In oblivion should some types of black smithing / crafting jewlery be implemented? or say fishing and selling them in the local market? whats ur opinion

Obviously for NPCs but for the PC I don't rally feel like I need it...I don't want a merge of TES and The Sims...

nah the PC shouldn't or at least bethesda shouldn't focus on that. That is more like something mods could do, bethesda needs to focus on more important things the storyline or engine

I'm all for fishing or enchanting and alchemy and that kind of crafting on the road, but this is an adventure game, so forcing the player to daily visit one place every day would be really annoying. TES is the game where you're all over the place, so such an adventurer can't afford him/herself long term jobs

I say yes. No sense in marketing as a world where you can do anything when your only sources of revenue usually involved theft, killing, or foraging in caves.

nah the player shouldn't or at least bethesda shouldn't focus on that. That is more like something mods could do, bethesda needs to focus on more important things the storyline or engine

I wouldn't mind being able to fish, but blacksmithing is too much, I think.

As for owning your own shop, I don't see how that will work. Will I have to stand around all day waiting for people to drop in?

I think if you own a store, someone should work for you, and you just stop by to pick up your profits.

As someone mentioned, fishing, alchemy, enchanting, and hunting are fine. Being a blacksmith...no...Owning a store? Sure, another way to make income, but no way in hell am I going to keep myself in a shop, I'm either going to hire someone to work for me or rent it out.

That'd be a cool thing to do, like smithing and fishing, but to be honest I don't want to have any obligations in the game. I'm an adventurer damnit!

Owning a private shop sounds fun, but i dont see it happening in TESV. I would much wrather have the oppurtunity to become a count, and pay for certain shops in my town. Or even pay the count to endorse certain shops. Owning your own shop sounds a bit complicated, and strays too far from the purpose of the game i think.

No, I feel like that would be like a minigame, which I don't think would fit well with TES... then again lockpicking...

I don't think making officials 'professions' is worth while. If you want a job why not just role play the part? In relation to the shops/stalls, it might just be me, but wouldn't it be boring? Standing there waiting for random NPCs to come in and auto by "3 fishz plx". I feel time would be better spent on essential game components, AI, gameplay etc.

Hunting should be more rewarding to be fair, perhaps more traders that offer more.

Fishing, crafting and hunting could be some professions. And it would be better to work at a shop instead of owning your own.

yeah but some of us are playing on consoles and we dont have access to mods. I think that having a job would be pretty cool but its not really that big of a deal.

I agree with people saying they don't want anything too in-depth like the Sims. But a light degree of shopkeeping and/or crafting and material gathering would be welcome. I proposed a system for some basic skills like fishing/mining/crafting in a thread a few months ago. I'm too lazy to dig it up but I'll recap the basics:

Fishing, mining, crafting, etc. would NOT be traditional Skills (like Acrobatics, Alchemy, Sneak, etc.). Rather, they would be acquired abilities. Each of these abilities would have several tiers. All players would emerge from the tutorial at the first tier of each ability. A player can advance up the tiers by a variety of methods, including reading books, speaking to experts, practicing, and exposing yourself to factions/cultures who have experience with that ability. There would be maybe 5 tiers for each skill. With each tier, you gain the ability to gather more advanced types of materials and/or access new areas to look for materials. These materials can then be sold as raw materials, or crafted into items.

The Fishing ability would (obviously) allow the player to catch fish. At low tiers, you'd be limited to small fish like trout. At mid levels, you might be able to catch tuna, bass, etc. At upper levels, you could catch big game fish. (Note: I'd like it more if Bethesda created their own forms of fish to inhabit the world, rather than using fish that already exist in our world.) These raw fish could be eaten for a bit of health/magicka/stamina, and with a small risk of catching a minor disease. They could also be cooked over stoves and fires to increase their buffs and decrease the risk of disease.

The Mining ability would allow the player to enter caves and mines and extract ore from veins in the rock. At low levels, you have a high risk of failing to extract ore, and you would be unable to attempt to extract ores from many veins. At higher levels, you have a higher rate of success and you can attempt to extract ore from more veins. For the sake of progression, most rare ores would be in hard to reach places (strong enemies and enchantments, or in rocks that are hard to extract ore from) but theoretically, even at tier 1, if you were able to find a vein of rare ore, you might have a small chance of extracting a sample. I figure this makes sense because even a novice miner would be able to attempt to extract valuable ore from a vein if he were to find that vein... The ore could then be sold to blacksmiths or collectors, or it could be refined into metal hich could also be sold to smiths, or molded into a weapon by the player himself (based on Armorer skill).

This sort of tiered progression would be applied to other abilities like crafting as well.

I've always found the concept in the video game industry that everything had to be extraordinarily obvious and upfront peculiar. I think professions should be implemented but perhaps not advertised, make it a hidden perk of the game, Detailed and intricate in design with a lot of potential, but not something made aware to the character early in the game. On the one hand I understand designers desires to show off and be proud of what they put into a game, but I've always thought many skills should be implemented in this way. Granted its not TES in anyways, but neither is it something that's been done in any other mainstream RPG. Wouldn't it be cool if during your travels you discovered you could use tools in a new way and through trial and error, word of mouth, and your own discovery started learning to become a blacksmith and open all new avenues of gameplay previously not available to you? It shouldn't be an integral part of the game just as becoming a professional in any field of research in real life isn't an integral part of your life, nor should it be thrown into your face as an option just like you don't have people shouting at you in real life how horrible a lawyer, doctor, or scientist you are just because you never decided it was something you wanted to pursue professionally.

Discovering a hidden weapon in a game is an amazing feeling, or finding a new treasure that challenged your skill or ingenuity. I didn't get many of those voila moments in Oblivion, but Morrowind was full of them. Games should strive to top their best efforts in the past, and if a new weapon or piece of armor provides you with that sort of satisfaction imagine what one of these much more significant and even more complicated discoveries would bring you. I've always felt this concept shouldn't be limited to just professions either, it should be skills, styles or types of magic, and things as complex as insight into the world around you. Imagine if by a fluke in your travel, and reading various books and following vague verses and hints traveling on your own research and whims in a game like oblivion, you discovered a lost style of magic. In sort of an unofficial quest that you could approach on your own in many different ways through your own research, you found the first example in the history of TES of instructions on how to cast enchantments on people, places, and objects other then armor and weapons to create physical effects like walls, or areas where time flowed differently, or invisibility, silence, or any number of other effects.

An exaggerated example, but a good one as it could be implemented in a method of procedural generation within the game so that people wouldn't spread it like a virus on the internet making guides on how to achieve these hidden feats. It also reminds me of a review I read before Oblivion came out, where the reviewer described going from screen to screen and seeing a variety of different people playing Oblivion in completely different ways getting totally different experiences and learning a variety of different skills and talents. This would be essentially putting that same experience on crack with the potential variety both in early game and in the late game.

In any case I just hope to see something like this implemented in a game someday, I've no hopes of seeing it in this game, and that's fine. I could even accept that it may not be for TES, but as fellow Roleplay gamers, I'm sure many of you can at least admire the intrigue such a mechanic would add to a game should it ever be incorporated.

Certainly. I think the key to it being minimal development time is to start off with a more living economy, and then simply give the player access to what NPC's already do. The living economy, for example, would be beneficial to pretty much all players. Those playing as a fiend could burn farms and drive up food prices, starving NPC's and increasing crime. A profitable gold mine could make a town wealthier, making it both more attractive and more dangerous for thieves. In general, there's a lot more immersion with NPC's entering stores and buying their needs with weekly paychecks, instead of these empty stores that cater only to you and whose funds revolve entirely around what you buy and sell there. If there's already an economy, then all you have to do is flip a little switch to have NPC's recognize the player as a merchant, with basically no programming effort at all. Setting up your stock and prices are simple number-input options, and not hard to program either. As for standing around, what deterrent is that? Maybe you could hire an employee. If not, if that's going to drive you away you probably weren't going to pursue this option anyway. I'm openly baffled by the responses some people have that imply that they think having the player "stand there and do nothing" is going to somehow sap development time and resources. I'm pretty sure the ability to stand there and do nothing will be an option regardless of if we can run a shop. If you focus on making it more of "giving the PC access to what NPC's already do", instead of treating it like a whole player-centric side-faction, I think you could add the option with little effort. People who don't want to do it wouldn't suffer for it.

I completely agree... I think something that has been lost in modern game development is adding extraneous stuff just for the sake of doing so. A lot of suggestions, professions, shops, a working economy, true radiant AI, fellow wandering adventurers, wars and political infighting and conflict, et cetera, all are things that would add a great deal of depth to any game, and yet could go largely unnoticed by a player in game. In fact for the most part they would change nothing for the unobservant hack and slash adventure gamers that are becoming increasingly common fans to this series, and yet for the die hard RPG fans, they would add immense depth, and potential for a ton more gameplay opportunities if you were willing to pursue them. Further all of these ideas and systems have been developed in other games with relatively limited work. Granted many of these games aren't of this genre, borrowing largely from Simulation games, and RTS, but none the less, a little bit of added complexity would be nice. The real issue is the amount of time the developers are willing to put into things that won't necessarily increase sales a great deal as the mainstream gamer has no interest in such features. Appealing to the original fan base just isn't as important anymore, and given the money involved in such large game releases and in development, I can't blame them for not going out of their way.

I say YES 100%. I was so hyped when I got to Expert/Master or Mercantile in Oblivion only to find out that investment into shops really means "give them money so you can sell better stuff to them."

Owning a shop? Who's going to man the store? Would it be closed while your player character is off on some quest?

I think it's a silly idea. I voted no. Selling fish sounds pretty silly too, but blacksmithing sounds less so. I do want to be able to use supplies to craft and improve upon my weapons, and if those weapons then fetch for a higher price, that's pretty much blacksmithing. And I do like that.

I really agree with Plotinateur, who said that working with an existing shop makes more sense than owning your own. Owning your own shop sounds like there would be a business strategy component to the game, and it would probably make it too easy to earn money, and throw off the game balance.

+1

I voted yes and no. I can understand why people wouldn't want fishing/blacksmithing etc in TES, but TES games are open world RPGs. Anything that actually makes me feel more like I'm in a real world is welcome. They don't have to be big focuses at all - just little things to pass the time.

As for the second one, no. I don't see anything odd about hardy adventurers fishing or blacksmithing, but settling down and owning a shop? That's taking the sandbox elements a little too far.

I agree and disagree with you. The first point I want to make is that your initial points are invalid. There are plenty of methods to run a shop without you personally being there. Would it run better with your personal oversight? Probably but that's not the point, you can hire someone else to run your shop and that solves the initial problem. The second issue is how easy it would be to earn money. Now while I agree with you that in many other games they've made it to easy to make money using businesses. This is one of those things that I think should be a completely optional task, and it shouldn't be something every character is quick to jump into. It should have the potential of producing a lot of currency, and even opening trade and production options or improving a cities economy. Likewise, it should also have the potential of killing local business, draining your personal funds, being an excessive waste of your time and money and leading to local economic problems. As a non-inherent part of the game it should provide potential benefits, and eventually be self sustainable, but not at first, and not with ease. With any benefit there must be risk, and making sure that they included that significant risk factor would mean the difference between a good shop ownership system and a poor one.

It'd be fun if I could do a fishing minigame then like cook them or something to create stuff I can use for battle.

And black smithing would be fun, if only for a way to implement weapon customization and unique looking weapons.