The official Bethesda forums have conducted a community question and answer session with the developers of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, confirming and clarifying several more features in the next addition to the hugely popular RPG franchise, which is due to land on all three major platforms this November.

Three of the Bethesda Game Studios design crew currently working on Skyrim (including Director Todd Howard, who we also spoke to recently) have chimed in to respond to fan questions, revealing new, tantalising factoids that will be of interest to those who have played previous Elder Scrolls or Fallout games.

In regards to equipment in the game, curiass (breast plate) and greaves (leg armour) have been consolidated into one piece "We get much better visual results combining those pieces, and it renders a lot faster too, so we can put more people on screen, so that was an easy tradeoff for us. We can also make a lot more armors now, so the number and variation types are more than we’ve ever had." and the light and heavy armour categories from Oblivion return, shunning Morrowind's medium armor class "it’s a design choice to focus on two armor types and making sure those feel different and the player appreciates them. We try to make your character move and feel different between light and heavy and having a 3rd one in the middle just muddies it up in how it plays, as well as visually".

The teleporting Mark and Recall spells and the Rising Force levitation are excluded again due to logistic issues with level design: "We were really limited in Morrowind because the player could recall or levitate out of many situations and break them. There was a lot of good gameplay and level design work that we just couldn’t do and now we can. Back then it seemed like many good ideas we had were shot down when another designer would say “oh yeah, I just levitate or recall away.” So we got rid of them".

Enchantments will function similarly to Oblivion, using soul gems used to refill a weapon's charges, however creating magic items has been tweaked a little "You now learn enchanting effects by “breaking down” a magic item you find, as opposed to them coming from spells you know. This allows us to separate enchanting from the other magical skills better".

Most importantly, on the topic of the PC version Todd confirms that the PC user-interface will include more advanced options than it's console counterparts and avoid the giant fonts that Oblivion suffered from "As far as UI, it visually looks the same across the platforms, but the controls are entirely different. There’s also a lot of “power user” stuff we do with the keyboard from how favorites work, to quick saves, and more that is similar to what we’ve done before in that area. We’re packing a lot of info on the screen and the whole interface is much less ‘look at giant fonts!’ than, say, Oblivion. The PC version also gets higher res textures, larger render modes, and a bunch of other effects you can scale up if your machine is a beast."

Lots of good news for Elder Scrolls fans. Check out the full Q&A for a few more tidbits.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is due on November 11 2011 for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.