First, this is mainly an "ideas and suggestions" thread, so post yours! Second, gather the idea that players can have ideas about how a game should play, and developers actually listen while in development. Now believe that this is reality, because it is. Third, remember that you not enjoying idea or feature X doesn't mean other people won't, and so if it doesn't directly affect something you do enjoy try not to shoot it down. Let that other person at least hope that they'll enjoy their thing while your off enjoying what you enjoy.

Skills: Rather than reducing the amount of skills available I'd much rather have them (more roleplaying!) and make them more interesting.

Acrobatics: I'd love to see climbing. If only just being able to grab onto, hang onto, and sidle along ledges. You could go from being able to grab onto and pull yourself onto ledges, to moving along them while hanging, to being able to jump again while hanging onto one.

I'd also love to see dodging. Jump button + direction that's not forward = dodge that way.

Hand to hand: How about as you level up you acquire different styles. You equip them like weapons, getting styles that are very fast, one concentrated on knocking enemies back/off balance, etc.

Mercantile: The higher you get mercantile the bigger your rewards for completing quests! That and have it govern bribes. I didn't like bribes just being a “get the npc's number higher” but you could bribe an npc not to report a crime. Or bribe a corrupt guard not to arrest you.

Perks in general: I'd love to see perks become something like talent trees. You have to unlock lower level perks to get higher level ones, and there would be minimum skill and/or attribute requirements, rising the higher the level the perk is. This would help differentiate players even more, an enjoyable thing for both roleplayers and min/maxers.

I also don't like how a lot of the perks sound. “A perk that allows a mace to ignore armor” sounds like it won't affect how the game plays much. Might as well just say “you do more damage with a mace” for the most part. Perks, even if there are a lot less of them, might be more interesting if they concentrated on making the game play differently when you get them. “Adds a power (press and hold) swing to your mace. Takes longer but has a high chance of knocking the enemy off balance.” Then you'd have more to consider, when fighting, rather than just a higher number.

Combat:
Magic actually sounds good so far. But I'd like to see destruction even more differentiated, with lightning being nigh instantaneous and have the ability to chain to nearby enemies. Fire a medium speed and be able to knock down enemies (exploding fireball), and ice to be the slowest but most powerful (as well as slowing enemies).

I'd also love to see a really good dispel... spell. Someone casting a fireball at you? Cast a powerful dispel fast enough and it disappears, same goes for trap spells and summoned creatures.

As for ranged. Team Fortress 2 has simply the best bow and arrow system in any game I've ever played IMO. I support the higher damage arrows, but require some timing too. Your shot should be the most accurate the instant you knock the arrow, and slowly start to lose accuracy the longer you hold it. It works incredibly well.

Finally there's melee combat, and this is what I'm most concerned about. “Visceral” is not a good watchword. Having the combat look violent and cool does not actually make a good game, that's just the icing on the top of what's ideally a delicious fighting system cake. I should just link what a designer wrote about Street Fighter, regarded by many as the most satisfying fighting series in the world.

But the basic idea is giving the player several options at any one time, with only a split second to decide which one is the best. A troll swings normally, blocking or swinging yourself might be the best depending on your respective health meters. A troll charges, dodging out of the way is the best, as standing in it's way will get you damaged and knocked down. Point is, I'd really like to see more talk and concentration on the tactical decisions you make, i.e. the actual fighting system, and less on the “kill moves!” i.e. what makes it cool to watch other people play the game.

Graphics: The interiors are going to look flat. I love reading about realtime graphics, and not stuff like that “Graphics of Skyrim” GI article. But the research papers guys publish that are filled with trig equations and make a lot of programmers twitch from sheer complexity.

The interiors are going to look flat, because there are once again going to be maybe two or three lights, and I don't see any ambient occlusion so far. A deffered shading model allows for hundreds of lights. That popular “real lights” Oblivion mod could be outdone by the designers, with (time appropriate) light streaming in from every window, showing off from every candle, and glowing down the corridors with every fireball. That and it sets up a lot of the stuff necessary for SSAO, which for those who don't know is a wonderful looking technique. First used in Crysis, it makes the lighting look a lot less flat by giving everything a soft “very close” shadow.

As for seeing outside, a single modder, the famous Reneer, is currently creating a mod that allows just that for Oblivion. If a single guy can do such for a 5 year old game I see no reason a large 150+ company can't match it for a new game. I'd suggest a hand placed point for each building that acts a “camera point” for each interior. When you stare out the windows the game shows whatever the point can see from that perspective (minus the building your in). I'm sure there's probably a better way to do it, but I'm also sure that if the game can handle all the exteriors it can handle a single extra interior at the same time as well.

I'd also love to a bit of extra stuff for the pc.

Anyway, a single person working on such should be more than capable of adding some extra stuff. Tessellation for much higher poly models is very cool. That and better shadows and lighting, specifically very cool DX10 godrays (that don't shift around a lot depending on how you look at them) and realistic shadows (PCSS, the farther away from the caster they are the softer they are, same as in real life). That's just three things.

Well, that's all I got. I'm sure you guys have a lot more though. Play nice! Try to offer constructive criticism instead of “I don't want that because I wouldn't use it.” And remember, your the customer! It's your fifty to sixty dollars, that buys you at least the right to come up with your own ideas. And we can all hope that after Oblivion Bethesda has realized their fans are on the rare occasion perfectly right about stuff; even if they haven't played it yet (level scaling, culling, enchanting not being a skill, etc.)

None of us are in any position to say how to "improve" it seeing as we know very little about how it feels to actually play the game.

Hi, thanks for the unhelpful comment.

I could list a bunch of things I think would improve the game, but I'm not designing, producing, or developing the game. Ultimately I have no idea of the possible restraints the skyrim team is facing.

All I can do is hope, Beth is putting 100% into the game. If the game comes out and I do not enjoy it, I will not suggest the game to friends and colleges (seems unlikely, as I always enjoyed games BGS puts out). If the game is what I expected I will promote it and download future content for the game.

Edit:Changed my mind maybe a suggestion or two is what BGS needs It doesn't hurt anyone, regardless.

This.

Who cares? No one else seems to. Just have fun with it. Go nuts, your here already. There's no harm in speaking up, I don't know about Bethesda but plenty of developers actually listen.

Haven't seen anything definite that looks like it needs changing. Its a bit premature to be thinking about what isn't being done right if we haven't even seen the game in action yet.

Hmm... You know your right.
I supposed my experience would be improved if:
Levitation was reintroduced (instead of pretending I'm flying during fast travel)
I can absorb trapped souls into my mana pool (effectiveness based on enchant)
Summon weapon gives you a greater skill buff (it is temporary)
Ability to enchant a staff with whatever spell I want
Control Undead (like turn undead, but so much better)
True Reanimate (that makes the dead NPC a perma-slave until it is killed)
Necromancers (that aren't generic douchebags)
Spears (not like NV dead money spears, real spears)
Affect mind spell (confuses or instills fear enemies)
Teleport (to a totem in home or something)
Azura's star...
That was fun

so basically, you just made whole new thread, and wrote for about an hour, just to tell what you don't like about the game, even if we don't even know 5% of what the game is?
and not only that, but you're also guessing stuff to complain about! who knows, maybe they changed the interior's lighting! (that was an example)

Listen, I know threads lwritten ike these are actually a good thing, and come from a good intention, as opposed to the "they should just give us EVERYTHING we ask for" that I keep seeing on the forums, but you have to understand that they're only useful when talking about games that are already made, as a help for games that are still early in the development.

Honestly, it sounds like they improved A LOT from Oblivion, and I thought Oblivion was already awesome. I got my 60$ worth already from what I read in the few updates.

Alright. I'll bite.

Up to the formal announcement, I had many hopes, dreams and desires for TESV. Since the announcement, only one substantial desire was shot down. I wanted Dragons. Oh there's Dragons. I wanted bigger, better looking, more thrilling combat... We got all of it. Dwemer Lore? Check. Better weather? Check. Better character design? Oh hell yes. The game looks like everything I wanted and more. Except one thing. One little thing and I still don't really know how it will turn out.

That one thing was Parkour. Not just flashy free running but the ablilty to simply and smoothly vault through your environment without anything too complex in terms of Interface (Assassins Creed? No. Brink? Yes.) I had hoped and prayed that the acrobatics skill would start out with nothing more then the ability to hop a fence. Then maybe you can grab a ledge. Soon you are sprinting and vaulting around on rooftops, rockclimbing and running along narrow edges with ease. The way I saw it, with my clearly biased eyes, was that if they were going to promote SMART movement as the best way to play in first person, if they were going to say that once you tried it, you could never go back to the Fridge on Wheels approach of older games... Well then OF COURSE they'd implement something like it in TESV. I'd watch the videos and say things to myself like "See?! That's exactly how BGS builds TES, with each item knowing what it was before it ever even made it into the game" I pictured all the attempted free running I'd do in Morrowind and Oblivion, jumping from roof to roof thinking that one day I'd have something like SMART to make this really work. With weight and substance and solid physics.

If Skyrim is nothing like that. I'll love the game for everything it already is... Of course. But if I cannot even pull myself up onto a ledge, I'll have a bit of a disaffected heart.

That said, I could always just mix up a batch of Anna?g's flying potion or use a Dragon shout to fly over the rooftops.

So all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

All I've seen posted by the topic starter is complaining about all kind's of stuff. they should do this and do that, graphic's are bad, skills are bad, Im smarter than Bethesda kinda attitude, jesus

There are at least ten thousand posts on this forum wanting stuff. This is what I'm talking about in my first sentence, stop being negative! "I want the greatest game ever made" is a more interesting response than "I don't think games can change while they're in development."

well, if you see it that way, then I have no other choice than to agree...

alright, I'll give it a shot:

I want to be able to cast a spell on my weapon's blade to have some temporary enchantment on it.
I want to literally climb the dragons when I fight them
I want to customize my armor with colors, alternate parts and the like.


but that's pretty much it.
BTW sorry, I guess I've just grown tired of some people on this forum acting like this game will be a total fail because there's one single detail they're not happy about

Dyeing armor would be a nice touch, but whatever Bethesda doesn't give me in the vanilla, the mods will be there!

Release the construction set too please.

That's alright, overly dramatic responses are the norm on the internet. Ice cream for everyone who responded with their own ideas :icecream: :icecream: :icecream: :icecream:

Second, but for everything we don't have to mod in means yet a different thing to mod in! Besides, won't anyone think of those poor console players :cryvaultboy:

They already had dodge rolls in Oblivion. You did it by holding block and jumping in the direction you wanted to go.

How is it unhelpful? He's right.

Yesterday, a similar (but more trolly) thread was locked by a moderator, citing something like "too deep in development to accept changes"

I'd like to see horse physics stepped up and be more in-line with games like Assassin's Creed II and Red Dead Redemption. Horses in Oblivion were way too clunky, and were so slow that it discouraged me from exploring Cyrodiil on my own instead of fast-travelling.

A big problem with Oblivion for me was when you had mulitple characters, and all their save-games went into the one long list. Save-games should be sorted for each character. To coincide with this, the game would do well to have more than one autosave slot. Perhaps when you select "Load" from the main menu, you're brought to a sort of scrapbook/3D menu that allows you to cycle through and see an overview [race/level/active quest etc] of each character. When you select your desired character, you're brought to a list of their save-games.

Something else that really drained my experience with Oblivion was having to scroll through your inventory, like if you wanted to equip a torch and had to cycle through all the hundreds of keys and books you've selected. I'd simplify the inventory's keys by putting them on a universal keychain in the inventory, so that they don't take up all that scrolling space in your inventory. On top of that, it'd be good if you could scroll page-by-page down your inventory instead of scrolling through each item.

A mini-map has become a staple in sandbox games since 2006. Skyrim needs one.

I'd like to have a "universal container" - that is, a chest or a cupboard that you can access from any of your houses. It was annoying when you had multiple houses in Oblivion, and you had your loot all mixed up between them. Say, you put all your leftover loot into a chest in "City A", and you can then go to "City B" and access that chest from there as well.

While I'm on houses, grabbing/moving objects needs to be reworked. Perhaps there should be a feature that allows you to decorate your home easier. Go up to a bookcase in your house, and you can put a book on there instantly, instead of having to use the tedious "grab" feature. Same for things like display cases, and crockery.

That's it from me. I hope an admin/developer reads this and takes it back to the team. Still and all, I know Skyrim will be a fantastic game.

You do realize your trolling right? Could people stop, please?

Saddening. I think I speak for a lot of people when the flaming the OP is doing is quite repelling. I kindly ask tombofsoldier to sheath his silver tongue.

Anyways, I insist that the beth community stop taking such a pessimistic stance on this whole game. We do not have adequate knowledge to judge this game yet.

Remember, people, Beth devs may read your posts, so keep that in mind before you go flame. Don't turn off the devs. Be nice.

Flattery will get you everywhere...

To be completely honest, however, my Interiors mod would not be possible without the work of the All Natural team, who actually modified all the interior meshes so that they have transparent windows. Likewise, without SomeWelshGuy's own mod (that is hand-placed rather than scripted like mine) I would never have gotten the idea in the first place.

Well, good job et all then! You guys are awesome and I wish my Oblivion mods had been half as cool.

That and in my ever continuing quest to aide people. Developer dudes, MSAA is totally outdated! Ya'll can get cheaper, near as good anti-aliasing (gamma correct) using post processing ala http://www.computerandvideogames.com/284581/news/3ds-battery-life-only-3-5-hours-with-3d-activated/ and temporal AA. Your welcome!

Edit- And as you can http://www.gamedev.net/topic/593873-your-ligthning-technique/ everyone thinks deffered is totally cool. If you have any questions about how certain things are handled, such as materials or light bleeding I can link to the papers. I really should spend more time doing more productive things than reading about this stuff. Light index, pre-pass, something! You're level designers will love you long time.

Another excuse to say the same thing for the fiftieth time, yay!
Limit all effects, reflect, absorb, resist, chameleon, you name it, to 85% like the armour rating.