Official Ideas and Suggestions topic # 3 : V - Skyrim

» Tue May 18, 2010 3:47 pm

"What motivates you into a life of adventurer?" was a question in Daggerfall. There were few options, and they didn't have a big impact on anything. That is easily fixed. New question "What gives you pleasure in life?" will determine how do you roleplay to stay in character. The gameplay should somehow encourage you to occasionally do the things that you decide your character loves to do. How? That's up to developers.
Some quick answer examples out of my head:
-Helping others
-Riches
-Knowledge
-Eating good food
-Eating a lot
-Drinking fine alcohols
-Getting drunk
-Hunting
-Fishing
-Living outdoors
-Living cosily
-Bathing
-Wearing fancy clothes
-Doing business
-Gambling
-Brawling
-Stealing others' property
-Killing innocent people
-Inflicting pain

the list could be endless. Especially when it's easy to mod in more content.

Choosing only one option should represent an unhealthy obsession in something. How easy would it be to roleplay a drunkard, if drinking was the only thing that he's looking forward. Or a homicidal maniac. A normal person might have 3-6 things that he/she finds important. My ranger and woodsman would be happy living outdoors, hunting and fishing his own food, and occasionally doing some good errands for people. My fat merchant would be motivated by riches and high-life. He'd live in the most expensive inns, drink and eat only the best consumables available, dress fancily and travel here and there always buying and selling new stuff. Add a sadistic urge on top of that, and you have a whole new person there!
In these forums people use the verb 'roleplaying' or RP as a series of imaginary game elements. They just descide that their character should do these things, and then it's all up to themselves if they stick to the plan; the game mechanics don't have anything to do with it. Now you could choose IF you want the game to support your roleplaying, and it would have an impact on your playing. Choosing none should also be an option.

This is my last update on the big wall of text, and I don't remember getting any feedback. How do you like it? Do you want to be keep RPing all in your head, or do you want game mechanics to support it? Or do you think that this is useless and takes developement resources from your hack and slashing experience?

Imo the biggest difference between a RPG and Adventuring Game is the choice of character. It's bigger than the character developement (I hate being unable to choose characters in Gothics or Witchers)

This idea here will make your character unique and easilly roleplayed. Imo. You?

» Tue May 18, 2010 11:08 am

Generally better animation for characters and also MANY more NPCs in the world especially in cities so that cities look like cities. Take a leaf out of assassin's creed for this where the cities were realistically crammed with people.

a small number of scripted melee range kill animations against low level enemies or set piece bosses that cover all skills. Again like the counter-kill animations in assassins creed. Would work well with blade/blunt weapons but can also incorporate magic. E.g if you have flame/ice magic the animation could be the PC grabbing the enemy's throat or placing hands on his head and immolating/freezing them or hurls them into a wall with telekenesis or forcing them to mutate or explode etc.

oh and bring spears and staves back! and throwing weapons too! (these should have a 100% recovery rate to represent the fact that throwing stars, knives and spears tend to be more sturdy than arrows like IRL.

» Tue May 18, 2010 3:19 pm

More handplaced stuff, Morrowind was handplaced, nearly every single thing, and this the player feels when playing the game, atleast me. I feel that the game is made with great passion and love for a complex world. Oblivion on the other hand, was a action adventure game with bits of rpg elements. Sorry it is the truth, no rpg's should be easy!! we need powerfull enemies in high lvl even thou the player is in low lvl, this makes the feeling of defeating and enemy with the use of pure tactic¨instead of hack and slash on everything like in Oblivion. This is what I feel is the most important thing in Skyrim, make it dangerous, very very dangerous, let the player work like a maniac to do advanced task's and quests.

» Tue May 18, 2010 11:07 am

I was kinda thinking about beards, tattoos and factions (all in one)
for example if you have a long beard with X items in it ( bones or beads etc.) you would belong to X clan, the same with tattoos,for example an imperial legion soldier can have a dragon tattoo on his back.

» Tue May 18, 2010 6:21 am

Suggestion: Do not put a outdoorsman skill and all sort of skills like that.

» Tue May 18, 2010 12:32 am

The thing with Oblivion was that you could solve everyones problem and there wasn't much left to do.

-Make Daily quests like they have in WoW

-Make it so that Armor is much harder to get instead of killing some bandit at 20 and getting a full Daedric set, make it so that you would have to scour all of Skyrim to get a gnarly set of it. I spent atleast two weeks getting a full daedric set in Morrowind.

-Maybe a profession of sorts like how Alchemy is but maybe we could pick up ore like you could in The Shimmering Isles. Except you can now make your own set of w/e ore you grab.

-No more DLC make a full blown disc expansion. Idk how New Vegas or w/e was in terms of size but I heard it was awesome.

-I have never beat the Nevarene quest line i ended having to cheat and skip a bunch of things. Bring that back, in Oblivion I beat that quest line in no more than a day not even.

-For the love of christ and all that is dear sweet and holy bring back Artifacts that you didn't need to talk to a Daedric Prince about. You had a billion different types of Artifact in Morrowind and then the Daedric shrines. In Oblivion you got like 10 shrines to visit and that was it. I had ended up just having a full set of self enchanted Daedric armor. In morrowind my guy looked like idk lol. He had a piece of everything god given or found from some Daedric shrine.

-Idk about anyone else but don't have some things scale with your level. I remember going into this Daedric shrine somewhere in Morrowind and being generally terrified after catching an ass beating from some high level Dremora.

-Lets get another Umbra but this time make the fight more intense

I loved fighting the Orc and not some much the Nord chick but I have since named every character after him in his honor.

- i'm out of ideas now but keep it up and dont let it become like Oblvion

» Tue May 18, 2010 1:25 am

I think Oblivion's DLC was great - a good mix of sizes from short ones like Battlehorn Castle (my favourite quick one), a great medium-length one in Knights of the Nine (which still took a fair few hours to get through), and a full-length expansion in Shivering Isles (which could almost have been a standalone game). In fact, I'd rather have a range like that instead of 5 medium-length ones like they did with Fallout 3 (though I did really enjoy those ones) - for example, if Mothership Zeta was 2 hours and Point Lookout was 14 hours, I'd have preferred it, but I'll be happy with whatever they offer.

And on that bombshell, that's 200+ posts!