Hi everyone, It has been some time since I last was on here. For those of you who are new to reading my suggestions, there are two sections of the suggestion. The first is the short version of the suggestion; skip to this if you do not enjoy reading. The second is the detailed version which contains what the suggestion may be like, how it might be implemented and possible features or beneficial side effects from it.

First of all glad to be back, I live in Alabama so as you can imagine it has been difficult around here for a spell. If you have not heard of me on here, I am a long time poster since morrowind. I have been banned a couple times and with much effort was able to come back thanks to rohugh. I often make suggestions for realism and variety. I was one of the ones responsible for Fallout New Vegas’s hardcoe switch, its thermite mission, and other smaller suggestions that got through. Though not all of mine are gems, every now and then a guy gets lucky.

Now if you would like to add to the suggestion please post your thoughts, I will be changing the suggestion based on feedback. If you want to say why it shouldn't be put in like the usual suspects of time delay, money spent better elsewhere, blah blah blah. Go ahead. Though let me remind you from what we have read from the magazines and saw from the videos most of the problems have been fixed so it is becoming difficult to come up with these suggestions.
Short Hand Version

Add a substantial increase to animations, ambient noise, conversations, singing, traveling, and other elements that bring the world alive.

Detailed Version
I attempted to think of a suggestion that was time saving, yet would add a tremendous boost to the game. You walk through the walls of a town, there is a load screen. How can you combat this? In 2007, when Bioware’s Mass Effect came out they disguised load screens with elevators. Since TES takes place sometime during the medieval era, elevators are impossible but this technique could be used. As you enter the city walls you notice the guards at the gate. They have been on the lookout for smugglers and escaped prisoners so they are searching everyone for illegal contraband and comparing faces to wanted posters. The officer promises you it would only be a moment. As your being searched, you hear your two companions talking about the security as you watch the officer check your bags. He signals you through and all the while you had no idea everything was loading. This is but one instance. Caves could be solved with a larger entrance, houses that are small, just have it load as you walk up to the house if it’s in the country, if in a city setting it presents more of problem and the disguise needs to be thought out for each instance.

Animations and places have been implemented to show you how they survive in the world. There are still some animations and places that can be added to make the environment seem more real. On the note of places we are not entirely sure that Skyrim will have farms, fishermen, and hunters because all of this was more of a New Vegas deal which was made by obsidian. So I am only going to assume they will. When you walk into a village now they actually have jobs, so you will see citizens making tools, wood crafting, mining, fishing, farming, cleaning, scavenging, and what other jobs Bethesda was able to think of, but you will also be able to do these things for money. Hopefully you can walk into these towns and see someone cleaning the streets, gathering wood to stoke the fire, someone stoking that same fire, the black smith working on the metal that was mined from the nearby mine, the carpenter who made the homes and wood handles, that all can be traced back to the town. This shouldn’t be all though only to give you a picture.

One thing that also might help is to see people traveling, not just caravans, legion, and merchants, but people. Seeing carriages, people riding horseback, pilgrims, and so on, to see them walking the roads and later in the town is an improvement.

Something I have rarely seen in games is singing, as you may or may not have known singing with workers in the past was big, especially with slaves. It is a sign up culture which as you know is a sign of civilization. Nothing crazy, maybe the black smith hammering away at horseshoes singing the song his mother taught him.

Conversations were in oblivion, we think they were taken out because it was annoying to hear them so frequently and always about un-realistic conversations. Typically in a town especially a small one you would hear gossip but for the most part they would talk about being short of food, or some other problem they have. They might talk about their family as well. I doubt you would walk up to your friends and hear them talking about how they need someone to kill rats in their basemant. They had a fine idea, but they gave up on it entirely.

Facial expressions need to be on par with the competition. Bioware has done the best on this with their conversations and such, but Bethesda’s isn’t too bad but it could use improvement now. Have you ever seen the tears in the eyes of a widow who is looking for her husband and is desperately pleading to you to find her husband? Who for whatever reason wondered off into a cave. Have you ever seen someone grimace in pain as they struggle with a crippled limb (if it’s in TES)? Well no, you typically see their faces bobbing around not making much emotion. The emotional draw on TES and Bethesda stories have generally been lacking. This would be a start.
While perusing the mods I located a mod for fallout 3 that gave names to everyone in the town of ‘Megaton’. Well I think this is a great idea and should be spread to the vanilla games. It adds a little more life to the game. It is odd to have some that have names and some just worthless to where they don’t even get to have one. It seems fairly easy to have a random name generator. Another improvement to this would be to not have a name listed to people you do not know in conversations. So if you had never been to a town before you would need to interact with that person to learn their name then it would show up. Sometimes a name will change during gameplay, but the text name that comes up does not change. The only instance where this was fixed was in New Vegas ‘Dead Money’ DLC the companion dog and god.

Animations are lacking in Bethesda games due mostly to the fact that they simply don’t have the time to get them in. Like when you are looking at you’re pipboy and turning the dials and you do not see fingers turning them they just turn but you know someone is there. From opening doors, taking injections, eating food, picking up desirables, and simply fatigue, there is no animation. It certainly is not top priority but nothing in this suggestion is. It only makes the game look better and improves immersion. You can tell that they know this, in fallout 3 they added animation for drinking water. So you know they think about it. A way to get around this is to disguise it. Like the journal where you pick out what you want to wear and so on. I look at the inventory and think of what could be though. I have a suggestion for this later so keep looking out for the name Christopher making suggestions.

The HUD was the last thing I can think of to add to this suggestion. Bethesda has done a beautiful job with allowing us to make the HUD completely invisible if we wanted to. After I got my computer and bought NV, I didn’t know the capabilities you could do with this. First off start with the camera, you are in a POV type camera or first person. This is a famous Bethesda characteristic really. It can be improved though. Making the camera seem more like you are looking through eyes would help, like when you are running have it slightly bob. When you are tired, high, drunk, crippled, or whatever state you are in have them affected adversely. It might be hard to fight if you were drunk, right? Have the character mimic these effects. After this has been taken care of the HUD something militaries are dreaming for their soldiers, tells you everything you need to know. Your HUD tells you when you are dehydrated, monitors your limbs, tells you your health in a bar measuring system based out of points. Your HUD is your baby, but you do not always need it up. It would be nice to see when you’re walking and your weapon is holstered you have no helmet on, for there to be no HUD. Then as you progress get your first Helmet, put it on, and you take out your weapon, and the HUD pops up telling you all this. Maybe your helmet might also have effects too it as well, such as night vision, infrared, and so on. The moment you holster your weapon, the HUD fades to 25% (optimization possible) opacity. Then when you’re thinking about putting on a helmet you think twice about which one is better and stop looking at these stats. Of course all of that should be in options because many don’t mind having it or cannot play without it.


Thank you for reading -Christopher

to be continued. . .

you should check out L.A. Noire's facial animations. they're jaw dropping to say the least.


I really agree with trying to mesh the loading screens under something. waiting on loading screens doesn't really bother me, but it really does break the immersion a little. i think it would be harder in a game like Skyrim than in other titles we've seen (Assassin's Creed, ME), but it would be an appreciated attention to detail nonetheless

Yes but I find where the quality of the facial animations have increased incredibly in L.A Noire they make the hiccups seem worse and make them much bigger discrepancies than they would be normally, of course L.A Noire was the first attempt at such Tech so this is inevitable but once Devs get used to this stuff then faces will be 100% Awesome!

Well I will have to check that out then. I just realized I forgot to put a poll on this lol.

The witcher 2 does a good job with hiding loading screens. A really obvious, but clever IMO, example is in chapter 2. To walk into henselt's war camp you walk through one door and enter a sort of killzone(if the enemy got through the first gates) then just walk to the next door. I suspect that during this 5 extra seconds of opening two doors it loads up the whole fort behind you. The open door animations are a perfect opportunity to use to load, then as your in the killzone and walk 5 feet to the other open door animation.

Edit: for houses they should get rid of the load screen when loading. In oblivion it would pop up then disappear a second later. I'd rather it just turned black for that one second while it loaded. Plus whatever it takes to load the load screen can be used to load the actual house/building(obviously it's a small but still). I'm not sure how long the load is for xbox/ps3 but if it's anything close to pc (one or two seconds or three) then do it for them too.

I suspect skyrim will have walls around cities as a defensive measure, so having the small killzones is logical and true to how they would have been built(seeing as a wooden door is the weakest link). I'm not sure if consoles can load up that fast or not, I suspect not, but I'm sure they could have us enter and come upon a smaller area of a town/city, with a building blocking other areas views, and they could just keep loading as we walk towards that area. If done right we would never realize its happening.

With consoles you have to clear your cache every week or so and download the game and it runs fantastic then. But yeah I haven't played that yet either. I am going to get that one though. I loved the elevators in me1 though. Everyone complained so they took it out rather then just make the ride shorter.

BUMP

I added a good bit to the suggestion involving the HUD, animations, and NPC names.