People are crying 'oh woe is me, 18 skills!', but fail to see what the devs are truly doing with the system.
I'd like to use New Vegas as a partial example. In New Vegas, there were many perks. Some had to do with different weapons UNDER THE SAME SKILL. I took commando. I took shotgun surgeon. I took all sorts of things related to using rifles or rifle-like weapons. My brother took all the perks related to one handed weapons. Eventually, I got to the point where if I tried to use a pistol, I would get totally creamed in combat. But why was this? My small arms skill was 100! Ah, but that's where the perks came in. I was so specialized that I pretty much HAD to use what I was specialized in if I wanted to be competitive. Sure, I could attempt to use one handed firearms, and could do so with some measure of effectiveness, but I was still going to have a very difficult time with some of the stronger enemies in the game.
That is what they are doing with the skills in skyrim. So what if they have only 2 weapon skills (one handed and two handed)? By having a multitude of perks that support and empower certain weapons (such as the mention "mace attacks ignore armor" perk in the magazine), they effectively create a skill for each of those weapons.
As for the loss of Mycsticism, that is okay as well ("GASP, Orzorn, the magic using ranter, is okay with the loss of a magic skill?!"). Why? Because even though we lost the skill, the spell effects remain and live on in the other skills. Hell, it wouldn't matter if we last all but one magic skill, as long as the spell effects lived on through that skill (of course, that would be madly excessive).
Another issue is one of depth. It seems many of the removed skills were ones that were "passive". By that, I mean the player did not actively have to attempt to use them. An example would be athletics. Its kind of ridiculous that running, something that every adventurer worth his or her salt, would be a skill. It is obvious that it would raise regardless. Same goes of any of the armor skills. "But if they remove armor skills, anyone can wear anything!" I say so what? Can we not already do that in real life? Besides, a thief would not want to wear heavy armors, as heavy armors would make noises and, well, be heavy (limiting their carrying capacity). A mage would not use any armor at all, because of the restrictions to their spell casting (unless they got perks for it, of course). A warrior would naturally use what gives them the most armor, so heavy would be an obvious choice, regardless of armor skills being in the game or not. In addition, perks skill provide for specialization. A warrior may end up with multiple heavy armor related perks, so attempting to use light (or no) armor would be almost suicidal, if not just uncomfortable.
18 skills is okay, so long as each skill feels unique, had depth, and gives us several actions to use and play around with.
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