This thread is for ideas and suggestions for future Elder Scrolls games, and to keep all the discussion in one series of threads.

We also have an official thread specifically for http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1511970-tes-vi-location-and-setting-speculation-15/ suggestions for future games.
Now that Skyrim has been released the number of suggestions and ideas for the next ES game are starting to show up. We have a long way to go before we get another ES game and all topics like this will be closed and either transferred or referred to this one.

Please keep any discussion of Skyrim in the correct forums.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1514645-official-beyond-skyrim-tes-vi-51/

In an attempt to look at something different for a bit, what do we think to the bartering/trade system? Do you like how it is in Skyrim? Would you prefer that the world had a more in depth economy? Does it bother you that by high levels you can buy extremely exotic armours from village blacksmiths?

Last thread went over it a bit. In regards to smithing, I think the equipment available from each smith should be unique to a certain extent, with them having goods other might not necessarily have. Obviously the highest tier equipment (Ebony, Daedric, Dragonbone) shouldn't be available. As for the economy...not sure. Todd made promises about it, but I can actually live without it. Maybe having different price listings depending on locale, but eh, I can do without.

As for bartering itself, scrap what Skyrim did and just implement a single transaction menu like Wasteland 2/Fallout 3 and New Vegas did. Buying and selling each item individually and toggling between two different windows was annoying as hell. Half the reason why I don't like buying/selling in Skyrim in general, I much prefer trading. On that front, I'd like to see mercantile back if possible. Having a great business acumen like in Fallout NV while having a low speech made for rather interesting RP opportunities.

The current system is set up for convenience: we'd never visit the blacksmith if she didn't stock relevant gear. So it is a trade-off between realism and utility.

The blacksmith is a place to pick up materials for crafting etc, and to sell stuff you've picked up. So they still have a function for higher-level players.

But what if some new mechanic comes into play: for a start some kind of high-level merchants who unlock via a tough quest. Maybe even crafting should be attached to guilds somehow? E.g.: you can get blueprints for stealth gear as part of the thieves guild progression.

Maybe enchanting should only be available if you've joined the mage's guild. Alchemy could be available to all, but (ala Oblivion) gets a big boost when you buy a calcinator etc or if you progress in the guild.

The economy really has two main areas: the personal economy of the player (where most of the dev time is spent), and the wider world economy (which afaik is non-existent?)

Personal economy is a big problem: how to keep it going and keep it rewarding for high-level players? I think part of the solution is to ramp up the outgoings as we acquire property. But this is complicated by the fact that property is also available in DLC and therefore not everyone has it. BGS seem to have kept this very simple up until now: just let the player buy and sell stuff (including making some cash by buying herbs for 1 coin and selling potions for 2 coins). Then add a few items (Hands of the Atronach) that are ludicrously expensive to provide high-level goods.

The world economy is even tougher: any modelling of real-world factors is always going to fall short. I would love a realistic system but I don't think it's reasonable to expect it any time soon. It might seem terrible but I actually don't mid the Skyrim system of a daily merchant limit. Or even the Oblivion version! I just think it's too complicated otherwise. If I go kill 10,000 horkers then sell all of the meat to merchants at Whiterun horker steaks would need to be worthless. And almost as worthless in surrounding towns. Then as the meat rotted or sold, that effect would taper off. I dunno. It just seems like there's a lot of coding in there, and it doesn't add anything apart from the fun of griefing!

I think they should spend their time not modelling the way money moves around after it hits the merchants, but in allowing us to find creative ways to buy and sell stuff. So for example, making it feasible to craft, hunt, brew, cook, farm, steal, etc and then sell the products of those activities.

I get the TES focus on freedom: so we can craft anything if we have the ingredients. But I think recipes and blueprints should be part of progression (they already do this in Skyrim with unlocking smithing options as smithing levels up, but I'm talking about picking up individual blueprints: Ebony Boots, Glass Helmet). I also think it should be possible to (as others have said) craft armor of one style using different materials, and I'd also like to have prestige tiers on our gear. So I could, for example, upgrade my Ebony armor to be more powerful than Daedric. Each tier is like an upgrade that costs a heap of gold and some special ingredients. It changes the look, adding gold, gems, decoration, etc. This is all about the high-level experience, but would be cool.

This is a far-fetched idea, but I would love to see more destructible environments in games. I know we will have it one day, and some games have it to an extent (Red Faction: Guerilla!). But this would be so much fun in TES.

I know ESO rolled with something like this (Morrowind had it to a lesser extent as well, but not in the way anyone thinks), but I frankly find it uninspired. It sort of perpetuates a monotony with everything that I'm fine with not seeing, even though we do know other races (Nord's obviously smith ebony, albeit Skyrim's is depicted with a Dunmeri style) utilize the stuff as well. I'd much rather each "set" of armor look nice when set off by itself as Skyrim and Morrowind did then ESO's take, with a few more sets to round everything else out. Things like Nordic/Imperial steel goods being used along side the "base" sets that have the cultural trappings of the region the games taking place in.

I think I've said this before, but it's relevant to bartering etc: I'd like my followers to have a 'Junk' category. When we arrive in a town, my follower should go off and sell this stuff, and maybe pick up supplies too. Follower mods ('Vilja') can do this already, but I'd like to see it baked into the next game.

All my yes. Giving followers the ability to go about in their own city and get their own supplies (This is more relevant to archers though) is something I'd love to see.

Sorry for the late reply. You don't have to respond if you don't want to, the conversation seems more or less wrapped up, but still a lot of it seemed worthy of response.

I meant magic in the mechanical gameplay sense. Tamriel in general is inherently magical. It's not just another way to skin a cat as was depicted for example(and quite unfortunately) in the teso trailer, where the mage, warrior and thief archetypes basically did the exact same thing with different tools. Logically, and in game, magic, the bow, the sword, etc, are not just variations of the exact same tool, but different tools in their own right, typically heavily associated with vastly different paths, with magic, from my understanding, being the most esoteric, non intuitive complex and rewarding in the long run.

At present in the games timeline, yes, and it is even commercialised, almost dangerously so at times, like in the story of feyfolken.

The problem here is that we are talking about something that is inconsistently defined at best and unexplained at worst. The lore itself appears to be the most consistent thing in the games, so I view that as slightly more canon than the games representations themselves, and in both cases it is commonly shown that willpower and intelligence determine ones capacity to use magic. Lore like the 2920 series provide several examples of some people being more or less adept at magical use, and one example seemed to present magical use as something similar to the way the force is used in the starwars universe.

In fact, I would say that "the force" and "magic" could be viewed as very similar and have been treated quite similarly by the series in general. The force is simply "stronger" in some individuals and races.

Probably. Depending on the timeline. The mages guild history does make it clear that there was a time when magic was, very, very, very esoteric, implying a non-intuitive nature to magic, to some extent (to take the altmer nature and the nature of nordic voice into consideration)

Personally, I like the idea of this and would like to see a game take place very far back in time, before red mountain, before the mages guild, back when the dwarves existed and the nords were still semi literate thu'um using savages. Seeking out and talking to mages, assuming they are even friendly, could be a questline in itself.

I think it is more a question of the extent to which they could use magic. The magical use was inherent to their success to my knowledge and if you were to factor out the magic part, they wouldn't be particularly impressive. Studied eccentrics at best perhaps?

To return to my main (and most important point), I still feel that magic is different to the path of the thief or the warrior (I would argue that 'the lord' is also an archetype covering, money, politics and speechcraft) in that there doesn't seem to be a ceiling to its possibilities as yet represented in the game, whereas the power bottlenecks of other playstyles, while spectacular, comes relatively quick. In both lore and in gameplay, if you want to be the best you can be, with the strongest grasp of things as possible, you need to take up the magical path.

With this in mind, if it were to be recognised, which I feel it should be, I would hope that magic should be represented as such but with the highest levels of magical power being only accessible through great and complicated in-game effort, rather than simply castrating it in a ham fisted way to accommodate for gameplay "balance".

For the sake of discussion, how should we define a mage? an extensive magic user or one who specialises in magic?

Yeah, aptitude, acquisition and implementation could do with more revision.

It's a question of paths and extents. You could view everything as a shade of magic and everyone interacting with the universe as a mage by default, but then the "mages" we write about would simply be practicioners of 'higher' magic.

The question I am posing, somewhat rhetorically, is , how high does magic go exactly?

The math comparison is a pretty good way of looking at it I think. There is a missing link to the subject, so we cannot really be too objective here but, while mortals are magical and magic use is nearly universally possible, it is not very intuitive nor particularly easy to grasp. It's possible to get through life without much mathematical and scientific knowledge, but, it's pretty hard to get around picking it up if you want to really be the best you can be and understand yourself and the universe and I feel it is the same for magic in tes.

Magic is not just a glowing screwdriver, it's a seemingly nigh infinite toolkit of possibilities. It would be nice to see it more represented as such.

A very military focused main quest could make use of it for sieges and the such on frontiers that only really exist to be "ruined". Non essential generic fortresses and the likes getting burned to a crisp or blown to bits. Sinking ships too.

Even simple stuff like slicing the ropes of a draw bridge to escape pursuing guards could provide a lot of fun.

Er...the thing is magic was arguably even easier to get a hold of back then, even before the Mages guild (attempted to) monopolized it. On Summerset, its true, the Psijics did try to keep a strangle hold on the craft to keep it from falling into the wrong hands so to speak, but elsewhere...not so much. The Orcs and Reachmen had their own stuff, and freakin Ahizdel managed to seek out and find plenty of teachers in the various arts across Tamriel, and most of these cultures had it as a common place thing. The only areas where Mages would be difficult to get in contact with would be Alinor (If you're a human or a member of a lower caste, which again, touches on the social standing issues I noted earlier) and High Rock, where hedge wizardry was rampant. Hell, the Nord's had their own magical craft beyond the Thu'um in the Witch-Warriors, so...it wasn't even uncommon back then.

http://www.imperial-library.info/content/page-17-0 http://www.imperial-library.info/content/page-18-0. Which leads into my next point...

The kicker is...they really weren't. Okay, they were tough, but they weren't what I'd call high end opponents. The only member of House Telvanni that I'd consider to be the powerful monster you're talking about would be Divayth Fyr...who is freakishly old by Tamrielic standards, and the game backs up his certified badass credentials by making him one of the most powerful NPC's in the game. The rest of the Telvanni leadership is nowhere near the level, and can still be dispatched by anyone that can clench their teeth and fight as well as they can cast. The power of non-magical mortals is not something to be trifled with, something the Daedra themselves can attest to.