OK, so I'm back again, and it's like getting svcked into the whirlpool of life and then surfacing after a while.

First of all, I know this might not be the place to post such a thread, but as I knew here was the place that the overly resourceful modders frequented, I posted it here, hoping for some great suggestions and comments, and this thread might give some modders a few new ideas. Who knows?

When I reviewed the plan for my next Oblivion projects, I saw that all were about improving some aspects of Oblivion's game-play, then I thought about the next elder scrolls game and asked myself: "What if it was such a great game right out of the box, that it did not require mods to improve its game-play."

Then I thought about the current problems until I reached to the solutions that IMHO can result in a novel and great experience, but definitely an "elder scrolls" experience, so in this thread I will compare different aspects of the previous games and then propose my best solution for the next game.

Some of my suggestions can be done with relative ease in the next engine, as I am already planning to add them to Oblivion via mods, but mind you, they could have much better effects on the game-play if they were integrated into the engine itself instead of mods.

On the other hand, some of my suggestions might require a bit of ground-up development, if we want to take full advantage of them, but the effect of these suggestions would be really worth the effort, believe me.

The elder scrolls 3, Morrowind: Mw
The elder scrolls 4, Oblivion: Ob
The elder scrolls 5: TES5

Fallout 3: FO3

I start with my casual/visual suggestions and gradually develop the thread toward the more technical ones, and I will post them in series because they are too much to post in one section, and the feed-back can be good.

By the way, I heard about the April fool story of "TES 5: Alinor" but IMHO the best setting for the next elder scrolls game is indeed "Summerset Isles", if they do not decide to make the whole Tamriel, I mean.

Edit:
This post is getting updated regularly, as I compile new sections of my ideas and suggestions.

Any suggestions and comments about different sections of this post are greatly appreciated.

The Environment, adventures, and the sense of discovery:

Mw was a fantastic fantasy world with bizarre landscape, bizarre buildings and bizarre monsters, with a unique atmosphere designed by hand, everywhere. On the other hand, Cyrodiil in Ob had beautiful realism with an almost medieval atmosphere that gradually became repeating, and FO3 had a unique devastated landscape which had great variety in design but was almost monotonous in atmosphere.

My suggestion/hope for TES5:

I have recently read a synopsis for "The Infernal City", and I must say that it perfectly into the theme that I have imagined for the world after the Oblivion incidents, like the devastation of Vvardenfell, and explosion of the isle's volcano, the disarray and anarchy after the emperors assassination throughout the empire and so on...

The next TES is probably dated *after* the Oblivion incidents that we experienced in Cyrodiil, let’s say 200 years, so probably oblivion gates have already opened all over the Tamriel, but hopefully there was no hero in the continent where TES5 is going to happen, so, maybe about half of the entire continent, where people could not fend off the oblivion hordes, was devastated.

The hordes have probably, razed the occupied lands and towns, flooded the landscape with lava, made their own gigantic towers and dungeons, and tried to make a home in the new land.

The original native people of the continent, have probably tried to regroup and attack those new towers and dungeons, and may have succeeded to capture some of the more accessible settlings, and destroy the nearby gates, but the invaders must have retreated to the more out of the reach places, and left some destroyed lands and towns behind.

The continent is probably torn apart by destroyed lands and has fallen under disarray and anarchy, as the imperial hold is no longer upon it, and it is now made of different civilized parts separated by scorched and invaded lands.

Those destroyed regions are either occupied by the remaining oblivion hordes or in the those places where the lands were cleared from them, they are now the hideouts for some outlaw clans or bandit camps and the like, and those people or creatures will probably attack anybody who dares to cross those lands.

If this theme is selected for TES5, then we can have several different environment types over the surface land:

1-Separated civilized zones maybe ally, neutral, or even at war with each other
2-Devastated and scorched lands and towns filled with hostile creatures or people
3-Oblivion-like towers and dungeons used as daedra dens or outlaw hideouts
4-Original ancient ruins and strongholds filled with untouched adventures
5-A few out of the way and untouched gates to some deadly Oblivion realms
6-I have not gone into that yet, but other oblivion realms like Coldharbour

You might have noticed that this is a combination of all Mw, Ob, and FO3 environments and in such a complex theme the game developers can make a very exciting and dynamic world and a main quest that requires the players to tackle with a lot of problems, maybe unite the land under a single flag, again.

The players would start in a civilized area, and are limited to that area until when they have grown enough to be able to pass from the hostile lands and enter the other civilized parts of the continent. This way the game developers can feed the players with a lot of adventures and sense of discoveries, especially if the theme and culture of the different civilized areas are different.

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In Mw we had fun adventures under the water surface looking for submerged daedric shrines or grottos, but in Ob and FO3 this feature was almost non-existent, so please let us have access to a lot of developed underwater places, coastlines, or lakes.

In Mw we had fun adventures in the 3rd dimension, as there was a lot of places that could only be reached by long vertical diving under water or levitating to the normally out of the reach places in the caverns or Telvanni houses, and there were flying monsters who could attack from above, and surprise you.

But again in Ob and FO3, The adventures and surprises related to the 3rd dimension are sadly missing.

So please give this important dimension a serious development, even if you do not want to provide the flying option again, you can at least make steep ravines and mountain-side drops, and elevated lands that could be reached via narrow back-ways winding up the less vertical sides of the ravines and the like.

Please return to Mw's bizarre trend in landscaping and culture design as it is the world of Nirn not Earth, so medieval realism is not required, and in the fantasy world of Nirn, it would be more appealing if we could see what we do not see in our normal day to day life, like normal trees, normal animals, and normal people.

So it would be great if we could have a world full of bizarre gigantic trees and mushrooms, or craggy mountain ranges, or great cracks in the ground, with steep sides, or huge waterfalls raining down from high mountain zeniths which themselves are counted as ground for even higher mountain ranges, or towns made on the sloppy sides of big hills, or a scorched town that burns because a volcano is growing in the middle of it, or swamps which boil, releasing green gas which disperses in the air, or jungles of trees that their wide-spread canopies combine to become like a form of ceiling overhead, or oblivion towers so big that would force us to look up from a few cells away, and so on...

Environmental effects like the following list would be nice as well: Hearing of loud animal shrieks from afar, or grumbling of the ground near lava, or sudden hisses of released gas, or sudden formation of a cloud in the sky and it's moving away, or a formation of a twisting tornado on the horizon and its movement around, or a gigantic semi-permanent mushroom made of smoke seen on the horizon, or lightning bolts that hit the ground and lightens up the surrounding area.

In Oblivion realm, it would be great to have environmental effects like: Bubbles of different size which rise from surface of lava or slime to burst and splash chunks of the fluid around and release colored smoke, or passage of gigantic rotating asteroids across the sky, or gigantic birds that fly around the sky, and when they open their beaks to call, the ground shakes, or two or more huge creature fight with each other on the horizon in another volcanic island, and so on...

In Coldharbour it would be great to have seas of slime and sludge instead of water, and zombie heads and hands that reach out from under the surface, and sudden release of indistinct steam-like spirits from a crack of the earth and theirs fading moan as they fade away into oblivion, the time can always be before dawn, i.e. light horizon and darker sky, there can always be twilight, the whole light can only be moon-light, some-times brighter than other times, sometimes a shadow can form on the ground and then it can move toward the player and then it can end in a shuddering shriek as it reaches the player, and so on...

In all those areas, environmental spawns would also be great, and I mean random temporary spawns to give more life to the environment, like: small animals that scatter around and hide inside holes, or birds that chirp, and when disturbed they fly again, or a mass of flies which surround the player and then disappear after a while, or...

Well I think I'm going to offer a method which integrates any type of spawning into a single algorithm, but it has to wait for now.

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OK this part can also be listed in the next section, but never mind, and here it goes:

Mw was mainly a volcanic island which had some steep mountain-sides that would prevent us from going in some directions, some small lava pits that blocked the way for some distance, and so on, but those were barriers at first and after improving the acrobatics skill, or some sort of levitation spell, then you were on the high road.

Ob's surface area was almost flat in the middle and only in the upper margins of the land we had some steep mountain-sides that would make path finding a bit of adventure.

This was a problem that reduced the feeling of success and the sense of adventuring in finding new places in the surface areas, as any easy access would make the goods look cheap.

So the solution can be a land that is divided into separate parts by high and steep mountainous areas or flooding lava rivers that start from mountain caves and end in deep cracks in the earth, or high walls that divide the lands, like Great Wall of China, made by the oblivion army, or any other type of impassable barrier.

Some parts of the landscape can be totally elevated, (with steep sides), that could be accessed later in the game when players are leveled enough to be able to pass the dangers in the main passage ways leading to these elevated parts, or they could enter a dungeon at the bottom of the steep mountain-side, and accidentally or through a quest, find another passage to those high places.

This leveled structure where the players start the game in accessible or lower areas and have to reach or climb to some higher or inaccessible areas as they conquer each area, will surely result in a great sense of adventuring and progression, and will give the game designers a great new option to reward the player: *Access to a new area*.

This can be a reward for some quests or for the adventurous and sharp eyed players who look for other ways, and the way to some areas can be at first blocked but later, it might open up, and so on...

The world, accessibility, level scaling, and the sense of progression:

In both Mw and especially Ob you could travel to any place in the surface area as soon as you finished the character generation phase thus effectively negating any sense of progression that a player might feel as he was grown enough to be able to survive in new places.

In Mw it was a bit more problematic because you could not fast travel and you had to move on your feet, but in Ob you could jump to any city right at the start and move to anywhere from that place.

In Mw it was harder because monsters where not exactly leveled like the player, but this actually showed more inside the dungeons, and the surface area was a bit more scaled like player, but in Ob, it was not important where you went because the danger level was almost always a constant amount, so you could go anywhere and be constantly challenged by a default amount of danger and reward.

In Mw, at start you were a pimpled newbie that was afraid to enter the dungeons because of the possible dangers inside, but after a while, when you had grown enough in stats you became the bad-ass god incarnate and none could touch you, although you were nowhere near the limits of your possible growth, but in Ob you were always challenged, constantly, no matter where you went.

Mw had somehow a good sense of progression but it stopped prematurely, and Ob had no sense of progression, at all.

FO3's character progression was totally different so we would not discuss it here.

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So, what is my suggestion for the level scaling of the next episode in TES games?

First of all let me tell you about my first experience of an old game, called "Might and Magic VII, for blood and honor", (M&M7). It had very basic graphics and combat system, but it had some great RPG elements, that compared with or even outweighed the more recent games.

In that game we started in an isolated island in which we could go anywhere over the surface, but some places were very challenging for a newbie, and when we entered a specific cave we would encounter a dragon which could have killed us with a single spit of fire, and we had to run around the cavern and collect some loot as we tried to avoid the dragon's deadly spits. (Drastic danger level differences of the different places).

In this newbie island, we had to complete some tasks before we could move into the main land, and this was not possible at first, because we had to develop our characters quite a bit before we could survive the dangerous places that we had to go to complete those tasks. (Drastic sense of progression)

We could not use all the gear and spells, in the game for all the characters, and as we developed our characters, they could use more gears or spells, but they would never lose their unique characteristics, so till the end our mage characters would be totally different from fighters and so on... (Great role playing and sense of progression)

When we finally bit the challenges in the Newbie Island and went to the main land, we felt again as newbie’s in that area and were afraid to venture much ahead, because of the magnitude of danger levels, but we could grow and win those challenges to pass to new areas to feel as newbie’s yet again, and so on...

Whenever we reached a new and more dangerous place, we would encounter new and greater challenge and better loot and with each level of progression we could use more items and spells, so after a while, there came a time when we would enter the area filled with several dragons and titans which we could dispatch with relative ease, (the dragon in the newbie island cave was a small one compared to those), but we could be still challenged more as we reached to the next danger level area.

And this trend remained till the end, i.e. there were both easy and challenging places till the end, some accessible and others inaccessible or too dangerous till later levels, and it was GREAT.

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My suggestion for TES5, is a world that is a combination of the elder scroll's open worlds with M&M7's progressive increase in danger level, so you start in a newbie area in which you are to stay until you are a bit more mature, but after you are able to exit that area and have access to the rest of the world, you would still have to avoid the areas in which your character would not survive for long, that’s the main theme, but for the details:

In the newbie area, when you try to exit the place, you are told that you are too inexperienced to do so, or you are told that you have to pass a test or complete a task before you are able to exit that area.

But the players could exit that area if they found some backdoor ways, accidentally or by befriending and joining groups of people. But it should be difficult and/or dangerous.

To be more specific: This newbie area can be an island, a walled town, a big castle, an underground cavern complex, or a land area limited by natural barriers like mountain ranges, swamps and coastline, or man-made ones like walls with guard posts and the like.

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But let me start from the beginning and develop a sample theme for the start of the TES5:

In Mw the game started in a dream. The player as prisoner was asleep and dreaming as he was told that he was chosen, and he was told to wake up.

In Ob the game started in a dream. The emperor dreamed about the hordes of destruction as they were about to invade the lands under his command and destroy it.

In TES5, the game can start in a dream. You can dream about the hordes of destruction as they are invading the land of TES5, and destroying the towns, and building their own towers of oblivion in the scorched land, and then dream about the regrouping of the native people to attack the invading forces, and forcing them to retreat to out of reach lands, and the resulting anarchy and unrest in that continent.

You see yourself in a dark, nightmarish world, fighting a huge beast, something like a combined monstrosity of human, crocodile, goat and wolf. You are defeated and it grabs at your body and takes you away as the world fades into darkness.

Finally you will be informed, (in an un-earthly voice), that you are chosen, and you are freed to unite the nation and bring back the peace, you are told that you have lost everything and must start from the beginning and try to recover any skill and strength that you have lost, and you are told to seek a specific person, or a specific place, (with a specific name), and then you are told to wake up.

After that, inside of a sick room gradually appears before your eyes, and you are a floating entity approaching a bed. A covered body is over the bed and you enter that body, after that you push the cover away, and try to open your eyes and look around to see an old nun/nurse knitting beside a desk in a room filled with old beds and a few other unconscious patients.

You try to sit, but the nurse notices your movement and shrieks that you are awake at last, and then forces you to lie down on the bed again, and exits the room to fetch the priest of the cathedral, (as the sick room is part of a cathedral).

You try to sit again, and when the priest hurries into the room and looks at you with noticeable awe, you are already sitting on the bed. The priest hurries to your side, dragging the chair which the nurse had occupied before, then he places it in front of you, and sits down to survey you more closely.

Then he says: "Look at you; nobody would ever guess that you have been asleep for about two centuries! I know that you are weak, but your face does not show it at all. Can you remember your name?"

In this moment you are presented with a character generation dialogue to select a race, body, face and a name.

After that the priest informs you that about two hundred years ago the gates to oblivion started to open on all the surface of the Tamriel and the hordes of oblivion invaded their lands and destroyed a lot of places, and made a mayhem that still rages after so many years.

In the first days after the start of the invasion, you were brought here to the cathedral, unconscious, and were bedded in this very bed and then the priest that managed the cathedral at the time was informed that you were a special patient that might remain asleep for centuries, and he and the next priests were to keep an eye on you, until you awoke.

After that you must be trained a bit of the basic weaponry and spell casting to decide what would be your class of actions, and you were to be watched by a seer mage to decide how the stars have affected your fortune, and then we have to supply you a bit for your voyage ahead.

At that point we should let you wander around the island and get some experience to gain back some of your skills and strengths. Then we would put you to a final test which will remain a secret until you are ready.

After the test, depending on the result, you will be sent to a place in the main land to fulfill your mission as no doubt you already know a bit about your mission.

The priest waits for a bit, looking keenly at your face, but as he gets no response, he starts to rise and says: "All right keep it to yourself. Can you follow me to the next room?”

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All right, let’s assume that the newbie area is in fact an island, like M&M7. In this island you can see the main land from the coastline but if you try to swim all the way to the mainland you would become a good meal for the sea creatures, unless you reach level 20, for instance, which would be impossible in the relatively small newbie island with its limited amount of available quality equipment and assets.

You could pass the main newbie island challenge and get the rights to use the official available transport facility, which probably is a part of the main quest, or you could look for an alternative way, like a smuggling ferry available at specific times of the night to a specific group of people, so you would have to find your way into those groups.

Or you can find and befriend a secluded monk or mage in the hidden and dangerous depths of a cave or dungeon in the Newbie Island, i.e. this island can have some very dangerous places from the very beginning, so let’s develop this theme.

In a newbie dungeon cave there can be a sign that warns the characters not to enter the inner depths of some branches of the cave, but if anyone enters those depths and could outrun or evade the resident dangers on those areas, and find the correct route, they could reach a relatively peaceful place to find some good loot and for instance a lonely mage that could teleport them to the main land.

This way the game gives the players a standard route that would develop their characters, and gives them a taste of what is in store before they could have access to the rest of the world, but it also gives them other back-door opportunities to find a faster way out, but they have to use their mind and character skills to find those opportunities.

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Anyways, when the players exit the newbie area, by any possible route, they would start in a relatively easier place and would gradually have access to more dangerous places.

The game can be dynamic in this aspect, i.e. like my next Oblivion project, the surface area can be divided into different zones, and the relative danger level of each cell is governed by the combined effects of the nearby danger zones, so if we give a higher level of danger to a zone (compared to the neighborhood), the cells near the center of the zone are more dangerous than the border areas of that zone.

The danger levels of these zones can be defined/altered on the fly, so their next (monster/loot) spawns would be leveled to the current danger level of that area.

From the start of the game there can be more dangerous places like outlandish moors, and hostile towns, and less dangerous places like near the newbie towns, but those danger zones can be adjusted in the real time, so when the player exits the newbie area and enters the rest of the world, the place in which he has entered the world is marked as newbie area and it's danger level is scaled to the newbie level, and the way to the nearest newbie town is marked as low level danger as well.

But the rest of the world remains at its default danger level, except for the fact that the danger level of faraway places are raised a bit depending on their distance from the player's starting area, even the areas around the newbie towns of those faraway places would become a bit more dangerous.

The danger level defined for each zone is the approximate level of a player that would be moderately challenged in that area, so if a place is marked as a magnitude 20 danger level, then a level 20 player would be moderately challenged in that area, with regard to the probable arsenal that a level 20 player would possess.

The dungeons are defined as dangerous as the cell that their entrance is located at, plus a defined amount of danger level, depending on how deep they go, so the place near the entrance is just a little more challenging than the outside area, but the deeper levels would become increasingly more dangerous.

Each internal cell can point to an external cell for the danger level reference, which can also be useful for the target of spell effects like "jump outside", and for the environment effects like "natural interiors", and each cell can have a relative danger index that is added to the calculated danger level for that external cell, so for a first level dungeons this can be 5 and for the next level this can be 8 and so on...

This way the developers can still use this leveled list idea but instead of scaling it to the player level, scale it to the danger level calculated for the area. And also the developers can change the danger level of different areas on the fly, depending in the events that have happened in those places, as in the main quest line or other big happenings.

For instance a war between two opposing clans or the opening of an oblivion gate in an area could increase the danger level of that area as much as we like, without the need to spawn a specific amount of monsters, and just by changing of a value, and setting the zone to respawn at the next visit.

The designers should also be able to place individual high level random monsters and loot, wherever they like, and select their danger level by hand, because this way we can have a scenario like the single dragon in the specific cave of the newbie island in the M&M7 game.

The random monster template should have the option to select a minimum and maximum for the size of the calculated resultant monster so that only monsters within that size range are selected.

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By developing the dynamic danger zones idea, the game can still have leveled lists and randomized encounters and rewards, but those encounters and rewards are leveled depending on the place, and not the player, and we can have extremely dangerous places from the beginning of the game which could possibly be scaled as level 100, so a level 100 player would be challenged there and thus we can have places that in an unmoded game would always remain as too dangerous to enter.

So if a player had a perfect chance and those leveled list were in his favor and he could somehow evade those dangers, he could find the loot that are scaled at level 100, but this requires that the game could supply danger level and loot that is scaled to level 100.

Diablo II has done that by giving the same monster meshes different textures, scales, attributes and names to scale them for more different danger levels, also it does it for the loot as well, so Diablo II can have a relatively more scaled danger level with relatively fewer resources.

This way the game can scale the danger levels of different areas and the dungeons in those areas so that the deepest level of the dungeon at the most dangerous surface area would be scaled to the danger level that a level 100 player would be moderately challenged there.

And there could be a GMST definition as 1.0 that could be multiplied to these calculated danger levels, so that later on it could be changed easily by mods that could supply danger level and loot beyond the default level limit of 100 for the leveled lists.

Remember that this level 100 is just an example and it can be any other number.

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The Bottom Line is that for the free form type of games like TES, the perfect setting is a world that always has some areas that are too easy for the player, other areas that are too hard for him, and some areas that are just right, no matter what level he is.

This way the players can set the pace themselves, casual gamers can take it slow and attend the easier parts until they are ready for the harder parts, but hard-core players can try to get ahead of themselves and find the harder places before they are the right level, to get better loot earlier.

Another benefit of this scaled world is that there are areas that are always too hard in a normal game-play, so in the forums, we might read comments like this:

=== === === === === ===
"Yeeeeeaaaaayz, palz, *F*i*n*a*l*l*y*, I got past those nasty guardians of the "Netherwatch Citadel", without any cheat, honest!!! OK, I did not reach the throne room, but who has?..."
=== === === === === ===
"WOW, that’s incredible! How did you manage that? What level is your character? What is your race and primary class?..."
=== === === === === ===
"Well, I had quite a bit of luck, because..."
=== === === === === ===

This can turn into contests and survival races and so on...

But remember, the higher level nasties should not chase the players to the end of the world, and passing some gateways or passages into more civilized areas should warn the nasties to back away and return to their territory.

Let's talk about economy, social status, and relations.

Both Mw and Ob had the same problem, i.e. after a while, when the players had looted enough places, the time came when they did not know how to spend their money.

Lots of mods tried to solve the issue by providing costly houses or items for sale, or adding taxes for properties, or trying to reduce the amount of valuable loot and gold, or making merchant more unforgiving, and so on...

I think all the solutions are good, except for annual payments and taxes, but there should be a combined effect of all of these, and most important of all, advancement should be costly, very costly, so players should always be looking around for better loot to be able to acquire a specific skill perk, or guild position, and so on...

Why so?

When I pay for a property that I already have, it only brings dissatisfaction, because why should I pay for a property that I have already purchased, or acquired by risking myself, but if I have to pay to acquire a new property, power, or position, then I will not look at the cost, and will pay gladly for the end result, especially if there was no other option, i.e. if you grow in a system, and know no other way, then you accept it without question, and payment for advancements brings no dissatisfaction.

So merchants should bargain hard, and good loot should be hard to find, and costs should be high, and for advancements, any type of them, the players, should be forced to pay dearly, depending of the grade of the advancement, so like previous games, we should pay increasingly more for skill advancements, but we should not acquire perks automatically, and should pay dearly to learn them.

In Mw and especially Ob, you found better loot in fallen foes than in containers of an area, and fallen foes were more numerous than containers, but it should be quite the reverse.

The world after Oblivion crisis is in mayhem and anarchy, the economy is in its worst state, the people are far poorer than what we saw in Cyrodiil, and quality loot is rare to find, so the normal gear that the average foe uses should be worn out, damaged and cheap, compared to danger level of that area, but bosses, and more select foes of the area should have better gear and loot, and containers should be relatively hard to access, and might have hazards and traps, but they should be better loot source than normal day to day foes that we kill regularly, because there are more foes in an area than containers and we should give thief-like characters better loot for their efforts to remain unseen.

I mean fighters and mages kill the foes and loot them *and* the containers, but thieves might be able to avoid the foes and find the containers, and loot them, so for their efforts and skills, they should be awarded adequately, so normal containers should have better loots than normal foes.

The more dangerous parts of the game should have better loots on foes and containers, depending on the danger levels, but the worn gear should remain worn gear, although higher level worn gear. On the other hand, the containers and boss gears should reflect the danger level more.

So when a low level regular foe uses a rusty iron mace, a higher level one should use a rusty dwemer war hammer, and when a low level regular foe wears, a patched and worn-out leather vest, a higher level one should wear a worn-out Scraag-hide armor, which should fetch more money , but not much.

The bosses and containers should be another matter, and by containers, I mean any type of them, so the remains of a previous adventurer, on more dangerous parts of the game should have a chance of some very juicy and quality loot. Thus it should be worth it for a relatively low level player to enter a higher level area, and try to remain unseen or outrun the foes, and loot a few containers, and then run back to the less dangerous parts.

The quality and price of player's worn gear and owned properties should have much more effect on people's behavior and respect for the player than the previous games, because quality properties are rare, but let me expand this subject a bit.

In the previous games, there was only one factor to change the behavior of characters toward each other and that was the love-hate factor. This factor is a must, but we can add flavor to it, by adding more factors, like:

Love factor: How much a character likes another one. Results in different dialog options and smiling face and so on...
Respect factor: How much a character respects another one. Results in more attention, and affects the dialog results and the stance of the body.
Fear factor: How much a character fears the other one. Results in different dialog options, and the stance, and the behavior.

These factors could affect the dialog options and the stance of the characters and their behavior, but I will go further into that when I start on AI.

The main quest might require the players to unite the different civilized people into one nation, so they should try to rise in the social status, and this could only be done via getting to higher ranks of guilds and factions and acquiring high class properties and clothes, and raising the respect of a few influential factions and societies.

In other factions and societies, you can be as disrespectful as you like, because it does not affect the main quest.

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Shops are always problematic places, if you do not provide good stuff, they are of little use, and if you provide good stuff, they might spoil the fun.

Here is my suggestion for shops, and this is still another spin-off of M&M7 game-play:

They should always provide low to medium stuff depending on their area's general difficulty level, so if you enter a shop in a newbie area, it should have newbie stuff, and in higher level areas shop should have a range of stuff, from low level to mediocre loot.

But there should always be a very small chance of finding some higher level stuff inside shops, for instance stuff up to 15 levels above the general level of the area, so in a newbie place; a weapon shop should have a small chance of providing a few dwemer weaponry, for instance.

But as I have suggested before, the shops should bargain hard, to force the player think twice before deciding if it was worth it to buy that dwemer hammer, or spend that money on the "Shattering Blow" perk.

The merchants in lower level areas should be easier to bargain with, but on the other hand they should have less money to spend and lower grade goods.

In the first newbie area, for instance in the newbie island in my example theme, there should be merchants that are easiest to bargain with and they should have little money, but some of them should have some higher level and useful item.

This way if the some adventurous players find the hard to reach places and get the few random high quality items, they are either satisfied with the items or might want to exchange them for other few high quality items that the merchants might have.

As for the loot that we sell to merchants, they should be stacked in his inventory or storage chests until the end of the day, but after that they should be converted to money except for a few select items, I mean those Items that players might later regret selling to the merchant.

So if a player sold important items, quest items, or very high level items to a merchant those items should be moved to a specific storing chest in his possession, for sale, he should not equip quest or otherwise important items himself, and could not use high level items above his skill levels, but might decide to equip one that he can use.

He can sell non-quest items to npc customers that can use them, but any item sold from that specific chests are tracked, so if we ask him what has happened to it, he can answer "I sold that to one of the Governor's special guests", for instance.

Similarly quest items placed in containers, remain there even if that container respawns new loot, and if you put enough high level or otherwise important items in a container then you will effectively prevent it from respawning altogether.

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OK, this is still in development, but I wanted to release what I currently have.

I'm still working on character development, game-play, death handling, level structures, quest generation, and so on...

But this is the time to explain why I do have so many ideas to write here.

For years I have worked on new ideas about how to make better games and in general better applications, ideas that might require a foundation within operating systems and compilers, with a new type of application development that is a next step from object oriented programming, as oop is a next step from procedural programming.

But I do not want to go into such details here, but as these ideas encompass from the lowest level to highest level game development, the midpoint to higher level ideas could be easily be "The Elder Scrollized", so I started on that from higher level ideas and going toward more basic ones.

Anywhere that I sense that I have gone too far, I can stop, and I really appreciate any feedback, as this is the first time that I am releasing a variety of my developed ideas and algorithms.

And mind you, this is the result of a week or two of a percentage of my spare time, and I have not really started on those ideas and algorithms yet.

Nevermind

Heh.. Wrong forum, wrong thread.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1092018-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-166/

wrong forum, wrong thread, and posting 20 times in a row (especially when most of them say "pending") is really frowned upon. you should also read over the suggestions already posted in the appropriate thread, as parts of what you suggest has probably already been discussed, which would save time and space.

Sorry lady, but those pending posts are placeholders for future sections of my ideas, and I followed the link that Mr. Tissue Box gracefully provided.

I did not know about another thread about this subject, (but I should have known), and when/if I finally complete my ideas, suggestions and details, I hope there would not be much complains about the place of the postage.

I can not suddenly enter that thread and post the entire encyclopedia on that thread, especially if I wanted to remove the parts that were already discussed, as it would result in a very patch worked text.

So, please bear with me, and you would not regret that.

But if some moderator does really think that this thread should move to another place, go ahead and move it, I will follow the rules.

Just wanted to say that I have not stopped working on the ideas and have been working on character development system, which lead to the world and quest structure, which also lead to dialog and speech sub-system.

I'm working on a different style of speech sub-system which can surprise you just a bit. :whistling:

After that I would return to the world design and finally the character development part.

Trust me if those ideas are implemented like my dreams and ideas, then adding content to the world would be like this:

Adding landscape to the world would be like throwing a bucket of paint over a canvas, then using our tools and fingers to shape it a little more, and press some stamps here and there to fine tune it even more.

Then we can define the parts that are mountains, jungles, swamps and so on..., and ask the engine to add detail to the landscape, and then start to fine-tune that even more.

We can push or pull the ground or change the shape of the mountain on the fly, and add or change the detailed content as we like, and only the initial definitions and the final changes are stored.

We can add meaningful content, like a city or settling to the landscape, or smaller items like a whole farm, or smaller, like a hut, and the content are intelligently created, then we can fine-tune the content and save that content to the place.

Each area can have some population which are selected from templates, and filled with appropriate available individuals, or those individuals can be created for them, and we can add events to the "event manager" which tries to use the current individuals, or waits for the designer to assign or create ones for the roles.

Events can be developed into quests if we like and making quests are like this:

Designers can create different quest templates like clay dolls, then tear them apart, from limb to limb, and add the limbs to the database storage or pool.

Each limb knows what contents and roles it does need, and how it can be attached to other limbs, and the designers can make the skeleton for their desired quests and let the engine fill it with appropriate limbs, and then start to fine-tune the final body of the quest, or patch the places that need attention, like unfilled roles or content placeholders, and so on...

And they can define the final or intermediate rewards, or leave some parts to be completed by "Global Event Manager" and its close pal "Automated Quest Generator", and check the resulting quest visually stage by stage to see if it has any flaws, and save the final local quest and attach it to the local events, which would freeze the event in place.

Each quest limb knows how it can be attached to the available events, so the automated quest generator can make ones on the fly if that is what the designers want, so we can leave some small and quick quests to the engine and wait for some appropriate ones to attach our manually designed epic ones to the current events or quests on the fly.

So to sum it all we can have the whole Tamriel developed in the era after the oblivion crisis which would have devastated more than half of it and made it easier for the developers to create, because of fewer cities, and more scorched landscape.

This landscape would be created by the landscape generator, guided by the designers to place the landmarks in the appropriate places, and then tweaked and fine-tuned afterwards.

The content, population, events, and quest, would be created and placed automatically, but as before tweaked and fine-tuned in the required places, so that the main quest and the manually generated side-quests are unique, but the normal events and quests are made on the fly and could be ignored or attended, and some bigger quest-lines could be attached to the appropriate places of normal quests if not ignored.

But these normal quests could be made in a way that would not seem repetitive, i.e. the templates could use any available individual and resource at hand and fill the roles and add some random elements to differentiate them even more and the rewards can be selected from gain or loss of a vast range of items or change of reputation or even result in another event or quest to make a randomly made quest-line.

If a role is not filled automatically with currently available individuals, some could be made on the fly and join the party from appropriate places, and afterwards dismissed when no longer needed or killed, great for those bandit attacks and camps, and helping individuals or caravans and so on...

The end result would be an enormous world filled with life and events, and so much quests that would seem never ending, which would really be, and future add-ons could add new types of events, quests, rewards, and role templates, and add them to the pool, so it would never stale.

There would be large areas which would be almost completely randomly generated so someone could wipe it clean and start from scratch, and fill is just as he liked, but keep the significant content required elsewhere available for the time when it is needed, and new changes to the landscape or its contents and population would blend seamlessly, so there would never be a landscape tear, or a broken quest.

A badly implemented mod could result to an odd static placed at odd angle, but it would be seamlessly linked to the landscape around, but might be inter-collided with other statics, but moving those statics around by a patch mod would be just a few seconds work.

Quests are made of intelligent quest limbs that attach themselves to other quest limbs like magnets, so if two mods collide in the same place of a specific quest, they would result in more options, or in the worst scenario, a seamless quest and some ignored quest limbs of the mods.

This brings us to the dialog and speech sub-system which is a real handicap for the current game development trend and slows the current game development tremendously.

The current trend of voice acting needed for any spoken sentence has handicapped Ob's quest development compared to Mw's easier system, but I'm developing a new system that would make it even easier than Mw, and make it possible for those random quests and on the fly role fulfillment of different parts of the quests.

As a side effect, the new system completely eliminates the past problem of repeated lines that one could hear in Mw, and Ob, and make any individual unique with a unique personality and voice.

No, this is quite possible with current technology and I'm puzzled why not implemented already. Just wait until I complete the essay.

As I said before I'm currently working on it and I really like the end result, (of the ideas I mean).

That's all folks, for now. :wave:

Um, you've been linked to appropriate place to put your "ideas" where they can be properly ignored.

I know, but I have looked at those ideas and it seems that my view point is so radically different that it would be inappropriate to interfere there, and I post infrequently, but add so much content when it happens, so it would be better to have my own thread.

By the way, I saw a few people with ideas a bit like my own, especially one which had posted a suggestion for NPC behavior and had suggested to develop more than one factor that would affect their behavior toward other NPCs, and that suggestion was exactly like my own.

That was creepy, you know, as I had suggested instead of just "love-hate" factor we could add two more factors of "fear" and "importance" to that one.

His other suggestions were more tuned to my trend of thinking as well, but as I said before, I could not jump there and fill whole pages with ideas. :grad:

but why is this thread in the modding section ? I can appreicate the time and effort put into the post , but isnt this the wrong forum ?

There is a http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1096483-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-168/ topic already running. Please use it.