Hello, I'm new to the forums. Although, I've watched this forum for a while, just never bother to enter the antics of forums. With the announcement of Skyrim I restarted another character on Oblivion. Because of this I want to share an opinion on TES, and RPG's specifically. Some of this has been said, but I'd like to emphasize something a bit more.

When you play an RPG, you're playing for the experience of being a role within the game. The role should be important to the story, and specifically to the world within the game. While I feel this was achieved in Oblivion (using this an an example), I feel it was only achieved to the story aspect. We had to save Cyrodil, but where's the personal touch? Maybe if I REALLY cared, it would be special, but the main storyline just was something my character had to embark. So this leads me to the question; how do you make the player feel essential, important, and satisfied with hard work?

First thing that comes to mind in creating. We all have creativity in us. It's the best of any trait in my opinion. RPG's specifically tap into this. Armors, clothes, weapons, enchanting, all a form of creating your role within the game. But where Oblivion falls short is, the creativity is limited to customizing. Yeah, there's armor and weapons, but your find/loot it. You can't create anything basically.

Many games fix this by the elements such as mining, crafting, and so on. I've read a good bit of threads about this. I know this may be blasphemy to the forum, but one game (my nephew plays it) that is rather infantile but addictive is Runescape. TES is on another level compared to it, but what makes it so addictive. It's simple, the system of creation it uses. You can go mine, leveling up to mine better things. You can craft, leveling up to craft better things. There's a smithy skill, to create armor and weapons. It even goes as far as fishing and woodcutting. This is a prime example of how a simple concept of creating and hard work can be put together to give a feeling of achievement and significance. You oh so want to mine that extremely rare and hard ore, but you gotta put in the time first. You want to make that awesome bow, out of Yew tree? Heh, you better get to chopping! It's a simple concept that I feel would enrich Skyrim, and I hope it's there.

The second element that comes to mind is something that is very deep within RPG's. It's the idea of finding and killing an extremely hard monster/person for that sweet drop it may have. While this was there a bit in Oblivion (mostly quest related although), it was pretty much nonexistent with the scaled leveling and such. Looting in Oblivion was, well, worthless in my opinion. Random encounters offered the same rewards. To reiterate a lot of the threads that's been posted, the scaled leveling has to go. I hear this was blamed on becoming mainstream. Well, in that case, stop holding the hands of people who will buy the game. A game that basically gave a middle finger was Demon's Souls. Extremely hard, but when you beat it, you feel like king of the world. A long time ago, this was present in every game. Games weren't too long or too shiny, so difficulty was the way to go. Now when you let you nephew borrow an old Contra game, or something just as hard you feel powerful seeing them struggle on what you have beaten. Make the game give us difficulty. If we want to stick to easy goblins and rats, let us. If we want to venture deep into a dungeon in search of a mystical dragon in hope that it will drop dragon armor (red dragons give you...wings?).

The last element that I want to touch on is decisions. In Oblivion, we had fame and infamy. It was fairly important but on a grand scale is insignificant. In Skyrim, there needs to be drastic decisions. It doesn't have to be in the main storyline, but somewhere. Do we kill or save her? Do we bombard this city, or protect it? Things like that make for interesting roleplay. We can even take it further than moral decisions. How about what guild to join? If we join Guild A, we can't join Guild C, and we're at war and must skirmish with Guild B. In Oblivion, this idea would be foolish with the limited amount of guilds. Simple, make more guilds. Guilds or clans of such are to me a very important and fun aspect of RPGs. It gives a feeling of significance. It makes interacting with NPC's more amusing and interesting.

To reiterate guilds and quests, I want to talk about Knights of the Nine. To me, this was the best time I've had ever in Oblivion. I have a save to where I can pop it in and start the quest line over. The simple rebuilding of an order, recruiting knights, having them follow you, sieging an enemy together...*gasp* OH MAN I LOVE IT! After it's over you have that feeling; "Man, I just did something awesome!". Make more quest lines like this; maybe rebuilding some ancient Nordic order?

Aside from that, I also want to mention the ability of not just being in Skyrim. This is probably a sketchy topic. I'm not talking about traveling to some huge place. But maybe a distant island, a visit to a Summerset island perhaps. Shivering Isles gave us a new place to explore and such, but it doesn't have to be on such a grand scale (because if it is, it will be DLC and the unfortunate may not get it). Remember that painter quest in Oblivion, that was sure odd and fun. Mostly, I understand Skyrim will be snowy, and we should be able to escape that.

To summarize this thread:

• Mining/Hunting/Smelting/Woodcutting/Crafting
  
• Difficulty/Dungeon Looting
  
• More Guilds
  
• Escapism from Skyrim now and then

Well that's it for my first thread, hope it was well constructed! Opinions?

I believe that good writing, immersive quests, and immersive game environments obviate the necessity for stultifying & monotonous in-game activities such as crafting.

I totally agree on this thread. Drastic decisions would be awesome in the Main Quest. i.e: Do we kill [Extremely Important Person], or do we kill [Extremely Important Person No. 2]? This would be a very good thing to have in Skyrim.

Also, good job for your first thread. :tops:

Very well said. I know RS is a bit of a taboo with serious gamers, but I have to agree with you. Not only did it have a rewarding crafting system, but It also had a working in-game economy. Due to persistent items.

One other thing is, the game needs less "robotic" npcs. Mostly they just spew the same rumors over and over again, and fight you if you hit them. I hope we will be able to form friendships and have adventures. Which will cut the boring and lonely factor out completely.

Anyway, I cannot sum up all my ideas right now. Just look at my posts made a few months ago to see my full views on the matter.

edit: Also, I have to say since you brought up Demon's Souls, I am one of the few people who thought it was easy, js.

Thanks Horseman! And to Obscurbus, I really agree on the economy part. That was something I just remembered I wanted to mention. May add that in. About the loneliness and adventure with NPC's, that's why I liked Knights of the Nine. It felt as if it placed personality into the NPC and made them important to me. And I'll take a look at your posts



Oh I agree, I will choose that over things such as crafting. But what about when we want to escape exploring, quests, and stories and just make some cold hard cash or equipment.

Welcome.....wait...antics? ANTICS? No soup for you! :stare:


Hmm just a bit preemptive and reactionary, but isn't hard work something that the player chooses to partake in? Is it up to the game maker to make something hard, or to the player to find the difficulty?


Craftig, yes, it sounds nice. But with the leveling in the craft skills, the quests to obtain siad materials should be challenging....


I'm only going by a really foggy memory on this, but I think the level scaling was a result of complaints about MW. But I can't remember what those complaints were :sadvaultboy:


I agree. Again, this was done in part due to feedback that MW didn't give players enough direction.

I come from the world of adventure education and challenge courses; I agree challenge is important. Could another term would be risk. With greater risk come a greater sense of accomplishment, but was there any "risk" in OB? Is there any risk in any game where the user can save right before a battle? Is challenge again up to the player to make one's own game challenging?


I see this as consequences, not so much decisions, but I see where you're coming from


Bah, fighters. :sick: Just to be an donkey, others might say that this is cliceed..cliched..erm...ya..."develop your army and conqure!" (Never played KoN, so I don't know if this was true)

Yep, I liked that. It was original :nod:

Nice post, just wish I had more to give ya in return.

Cheers

grrr dang matching quote and /quotes!!!

Don't worry, it was a good response =)

You have a confusion between induction and deduction.