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?

[gpstr]

It's a fact of life, and thus of a roleplayed life, that not only do people have inclinations and aptitudes, but time and energy are finite things. Not only are people inclined to be more skilled at one or another thing, but they only have a limited amount of time and energy to invest into doing things, and which things they choose to do will have a great impact on how skilled they are at one or another thing.

It's not necessary that a roleplayed character be constrained by a set of little boxes first outlined by Gary Gygax 40 years ago. It's only necessary that they be constrained by inclination, by aptitude and by the finite nature of time and energy.

The first - inclination - is, or at least should be, entirely within the hands of the player. If the player decides that the character is inclined to do this and not do that, then so be it. It's certainly possible for a player to choose an inclination that makes no sense within the context of the character, but in my opinion, that's just really the way it goes. I don't believe that that choice should ever be denied the player, and I really have no idea why anyone would wish to deny players that choice. It's not necessary to playing balanced characters, since balance is achieved through other means anyway, and it's certainly not rewarding for a player to be told that s/he is not allowed to choose this and must choose that instead, so I see nothing to be gained by even attempting to constrain it.

The second - aptitude - should be within the hands of the player, just so that players can play the characters they want to play, but it has to be constrained in some manner, just because there are natural limits to aptitude. And yeah - I think that being able to distribute points between a range of "attributes" is the best way to do that. If it's a game with different races and genders, as most are (and as TES is), then I think there should be different ranges for different attributes between the different races and genders (so that, for instance, the strongest Altmer still won't be as strong as the strongest Orc), but the actual distribution of the starting points should be entirely within the hands of the player. Balance is maintained by having a pool of available points to work out of, so that any notable increase in one attribute can only be at the expense of another. And as SubRosa notes, this is the place where Skyrim fails utterly, and that failure is in fact the biggest reason that I simply refused to give Beth my money for that product. Whether simply in order to save themselves the time and expense of devising and coding a workable attribute system or to save casual gamers the risk of picking a "bad" set of aptitudes, or, as I suspect, a little of both, they simply eliminated that whole aspect of character creation entirely.

The rest - necessarily finite time and energy - is actually the easy part to do, though it's potentially difficult to do it right. All it requires is some sort of skill/experience/level/etc. progression, and all that really does is scale the game time to the time the player will spend playing it. The amount of time the character will be able to invest in pursuing one or another skill is already constrained by the fact that the player can only spend a finite amount of time playing. So it's really just a matter of scaling the two well and matching them up with a workable growth curve. That's something that Daggerfall and Morrowind both did pretty well. Vanilla Oblivion is only so-so - the growth curve is a bit too steep to make for a good, lasting game - the time from being a beginner to being uber is too short. But with a bit of careful major-choosing, it's possible to get the curve down to a more comfortable pace. I have no idea how it is in Skyrim.

So...as far as this specific aspect of all that goes, that's my ultimate RPG - wholly unconstrained ability for the player to pursue whatever inclinations s/he might prefer, but with the actual results of that pursuit being reasonably constrained by the aptitudes of the character and the time and energy spent pursuing them. I see absolutely nothing to be gained by creating some predefined set of arbitrary constraints when all the constraint that's necessary to play believably limited characters can be handled otherwise.

As but one example - my Breton spellsword Lydia. Lydia wanted to be a swordfighter. That was her inclination. Nobody told her she couldn't be - there was no "class" designation that prevented her from doing it - that's what she wanted to be, so that's what she pursued. And it was a hellacious struggle. She had terrible strength and terrible blade skill and could barely manage to survive at all. Grudgingly, she had to shift to using magic a fair bit early on, which was easy enough for her, since she had a racial predisposition to it. And again, there was no arbitrary constraint that said she couldn't do that either. All there was was the fact that she knew that the time and energy she spent casting spells was time and energy she didn't spend swinging a sword, and thus was just that much further from her goal of being able to swing a sword. So she tried to limit her magic use, just so that she could keep gaining skill with a sword, so that she could do what she wanted to do in the first place. And so she kept plugging away at gaining skill with a sword and filling in the gaps with magic, and finally reached the point at which she could make it through the world without having to use magic at all, just relying on her sword skill. She was a great challenge to play, and ultimately a very rewarding character.

That's all the constraint that's necessary to create a believable and interesting character, and it existed not because of some predefined box into which she was stuck at the beginning of the game, but simply because she started out with a particular set of aptitudes and a particular set of inclinations, and invested a particular amount of time and energy into pursuing those inclinations. That's all that's necessary and all I want (as far as that particular aspect of a game goes).

This post has been edited by gpstr: Apr 6 2015, 09:19 PM