The Future, I had to do it. Options

[Channler]

So I have an invariable amount of time a day to sit down and reflect. And today I sat down at my computer and decided to type in a few letters that haven't graced my computer in a long 2 or 3 years. Morrowind.com

We all know this just leads to the TES main site, but it reminded me, before the release/announcement of Oblivion, the fervor that which I checked those forums every day, and the absolute excitement I received when the Daedric runes came up when I visited the site.

Well I don't know why, but I feel a little bit of that excitement again. I almost feel like I'm about to jump into the goon rush that is the elder scrolls forums and jump into one of those "TESV" threads. Interesting stuff guessing the future.

Anyways so I think I'll be the first to open up with the grossly general question..

What do you hope for, for TESV?

[mplantinga]

I am concerned about TESV. With the looming possibility of an Elder Scrolls online, I worry that the single-player game will continue to head toward its seemingly inevitable extinction. As cliche as the player-hero scenario is, I've not yet managed to feel drawn into the MMORPG scene; it seems to expensive and the player-character too insignificant.

Online-rants aside, I do have some thoughts as to what I would like to see in TES-V:

1. Story.

A good game depends on a good story. This is not easy. I certainly won't say that Morrowind had the best game story ever, but IMO it was better than Oblivion. (In Oblivion's defense, the Dark Brotherhood quests were somewhat more imaginative than the Bethesda average). The story should be exciting to discover, and preferably, offer choices to the character that have permanent effects on the world. Turning down a quest or choosing option A over option B should have consequences, perhaps eliminating possible future quests, changing the direction of the main plot, etc. A good quest has multiple solutions with different consequences. Again, the Dark Brotherhood quests did probably the best job of this, allowing both brute force approaches and stealthy approaches (which usually gave the better reward).

2. Replayability

For a game to rank among my favorite games, it has to be a game that I want to play over and over, creating new characters just to have the experience of doing it all again. Morrowind had the advantage of some mutually-exclusive storylines that forced you to make new characters to experience all of them. Oblivion seemed to have ignored this in favor of "be anyone, do anything." Which, by the way, is not the best choice ever. It isn't reasonable for the wimpy (but powerful) mage to join the fighter's guild. He can't even swing a sword or use armor, and all of a sudden he's the head of the fighter's guild? That seems rather ridiculous to me. Better to put significant restrictions (ie skills or attributes) to ensure that the characters skills match the guild in question.

3. Unique player characters

This is something that both Morrowind and Oblivion failed at miserably. It didn't really matter what race or birthsign you picked; by level 20 you could master whatever you chose and a Breton Mage could beat an Orc in an axe fight. Basically, this meant that race/sign (and even class) could be chosen randomly, with no permanent consequences. In defense of Bethesda, it is likely reasonable that, with enough effort, and wimpy mage could become a decent swordfighter, but really, if you wanted to be a swordfighter, you should have been a Warrior, not a mage. This is one of the reasons I enjoyed Galsiah's character development mod, because the choices you made during character generation actually mattered.

4. Intelligent leveling

IMO the leveling system in Morrowind was rather dumb, and I was annoyed when they kept it in Oblivion. With the obvious interest in GCD, madd leveler, etc, I thought it was obvious that the leveling system was broken; it seems I was right, because there are a plethora of comparable mods for Oblivion. Perhaps Bethesda will learn from this and get it right with TESV. I won't hold my breath, though.

In addition to fixing the way the player character levels, something must also be done about enemy levels. In Morrowind, once you reached level 20 (approximately), you became invincible, and nothing could really challenge you. In Oblivion, everything levels with you, which means there is no point in leveling. Both of these approaches failed to deliver consistent, challenging, and rewarding gameplay. There has to be some happy medium whereby enemies remain a challenge, but there is some benefit to leveling. I don't know how to do that, but I don't make games. It's their job to figure that out.


Final thoughts (for this post, anyway)

Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed playing both Morrowind and Oblivion. But the number of hours I've spent playing Oblivion pales in comparison with how much time I've spent with Morrowind, and that's not just because I've had Morrowind longer. I really believe that Morrowind was a superior game to Oblivion, and I'm worried that TESV will continue the trend and be worse again. I don't really care about graphics or voice acting, I just want a game that's fun to play, where the game mechanics don't annoy you and where you might actually consider playing the unmodded game more than once (I personally can't play Oblivion without mods; Morrowind I might again sometime). The things I discussed above are the things I most want to see improved in TESV. I really hope that they are.