its not that we're too late about it being made...we're hitting them early with what they could add into it in the future but we shouldn't worry about it because I believe Todd Howard's ambitions about this game are so great and that this might be one of the greatest games ever made...we'll have to wait and see if he his true to his actions and words...i'm already envisioning the moment I get home January 6 and look in my mailbox for that Gameinformer issue with a plethora of information haha

then why dont the vanilla women in new Vegas have giant boobs and full nudity with all Armour being replaced by skimpy outfits?

This sounds logic to me. And in any case, with a million different request/views etc, how can you please everybody and if they started to listen to one but not the other this place would explode.

Earlier suggestions will have had an impact. Take level scaling in Oblivion. There were lots of complains about it from the users on the forums (it was never mentioned in most popular reviews and such), and the system got an overhaul for Fallout 3. Conversations in Oblivion were mostly meaningless, they made them better in Fallout 3 too.

Any major suggestions made now, less than a year before release, are not going to make much of a difference. They're not going to overhaul the whole combat system anymore. At most they might notice that they forgot something that would be easy to implement and that makes a lot of sense (deleting spells) but other than that this forum is mostly a place for excited players to vent all their ideas.

Game developers with a userbase as large as Bethesda's aren't in a position to turn their own ideas into products within their most important and successful established franchise, no. With a new franchise? Maybe. But when a series is as big and as important to a developer's success as this one is, they can't afford to just do as they please. The business simply doesn't work that way.

And Bethesda in particular doesn't work that way. Their focus seems to be on two things: trying to broaden the audience for their products as much as possible without alienating their core fanbase, and trying to correct the issues people see in their games. The issues they're trying to fix are specifically from feedback they've received from their customers, and that feedback includes these forums. The intent on broadening their audience, to a fair degree, informs the approach they take in trying to fix said issues. All of this is pretty apparent in Oblivion: Morrowind's combat system, the difficulty of the game (either for being too easy or too hard, often because players would get in over their heads early on or would play it far too safe until everything was a bit of a joke for them), certain quests involving exceptional difficulty in finding things, the overall quest design, excessive amounts of forced wandering during many of the quests, the horrendously bad (read: almost nonexistent) stealth system, the gray-and-brown look of the game, the lifeless dialog and poor persuasion system, statue-like NPCs, downright silly lockpicking... these were all major points of criticism for the game, and things that came up the most among people who enjoyed Morrowind. So Bethesda's response involved completely overhauling the combat, introducing level scaling to try and control the game's difficulty on a bit of a broader scale, introducing a compass that more or less constantly tells the player exactly where to go, focusing on fewer quests with far more complex game design involved in them, introducing a fast travel system that could get you where you were going near-instantly at almost any point in time, introducing a full light-based stealth system, bringing it to a fairly typical fantasy setting filled with bright and vivid colors, voicing every character and introducing a minigame to make persuasion more involving, using an AI scheduling system to make NPCs actually move about and do things, and introducing another minigame to handle lockpicking (again, in an attempt to make it more involving). You can see them doing similar things with Fallout 3 - things like the minigames were made a little more interesting and believable and a little less impactful and exploitable because they were a major issue people had with Oblivion, they introduced nav meshes because of complaints to do with Oblivion's pathfinding, and they scaled back things like the fast travel, the quest compass, and the level scaling pretty significantly. I could even pull further back and go into detail about how Morrowind handled criticisms of Daggerfall in a similar way, but... well, this post is long enough.

Do Bethesda take significant game ideas from their forums? No. Absolutely not. But they absolutely do monitor the input they receive on their games, both here and elsewhere, and from what I can tell that seems to be the primary driving factor in a very, very large number of their decisions (and maybe even in most of them). If a large enough amount of people complain about the omission of a feature then they will often introduce that feature, and if a large enough amount of people complain about something about their games not being up to snuff then they will almost always tweak and modify that something in an attempt to fix it. This is one of the very few reasons I still bother to follow the company and buy their games.

Yes, I think some people try to hard to come up with ideas. Then other people agree which makes Bethesda include them. We should just shut up and wait to see what they do, they make the game.

At this point in the development, very little.

That doesn't mean they haven't noticed suggestions and ideas from Oblivion until now. A lot of the changes in Oblivion were things that people brought up on the forum. They didn't always work out the way people hoped, but they made changes. Horses, level scaling more obvious than Morrowind, skill requirements for advancing in a guild are a few I can think of off-hand. Since the ideas for TESV started right after they released Oblivion, there was time for the devs to see the threads in the forums. What they included we'll have to wait and see.

Wow, what a great post. I completely see it this way too. You have great insight into game design philosophy. Great sum up of Morrowind's flaws too (which you far too seldom hear on these forums since the majority of the hardcoe fans here coming from Morrowind were disappointed by Oblivion, unlike me).

I very much doubt that suggestions will be or have been completely ignored. Some would be impossible or unrealistic to implement, while others easier. Some suggestions added to the game may conflict with other suggestions made by forum goers, not every one can be pleased but I have faith that Bethesda would only pick good suggestions that enhance the game.

If anything I'm worried that they listen too much.

So, so many stupid ideas :yucky:

YES!

I certainly hope gamesas hasn't listened to a single one of our own ideas.

Can u pls list a few noticeable ones? Really, I have never followerd forums, aside from Bioware's excellent Neverwinter Nights and Heroes of Might and Magic 3 Community from some arrogant french/russian (whatever).

btw, my first impression is some few ppl r tasked to check the forums occasionally, and report nay interestingness to "da main man of coputers" at B.

Well I'm still hopefull, at least in dlc, that they'll add a realm of oblivion inhabitited only by beautiful redhead elves :celebration:

There's more than that for Oblivion, there's another huge list of things they changed based on fan criticism of Daggerfall, and there's more going into Fallout 3 as well... but you get the idea.

Hasn't the suggestion thread been up for like 3 years?

Many thx, it is good to know that what we do here, provided it be in a civilised / constructive way, *may* be taken in consideration.

Don't you use logic against me, I will cling to my delusions and pretend the devs read everything I say and take me very seriously.

Well, yes, I was talking more specifically at this point in development. I see threads like "How should combat play in Skyrim?" popping up and I think to myself, "Trying to a change to the combat system this late in development is awfully futile. Maybe for TES VI, though that would probably be an expanded or modified version of the combat system of TES V."

I am hopeful that they won't listen too much to community input. I'm glad they waited til they were further along to even announce it. Besides, if you don't like something, mod it.

I'm worried we might have too much impact!

With some of the outlandish stuff people ask, or the over the top amount of cuustomization it could become a feature creep. I think the devs know this and will take it all with a grain of salt though.

I trust them to make a quality game. Its not like they're ignorant of past games or competitor games - they do play them after all. If there are flaws they deem "fixable" or things that need tweaking they'll do it if they can. I don't expect them to listen to you or me though - most of our complaints and concerns are either pretty trivial or pretty ridiculous.

I'm sure Bethesda has been keeping a VERY VERY VERY long list of suggestions tucked away somewhere that they have collected over the years and still add to today. There are always a ton of suggestions floating around and I'm sure the developers read most of them and at least writes down the better ones. Will most of them ever make it to the game? Of course not... but that doesn't mean they don't read them. You have to understand that a "radical idea" is quite often not something that can easily be dropped into a well established game design. For example, some of the suggestions for changing leveling and combat I've seen in the last few days could possibly require massive re-designs of the entire game that would take months to pull off (assuming the game is sticking close to Oblivion's gameplay). Something like that, no matter how good, has absolutely no chance of getting picked up and used in the game at this point. It might be kept in the idea bank for future projects, but a drastic change to the current game design is highly unlikely at this (or any) stage once the design document is finished.

It should also be noted that the most input the developers listen to is likely right after a game is released (in this case Oblivion). They likely take note of the feedback on new (and old) features and keep track of what was popular and what wasn't and use that for the starting point. However, while the developers listen to the community and do from time to time add user suggested ideas... its their game, and at the end of the day what THEY feel is best is whats going to happen. Major suggestions made now, and shortly after release have a far better chance of changing THE NEXT game then the current one. To be honest though, the majority of the suggestions I've seen flooding the forum lately haven't been very good... or have been far too drastic that have any chance of being added. Small suggestions at this point are the only thing that have a real chance to be adopted, and they would have to be really really good ideas.

Side Note: The vast majority of things suggested, have probably either been:

1. Thought of by Bethesda already.

2. Suggested countless times before. I know everyone wants to think their idea is super amazing and original... but the odds are its not.

All I want is a map that is the size of the united states, has 100% unique landscape wherever you go, has 525,123 completely unique dungeons, at least 1.5 million people all with unique names and backstories and 383,912 quests that are all exciting from beginning to end. Also cliffracers.

The bulk of the game's features will be decided from the start when they're first beginning production. They have to come up with a budget at that point, and everything, down to the smallest beer mug the design and put in the game, costs money. They have to look at these things practically, and derailing an entire train of production so they can implement something some faceless people on a forum suggested is highly, highly unlikely. To do so would require rescheduling, shifting responsibilities, and possibly delaying the final product. No, the majority of our advice that they will heed will be the negative feedback they received from Oblivion and FO3 (in the reviews and common critiques that have come from them in the years since their release). If they're a good set of devs (and I believe they are) then you may see some of the broad suggestions put forth here inspire a feature or two (maybe a quest, item, NPC or landmark). But don't expect anything drastic to happen because of any single person's idea.