Hahaha I was actually waiting for them to open it too wondering what was taking so long, good on you for taking the initiative.


Anyways it kind of got skipped open during the guild talk but I wanted to bring up a discussion on magic.

"Another thing I've been thinking a lot about again is magic and growing it so each school can do more and actually be something you can really devote an entire playstyle too instead of mixing and matching all of them, all though obviously that could still be done. To achieve this I think you need to make each magic school have 3 types of spells; Offensive, Defensive, Utility/Misc."

Alteration

• Offensive: Gravity spells where you alter gravity to either crush enemies under high gravity or use low gravity to pick them up and hurl them. Alteration would also have stone spells where you create stones and hurl them at enemies.


• Defensive: Mage armors which increases your armor rating and provides a physical damage resistance and gravity spells that can provide AoE's that push away enemies or projectiles.


• Utility: Basically what most of Alteration is now, spells like open, water walk/breathing, clairvoyance, etc... In addition to those and going back to the theme of gravity spells with things like levitate and feather/slowfall. Also would include utility stones spells such as petrify which slowly turns the enemies to stone for a short time to replace paralysis.
  
  

Conjuration

• Offensive: Shadow or daedric spells where you use daedric magic to summon souls to DoT and Debuff enemies. Other daedric spells like launching daedric energy in either a shadowbolt or dark crystal form, ESO has a class that can specialize in this. There would also be the classic bound weapons.


• Defensive: Bound armor which provides both physical and magic damage resistance at the cost of losing a % of max magicka while active.


• Utility: Summons/Necromancy where you use pets to help you out. These pets like bound armor would cost a % of max magicka while active. You could also have other summon spells like summon portal spell to travel or a summon chest spell.
  
  ?

Destruction
Destuction is a bit different from other schools so I actually broke it up based on elemental types rather than offense, defense, utility. Although it does still have those (besides utility) I just feel like the elemental differences is what's more important here.

• Offenisve:
  
  • Fire: High damage specialization that has a lot of AoE spells and it's secondary effect/proc is DoT damage through burning.
  
  
  • Ice: More control oriented with spells where you slow/chill enemies until finally procing them to a solid freeze which you can them use to deal automatic crits with certain spells.
  
  
  • Lightning: High single target damage that can arc to nearby enemies and can proc to stun enemies for a short time.
  
  
  • Wind: Physical damage based element using either concussive wounds to knock enemies around or "razor" winds that can cut enemies to shreds.
  
  


• Defensive: Shroud spells that can reduce spell damage from sources of the element type or the one it's good against. Ice > Fire > Wind > Lightning > Ice
  
  • Fire: Shroud provides protection against fire and wind damage. Burns enemies who get to close and can set fire to enemies who hit you. Can also use lava armor spells to also provide physical damage resistance.
  
  
  • Ice: Shroud provides protection from ice and fire damage. Chills enemies who gets too close and can freeze enemies who hit you. Can also use ice armor to provide physical damage resistance.
  
  
  • Lightning: Shroud provides protection from lightning and ice damage. Zaps enemies who get too close and can paralyze enemies who hit you. No lightning armor provide physical damage resistance but the shroud can absorb spells and turn it into magicka.
  
  
  • Wind: Shroud provides protection from wind and lightning damage. Cuts enemies who get to close with a chance of causing bleeding damage and can knock-back enemies who hit you. No wind armor to provide physical damage resistance but the shroud can increase your speed (attack and movement).
  
  


• Utility: Enhancement spells for your weapons adding damage and a bonus effect to weapons based on elemental type.

Illusion

• Offensive: Mind crush spells to obliterate your opponents mind and chaos/rage spells to have enemies harm each other. Can also summon illusion beast that can harm enemies but are extremely weak to spell damage.


• Defensive: Mirror spell that creates clones around you to confuse enemies. Pacify spells to calm enemies.


• Utility: Charm spells to make you more likable, mirage spell to make you look like and ally to enemies, invisibility/chameleon spells to sneak around. Would also like to see a mind transfer spell that let's you take control of an enemy.

Mysticism

• Offensive: Arcane spells that use magicka in its purest form; arcane missles, blast, etc...


• Defensive: Planeshfiting spells that let you partially enter the aether and become ethereal to become immune to damage, but also making it so you can't deal any. Time spells that let you jump back in time to bring your health back to where it was before.


• Utility: Planeshifting spells that let you bring enemies into the aether with you where you can damage them. Time/space spells that let you blink or teleport (mark/recall)

Restoration

• Offensive: Sun spells that can damage all enemies but are super effective against undead and daedra. Sun spells also have the chance to blind enemies stunning them, some can also heal you for damage done.


• Defensive: Ward/Shield spells that can absorb a certain amount of incoming damage for a short amount of time.


• Utility: Healing spells to keep you and your allies fighting, as well as some buff spells to increase things like regeneration rates or increase attributes.

I think there is some promise to a system like this.

I have been wanting different elemental spells to cast as well, so I think wind spells would be viable. It would be cool to see some other ones too like earth and water, but I am not sure if those could work out development-wise. Manipulating the earth to throw chunks of it at an enemy or a wave of water would be pretty dope. One of the things that I thought Skyrim did really well with magic was giving the elements other natural aspects to it too: fire doing extra lingering damage, ice also decreasing stamina, and lightning also decreasing magicka. If wind spells were added, they could have the change to stagger an opponent. I like some of the other ideas you have too. However, I am not sure that every single elemental spell should have other aspects beyond normal damage. If you are a beginner mage you wouldn't know how to really harness all those other aspects of your elemental spells, so I think it would be best to either relegate those secondary effects to the higher level spells along with some perks.

After thinking about having both mage and bound armors, I originally thought those would be redundant and make one of them unnecessary. Generally speaking, though, the more options the better. It allows for greater variety in roleplaying and greater variety in spells.

I will have to look into the ideas you have for the other schools of magic later. But for now, I could get behind a system like this if done well.

None of the other skills work that way, though. There's no offensive or defensive component to lockpicking, and no defensive or utility component to one-handed weapons. And ultimately it doesn't make sense to do it that way, since it's a combination of skills that help define your character's play style. Making sure each skill has a viable offensive, defensive, and utility use to get you through the game on its own would be limiting (as you wouldn't be able to make a skill out of something that can't stand on its own) and require a whole heap of extra work.

This is beside the point. The magic schools can be used in combat; lockpicking cannot. Therefore it is appropriate to suggest that magic schools have more functions in combat. It is not appropriate to suggest that lockpicking has more functions in combat.

Personally I think it is a great idea for all magic school to have offensive, defensive and utility components. I've often wished to roleplay a Mysticism mage, for instance. If that school had a wider range of effects it might be possible. Roleplaying games should be about offering greater choice to create unique characters. This is exactly the type of idea that might offer greater choice.

Have you never blocked with a sword? Have you never used a sword to disarm an opponent?

Which is the point. From a gameplay design standpoint, why should you be able to get so much more out of a magic skill than a non-magic one? Especially given that by using the skill so much, it's going to level faster and more efficiently, so it's a disincentive to do it the other way. Mages already have a problem of usurping other skills (open lock spells for lockpicking, bound weapons and armor spells for weapon and armor skills, invisibility and chameleon spells for stealth, etc), it's not a good idea IMO to make it worse.

Are those enough to forgo armor and block skills? Should they be enough to forgo armor and block skills? If a plain old sword was enough to mitigate damage, what use would highly-protective armor have?

In the fantasy-image of the Duelist, yes. Though, it should feel very distinct from other defensive approaches, which is why I don't think you should be able to block with a Weapon, and should have to rely on more active parries. It makes defending with a weapon distinct, and require different behaviour, than simply treating it like a Proxi-Shield.


But anyway... I do think there is merit to the idea of all Skills having Offensive, Defensive and Utility approaches... But it's something that needs to cover ALL Skills, not just magic ones. If you're going to take that approach, it's not something that can be limited to a single paradigm, but should be applied unilaterally across all paradigms and skills. Which poses a problem, because some skills just don't have the range. Even if you merge Lockpicking and Pickpocketing, there's really nothing in their concept that can be used to kill anyone. And what Utility are you going to find out of a Claymore?


While I think CKelley is onto something with the Magic Schools, unless the same breadth of division can be applied to the other Skills, I think it creates a major functional imbalance that we really have no way to address. It makes each Magic Skill able to stand on its own, while all the other Skills still require interconnection, and that's a problem.

I don't understand the need to make all skills equal. Magic is more powerful and varies more but that's okay. It's not like skills are locked behind classes where you can't mix and match. Don't try to limit something because of anot her thing. Magic is just such a broader thing than weapon skills so trying to liMIT one to the other is stupid.

Let's back up and review your post for a second. You made a sweeping generalization when you wrote: "no defensive or utility component to one-handed weapons." I simply pointed out that this was incorrect.

That was the whole point of my reply and I stand by it.

Yes, it is. But that's not really the problem. The 'Magic' paradigm should allow you to do practically everything the other 2 paradigms offer, just as well (or close to it). And that's perfectly fine. But each Magic Skill shouldn't be as independently viable as an entire Paradigm. You shouldn't be able to stand alone on Destruction Magic, or Conjugation Magic, when neither the Warrior or the Theif have a similar ability to stand by one of their skills. As a pure-Mage, you should be able to fill all the Offensive, Defensive and Utility roles you need, but allowing each Skill to cover the same range doesn't really do anything to add to build diversity or combinations, it just complicates balance and strips away character in favour of breadth.


If you could apply the same range to every Skill, or if you limited each Magic School to progression along a single approach (IE if you choose to develop Destruction defensively, you can't develop its offensive or utility alcharacteristics) it may be a more apt fit, but treating each Magic Skill as a stand-alone approach it's self really pushes the value of the system to a dangerous tension.

In context, please. But if you must, then let me clarify: "no viable defensive or utility component to one-handed weapons to stand in place of other defensive and utility skills" (which is what the post I responded to was all about, letting each magic skill stand on its own).

For balancing. If you have some skills that are super useful and super powerful compared to the others, the difficulty balance will have to be geared for one or the other. If it's not geared for the stronger skills, people who want to use said skills will find the game too easy. Whereas, if it's balanced for the stronger skills, people who don't use them will find the game unnecessarily difficult.

Magic is more flexible than tangible things like weapons. Plus they already do it for some skills. Destruction already has offensive and defensive skills yet it wasn't overpowered without cheesing impact. All it would be doing is making magic skills more equal to each other and something you can dive and specialize in instead of HAVING to mix and match skills. A warrior can stand alone in a weapon skill that's actually the way it's suppose to be done, people don't play warrior classes and need to specialize in both 1 handed and 2 handed weapons they choose the one they like and go with that. You could argue they also use blocking but that's an action that's apart of those two but has a separate skill line. Also you argue that making each skill able to stand on its own doesnt add to build diversity which is complete bullocks. If each skill could stand on its own that's 6 different playstyles for just magic characters. Then you have the diversity of mixing and matching the different offensive, defensive, and utility of the schools you like. If anything the current magic system doesn't allow you to do that, the whole reason I came up with this idea was because I once tried to play a pure illusion mage but found myself unable too because even if you have your enemy tear eachother apart you still needed to rely on destruction or a weapon to kill that last guy. In the Current system you can't play a pure Alteration mage because it doesnt have any way for you to actually kill people it's just a utility and buff magic school.

The magic and physical combat skills and systems are just too different to compare together and be thought of in the same way.

That's a different sort of balance though. Obviously you'd need to balance the way thing do damage and such so you dont have a skill that's doing tons of more damage and letting you faceroll through content while others can't even trudge through it. But that's not what this would do, this would just add depth and more variety of gameplay.

It's not about the amount of damage, but how well you can perform tasks (not all of which are combat-related). If all one person has to do is raise one skill to have access to good offensive, defensive, and utility capabilities, while someone else has to raise three separate skills to get the same, it's harder to design a leveling experience that'll not end up too easy/fast or hard/slow for one of those people.

Hello everyone,

First time posting here, been playing The Elder Scrolls games ever since seeing Morrowind reviewed on Toonami/Cartoon Network as a kid. I wanted to ask/discuss what possibilities there are for physics in the next elder scroll game and hopefully someone could point me to previous discussion if it has been talked about already.

Specifically NPC reactions to forces acting on them or rag-doll physics when unconscious or killed. I've heard Bethesda is looking at creating a new engine for the next game, which will hopefully have an upgraded system for all this. I really like the Euphoria engine used in Rockstar games like GTA or RDR. If we had something on that level or better I think magic in the next game would be much more fun with all the possibilities of throwing bandits around and what not.

Also, one major thing that has bugged me about the game series, especially Skyrim being more modern than the rest; I want to play in 3rd person but cant stand it because if your walking in one direction while in 3rd person but stop moving, then start moving in a different direction your character INSTANTLY is facing that way. It completely ruins the immersion for me, I'm thankful for the 3rd person option as always but I mostly just use it every few minutes to admire my character because of this. It would be great to have your character actually turn where you want to go as they start to walk.

Bethesda is hiring people with experience in the current engine. So we can expect them to continue to use their present engine for at least one more game. But what you want isn't an engine issue anyway. Bethesda uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havok_(software) for physics. Havok is middleware that can be added to any game engine.

They have already adressed that in Fallout4, so they'll hopefully do even better in TES6, it's much more smooth in FO4 compared to their previous games.

That can easily be solved by limiting how quick people can get those certain spells and how powerful they are. Yea if you put the best offense, defense, and utility into one skill then it will be over powered but simply giving people the options of those into each school with different pros and cons is another thing.

Anyways the way I see the magic trees breaking down with that idea of being more round is

Alteration

• Gravity - Gravity offensively, defensively or even for utility


• Armor - Mage armor spells to provide protection


• Stone - Spells that petrify and can hurl stones at enemies


• "Druid" - This would be spells that could change nature like a "vine snare" or transform your body into an animal one. Would be cool to see but probably doesn't fit.

Conjuration

• Dark Magic - Use daedric magic and souls to damage your enemies


• Summons/Necromancy - Anything having to do with summons or necromancy


• Bindings - Creating bound armor or weapons

Destruction

• Fire - Most offensive element with plenty of AoE and Dot effects and spells


• Ice - More control and defense oriented with slowing/freezing spells survival abilities


• Lightning - Better for single target enemies with abilities that allow you to paralyze and regain magicka


• Wind - Lots of enhancement spells along with either concussive or shredding spells.

Illusion

• Mind Manipulations - Spells that alter someones state of mind such as; rage, fear, pacify, etc...


• Illusions - Creating actually illusions such as decoys and mirages of yourself or illusionary beast


• "Sensory Illusions" - Illusion spells that alter senses such as invisibility, throw voice. etc... could probably be merged with Illusions

Mysticism

• Arcane - Spells of pure magical energy that can damage magicka


• Ethereal - Shifting in between dimensions to either isolate yourself or enemies


• Space/Time - Manipulate space and time and do things like teleport across the province or blinking forward back in time and slowing it.

Restoration

• Sun - Spells of aerdric magic that can blind or burn enemies and deals extra damage to daedra


• Healing - spells that can heal you or allies


• Wards/Buffs - create shields of light to absorb damage or fill yourself or allies with power

That's how I would see breaking down the skill lines into there "sub"-skill lines, obviously there would also be miscellaneous perks or spells that don't follow those "sub"-trees but are still in the school.

Yea it could be worse too, the movement could be on the opposite end of the spectrum like Rockstar games used to be where your character turns around like a truck doing a U-turn.

But that's still not addressing the issue. The problem isn't making Magic more powerful, or balancing our Magic progression, the problem is making it so each Magic SKILL is competitive with entire Laradigms.


Magic should be able to do everything the other Paradigms do, and maybe a bit more, but each Magic Skill shouldn't be able to replace the entirety of the Thief or Warrior skill-sets. When you make a single skill able to cover every angle, you aren't encouraging diversity or interesting combinations, you're just encouraging mono-typing. And that problem becomes even worse when you present that degree of versatility against options which are less competitive or useful.


Everything within the same broad category should remain competitive. All Perks within a skill should have the same rough value. All Skills should be about equally relevant. Making some Skills flat out more useful than others is already a problem we have, and treating Magic skills as mini-Paradigms in their own right only makes this problem worse.

The problem there is that the magic system and the combat system are completely different. All a warrior needs to get through the game is to choose the weapon style of his choice. You can easily get through the game by picking up your favorite 2-handed weapon. Blocking is innately built into the combat system so you don't need a shield to level it up so it's largely a part of weapon skills. So just by using 2-handed you have both offense and defense capabilities. The only thing that's locking is utility which isn't something that weapons can do besides making it so you could bash open chest and doors. You can argue they also needs armor but so would mages and it's not something you need to put effort into to get use out of. Warriors already play as single paradigms as most people probably don't play characters that switch between weapon types very often, when you make a warrior class the main classification or decision you need to make is what weapon type do I want to use.

Adding more breadth to the magic trees only adds more options. It makes it so you can solo a school if you want to, but it also allows for more varieties of mixing and matching not only with magic schools but also combat ones. All this would do is get rid of the need to use certain schools of magic you may not want to use.

If you're playing on anything but Novice, you absolutely cannot survive on Blocking alone, even with a shield.


But that's still not the problem. Again, Magic SHOULD be able to stand on its own in all fields of Defense, Offensive and Utility, but that is only in taking Magic as an entire Paradigm of skills. Each individual Skill shouldn't have the same ability, unless that versatility can be applied across the board, because it's adding a disproportionate amount of value to a select concept for no reason other than, really, 'Its Magic'.


The entire function of the Skill system is to encourage mixing and matching different ways of dealing with problems to create a more diverse and distinct character identity and approach out of it. If you present a situation where some options can cover every angle, and others can only do one, you instantly make those less-useful options less attractive. This can be resolved by making them far superior because of their specificity, but unless you're being locked into the choices you make this doesn't really offer any sort of tradeoffs.


Ultimately, all it serves to do is heavily over-balance the Magic approach while marginalizing the Combat and Stealth, while at the same time turning the character of the various Schools into little more than flavour while they all allow you to do the same things anyway.


Maintaining conceptual balance is important both in keeping the games actual mechanics balanced, and in building out the Skill-Identities and uses. If you have a Skill that's too useful in too many situations, it quickly overshadows others, and probably means that either the concept is too broad and needs to be divided, or your other Skills are too focused and need to be amalgamated. Every Skill should have a purpose, and be balanced against the usefulness of others, not be treated as an isolated idea that has no relation beyond its own expression. And if it's designed as a stand-alone option that doesn't need other Skills to be successful, then every other skill should be given the same treatment.


Just like with Combat and Stealth Skills, the Magic Skills should maintain a sense of purpsose and identity, and work together to form a comprehensive whole, rather than each being able to stand on their own. Whenever you have a Skill that can do everything on its own, you're not only creating imbalance between skils, but compromising the whole that said Skill is a part of..


Magic SHOULD be able to cover the same Offensive and Defensive approaches as Combat and Stealth, but like Combat and Stealth, it should he viewed as a collective approach, not as a bunch of independently competitive elements.




And it shouldn't do that. If you choose not to use Mysticism, then you shouldn't be able to automatically recoup the losses that decision brings. You should face the consequence of that decision, and have to find other ways to deal with the aspects that Mysticism spells impact. That could mean dabbling in Athletics to get some mobility, or Lockpicking to get past closed doors. But you shouldn't be able to do everything without having to compensate for the decision not to use a Skill.

I have quite easily with just two-handed and maybe a perk or two into heavy armor, now you can point out how that's two skills but armor is leveled passively and not something you have to work at. Just running at people with a 2-handed sword is totally a viable way to play on just regular difficulty, maybe even higher difficulties I wouldn't know as I find Bethesda's way of increasing difficulty by just changing damage multipliers annoying.

I really don't see how adding a few defenses spells or a few offenses spells will completely inbalance it. A lot of the schools already have this, Conjuration already had offensive and defensive skills, as did restoration and destruction. adding a couple mind blast spells into illusion isn't going to make it anymore OP, the one I'd agree with you on is adding earth magic to alteration. As long as you give each it's pros and cons while still allowing that variety it's perfectly fine and easily balanced. Each school will do something different and unique and better than other schools where if you're trying to make a well rounded character you most likely will mix skills and spells but you won't absolutely be forced as far as combat goes. You should be able to play through the game as just a pure alteration mage if you want, It might not be as good if you mixed schools but it's do-able. \

I agree if 1 skill was able to do everything just as good as other skills then yea that'd be op but adding a few spells that allow you to do something similar but not as well as other skills is fine.

What I would really like to see in the next game is for them to take combat and construction to the next level.

I would like to see multiple fighting styles or schools for single and double handed weapons and for the love of dog please bring back spears / quarterstaves and a decent unarmed style ("I know Kung-Fu").

Jedi Academy (if I recall correctly) had 3 styles (I'm not going to go FULL NERD about the styles and their precursors):

LIGHT: fast / quick attacks, high precision, lower range and damage

STRONG: heavy, slower, longer ranged attacks focused on power, breaking defenses and doing massive damage

BALANCED: just what is says, it was the in-between style balancing power and speed

What was cool, imho, was how your stance and weapon position would change based on the style you adopted. I know that programmatically this would require a lot more glyphs and animations etc. but for the experience it would be so much better. A number of online games in development - like For Honor - seem to be toying with styles and stances and I think the next TES game would benefit from a similar system. Then just have your flourishes and end-moves get better as your skill in a particular weapon and school improves.

Then mounted combat - no brainer - Mount and Blade have had a great combat and mounted combat system since day one. TES could learn a thing or two from them. I loved the focus on defense, blocking and parrying as opposed to just hacking away at opponents.

Armor - bring back proper armor layering. Take a look at something like Kingdom Come Deliverance for layering.

Town building... Hearthfire approached this. I would like to see more on that side. Morrowind had that cool estate you could build, complete with a mine and staff. They could work that in a bit better without the need of a DLC. And most important keep working on the containers - like book shelves and armor mannequins, display cabinets etc. Perhaps even a Mark / Recall or Summon Door so you can always get back to your house... even just being able to unlock a "door" in every town (Howl's Moving Castle style.)

Businesses... goes hand in hand with the above. You should be able to buy businesses - a rare book shop, definitely an Arms and Armor shop to sell all the loot you pull off your dead opponents , a bar or inn would be nice and it opens the opportunity for a whole whack of quest lines.

Banks would be nice too.

Difficulty:

I think that says it all. I find it annoying that bandits and mobs level with you. By the time you are the hand of the nightbringer, the silver fox, the dark brotherhoods top assassin, high mage, lord of the fighters guild et al low level mobs should simply drop their weapons, throw their money at you and run in fear shouting things like "by the seven, please don't kill me" or "run, run its Lord Captain Amazing Hero Guy". Skyrim started balancing this a bit better than previous games. I would prefer smarter enemies, who try to lure you into traps, try to flank you, make use of snipers rather than a [censored] bandit I have to hit 50 times because he is my "level".

You know i always that npc's could use frenzy on the player character and the way it would work would work is by switching the models with friendly npc's to enemies and that would trigger an attack.....actually....im not even sure how this would work becuase i know sprites can be switched but im not sure about 3d models though

Ah thanks Pepe - you reminded me of the other thing... NPC crowds... I want the cities to feel bigger and more crowded - like Assassins Creed - where most people won't talk to you or just avoid you - or if you stalk / persist in annoying them report you to the guards etc.

And i want the total opposite. Assassin's Creed and Wild Hunt cities feel lifeless to me, like crowded stage props populated by cardboard cutouts. I've lived in a city all my life, and TES' miniaturised versions feel far more alive and vibrant and real than anything you can get in Assassin's Creed.

And ultimately, i disagree. Skills should be treated equally, and any sort of imbalance between them destabilises the system.

Gonna be totally honest... I absolutely hated Jedy Academy.

I'm still not sold on the whole 'Stance' idea that many games seem to be pushing these days. All it really serves to do is allow for flashy animation cycles without really increasing the depth of options and interactions in combat. Be it Kingdom Come, or Dark Souls, or For Honour, they all have the same problem. You're stuck fighting the way the animators have decided you will, rather than having control yourself. You follow preset patterns, attack at preset angles, and follow preset behaviours. The absolute worst expression of this is the Arkham-style combat, where you basically just press a button and the game decides what you do.

We have anologue controls that are responsive, physics and animation systems that are adaptive, and collision detection that is precise. It's time to abandon the old models and give real control to the player. Allow them to attack and fight how they want, when they want, where they want. No 'stances', no 'historically accurate movements', no flashy animation cycles. Just the Player's understanding of the controls, and what their character is good at.