This is kinda a copy and paste from something a friend and I brainstormed after reading a book on game design. These options would be tied to character development. Yes I do believe in hit point reduction. There are many other ways to develop a character than massive amounts of hp. Action RPGs have a tougher go. Turn based games have been around since before we all were born. Chess is more than a thousand years old. So while I understand the game's devlopment is in the last throes I figured this might be kinda entertaining.

After 25+ years of video gaming, playing sports, and picking my nose... Oh and a little research and practice the most consistent recipe for producing fun was a combination of tense, realism, unpredictability, comfort, and enlightenment. I didn’t put comfort in the title because I think its kinda overrated by designers but its very important.

Copy and paste

Intensity- Usually requires elements of unpredictability. Produces excitement and addiction.

Realism- Inane in a vacuum. A versatile tool when combined with other elements. Can provide comfort, consistency, justifications, fairness, enlightenment and challenge.

Unpredictability- Requires realism for the sake of fairness, can produce intensity and challenge.

Comfort- Difficult to quantify and produce. Brands and controls are common stimulants for comfort. Without it everything else can break down.

Enlightenment- A combination of accomplishment and learning. Usually a product of comfort and challenge. Addictive


So that’s the criteria. These are the suggestions.


A free 1st person camera.
I don’t know why more games don’t do this. If the PC is knocked upside down or horizontal then the camera should be upside down and horizontal. The camera should stay locked with the PC’s eyes. Mirror’s Edge did great job of this. When you rolled in that game the camera rolled with you.


Coup De Grace
One hit kills should be in the game even for certain lower lvl combinations.
Give the assassin types a chance to slit a throat when they make their stealth checks.


Location damage
Let head shots be head shots. Borrow from New Vegas

Less combat
The law of diminishing returns isn’t favorable to game that’s a fraction of the size of TES games. Less combat adds intensity, unpredictability. Less bandits more farmers. Less levels means less hp. Less hp makes damage more intense and can be enlightening when you make short work of opponents as apposed to battering sponges.


Offered surrenders
The people and creatures that you fight in Oblivion are too brash. They are ready to die too easy. Let them flee, beg for mercy and offer a noble surrender, or bribe. Mercy could improve rep while a lack of mercy could make the PC more intimidating. Good opportunity for choice and consequence. This adds comfort, realism, and enlightenment.



Realistic damage
Again borrow from New Vegas. The damage sponges of Oblivion were not fun. Less hp for the PC improves intensity and reduces the necessity for level scaling when the higher level creatures are more vulnerable to a good set of archers, and higher level PCs are more vulnerable to wild animals and armed banditry.


Wrestling, grappling, biting
Choking, body slamming, headlocks, submission techniques, jumping on the back of a large creature is all as fun as it sounds. Implement that stuff at lower lvls and improve it. Don’t force someone to be lvl 15 before they can do a headlock.


Non-lethal combat
Bar fights between citizens are fun. Stop killing citizens over petty theft.


Real Adventure parties
To slap Bioware they have to be 6 man parties. There can and should be a strong solo element. Save that for higher levels. Let the lower levels join a party/gang/ merc unit etc. Prove that you can do it in 3D with advanced path finding that includes stealth, AI that doesn’t rush pell-mell to its death, mission planning, ambushes, and other tactics. Do that and you will also slap the rpgcodex which gave Oblivion a bad review. Another thing that might help is to add a negative hitpoint option like D&D so you can save people that are fallen. This would add comfort, reduce the necessity of scaling lvls, and add realism

Great battle tales
With less battles the battles should be more memorable. There should be hugs, high fives, kisses, after major battles. Identify the major battles and have the companions remember them and tell stories about them.

Limit Potions
Health positions are almost a cheat in Oblivion especially with the high hp. Make them rarer and more expensive. This would be balanced with the reduction in combat and hp.


No level scaling
Level scaling sacrifices everything for comfort but it fails to maintain comfort when you are fighting Rambo Goblins and Daedra on major highways.

One thing I think is more important than all that - increase the speed of melee battle when you improve your skills and attributes. Simply put, as you improve your blade/blunt skill you recoil less from hitting a block, you swing your weapon a bit faster if you improve your speed, and blocks are more effective if you time them right. Also, power attacks are faster if you improve blade/blunt skill. Maybe then two skilled fighters fighting each other will actually be different than two novices fighting each other. And if you're a higher level than your opponents it should show by more than just damage. Basically, outspeed the enemy, hit his block knowing you can recover in time to block the counter and finish off with a counterattack.

One big problem with melee characters was that melee combat got boring quickly. Maybe increasing the speed of battle along with the need to use advanced powerattacks will help that. Also it would give a great sense of accomplishment to not only outdamage, but also outspeed your opponents. One downside is that it would make things more difficult for players that prefer the RPG aspect over the action aspect, but then again if you've leveled your character far enough to make the combat fast, you've had plenty of practice.

Very nice thread. I agree completely with the OP. I wonder how long it takes people to realise how fun few, but intense fights can be.
It's also the way I like my shooters. In my favorite game, when you get shot only once, you start bleeding to death, accompanied by shader effects that do not even allow you to properly fight back anymore. The fact that you might take one or two more shots before dying does not really help you in that situation - you're out of the fight. You'll run, hide, seek help until someone fixes you up and stops the bleeding. Combat is rare and very, very deadly, but so much more rewarding and entertaining. Imagine that translated to a medieval setting. You basically said it - both the PC and NPCs would surrender more often, run, hide. The preparation of the fight would be more important than it is now, because avoiding being hit is much more important. Healing should be slower, and more rare, and not possible mid-fight. Being hit should have serious consequences.
In the P&P games I play, the characters, even fighters, usually avoid fights when they can. They are prepared for a fight and will do it gladly when there's no peaceful option, but facing an enemy, even a single bandit, always poses a risk. Sure, theoretically they are stronger and better equipped, but if they screw up and miss their first strikes, and then fail to block his counter, they still might spend the next few days in bed because of a broken leg or arm - if not worse.

I like it that way.

Sadly, many people don't, and I guess it's impossible for Bethesda to incorporate both this and the "normal" game mode to chose between, since the number of enemies and the kind of fights would greatly vary between those options, and every quest would have to be designed twice.

:celebration:
I'm with you and opponents should be tougher to hit too. Advancement should be more about the ability to land and avoid than damage. Damage should be more static. You are right this is as important as anything.

I agree, to one extent or another, with everything that you bring up except for this. I like TES games because they don't have parties. It is part of what makes them unique.

Along the lines of sneak attacks and one hit kills/assassinations, it would be cool if as you get higher in level in both blade and sneak, your chance of assassination/instant kill increases. So as a low level, it'll be pretty rare that you slit someone's neck, but if you're a very high level, then it'd be possible to assassinate 4 or 5 guys in a row.

However it would be nice if you had the choice to assassinate or not, like maybe your character will go for the assassination if you target their head and if you fail the attempted assassination then it will count as just a normal attack with no sneak attack bonus.

@Brotha Lynch

Those ideas are nothing short of brilliant!

i would add restrictions on magic..........morrowind had zero regen which alot of people hated and oblivion went the opposite extreme with the super magicka regen. a very slow rate of regen that forces you to use potions in big fights but doesnt force you to sleep even if nothing else is going on around you. if you were using potions for anything in vanilla oblivion you were doing something wrong. you get cure disease at journeymen level, which takes you all of 10 minutes to rank up to even if you dont pick it as a major skill, at which point there is nothing that cant be cured by it so no need for cure disease potions. why spend any money at all on cure health potions when you get early access to cure health spells that you can spam over and over with ease.

i would also make some diseases and damage health effects curable only with potions or by a only the master level health spells so that they dont become useless except for the most dedicated healer.

i myself enjoy the immersive camera effects in games like far cry 2 which like you said moved with the orentation of the character itself instead of going out into third person view. however, i would limit it only to moving the camera from normal height to on the ground and not changing orientation as alot of people actually get sick from the sudden camera view changes. this is similar to people getting sick when watching "shaky cam" movies. it does however improve gameplay.

in my game i had health equal between me and other npcs and i didnt gain health with levels simply because it is an idiotic game mechanic. getting stabbed with an iron spear is going to kill you no matter how much you work out. only your armor should improve your toughness.

i loved using partners mods for morrowind and oblivion despite their occasional stupidity. they went well with the other mods i used which increased spawns and made the world less player centric. it was fun being the thief guy that shot arrows or did sneak attacks while my other two companions handled the spells and close up warrior type fighting. i felt more like part of a system than some invincible god being that the universe was created around.

games like assassins creed show you how to NOT do stealth...........they are horrible assassin games. you can kill infinitely with the same damn attack animations and you dont even need to hide in that game. what i would like to see in stealth games is a chance to fail at sneaking up on an enemy. you step on a twig or piece of glass as your sneaking up behind them and they immediately turn around. the chances of this coudl be reduced as you get better at sneaking to only few percentage points at master level.

oblivion NEEDS location damage now.

Awesome suggestion dude

Its not really unique to the genre. A combination of efficient soloing and a large party would be unique. I'm not even sure if soloing is unique to TES. You can have eight followers in Oblivion before the game warns you that you have too many and even then it lets you add more. We have the companion thing its just not done well. You can get an entire party of toadies, and worthless assistants at the higher lvls when you dont need much help. By then lvl scaling makes it tough to keep decent followers alive anyway. With a mod for lvl scaling and companion AI Mazoga made for a decent travel mate in Oblivion. So if you are going to have it flesh it out and make it a strength. For god sake beat Bioware's 4 man parties in that 'strategic' mess Dragon Age. Do it right. Take the useless followers and make a band out of them for lower level adventures. Save the soloing and useless squires or Atronach(sp?) golems for higher levels.

Training an apprentice would be cool. Maybe they should save that for DLC.

Support, although I read on wikipedia that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Scrolls_5, so that might mean that they're upping the intensity of general combat as well.

Or just have them heal over time like in OOO.

Relying on a RNG =/= fun.

Yeah I agree with most of it.
Except for this one, which I completely disagree with "Great battle tales. With less battles the battles should be more memorable. There should be hugs, high fives, kisses, after major battles. Identify the major battles and have the companions remember them and tell stories about them."

Hugs, high fives, kisses... no, just no. But the rest, yes, just, yes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1UO6X0KRjc

You know you want it

OP got it.....

Besides what Frank327 brought up there is one thing I forgot. Its something that I know wont be that popular.

Become more range weapon oriented.
I’m sick of arrows and bolts getting disrespected in RPGs. In Dragon Age they were like toothpicks. Skyrim should play like a shooter in an the open world. Again this is where they can borrow from New Vegas. Skills should have a greater sway on accuracy like in Deus Ex. Higher level characters could feats that catch arrows or evade them while spells ward them. Strong metals could prevent criticals from headshots but every headshot should do potentially deadly damage. NPC companions should use ranged weapons until they have little choice, or facing snipers.