"First," Tosh Raka says, "is that we kill all the vampire snakes." Then the Tiger-Dragon Emperor wants to invade Tamriel.

So reads the Mysterious Akavir. An invasion by powerful forces while the Empire is still trying to come to terms with the loss of it's leader would certainly make for interesting gameplay. The fact that the invasion is also based on lore would please many series die-hards, too.

Another potential main quest plot would be the sudden re-emergence of Yokuda. Why has Tamriel's very own Atlantis suddenly came forth from beneth the ocean waves? Is it the will of the Nine? The whim of a Daedric Prince? Something even more dark, more sinister? And has it to do with the new era the many races of Nirn are now entering?
Various races and factions could arrive in their hundreds, thousands even. Maybe the events of such a game could take place after a few years of colonization, casting the player (the hero of the piece) in the role of a new arrival. It could work wonders for gameplay. Redguard rulers could be trying to stake a claim to the "new" land. New monsterous beings could be discovered... And dispatched accordingly by the player. It would also give the developers a chance to let their imaginations run wild with ragards to the lay of the land.

I don't know. These are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head. I'd love to hear what others would do if they had the position of plotting the main story arc in a new TES epic.

PS - To the mods: I feel this topic is suitably differant to the suggestions thread to warrant it standing alone. However if you feel it is not and decide to merge it then that's hunky dory by me.

I would make a change from the "your from prison" routine and start the player out by giving them the choice to chose their own background though a seies of seferal subtle conversations with the npcs at the beggining of the game(like "where are you from" or "what are you doing here") and give the player a higher amount of choice in how the story goes,(Like in OB's Sivering Ilses where you could chose between the mazken or the azcan only add several different endings) so I'd like to have severel choices as to the storyline of the main Quest.

I beleive the next game is going to be in Skyrim(being that thats the only title they have ready to be on the cover of the next game)and is going to have to do with you killing the remaining deadra there(becuase apparently they go hit harder with the deadric invasion than cyrodil)and helping the new emperor regain control of a rebeling skyrim( what I'd realy love is if they gave you multiple option as to whether you help or hinder the empire, but that wont happen becuase they'd have to chose one of the storylines to be correct in future TES games")

The possible storylines you suggested sound more like expansions than main Quest storylines, but none the less I would love to see it in future games. I would like a small part of the main quest erly into the game to allow you to help with a growing Werebear problem(not fight but at least introduce the player to them early in the game and allow you to become one in the begging of the story and be able to notice the diferent things in the story line affected by what you do in that part of the story line ) being that it would appease the short term croud they were trying to to reach with the oversimplified Oblivion(not trying to flame OB, I love OB(espeseicely the kajiit in OB compared to morrowinds) but it's plain facts in was simplified compared to it's predacessers)

I really hope their already making it altough some sites are saying that officails says they havent even started yet.(although they might just be reading to far into their words) All the same no matter how much I might complain about morrowinds or OB's storyline I still got svcked into them, and I have no dout I will get drawn into the new storyline as I did the other's.

P.S. sory about the spelling.
P.P.S. sory if none of that made sense I'm half asleep

Daggerfall had six different endings and they worked it out for the later games. They made the Warp in the West happen

Yea, and that pissed a lot of people off

maybe you play a tutorial level as a kid and learn how to fight and pick your attributes and birth sign then and then it flashes forwards 20 or so years and you gain consciousness inside of a big burning building and when i say big i mean palace big there you save or leave people to die but ultimately you find some enemy what ever the main enemy is in the game shooting fireballs or spreading fire with a torch just trying to make the fire larger you kill him when he attacks you and then you escape outside a man will ask if you killed what ever was causing the fire and here you pick your major skills/class

the thing that attacked you is from a new invasion from- rebels/daedra/countrys /provinces/continents whatever but the point is there will be more quests like the battle of bruma with alot of people fighting it out and then eventually killing the leader of said invasion

My suggestion for the main quest:

No more invasion scenarios. Invasion has been thoroughly overdone by Oblivion.
Main Quest: Invasion by Mehrunes Dagon.
Knights of the Nine: Invasion by Ayleid Meridia-worshipper who's mad at the Nine and pissed off about Sword-Theory.
Shivering Isles: Invasion of Sheogorath by .

I'd much prefer a Skyrim politics-based MQ akin to Daggerfall, where you are the pawn of pretty much every major power in the region. I won't speculate on what the objective of the MQ might be, as that's an impossible task, but here's how I'd like to see the MQ behave. Most of it relates not to MQ substance, but to MQ structure and style.

1. Subtle start:
A MQ that just screams at you, "Go start on this path now or all hope is lost!" is a good way to svck the player into a linear game. It's also potentially good for things that have linear plots, such as books or movies. However, for a game that prides itself at being completely sandbox and non-linear, a MQ that pushes its own importance upon you from the get-go is bad design. It guilt-trips the player into starting almost immediately, because the beginning was so grand and epic. It severely guilt-trips the character into starting immediately, because there are few viable and non-baggage-carrying ways to roleplay that character to where (s)he doesn't care and won't immediately act. Therefore, the MQ opening must employ subtlety. A delivered letter, or a hint of information. Something that holds intrigue and can catch player attention, but something they can still stuff away and say, "I'll get to that later."

2. No Letters of Recommendation:
You start out as a nobody. You are not ordained by the gods. You are not given the golden seal of approval by a dead ruler. You are an unknown quantity to the world, and therefore you are insignificant. Even to vital quest-givers. Especially to vital quest-givers. To get anywhere with the storyline, you have to first get some recognition, and secondly, you must then grease the wheels (moreso than Joke! Admire! Coerce! Boast!, anyway). And recognition does not come solely from doing random good deeds across the land. That's all well and good, but political recognition is what matters most. Yet earning some trust (or even acknowledgment) from political rulers is a long and tedious task, comprised of playing the right angles, doing the right favors, and maintaining face all the way up the proverbial chain of command. In other words, significant semi-"freeform" work would be a requirement before getting into the real meat of the story. Which is good, because the meat of the story should always be saved until the intermediate plot.

3. Ability to feasibly walk away / Main Quest Intermissions:
Going hand-in-hand with a main questline start that foists its own importance upon you at the beginning is the main questline that never allows you room to breathe. Hence the need for times and places to come up for air. You just finished a job for one of your employers? They might congratulate you, compensate you, and then inform you they'll need a week or two to see how things pan out before they proceed. Instant break on that avenue of the MQ. Sure, since this would be a Daggerfall-esque political story, you could try your luck working for one of the other rulers while you wait, but that decision is not forced onto you by the game via "this is the next step, so go do it." And when that time-period passes, when the employer sends word to the player via letter/messenger that they have another task at the ready, the player has now been away from the MQ long enough to actually have the unbiased choice of continuing, or perhaps putting it off for a bit more so they might finish some unrelated work.

4. The Endgame pulls all the stops:
Chances to take a breather significantly reduce as the player passes the middle-story and enters into the beginning of the end. This is where all the epic, all the guilt-tripping, all the sense of "you really need to do this now" and urgency comes in. This is where the heat is turned up. And as it's coming in at the endgame, it's not falsely or arbitrarily imposed. The questline no longer has to push its own importance on the player. Since the player has now had the whole previous quests to discover and learn things over time, the player will push the importance on the questline, aided and abetted by endgame events and dialogue (And of course, the endgame does not literally mean "the end." For example, meeting with Vivec and starting the hunt for Kagrenac's tools was the endgame, even though the fight with Dagoth Ur was the end).

5. The End is not really The End:
While it might work in linear stories, no plot of the magnitude TES tries to convey climixes and ends in such a clean manner. "Killed Dagoth Ur? Well, the land's saved, so I guess we're good!" "Stopped Dagon? Great, now we've got nothing left to worry about!" Sure, you can still keep playing, but the MQ is done, and any actions you undertake to attempt to RP furthering it are RP and nothing more. No MQ should just end with the climix. Whether it's ironing out recovery details, or mopping up the leftover mess from the antagonist(s), or untangling bureaucracy, SOMETHING has to be there to let you gently down off of your proverbial MQ-high. After all, every story needs some form of epilogue, no?

I would love a game start in a forest after you awake after being knocked down by a bandit. An old traveller finds you and treats your wounds he asks about your name and background (class). Afterwards you are attacked by a pack of wolves which mortally wounds the traveller he then tells you that you must deliver a message to a man in a nearby town. This would introduce you to the main quest.

Many believe that the next game will be set in Skyrim, and it may be the case, I hope the main quest won't be about Daedra again. The idea of a Daedric invasion in and of itself didn't bother me, but Bethesda already did that plot, I want the next game to involve new events that we haven't seen in past games.

I can't say too much about what possible main quest could be used, as the specifics are impossible to guess at when talking about a hypothetical game we don't know anything about yet. I do hope though that there will be more options in the story than Morrowind or Oblivion, there doesn't necessarily need to be multiple endings to the main quest, but I'd like at least multiple paths to reach the ending, and even if the overall end of the story is the same doesn't mean every detail can't be changed. Multiple endings cause problems in sequels because you need to decide which ending is canon, or find a way to allow all of them to be possible, but if the narration of future accounts of the story events are kept vague enough, you can have multiple possible ways the events could have played out as long as the ultimate outcome is the same.



That may sound good on paper, but if you leave the interesting parts of the story too far ahead, some players may be driven away by the lack of any sort of direction, or worse, they might simply get bored with the game before giving it much of a chance because nothing interesting happens until some time has past. Games that just drop you in the middle of nowhere without giving you any direction are not easy to get into. In Oblivion, on the other hand, you're basically told that "If you want to advance the story, you can go do this, but if you'd rather ignore it, you can just run off and do whatever you want too." although Morrowind's method did seem a somewhat better approach, since the game didn't try to convince you that there was a sense of urgency when it let you go do whatever you wanted. In the end, although the best parts of a story will not be shown at the start, it must give something to draw audiences in, ir who would sit through it until the good part?



Morrowind often had a way of doing this, where instead of giving you the next quest immediately, the questgiver would only give it to you if you said you wanted it or were ready, sometimes, you would actually be asked if you feel ready for it, or you may actually be told to slow down, go practice you skills, get better equipment, do freelance work, and such. Functionally, it wasn't very different from Oblivion, but the approach did seem a little more believable.



Yes, and when something like the Warp in the West happens every time there's some sort of crisis going on in some part of Tamriel, it's going to start seeming a little hard to believe.

RE ThatOneGuy's post - Some nice ideas there kiddo.

Of course, we're not really speculating as to what the main quest of the next major TES game will be. No, it's more a case of throwing around ideas of our own, thinkinf what we ourselves would do given the position of chief writter on a cannon entry in the series.

Oblivion's problem was that it gave you the choice between advancing the story or doing your own thing through a popup, not through what was actually happening in the game. I didn't like that if you were RPing a good character, you pretty much had to jump into the main quest immediately, and stay there until Martin was safely at Cloud Ruler Temple, at least. I liked Morrowind's approach better, though some thought it wasn't urgent enough. But you don't need an urgent main quest. You need one that allows players to decide if they want to jump in right away, or get acquainted with the world first. The only way I could RP a good character in Oblivion and not do the main quest first was to say that my character wanted to build a reputation first so that Jauffre would trust her when she showed up with the Amulet of Kings, not immediately hand her over to the guards. But that was stretching it. Some didn't like Morrowind's approach because Caius tells you to go away for a bit and won't deal with you until you've levelled--that wasn't good for players who wanted to get started on the MQ. Giving the player the choice would cater to both crowds. NPC: Do you want orders now, or would you rather build up your strength first? Something like that.

ThatOneGuy: Great post!

Although I feel the Prisoner beginning has become somewhat of a tradition, it would be nice with a different approach, I do however like the approach of one who's unfamiliar with the land, so arriving on a boat or via. some other method of long distance travel, would be a great explanation for the player unfamiliarity with the world.

The game could start by you being prisoner/slave in a small bandit camp somewhere in the wilderness in Skyrim, and another prisoner manages to break out and unlocks ur cell during night and after defeating the night-guard you gotta flee together with the other prisoner, and after a walk through the forest you reach the first small town. The person that helped you to get out of the cell could arrive again later in the main quest.
I kinda like the prisoner-beginnings, but i found the Oblivion start to be too long, the beginning of Morrowind was better, simple but still really cool.

I'd like it if you started off as a prisoner, but rather in a different context. You're a slave working in a vast mine complex owned by some wealthy bloke who plays a main part in the world you see as one of the bigger corporation-style factions. You begin at first doing work - introducing you to some characters and so on. Then you follow whatever path and you organize a break-out.

There could be break-out styles catering to more subtle, hands-on or magical pursuits and of course there'd be more morally-inclined ways of doing it or an evil approach. With the good approach you let loose your fellow slaves and perhaps spare the overseers; another where you take over the mine as your own for profit; another where you flood the mine and kill everyone, etc. - all with their own, long-lasting and far-reaching ramifications.

You're directed toward a nearby town, where (when you initially get there) there's a speech introducing you to the main quest plot, whatever it may be. You have several liberal options to how and when you pursue this. The reputation you've built might influence how and through who you're introduced to the storyline.

If you're some sadistic murderer you'll be introduced through jail, where one of the political factions offers you freedom through service; another route to the main quest comes when you gain renown as a magic-user, following through some sort of mage-guild based plot where you're contacted out while doing some particular mission, and so on.

TESV: A story about the fall/rise/corruption of the empire. Oblivion set it up perfectly, and I'd be confused if it didn't happen.

TESVI: I want Vivec to come back. I think it could be pretty awesome. Vivec was taken by the Daedra. But who said he was killed? Perhaps some kind of deal went down where Vivec was granted his godhood back for some kind of task to do. (A Daedric Prince can't enter Nirn usually, sending in Vivec would be easier than most solutions) Vivec would then start preaching about how he's helping the Dunmer by reclaiming land for them. I would love to see a 50-50 Argonian/Dunmer inhabited mainland Morrowind that Vivec is trying to reclaim. The more faithful of the Tribunal temple that survive could take part, aswell. Using Almsivi Intervention could get me killed. When a mortal has that much power, insanity is easy to reach.

I really hope they take advantage of the political unrest that has been suggested at the end of Oblivion. I much prefer a more political storyline to a sort of "Good VS Evil" one. There should be no "good guys" - the two sides should be Loyalists, wishing to remain in the Empire (and probably comprised of the wealthier citizens who have benefited from Imperial rule) and Separatists, who wish to secede. The separatists could in turn be divided into a sort of Bolshevik and Menshevik type scenario, with some attempting to leave through legal channels and peaceful public demonstrations, while others rise up in arms and kill their local figures of authority in an act of defiance against the Legion.

This kind of storyline just begs for player choice on the side to help in their struggle, although if this is the case the ending should be the same. Perhapsthe first part of the quest is focused on working for your chosen side, before a greater threat arises (invasion from a foreign continent?) and then the quest reshapes to uniting the province against a common foe.

I hate to bring this thread down but doesn't this board prohibit necromancy? This thread is really old...

Actually, you could get quests from Caius before leveling. He just suggests that you go get some experience before jumping in. So that system that you suggested is ho it was in Morrowind.

I'd like a story with more politics in it, but not to the extent where you are always a pawn in some grander scheme of the higher ups. Like say some new island was discovered and now, all the nations are rushing there and staking claims, this could lead to you being in charge of your own small kingdom, and forming alliances and treaties.

Another is you could start out as part of a legion squad in a war against the Akavir and while riding in the back of the wagon to your post the guy asks you to look around asks you about your preferences and etc. so that could be the tutorial. Afterwards some catastrophic event happens squad is killed wake up somewhere new and now you do what you want.

You resurrect a nearly year old thread to say that? Anyways, the "prisoner beginning" isn't really that "traditional". Morrowind start out in a ship, Daggerfall start out with a ship (and crash), and Redguard start out with a ship (and it involves pirates).

:facepalm: Good point.

[quote name='Uberpwnage' date='05 July 2010 - 08:09 PM' timestamp='1278353397' post='16125842']
I hate to bring this thread down but doesn't this board prohibit necromancy? This thread is really old...
[/quote]

I've searched the rules, there seems to be nothing prohibiting continuing old discussion. It was open for posts and II feel this topic is still valid.

[quote name='Qawsed Asap' date='05 July 2010 - 08:47 PM' timestamp='1278355667' post='16125964']
You resurrect a nearly year old thread to say that? Anyways, the "prisoner beginning" isn't really that "traditional". Morrowind start out in a ship, Daggerfall start out with a ship (and crash), and Redguard start out with a ship (and it involves pirates).
[/quote]

Yeah I did, the thread was open, so why would it be a problem, is it not valid?

You forgot the part of morrowind where you were a [b]freed prisoner[/quote] sent to morrowind on a ship.

Some of the interesting quests are back in the catalog. If I use the search function will it not find anything as long as it is open?

Usually these suggestion end up in the TES V Ideas and Suggestions in the long run.


Except it does not really hold any water as to the fact that if the PC is really a "freed prisoner" or not. The ship does not indicate that the PC was really a convict and there wasn't great emphasize that the PC is a convict either. That, and Prison/Jail =/= Prison Ship. Way I see it, it opens alot more background for the Player to Play around.

oh, alright it must have been a different board, my apologies.

I think this thread would be interesting to speculate about scenarios after Elder Scrolls V.

Even though we know nothing of Elder Scrolls V, what about VI, VII, VIII, IX or X? or XI, XII, XIII, XIV or XV? or ... you get the point.

I think a scenario involving Morrowind after the splode of Vvardenfell would kind of be exciting, but boring at the same time. Elder Scrolls VI: Morrowind?

Unless it also took place in Argonia.

Actually the only time I'd like to see the provinces of Morrowind and Cyrodiil revisited is if the entire continent were available to explore.

I would also be fascinated if in the distant future, not only is the entire continent of Tamriel available, but it was also the size and scale of Daggerfall or Arena, but with graphics well beyond what we have today.

One day, I want to explore Akavir and other lands outside of Tamriel. I want to visit all the Daedric realms, not just Deadlands and Shivering Isles. By then, The Elder Scrolls might be a series that has been around for fifty years, and at that point would be legendary just like how Dungeons and Dragons has become.

well, I can see why you would think that, but I don't feel that we are actually suggesting anything as much as we are just discussing the way beginnings have been handled in the different games.



He was still a prisoner, and the whole "problem" there is with the prisoner background is that one haves to rationalize why a good guy would be in prison (provided you play a good guy). I don't feel people have as much a problem with where you start, as much as they have a problem with being labeled a prisoner.

What I'm saying is, that you could really have started anywhere, but it would still be a problem because you would still be labeled a prisoner.



No worries