User blog comment:Psychopski/Mystic Knight: Potentially awesome class, but what's with the shield not being held in the off hand??/@comment-1202590-20130605051735

I think this is because capcom ran into issues with shield animations, specifically sheathing/drawing as one would the main weapon. So they decided to resolve this shield swapping issue both ways in different situations; for the fighter and assassin, an equipped shield is always out, for the mystic knight, the shield is always sheathed(except when blocking.) I'm not so bothered by clipping, as Oblivion made me accustomed to it. I can understand a programming shortcoming as such was described here on release, as the devs would have to take a few shortcomings to make the release date, but not why it wasn't patched out later, and instead we got day-one DLC and disc-locked content.