from the experience. If anything, the limitations of fast-travel in Morrowind made teleportation feel like a useful ability. Teleportation had enough limitations of its own that I never thought of it as a game-breaking feature. I used it enough to appreciate it, but never felt that it was breaking the game or making it too easy. The same applies to levitation. It was nice to have, but I never felt like it was a way to bypass content--especially since much of the game content takes place in interiors, where low ceilings are going to prevent levition from being an exploit to bypass all the enemies in a dungeon. And outdoors, I'm pretty sure Cliff Racers aren't going to be thwarted by levitation. I liked those spells, because they were another nice non-combat way to diffferentiate mages from non-mages.


You're describing a scenario I've never experienced in Morrowind, despite the presence of teleportation and levitation. With duration limits, spell costs, and the inability to set a bunch of marks everywhere, those spells didn't seem ripe for exploitation.

By the way, Oblivion had even more teleportation than Morrowind. Because of the way fast travel worked, I found it much easier to move around the game world without a teleportation spell than it was to move around in Morrowind with teleportation spells. In Morrowind, I had to think about where I wanted my mark to be, as well as consider where the fast-travel nodes were. In Oblivion, everytime I needed to go to somewhere new, I could just fast-travel to the nearest explored location, and take a short walk to my destination. If Oblivion had a proper fast-travel system, teleport spells would be an enhancement--not a game-breaker.

A lot more often than I did in Oblivion. But no more than I would have, if given the choice.


I'm not sure how arguing that a feature wasn't game-breaking in Morrowind proves that it would have been in Oblivion and would be in Skyrim.

I don't know.

Let's say combat is removed. You can no longer attack enemies, though they can still attack you. You can now only play like a stealthy sneak. The ability to just kill the guards and sentries was making it too hard for the level designers to come up with anything challenging, so they got rid of it.

How exciting is the dangerous trek through the dark forest, to the castle at the top of the mountain, if you're getting there by swinging swords and flinging spells at the enemies until they die one by one and then running through the castle, grabbing the item you're searching for and then casually strolling back to the exit amidst the corpses of your slain opponents?

First of all:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3567 ... Skyrim.php

Second:
It's hard to argue for the removal of a feature, when I actually want it and did think Oblivions fast-tavel system was sub-par - as I originally wrote, I can understand the design decision but I can live without it, if it makes for a better game. I haven't played Skyrim, so I don't know. It didn't make Oblivion a better game anyway.


Yes, you would probably have used levitation a lot more in Morrowind... But teleportation was used all the time in Oblivion, which Klasodeth also says in his post, thanks to the boring fast travel system. Constant teleportation == worse than going in a straight line => even smaller apparent world. Mark/recall/interventions and fast-travel have almost the exact same problems though.


An example would be:
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Scar ... in_Mzuleft
Which was very hard for lowlevel characters. But if you had levitation you could just fly over the mountains to get there and then use a cheap invisibilty ring to bypass the enemies. But since it only has so many charges, you'll probably find yourself trapped when invisibility has run out. So you have to make sure to run fast, bypassing all enemies and when you're done get the hell out of there with a divine intervention.

Not too bad actually, if I'm given the opportunity to do sneak kills when necessary and are able to find hidden alternative routes and even bypass enemies as I go along.


Let's say walking was removed and you could only levitate, because the ability to walk might cause you to fall to your death and it was making it too challenging for the level designers to design areas where this couldn't happen, so they got rid of it.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. It was fun!

Quite often, 99% of the time I got around with fortify jump and levitate to stop fall damage.

Indeed, me to, though I used slowfall 1 not to take damage. Had my 5 rings on 5 hotkeys, 2x constant jump, 2x superjump, 1xslowfall. Makes you get around in the world extremely quickly... Would argue that most people didn't do this though...