Not very experienced on these forums, so if I have resurrected a thread from the dead, please feel free to close/freeze the thread as needed (because necromancy is EVIL). I have noticed that a lot of attention is paid to major elements of the game, which obviously makes sense (because they are the most important). However, these major elements also usually require the most effort. In the flip-side, there are small parts of the game that could easily be fixed by the devs, and are not controversial. I have come across many of these ideas on the forums, but have subsequently forgotten a lot of them. So the purpose of this thread is to compile a list of extremely easy changes to implement. These changes should fit the following 3 categories.

1. The changes should be easy to implement. This means that they should require little effort on the part of the developers. I am not looking for game-changing changes, but easy and logical changes that would improve a small section of gameplay.

2. The changes should NOT be controversial. For example, no matter how much you love the idea that you must eat every hour to maintain your fatigue, others would have strong opinions against such an attribute. I am searching for ideas that are really just common-sensical and couldn't dampen the enjoyment of other players.

3. The changes or additions should improve the gameplay of TES, not change TES itself. By this I mean that the change or addition should not seek to change the experience of playing the game, but rather streamline that existing experience.

Food for thought: think of silly problems that plagued everyone in Oblivion (even if they were later fixed in mods), and suggest a manner in which they could be fixed without fuss (even if a mod already did it), such that console players or non-modders could enjoy the fruits of the change.



I'll start us off.

1. A keyring in the inventory. In Oblivion, I wanted to keep my keys so I could re-enter any door I unlocked at some point. Unfortunately, this meant I always had to scroll through hundreds of keys to get to items lower in my inventory. It was annoying and unnecessary. It would be nice to be able to click on the keyring to expand a menu of all my keys, but to have that menu minimized until opened. Kind of the same way menus work on the computer.
Note: this can also be applied to the house decorations +ledger for notes (credit Animal Mother)

2. A full screen map or the ability to zoom in and out like in fallout 3. I am pretty sure this will be implemented, but it is really useful. I remember playing Oblivion on the 360 and always having to drag the map over, which got really annoying. Easy to implement, and makes the game better.

Show me what you've got!
Also, don't be afraid to mention things you heard elsewhere (giving credit would be nice). It is the ideas that count. If the thread is popular, I might hand it over to someone active, as I likely don't have time to oversee stuff...

Note: I'll immediately add things I think obviously meet the criteria. If I haven't added something to the list that has been posted, and you really think it should be there, quote it with enthusiasm!

Added to List

1. Theft key to stop unintentional theft (Bulwark pg 1)

2. Turning held objects in three dimensions (Soren0015 pg1)- to place things like books properly.

3. Get rid of latency when mounting horses + improve animation (milne pg 1)

4. Devs check out the mods which fix a lot of this stuff (Baygul pg1)

5. Colour-code shop items according to your ability to buy/use them (Animal Mother pg 1)

6. Individual Character slots: multiple character profiles (Vamphaery pg 1)
*not sure how difficult this would be, but can't imagine it would be too hard)

7. Journal You can Write in (Chineapplepunk pg 1)

8. Psychic Guards Removed (Rhyme Crac)

I don't know if people would find this annoying... but maybe have a "theft key", so when you intentially want to steal something, you press it and then click on the item. (only if they're flagged red of course) I've found that sometimes when moving too quick to talk with someone, or when standing up from sitting in a chair at a table, I've occasionally stole items. Something easy, like shift click for example.

something along those lines makes sense. I know it has happened to me on occasion. This could also help while looking around shops. I know in fallout 3 the shopkeepers were always suspicious when I was looking at their wares, for example. They would say things like, "I can see you eyeing that!" or "I've got my eyes on you". Real shopkeepers don't say that when you browse. If you had to be in sneak mode or something like that, it would also help with immersion. I could browse like a normal person and not be treated like a hoodlum.

Did I play with mods too long, or could you minimize the "Keys" section of your inventory and never look at your keys at all?

They're partially fixing this with smarter AI. If you take a fork or an apple nobody should react like you just broke a law.

Seems like a mod-added option to me...that or else I managed to play an asrounding number of hours without ever realizing how to minimize that damn list of keys that always dominated my list and caused me to have "key stashes" in various places that contained keys I hoped I didn't need any more. :shrug:

Consistant voices and dispositions for NPCs regardless of the topic.

Full Screen/widescreen menu mode.

Equipment stats to be highlighted at varying shades of red or green to compare how good or bad they are compared to your current equipment.

Groups of enemies, instead of only one-on-one encounters (wolves, bandits)

Less gold/tongs inside animals like wolves, just a wolf pelt will be fine.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the vanilla game. Seems really easy to change though, and worth doing for the non-moddable consoles...

The ability to turn objects you are holding on all three spatial axis. Maybe with the Arrow-keys, or the ones from the numpad?

" I can't for the life of me get this bottle to stand up on that shelf "
" Why are you dangling it from two fingers?"
"So hard"
" Quit dangling it "
"Nope, it can't be done, oh, there we go, knocked over all the books "
"I hate you "

that's a good one, if it is easy to implement. I remember those pains trying to arrange stuff indoors. This could also be applied to telekinesis control (it also seemed to need some work).

Huh. Must have been DarN. I can't imagine playing the game without his UI.

Any rate, Fallout: New Vegas definitely has a keychain, so I'd say it's a likely thing.

Improve the horse animations, specifically the mounting and dismounting. I don't want to stand looking at the horse for full minutes before the animation kicks in.

I don't actually know if any dev will ever read this, but if you are out there, head over to tesnexus.com and see what player-made mods are popular to get an idea of what the new TES could use. These include levelling overhauls, weapon diversity, extended combat and magic systems, unique landscapes, user-made quests that actually have plots, immersion factors like weather and populous cities, and interfaces. Anything that an unpaid modder can do counts should definitely count as an "easy change".
TESnexus has fixes for most of the "easy changes" that I would like to see in Skyrim. Here is another that isn't on TESnexus:

-Quantity of epic/magic/enchanted items: In Oblivion, epic/enchanted/magical/unique gear is so common it feels worthless. Every vendor has their own unique item to sell you and even at low levels, low-level enchanted items are far too common. This is more of a personal preference, but I feel that such a prevalence of magic items breaks immersion. An iron weapon that does a measly 5 points of fire damage encounter-able at level 3 makes magic items seem so mundane. Again this is a personal preference that does not apply to everyone, but I feel that magic items should seem special and unique. They should only be carried by difficult monsters or awarded by quests. Even so, they should not be so common nor so underwhelming that they become replaceable to the player after several level-ups and the consequential availability of new gear. This aspect is handled somewhat better in KoTN, with the autoleveling Crusader armor. Which makes sense. Unloading divine relics to the nearest merchant a few levels after completing KoTN would be an immersion breaker.

In general, the best thing devs could do would be to build bridges with their fans. I hope that for Skyrim, BGS can build off of what fans wanted changed about Oblivion. And maybe they could hire a writer and more than
(# of races)*2+(# of main characters in plot)
voice actors.

a UI for pc.....

Grey out weapons, armor or spells at shops that are too advanced for your character, if you are capable of using the item or spell but its too expensive, have the text in red

Scaleable Lists and Text

I like the idea for the keyring, and would like to expand that to incorporate a ledger or a book that holds all your notes and receipts

Now that it has been confirmed that you can cut down trees, mine and farm perhaps have three tabs that seperate out Raw Materials, Tools, and Alchemical/Food ingrediants

Individual character slots with multiple save files in them, rather than a list of every save slot for every character.

A journal to write in - was suggested in another thread and I think it's a really good, simple idea.

Turn objects plz
Thx god for quick save/wait forget scary enemies it's for in between aranging books and other items lol

i didn't know that but an easter egg for minecraft would be cool, something like when your hand to hand and strength are max you can punch down a tree.

a good change is to make guilds have more interesting and unique quests, not just the standard fetch, or kill for the DB, quests.

Great thread idea!

How about no physic guards? That should be an easy fix, and it's terribly silly. Make people run and try to report to the guards - or even scream if there are any guards within earshot. You can counter this by placing guards in certain businesses.

Spears.