I thoroughly enjoyed Morrowind and Oblivion, appreciating some changes they made in transition and not appreciating others. I hated that they took away some of the variety of Morrowind. What was wrong with spears, short blades and medium armor? Half the fun of these kinds of games is having to deal with short-comings regardless of what set of skills you pick and having very focused skills like this to pick from means that there are more short-comings to deal with. What I was in favor of is the sort of thing that Oblivion did with the Security skill. The security skill itself is useless because you can open anything by pure gamer skill. Skills like these can be done away with for Skyrim and can just be a passive skill that every character gets. The more you pick locks, the looser the mechanics are in terms of timing... but it shouldn't be a separate skill. You as the player learn how to pick locks, you don't have a number dictating what you can and cannot open. Things like this doesn't mean that the game is straying further and further away from this thing we call an RPG, I just hate that people think RPGs have to involve number-crunching in just about everything that you do. We're playing a video game, not Dungeons and Dragons tabletop. Gamer skill should account for something.
I'm not a fan of the Sneak skill either. It should be purely about your ability to hide in the shadows and what you are wearing(in terms of color and in terms of weight). If you're wearing a long sword, you shouldn't be able to stay silent while crouched because it would clank and drag along the floor. Same thing with armor and clankiness while you're moving around. I want a little more common sense in these games. In the older games you could wear a full suit of armor, have a massive axe on your back and be barefoot and sneak around... it was retarded but the game mechanics allowed you to do that effectively. Taking a more common sense approach would totally eliminate this. You shouldn't ever be able to wear armor with a massive weapon and sneak around as effectively as someone wearing leather or cloth can with a dagger or a bow or something, thus to be an effective assassin-type character, you should pick up Marksmanship/Short Blades/Blades and Light Armor as you can't sneak effectively with armor and large weapons, unless you're willing to attempt an assassination unarmored and with a weapon you're not used to using which then wouldn't land you a one hit kill. They would have to rework how you equip armor/weapons and when you can change equipment to avoid exploiting the use of going without armor up until you're right behind the person and then just equipping all your stuff before attacking them however. If you had to watch your character go through a little animation that made noise when changing their armor when baddies are near(the same mechanic that denies you of resting when enemies are too close), then it would be impossible to change your equipment right as you get behind the enemy. Thus, the importance of skills like Short Blade and Light Armor go up. Other things should be introduced that raise the importance of each skill.
Mercantile and Speechcraft can be combined into one for that matter as the act of bargaining is all about communication, which is what Speechcraft is about. They didn't have two separate skills for herb picking and Alchemy so why should Mercantile and Speechcraft be separate? Acrobatics and Athletics can be passive, they don't need to be separate skills. Who walks? How often do you do platforming jumps throughout the game? This kind of contradicts my point above though on the issue of short-comings but not really. What makes a skill picking system good is having too many good skills to choose from, where you have to go without certain things. If they had just enough to fill the more common types of characters and gave you a real tough time coming up with a hybrid, then that's good enough. Athletics and Acrobatics are almost totally useless. Athletics can be a product of how much weight you're carrying and how much strength/agility/endurance you have. Boom, skill is gone. Acrobatics can be a product of how much weight you're carrying and how much agility you have. Boom, skill is gone.
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