I, myself am a huge fan of realism in games. I love sims, I have been playing for years it has a beautiful mesh of realism mechanics.
But it is not in the setting I would like it to be.

Skyrim on the other hand looks beautiful absolutely stunning the perfect setting for battling dragons, epic quests and sitting infront of a campfire.

What I would like to see in terms of realism added to a game are quite simple really.

List of my nerd desires:

1. Be able to set up a small tent and camp fire to rest in the wilderness.

2. Get tired, the screen will slowly blur till you've had you're 8 hours of rest.

3. Be able to see you're character eat or drink in first person.

4. Hunting deer for the venison and actually cooking it over a fire.

5. Myabe when you sleep you can choose to Dream or simply wake up.(Maybe have a interactive progressive dream of a murder taking place, an npc comes and wakes you and tells you, youve been screaming and thrashing in you're sleep. You describe the dream to him/her and she reveals its something that happened in the town that your in long ago that had gone unsolved... =P lol quick idea there from the respones.

6. No loading time going through doors, transparent windows.

There are a few of mine, cliche' I know but I've yet to see them implemented into a game, Whst are some of you'res?

1. Agreed.

2. 8 hours is a bit ridiculous. I get by fine with 5 hours a night

3. Nah, it's not worth the effort.

4. Yes, definitely.

5. Again, too much work.

6. They pretty much already said no to this.

I love idea 3,4,6.
Although as sad as it is, we're most likely getting full seperation of exterior / interior cells as in Oblivion. It svcks. Hopefully Bethesda will at least make us be able to see through windows though...

I'm unsure about idea 2 and 5... since I think I'd prefer not to have sleeping in the game (I'm okay with it being optional though).

1. That would be so many different levels of neat. Sitting down on a fallen tree, roasting some food.

2. 8 hours seems like too much.

3. An old Xbox game Breakdown(amazing game) had that. It would be VERY nice to see another game with it, especially TES.

4. Said so in 1.

5. I don't know about dreaming....it could be something similar to how it was in Morrowind though.

6. I really do hope they go back to having cells one with the game world. The Fable series has had this for ages, and the game world on it oly continues to get larger. This wouldn't be all that hard to do at all.

1. Why not?

2. As long as I can turn it off, sure.

3. Yep

4. Isn't cooking already in?

5. Need a little bit better of a definition on this one.

6. Not gonna happen on a game this scale. Period. They could fake the transparent windows fairly easily but houses need to be in their own cells.

As for my ideas I have none. Idc about realism anymore than what they put in the game. I play a game as a game because its only a game.

Separation of exterior/interior cells isn't that big of deal especially when it makes it easier on your system to run the game. So there is no reason to be disappointed. As the saying goes, "You can't have your cake and eat it too." To have all the other features that you want in the game to make it fun, you have to sacrifice the process eating features such as conjoined exterior/interior cells.

But, it's perfectly possible, or would have been at least considering they were building pretty much everything from scratch in house. I mean, I can still think of a way it COULD be possible.

6.already confirmed won't happen with the windows, and would a game without loading screens even be possible? In theory a person could do this but they would need a whole lot of Ram, a really good processes, and a pretty fast hardrive
3.I always play in first person so I wouldn't care for this, and sometime I drink a potion in the middle of combat, I wouldn't wanna stop and drink while someone is swinging a weapon at me

Someone from Bethesda (forget who it was right now) said, "insides will be insides, outsides will be outsides". SO I'm thinking it's a no to 6.

You have inspired me Sleign, Now I am in the Construction Set looking at Oblivion Object numbers lol. In a city like Bruma you have 22 buildings, not including the player house. Render an interior for each of those and you have 44 Objects being rendered instead of 22 then factor in all 51 people who live there as they would all have to be rendered all the time, not having a cell of their own to disappear to. That is 95 objects. Then think of the objects in one building, say Olav's Tap and Tack. There are the tables and the chairs and the doors and the beds and the food and drink and silverware and containers. Just the objects in his building raise the amount of stuff being rendered to close to 200, if not over. Then multiply just the amount added there by 22 for all the other houses. Well that makes it about 2300 objects. We haven't even counted cells separate to main buildings like basemants, the guard quarters, the jail, etc. It just won't happen.

I like 3, 4 and 5. It seems 6 won't be in. :tops:

* Actions have genuine, plausible, "gloves off" consequences.
* Appearance (including clothing [or the lack of it], armour, weapons, etc.) affects reactions, in a variety of logical/intuitive ways.
* Food, drink and sleep are not optional extras in your life.
* Magic has a price. I know, I know - magic and realism? Sure. But even so, I feel that it must have a price. A "tax", if you will. I can only hope...
* "Fatigue" should be what happens when you're low on, I don't know, "Stamina" or something. "Fatigue" is not a thing that you should want to be "full of", suffice it to say: English ftw. :rolleyes:
* Horrible wounds and disease from combat, being bitten, and whatever else.
* Morality and ethics with considerably more depth and breadth to them than previously.

To begin with, those would be nice.

I like all from 1 to 6 and I am sad that 6 isn't possible yet. My thief would have enjoyed greatly to look through windows to see who's inside

Seems like a good idea

Not a fan of this. Some games I've played with this mechanic, tend to be tedious. You get tied up in micro-managing every aspect of your characters life, that you can't truly enjoy the game. Just my opinion though :shrug:

This would be great!

I love this one

Dreams that happen rarely, for a purpose, might not be bad, but I don't think it should be something that happens all the time. It should be reserved for special circumstances :shrug:

The loading times can be annoying, but they do serve to help reduce the overall lag in the game. Hopefully with the new game engine, this will be improved upon. Transparent windows would be lovely!

I didn't say it wasn't possible, it is completely possible. But trying to load all of the buildings in a town and all the myriad of items in those houses take a lot of processing power making it hard for all but the best of computers to handle. It's better to have a mostly open world with some separated cells to alleviate the strain on the system. Besides, open cities with separated cells for buildings is in Morrowind, so I expected everyone to say that it was perfect.... However I would like the windows to show the time of day outside instead of always shining light in.

@Badprenup Nice, I'm glad someone took the time to illustrate the issues with rendering everything in an area at once. I'm too lazy to do it. Thanks for working out the numbers :foodndrink:

Realism doesn't mean "like real life" it means "plausible within the setting". Magic is totally realistic in the Elder Scrolls.
Also, weren't you paying attention? It's already confirmed to be called stamina.

You misunderstand me. Just because you can do something inefficiently does not mean you can't do it efficiently.

I think that if you get damaged, ( Bite, Arrow wound, sword/dagger cut, etc. ) there should be an animation that lets you dress the wound, similar to that of Far Cry 2.

Wrong. "Plausibility" would be the word you're after. "Verisimilitude" is another decent choice. And I did put a disclaimer there - weren't you paying attention?


A matter of opinion only. I disagree.* But I respect your right to a difference of opinion. Kindly do likewise.

* That is, I find that it lacks plausibility, inasmuch as magic can, or... can't actually, in the first place. Eh, you know what I mean. :shrug:



I've had little opportunity to comb through all the updates or whatever. Literally, I have not read such a thing, until well, right now. In other words, it's the first I've heard of it. So, it's nothing to do with "paying attention".

But I'm glad to hear it, regardless.

same here

go play the sims.

I agree with the hunting and setting up camp stuff, but the rest is just ridicilous. I mean rest for 8 hours? You don't have to rest in 8 hours IRL. The fatigue system will be more apropriate. No loading screens what so ever? It's impossible to not have loading screens. IIRC, Todd Howard mentioned this in one of the GI interviews.

Well the problem with it at even this point in time is that it requires a vast amount of processing power to do it. The top of the line computers can do it right now but the average computer still cannot do it well without horribly lagging or crashing. Let's not even get into the consoles. The problem is that trying to render all the objects in an open world at once would be infeasible. Trying to load as many objects and NPCs that TES has in a certain area such as a city, would cripple all but the best computers. Now rendering objects to a small distance would allow for smooth gameplay if you stand in one area for awhile but when you go traveling through the city it will try to load hundreds of objects simultaneously while you try to move through the town crippling all but the best computers. It's infeasible to make it that way if only a fraction of the players can play it. Maybe in another 5-6 years the computers that are the norm will be able to consistently load so many objects. The only solution is to either, remove all the static objects in the game to where you can't interact with them and they are only part of the building so that we can have buildings that are not separate cells or we stay separate cells where needed like buildings and allow for us to keep all the objects that make the world feel real. It's a choice and chances are most people will keep their thousands of objects strewn around the world. I know I would.

An idea of realism would be: time to pass according to the action that triggered the fast-forward. For example, if you are wounded severely (I assume a dragon is hard to kill and will cause you more than a few scratches), resting should take weeks, months, not hours or days. Of course the loading will be just a few seconds, but the amount of game time that passed to cure diseases or deep wounds should be a lot higher. I don't want this just for time sake, I want it so we could spend more game time in one playthrough, a few years instead of less than 1 year. The point is to make space for seasons. In one playthrough as it is now there is no time for seasons to change, and I would like seasons a lot, with all the changes that they bring in nature, animal life, towns aspect, people's occupations and so on.

But you misunderstand us. Just because something is technically possible doesn't mean there is an efficient way to do it right now. This would never even be remotely feasible with current consoles, and you would also need a top of the line PC with some of the best and most expensive hardware available to the public to handle it. What's more no engine is able to handle that and all the other mechanics of a complex RPG at this time. Next gen? Maybe, but doubtful there too.