Kind off sidewinder side topic:
One aspect I do wish they'd change more in general is that most characters are based on the idea they're -20 or so.
If I have to be called, child, kid, boy, girl, young'un, sprout, sprat, youth, bairn, tot.. etc again in a game I'll scream.
It's fine if I made a character in their early 20's but not when I stick to 30's ish or older.
I ain't in never never land, and my name's not Peter.

I can certainly relate to that one. I like to play as if I am actually my character interacting with the game world, but I'm certainly no pimple-faced kid striking off on his own for the first time in his life. That's one thing that bugged me in Fallout, people in the game were always calling me "kid". While at 54 I'm a bit old to be off fighting monsters and such, I can certainly relate to playing someone who's about 30. Certainly more than I can with someone who's only 18.

I despised this mechanic in Fable and its one of the major things that stopped me from even exploring Fable 2 and 3. By the time I had done everything I wanted to do and settled to finish the main quest and get married, my character was over 60. The game didn't even feel like that many years had passed. I'd just be a couple years older the next time I came to town. But bless Peter Molenieux for trying to "simulate" EVERYTHING. I swear if they let that man have his way he'd turn dying of dysentery into a cheesy click-timing mini-game.

Anyway... where was I? Ah yes... aging. As poorly as I'm sure Fable handled the mechanic, I'm not convinced Bethesda can do any better. No slight against Bethesda, I just think its difficult to tell a story that takes place over a 50+ year timeline.

And if it should pass that Bethesda does try such a mechanic, I'll simply start playing elves and such a timeline will be trivial.

One 24-hour day is, according to Oblivion's time-scale (30:1), 30 days in Nirn, so roughly 12 full days of playing the game would be one year in Nirn-time. So if you play for a year (total), that's roughly 30 years nirn-time. So yes, this would be cool, if every 30 in-game days the age slider goes up a tick, fun stuff.

I don't think I'd want this unless they were able to implement it really well. I also admit I normally put alot of time into my character's creation, and with Oblivion's slider age system or Oblivion Vampirism, my character's appearance can really get screwed up. So I'd need to see how the aging affects my original character before supporting this, but generally wouldn't want my character becoming disfigured by age or dying of natural causes during the game.

I don't want to spend hours making a perfect face just for it to be ruined with wrinkles and liver spots.

No.

It's definitely an interesting idea... but if the player character is getting older, it would only make sense for all the NPCs in the game to get older too. There are even supposed to be children in Skyrim... should they also gradually get older? It's easy to make a generic NPC age, but a child would have to gradually grow through the teen years and slowly become an advlt. I certainly like this idea, but I don't think Skyrim's NPCs will be quite that advanced. This may have worked with Fable, but it's easier to make their NPCs grow and age because they're no where near as detailed as the NPCs of Skyrim.

Getting old would be problematic. If you think about it, Oblivion is a great example of what would happen. (Note: Time would have to progress faster, or you can't even age at all."

"Go give the Amulet of Kings to Jauffre!"
:2 months later:
:Priory Destroyed by Cult:

"You must find the heir!"
:5 months later:
:Heir turns up dead:

"We must stop the Necromancers from destroying the Mages' Guild!"
:8 months later:
:Mages' Guild Annihilated:

Indeed, most players aren't going to be playing the game for long enough in in-game terms for aging to have any noticable impact if it occurs at any realistic rate, and having unrealistically fast aging would be far more unrealistic than having no aging, seeing as if aging was done at a realistic rate, you probably wouldn't notice it, added to that, even if the game DID last long enough for aging during gameplay to have an impact, that doesn't mean I want it to, because I agree with what BoSStealthAgent said, I don't want to work hard to get the character I want only to have my creation ruined by the effects of aging, though I don't just mean that for cosmetic aspects, as realistically speaking, aging should also effect your character's abilities, and I don't want to have a powerful character I developed by investing hundreds of hours into the game to suddenly start getting weaker only because of the effects of age. Further, in-game aging would actually penalize players who want to make older characters, as the older your character, the less time you have before the effects of aging start to negatively impact your character's abilities, best to set your age as low as possible, so that your character can have a longer lifespan, which in this case may be meant literally if dying of old age is also incorporated, and I'd rather have age remain a cosmetic or role-playing choice, such as it is now.

In short, aging may seem like a realistic idea, but unless it's the Sims, I don't think it's really needed or even wanted in a game, and, well, if I was looking to play the Sims, I'd be posting on a website devoted to that series, not the Skyrim forums.

Yes, Daggerfall to Oblivion the games did not last that long in game, Daggerfall was probably multiple years in-game but only because of the long distances, some fast travelling might take over a week.
However 2-3 years is not enough to age the character visible asuming he is around 20 years.

Best option is to allow to change the characters look in game.

That is a very good idea Zaria.
For everything I may dislike about DA:2's approach to rpg's the fact they gave an in game face editor to tweak appearance was a great idea.
I hope Skyrim allows one such tool as well, that way anyone could Roleplay age changes.
Then physically implement them based on how many quests they've done and areas explored..

er sorry about this i know you posted this a while ago but i thought redguard were men not mer or am I just being a spanner? but anyway i think an in-game facial editor would be nice for those who want to age their characters but no to your character actually dieing of old age

This should ofcourse be optional. It seems noone is to hot on the idea of dieing on natural causes, which i myself think would be a laugh, but haricots verts. I do just think the longevity of a character would make them more interesting, but the way you get older is the thing that seems to be coming to most scrutiny here, and to those i say Va te faire foutre, trouduc.

They should do it one way or the other, but definitely NOT optional. Either the storyline progresses over a substantial timeline or it doesn't.

Dont let my wife hear you calling her that lol

Seriously now ........... I think as has been mentioned previously that time passes so slow that even with my 200+ hours into a single character in oblivion there were only a max of 2 years that have passed in game, so an aging mechanism within the game would be pretty pointless IMO

I like the idea of retiring, but in a way that ends the game. At the end of fallout you get all those things telling you what you did over the course of the game. I think you should maybe have the option to retire whenever you want, which ends the game for you and does a brief description of your life and adventures in a similar style to fallout. Of course if you wanted to go back on you could just load up a previous save.

Yeah, that's really the wall infront of the idea. I was really hoping someone would come up with a creative solution to that problem, but 'creative' criticism rather seems to be alot of people's game. So dunno, just saying 'speed up da time' is lazy but its pretty much i best i got so far.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't characters age (at an accelerated rate) in Oblivion?

I set my Dunmer at the youngest setting at the beginning, and by my 100th hour of play or so he had accumulated some definite wrinkles.

dont think that i would care to see aging in the game but i do think it would be cool if as you went through battles and your armor became more and more "broken" or w/e....if for certain levels of brokenness your armor and weapons gained battle scars to some effect. Not sure if that is even that similar to aging though lol

You say you're going for realism, and then in the same breath mention your character getting old.

It is about as devoid of realism as possible for your character to get old while everyone else stays the same.

Obviously this is something that isn't worth solving, since I think we can safely say making everyone including all vitally important characters age would require new skins new voices, new everything.

Additionally it would be strange if they didn't eventually die, so what would they suddenly stop at old age? Why not have them stop where you make them?


Wouldn't you be annoyed if you carved out some awesome character and he died so you could never play him? What about how nimble he is? If his skin cells are aging why wouldn't his muscle cells be aging? At about 40 should the characters abilities degrade as well to replicate the age?



Too many problems. Maybe in few more generations of games. Or in a different game series.

even if people played enough for their character to age... i doubt many people would like it.

people people create a character young, wanting them to be young... like, what if we make a character who is supposed to be immortal? it'd kinda break that roleplaying immersion if we see em growing old and dropping dead of old age! :facepalm:

look, keep the real-time aging to fable... this is the elder scrolls, we're supposed to be able to play what we want... and i think more people would rather choose their characters' age and stay in that age, than watch every character they make drop dead for no reason at some point during gameplay.

Too many problems with what you say buddy. You should try reading the original post before you get your fingers nimble and your head rushing with amazing put downs. Speaking of which.

I didn't mention it, but i kinda thought it was pretty self explanatory that everyone else would get old. Sometimes logic can interfere with your ability to flame though, i get that.

Didn't you read the bit about dieing?

Well, realistically you would have probably finished the majority of things you wanna do by the time your heart packs up or whatever. I mean the main reason people are saying they don't want it is becuase time would be slow.

I did not flame you, at any point. I addressed this issue by stating that it would take a vast some of resources to age everybody in the World. It is implicit in this post that I feel this would detract wholeley from the more important aspects of the game.


It's fair enough that I didn't read your post and I apologise for that. I get that you are asking for solutions, but the problems I suggest nevertheless, are still problems.