As the question says, would you rather have improved combat or better immersion like better quests, more interesting npcs, better guild factions?

I would like a game that played like skyrim but had better quests and guilds. I think the combat overhaul from oblivion to skyrim came at the cost of the immersion oblivion had compared to skyrim.

Better immersion, hands down!!!

Yeah I agree with the OP. I would rather for the next game, that they spent little to no time on newer better graphics and combat (id be happy with what we got in skyrim), and focused most their effort on guilds, side quests, spells/magic, weapons/armour and guilds (had to say it again, cus seriously, they dropped the ball on this with skyrim big time).

I would like to see both on the next generation. But if i had to choose one i would choose better immersion.

A focus on immersion.

Skyrim felt shallow. Morrowind feels like I'm making a difference.

And Oblivion should have given us the lesser power of making cheese rain from the sky once you become the Mad God.

I have to go with Better combat. While I like better Immersion, TES still needs better combat. I do enjoy the combat in Skyrim but it's a joke when you compare it to Dragon's Dogma or Dark Souls.

If I had to choose one it would be better immersion,

Fortunately I don't because there is no reason for them to be mutually exclusive.

Given one or the other, I'd pick Immersion without a moment's hesitation. In a real-world situation, I think both need some work, and Bethesda can afford to improve both, but I'd prefer that the vast majority of the development work goes into the non-combat end of it.

Ultimately, I play TES games for their unique and detailed worlds, not for their storylines or combat systems. If the world is mediocre and boring, I'm not going to slog through it just to generate fights.

If I cared more about combat than immersion I probably wouldn't play TES games at all.

Every time I hear people say they want better combat I get scared. Because by better, I'm afraid Bethesda will think they mean faster, like hamsters on meth, with "cinematic" florishes and wild leaps and swings and rolls and giant weapons with sparklies. And I hate that. Now if by "better" they mean more like Mount & Blade where your shield actually stops damage but gets tattered and then breaks, you can feint, you can make a high looping strike, or a low one to get around a shield, or shatter it with an axe - and most important - there is a speed slider for combat which slightly changes how fast everything moves so those of us with aging reflexes can tune the response curve to our liking, then I would say better combat. But since I don't trust any developer to make combat that is better for me, I say, keep the combat we've got, which I actually like, and go with more immersion.

I don't see why Bethesda cannot strive to aim for both.

An improved combat system is only one requirement out of many that must be fulfilled in order to create better immersion.

To me, combat is an obstacle to what the game is really about, exploring and uncovering the story, it is not a focus for me.

So, Immersion, but that is not really a problem in these games, that aspect is pretty well handled.

So, just give more quests, and make them deeper with more choices on how to handle them and the outcome.

If you have to put it that way, immersion all the way!

I disagree, the Souls series for example is just as immersive and athmospheric as Morrowind is, and it focuses on combat.

I do however agree that the immersion is would makes the main series TES games great, not the combat, so Bethesda shouldn't focus on combat. And I absolutely agree that the immersion in TES games is already great.

Imagine a TES spinoff in the style of Dark Souls, playing a sole Daedroth on some mission. The kind of athmosphere invoced by combat heavy games like that would fit the Realms of Oblivion perfectly.