GameSpot: One of the most uniquely enjoyable (and some critics would suggest, unbalanced) aspects of Morrowind was its open-ended character creation and advancement system. Is a similar system planned for the new game?

Todd Howard: Yes, and I would agree that parts are unbalanced and that's something we hope to do much better this time. We really like the skill-based system, as it rewards you for role-playing your character class. Now, the number of skills and what they do has been changed again, and you have a huge variety of choices you can make, but hopefully you'll see pretty quickly in the game that we have a better balance between combat, magic, and stealth skills. We've really overhauled each area so that people could play the whole game using one set of those skills. So combat gets much deeper with different attacks you learn as your skills increase. Magic is similar to our past games in how it's used, but now it's more effective to use as your only means of playing the game. And with stealth, we've totally changed how we handle this, thanks to Emil Pagliarulo who joined us from the Thief series of stealth games.​