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Posted by: Vital Mar 27 2014, 09:25 AM

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?

Posted by: mirocu Mar 27 2014, 09:41 AM

Great thread idea! I´ve been thinking the same for a long time, actually

I pretty much agree on the combination of the last three games there, though I don´t have any comment on Skyrim since I haven´t played it. My favourite is Oblivion, I love and adore the environment and the music. The combat is good and I love that we can make our own spells however we want them basically.

Though... It would have been a good idea not to have the FG porter follow me around once I´m a part of the Guild. And it would have been an even better idea being able to delete spells in a game where you can make hundreds yourself, don´t you think, Beth?

I would also have liked if not every animal spotting me attacked me, at least after a certain level. What´s the point in fighting mudcrabs and rats when you´re at level 20 or higher?

All this, and a few things more, are what I can come up with regarding Oblivion. Other than that I´m struggling to come up with something else I would like to change. Maybe in a later post...

Posted by: Grits Mar 27 2014, 10:52 AM

I like what you said so far, Vital.

My ultimate game would cover all of Tamriel. It would include various customizable modes such as Needs where you must eat, drink, and sleep, Exposure where weather has an effect on your character, and Consequences where certain deeds or accomplishments prevent access to others. These elements could be configured or disabled through a menu system like the Mod Configuration Menu mod for Skyrim.

I must emphasize customizable modes since I would always pick leaving options open over having the game limit the player. So while I might decide that being caught murdering anyone will get my character kicked out of the Mages Guild or that earning certain daedric artifacts will prevent my character from using chapels (Consequences mode), I wouldn’t want to make those choices for all players or even for myself with a future character. I can’t anticipate all of the ways I’ll want to play, so I don’t expect game developers to manage it.

Posted by: mirocu Mar 27 2014, 11:02 AM

Good points there, Grits

Posted by: Vital Mar 27 2014, 11:33 AM

Good points indeed, Grits

I agree completely about customisable modes. This is something I am surprised is not in more games, particularly games like TES. It could include things like HUD display, needs, settings, weather exposure, other "hardcore" rules etc. That way they can please everyone from the young, "casual gamers" (a term I despise for a million reasons) to the more roleplay focused players, like most of the people on this site.

One small thing that I read is in Arena: You can only have one daedric/aedric artefact at a time. Whether this means you sell one, or leave it locked away in your house, for me this would be great. Unless I get rid of a daedric artefact, I cannot gain the quest for another. As soon as I get rid of it I can. Another thing that could be customisable.

Mirocu mentioned a big one, Spell creation. Why they abandoned this (and many of the pre-made spells) I have no idea. Why Beth? Just why??????

Posted by: mirocu Mar 27 2014, 11:47 AM

So much this!

While I do want freedom of choice, being able to serve just one deity at a time just makes more sense. If this is the case in Arena I definitely support it

Posted by: Vital Mar 27 2014, 12:02 PM

I agree entirely. As long as you are able to ditch the deity you serve (possibly with some consequence other than losing the artefact) and/or change to serve another I think this system makes lots of sense and works well.

Posted by: Grits Mar 27 2014, 12:04 PM

Some more thoughts after my first cup of coffee.

Racial bonuses and Birthsigns. I would like these to make a real difference to characters. I like to play against type, but that means there should be an actual type to start with. For example my orc mage should have a much tougher beginning than an Altmer mage as a result of their racial bonuses. However an orc born under one of the mage birthsigns might reasonably choose that path in life.

Daedric realms: yes please. I would like vampires, werewolves, and other daedric creatures to have a much harder time fitting in on Mundus. The realms of their corresponding princes should feel like a more natural home than Tamriel for daedric-focused characters. Which brings me to…

More factions. My Volkihar vampire should be randomly attacked by Boethiah cultists, for example. Regular merchants (not under Thieves Guild influence) should refuse to trade with my character if he’s wearing Thieves Guild armor. A Thane of some Skyrim hold should have to give up their title in order to earn similar status in another court, but allies of their Jarl might provide honorary status. I suppose this also ties in with Consequences. Gaining bonuses from altars should mean choosing a religion first.

Khajiit: Let’s see some more of the different forms. Let’s get to play some of them, too!

And finally (for now), ARGONIANS! Not only can they breathe underwater, they should be able to see underwater with perfect clarity as well. Their swimming animations should be crocodilian awesome, not the sad frog-like thrashing of the other races. I want to see submerged settlements with predictable current “roads” between them. Digitigrade feet, optional mid-game gender swapping, a special tail whip attack, and no mammary glands, please. Tamriel’s weirdest race has huge possibilities. I’d love to see Black Marsh as a completely alien world to an elf or human.

Posted by: ghastley Mar 27 2014, 12:58 PM

Having played a number of games with a LAN co-op mode where a small number (even just two or three) of players can play together, I'd like that option. Where it worked well, you had a team of players working together, instead of a single player and followers/minions, so it basically used the single-player mechanics, but permitted the supporting cast to be controlled by additional players. Instead of hiring Marcurio, for example, you'd meet another player in the Bee and Barb, and agree to go adventuring together as equals. One player hosts the game, and therefore gets the choice of location, and the game prevents PvP by making friendly hits ineffective.

That's what everyone was asking for, not the MMO we got.

Another thought is to have the "ultimate game" have borders. You can start in any province, with local game rule variations. No levitation in Cyrodiil, but it's OK in Morrowind. Everything in Skyrim is immune to frost. If you want a change of rules, restart in another province.

Posted by: McBadgere Mar 27 2014, 01:54 PM

I've wondered about something like what you have in Assassin's Creed 2, where you (Ezio) inherit an old Villa, which has a small town inside its walls...As you do...Anyways, one of the things you can do is upgrade it all and in return, you get money every 20 mins...Which then goes to help you upgrade more/buy more stuff...

It'd be like Hearthfire, where you could "Buy" the shops for your village and then you'd do quests for the traders...And the more quests you do, the more money you get etc...

Aaaand, if you created armour for the blacksmith, you'd get a bigger return from the shop when they were sold, than if you just left him to it with his lesser skill etc...Same with the alchemy shop etc...

This would mean that if you were inclined to not be an adventurer as such, of if you decided to retire after a while, you'd still be able to make money...

I'd love more armour customisation...Back to the Oblivion separate items...I hate the Skyrim all in ones...

Plus, I want all my spells back...And the ability to make spells...And to enchant any item with any spell I so wish...

And, most espescially, I want all my Ease Burden spells back...

Posted by: SubRosa Mar 27 2014, 06:06 PM

Like Grits, I would most like to see consequences for your actions return to the series. The only one Aedric/Daedric artifact that Vital pointed out sounds like an excellent idea.

I would like to extend that to only being able to be in one Guild at a time, as well as making joining a Guild something that takes both effort and aptitude. Back in Morrowind there were minimum skill values you had to possess to join and advance in Guilds, that would be a good start. I think the Guild quests ought be built in such a way that you need the appropriate skills to finish them as well. For example a Thieves Guild quest should have locks you need to pick to complete it, a Mages Guild quest should require certain spells, a Fighters Guild quest should have challenges that involve defeating opponents without using spells, and so on. If you can't hack it, then you have to leave and learn that spell, get your lockpicking skill up, and so on.

I would also like to see Guild rivalries return, at least making people from diametrically opposing Guilds such as the Fighters and Thieves Guilds dislike each other. It would probably cause too much chaos if the "official" guilds like Fighters and Mages attacked one another on sight. Though Skyrim does have members of the Assassins Guild attacking your character on sight... But Grit's suggestion of a vampire having Boeithah cultists attacking them sounds great. Or a priest of Akray having necromancers come after them.

That folds into having religions that you can choose. The thing there however is that Tamriel is presented as a polytheistic place, so a person following only one deity would seem odd to me. Following the Nine however sounds perfect though, and being able to invest most of your time with one of the Divines sounds good - not the total exclusion of the other eight - just a focus on one. Since the Daedra don't seem to play that well with one another, that might work as an only one Daedric Lord. Or perhaps only a certain number (like three if you are a 4th Age Dunmer believing in the Reclamations) of non-opposing Daedra. I also think you should be able to choose an agnostic or undecided yet religion, as well as plain old atheism (its all just some magic-using clerics faking it in order to gain power and wealth after all...)

Interacting with things like altars of your religion might give you a larger bonus than undecided people. Interacting with opposing religion's altars might cause damage or curses. Likewise with interacting with people belonging to the same or other religions. There might even be a few unique spells that can only be learned by members of the same religion, like an Arkay's Wrath spell that damages only undead.

Basically I would like to see truly unique opportunities and penalties open up in the game depending upon the choices you make for your character. So no two games are the same, and you cannot do everything with a single character. Unfortunately that latter is exactly what Bethesda wants.

Posted by: Vital Mar 28 2014, 12:23 PM

SR, you make some great points on the factions.

I tend to only join one or occasionally two factions in any game anyway. I think you should be able to join certain factions but not advance high into all of them. As a battlemage I can join both the mages guild and fighters guild, but at some point (early on) I will have to choose between them. Or, maybe beth gives us more factions/ sub-factions. For example a separate sector of the mages guild for battlemages? You would need a certain spread between combat and magic skills to qualify for this but it would greatly benefit characters of that playstyle.

Also you should be able to quit factions, depending on your rank this could leave you unable to join ever again. This might be a little problematic regarding factions questlines though. Also, quitting a faction such as the dark brotherhood or Imperial Legion (if this was a faction) would have great consquences.

That brings me to my next point. Faction questlines should be much longer and involve a real rise through the ranks. What you said about having the necessary skills for a faction and certain quests is a brilliant idea, SR. I feel like you should start off with the real low jobs; killing rats and smugglers for the FG, collecting alchemical ingredients and attending lessons for the MG, getting the simplest pick-pocket and petty thievery jobs for the thieves guild etc etc. Once you've risen high enough and levelled up your skills you can slowly start a more interesting questline. This questline shouldn't really just come out of the blue though, it could be hinted to somehow throughout your rise through the lower ranks.

There is so much more to discuss, I believe, but I get the feeling that from everything people have said so far a game with more consequences for your actions is pretty popular...

Posted by: Callidus Thorn Mar 29 2014, 07:36 PM

While I'd love to see factions improved, I'm not really sure I'd go with everything you suggest Subrosa.

Skill requirements for advancement are something I'd like to see returned, but I don't see any reason to restrict the player to one guild. Beyond the fighters guild going after the thieves guild in Morrowind I've not seen anything to suggest that the guilds are opposed to each other, and it only happened in Morrowind because of the Cammona Tong.

I could see the thieves having you run up against locked doors and stuff, but I can't agree with requiring certain spells for advancement in the mages guild. Spells of a certain rank is one thing, you can play a mage without using all the schools of magic. I wouldn't mind seeing the highest ranks locked out in this fashion though, so to be arch-mage you need to be a master of all the schools of magic.

And I don't realy see a particular reason why the fighters guild should require you to not use spells. Battlemages serve in the Legion, so it's not like they're inferior fighters, and if you can still use potions and enchanted equipment then it's not much of a restriction. Then again, if you had a sort of trial by combat thing for advancement, it would make sense. I'd actually like to see that.

But with regards to the opening post, mostly I'd like them to head back towards a more Morrowind style game, one with attributes and the chance of failing a spell or attack.

Posted by: Vital Mar 30 2014, 11:26 AM

Callidus,

I think there needs to be some restriction to guild membership. If you join an organisation like the DB or Legion then I think you would be completely bound to that one faction, the FG and MG may let you be a member of each but eventually you should have to choose.


I always imagined the legion battle-mages as a sort of heavy support. Not as far from the action as the archers but not right in the thick of the action like the infantry. In Skyrim only two legion battlemages are seen in the entire game (as far as I know) and they use destruction magic to fire at a dragon. The MG is responsible for all use of magic in Tamriel, whereas there are various legal fighter organisations/mercenary groups in Tamriel separate from the FG. A battlemage uses a lot of magic and so the MG would want some control, I'd think. As I said before, a sector in the MG specifically for battlemages would be quite good.


I agree that attributes and majors/minors should be brought back. But I think the system should be slightly altered so I don't have to select majors I will never use in order to balance my levelling. As for failing spells and attacks; spells yes, melee/ranged attacks no. I know its not realistic to pick up a sword or bow and suddenly hit the target every time, but its less realistic to swing right at something and see your sword connect without any effect, IMO.

Posted by: Callidus Thorn Mar 30 2014, 04:40 PM

I agree, there needs to be a restriction, but I don't think it needs to be on joining. The Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves Guild are both supposed to be clandestine organizations, so why should everyone automatically know you're a member? And since the duties of the Mages and Fighters Guilds don't overlap, it's not like they're competing, so they wouldn't have an issue with each other.

I think the restriction needs to be on how high you can advance in a guild, based off the character's, and player's, skills. The Fighters Guild could determine advancement through trial by combat. House rules of no magic or potions, and they provide the equipment for the fights. The Mages Guild could require you to cast various spells at various mastery levels to prove you're qualified, with the Arch-Mage needing to be a master off all the schools of magic. The Thieves Guild could have obstacle courses: traps to disarm, locks to pick or keys to steal, silent movement sections and the like, again without the use of magic/potions/enchantments, getting harder and harder as you progress through the ranks. And the Dark Brotherhood could dish out missions like in Oblivion, with a bonus for completing them in certain ways, and use the bonuses to determine if you qualify for advancement.

That way you need to be skilled to advance through the guilds, without relying on the blunt number crunching of Morrowind, and the blocks on advancement seem much more natural. Sure, with enough effort you might be able to become the master off all the guilds, but it's going to take a hell of a lot of effort to do so.



I don't see any reason why a fighter/mage type character shouldn't be able to join both the Fighters and Mages Guilds, since they clearly fall into both categories. And a seperate section for battlemages is a terrible idea in my opinion, just because it caters to one very specific type of character.



The problem with Morrowind's combat was mostly a lack of animation for misses. If you actually see the enemy dodge, or the blow slide off their armour, I don't see why missing in melee combat shouldn't make a comeback. As for balancing leveling and selection of majors, that's more of an issue with level scaling than one of attributes. And part of it goes to flaws in the gameworld design, like how in vanilla Oblivion everything pretty much stops at level 25, and beyond that enemies simply become damage sponges.

Posted by: Thomas Kaira Apr 1 2014, 05:04 PM

It's rather unfortunate, but the trend for the entire previous generation of RPGs has been about removing choice. Only, instead of the linear option where you can only do one thing and nothing else, instead you can just do everything from the word go. No need to specialize, no need to plan ahead, no need to exercise that brain. It's a bad trend, and I'd like to see the adult game market return to asking you to think about things.

So, what would I want to see in my ideal TES game? Well, a lot of things, but let's start on one of the most critical aspect of an RPG: the stats and abilities of your character.

1. A more complex stat system. Skyrim was over-simplified in my eyes, as it only had two stat systems. The primary attributes, which you increased by a flat 10 points every time you level up, and the skills, which improve as you use them. But the actual meat of the game was not in the stats, it was the perks you pick every time you leveled up. It was to the point where the stats of your skill didn't actually mean much because the perks far outclassed what you could do through practicing your skills alone. I'd like to see this reversed. However, perk points would be refundable, as they represent your character's skill style. If you want to change styles, you should be allowed to do so.

2. I'd also like to see the old style attributes returned, but handled differently:
>Instead of choosing three attributes to increase every time you level up, with the amounts determined by your skill usage, you'd get a flat 5 attribute points instead that you could allocate however you wanted.
>As you improve your attributes, you will gain traits, which are minor passive abilities based on the attribute. For example, as your strength improves, you would gain traits that reduce stamina drain from holding a drawn arrow, or allows you to swing two-handed weapons faster, or gives you some extra carry capacity.
>Attribute points would be hard-capped at 250, though, so you would only be able to max out about three attributes.
>These points are non-refundable, as they represent your character's base abilities.

3. The perks themselves would be less about improving your skills and more about augmenting them. Things like unlocking new attacks with weapons or being able to do something you weren't able to do before. Things like "deal 10% more damage with bows" would be moved to traits, while perks like "you can zoom in while drawing a bow" would remain perks. To help reinforce the point, each skill would have multiple paths you can take up the perk trees to represent different playstyles. Take for example archery.
> There would be two paths, the skirmisher's path and the ranger's path. Skirmisher style would emphasize quick shooting with little thought given towards where the arrow is actually going to land, so the perks would be along these lines:
a. Quick-draw: You can draw your bow 20% faster.
b. Fleet of foot: You can move faster while you are holding an arrow at knock.
c. Rapid-draw: Immediately drawing a new arrow after firing will draw your bow 50% faster.
d. Rapid-fire: Firing your arrow as soon as it is fully drawn will deal 20% more damage.
e. Skirmisher's Intuition: Firing an arrow as soon as it is fully drawn reduces aim spread by 50%.

>Then there's the ranger's path, which emphasizes taking your time and lining up your shots.
a. Eagle-eye: You can zoom in while your bow is drawn.
b. Focused eye: The longer you hold your aim, the more accurate your shot will be, to a maximum of 50% less spread.
c. Focused aim: The longer you hold your aim, the more damaging your shot will be, to a maximum of 50% greater damage.
d. Slowed pace: Zooming in will slow time.
e. Ranger's intuition: you can see the arc your arrow will fly.

Posted by: Alexander Apr 2 2014, 02:09 PM

Nice thread idea, and some great ideas here!


One thing I've always found TES games lacking in, is having a place to call home. I'll admit Skyrim did it better then the games before with the limited customization options and actually having a fast travel option there, but I'm always hoping Bethesda does it even better then they have so far.

I'd like to have a lot of customization options, no actually I'd like to have a giant load of options. From having a small hut or a bigger hut like you were able to have in Skyrim, to having your own settlement to rule over as Morrowind tried to implement but didn't really got right.

I'd like to be able to be able to place which room holds my storage chests, how many, up to a reasonable amount, of retainers I want and the matching number of homes around my mansion, whether I want a gate or moat or both.

The option to have all of my armor, weapons, books, ingredients, etc sorted automatically with the click of a button.

The option to either have a maximum amount of things to be placed in a store container or no limit there.

I could go on and on there, perhaps it's asking too much but I'd love to see Bethesda do this themselves rather then having to rely on mods to add parts of this.


Aside from that, it's been mentioned earlier in the thread, but factions could be done a lot better then they are now. I loved the idea of Morrowind being divided between 5 great houses, even if we only got to play with 3 of them, I loved the ideas behind the great houses, the vast differences in culture, history, approach to current affairs and whatnot. I would also love to see some more benefits to becoming head of a faction. Even as Archmagister of the Telvanni, I never really got the feeling of being something special.

I'd love the game to include the whole of Tamriel, and still being able to join great house Telvanni and travel to the Summerset Isles to learn magic from the Psijic order. That would be great :-)

Posted by: mirocu Apr 2 2014, 02:34 PM

I´d wait for anything like that until they´ve fixed it so rain doesn´t clip through roofs when you´re outside..

Posted by: Callidus Thorn Apr 2 2014, 02:37 PM

As a console gamer I cannot state just how much I agree with this. It always pisses me off over at Bethsoft when something is being discussed and someone just rolls in and says "mods'll fix it"

Posted by: mirocu Apr 8 2014, 08:07 AM

Even though I´m on PC I still agree with this. I´d like to have a pure vanilla game but I feel forced to use third-party programs just to get the game working the way it should have worked from the beginning!

Oh, well. I guess a perfect game would be boring anyway...

Posted by: Vital Apr 8 2014, 09:48 AM

As a console player, I completely agree with Callidus. Bethesda relies too heavily on the modding community and often hides behind it. Bethesda can make an average game and knows that the console players will cope and the PC community will just fix it with mods. Mods should be used to add to the game and change it, not fix problems with the game and improve it to the standard it should be at.

Maybe you're right, 'rocu. A perfect game probably would become boring. However I'd like to see the TES games made to a higher standard, better suited to it's 'true' fan base.

Posted by: mirocu Apr 8 2014, 09:53 AM

Posted by: Callidus Thorn Apr 8 2014, 10:06 AM

*applauds*

That said, post-Skyrim I no longer consider myself part of the TES fanbase. Bethesda simply aren't taking the games in a direction that interests me. I'll stick to Oblivion, and Morrowind if I ever get around to firing it up again

Posted by: mirocu Apr 8 2014, 10:12 AM

again


I have no opinion of my own...

Posted by: Callidus Thorn Apr 8 2014, 10:39 AM

What I'd really like to see brought back to TES, what I think is needed, is weapons. One handed/two handed is about the dumbest possible way to split the weapons up, and there just isn't enough diversity in the weapons anymore.

They need to get over their obsession with long swords, and spread the high wuality gear around some. Far too many of the "best" weapons were longswords in Oblivion; Goldbrand, Umbra The Ebony Blade, The Honorblade of Chorrol, Dawnfang/Duskfang, and there were probably others. And compare that to the number of axes of a similar quality:... Oh wait, there weren't any And Morrowind wasn't much different.

Staves need to go back to being staves, not magic based guns. Some of Morrowind's staves were fantastic, while Oblivion were generally just... meh.

But the biggest change I think needs to happen is the reintroduction of on-use enchantments. Maybe limit them to rings and amulets, but it would be nice for a fighter to be able to open a locked door without needing to use a lockpick, or for a mage in Skyrim, from what I've heard.

Posted by: Vital Apr 8 2014, 11:07 AM

I still enjoyed Skyrim, despite many of the changes annoying me. In fact, I spawned one of my favourite TES characters ever and plan to go back and play through the other games with him once he is (mostly) done with Skyrim. I believe their were mods that brought back attributes, classes and such from the previous instalments in the series but being on console I never used any of these. It was just my imagination that kept the game an RPG and not another open-world action adventure game except in first-person.

I always imagined my classes before I made a character, and tried to stick to them. Only levelled up after I had slept, only joined factions that it would make sense to join for that character and his/her circumstances and dragged out these questlines myself, often by pretending other quests/misc. jobs were related to the faction. In general I used my imagination to make the game fit my own needs, almost like mods within my head.


This worked fine for me and I was still able to enjoy the game greatly, but I often ask myself; "If I buy a game, produced by one of the most renowned developer's in the gaming industry, for $90 to play on a machine that cost me $600, should I really have to use my own imagination to such an extent, just to get the full enjoyment out of the game?"

The answer is no. I can imagine its a similar situation with mods. They are wonderful and should be used to greatly increase the enjoyment gained from the game, but not as a means to improve the game to the level it should already be at.

C'mon Bethesda... Please

Posted by: Acadian Apr 8 2014, 12:50 PM

I want reins on horses (like Oblivion didn't have). Oh, and the ability to take their tack off and put it on so the poor animals don't have to sleep under saddle. And working saddlebags of course - after all, a horse should be able to carry as much as. . . well, a horse.

Posted by: Vital Apr 8 2014, 01:12 PM

Saddles and saddlebags that are more than animations are definite must have! It's so annoying because the horses in Skyrim actually have saddlebags on their backs, but you can't actually interact with them.

Facepalm Bethesda!!!!

Posted by: Grits Apr 8 2014, 01:15 PM

Oh, horses! I would also like mounts and animal followers to have simple commands. Follow or stay, fight or flee, home marker and go home. A follower command for Use This Horse would make me very happy.

Posted by: Vital Apr 8 2014, 01:21 PM

Me too! No longer would my characters have to feel guilty for either leaving their horse behind for their follower or letting their follower tag along a mile behind them as they ride their trusty steed.

Posted by: Jacki Dice Jan 27 2015, 12:59 AM

The perfect TES game? That isn't Morrowind?

Well, let's see...

I would like better hair styles. I know this is a minor issue, but what does Bethesda have against bangs? I would also like to be able to change hairstyles. If I'm going adventuring, then a pony tail is fine but if I'm dressed up, I'd like a nicer style.

I would like to see somewhere that doesn't look so.... Europe/North America. I get why Skyrim looked like that, but as I recall, Cyrodiil was described as jungle. I did not see any jungles. Besides, there are so many Western styled games. There's so much more to draw inspiration from! Or create! That was one thing I loved about Morrowind. It was so new.

As for housing, I liked being able to buy them and customize certain rooms. To expand on that, there could be a "decorating mode" that pops up as an option when you enter the home or you can click on a specific piece of furniture. In the decorating mode, you can rearrange the furniture, get rid of things, or put in new items. There could be an option for the display cases so you don't knock things out of them accidentally -_-

Keeping with the Hearthfire theme, if you buy a plot of land, I think that should be fully customized as well. If I have space for (and can afford) a house with ten bedrooms, then that's what I want. The building of the house can have a "build mode" option where you place the foundation on your land. It can show the borders and once you pick it, you're stuck with it. Then you do the normal building like in Hearthfire. Then any additions to the home has to fit properly or you can add a story. Maybe you can eventually have fencing or another house, like the strongholds in Morrowind.

The seasons should change somewhat. Instead of rain at random, a rainy season. And people would likely be indoors during the rainy season. Maybe inns would be booked. Bandit caves would have them all inside. Same with snow or wind or extreme heat.

Holidays too. We have a calendar system, so why not? And some could be more culture-specific. So maybe the Dark Elves are celebrating something while everyone else just goes along with their daily lives.

If children are going to stay, I'd like to see children of other races, not just human kids. And I would be very happy to see an interracial family every so often.

If marriage is going to be an option, then I would like the marriage pool to open up. There were no Khajiit or Bosmers! And literally no one in the Thieves Guild? I would also like it to mean something. It just seemed so...blah in Skyrim. Maybe your marriage has certain effects based on who you marry. If you marry a beggar or someone with high status, it affects how people treat you. And your spouse has certain standards. How will the react if they find out you're a part of the Thieves Guild? Or the Fighters Guild? If you never have any money? If you're a warrior or not?

If you have pets of any kind, I agree with the tell them to wait function. I felt so bad when my pet scrib got killed

Animals should run away from certain fights. People should too. In Skyrim, they say they give up but they just keep going. It's like, they just saw me kill a dragon and now they want to fight me? For real?

I liked in Morrowind how certain factions didn't like each other and others were close knit.

That's everything I can think of for now

Posted by: Destri Melarg Jan 29 2015, 12:23 AM

My ultimate TES game would look something like this:


Foremost it would be called TES VI: Alinor and it would be set in the Summerset Isles/Alinor for two reasons. First would be the foreign and interesting landscapes and architecture alluded to by Jacki above. Second would be for the purposes of the story. At this time the Thalmor rule Alinor. No matter what race you choose you start the game out as just another slave brought into Alinor to do the manual labor (I do not see the Thalmor doing such menial tasks themselves). This allows us to uphold the Bethesda tradition of beginning every TES game as a prisoner of some sort.

However, your status as a slave is only a cover. You are, in actuality, a Blade sent by the Elder Council to help destabilize the Aldmeri Dominion through any means necessary. To do this you end up in alliance with a resurgent splinter group of Altmer calling themselves http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Beautiful#The_Beautiful From there the main quest would involve political intrigue, espionage, and assassination all for the purpose of bringing the Dominion to its knees. At some point you become the most hunted man/woman in Alinor with guards and other officials ordered to kill you on sight. There would also be a love interest involved for those into that kind of thing.

Factions involved:

- The Mages Guild, of course. They are in an eons long battle against their rivals in the Psijic order. Only one of the two would be joinable in any one playthrough... and there would be a prerequisite of magical skill necessary for membership. Sorry warriors and thieves, mages only need apply.

- The Fighter’s Guild would be there for mercenaries looking to make some extra coin. Skill with weapons is encouraged though not necessarily required. For those belonging to one of the Dominion’s pilot races (Altmer, Bosmer, or Khajiit) there would be a small assortment of knightly orders joinable, each with their own story and conflict. For membership in one of these weapon skill is a prerequisite.

- The Alinor Thieves Guild would be in the most direct conflict with the Thalmor Hierarchy. One could choose to ply one’s nefarious trade (prerequisite skill required) or, if Altmer, one could choose to join the enemy (if only to destroy them from within).

- The Alinor Dark Brotherhood is at war with itself. Following Greywyn’s teachings a splinter group of vampires within the order have founded a new chapter of the Crimson Scars. Only one faction can claim Alinor as territory. Will you be the one to tilt the balance of power? Note: one must first have the necessary skills to be approached by the DB, then one must be a member of the DB before contracting porphyric hemophilia in order to join the Scars.

Add to this the usual side quests and random dungeons in the wild and I'm good to go.

Posted by: gpstr Apr 2 2015, 01:15 AM

There's one and only one thing that I really want to see Beth do with TES - I want to see them revive the spin-off "Elder Scrolls Adventures" series and put Todd in charge of that, then put somebody who actually understands and appreciates roleplaying in charge of the main TES games. (Or, conversely, just complete the transition of the main series games to linear action/adventure and create a new roleplaying spin-off series - either way)

If they don't do that, then there's no point in even speculating about anything else.

Posted by: Destri Melarg Apr 3 2015, 07:33 PM

Good point.

Posted by: ghastley Apr 3 2015, 08:55 PM

I'm assuming, from the way you phrased that, that your preference is for the roleplaying alternative. If you take that to its logical conclusion you should have no questlines at all, perhaps just an objective, such as overthrow of the Thalmor as in Destri's proposal, but without a pre-defined path to get there.

So how could a game do that? Maybe it tracks your successes in the various guild scenarios (mage/Psijic, Thieves, Fighters, Assassins, whatever) by their affect on the stability of the central authority. You could take over forts for the rebel causes, assassinate incumbent officials, steal stuff, take over sources of magical power, or whatever it takes to weaken them. If you want to play a Jack-of-all-trades, they wouldn't all have to be part of a single questline, but you'd have to do joining quests and you'd only get quests suited to your skills, so progress could be slower.

To avoid the potential chaos of the game having to account for the consequences of all your possible actions, you'd reconcile the situation at various levels by having other unseen actors perform the other tasks for the current step. E.g. If your character steals the Staff of Excessive Magical Power, then the High Wizard is assassinated by someone else, and Fort Wurble falls to the rebel armies under another's leadership.

Side quests get you followers, equipment, spells, whatever you need to advance your skills, much as they do now.

That kind of game, though, won't appeal to those who want to become leader/arch-mage/king of everything. But there are probably a lot of folks who just want to be acknowledged as a Hero of the overall campaign, much as happened at the end of the Oblivion MQ. It also has the problem of coming to an overall end, when your side wins, which is why they've always had the separate questlines to give you more to do after the MQ. I'm not sure what fills that gap.

Posted by: gpstr Apr 3 2015, 09:29 PM

Here are two significant facts about Todd Howard:

When he first applied to Beth (which he did on a whim, because he used to go past their office on the way to university - he didn't even play video games at the time, much less have a particular desire to develop them), they turned him down. He didn't give up. He kept coming back until they finally relented and hired him.

When he was first put in charge of a game, he put out Redguard - a wholly linear action/adventure game with a fixed main character, and a game that was such a bomb that it almost bankrupted the company.

Now remember - Todd doesn't give up.

RPGs are a niche market. There just aren't enough fans of complex RPGs to establish and maintain the sort of franchise Beth unsurprisingly wants TES to be. So the real hell of it is that Todd was right, all those years ago - he was just trying to sell an action/adventure game to a fanbase that was then exclusively serious RPG players. So what he had to do - what the company had to do - and what they HAVE DONE - is to slowly transition away from that fanbase. That's exactly why each and every game since Daggerfall has contained less roleplaying complexity than the previous game(s). They float this nonsense about how each game is its own thing, but that's obviously not the explanation, if for no other reason than that no company invests millions of dollars into a whim. The games are what they are because that's what they've been designed to be, from the very first development meeting. And the trend has been consistent with every single game - every one, with no exceptions, has less roleplaying complexity and more simple linear storylines than the previous one(s). That's not just a random happenstance - it's a deliberate design decision on which millions of dollars rests. And from a pure profit standpoint, it's obviously the correct decision. Even the people who see what's happened to the series and hate what's happened to the series are more likely than not to buy the new game anyway, so Beth gets their money anyway, so their opinions count for exactly nothing. And for every one who decides that s/he's had it and isn't going to even bother, there are dozens of new fans who are eager for the chance to pump 20-some hours into a cool looking game with some neat features that they don't really understand but that's okay because it's set up so that they can't lose anyway and then they get to post their list of achievements on their Facebook.

It doesn't matter what RPG fans might want - RPG fans are to Bethesda as decaf-drinkers are to Starbucks. Sure it pays to at least make an attempt to satisfy them, but only as much as is necessary to not drive them away entirely. The bulk of their efforts have to be spent satisfying their MUCH larger "20-some hours of cool looking game with achievements I can post on Facebook" fanbase, because THAT'S where the money is.

The ONLY way that RPG fans are going to get another great game out of Beth is if they do a spin-off RPG series - a sort of specialty series, done knowing that it's not going to sell 20,000,000 copies. The next main series game, just like every single game since Daggerfall, will be LESS of an RPG than the previous games. That's absolutely guaranteed. Todd doesn't give up.

Posted by: Acadian Apr 3 2015, 10:27 PM

I play really for the 'sandbox' element. I would actually prefer there to be no significant questline to foul up the sandbox with obnoxious things that take significant effort to ignore (Oblivion Gates, Dragons, Civil Wars). I am a little tired of the mental gymnastics that TES requires to overlook those things they want so hard to drag you into. I don't mind small side quests though.

Buffy's at her happiest simply exploring on horseback and clearing random dungeons just for thrills.

I know there are quite a few of us here and on the BethSoft forums that prefer the open world stuff to the quest stuff. You'd think that the devs would listen to those of us who play their games for years (not hours) and scoff at the concept of 'beating the game' - or even ever 'finishing' it.

I'm only interested in medieval fantasy single player RPGs that allow me to play my mystic archer. I'm not delighted with what TES offers, but it currently seems to be perhaps the 'best' choice. I do long for a more open world and less quest driven game in that genre. I would readily abandon TES should a competitor provide that.

Now, that all said, I am grateful for BethSoft's decision to provide players access to their CS / CK so that the games can be modified to bring them a little more in line with the desired vision of each player.

Posted by: Winter Wolf Apr 4 2015, 01:34 AM

Yeah, there has certainly been a step backwards with each game when it comes to character building. I could not believe just how plain and boring Skyrim was. There was really no point in choosing one race or gender over another. Fire resistance in Oblivion helps, and frost resistance in Skyrim, but otherwise that is about it.

If Todd is heading back towards a linear one character game design, it does make sense why we are losing so many choices.

I guess we are still lucky that they support mods and allow us to fix all those annoying things.

Posted by: gpstr Apr 4 2015, 03:46 AM

Skyrim has sold over 20 million copies.

It would've been impossible to sell that many copies of the game if it catered to roleplayers specifically. We just aren't that big a market. And it really is just that simple.

We're sort of the "first wives club" for Bethesda. We're the only reason that they managed to hang around long enough and get established enough to continue to make games. But we're not sufficient to serve their desires now - they got what they wanted out of us and now it's time to move on. They've continued to include some roleplaying elements and they undoubtedly will continue to do so, but I fully expect the roleplaying to continue to diminish, and really for good cause, from their point of view. It's an unnecessary and expensive complication. Every alternative that's included in a game is something that needs to be coded and tested and debugged and tested some more, and an ever-growing number of their fans don't want those complications anyway - to them, they're just sources of confusion and frustration.

Todd made that explicit in the run-up to Skyrim. He repeatedly made statements about things that were being removed (attributes, for instance) because they were unnecessary and confusing. Their stated goal was to make it so that it was impossible to make a "bad" character. That, to me, just demonstrates that either they don't understand roleplaying or they're catering to players who don't understand roleplaying or both. Probably both. Roleplayers know that there's no such thing as a "bad" character - NOT because there aren't characters who are more difficult to play than others, but because difficult characters add spice - they aren't "bad" - they're just a challenge. But to other gamers, if they aren't effortlessly uber, they're "bad." And those are the players to whom Beth is catering. And again, much though it galls me, they're right to do so. You can't argue against 20 million sales.

The only hope we have for a TES game with more rather than less roleplaying elements is a spin-off series. That's the only way that they could tailor a game to roleplayers AND continue to pay their bills. We can't keep them afloat by ourselves.

I'm not terribly hopeful though. It'd be nice, to be sure, but bluntly - very bluntly, just to make the point - I really don't think they give a [censored]. They've made it pretty clear over the years - even going so far as to include a recurring character in the games just to express it overtly - that they have absolutely no respect for what we might desire. We're just demanding idiots, and all we deserve from them is M'aiq's scorn and ridicule. And again - 20 million sales. Viewed from that perspective, they're right.

Sorry to be such a downer, but this is something I've given a lot of thought to, and it's unsurprisingly pretty much impossible to really address the subject on the Beth forums.

And now that all of that's out of my system, I'm going to go spend some time with Ughoth the Orc mage. He just came back from Fisherman's Rock with Mazoga and is parked outside the Leyawiin castle gates.

Posted by: SubRosa Apr 4 2015, 05:05 AM

I agree with everything you said gpstr. I even recall Todd saying that they wanted to make Skyrim less "spreadsheety". Statistics like attributes and skills confuse people who don't want to put any effort into a game. I expect that the next TES game will not even have Magicka or Stamina. Instead all spells and special attacks will have cool-down periods between how often you can use them, like Mass Effect and other console games. Health might stick around to determine how many times the player can be hit before dying. But they might find a way to simplify that as well.

OTOH, there is hope for the gaming industry. The recent successes of games like Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity give me a really good feeling. Wasteland 2 was an excellent RPG done in the old school style. It was like playing Fallout 1 and Terror From The Deep all over again. I have not tried Pillars yet, but everyone says that it too is a throwback to the good old days of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, and it gets insanely good rankings on sites like Metacritic. It is on my "to buy" list of games, once it is has been out a while and there has been time for wikis to be made, and patches to be done.

Thanks to Kickstarter, the developers of both games were able to create them without the interference of a big corporate publisher like EA or Bethesda. That allowed them to make the games they wanted, rather than the what the money was forcing them to - which is to say a game like Skyrim. When you turn loose people like Chris Avellone and Michael Stackpole that way, good things are going to happen. I think that this is the future of gaming, along with indie developers like Cd Projeckt and Talewords, and DRM-free distributors like Gog.com.

People are starting to realize that you don't need a huge amount of money to make a good game. Because a good game is not about hiring Patrick Stewart or Kevin Spacey to do the voice acting, or having photo-realistic graphics. You just need vision and talent, and you will do well, even in what I agree is a niche market like us RPG'ers. Pillars raised over a million dollars in the first day of their Kickstarter campaign. They made the game with only 4 million dollars, and it certainly looks like its sales will be enough to fund Obsidian's next project.

Posted by: gpstr Apr 4 2015, 05:23 PM

I agree - indies are the future of gaming, at least from our niche market perspective.

This industry, very quickly, became like the movie industry. It puts out the same sort of product, and for the same reason - failure is too expensive. Because of the staggering amounts of money they put into projects and because their hope for profit is all wrapped up in one specific product, it pays to do what they can to ensure that that product will appeal to the widest possible range of potential consumers. That leads to making a product that's superficially glossy and appealing, but underneath that superficial gloss, has been pounded into relatively formless mush. It can't be truly challenging and complex and unique because that carries too much risk of alienating potential consumers. It has to be as vanilla as possible.

Like with the movie industry though, the fact that that's what the major studios do opens up a market for smaller companies who can and do take risks - who can and do make products that are almost certainly only going to appeal to a niche market. They don't have enormous headquarters filled with overpaid executives and bloated staffs and they're not interested in shelling out all the necessary money for the marquee stars, so they don't have the expenses of the major studios, and they aren't run by boards of directors whose only measure of success is profit margin, so they don't have the stifling caution of the major studios. They can and will make truly creative products, never expecting nor needing them to appeal to anything beyond a niche audience.

Beth actually once was such a company, and that company made Arena and Daggerfall. They aren't that sort of company any more though, and that's just the way it is.

Posted by: Renee Apr 5 2015, 01:48 AM

The next TES game will only have one bar, which will represent Health, Magicka, and Stamina. It will also have one of the ideas glargg thought of awhile back: a Beat All Quests button, for people who are too lazy to even fast-travel.

Posted by: Winter Wolf Apr 5 2015, 07:38 AM

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.

Posted by: gpstr Apr 5 2015, 08:56 PM

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.

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.

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.

Posted by: haute ecole rider Apr 6 2015, 12:48 AM

After sitting down and reading through the last several posts, I have to agree with all the valid points made here.

One thing I hated about both Oblivion and, yes especially, Skyrim, is that one is forced into the MQ. It starts whether we are ready or not. You start Oblivion with Emperor Uriel already dead (well, as good as) and you start Skyrim with Helgen in ruins (or as good as). You need to load up Arthmoor's excellent alternative start mods to have Kvatch before it's ruined, and to have a sky free of dragons, for as long as you want.

I would prefer to see the "MQ" actually be relegated to the same status as the "side quests." Yes, the MQ would give us the primary reason for buying or playing the game, but it should not start until we are ready to start it.

A TES VI game that would be linear and "Failure is not an option" in style would be the basic game. Then the DLC's would be the ones to give it the RPG flavors. If I brought TES VI alone, it would be just the MQ - mainly just to "beat" the game. Then I would purchase the DLC's to 1. change the trigger for the MQ to be determined by the player, and 2. to provide roleplaying possibilities for those of us who love to role-play and deal with challenges and opportunities presented by different races and, yes, even different genders and ages. A teen Bosmer will have a different skill set than an aged Imperial, for example. What about an adult Nord in the prime of her life versus a wise old Jarl?

A game that combines both Destri's storyline and gpstr's suggestions would be totally awesome! I would def get that game (and this is a player who doesn't hang out at Game Stop or even play anything other than TES IV and V, except maybe the occasional *gasp* casual game).

Posted by: Winter Wolf Apr 6 2015, 12:58 AM

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.

Posted by: Acadian Apr 6 2015, 01:09 AM

I will say that I like TES better than D&D when it comes to 'classes'.

In TES, all options are open. Buffy is extremely focused and specialized, but her skillset is simply not possible in D&D. Her focus is stealthy bow +magic. In my mind, those skills require quite a bit of dedicated focus and her 'price' is that she has no ability with armor or melee, and even her magic is poor at classic slinging fire/ice/lightning. I've had a gut full of games with 'classes' that say if you touch magic, then a bow or sneaking is off limits and that if you pick up a bow, you must back it up with light armor and a sword. Ugh.

I want all the skill options to be available and am perfectly happy setting and building my own class limitations rather than having them dictated by game developers.

Heh, I just want TES to get the obtrusive quests outta my face.

Posted by: gpstr Apr 6 2015, 03:17 AM

@haute ecole rider - I just have to say that I DETEST Arthmoor's Alternative Start. I used it on one character with whom I had no intention of playing the MQ and ended up essentially forced into it when the old guy showed up and forced a note onto him, then turned the guilt screws on him to get him to go to the prison. With the way that Arthmoor handled that whole process, it was literally impossible to entirely avoid the MQ and essentially impossible for any reasonably decent character to even turn it down. That mod actually puts even MORE pressure on the character to do the MQ than the vanilla game does. I think it's a terrible mod and I wish I'd never used it - it ruined that character.

That out of my system - I like the idea of a linear "main quest" main game and roleplaying DLC. It's sort of a shame to consider having to buy additional content just to get an RPG, but at this point, that might be the only option (other than an indie game). As I've noted, there's just no way that mainstream publishers are going to put out a complex and nuanced game - they have to be guaranteed a profit, and the only thing that's guaranteed to be profitable at that level is failure is not an option vanilla with a coating of flash and dazzle.

@Winter Wolf - D&D is just one approach to roleplaying. I certainly don't want to see something as innately creative as roleplaying constrained to the standards that were set by one form of it, no matter what that one form might be. By its very nature, roleplaying is virtually unlimited. I see nothing to be gained by imposing traditionalist limitations on it - by, for instance, barring "mages" from using "armor" because that's what D&D did. The only things I care about as far as anything like that goes are variety, balance and internal logic. I couldn't care less what the specifics are, just so long as the reality that's being created is internally consistent and amenable to a variety of effective characters.

@Acadian - I agree wholeheartedly. I have no problem at all with some manner of limitations - with the sorts of things you've done with Buffy - because those make sense to me. By their nature, characters who specialize, and particularly characters who specialize in difficult fields, should have limited abilities in other fields if for no other reason than just because they don't have the time and energy left over to dedicate enough effort to those other fields to get good at them too. But the idea that there's some sort of force that somehow entirely prevents a character from one "class" from even being able to handle a weapon or item that's somehow designated for some other "class" just makes no sense at all to me.

Posted by: Winter Wolf Apr 6 2015, 11:17 AM

I guess the problem that I see is that I can play an archer character with illusion support or an Illusionist mage with a back up bow and in ES they are exactly the same. That is madness! There is no advantage or penalty for playing either way and we end up with the exact same character. And the difference between a jack-of-all-trades character and a mystic archer is a lot smaller than you might think. It really just comes down to how many hours I choose to play like Buffy over the whole length of the time I play the character.

The correct way to role play is through character classes and not through self-limiting means that the game system provides. Education and profession should always be the determining factor in deciding who our character is, whether fantasy, real world or sci-fi.

It is a shame that Beth sees character classes, attributes, magic schools and specialization as too much work to put into the game. Look how horrible they designed the intro of Oblivion. In fact it was so bad they still had to put a custom class option in the game! And in most cases we had to use it just to fix the broken leveling system...

And what did they do about character classes in Skyrim? Oh yes, they took it out.

How is that an improvement?

No wonder we feel that Skyrim is 100 miles wide and one inch deep.

Good luck with Elder Scrolls VI and your 'freedom' gameplay.

Posted by: SubRosa Apr 6 2015, 06:50 PM

Long before my days of computer gaming, I played pen and paper RPGs, Dungeons and Dragons included. That was back when it came in two flavors, Basic and Advanced. TBH, I think it is one of the poorest RPGs ever made. It was just the most well known RPG, and so I think it acted like a gateway drug for many gamers like myself, who moved on to better games, like Shadowrun, or the Champions/Fuzion/Hero system, Call of Cthulhu, or Marvel Superheros. The 3rd edition ruleset of D&D is a big improvement over how it was in the past. But it still lags far behind the other games out there, especially with magicians.

One of the things I always disliked about D&D was the class system. Because real people don't always fall into narrow little boxes, especially ones made by someone else. Even with multi/dual classing it could be difficult to shoehorn a character idea into what classes a game provides. Knights of the Old Republic was like that. Why couldn't a play a Jedi who was good with a lightsaber and at using computers? Nope, only a Jedi Consular can fix machines. I have always found games that allow you to define your character how you want - by picking your attributes, skills, and so forth - were much better. Because it is my character after all. Why should some guy sitting in an office dictate to me what she can or cannot do?

However, some games that have classes allow people to create their own, which I never had a problem with. Because you could define your character however you wanted. Shadowrun was like that with its templates. Basically it was a set of stats, skills, gear, and so forth you started with. When you created a character you could use a ready made template like a Street Samurai (who was all into combat skills, physical attributes, and cyberware), or you could make your own template using the rules they provided for how to assign skill points, attributes, and so on. Once you started playing the templates no longer mattered, as you could invest your experience points in raising any skill or attribute you wanted. But just as gpstr noted, you could not raise everything with the limited points you had. You had to pick and choose what your character's strong suits would be. That kind of game I love. Like the Fallout games, where you choose your attribute points, and then pick 3 tag skills. Then you take whatever perks and raise whatever skills you want every time you level up.

One of Skyrim's biggest weaknesses is not the lack of classes. It is the lack of ways it offers to define your character at the start of the game. The lack of attributes is far more glaring here. But even working within the game as it is, they could have allowed you to give your starting character extra points to either Health, Stamina, or Magicka. They could have given the option to start with one or more Perks. They could have allowed you to have a 5 or 10 point bonus to half a dozen skills. They could have allowed you to start with a Standing Stone Power, or choose from a list of Novice spells. All of these things would have gone a huge way to defining a unique character at the start of the game. Coincidentally, these are all of the things I do when I create a character for Skyrim, using the console and my own modded starting room. None of my characters in Skyrim ever start the game alike.

Posted by: ghastley Apr 6 2015, 07:17 PM

Good point about the "unallocated points at startup". Most of the D&D games let you re-roll until you get an attribute balance you like, so why not just give you a set of points to distribute?

Posted by: gpstr Apr 6 2015, 07:32 PM

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).

Posted by: Winter Wolf Apr 7 2015, 11:24 AM

Skyrim actually did the leveling far better than Oblivion, in terms that the game speed of inclination matches the output to achieve the results. In Oblivion every skill leveled at a different pace and if you chose the wrong matching majors then you were in big trouble (as you know).

The problem with your second paragraph is that we could both play opposing characters with different inclinations and yet end up at the same place after 50 levels. ES does not have the scope through only adding attributes to the mix at the beginning to fix that. After 50 levels the game will simply flatten out to the uniform boorishness that ES always becomes.



Okay. These are my thoughts.

First- Bring back character classes. After all, how can you play a role without any role to play. Simple right? As I said above simply adding attributes will not address the leveling out that happens over the journey of a Beth game. Changing the beginning will not change the end. Try playing 300 hours of Fallout 3 and then see how different our characters turn out. I doubt they will be any different.

Second- Scrap the silly start-in-the-jail idea. That is nothing but lazy game design. So typical of Todd and his team and those who accept it.

All characters should start at 0 level and be involved in apprentice/training in their chosen profession. Join the parade ground in the Imperial Legion, work for a local footpad thief, go to class in the Arcane University, etc. Room should be allowed to achieve honors or be a trickster like Maxical, it all depends how you wish to play it.

Guild Quests should only be open to those of that profession. However, if a warrior class wanted to join the Dark Brotherhood there should be ramifications for doing so. Perhaps they insist that you murder one of your colleagues to prove your worth and the Legion becomes very annoyed as a result.

Cause and Effect.

And if you wanted to abandon your apprenticeship then that is okay as well. But that would mean you miss out on the specialization perks or attributes that belong to that profession. This is where you would simply add the points at the start of the game. I say make those adding points meaningful.

Perhaps skill caps at 80 for those who run away and later on they must make a costly visit to a master trainer to get that skill up to 100. Just like real life where if you skip school you pay the price later on.

Multi-class skill sets (Mystic Archer) would be allowed for combat, but there must be a penalty for doing so. Buffy should not be allowed to achieve the same level in archery that a specialist would get to. Sorry folks, but that has always been the rules of multi-class. In the same way the highest level spells should only be available to those who specialize.

That is one thing of many that role play should be. Do I specialize or multi-class. This do-anything-I-want attitude of ES is ridiculous.

Spellmaking and Enchanting should be in the game, but I would only allow the mage class to access it. Warrior and Sneak class would either have to pay for the service or find better weapons and equipment then is currently found in standard ES game, helping them keep up to speed. While playing a mage the said weapons would not appear, thereby depriving them the advantage.

I would bring back attributes, gender differences and also consider personality traits and likes/dislikes. Anything to brake up this boring same pot that Beth forces us into. I would scrap health regeneration and bring back armor and weapon degrading. I love using repair hammers!

Lockpick and Security needs to go back to the way it was before. I loved the auto attempt feature which made the character play the game instead of me. And the Open Lock spells must make a return. A mage using picks is wrong on so many levels.

Role play should always be about choice, variety and cause/effect. It is far deeper than simply adding attributes back into the game.

Marriage and Adoption is a complete waste of time and serves no purpose. Instead I would put effort in putting retirement into the game. Perhaps each time you start a new game the system asks you if would like to retire the last character. If you choose 'yes' one of the in-game homes is taken out of action and your character lives out their life there. A good aligned character can be spoken to with dialogue options, an evil character will be more reserved. And you might even see them around town when you visit.

All quests would reset with the new character and if you wanted to keep playing that old guy you could still reload an earlier save.

I haven't even looked at fixing the Main Quest story writing to suit an evil character or those abysmal fetch and carry quests that Beth love to use. But it is not hard.

Of course, if Elder Scrolls is not a RPG and is nothing more than a exploring and collecting game, then just leave it as it is!

Oh, and gpstr, you will probably find that a spin off series will certainly work. If for no other reason the it will now be a 10 year wait between ES games. Five years to Fallout and another five to the ES.

I cannot see that happening, at least in the long term. Beth Game Studios will break into two companies, one to build each game. So you might get a different direction yet!

Posted by: gpstr Apr 7 2015, 04:17 PM

The game flattens out later because all the races and genders have the same maximums. It flattens out because an Altmer with maximum strength is exactly as strong as an Orc with maximum strength, which is exactly why I've said, more than once, that the races should have different maximums.

I don't need classes to play a role. I have no idea why you think I do.

Read this post: http://chorrol.com/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=5529&view=findpost&p=237340. Every one of those is a role. Every one of those is a rich and detailed character with strengths and weaknesses and virtues and faults and things they're good at and things they're not good at. All of them are roles. None of them are classes.

It's not necessary to "allow" or "not allow" that. I addressed that in my last post - it's just a function of time. Even in Oblivion, even with its balky leveling system, those penalties already exist, simply because every single moment that your character spends doing one thing is a moment that s/he doesn't spend doing another.

One of my characters on that list - Jibran - is a swordsman. That's all he is. He uses no magic and no bow - he has no ranged attacks at all. The only thing he's ever done in combat is swing a blade. That's it. And consequently, he's far and away the best melee fighter I play. He leaves everyone else in the dust, just because while they've been gaining skill in a bit of this and a bit of that, he's been gaining skill in blade and only blade.

Now - if I kept playing characters long enough, they'd all catch up to him sooner or later, and if I played with a vanilla style build, it'd be sooner rather than later. But that's because the system in Oblivion is poorly designed - because skill progress happens too fast. If the system had been designed better - if it hadn't been designed to accommodate people who just want to be uber in a few hours - then no other character could ever catch up to him, just because they'd still be splitting their time between different things while he'd still be investing all of his time solely into the blade.

You're right that specialists should end up more skilled than hybrids. The place where you're wrong is your insistence that there has to be some sort of arbitrary rule that decrees that. If the game is designed well, then that takes care of itself, and that's as it should be.

Again, I could not possibly care less what has or has not "always been the rules."

Yes - it should - and that's exactly why I detest the sort of rules you're demanding.

Yes - there has to be cause and effect and there have to be advantages and disadvantages and benefits and penalties, but for a fulfilling game, and specifically in order to allow the "choice" that YOU have just advocated, that cause and effect and those advantages and disadvantages and bonuses and penalties need to be worked into the game organically - NOT just slapped on top as arbitrary rules.

Here's a Sufi proverb that's exactly on topic:

"In the desert, there is no sign that says 'thou shalt not eat stones.'"

You seem to think that such a sign is necessary. I say that all that's necessary is to design a game that's balanced and accurate enough that, just as in reality, it takes care of itself. And then, if I decide I want to play a character who eats stones, I'll play a character who eats stones. And s/he will suffer the natural consequences. That's what I want. What I don't want - what I resent with every fiber of my being - is someone else decreeing that I am not to be allowed to do that at all.

Posted by: Burnt Sierra Apr 7 2015, 06:28 PM

I think everyone would like that to be honest, after all, everybody here is a fan of role playing games. Emphasis on role playing. The closest game I ever played to what your suggesting was probably Fallout 2, back in ye olden days of choices and ideas over incredibly pretty graphics (hell, not even that ye olden, less than 20 years ago). Now, the emphasis is on real time action. Which I guess is what most people want. Not me, but I'm not the target demographic these days.

Maybe one day... Hopefully...

Posted by: mALX Apr 7 2015, 07:28 PM

I've fallen off the demographics target too, but I kind of took myself out of even attempting after seeing Skyrim.

If it was an example of the future of TES, I didn't want to keep following it down that direction it was heading. I agree with you that the trend is moving away from freedom/autonomy/and choice and without these it suffocates roleplay.

Posted by: Destri Melarg Apr 7 2015, 11:04 PM

My two cents:

Yet it remains a 'role play' game. It may not be the role you want, but Bethesda does give you a role to play. Hell, they even force the role upon you. You are Dovahkiin, and it is up to you, as the role-player, to decide what that means in your particular play through.

'Rosa mentioned Mass Effect earlier and I think that's a perfect example of a game that is basically on rails in the sense that you have no freedom at all in the ways in which you proceed, yet it still provides a deeply satisfying (well, to me at least) role-playing experience.


How can you argue for more freedom while lamenting the fact that the game doesn't follow a rule book?


To each his own. Personally, I find this to be a trend worthy of applause. Taking attributes out of the game works when those attributes become a hinderance. gpstr's argument that the strongest Altmer should never be as strong as the strongest Orc insinuates that the argument works for the other attributes as well. To say that my Orc can't be as charming as an Imperial or my Redguard can never be as smart as a Breton is simply ridiculous (not to mention the fact that it comes close to being insulting). Such constraints on character are exactly the opposite to the freedom we all claim to want. I would love to see attributes return, but only if those attributes can be chosen as they are in the Fallout series. Then one of the previous mentioned constraints can serve your role-play by giving your Orc/Redguard something to perpetually fight to overcome. However, that decision should come from the player. It should not be a mechanic built within the game.



I second this whole-heartedly (as does Acadian, I suspect)!

Speaking of our esteemed GM… it behooves all of us to take as example what Acadian has managed to do with Buffy. Sure, there are mental gymnastics required to achieve it, but he has managed to create a character who would be any role-players dream within the so-called limitations of Skyrim’s character/leveling system.


This is exactly the problem I had with the old class system!


This seems like an empty gripe when you consider that the game does give each race a starting bonus to half a dozen skills, and everything else you want can be addressed within a few minutes/hours of leaving Helgen Keep. In a game that encompasses as many hours as Skyrim that isn't a deal breaker IMHO.

I can't believe that I (of all people) am the devil's advocate in this thread.

Posted by: Winter Wolf Apr 8 2015, 11:14 AM

I like this idea and will certainly love to see it incorporated into future design. However, it still doesn't address the problem that happens with skill as it raises.

The game as it currently stands is a spreadsheet of values where you gain by everything that you do. The problem of that is that the level cap of Beth/Obsidian games has increased dramatically in recent years. Look at where it has gone- from 30 to 50 and now to 100+ with Legendary Skyrim.

Now what that means is that to reach that cap you will need to lift all skills to even get close to reaching a high level. And this is the key- what will happen if Bethesda decides to only unlock items (enemies or equipment) at a very high level, say 50, or 80 or even 90th level. And what if half the quests in the game have a level cap?

On Oblivion we were lucky that everything unlocked by around level 25, but what would have if Beth had designed it that everything unlocked at level 40?

My way of thinking is that a Warrior class should only receive a skill increase if he used the skill that was connected to his class. He should not receive an increase for using lockpick, or backstab or destruction magic, things that don't belong to his class. I would never advocate a rule that said, only a certain class can do a certain thing. Sure use that magic spell or backstab, but it means nothing to the level progression of the warrior.

And then all the equipment, bonuses, perks, quests, whatever, could be tailored to suit each respective class. Without having character classes Beth has no idea what we are going to do and so cannot design a game that has any proper merit or level design progression. By the time we reach anywhere near the level cap every character is uniform and boringly the same. The problem is far worse than just saying, make each race unique and have different attributes.


That is certainly an impressive list. But I fail to see how having classes would ruin that list? Character classes would be connected to skill and character leveling, not to things like personality traits.


The reason you say that is because you don't care for character classes. I get that. But a game that had character classes in it would certainly have to care about the implementation. Sorry, but I thought we were discussing 'the ultimate TES game'? Perhaps not.


What are you getting so worked up about? I understand your passion for RPG but not why you think that I am forcing anything on you? If I was saying 'you', it would mean, 'you, the player,' not you, gpstr.'

Anyway, I was responding to a quote from SubRosa in my last post, Hence, the quote tag. SubRosa and I have discussed Fallout many times and the whole post flowed from there. Why would I mention 300 hours of Fallout to you?

Posted by: SubRosa Apr 8 2015, 05:48 PM

The trouble there is that every member of each race is an exact duplicate. Apparently there are factories out there rolling out elves, humans, orcs, etc..., since we all start out with the factory-standard model. That would explain why the children all look the same... I find it very un-i... (sorry Renee, but here comes the 'I' word) immersive.

But more than that, the bonuses they give the races rarely match up with who my character is at the start of the game. The characters I create are people, with their own personalities, histories, and stories. Not toons I roll to beat the game with (Ph3R M3 n00Bs!). Because of that I could work past the inability to customize my stats at the start of the game. I play a person, not a bunch of statistics. However, it makes it difficult to do that working past, precisely because what my character can or cannot do from the very first moment in the game does not match who that character is in my head. For example, one of my earlier characters was http://i.imgur.com/XJAG61B.jpg, who was an Altmer barbarian. She was raised from childhood in the wilds by a Nord mountain man named Alp, and was a truer True Nord™ than any Nord could be. So she was supposed to be practiced with two-handed weapons, armor, and so forth. The things her 'uncle' Alp taught her from childhood. She wasn't supposed to know the first thing about Illusion, or Enchanting, or Alteration, and so on. Yet she started with Two-Handed at 15, and Illusion at 25. WTF? The Illusion I could ignore, since I would never use that. But the 15 in her main weapon skill made those earlier levels more difficult than they should have been for someone with her proclivities and background. Because of experiences like that, I now use the console and creation kit to tailor make every one of my characters.

So I really don't want a blank slate to begin the game with. Nor one that is exactly like what some guy sitting in the DC suburbs thinks every elf is supposed to be like. I want to think about who my characters are as people, what they like, don't like, can do, don't want to do, and so forth. I spend days, sometimes weeks, just figuring out what they will wear (take a look at some of my character cosplay topics in the Fan Art forum, I have three separate topic for just one character's outfits). In the end (or should I say at the start?) I want the character I play to fit that vision in my head, right from the get go. I shouldn't have to wait until 5 hours into the game to be able to play the character the way I envisioned them being at the start of the game.

Posted by: Callidus Thorn Apr 8 2015, 05:49 PM

I have to say, I agree with a lot of what gpstr's posted. And it's always nice to see someone else who refused to buy Skyrim

Personally, I think for classes we need something of a hybrid: The setup from the older TES games, pick your skills, favoured attributes, and specialisation at the start, and from then on all your skills count towards your leveling. It would have to be combined with something like nGCD of course, to handle attribute growth, perhaps set up to give smaller attribute gains from minor skills.

Posted by: Acadian Apr 8 2015, 06:10 PM

As far as skill management goes, I'm delighted with a little mod that I use. At the beginning of the game, you choose a cap level for all of your skills. The skills will then level up only to that cap and never beyond. For example, Buffy's caps are:
Archery and Sneak - 100
Illusion, Conjuration, Alteration and Speechcraft - 75
Every single other skill is perma-capped at 15. Even if she reads a skill book on heavy armor or gets free skill training as 'reward' for some silly quest, the knowledge does not translate to any improvement of skill beyond its cap. Simply looking at those skill caps gives one a pretty good idea her strengths and limitations.

This does, for better or worse, also limit Buffy's ultimate maximum character level as well (to about the mid-30s in her case). I have no problem at all with that because there is nothing beyond about level 20 that we want - and that is only to ensure we have pretty snow bears in our game.

Plenty of mod solutions out there for PC users. I admit that, without mods, I would not enjoy TES games. The real challenge is that if you put 10 players together, you'll get 10 differing visions of how things should work. So I'm glad I'm not a game developer, and think the smartest thing they can do is make sure and offer their tool kit (CS / CK) to the fan community.

I think most folks can agree that they don't like being forced to try and jam their creative round peg concept for a character into a square hole. And I think most folks could agree that doing a quest because you want to is good, but being overly pushed into an unwanted role as The Chosen One as viewed by the devs is not so good. Similarly, if you join a faction the option to rise to the top is fine as long as the option to simply remain a 'working' mid-level member of that faction is also supported by appropriate quests.

Posted by: SubRosa Apr 8 2015, 06:20 PM

The smartest thing to do is make it the way I want it!

Posted by: Destri Melarg Apr 8 2015, 08:21 PM

And I can understand that point of view. The point I'm making is that, if the opposite were true and we went back to fixed attribute starting points for the various races, then we would inevitably find ourselves in a situation where developers give us elves that are physically weak and orcs that are mentally inferior. That, to me, is far more limiting than just starting me with a blank slate that I can then develop the way I see fit. I'm okay with it taking me 5+ hours to get the character I'm going to enjoy for the next 150+.


I think we're actually in agreement here. I've still never even finished the main quest of any Bethesda game (going all the way back Morrowind, and that includes Fallout 3). My characters start with a personality, not with a pre-formed skill set. You are arguing that your characters are 'people, not a bunch of statistics' while being put off because you can't start with the statistics you want. My characters discover who they are throughout the course of their adventure, that's a big part of the fun for me… and all I'm saying is that I don't mind starting my character off as a blank slate if that means that I don't have to be burdened with the ideas of that 'guy sitting in the DC suburbs.'


So it sounds like what you're really put off by is the fact that Hera couldn't steam roll the earlier levels the way you wanted.

Think about it… your Altmer barbarian was still able to use two handed weapons (which in a number of so-called rpgs would have been impossible because you had the effrontery to pick a high elf... and everyone knows high elves are just mages), she just had a not-too-steep learning curve to negotiate at a time in the game when enemies are easy anyway. You were also able to fit her into the fur armor you wanted (again, impossible in most so-called rpgs). As you've stated you could just ignore her apprentice level skill in Illusion… or you could just incorporate that into your role play by using courage spells to simulate her leadership qualities. All of that came with the vanilla game us console players use which, being on the PC where you can just change things to the way you want anyway, doesn't apply to you.

I have always sought out and respected your opinion, 'Rosa. But, in this case/thread, I think we're all getting upset about the wrong things in Skyrim. Personally, I don't care if they continue to streamline the mechanics. What I care about is that they continue to streamline the story-telling! Give me an epic and engaging MQ (hopefully one I'm not forced into), and interesting side quests & faction quest lines. Make the effects of these quest impact the world beyond whether or not a tree grows in Whiterun. Give me a world filled with 3 dimensional characters and relationships that feel real and not contrived. Do that and you can take away all the attributes and impose as much homogeneity in character creation that you want!


I'd buy it… as long as it had a tool kit!

Posted by: SubRosa Apr 8 2015, 08:51 PM

Not steamroll. I don't expect that until the later part of the game. I just want to possess the basic competency of a person who has been using the weapon/skill since childhood. Along with the basic incompetency in other things they have not been using.


My elf characters in all the other RPGs I have played - like the Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate games - could start out as muscle-bound barbarians who were good with a sword and clueless about magic as well. So I am not sure what other RPGs you mean?

Posted by: Destri Melarg Apr 8 2015, 09:45 PM

Fair enough. Ten points give or take at level 1 is still not immersion breaking for me... but I can respect that it is for you.


Okay well, since you brought up Bioware, how about KOTOR. If I recall you yourself used it as an example when you said you hated the fact that your Jedi couldn’t be good with a lightsaber and computers unless you chose a Consulor. What about the Mass Effect series? There choice of class limited you in what weapons/armors you could wield/wear. Try to be a dwarf mage in Dragon Age... you can’t. Even if the developers site story reasons as explanation it remains a somewhat arbitrary imposed limitation.

Being on the console I am at an admitted disadvantage when it comes to good RPGs. You obviously have more experience with the subject. I, for example, have played Balder’s Gate but not Neverwinter Nights. I’ve also never played a good pen and paper RPG so anyone who has is bringing to the subject more experience than I. I am simply saying that, on console at least, the Elder Scrolls still gives us more freedom than just about anyone else. I should have framed the argument in those terms initially, sorry for the confusion.


Edit: Look, every opinion expressed so far in this thread has been passionate, heart-felt, and well thought out. All of them are defensable and none of them come across as ‘wrong’ to me. What I’m saying is that none of them get to the heart of why we feel the way we do about the current trend in the Elder Scrolls series. We were all able to suspend our disbelief and fall in love with this series when the battle system was, quite frankly, trash. We did so because the stories we were able to tell within this world were so good.

Immersion doesn’t come from attributes or racial specials or any of the other bells and whistles that constitute game mechanics. Immersion comes from a suspension of disbelief inherent in the personal story being told in a living, breathing world where actions have consequence (which, correct me if I'm wrong, is ultimately the point that gpstr was making) . A story of good quality can withstand flaws in the battle system, or the absence of attributes, or even the loss of the freedom to do what you want in the way in which you want to do it. A poor story makes all of these errors stand out in bold relief. Lack of this basic element is why Skyrim, as Winter Wolf so astutely pointed out, feels a hunderd miles wide and one inch deep.

Once again I have succeeded in de-railing your thread, Vital. That's enough out of me. Apologies.

Posted by: SubRosa Apr 8 2015, 10:37 PM

I agree with all of that. I don't like other people choosing what my class can or cannot do. But I thought we were talking about specific races being prevented from starting the game with certain skills/abilities/equipment? I never had a problem playing an elf and being a Jedi Guardian in KOTOR, or a Soldier in ME. Oh wait, yes I did, because there are no elves in those games! You are quite right about Dwarves being prevented from playing mages in DA though. I was never really thrilled with DA:O. The classes felt claustrophobic, and I didn't like the game world at all, so I haven't felt the desire to try any of the sequels.



In a sense you have played a pen and paper RPG, in the least that the BG games use the 2nd Edition D&D rules underneath the hood. Though it is true that was not the best of RPGs. The Neverwinter Nights games are definitely worth a try. I highly recommend them, especially the first one. They use the 3rd Edition D&D rules, which were a big improvement, as they give your characters a whole lot more they can do. If you liked BG1 more than BG2, then you would probably like NWN1 more, as it more similar in the way the world is laid out, being a very open area you can almost wander at will (though not completely). Where NWN2 is more like BG2 in how you can only go to areas after starting a quest that takes you there. Both games are dirt cheap on Gog.com.




I agree in the suspension of disbelief. It is just that some things help some people suspend their disbelief, but not others. The story is the only thing that kept me playing Mass Effect 1 until the end. The gameplay itself left me cold. To be honest, I enjoy the sword fights in Skyrim. The addition of bashing adds in a new dimension that the previous ES games lacked. You can play a one or two-handed weapon character and literally never get hit, so long as you time your attacks and bashes and movement right. It turns every battle into a ballet, which I find very fun.

I have never been impressed with the storytelling in the ES franchise. I have always played the games for the open world. In the end I prefer to write my own stories with my characters. I just need a sandbox to play with them in, just like the good old days when I was knee high to a grasshopper. That is why I don't really hate Skyrim, and I am sure I will give ES 6 a try whenever it comes out. Though I think I will wait until they patch the backwards flying dragons in that one. So long as Bethesda gives me a sandox, I'll get my knees dirty in it.

Posted by: Winter Wolf Apr 9 2015, 12:37 PM

It has been very interesting to read the posts here. I guess the one part of role playing I had never considered is that most other people on this forum like to take time and discover the role their character will play.

That is something I have never done myself, whether on paper and dice games or on the computer. I am fired up from the first moment and always know exactly what type of character I want to play. Sure, things like mannerisms and personality are smoothed around the edges as I go, but that is it.

The basic core and what he/she will achieve is burning bright right from the start.

I am curious though, how do you decide majors/minors if you have no idea what your character will become? Do you just take anything and then fix the character as you go with console command and mods? I have never had to do that as I theme everything around the character, majors, leveling, quests, equipment, you name it.

Posted by: haute ecole rider Apr 9 2015, 06:13 PM

For me role-playing is storytelling. I take a character with some basic attributes (such as my female Redguard character, Julian of Anvil). She's weak in magic, but strong in athletics and combat. The story that unfolded as I played her built up her stealth traits, and finally her magicka to the point where she could cast a flame atronach. Can she summon Volanaro's Dremora Lord? Not without some help from the console, so she doesn't use it much. But she has built up her magic skills considerably through the course of her story, to the point where she actually leaves combat behind to take up study at the Mages University.

Alise Sudmeri has done the same in Skyrim. She is a lonely character who is a bit of an outcast, unable to find a place where she feels safe and loved. So she shivers her way through the northern province in search of a home. All the decisions she makes reflects this. How have her attributes grown and changed? I'm not really sure at this point. The only thing I'm sure about is that she loves her adopted children and will do anything for them. They bring out the mother in her that has been repressed for too long.

Posted by: gpstr Apr 9 2015, 06:58 PM

As but one example - Dawn the Breton. She uses magic and a claymore - mostly destruction and illusion magic for ranged attacks and crowd control, and a claymore up close. She has no need for the sort of limitations you insist on since she's already limited by the fact that she's splitting her time and energy between divergent skills. She'll never be as skillful with a sword as Jibran, for instance, who's never done anything but swing a sword, and she'll never be as skillful with magic as Tim, for instance, who never did anything but cast spells. The limits you believe necessary already exist solely as a function of the fact that time is finite and time spent doing one thing is time not spent doing another. And, more to the point, in your demand that some sort of unnecessary restriction be placed on characters, it's quite likely, just because this is "the way it's always been," that you would decree that she, as a "mage," can't use a claymore AT ALL. She'd be arbitrarily required to use a dagger, as if there's some sort of law of Nirnian physics that causes weapons bigger than that to literally leap from the hands of "mages." So she couldn't even exist.

Um... what?

If you say the former, you necessarily mean the latter. That's exactly the problem. If you say that "you, the player" must be compelled to do this and prevented from doing that, then you're not only saying that I must be so restricted, but that every single solitary person who might ever play the game must be so restricted. That's exactly the thing to which I object.

Well... actually, to some notable degree, for me, it does.

It's not a coincidence that I've played so many unusual characters - Altmer barbarians, Orc mages, Orc thieves, Breton tanks... I like playing against the grain, and specifically because I like the challenge of working out how to get this Orc to be a powerful mage in spite of the fact that he's less well-equipped to be a powerful mage than the Bretons and Altmer around him. I love the fact that my Altmer barbarian started out fragile and weak - that meant that he had to REALLY want to be a barbarian and had to REALLY work at it to succeed, while a Nord or an Orc could've just effortlessly cruised to the same end. His shortcomings, and his struggles to overcome them, are a huge part of his story and of his personality.

It's a basic rule of storytelling - the way you create an interesting story is to create a character, give him a goal, then put an obstacle in his way. The drama of the story comes from the things that need to be done in order to overcome the obstacle. With no obstacles, it's just a boringly straight path.

Now personally, I have no idea why anyone prefers complete blank slate characters. To me, that just means that there's no reason to even care about picking a race. With racial differences, I get to choose whether I want to play a mage from a race that's predisposed to magic and thus has an advantage and will become extremely powerful or a mage from a race that's not predisposed to magic and thus has to work that much harder to succeed. Without those differences, I get to choose whether my mage is yellow or green. That's it. The former pair of choices goes some considerable way toward defining the character and laying a foundation for his story. The latter pair of choices is ultimately meaningless trivia - there might as well just be one race and a skin tint slider.

I should note at this point that I think a whole lot of the problem (broadly - I make no claims about you personally) isn't really about the game at all - it's that the distinction is made in the context of "race," which triggers a basic gut-level reaction in people. I don't think it actually has anything at all to do with how the concept of racial differences affects the game, but is primarily just a fundamental discomfort with the notion that there might even be any notable differences between "races." And I can't help but wonder if this controversy would even exist if they were referred to as different species instead.

In any case, whether it makes sense to me or not, it's undeniable that that's how some people prefer that "race" define nothing more notable than skin color and ear pointiness. So that means that my ultimate RPG (I can't even say ultimate TES game, because that's so thoroughly inconceivable - Beth WILL NOT make any game even vaguely like that) includes attributes and includes racial/character presets that can be toggled/adjusted to the player's preferences, so those who want diversity and advantages and disadvantages can have them and those who want a broad sea of undifferentiated blank slates can have them. I'm not wholly comfortable with that, just because it would seem to invite balance problems to have to build a world around some potentially relatively broad range of choices there, but that's the best I can do. I think that sort of thing is vital - that fully-fleshed characters can't be defined solely by their skills - that, just like real people, they also have to have talents. Just like real people, they have to have things that they're innately talented or not talented at - things that they'll be able to do easily if they choose, and other things that they'll find difficult to do if they choose. If they have the exact same aptitude for everything as everyone else, then much of the pleasure I find in roleplaying is gone, just like that. That others don't share that pleasure is just something that needs to be worked around - I'm willing to accommodate that.

For the most part, I use a standard set of general purpose majors that are simply ones that increase slowly enough that I get to spend as much time as possible with the character before s/he becomes overpowered and boring - things like Mercantile and Restoration are ideal, since pretty much everyone uses them, but they increase very slowly.

I have to have some basic idea of what the character's going to do to survive, because some majors, and more significantly, their specialization, are going to depend on that. But it's not necessary to know much - I just need an idea of what type of melee weapons they'll use if any, what type of armor they'll wear if any and what type of spells they'll cast if any. It's only necessary to set things up so that they don't level too quickly but they aren't crippled either - basically, that just requires making sure that their important skills are either non-spec majors or spec minors. Beyond that, it generally works out - some struggle more than others to gain the skills they need, but that just becomes part of their story. And if all else fails - if a build just isn't working out - I use the console to retcon it. I just change their majors around as necessary, then edit their skills and attributes to match. That's pretty rare though - I've done it enough times now that I've got a pretty good feel for assigning majors and specialization so that the character can do anything within a fairly broad range and at least not be crippled and not level up so fast that they're uber after too few hours, and that's pretty much all I require as far as that goes.

Posted by: Destri Melarg Apr 9 2015, 09:54 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPw-3e_pzqU

To piggy back on hautee's point:

Just because I don’t yet know who my character will become doesn’t mean that I don’t know how he/she starts out. Like you I have a very clear image in my head of who my character is to start the game. I just go in knowing that the events of the game are going to change my character in ways that I can’t yet foresee.

The best characters change over the course of time. They take on new skills and discard old ones. Their attitudes evolve (or devolve, as the case may be) based on their experience. Look at the fan fics we all love on this forum. Buffy, Julian, Teresa, Maxical, Athlain, Jerric... they all have changed considerably over the course of their various stories. The character arc is one of the key elements of effective storytelling and, when you get right down to it, isn’t that what ‘role-playing’ is all about?


Believe me when I say that I know the basic rules of storytelling. And I like to play against type too. I love playing Redguard mages, Orc spies and Bosmer tanks. Nothing in Skyrim (which I assume we’re talking about because it’s the only game that starts you as a blank slate) prevents you from doing this. I find it interesting that you oppose restrictions while simultaneously calling for them. You decided the nature of the obstacles your characters had to overcome. The game was incidental in that decision... in fact, the game is merely the setting for the story you want to tell. If you want your Altmer barbarian to start off weak, then make him/her so. But you have no right to decide that my Altmer barbarian has to start off the same way.


And see I come at it from the exact opposite point of view. Every character starts as a blank slate, regardless of what starting skills or attributes the game determines you possess. Nothing that makes your character special or unique comes from within those starting attributes. Remember, all the values for those skills and attributes are going to change based on where you decide to take the character. I personally don’t need the game to determine something for me that I am comfortable determining for myself. I still come into the game knowing that Altmer are considered the best mages, Bosmer the best archers, and so forth. None of the racial norms/stereotypes have changed. My choice of race is still made acknowledging those differences, but I like being in control of determining for myself how successful/unsuccessful my Altmer barbarian can be without the game forcing it upon me.


First of all I thank you for making this distinction, even if it was unnecessary. I think we all on this forum have devoted an appropriate level of thought to this subject. Your arguments so far have been eloquent and extremely engaging to read. I don't believe you have to worry about offending, and I don't believe that you think my comments are some knee-jerk reaction based on the fact that some game developer thinks that black people are dumb.

If you only see the various races as a predetermined set of attributes and skills then I can see how you think there’s no reason to choose a race if all those attributes/skills start the same. But I think that misses the bigger picture. When I decide to play an Altmer the starting attributes, skills, and racial specials are completely irrelevant to me. I am choosing to play as a member of the first race to navigate the oceans and seas of Tamriel. I am choosing to play as a member of the race that gave all of Tamriel its language and science (not to mention its religion and magic). When I choose an Orc I keep in mind the founding of Orsinium and Boethiah’s harsh treatment of Trinimac. When I play a Bosmer I try to hold to the Green Pact and a healthy fear/respect for Y’ffre if my character hails from Valenwood. As a Redguard I wrestle with the conflict of Crowns versus Forebears and, now with Skyrim, the betrayal by the Empire when they signed the White-Gold Concordant. Race is more about viewpoint based on shared cultural experience than it is about pointy ears and yellow or green skin. That viewpoint doesn’t waver, even when everyone starts with the same attributes.


This is the first thing you have written so far that comes across as condescending and it is, quite frankly, beneath you.


And that is exactly what Bethesda did in Fallout 3. S.P.E.C.I.A.L are attributes that each player can tailor to his/her liking right before the player is given the option to select 3 skills to 'tag.'

Posted by: Winter Wolf Apr 11 2015, 01:51 AM

The one mistake I have made is that I came on this forum and started preaching 'character classes,' without defining what I actually mean by that. Somewhere everything got mixed up in the discussion about role play and the direction that the game should take.

My idea of classes is very similar to the way that Acadian demonstrated in the example above. Buffy takes certain skills out to 100 and others out to a lower value, and that is exactly what I would promote. Those values determine one class from another and is a way to prevent every character from becoming bland and uniform after you have either reached (or come close) to the level cap.

The system could look like this as an example-
Four specialist builds that take 5 skills out to 110 max. (fighter, magic-user, rogue and archer)
Then as many multi-class builds as the player can imagine that have 7 skills that have a 80 max.

All other skills not chosen would only be able to reach 25 (Apprentice level) and have to stop. Currently in Oblivion we can still level all minors, in fact, every skill out to 100. This is something I hate with just as much passion as you hate character classes.

The main difference between my design and the mod that Acadian uses is that I strongly maintain that a specialist character should always advance further than a jack-of-all-trades character, thus the skill level caps that I would use. Of course, Buffy is in many ways more extreme (and fun) in the example of character classes. She has her non-using skills sitting at only 15.

Dungeon and Dragons did have the rule that restricted use of many things, ie Clerics cannot use edged weapons, only thieves had back stab, magic-users could only use a dagger etc, and the reason for those rules was so that each player had a different character around the table. It would have been ridiculous to have 6 identical builds playing the same game at the same time.

Elder Scrolls is strictly a single player game so I see no reason to promote such rules. I would prefer to have the player have to tag 'blade' as a skill if they want to have it reach a high level. 110 for a specialist build, 80 for a multi-class character and only 25 if they have not chosen to tag it.

Other than that the player can player the game anyway that he desires.



Thanks for going to time to explain the way that you build the character. I did think it might be something along those lines.


Destri- I really like that you have pointed this out and it is something that does slip under the radar in the real world that we live in. At least by hopeless people like me who rarely get to see the world from another point of view. I do agree with the way that you see the starting game, as every race can have strong or weak, fat or skinny, fast or slow individuals, and it makes little sense to determine a set group of values to those individuals at the beginning.

This is partly the reason I will always see the end of a Beth as more important as the start. Oh how I hate having every skill hit 100 and a level cap approaching god-like status!

Posted by: bobg Feb 14 2016, 12:41 AM

I just got to this thread and the idea of defining what I really like in a game caught fire so here goes.

I need to preface this with a my simple philosophy about games. I think people play 1; for the bragging rights and 2; for the entertainment/escape value. Entertainment effects tend to wear off in time like watching a movie too many times. Bragging could be among friends but is mostly done in a forum or game-chat. I think the very best games offer some of both hence the popularity of games like WOW. The point being that yes, the numbers do matter but they shouldn't disrupt the roleplaying. That said, here's what I want.

Number one, above all else, it must be sandbox.

Overall, I liked the gameplay of Daggerfall best. I also preferred it's scale both in territory and dungeons. I liked it's were-beasts, it's faction vendettas, spell casting and weapons based on a combination of skill and chance.
Banking.
Making your own armor.

Morrowinds extensive MQ which took you in one direction at the start and then turned it all around by the end was truly epic. That's what I want in a quest. Otherwise, just let me discover things as I travel around.

Levitation; nuf' said.
Believable transport options.
Really nice smoky, sparkley, spell effects.

I want the best of graphics that pushes the rendering to it's max.
The excellence of Oblivions sound effects (with a few really lame exceptions).
Character animation that doesn't make them look like crash dummies. A good example of doing it right is the latest 'Witcher' game.
Interesting Companions that do a better job of traveling with you rather than trailing behind you.
Charming, elegant, cozy, or foreboding homes the PC can own.
The game must have a Construction set with the powers of the existing CS plus import/export capabilities to a range of current modeling programs such as 3Dmax, Maya, and Blender. This should include adding animations as well as meshes and textures to the game.

Years ago, there were voice simulation programs that sounded very good and could provide enough variety to give game characters their own unique voice. This has never been incorporated into a game but I want it.

AI, and AI, and more AI.

Posted by: ImperialSnob Apr 3 2017, 07:47 PM

Hand development over to Obsidian

Posted by: RaderOfTheLostArk May 5 2017, 02:41 PM

My ideal TES game is probably not feasible, but one of the main things I'd like to see is take the best out of what each game has to offer, with some tweaking and improvements. Some examples:

Arena:
-Number of miscellaneous magic items (i.e. amulets, belts, torcs, etc., not weapons or armor that can be enchanted)
-I'd like for some dungeons to be the length of those in Arena
-Bring back some of the creatures (e.g. lizard men and medusas) found in the game
-Include some of the deities from the game that have never or almost never have been mentioned since then

Daggerfall:
-A length of time passes before you can move up ranks in guilds; in Daggerfall, when you meet the requirements for a higher rank 28 in-game days had to pass before it was official (obviously not feasible in the later, scaled-down games, so I'd like for some ranks to have a 1-3 day waiting period before you rank up)
-Some services in guilds are restricted until you reach a certain rank; I'd like to see something similar applied to guilds in a new Elder Scrolls
-The character creation system (by the Nine, there is so much that can be done with that if it was brought back)

Morrowind:
-Variety of magic spells available
-Less reliance on markers (or better yet, allow for markers, a radius, and be given directions to where you need to go
-More methods of travel

Oblivion:
-Variety of miscellaneous quests (I personally felt that Oblivion did the best job in this regard)
-Pacing of the faction quests (also felt that Oblivion did this the best, for the most part)

Skyrim:
-The perk system, which I think has allowed for the best differentiation in characters' progress thus far
-Functionality of the spell system

Online:
-More emphasis on the culture of each province
-More utility to food and drink
-A lot of the elements of the crafting

Battlespire:
-I have played very little, but I know Battlespire shows some Daedric politics, which is really cool

Redguard:
-Obviously since it isn't an RPG and it has a set protagonist it is hard to come up with things that would translate well to TESVI, but I'd love for more lore on Cyrus

Can't speak on the mobile games because I'm not sure if they have anything to offer for a new TES game.

Posted by: ghastley May 5 2017, 03:52 PM

I have issues with the way that Daggerfall did character creation, but I agree that it could be the basis for a better one. The idea of trading weaknesses against strengths when creating the character is the right one, but they failed to link them, so you could pick weakness to paralysis, for example, at the same time as immunity to it. That would have been better on a slider, with immunity at one end. I'm not sure what belongs at the other end, though. Inability to move?

There are some attributes that are inherently binary, like waterbreathing. You either do, or you don't, and percentages don't make sense. These are perhaps the ones to distribute, one per race, as differentiating bonuses.

And by Race, I mean man, mer, cat, lizard, and maybe some new ones, rather than the artificial cosmetic ones we have now. These should also act as factions (although others should exist) with some inter-faction disposition consequences. It would be good if the edges of the races overlap a bit, with the ability to create an elf who passes for human, or vice-versa.

Morrowind's variety of transports was welcome, but its "walk everywhere, or you'll fail if you run" wasn't. It also made a few places hubs and thus diminished all the others. An expanded Mark/Recall that effectively let you add you own hubs was a popular mod, if only so you could go home to dump your loot.

In Oblivion, I found myself using the same "wait for it" style in my own mods. The way you get people to do all the quest lines is to make them wait for the next step in each, and look around for something to fill in the time. This was much better than Skyrim's tangling one quest line with another, so that you have to join the College to do the MQ, etc.

Skyrim's mechanics, such as the event-driven scripting and Radiant quests are a must for a mod-maker. I'd keep the choices of the perk system, but tone down the effects of the steps. Especially the sudden ability smith with a particular material.

Posted by: Decrepit May 7 2017, 09:03 PM

This topic is dangerous for me, as my "ideal" TES title is feasible only on a more advanced form of the Holodeck seen in the old TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'll throw out a few ideas that don't require so elaborate a setup. Even so, at least one is impossible with current PC horsepower, more are impossible or at least impractical on console, and one is might be highly unpopular.

World Size: Daggerfall got it right. If we're talking "ideal", this is a must for me.

World "composition" (for lack of a better term): In Minecraft, the entire world is composed of squares or derivatives thereof. These "building blocks" can, for the most part, be manipulated by the avatar. My ideal TES title needs this too. Only, the basic Minecraft "block" is half the size of the avatar, far too large to realistically represent a great many things. I'd compromise and settle for building blocks the size of grains of sand. I'd make it so the avatar can manipulate these "blocks" only in a realistic limited manner so that, for instance, an avatar can not chop down trees with his or her bare hands. My thought is that an avatar should be able to, say, take shovel to ground and see it response realistically with dirt flying at each dig. A game world the size of Daggerfall, composed of sand-grain size nodules, is the demand I see as impossible for now, even on high-end consumer PCs.

Fast Travel: Here's my unpopular stance. In a game world the size of Daggerfall, I'd abolish the sort of "casual" fast travel seen in Oblivion and implement a more limited system. My thought is that fast travel should be confined to sanctioned teleport authorities, along with clandestine "shady" practitioners available to those who choose a "dark" path. Teleport service comes at a cost, which can be quite steep depending on distance traveled (and the agency one deals with). On the other hand, those required to travel long distances in the execution of official duty can obtain "passes" from an authority allowing free travel to specific task related destinations. (The game might also have other forms of fast transport such as Morrowind’s Silt Striders, but these would travel in real-time at whatever speed is realistic for them, as do Oblivion/Skyrim horses.)

Jobs: My ideal TES entry would sport a wide variety of “meaningful” career professions the avatar could avail him or herself of if they so choose. Road Patrols provided by the Oblivion mod “The Elder Council” are an obvious and fairly simple to implement example, as are its embryonic tax gathering assignments. These need more sophistication, but if properly implemented can provide avatars with lifetime work. Again, this are examples only. There should be a great wealth of professions of all sorts.

Guild Leadership: Of the five TES entries, I prefer Daggerfall’s advancement mechanics and mundane quest assignments, along with Oblivion’s story-line quests. An avatar should not be offered leadership position within a guild unless meaningful responsibility comes with the title. (These would then fall under Jobs.) If leadership is offered, avatars’ should be able to opt out for whatever reason.

I’d like to see more survival/immersive/Sim-like elements added. Heck, Minecraft’s food/health maintenance/recovery mechanic is a cut above what TES provides. (While not ideal, I wouldn’t mind a mod that implements that exact mechanic in Oblivion. Don’t know that I’d install it, but I’d be tempted. Yes, I know similar mods are available. None excite me enough to want them in my load order.)

Better / more realistic Melee Combat: Why not? Kingdom Come: Deliverance looks at if it will prove that this is possible, though it itself isn’t perfect by any means.

I’ve been giving much thought to timescale, but that’s a whole other topic.

I’m losing my train of thought, not that I had much of one to start with. Better call it quits.

Posted by: SubRosa May 7 2017, 10:14 PM

I think the ultimate TES game would be coded by some company other than Bethesda.

Posted by: RaderOfTheLostArk May 8 2017, 02:26 PM

Oh, absolutely on Daggerfall. It wasn't perfect by any means, but due to the variety of things you could do with it and the depth I thought that had the best character creation in TES, at least in concept. Building off of that would be welcome to see. But along with refining strengths/weaknesses, the division of major/minor skills, etc., I'd like to see at least some of this to be at least mostly optional, if not completely. If somebody does not want to deal with the details of their character and make them completely average, let them. If you want to add flavor and spice things up by tweaking the minutiae, go for it. That's a general overview of what I'd like to see from character creation.

I still wish for fast travel mechanics to be kept, but have enough "natural" means of transportation to be able to cater to a wider variety of players. I like having the multiple means of transportation, but sometimes I'm just lazy and want to fast travel. Having mark and recall back would add some more variety, and through perks you could even set 2 or 3 marks to recall to.

I have some ideas for smithing, but that is a topic for another time.




Part of me does want a world the size of Daggerfall. That was part of that game's charm. In the interest of feasibility, I'd rather keep the scaled-down, heavily detailed worlds of Morrowind onward.

Regarding your jobs paragraph, something I'd really love to see is more guilds and a wider variety of them including brand-new ones. As an avid history lover, I'd love for an historical guild of sorts that delves into the past of the province that we are in.

And for guild leadership, I agree on the optional part. It should not be an office thrust upon the player and there is nothing they can do about it. But if the player wants it, they should be able to have it. Obviously if it was realistic they would have a lot of responsibilities to attend to, but in the interest of fun (it is a video game after all) I'd rather these be toned down and/or optional.

Posted by: Decrepit May 9 2017, 01:46 AM

I hear this argument between size and detail quite often, but don't buy in to it, especially as we're talking "ideal". My ideal TES title would be both Daggerfallesque is size and richly detailed, its graphics quality at least on par with Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Posted by: RaderOfTheLostArk May 9 2017, 08:28 PM

Fair enough. I was just trying to come up with what is most ideal to me but was still in the realm of what is likely currently technologically possible. But I digress.

I wish we could have a mix of Arena and Daggerfall in terms of scope. All the cities and main quest locations from Arena (if lore-wise are still standing, in the same place, etc.) would be available, and then jam-packed with locations like in Daggerfall, and each province has a scope similar to High Rock and Hammerfell in Daggerfall. We would also have multiple modes of transportation and fast travel, but if you wanted to you could travel on foot to each location. A couple things I wish we could have seen in Skyrim is the Fortress of Ice from Arena and some lore on what exactly happened to the Arena city of Snowhawk. I really appreciate how Online has some main quest locations from Arena (e.g. Crypt of Hearts, Selene's Web). I'd also like to see the ruins of Crystal Tower, and what a modern-day version of the Adamantine Tower is like now. All of this is graphically at least on par with Skyrim or Online.