Yeah, I've noticed there are a ton of radiant story scenarios in Skyrim that are rarely ever seen, because everyone always reloads when they do something that triggers them - collecting a high enough bounty can get bounty hunters on your tail, assaulting someone can get you thank-you notes from their enemies, or even trigger new misc quests where someone asks you to assault their rival.

edit: one "radiant" thing I think will help a lot is to give more generic NPCs schedules. Like bandits sleeping in shifts, with the sentry raising an alarm and waking everyone if you get spotted. Or nocturnal creatures leaving their caves at night to hunt around. If there's a dynamic feature to throw down a campsite, enable traveling NPCs to do that on their own. And I think a fair compromise between Skyrim's repetitive dialog scenes and Oblivion's silly conversations is to have unique NPCs engage in their own custom-made scenes, and then open up more randomized conversations for generic NPCs like bandits, guards, or workers - tailored to their class of course, so bandits talk about bandit stuff and guards talk about guard stuff. And a bit more refined than Oblivion's, if it needs to be said...

I think the generic NPCs are better only because having NPCs without a name automatically lowers expectations so I don't try to talk to them; I know they are just filler. For my part, I think all I'm looking for in interactivity is reactivity. Until someone develops a toolkit that allows developers to have realistic spoken dialogue with proper inflection (which is something I think we talked about before) I don't know that I expect anything beyond basic introductory dialogue and stuff. Now, I think they could designate people in the game to be "contact points" or in-game friends of our character, such that we go to them when in town and can have more in-depth interactions that change as events in the game go on. For instance, maybe Ralof or Hadvir becomes a point of contact after Unbound, such that you can drop in on them any time and you get reactive dialogue depending on what's going on and develop friendship with them (go fishing with Ralof maybe or help his sister out at her mill if they need it).

The developers could place in people like this or just stick with companions who have story based reasons for being closer to you than some random person, and can focus resources on just making a few individuals more interactive. That would be the best bet going forward in my mind.

Harder, more unique games like Morrowind are the reason dedicated ES fans like me are even here over 10 years later. If you take some risks and do something unusual, then even your haters will stick around to see what crazy antics you'll try to pull off next.

I think Beth should increase difficulty and improve combat mechanics. Development has become too algorithmic and if you don't polarize your audience a bit, then your games are just going to make everyone feel equally indifferent.

Oblivion and Skyrim were too risk- averse. I get that the cornerstone of this series is to "allow the player to do anything", but without limits, the player doesn't even have to get creative. Consequentially, the player can't enjoy the intrinsic satisfaction of solving a problem. It will follow the beat of most MMOs where the player just progresses to obtain the next item.

For real. Level scaling just causes game progress to be purely cosmetic. The biggest player advancements therefore lie in the story-line. If it's truly a good "sandbox" game, then the player should be allowed to avoid quests and just have fun doing whatever. But you can't because challenges are few and far between.

So, to boil this down:

- Streamline combat mechanics

- Allow spell creation (You did this in Morrowind, and you already understand the benefits of enabling your players to customize their stuff.)

- Dilute level scaling

It's been argued in fhe past that Morrowind was just a dumbed down version of Daggerfall.

On the contrary, I find those games took pretty big risks. The core of Oblivion and Skyrim's gameplay experience was built around Radiant AI and Radiant Story respectively. Two ambitious systems they had to design from the ground up with pretty tight deadlines. The reason those games may feel "safe" is because the risk they took on when developing them was almost the games' downfall, and they had to pull back at the last minute to get something that wouldn't break itself after an hour of playing. Very few AAA game companies would even think about doing things like that, precisely for those reasons... it's too risky to base the core gameplay experience on new and untested tech that might not even work out.

Vs. an unleveled world that causes game progress to be a linear theme park ride (which kinda defeats the whole purpose of being open world). The only reason Morrowind got away with as much unleveled content as it did (which not all of it was unleveled, FWIW), was because the level range from the weakest enemies to the strongest wasn't that great, allowing you a little more freedom in where to go when, which in turn lead to the game becoming too easy too quickly because you'd quickly out-level content you needed to do. That's the big reason they did level scaling like they did in Oblivion, because Morrowind players complained there was no challenge in the higher levels.

The benefits being the ability to work around the limitations of the static spells they put in in the first place.

I think CypherSpark (who is clearlly the Arch-Fallen, and who I am reporting to the Unforgiven forthwith. The Ravenwing will be with you soon, heretical spawn of Luthor!) is talking about in-game risks rather than design risks. As in, the games are too easy, and nothing poses a challenge.


I still disagree with the premise, mind you. Morrowind is only challenging if you don't know how it works. Almost everyone gets lost and eaten by a Kwama or an Alit their first time, but when you understand how the stats work, and how the level zones are dispersed, Morrowind becomes a very easy game. Understanding it's mechanics makes the game easy, which isn't really any better a design direction than, say, Oblivion, where you can reasonably function with total ignorance.


Since Daggerfall, TES games have been easy, almost leisurely games. This doesn't mean that there aren't difficulty problems, but pretending Morrowind is exempt from this is just not true. In fact, many of its clunky mechanics and easy exploits make it one of the easiest.


Otherwise I generally agree with what needs to be done, to a degree. I think that combat is the most functional it's been in the entire series, but could still serve with some modernization. I wouldn't call it streamlining, as I think the best benefits come from more diversity and variability, but it does need to maintain a degree of intuitive function, and avoid overly convoluted rules like older, Classic RPGs.


Spell Crafting is something we've spoke of at length in the past, and I agree it should return. But not like it was.


As for Level Scaling... I think Skyrim had the right balance. The overworld focuses more on projecting an ecosystem, with particular types of creatures wandering in particular areas and not having absurd, disjointed level jumps in creatures (Wild Hunts Wolves being a good example... Why are the wolves on Skellige 15 levels higher than those on the mainland? It smacks of 'Gameplay' for its own sake) and allowing for freedom of movement and exploration. Meanwhile dungeons and more in closed environments are more restricted, with minimum and maximum levels to offer a more structured requirement experience. The only thing I'd change is some more dynamic scaling within the world, indeoendant of Player Level, but that's an Economy discussion.




Yeah, I definately don't think we're near a point where you can reasonably flesh out everyone into a fully interactive and reactive experience. But they shoudnt be there just to take up space. All NPCs should have 3 qualities: Interactivity, Purpose, Persistence. And if they are missing any individual quality, there should be a reason for it, beyond just cutting corners.


I've been playing around a bit with a minimalist system for NPCs, and you could get in a Skyrim-Number of moderately fleshed out NPCs (about 800 people with 60-80 lines of Dialogue each) and a pool of dialogue that can be assembled to make about 250,000 minor NPCs (with only 4-8 lines each) for fewer total lines than were apparently used in Fallout 4 (approximately 110,000). This includes several lines allotted to every 'Main' NPC for quest dialogue, but doesn't account for inter-NPC interactions and large scripted scenes.


It's far from perfect, and requires a significant amount of voice acting work, but it may be an achievable goal...