Because of this the new system feels like it's driven more by "XP" than by experience. Doing "everyday" tasks like selling loot and lockpicking can now increase your level, which in turn can be used to improve (or "perk up") skills that you haven't touched in a while. This goes against the basic ES model of "you get better at things the more you use them". Sure, increasing skills is still important because you can't unlock certain perks without having the requisite skill level, but overall skills seem to play a much smaller part now.

Speechcraft also needs a proper minigame.

I don't mean something that gets so rote that I have the exact pattern of clicks memorized into total muscle memory because, once you remove the symmetry, there are literally only 4 possible combinations of "best" responses.

I mean looking at a game like "Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble", whose whole gameplay mechanic was based around fast-talking their way out of problems, and where their talents were represented in the form of playing card suits. Trying to bluff your way past an advlt in that game involved playing functionally bluff poker, and interrogation involved something like Wheel of Fortune where you can buy a certain number of the letters in a message, and have to guess the results.

There also needs to be a better limit to the game - so that you can't just make up for every drop in relation by simply another speechcraft pie down their throat.

What I would suggest is something fairly abstract, but symbolic of what you are doing - arguing with someone could be a game similar to Othello or Go, where you are placing down statements in an attempt to entrap and eliminate the opponent's statements from the board. A standard relation-raising game or attempt to flirt or charm your way to a better deal with a shopkeep could be a memory matching game where there are cards with symbols on them, and the target of the flirting has a few favorite and a few random symbols they will ask you to guess where those cards are.

The perk system should be kept, one option would be awarding perk points for each skill every X levels of that skill, forcing you to choose in between options, or bringing back the "only major skills give you XP" system.

In the next Elder Scrolls game, I hope to see more joinable factions. I mean, I want to be able to join not just the Mages Guild, the Thieves Guild, the Warriors Guild, The Dark Brotherhood, The Imperial Legion and (possibly) the Rebels, but also factions like the Vigilants of Stendarr, different clans, Vampire clans, packs of Werewolves, and also Daedric Gods-worshipping factions. I want to be able to join every named group in the world, and It would be really nice if it would work like in Morrowind: that if you joined one faction, another one would be mad at you, and vice versa. That's all.

The Elder Scrolls VI: Spears

Something I'd like to add on about role-playing and guilds and using Radiant Story in future Elder Scrolls:



Honestly, the shortness of the guild quests would actually not be such a problem if you did one simple thing - make the player do some Radiant Story quests as "grunt work" once they are entry-level associates of a guild to "earn their place" in the guild.

If you just work on making the dynamic quests interesting, you don't need to have plot quests except as capstones or dramatic turns in the plotlines of faction or main quest lines. I would like to say, however, that means you really need to work on making procedurally constructed quests interesting and varied. **

For an example, Mount and Blade has essentially no plot at all, just 6 warring factions and a bunch of random quests which are set to repeatedly be offered to the player. It doesn't suffer for lack of a plot, and in fact, just helps to free up the player from any sense that they have some sort of railroaded main plot forcing their character to be anything other than what the player wants him/her to be.

Work on making an immersive world, and making quests where if the local gnoll encampment goes too long without being exterminated, they will start raiding Farmer Bob's outlying fields, and Farmer Bob will then put in a request for the local hired blade faction that has had a good success recently to get rid of them, and you have a good quest set up. Better, the local economy could be harmed in-game until the gnolls are gone, while it improves the safer the community is, making those random quests actually give you the feeling that your actions have a concrete impact upon the world.

Then, you can make which faction of "local hired blades" the farmer goes to become based upon the publicity of various rival "fighter's guilds" that the player could join. Picking one of opposing fighters guilds that are all basically mercenaries, but where the mercenary band you join with might have radically different philosophies as the other fighter guilds, and different clients that prefer to go to them (so long as their reputation hasn't been destroyed by the competition), and you have a way to keep factions and guilds interesting without having to go through hand-painting and voice-acting big dramatic "ONLY YOU CAN SAVE THE WORLD" plotlines every 5 seconds.

Give players the ability to hire immigrating procedurally generated NPCs that are looking for work to join their guilds to replace any losses, and a much better follower control system, and you can even have quests where you take out guild members to fight with you and die, but not require reloading or having a permanent hole in their company roster.

Spend the time to make procedural gameplay/Radiant Story a serious core mechanic of the game, and it can outright carry quite a bit of the heavy lifting of making a detailed gameworld for you, Bethesda. Just look at Dwarf Fortress, a game whose procedural world generation builds a continent with a 1000 year history at the push of a button, and whose creator is currently working on making a truly dynamic living world with a population of hundreds of thousands and a working economy.

Any company can make a "save the world" quest, but Bethesda is known for creating a jaw-dropping world with incredible verisimilitude, and working on improving these aspects of the game helps to make your games more truly unique.

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** EDIT: Interesting and varied quests means quests that aren't just go-here, kill that. It should be something that actually relates to the state of the world around the player, so that maybe if crime has become a big problem, you start getting requests to catch thieves or guard important goods. Alternately, if you are part of a criminal faction, the marks should adapt their defenses to guard against the types of crimes you commit. Again, invisibility spells breeds guards using scent dogs to catch you. Going in brute force? They might hire some powerful mages or warriors to stop you.

Likewise, while I like the quick travel option in this game, you might make an Indiana Jones style red line going across the map (especially if the game is going to have to pause to load the region, anyway,) and have random encounters when you try to fast-travel stop you mid-travel, rather than simply appear when you show up at the city gates.

That way, you can also take on jobs as a caravan guard, and have random encounters where you protect the caravan without making the quest take a huge amount of time just walking alongside the caravan. Also, make some diversionary wolf pack tactics occasionally on hitting those caravans, as well - small threat hits and runs to lure the player away while the main force strikes from the other side. Something to keep every quest of the same type from feeling the same. That's what procedural coding is good for - making things a little random.

About quest marker,best solution for it would be if players at the beggining of the new game could choose if they do or dont want quest marker to be in their game,and of course for Beth to include quest directions given by NPCs,that way everyone could shape theyre own game at the beggining to suit them,and thath shouldnt be so hard for Beth to include.

Starts out in the back of a covered carriage...Opening credits and all that B.S.
"Hey, you awake?" whispers an old man, "Hey, where you from?"
*Character creation
"That's what I though since your a ____. Had to make sure. What are you in for?"
*Choice between "I don't know..." "You don't want to know" and "I have done nothing wrong. They must have the wrong man."
"Whatever you have or haven't done must have been pretty big."
"What's going on?!"
"You don't know?! We're--"
*Cut off by pounding on carriage wall
"Hey! We're here! Let's go!" Yells Redgaurd Official
*Carriage opens with bright light
*Pulled out forcefully as light returns to normal as eyes get used to it
*Large town with similar to Anvil's architecture Hanging stage thing in view
"By the order of the King of Hammerfell the following persons are to be executed by hanging." *lists off random names
*When you come up to be called a small window apears and name is entered
*Prisoners are hung 3 at a time - 9 total including yourself

That's as far as I got. Don't know what saves you.

Probably been mentioned, but having it set in one of the western provinces and using the Aldmery Dominion/Empire as a main point of the plot would appeal to me.

Summerset Isle.

It's what everyone wants to see isn't it?

(or Valenwood, with all that lore and creatures)

I'd rather they take us to Black Marsh or Elsweyr, I'd like to see the beast races lands and society.

I would like to see open cities, changing seasons (with real impact to the life of people and animals) and a bigger map, about 2x of the size of Skyrim. I'd like my trips from one settlement to the next to be longer.

I`d like simplified features of the construction kit to be in game
- the option to build houses and furnish rooms from templates - eg generic kitchen,study,manor,town house,cottage
- the option to get NPCs with specific skills to live there - eg tradesman,trainer
TES games strength is the massive worldspaces they provide so why can`t they be better utilized by giving the average player the option to put something in them?

Lots of these things have been said before but:
-Put back spellmaking and make it better (as in destruction spells that combine effects or summoning spells that summon multiple criters). Combat has evolved quite a lot since the days of Dagerfall while magic didn't (especially since MW).
-Put back levitation!
-Make level scaling less obvious and DON'T scale nearly all the loot. It feels better if you work 50 hours to get a full set of daedric and then you are one of the few people using it. If you worked the same amount of time but then you have bandits runing around in it then it cheepens the value of your character's actions. Also not having everyone level at the same pace with the player and even making randomly leveling creatures (as in a dungeons with bandits that are between levels 10 and 20 regardless of your characters level). Also adding some sort of name generator may reduce the scaled feeling.
-Make the fastravel thing a privilege. I'm not going to say remove it but it could be designed to work like a modified version of a teleportation spell with the distance you can teleport being linked with your skill, level or mana cost. Going for one place to another should either cost time, money or mana not be a free for all thing.
-bring back the large number of factions seen in Morrowind. I may be overly nostalgic but having 14 or 15 factions like you had in MW is better than 5 or 6. It also gives a real chance to complex multisided plots and interesting quests. Also improving the depth of the quests NPC's and lore is always a good idea (Skyrim is better than Oblivion here no about it doubt but there still is plenty of room for improvement)
-Make skills more important and bring back atributes but do keep the perks. A complex system is good for character development. Also don't try to make the PC become a jack of all trades or a combat/magic/stealth specialist. The game shold provide for all styles of gameplay.

I keep seeing this, but I still think that quick travel as it stands makes some sense, if they just made it seem less like transportation was teleportation, and more like simply hitting the fast forward button.

What do you think of this part from my own suggestion?



Then, you aren't just "teleporting", you get stopped along the way and have to fight your way out occasionally at some random spot on the road if you are fast-travelling.

__________

As for attributes and perks -

I actually dislike the way perks are handled. The point of this game's leveling system is supposed to be that we gain skill through use, not through levels, but that's exactly what perks are - some skills have all-powerful perks that completely overshadow the mild effects of the skill ranks, and because of how you can rank up, say, One-Handed all the way up to 100, then switch to Two-Handed just to get more skill levels by ranking up Two-Handed to 100, but all your perks would still be in One-Handed, your character's skills would be lopsided because your skill does not improve through use, but through the allocation of character points at levelup.

Conversely, attributes did need to be shaken up a bit. Intelligence and Willpower literally did have no impact on gameplay but to give you more or faster recharging Magicka, so just giving you a Magicka attribute isn't a terrible change. Endurance likewise was literally just for more Health (and some Stamina). They simply rolled the minor effects together into Stamina. Personality and Luck are gone entirely, but Luck was never really useful, and Personality only really had meaning when you were breaking the game with it.

Now obviously, things could have been rewritten to be better, but I don't think this is actually a terrible move on their part, although I'd rather see something more akin to your stats rising completely without the player assigning character points to attributes at all, but dynamically growing with use, the way that the game's whole leveling mechanic is supposed to work.

I really think a lot of resources should be put into making the people move realistically. Skyrims NPC's are good, absolutely, but like a lot of other things time should be taken to take it from being good, to great.

Also, how the hell is Bioware getting that quality of voice acting? Skyrims (once again) is a good standard, but i'd just played Dragon Age: Origins before starting it and the voice acting in that game is superb. Again it's something that could go from a good standard to great.

@Wraith_Magus: While your idea looks good it has some isues:
1) How often would encounters happen? Fast travel is for most people a way of getting fast to where you want to go. Getting stopped 3 or 4 times in one fast travel is going to get old very soon. In fact even being stopped once in each fast travel may get tendious. However making a cross between a safer payed carriage/ slitstrider/ horse transport system where you pay for traveling and a fast travel system like you described made for nearby locations would be optimal (teleportation may still seem good for mages and more options are almost always good). However I'm against caravan quest fast traveling. Quests need to be challenging so walking around a caravan will encourage you to explore the game and make you feel that you've earned the gold. I'm all for intelligent ambushes and tactics though. Some 60-70 NPC battles could be implemented adding a new level to combat complexity. New tactics could also reduce the need for leveled enemies.

As for perks they aren't bad just overpowered. If I were the one designing the next game I would be really tempted to dump the whole level system and just change the character throught skills atributes and perks. I'd actually handle atributes pretty much like skills (although some of them would gain points by killing things since you can't really measure things like endurance in relation to the players actions others like intelligence would also become better by casting spells or fighting).

As for NPC's I don't think they are that much of a problem, sure they can be better but there are a number of more important things to deal with.

I actually think more of Baldur's Gate, where you had to travel through a map at least once, but then, you could "quick travel" through a map of the overland areas without having to actually walk through it again.

You'd get stopped whenever there was a scripted event for an assassin to stop you or a highwayman or the like to stop you and demand a toll. Maybe there could be a "random encounter" when going off the beaten path, but you should probably only have a 10% chance per trip to ever get ambushed outside of scripted events.

Horses might give you an option to just ride ahead past such threats, and lower your encounter rate, as should carriages. You could even include teleportation spells and it would not only have no encounter rate, but also take no game time.





The problem I have with perks is that it means you can't just play your character, and develop them through use, you have to pre-plot your character's growth because any perk points you don't use properly are forever wasted. Sure, some people like the notion that you have to sit down and chart exactly how you are going to level up in advance, but part of what makes TES unique is that you're not supposed to have to do that.

I think that we can have perks, but make them no longer level-based, but rather, based upon skill ranks and have its own internal perk tree that means you can't fully complete any skill's perk tree by sacrificing gaining perks in another skill.



That way, we keep the character specialization choices and the notion that one character cannot become a master of absolutely everything, without making you have all perks in one of your skills and none of the perks in a couple others that you are also at "master" levels for. Skill trainers could become perk trainers, as well, making them play a more serious role in the game. Perks could come about not from just spontaneously gaining the ability to perform a new power attack, but by being trained in how that power attack is done.

As another alternative, we could have our skill tree actually a matter of selecting a perk that we want to work on in a skill, and then our experience goes towards that "sub-skill" of that perk. So, instead of having an across-the-board "You are rank 28 in Skill Name", you actually are gradually gaining the benefits of a perk over time. So, for example, instead of having a single perk point instantly give you +25% lightning damage, you could choose to focus your Destruction practice upon lightning damage, gaining +1% bonuses for every arbitrary amount of experience points in Destruction. You could also have some sort of slider that lets you decide how much you want to "focus" your experience on one thing in case you want to be more of a generalist, or just don't want to bother micromanaging.

As for attributes, it makes more sense to have the power of magic tied to your total magicka pool. That way, it actually scales upwards in power as you level, since magicka on a wizard can be seen as a general function of their level overall, but where "battlemages" would have less magicka and more health and/or stamina, so pure wizards would have somewhat stronger spells. This also compensates for the problem where magic effects don't scale to the level of the player or the threats the player faces. Magicka-boosting items would also be magic damage-boosting items, as well, making another reason for pure mages to favor unarmored caps that carry such effects. (Especially if enchantable equipment might have multipliers to certain types of enchantments, so that robes are always going to have better magic-related enchantments than heavy armor.) Stamina, meanwhile, could increase physical damage (which it already did since Oblivion, if I'm not mistaken).

Making a sub-skill system seems complicated and cumbersome. Making specific perks tied down to a certain set of skills would make most sense. Perhaps implementing skill groups such as one handed with the short blade, long blade, blunt weapon and axe subskills so you could choose perks. More than that you could also level in all the subskills when you level in one of them but by a lesser amount. Someone who is a master of the long blade won't be pathetic when using short blades. So perhaps leveling 1 level in short for 3 in long? Even better have skill trees like combat->twohanded->longblade. Combining that with an well thought atribute system and you may get totally realistic scaling. Also magic power shouldn't be dependent on the magicka reserves because that would make things overpowered since you will not only cast more spells but also stronger ones for the same cost. It should be dependant on skills as someone with a high destruction skill will be able to cast more damaging spells than a more powerful wizard that is specialized in conjurations.

Well, the point of having those "sub-skill" perks is that you don't have to choose perks from spending points in a menu, but through just playing the game. Basically, if you use a short blade, you get the short blade perks, and if you use a mace, you start working up the mace perks.

Likewise, attributes leveling off of how you use your skills rather than picking them at levelup.

The real problem I have with the perks system is that in a game where I am supposed to be able to make whatever character I want through dynamic evolution of my playstyle is that perk points force me to choose, from the very moment of hitting level 2, which skills I'm going to be using for the rest of the game. The first time I start playing, I have no idea if I'm going to want to use bows and conjuration, or stick with destruction. I don't even have a conjuration spell yet, and I've been using that flames spell, but I know I'm going to want conjuration later, so should I just put perks into that now? How much am I going to hate using bows later on in the game, I've hardly even started using them now... This isn't the sort of question I should be asking myself when I am in a game where my character evolves naturally through play, as my choices now wouldn't be permanent bars to learning the paths I didn't choose later.



The reason why you scale it to magicka and not destruction skill is because you can simply power-level one school of magic early on, and then destruction is overpowered early on, then, like now, will stop scaling later on in the game. Making magicka the basis of magic power, however, you actually tie it in to your level, and as such, it scales as you progress through the game.

We could then also make a more dynamic "spellcrafting" system where we could simply have an in-menu slider where you just keep using the same basic fire spell but could tell the game to "overcharge" your spell by spending more magicka for more damage, or once you learn fireball, could expand the blast radius or increase the duration of the burn. That way, you don't have 900 spells in your spellbook by the end of the game, you just use the same basic spells, but scale it up or down. You just, essentially, "favorite" certain settings of the basic spells. You just set the scaling of your magicka so that as your maximum magicka increases, the power and also the magicka consumption of your spells increases, so that a given spell setting would take up the same percentage of your maximum magicka.

Unless, of course, we are talking about re-instituting attributes so that we would have one distinct "makes magic more powerful" attribute and another "gives you more magicka" attribute.

Speaking of skill levels, as well, there are actually elegant ways to prevent the game from breaking when you keep adding on skill levels to a character, which prevent the sort of nonsense you see with infinite enchantment/alchemy loops. I posted this in a magic scaling thread:


Likewise, crafting skills could be something more like having their power be "(11 - 100 / Skill Level) * 20% of standard weapon/armor rating". Constants would have to be adjusted, but basically, that formula would mean that no matter how much you overlevel smithing, you won't get more than 220% normal power.

My short list

First off, I think the quest marker should be available through the whole game with the option to turn it on or off in the main options menu. Some quests are easy enough without it, so I might not WANT it, though some are really tough. It's hard to make that decision once and for all within 10 minutes of starting a game that you've never played before.

Second, I want traps in my dungeons to be something you have to think to solve. It's a big problem in CRPGs in general -- Zelda three was about perfect in that doing something in one part of the dungeon would affect other parts. Even when you know where to go, it's quite often the journey that's tough. Pushing blocks to a lower level to be used down there was a good puzzle element. Having to pull and push statues is pretty cool. The three combolock was cool at first but I think it suffered a lot from having the answer ON THE KEY -- and from being in every dungeon of the same type.

Third, I think you could make less use of the level scaling if you added limb damage. If I could somehow break the ability of a high level creature to fight -- say I break the mage's leg or something -- then I don't have to be STRONGER, I just have to make him a weakling. Wabbajack could kill MD, and I think that should have been a legit way of winning -- it isn't something you'd necessarily try first off, nor is it something that is necessary to win, but it sure helps if you're a level 2 nobody if you can use something to make the other guy as weak as you. An arrow to the knee might help a low level player win against a large angry maurader, and it would be more interesting than simply using the stat system as your only hope.

As far as Guilds. I shouldn't be able to join everything, and for that matter, I should have to be highly skilled in the skills of that guild to move up in rank. I don't think real mages want an archmage who can barely cast a weak fireball, nor are the fighting factions interested in those who cannot fight. I also want it it take some work to rank up. I doubt a person could be in a RL bricklayers guild and build 4 walls and be guildmaster. You have to be in the guild for a while doing crap jobs at first and then gradually get better jobs as I prove myself. I shouldn't start out killing necromancers, I should start out gathering ingredients. As far as joining "everything" it's not very realistic to expect that I could join to factions that are at obvious cross purposes and not get thrown out of one of them. I'd actually love it if my character choices as well had a bit of an impact on how others see me. The idea of an Aldemer Stormcloak is a joke -- they hate the Thalmor for many things -- at minimum I should be considered a potential spy.

People should react to what I've done. Not necessarily tell me what I've done, but perhaps not sell to me if I'm a thief or something, or lower the prices after I've saved the village from dragons. If I singlehandedly saved Chicago from a raging inferno, I think I might rate the employee discount at Piggly Wiggly -- it's how real people would react.

Give me Black Marsh, I've got wet dreams with it.

Was that a pun on the swamp bit or :nono:

im starting this topic to see how many people would like the idia of co-op. i thhink it would be an epic dlc pack with up to 3 players able to join a game whith you. i dont know about you guys but i would love to be able to explore the world of skyrim with freinds. think of all the fun you could have with a mate on it and there could be difrent severs for difrent settings such as novice adept etc


please we need evryones imput and hhopfully bethesta will take it into account

For the love of Talos, can we please have a UI inspired by someone other than Apple? Props to Todd Howard for reminding me why the only Apple product I'll ever own is the iDontCare.

If we are to have perks, can we get some that have style and make you feel individual, rather than "put points here to be trite archetype"? You can do it, Bethesda. I actually enjoyed taking perks in FO3. Skyrim? nope.

Get away from reinforcing archetypes. Half the fun in Oblivion/Morrowind is to defy them.

Stats need meaning. I've hit a point in Skyrim where the only reason to increase Magicka is to cast spells that aren't worth it, and the only reason to increase Health is to match Stamina. Which I'm increasing for the 5 points of carry weight. I'm pretty sure this isn't how you envisioned the system working. I propose going back to health/magicka/stamina being derived stats, but this time, let's try to make the base stats multi-faceted instead of simple cause-effect. Don't ask "why does a thief need intelligence?". Ask "why might a farmer want to be more intelligent?" Don't ask "when I raise endurance, isn't my goal more health?" Ask "What should more endurance enable me to do?" Couple this with the ability to gain stats between levels, and you've got a unique experience. Somethign no one else offers.