The Ultimate TES game, What would you like to see Bethesda do? Options

[Vital]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this but it's not directly related to Skyrim, Oblivion or any of the older games and is a general discussion about an RPG series (The Elder Scrolls) so it seemed the best fit

Just to clarify: This is not a "Which TES game is the best" thread. It is a thread to discuss the various features seen in any of the TES games, whether you liked them or not, how they could've been done better, why they should've left them out, what they should've had instead/as well, etc etc...

Ultimately it is a discussion about what would be the ideal Elder Scrolls Game in your opinion and how Bethesda could combine all the failures and successes of the previous games in order to create this. If you're already happy with one game, how could it be made better? (It can't be perfect )

Feel free to talk about different mods and games other than TES and how these could be implemented into the game as well.


To start:

I personally would love to see a combination of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim (these being the only TES games I've played in depth) put into one game. The alien environment, number of factions, lack of hand-holding and so on from Morrowind, combined with the brilliant questlines and general feel (I can't explain this one but it just.... is) of Oblivion and the better combat, crafting and mechanical superiority of Skyrim.

This is just a brief description of some of the things I would like to see. I could write a 30 page essay on this and if this thread gets response I will put more stuff up. Anyway, what are you guy's thoughts?

[Winter Wolf]

It has been years since I considered ES a role play game. Can I play a pirate and raid ships off the coast of Anvil? Or perhaps a guard that uses corruption to work my way up the Imperial ladder? Or join the fishing guild the works off the northern coast of Skyrim? Or join the Talon Merc or Enclave?

Of course not. These things are beyond the scope of a current Beth game. Instead we must approach the games as nothing more than a really fun exploring game that allows use to open up inventories and collect cool items and store them back at home, slowing raising our character level and (hopefully) becoming more powerful. These days that is all we can really hope for in Beth games.

It is the character design at the start of each ES game that is the most worrying trend of all. Beast race, Human, Mer, there is no difference now, just like Caucasian, African-American, Asia, etc mean nothing in the Fallout series. That is something I am really worried about. Skyrim has set a very bad trend.

And remember that Dungeon and Dragons never allowed us to run around in Heavy Armor as a mage and do the crazy things that ES allows. The do-everything-you-want attitude that Todd preaches is in fact the ruin of the game. The whole rule book for role play has been thrown out the window in this new era of fantasy games.

Perhaps it is mass market appeal as gpstr suggests.

[gpstr]

It is the character design at the start of each ES game that is the most worrying trend of all. Beast race, Human, Mer, there is no difference now...

That, along with the elimination of attributes, is the biggest reason that I decided long ago that I simply was not going to give Beth any of my money in exchange for that product. They deliberately designed Skyrim so that the only differences between starting characters were purely cosmetic, and that makes the sort of roleplaying I do flatly impossible. I have exactly zero interest in deciding what my character is going to become, then metagaming all the appropriate box ticks when the perk fairy comes so that my character ends up being that thing. That's sterile and phony and it's exactly the opposite of the way I play. I want to create a character who ALREADY possesses specific qualities, then just take him or her out into the world and see what happens, and Beth completely destroyed the ability to do that, and did it explicitly - as stated repeatedly by Todd and Pete - so that it would be impossible for players to make "bad" characters. Which just demonstrates, all by itself, how little they AND their intended customers know about roleplaying. Roleplayers know that there's no such thing as a "bad" character.

And remember that Dungeon and Dragons never allowed us to run around in Heavy Armor as a mage and do the crazy things that ES allows. The do-everything-you-want attitude that Todd preaches is in fact the ruin of the game. The whole rule book for role play has been thrown out the window in this new era of fantasy games.

Well... I have to say that I couldn't care less what D&D allows or doesn't allow, but aside from that, yes, mostly. It's not just "do-everything-you-want" since "do-everything-you-want" is actually a good quality in an RPG. The ever-growing problem with TES games is "do-everything-you-want-with-no-difficulties-and-no-consequences." That's the problem, since it makes choices ultimately meaningless. All it comes down to is whether you want gray skin or pink skin or yellow skin or fur, or whether you want round ears or pointed ears, or whether you want to be tall or short. Beyond that, the choices are utterly meaningless, since the character is just going to be whatever results from the boxes you tick when the perk fairy visits.

Perhaps it is mass market appeal as gpstr suggests.

I'm 100% certain it is. Skyrim was deliberately designed to provide an expressway to Uber City for the benefit of all those players who aren't interested in taking the scenic route and just seeing where they might end up. That's the trend the games have followed since Daggerfall, and that trend isn't going to stop now.

-------

And to drag this back on topic:

So - my ultimate TES game?

That'd be a spin-off title, so it could be made by a relatively small and unconstrained team of creative talents without the necessary restrictions of having to turn a profit on a triple-A title.

It'd be a fully 3d game world.

It'd have a fairly wide range of attributes that would depend on a number of starting options - race, gender and age, at least. It would have an even wider range of skills, which would also be affected by starting options, and could be further customized by the player at character creation.

The upshot of all of that would be that the player could create virtually any starting character, but within the constraints of the choices made, so that, for instance, the Orc most inclined to be a mage still would be at a "disadvantage" to the Altmer most inclined to be a mage, while the Altmer most inclined to be a warrior would still be at a "disadvantage" to the Orc most inclined to be a warrior. And those inclinations would carry throughout the game, so not only would different races, genders, ages, whatever be at an advantage or disadvantage starting out, but would have higher or lower maximums for those attributes or skills. No Altmer, no matter who it is, should EVER be as strong as the strongest Orc. Period.

Then it would provide an open and unscaled world with reasonable hints on where it was safe to go and where low level characters are sure to die and just let the characters loose in that world, to sort things out for themselves. It would have a wide array of factions and long and involved faction quest lines (for those so inclined), and with meaningful and significant relationships between the various factions and it would have scads of side quests. It would likely not have a main quest at all.

And there's undoubtedly a lot more, but that's the gist of it.

And Beth is NOT going to make that game, or anything even vaguely resembling it. But I predict that somebody else will.

This post has been edited by gpstr: Apr 5 2015, 09:13 PM

[Winter Wolf]

Well... I have to say that I couldn't care less what D&D allows or doesn't allow

Why is that? All games that aim to be fantasy role-play had their origin in table top RPG's. Most of the head of the game designing departments are in there mid to late 40's and all would have grown up in that Tolkien and D&D world. We would have none of the ideas like race, attributes, leveling or character class without it, and it it is crazy for Beth to throw game role-play out of the window just because it is a single player game where they want you to do everything.

I am reading 'Magician' at the moment, a book that came out in 1982 and I am staggered at the amount of ideas tha Elder Scrolls stole from it. The game world we see today is built on the past, whether we like it or not.

I do agree with the mass market problem. I would love to play characters that are built around a character class and are forced to have multiple characters to experience the whole game element. And they would have unique quests with real meaning, not just the jack-of-all trades experience that gaming is today.

This post has been edited by Winter Wolf: Apr 6 2015, 01:02 AM