Skills & Perks

Ah, the glorious skill systems of The Elder Scrolls - They change with every game, you know. Yet, they always seem to manage to keep the feeling of freedom around, like a fresh breath of air. In Morrowind, there were 28 skills. In Oblivion, 21. In Skyrim, we will see 18 skills.

There are some skills from the previous games, lets take the example: Oblivion, that have been removed. You won't be getting to upgrading your hand-to-hand abilities, for that has been cut off <-- That doesn't mean that you can't fight hand to hand, but there are no skill for it.

Mysticism has also been cut, but you will still be enjoying spells form this school! They have merely been transferred over into other magic schools.

Then we have Acrobatics and Athletics, which were axed for obvious reasons. Don't quite get? Feel no shame, neither did the other retar.... Guys. The developers thought that there wasn't much choice in athletics and acrobatics. You know, who makes a character who doesn't run or jump? So now we have a fixed jumping height and running speed, along with the ability to sprint.

This time around, you won't pick a Specialization or any Major, as well as Minor skills. Every skill well make you progress towards the next level, of which there are 50 by the way.

If any of you have played Fallout 3, or New Vegas, you'll instantly recognize the word: Perk. In Fallout, you got to pick a new perk, everytime you levelled up, and Skyrim will be no different. Skyrim will have 280 perks to choose from and given that there are 50 levels to progress through, we're going to be missing out on 230 perks per character we make.

The perk/skill system is as following: When you level, you pick a perk. If you want to upgrade, say your fire magic, then you pick Magic --> Destruction School --> Fire Magic.


In the fricken huge embedded picture, I show a map over the 15 confirmed skills (meaning that we're missing 3) as well as the way they branch out and known perks (which means perks that I know.) Keep in mind that it isn't completely finalized, since we don't know any more, as of yet.

*EDIT
I missed the magic school: Illusion.
I added Illusion

As a final detail, I'd like to mention that the skill / perk menu isn't a boring scroll-like scrren menu anymore, but you actually look to the heavens and then the star constellations are the skill trees. When you pick a perk or level up a skill, the corresponding star will appear brighter in-game. Boner!!

*Tip
You can zoom out by holding CTRL and either scrolling backwards, or pressing "-"