This.

i enjoy game with a healthy dose of realism and to those who say realism is out door i dont think i can find dragons outdoor. thanks

I find some unreslitic games completely entertaining. I love FF IX, and it's far from realistic. But for TES, I want some quantity of realism, not in the sense of it being as real life, but feeling believable. I wouldn't like to be able to destroy the world using only one hand, I want a bandit to be a menace for a low level character. When you reach a high level, you should be really, really powerful, but even them I wouldn't like to swing my sword and see guards falling dead on the ground at the first touch. I would like my character to be the most powerful human/elf/whatever in Skyrim, OK, but enough normal guys should have a chance against me, and the final boss should offer some challenge.

Anyway, this time around you are Dovahkiin, gifted by the gods, so it would feel believable if you were stronger than an average guy...

It depends on what kind of a game it is.
Certain games are more enjoyable when they're more realistic and others are more enjoyable when they're packed with mindless fun.
As to RPG's... The only part of realism I dislike in an RPG is realistic damage, that I do not want.
Other than that I think that realism is something very much needed for the general atmosphere of the game.
At least "realism within the game's rules".

So for Skyrim I think that realism within the franchise universe's rules is very important, but it should not have realistic damage forced upon me, allow me to toggle an option for that instead.

My main goal in a game is to have fun and get enjoyment out of the game. Whether it is realistic or not really has nothing to do with whether or not I will enjoy the game. Personally, I prefer to more fantastical setting in fantasy but I enjoy high fantasy as well.......otherwise I would not really be a fan of TES.

The more realistic they do or do not make it will affect everyone differently and I think TES has always pretty much done a good job of balance in this area.

Didn't mean to imply that they were opposites, but they do frequently conflict.

Realism is absolutely crucial to TES, but enjoyment is important too. Balance.

No realism = no enjoyment as simple as this for me!

i like realism in games not totally realistic over the top ideas but i have fun with some of them like FONV hardcoe mode because i added extra challenge and challenge is fun

A lack of realism has ruined my enjoyment of games far more often than an overabundance of it. It's not usually a concern for most games.

There is a certain balance. For instance, I disliked fast travel in Oblivion, not simply for being unrealistic, but just being unbelievable. It is, for all intents and purposes, teleportation (though not instantaneous). I also disliked how unrealistically small the map was. However, I also would have disliked having to walk everywhere, especially if the map were more "realisitcally" sized.

Daggerfall had a map that was massive, and because of that, realistic. To make the game enjoyable, you also had fast travel, which while in practice is unrealistic (you can't press a button in your car, black out and wake up at your destination...unless you have keyless ignition and are drunk) BUT it also had a system where there were costs associated with that travel, which brings you back to realism.

I think that with "realism" comes enjoyment. But with realism I don't mean ressemblance of our normal world but the game being consequent with itself, what I mean is that if, for example, trolls are supposed to be ultra-dangerous in the context of the game then I want them to be hard to take down. I hate when a game "betrays" itself (It happens in most shooters for example that you are told of how badass and dangerous are some guys and then you kill a thousand on your own without much problem.)

With skyrim the main enemies seem to be dragons, if they are supposed to be able to exterminate us in the history then I want dragons to be a major pain in my ass while playing. I want to die a few times trying to kill a dragon and I want to have to work hard to do so. That's the only way that when I kill one of them I'll think "Yeah dragons are really dangerous, this is consistent, THIS IS realism in a fantasy game and I LOVE IT"

Ultimately, everyone is going to have their own tastes. That's why there are so many mods. Think about all the body / hair replacers, and how popular they are. I think the best thing that Bethesda does is provide the frame work and tools to allow you to customize the game to your own personal tastes, whether it's high fantasy (over the top crazy) or low fantasy (more realism, but still with enough fantasy elements to feel other worldly).

In general, the ES series seems to lean towards the low fantasy side, certainly in terms of look, until you run into dimensions of Oblivion or Shivering Isles, then you get twisted in another direction. So it's fairly well balanced towards the middle of the road. From there with mods, you can weight it in either direction. And from the glimpses I've seen, there's no doubt Skyrim will fall along the same lines.

Probably in the future, I would imagine that along with basic game settings such as screen size, sound volume and difficulty level, there will be a whole slew of other scalable options, maybe even broken down by category:
Magic - low fantasy to high fantasy
Combat - low fantasy to high fantasy
Stealth - low fantasy to high fantasy
Denizens - low fantasy to high fantasy

Personally, I like low fantasy, so that when I come across a really cool item, I feel as though I've achieved something special. It also forces me to think more tactically, and becomes more challenging to survive. But occasionally I like the high fantasy experience too.

As long as Bethesda provides the tools, everyone will be able to get as much enjoyment as they like, with as much realism as they like.

I gotta agree with OP Saints row 2 was fun because it wasnt that serious and not that realistic
I had so much fun driving around the bridges with Huge car mass driving at a train and watching it fly everywhere :rofl:

first off thanks for the NV mod.........

this is an issue that i have not only for gameplay reasons but also for versimilitude or whatever that word was that means "making sense in the context of the gameworld". as much as i loved morrowind one of the issues it had besides the combat was that once you go to a certain level you didnt run away from anything save cliffracers. this happened before you were even half-way through the game so the last half was far less challenging than the first half. thankfully the story was so freaking awesome that it save it and mods also fixed it later on.

for the versimie thingy...........it made no sense that in oblivion for example that within the span of a few months in game you could rise from average joe to become the most powerful magician around or the best swordsman around or both if you wanted to. meanwhile you have all these ingame NPCs that supposedly have been practicing magic or fighting wars long before you arrived on the scene and they end up all being weaker than you. your character should never become as powerful as the archmage who has been practicing magic for decades if not hundreds of years depending on their race. your character should not be as good a warrior as an angry battlescarred ogre that has been fighting for decades since the age of 3. how is it that you come along and manage to outclass everyone else withing a super short timespan?

in the case of skyrim the only thing my character shoudl be better at than most other people is the dragon shouts thing since that seems to be something your born with. as for the rest of the skills i dont want to be mowing through enemies left and right half way through the game withing a few in game weeks. its just stupid. if i want to play a game where im uberpowerful and i can kill multiple NCPs without breaking a sweat than i will go play assassins creed.

You know what I want? I want all the people who think that realism and enjoyment are mutually exclusive to go find another game to play and leave TES alone.

Really.

Part of the problem is that "realism" means different things to different people.

Like, you say "I'm not a fan of excess realism" and someone jumps in with "well, fine, just get rid of gravity & start swining 50 foot long swords that split mountains". Which isn't remotely what the first statement said.


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I agree with several of the statements said here:

1) Different people have different tastes

2) Realism isn't always opposed to enjoyment - BUT, the overzealous pursuit of "realism features" can easily detract from gameplay and enjoyment.

3) Different game settings & genres have different standards for "realistic".




....I, personally, have never seen the TES games I've played (MW & OB) as "realistic". Or even in pursuit of realism. They're fun fantasy games, not life sims. And making them so..... would remove a good bit of the enjoyment. For me.

(Another random example - the SimCity games. I played the original black&white game. I enjoyed it some, but wasn't very good at it. As the sequels came out, and it added more detail & "realism"..... I enjoyed them less. Because I personally don't enjoy massive levels of micromanagement. Which, in the end, is what the SimCIty games are all about. So - the amount of "realism" that makes sense for a game series... reduced the enjoyment.... for a player. Interesting how that worked. )


Hmm, and similarly - I play some FPS games. Both fantastic ones and "historical" ones (i.e, I've played games from the Marathon, Quake, Doom, & Half-life series. I've played the original CoD & Medal of Honor games. Etc, etc, etc). I've seen info about other "more real" ones like Arma, or some of the squad-combat counterterrorism games. And they don't look enjoyable (Again, to me). I look for "fun" in my games, and those don't look fun.


And so... I choose not to play those games that don't look like I'd enjoy them. But, like I said, I've never seen the TES games as "realism" style. So, all these calls for "it needs to be more realistic! Real drowning! real jumping! real fatigue! real eating and sleeping! Real, real, real!" seems like trying to hijack the games away from what they are. :shrug: