So, Skyrim's out 11/11/11

[Treesh]

The spell creation aspect is gone with TES 5: Skyrim (I think it was gone in TES:4 Oblivion, tbh).

Well, technically spell creation and enchanting was still in the game, but you had to be in the mage's guild and do enough quests for them to get a high enough rank for them to trust you to not blow yourself up. It bothered me that if I wanted to enchant something, even my straight up fighters had to go help out the mages. I couldn't do that since there used to be animosity between those two factions.

In Skyrim, the nicest thing in my opinion, is that every skill proficiency gained goes towards completion of your level/experience. The higher the skill, the more you gain towards your experience by leveling the skill. So, not only did they remove the limitation of having to choose 6 skills you want your archetype to be based around (or 6 skills that would directly effect your overall level/experience) - they made it so that the higher the skill is, the quicker you level.

This is a fantastic change because if you're playing your archetype the way you envisioned the character being played, than he/she should have high skills in things you do regularly. So, if you're a sneaky assassin - you should be sneaking around a lot, and in turn have a higher Sneak skill. Then, when you gain more proficiency in Sneaking, your character becomes stronger than they would if you had gained proficiency with something that doesn't really fit your archetype such as 'Repair'.

What worries me about this change though is in Morrowind, I would end up leveling non-combat skills fiddling around and then I'd end up too high of a level compared to my fighting skills and get my butt handed to me repeatedly. For instance, if I made the mistake of having Sneak as a major skill, I'd fly up levels but it was hard going if I had to actually fight anything because my short blade skill was too low compared to my level. You basically had to make sure that the things that will naturally go up quickly weren't part of your major skills. I can see the same thing happening with Skyrim, but I can't really control it like I could in Morrowind. We'll see though. I just end up doing too much non-combat stuff in the TES games. =)