I have been trying to read up on Skyrim and it seems around Tamriel there is some unrest. The collapse of the Empire for example. I often got lonely in Oblivion just wandering a big map, getting attacked on occasion by a creature or a guy. I think it would spruce things up a bit if there would be a lot of hate going around. For example, you are taking a nice stroll down the forest and you see 8 bandits squaring off against 12 Guards. Later on you see a brother and sister bandit trying to raid a caravan. After a nice dungeon raid, you go into town and you see 5 pissed off civilians beating up some random guy.

This would serve no purpose except to see conflict that doesn't exactly revolve around you. These NPCs squaring off would never attack anybody else except the group they are dueling. Once the enemy is dead, they go about their business. Remember the Sintav-Atius dispute from Oblivion? There was a big dispute between the 2 families. No family member served any purpose and would have been awesome to see them duke it out in a duel to the death.

This wouldn't run too rampant, an outright war would be ridiculous. But seeing more NPC vs NPC action would have been awesome. It just doesn't make any sense that bandits or guards even exist since if you were to die, bandits would loot nobody and there would be nobody breaking the law.(people do break the law, but guards only go after you.)

^^^this
You have a good idea, and i hope Bethesda does this.

Thanks. I do hope an idea of this sort is included :thumbsup:

I've been looking for Epic NPC wars in oblivion... and I'm sure it will definitely add to the game if raiders were to suddenly attack when you just bought a house or something like that. Wouldn't that be awesome?

Except part of Skrim's story is that the province is currently embroiled in a civil war...

I'm not sure about NPC Wars, but from what I read from that Game Informer Article, it mentioned "two burly men might reach at the weapon at the same time, and being to fight over who will take it home" in response to the player dropping a weapon on the ground and leaving it. It sounds like at the very least there will be more interaction and fighting between NPCs.

Yes, the civil war needs to feel like a war, not the pathetic Oblivion battles of twenty AI or less (if you're lucky).

Very true, and I rarely if ever leave the oblivion/mods section because as much as I think skyrim will be the best thing ever created by woman/man's hand, the topics in this forum repeat themselves far too much.

This thread has probably been mentioned before in a "what would you want revision 2595849" thread, but it's nice to see it simply laid out here.

Yes, I would love that. Good suggestion. I assume skyrim will be using a rather complex lod-system where people rez in at different poly/texture resolution levels per jump in distance. This would allow for huge battles, since only a handful would ever be in full detail.

I mean, I have my oblivion tweaked for a max of 80 npcs on screen using ai at once, most I have actually seen is about 30. However the game crawls with this many npcs on screen. And it rarely benefits the overall game, because a lot of npcs/creatures/monsters, will roam/battle eachother outside of your perception range. So you will be paying for calculations and poly counts you never bear witness to. (mostly in forest areas).

So yeah, on a modded oblivion install you get something close to that at the cost of having to use streamline or something to even out the fps loss because of it.


In terms of skyrim, I assume more than a single cpu core will be put to use, so surely a lod system + actual multi core cpu support would allow large scale things to happen without breaking the engine. Also radiant story should allow for certain attacks at certain times as well, like if you take on a quest about a theif who is running from the law, however he is being falsely accused, so he joins with a evil mage sect for protection however they experiment on him and make him a monstrosity, he attacks the town you took the quest in, and you have 150 guards all getting thrown in different directions.

Bad example, and I wrote that without crosschecking logic, but that kind of thing surely is possible with radiant story + and could be somewhat dynamic. So you could even have other creatures from the outside (or not, depending what their routines are) come in and see this huge creature/man creation thing, and attack it as well.

And then some npcs get killed in the crossfire, one of which would have offered a quest, and then a note is dynamically put in their inventory as the same quest.

I hope skyrim is complicated in ways similar to this.

A possible game balance drawback of big, big fights could be..... gee, look at all the free loot we can get for just watching some NPCs duke it out. (And then you start coming up with convoluted systems that don't let you loot bodies under certain circumstances, and then you start getting problems when the system malfunctions and keeps you from looting a quest mob because you had an NPC helper nearby, and..... )

Have the victors loot the corpses and get angry when you loot their kills. Also adds to immersion.

But then they attack you... and you have to kill them. And then there's even more loot! Ahh!

That doesn't mean anything, there was a great "battle" in OB that had like 10 NPCs..

I think that you should be able to command squads and lead troops.

Damn straight. Stalkers in...well, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. do this, so why can't Skyrim NPC's do that? If the player's quick enough, they might get something, but chances are the good stuff will be gone. Actor hostility for looting corpses you didn't kill might be cool, too.

Stuff like kind of did happen in my Oblivion game. Every now and then I would see a guard in the middle of the field fighting some daedra or bandits fighting some random person. And once some guard was attacking this bandit and killed him but he managed to kill this women and her horse and the women ended up someone I needed to question for a thieves guild quest. I managed to do to it without her but of the 10+ Oblivion files I have created nothing like that has ever happened.

But I would love to has this stuff happen on a much bigger and random scale.

I think people breaking out in fist fights every 5 minutes would be quite comical, but would really break immersion.

2nd this

edit: double post

But making a corpse pile after the battle would have been so complicated with any more than that!

Sounds...too awesome to be implemented in a game in this century (I could possibly die happy after playing Skyrim).




Or even better, we could also befriend some NPCs (Nobles, Barbarians, Raise your own little gang of pickpocket children?, some random troll you fed bread to) and visit them to see how they progress as characters XD (I would be so sad if one of these comrades were to die, also the option to bury the bodies! and make a little tombstone in their memory They would be missed, though I do admit I'd probably kill half of them just to have those awesome tombstones around and an excuse to drop flowers over dead bodies).

I also wondered why I didn't have the option to murder NPCs without guards having to kill me every time, I understand they would eventually be all dead, but there has to be a better way to limit our homocidal urges in games D: