What about keeping the oblivion spell system BUT spells aren't instant. I.e casting a Master LVL fireball might take 30 seconds while a weak fireball would only take 3 seconds. That way, not only would you need to worry about the cost of the spell, but the time it takes to cast. You may not want to spend 30 seconds casing when surrounded by Order Knights and are low on health, because it would make it impossible to do any other action while you're casting the spell, which means you might not live long enough. I like the ice on the ground thing, but I don't want to be able to spam ice on the ground and have it stay there forever. It needs to melt.

What's the reason for hating it?

in dark messiah it disappeared after a few seconds.. you also had relatively slow regen even with the regen perk (which you didnt get till way later in the game unless you entirely specialized as a mage). i hope they take some stuff from that game cause despite its linearity dark messiah ranks up there with deus ex and vampire bloodlines among my all time favorite fps games. i still havent found a game that i had so much fun with using the combat and magic systems.

well 30 seconds seems a bit long but having a longer charge time for more powerful spells has been successfully incorporated into other games and works just fine.

Yes. I prefer my spells having a direct effect on enemies, lowering their hps or having some sort of status effect. Last thing i care to see in my rpgs are action game -like environmental effects. I feel the same way about body part specific damage. I'd actuall prefer if V went back to behind the scenes dice rolls/ real time combat like in morrowind....

wow...........thats sounds like an utterly boring game.

Gotta agree on that one. Going back to the same old, outdated systems sounds really lame and boring. Thank god he's in the extreme minority Bethesda probably doesn't listen to. It's not even viable from a total roleplaying stance, really. Not immersive to have your warrior character constantly completely miss a rat because some stat isn't high enough.

1. environmental effects for spells feel gamey if the interaction isn't present otherwise.
2. Dice rolls belong in table-top RPGs. They do not belong in video games that have actual physics-based damage (like dropping 10,000 watermelons on the Adoring Fan).

That is all.

Statistics and dice rolls determine combat in many rpg games out there: DA, kotor, previous elder scrolls and many many more great games. I think it does belong in games besides table top. If the combat used morrowind can be spruced up alot with better animations, better sound effects, etc, i think it would still be successful in a future sequel (or at least to real rpg fans out there).

My warrior character didnt miss rats. If youre seriously concerned about bethesda patrolling the forum looking for the greatest ideas and getting 'tricked' by a minority like myself, then thats just weird.

Umm, in the post you quoted I said I was glad they don't. Implying that I never had serious concerns. Thanks for actually reading it. :facepalm:

I read your post. Im sorry, you were relieved, not worried.I just wanted to post my opinions and what i would enjoy, not argue or have folks get relieved that bethesda doesnt listed to people like me. Im sure ill enjoy next installment just as much even if its similar combat to oblivion...which i liked as well, but i would prefer combat for statistic oriented. Just my opinion

Well perhaps there will be something for you that most other games these days lack: mods. God I love how mod-friendly Bethesda is. They pretty much give you a mod-kit with the game! Who else does that?

I wont mind more combat similar to Oblivion, but i wouldnt mind seeing something more statistic driven either...im pretty easy going

Got ya. Let's stop making a world we can interact with in more ways and sometimes have unique solutions arise as unintended side-effects just to preserve the dice rolls.

Count me out.

no one can say with a straight face that using the magic system in oblivion and morrowind was more fun than dark messiahs magic. as myself and a few other people have pointed out you would reload that game just to try out new ways of dispatching enemies. i dont recall ever doing that at all for a TES game. if someone dies its the same thing they just slump over and fall down irregardless of whether its magicka or weapon related. hell they could have died from cancer and the death effect would have been the same.

as for statistics i dont mind if they are there but i dont want to be able to see them. morrowind and oblivion are not dragon age or kotor. both of those games were turnbased games not realtime games like the TES games. oblivion had a very good combat system, not as good as dark messiahs but it was very good.

being able to use different magic attacks for different situations is alot more fun, instead of the lame old fire ball, ice ball, lightning ball at target. i especially love chain attacks. make guy slip off ledge with ice spot on floor, he gets up and you throw a jar of oil on him then levitate a crate at him throwing him backwards into the firetrap you set earlier which then explodes and burns him alive. all of those attacks did some elemental damage but they also allowed you to be creative.

the beauty of TES magic is that it can be fully customized to the player's liking, though i will admit that elaborate magic effects are missing from TES.

magic can do everything in TES, which is how it should be. there use to be a balance where the spells that can replace full skills were very magicka heavy requiring high skills, and that magicka conservation was difficult. however, a lot of this was thrown out the window when magicka regenerates, and restore magicka potions are prolific.

Morrowind had behind the scenes dice rolls. As for these spell situations, it sounds good for a fantasy action game, but not for tes im used to. Theres certain games id love to pop in and have people sliding on ice, exploding into fire, and getting oiled up, but the moment i see stuff like that in tes is the moment I know all is lost with the series. Theres so mny other areas of the game that can be focused on to make it a more immersive rpg experience. The months that are consumed by devs bringing virtual life to icy and elemental hijinks could instead be used to perhaps add some more varied explorable areas,items and even more detailed side quests.

cept that TES is essentially a fantasy action game. especially oblivion. its a game where movement and action are more important that character stats, you can beat someone with higher level and skill with a weaker weapon if you play it right and dont do anything stupid.

TES has never been a traditional rpg. even the videos of daggerfall showed combat in real time. its an real time combat rpg that uses physic in combat so it only makes sense that magic does the same.

if you havent played dark messiah already i cant emphasize how much more fun magic and combat are in that game. i would suggest downloadind the archery mod though since bows were very weak in the vanilla game. you can do the simply direct fireball to the face or ice attack but it gives you the option to do so much more. another treat is that the last level in that game is perhaps one of the creepiest, well designed levels i have seen in a video game for a long time. probably since the citadel leves in half life 2.

as for quests ive pretty much given up on them. unfortunately from now on quests will all have easy to follow quest arrows that hold your hand. you will probably still be able to become the master of every guild with no consequences at all. thankfully stuff like that can be helped with mods.

What it seems you are missing out on is that it is far from impossible to have both an expansive world and fun and interactive magic effects. As the other guy pointed out, it's not very "immersive" or fun to have people die or get hurt in the same way every time. As it is now fireballs and frostballs and lightning balls have no differences from eachother other than that on some hidden stat sheet enemies marked "vulnerable to shock" will suffer more, but you don't even really see that. Well, to be perfectly honest however I have seen zombies start running away when I lit them on fire. I forget whether it was a weapon or a spell that did the trick but I really loved those moments and they can improve. I mean, you can make the world as big as you want, but if the game physics are that boring and are only decided by dice rolls with the player having very little choice and not even a visual reward, I can see such a game getting boring quite easily. And as I said, multitasking is far from impossible. Hell, most popular games nowadays, even ones without magic, have shades of this idea. Mass Effect gives you the option of freezing enemies and shattering them, burning them to a crisp and laughing at their charred remains, or even psychically lifting them and smashing them into walls or crevasses for the lulz while you listen to them scream. And it's far from being the only game like that. Dark Messiah had similar effects, and it came out at almost the same time as Oblivion! Sure, from what I've heard it's not as long or free-roamy, but then it was likely not as well funded or made under a big name company like Bethesda.

Besides, the way I saw it, I always saw Elder Scrolls as, while both an RPG and an action game at times, an adventure game first and foremost. That's where most of the allure is. Adventuring. And adventuring would not be as fun if it weren't exciting. Adding different and varied spell effects (in addition to deeper combat and stealth effects and physics) would make the game far more replayable and interesting than a "dice-roll" RPG along the lines of Dragon Age. Sure, some people like Dragon Age, but it just doesn't seem as fun, and there really is not much point in replaying it as all the characters basically function the same. The only replayability is watching the beginnings for each race, but other than that it's hardly innovative. It's not Elder Scrolls.

Does the closed level design play into any of those effects?
I am asking genuinely.

Fable, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dark Messiah, they all had closed level design. I would not want to sacrifice the open-world-ed-ness of II, III, or IV, in return for those effects.
Those are my priorities.

Well it shouldn't be too hard to do both, and in any case I'd prefer open levels to widely diverse spells, but that's no excuse to totally skimp out.

As to your question, Fable and Dragon Age didn't have any of what I was talking about, so they are irrelevant. Dark Messiah as I said was more low budget. And Mass Effect 2, well I'm really not sure. Mass Effect 1 was closer to being open ended. You could explore random alien worlds whenever, although there was little excitement in that and in any case they were closer to standard levels. But still better than the second one, but highly doubt it was because they put effort into revamping combat, but because they got rid of the exploring vehicle (they added a new one in a DLC I didn't get I think) so you really couldn't explore like you did in the first. Anyhoo, Red Dead is pretty much the new king of open world gaming (though dry on the RPG element) and it had a top-notch physics system in place. Goes to show you don't have to just go for one and lose the other.

no not really. about the only thing you could say is that they might have predetermined "traps" like exploding barrels, or in the case of dark messiah planks that you could kick out and would make a bunch of stuff fall. or cut the rope on a bridge and it would fall away. but those could be used in an oblivion game very easily. oblivon had traps as well so i dont think that had much to do with it. i pretty much left my mages on auto in DA so i never messed with that games magic to much but with dark messiah the ice patch or fire trap worked on any relatively flat surface anywhere cept water or if there was a campfire or something in the way. im assuming the game simply determined the flatness of the area aimed at and then checked for water or obstacles. simple stuff that would work in a TES game easily.

Agreed


One thing I saw on youtube was a mage continually casting ice spells and making guard continually slip. The AI path was ridiculous. He just kept running and slipping across the frozen part of the floor, I think, because he was trying to go back to the "initial damage location" and look for a fight. Looked pretty funny though.
It would need to come with some much improved AI.

Also, the opponents in ME have no ability to zap you back with biotics. You can't freeze and get shattered.
If TES V has effects I hope they were much more thorough.

if he was continually casting he must have been using god mode or a mod that allowed fast regen. i think you can get a max of three or four of those spells off before you run out of magicka. as for the AI running to the same spot, ive done that tons of times with bad guys in oblivion. i would get raiders or undead to walk into the spike traps or the moving walls of spikes or the swinging blades and make the traps do the work for me. i think its just a universal part of gaming that your cannon fodder enemies are total knobs.

i agree with ME 2. between the cover system and auto aim that game was ridiculously easy. and the enemies never did half the stuff to you and your allies that was done to them. i swithed to hard mode half way through the game cause i was getting bored on normal and it was still too easy.

Yeah, only special power I eve noticed non-player/party member characters ever using was that sentinel energy armor thing. Didn't help them very much. I may have been pushed by biotics a few times before, can't rightly recall though, but I know I've never been thrown before.