If the upcoming Elderscrolls 5 could load the BSA archives of both Morrowind and Oblivion, then we could use previous cool stuff you guys made to make new cool stuff with the new game! I.E. use the meshes, voice acting, and etc. from previous games in mods for the Elderscrolls V. I am aware that legal matters don't allow, say the extraction and distribution of art assets from your previous games into new games. But what if they're just sitting there, in their original formats?

Secondly, could you guys use steamworks instead of GFWL? I like Steam a lot more, as I'm sure many do, and "cloud syncing" of my savegames is very cool, even if I don't use it that often.

Lastly, optimization!

Make your game run faster without sacrificing how it looks:

http://www.ericrisser.com/TrueImposters.html Makes distant objects cost your video card a lot less!
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/fragmerging/ "Quad fragment merging" Makes all those fancy "shaders" cost video card less!

I wasn't sure if you guys had seen that second paper, but the thought of a massive reduction in shading costs is very cool. Since it's such a recent paper you guys could be the first ever to implement it in a game!

Bethesda has always had a habit of doing stuff their own way... I doubt they'd be willing to implement 3rd-party technology to that extent. It'd be great, of course, I'm not bashing the idea, just seems unlikely to me.

Since I like educating people...

Pretty much every game that comes out today is mostly based off research other people did. Graphics are just like building a car, no one really wants to re-invent the wheel. Sure, Toyota might do air conditioning a bit different than BMW, but the principles behind it will be almost identical. Similarly everyone today does shadows the same way. Different settings, slightly different code might make them look somewhat different, but ultimately they're doing almost the exact same thing.

Just something for anyone who might interested. Fact is a lot of coding is like this, they don't like to admit it sometimes, but almost anyone building a wesbite or some new program will go and look how someone else did it, and often copy that fairly closesly.

A certain modder tried to import the BSA and ESP from Morrowind, He was successful, but Bethesda banned all files and discusion off the official forum and various modding sites (ie Planet Elder Scrolls and TES Nexus).


Not many want online integration. Steamworks will just slow the game down like G4WL. Also I found G4WL to be to money grabbing.
One more thing I beleive Steam versions don't have mod support, and thats Bethesdas biggest community.


That would be a good Idea. People with crappy computers(like me) can have it good, and people with good computers can have it at awsome. A win with everyone.

I'm pretty sure it's entirely fine by Bethesda to use Morrowind stuff in Oblivion and vice versa. It's when you upload it that they have the problems. (I think I may have seen the occasional thread asking how to do it)

Please, as awesome as Steam is, it just has no place in a single player game.

I agree with x_death on these matters.

Possible bad news there. I wouldn't be surprised if the minimum requirements are bumped to say a shader model 3.0 video card (Geforce 6000+, Radeon 1000+). Reason being that they're probably concentrating on consoles, and 3.0 is the closest thing to consoles without requiring DX10 (only half the gamer population has Dx10 card yet). By doing so they'd reduce the cost and headaches for themselves while being able to do more.

I'm sure though that as long as you have and AGP slot in your pc you'll be able to play it, though you and many others may have to upgrade for the next game. (No Oldblivion for this one guys, at least not down to what the Oldblivion mod does).

Mods work on Steam versions of the games. I do not play the Steam version, and have never done so, but I'm pretty sure the Steam versions support mods just (or at least almost) as good as the regular versions.

This mod I was talking about required that you had your own copy of morrowind, tribunal, and bloodmoon. With all the files there you wouldn't need to download any of them, except the esp converter and the redone armours(These armours are new user created stuff).

Incorrect. Steam versions work with mods. Valve is really big on mods. In fact, they worked with the creators of OBSE(and other script extenders I believe) to get the Steam versions to work with them.

Still, I understand that people won't want it with their single player game. Having a physical CE and Steam support would be one of the best things for me though, which is one of the main reasons I am hyped for New Vegas.

I don't see this happening. Even from a technical standpoint it seems like more work than it's worth.


Fallout 3 had GFWL and it didn't go over well. New Vegas will be using Steam so I guess we'll see how that goes.

Assurances have already been given that this won't interfere with mods and, as others have pointed out, mods work on the Steam versions of Morrowind and Oblivion.


Oblivion had speedtree, facegen, and havok - possibly other third party additions as well.

Exactly. When you upload it, it becomes an issue. I've seen screenshots of people wearing Oblivion's daedric armour in Morrowind on TesNexus. No one seems to mind. There's many other examples, too.

Actually, wasn't there some kind of minor issue? Bethesda was uncomfortable with it, for thier reasons, and found a miniscule problem they wouldn't normally care about. Something to do with textures... I may be wrong.

Well they aren't hosting the file, from what I heard, Bethesda liked the idea but because of [see below] they had to discourage it.

I guess my ideal situation was wrong, I believe the esp converter had some textures, Lava and Cloth, that were from Morrowind in its files.

There are a few mods that don't quite work properly on Steam, but yeah, in general everything works okay (or so I hear). It would be cool if we could use items from older games, but it's unlikely to be supported for various reasons and would probably never work quite right anyways since the graphics are different for each game. Perhaps the graphics in TESV will be similar to those in Oblivion, but I've used the aforementioned mod that allows users to use stuff from Morrowind in Oblivion, and it looks pretty silly. Of course, a large part of the reason it looks so bad is that in Morrowind the male and female clothing was the same (ie no boobs)...

steam supports mods.... why do people belevie that it doesnt its just a different directory even OMM works with it... everything works try it before you bash it i have never seen a mod that wont work with steam like i said same files different location its just programfilesx86 -> steam -> steamapps-> common-> oblivion and then its the same from there

We established this already(below). I have a question, Why do people reply to a thread without reading the majority of the posts? You could at least skim over the other posts.

And I didn't bash steam. I use it for HL2 and Portal.

that messed me up a bit with fallout but a simple trip to google and i was good to go, got plenty of mods and not one doesnt work because of steam

That alone makes sure that I can't play New Vegas & I was looking forward to enjoying it

I hope that Steam is optional for the disc versions & not outright requirement

Oblivion and no DRM, It didnt work with steam, it didnt work with G4WL, it didnt even have copy protection on the disk... And it still sold realy well and was a very popular game. and the same thing could be said about Morrowind. Then they brought out Fallout 3 which has many many problems, G4WL didnt work properly at all, and it was a nightmare to play.

So what crap will TES V have?