Loved previous titles in series and hope some of the changes you guys at bethesda have made (which some fans dont like) will not dumb things down too much.
Reason i say this is just look at what has happened to Dragon age franchise for trying to appeal to non rpg gamers with dragon age 2. What a complete mess. This is not to say its impossible but not while sacrificing your loyal fans!

I think it will be more simple in some ways. But we don′t need a super complicated rpg.
The main thing is: uniqueness + just much stuff to do and to find.
And i expect nothing less of Skyrim.

I'd say Skyrim will still feel and play like an Elder Scrolls game. I'd say some of the changes are a removal of dead wood and refurnishing. The time to be worried is when Todd says something like. "When you hit the A button on your pad, Awesomeness happens." And if Bethesda say they want the CoD Fanbase, then it's time to worry.

(BioWare said both of these things)

Hehe, yeah I'm not too worried either. The guys here at Beth seem to have a much stronger internal vision for how the game should feel and play that they stick to where as the internal vision over at BW is to sell 10 million copies.

There is some dead wood, as you put it, that could be cut from previous games still but I don't see anything that has lead me to believe the game will be "dumbed down", quite the opposite in fact.

I'm worried that Skyrim will play like Oblivion but even more simplified.

I Knew Bioware was going to slowly go down hill when they sold out to EA. Dragon age 2 combat is boring as f**k, SW: TOR looks like WOW in space. Mass effect 2 was alright but again it felt too simplified, barely any customization.

Combat in Skyrim is far more complex.
Spellcasting in Skyrim is far more complex (which also meant losing Spellmaking ).
Perks make character building far more complex.
Dungeon Crawling will be more complex (many puzzles and 8 times more Dungeon designers)
Radiant Story makes the whole game world far more complex.
...a lot of other stuff...

Doesn't look to me like Skyrim will be a simplified OB

I agree as far as the other mentioned game is concerned, but I've no such worries for Skyrim. In a way, TES games are as simple or as complex as players make them; partly by their nature (open world, relatively vast array of character creation options) and partly as a result of both the wonderful lore and modding community that backs up the games.

That's without taking into account any complexity and detail unique to Skyrim, which if current information is anything to go by, looks quite promising itself (see above posts).

Simple isn't always bad. Morrowind's gameplay was a mess and Oblivion improved upon it. Skyrim will improve upon Oblivion's.

Question is, will Skyrim go back to some of Elders Scrolls classic roots, such as Morrowind. MUCH more detailed world that doesn't all look the same, far more ways to customize your character, and a world where there is so much to dig up and find. I LOVED oblivion, still play it to this day, but I just thought when it came to the exploration side of things, there wasn't MUCH to uncover, unlike morrowind : ) .

What makes you believe this to be the case? From what I've heard they've poured cold water over the idea of spell combos, despite the fact that each hand can be assigned a different spell. They're still clinging to the old TES formula of 'chuck a fireball at your approaching enemy'; there's little complexity to that, certainly nothing like you'd find in classic D&D CRPG's.

Whilst I welcome the introduction of dragon shouts - you can see Beth's design decisions at work here. They don't want melee influenced players to 'miss out on' magical abilities, so they've included shouts to ensure all players can have awesume magic powers. I don't see much complexity there.

Believe me mate... TES is never simple!
Go read the lore and you'll understand!

- a lot of different landscapes confirmed (from icy mountains to lush forests ending to volcanic tundra's)
- from the trailer you could see that every city is completely different from one another
- more separate armor pieces (like pauldrons) seem to have made a return
- perks improve the customization as well (200 perks and you can have only 50 (and perks are very important here)... you can make a bunch of different characters thanks to that)

So most stuff you wanted has already been confirmed to be there so it ain't really such a question.

I am quite sure we can say that Skyrim seeks to merge gameplay of OB with depth of MW and quest generating of DF.

I don't remember talking about Dragon Shouts. Hell, I don't even consider it to be a feature of spellcasting system.

For spellcasting itself, just trap based spells (put a spell on ground and when someone stands on it, it casts itself) and the various spells we have seem in the trailer make it clear that the spellcasting system is better then it was in MW and OB to which we compared it (in other words, D&D CRPG's have nothing to do here). There are also dev's promises but I don't like using pure promises in arguments.

Simplifying things helped in Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age's system was already pretty messed up, so simplifying that would actually help.

So I'm pretty optimist in Skyrim's simplified system.

Skyrim seems great far... except for the very shallow OB fast travel system. It's really really bad. Definitely should be improved or replaced.

If quest markers are in, then add another huge minus on the "depth" list. Luckily, quest markers is a piece of cake to get rid of, especially now that we seem to have really good directions. Just add a transparent texture and you're done.

I hate simplification, things should be complex but understandable.


1. Where did it help?

2. How was it messed up?

The Oblivion was an improvement over Morrowind Argument needs to be staunched.

Different Times, different Mechanics, different thoughts on what an RPG is. k?

beyond making weapon strikes always hit and improving animations and graphics, Oblivion was a step back.


I hope they look at EVERYTHING that made Morrowind, Daggerfall oblivon, hell all the games in the series GOOD and just throw it on the ground and mold it into something Skyrim.

I agree 100% with the OP... after seeing the mess BioWare did with DA2, i'm scared about developers using words like "streamlining" and "simplifying".

Different items in ME1 didn't had any big differences, just their stats got changed. By the end you would get hundreds of useless items in your inventory and you don't know what to do with them.

In ME2 there were lesser weapons, but they were handled uniquely. Also you didn't had to get more copies for your companions.


Giving orders in that game felt like giving suggestions as they would usually do whatever I told them to do later. The companion AI is pretty much non-existent and building custom AI didn't helped in any way. And the fact that you can only use skills from your hotkeys were really annoying because usually you have more skills than bars, and you don't even have to use some of them in combat.

as long as its not press mouse 1 for 10 times and win it will be fine

oblivion had that and it svcked greatly, maybe now Skyrim will have more variety in killing enemies and using the environment.

1. Well, if you get a really good assault rifle early then yeah the rest of them are just gonna be crap to be sold but you could still get lucky every once in a while and get something better, I dislike the linear way ME2 handled them.
They should've found a way to improve on ME1's system instead of just scrapping it and replacing it with a simplified one.

2. They did just fine for me, I spent a long time detailing their AI though.
I remember using my skills/spells/talents just fine too. :shrug:

wtf

what did they do to DA2 :huh: ????

they better not have messed it up :swear:

I think the concerns of simplification and streamlining are valid. Many companies simplify things in RPG's to make it more appealing to a larger audience. By cutting micromanaging of items, armors, weapons, spells, quests, etc., makes it easier for more people to pick the game up. Instead of having 20 armor slots to consider when filling-out a character, 10 is more appealing because you don't have to look at a million gauntlets or pauldrons to determine which one is "better." Saying that, I'm a micromanaging freak, so I enjoy getting that gauntlet that has better base ranged defense with lesser base melee defense full knowing it has additional attributes which will flesh out my build, like +2 to sneak skill, and/or +1 to blunt defense.... Most people don't like doing that, and I'm not sure why....
Anyways, as for the streamlining argument, it depends on if it's done right. We can go on and on and on ALL DAY about why a mace is different than a sword, and how they're trained differently, but again, most people don't understand that concept. They think in a simple term: "I hold this in my hand, I swing it, it hits." Most people don't even know you train differently depending on the TYPE of sword you would use. This is why things like that are streamlined.... But it also comes back to micromanaging. They don't want to be teh awsum with a 2 base damage sword and teh suxxorz with an 10 base damage mace if they never trained their mace skill..... Just sayin'.

exactly, I for one enjoy the uber micromanagement and huge inventories with thousands upon thousands of items, ingredients, books, spells and all that, but like you said it will alienate a lot of the 6 button using friends, who don't have the mental focus to engage in such a time/mind consuming activity.

anyways I just hope we find more depth in the fields that really matter which are the quests, characters, combat, magic, stealth, if those failed then the game will fail, no matter how simple/complex the "stat" system is.

Thats like saying The Force Unleashed II is incredibly deep and complex because of the Star wars lore.