Continuing http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1277905-the-big-problem-with-the-way-things-are-going/


First of all, I want to clarify that I do not think Morrowind is the god of all games. I think a lot of the features in Morrowind (particularly the combat) was quite broken. So, I agree that the combat in Morrowind, was, for a large part, dissatisfying. As I've said elsewhere, I do enjoy Skyrim. A lot. 80+ hours worth. However, I'm now trying to work out why I don't really feel like going on, and giving it the replay value I gave Morrowind, and also why I found some things in Morrowind so much more immersive than OB and Skyrim. As such, I really want to hammer home that I believe the game needs evolution, I really do, but that I feel like simplification of a few certain things is having a trickle down effect to the extent that constricts and narrows the game. I don't want another Morrowind. I don't want to wander around 80% ashlands again. I don't want bad combat etc. etc. However, I want some of the original game mechanics back that helped my immersion, and I believe have been taken out to the detriment of the experience.


As I've said elsewhere, Beth is a corporation, and a company, but I think it's cynical to state that all they care about is the bottom dollar. I'm sure there are individuals within the company who put passion into the product, in order to give us the quality that we love today (or lesser than yesterday, in my case). However, anyone with any business sense AT ALL can see from games like Minecraft, and the original products that made these games successful at all, that something a little more complicated than the norm does not turn people away. Minecraft in particular is anathema to ANY video game industry pitch, ever. And yet it sells and continues to sell millions of units. Sure, Bethesda is a corporation, and they need to make money, but assuming that can only be done in one way is bad business sense. Similarly, it is up to the consumer to say when enough is enough. What if, next game, enchanting is removed, but players can find soul gems that they can attach to their weapons to give them power? And after that, what if a dungeon can be "autodungeoned" so it needn't be fought through? And what if, after that speechcraft is removed entirely, and all magic fields are merged to "Magic" perks, and all combat perks are merged to combat perks, and all stealth become all stealth? What you see is that the player (and assumed player intelligence) is coddled until eventually you end up with an experience approaching an open world Fable. Of course, you can say that none of this is going to happen, but it could - it's very possible. Look at the way the community responded to MW's hard map usage. People would mark their own physical map that came with the game, they'd look on Wiki's, ask other players for knowledge. All this, I believe, in the mind of the gamer, was fun. You were actively engaging with the lore and geography of the land, pouring over resources as you would in real life. Instead of a moderate fix on this issue (which wasn't really complained about at all on the forums), we got GPS mapping and fast travel. Do you see what I'm saying? If nobody says "hold on a second", then Beth won't understand the wants of all their players. It's much easier to work for a silent consumer, but it's also more dangerous, because it means that you're already losing your most die hard, caring fans.

I understand what you're saying, but I don't think making something much easier at the expense of (already established bounds of) immersion is a way of doing it. Sure, fix the combat, it was garbage. Fix the weapon hitting, that was illogical and frustrating etc. But fixing something with such obvious scaling and fast travel isn't even giving new players a chance to experience one of the big things of what made the games great in the first place. Essentially, to assume that new players are dumber than old players, or less capable, isn't the way of widening it out to a larger market. Similarly, the thing contains violence that restricts it to a more mature age group, so having it this simplistic and easy just isn't plausible to the market in any case.


But that's exactly it. Why do I need help to find this place? Surely if the world design is so amazing (and it is), the fact that I struggle to find an ancient, unopened cave is a victory for immersion and the entire lore and feel of the world. Why do I need help to find a place someone could have just described, and allowed me to find for myself? In removing this aspect, it speeds to player up much more to the fight, which I'll address below.

I don't think it does make sense to randomly teleport. Make the trip, hell, have horses be actually helpful and able to carry loot. Bring your companions and load them up. Manage the actual dungeon encounter with some forthought. With fast travel, Bethesda removes the need to make any of these actually evolutionary game design decisions. Instead of winning friends with speechcraft to come and help you in dungeons, and wait outside as squires and servicemen, you just port. Instead of saving to buy a pack mule that you can lead to a dungeon and hitch outside so you're able to transport all your goods, port. You see, there are so many ways to achieve immersion, but they require game design decisions and a lot of thought to make it work. This is the purpose of a sequel. Similarly, saying that "that wouldn't be fun" isn't valid, as all you're really leaving left as "fun" is rewards for quests and combat.

When I suggested these points, they were a general idea that needed to be worked out for many hours in a way that made sense (which should have been done for the sequels, as an evolution). Loading screens are fine, if they are symptomatic of a real world decision. For instance, why do shopkeepers not have an infinite amount of money and supplies? When I want to sell anything, I have to skip between the fences all around Skyrim. I'm already looking at a tonne of loading screens, so saying that loading screens turn a player off just isn't true. In any case, this isn't about loading screens, it's about making the player think and make decisions and sacrifices based on how they want to play the game. Are they an archmage mage with 100 in alteration who is finally able to port across the entire land, or just a lowly mushroom collector, who is only able to make it to outside the next town? From a game design perspective, this makes sense, because mages are less viable under the duress of unplanned combat in the wild, whereas my beastly duel wielding Barbarian makes his home on the plains, as he strolls the highlands searching, investigating etc. You see what I mean? There's a thousand times more heavy lifting done with a well explained, restricted teleportation use, than a free for all, unlimited fast travel ability. Hell, even only allowing one fast travel a day would make more sense. When is your character resting? Similarly, while fast travel is a choice, it is still a primary feature in the game. I can easily imagine next game that they'll entirely remove the carts outside of the cities, because, let's face it, with fast travel they're useless. Who, after the first hour of gameplay, would pay for the privilege of insta porting to where they need to go? My point is, if you don't fight for things, they may not stay as is, they may become worse and more stripped back.


In any case, it's another game design issue that required some good thinking out, that hasn't received any thought at all.

Well, I'm going to have to point to the most obvious, huge, giant, awful example of why that is entirely wrong. World of Warcraft. People LOVE being restricted to an area. When they leave it, they feel a sense of accomplishment. 25 million people have proved this. But I'm not asking for that, all I'm asking for is a static game world that doesn't feel like it's changing for me, just as the real world doesn't. Similarly, the entire idea of scaling is intelligent, but what does it actually do? The biggest effect it has on me, is that it constantly reminds me that I am playing a game, and that the game is moderating what I am and am not allowed to see. The entire RPG is to make the game subservient to you, not to be kept in a climate controlled space as you're shuttled along by the game. It's just a hugely different feeling as I've attempted to illustrate elsewhere.


It just isn't though. In what game do you expect to walk up to an outmatched challenge and come away succeeding? Again, it's just a question of good game design. If I stumble across a very scary looking fortress, I am expecting to get into trouble. A new player understands this. It's what they expect. Establish a sense of logic in the game and new players can overcome obstacles just like an older player. It's up to the game designers and the game itself to communicate clearly as to what the player can expect.

Similarly, I think what I really need to say is scaling doesn't need fixing, it needs an almost entire removal on things that don't necessitate it. Which is everything. A player who is vastly outmatched and doesn't want to have to think of a way around can just bump his difficult down to beginner. Simple as that. But to force every single player to have to face enemies that are always equally difficult removes all surprise from 90% of encounters and loot, and gives them no control or purpose in them hunting down certain quests and making their own destiny. And yes, I also think that scaling should have been removed in Morrowind.

Re Scaling Treasure Table:
Like I said, there is no sense of control of your destiny in the bigger way that you play the game while scaling exists. You're going to get a weapon allotted to you by your level bracket. Nothing is exceptional, everything is replaceable, it's all on rungs that you have to climb in the same way as everyone else. You can't do a single thing to jump a few rungs, even if you've played the game four times over. It entirely cuts out the immersive mindset and is entirely unreal. Like I said, a fifteen year old boy can still see a Ferrari in real life, just because he can't afford one. What you're doing is removing the ability for that 15 year old to see that Ferrari, and execute a planned and daring heist to obtain one. (Bad anology, but I think it gets my point across.) Now, applied to any one situation, that's not so bad a restriction, but apply it to the whole game, and I'm always aware that the entire thing is bending around however bad or good I am. It's entirely immersion breaking.


I think this is the thing. You consider the challenge/meat of the game to be found in the dungeons, or in combat/confrontational scenarios, with other areas considered support to the bottom line of how much reward you earn. I consider the challenge to be in every aspect of the game, in that I am seamlessly thinking as I would in real life, but in a game world with it's own share of diplomatic, combat, economical, subterfuge and other challenges. What I am watching is the game become more and more combat/dungeon oriented.

Entirely agree. Speech is a joke as it is at the moment. Everything, at the end of the day, comes down to you killing someone.


Entirely agree. When I say that acrobatics and athletics need to be in the game, I do not want them back in the same way as Morrowind, but I want them evolved (not entirely scrapped). It's a great, applicable idea. What those skills symbolise is physical agility. Can you roll? Can you jump higher? Can I fire my bow as I jump? Can I swim faster? Does jumping use less stamina? Etc etc etc. You see what I mean. Introducing any of these ideas makes for a much deeper gaming experience. Suddenly, I need to work out how to attract the dragon down to the plain, so that I don't lose all my stamina from navigating the cliffs. You see what I mean? Simple ideas such as this retain and should expand the immersion already founded within the series, not remove them. Instead, I can bunnyhop up a sheer cliff face with no repercussion what soever, but I, a trained and agile barbarian, can't swing a weapon down on the head of my enemy as I jump? Painful.

Also, naturally, the stupid AI needs to just use vector pathfinding, and understand how to handle uneven terrain. They also need to understand how to either use ranged attacks or else just run away from a guy with a bow.


Just like with acrobatics and athletics, they're good ideas that needed fixing and evolving, and not scrapping.
Again, the game suffers enormous depth issues without any inclusion of the natural world in its game play. Water needs to come back, need lava, need strong currents in caves that you have to negotiate around etc etc etc.

In reference to MAB: Yeah, I know MAB, but in terms of evolution of the game series, how fantastic would it be to climb on a horse and fight in Skyrim? It once again just expands the infinite nature of what is available to do, and it takes the series and what it can do further forward. All of a sudden, you have another different type of combat, with it's own pros and cons. The point is not that I want to play horse combat, it's that I would have thought it would have been a natural addition to the TES universe, especially with the inclusion of horses...


Bloodmoon, which was released 8-9 years ago had this, and yet we've yet to see it refined or expanded on in a main title. It's baffling. People were raving about how cool it was, and instead the big "evolutions" are the ability to skip exploring much of the land. It's not difficult to do this settlement thing. In fact, I would have even expected a choice of settlements to support, grow and enter combat with other settlements (the ones you might have had the chance to grow), and each with it's own economy and infrastructure (attacking the enemy mine lowers their output). Of course, many people (who ironically call me nostalgic blinded,) might tell me that it doesn't belong in a TES game, or that it's too hard, or whatever, but these are the things that expand and stretch and put an amazing quality back into the game experience. Instead of "wow, the new game allows you to actually lead a town, be mayor, run and expand a province alongside everything else!", it's "I can duel wield now, and there are dragons". There were so many missed opportunities for expansion on the title, and instead we get simplifying. Which is why I'm not satisfied.

Agree entirely on the guild issues.

In terms of Speechcraft - it needs a huge amount of thought put into it. Perhaps the ability to hire and convince mercenaries to assault dungeons for you would be a prudent power, or maybe the ability to negotiate a tonne more, or invest in businesses in a proper way (as in, own a business), and then, to that degree, why have money? You're going to need some incredibly expensive upgrades to your town, or city, that you've built through the method above. In any case, thought needs to be put into this, because as it is now, that skill is useless.


Thanks for the massive reply Wrath, I hope I've covered everything.

Oh, save me, Jeebus...

Well, this is going to be one massive pile of tl;dr if I don't cut the response to this into bite-sized chunks.

To respond to the first three blocks of text:

I relate that first experience of mine because it shows something that is wrong not just with Morrowind's combat system, but with a non-level scaling game, as well. I was already getting frustrated because of my lack of understanding of how the game worked, and my lack of ability to really accomplish anything or figure out how I could even start to go about accomplishing anything, and then I ran into an insurmountable challenge. Well, it wasn't even a challenge really, I couldn't even threaten the guy. The game didn't give me any clue why, or, for that matter, why that guy was even there.

There's a difference between walking up to a giant, getting clubbed in the face, and dieing - I can understand immediately what went wrong, there. When I honestly can't tell the difference between a level 1 bandit I'm supposed to use as grinding fodder and the level 30 super bandit that will eat my skull, and have no idea what I was doing wrong, then it just winds up being frustrating.

Dying once or twice because you couldn't tell how powerful an enemy is before it kills you is OK, but never being able to learn why it keeps happening, or how to make it stop happening in the future just makes players quit.

Trying to make a world with completely static enemies would just trap the player inside of a little box that is their restricted area, and then making it an invisible box whose limits they can only see when they run into instant death? That's probably the worst possible design decision you can make to invite new players into your game. When you are trying to get new players to feel welcome in your world, and get them to start understanding how to navigate and encourage exploration, you are cutting them down and punishing them for exploring.

In fact, let me skip ahead a little bit, and address this:



I'm going to be really blunt here: That specific thing, the thing about being restricted to a specific area for weeks or even months doing the exact same grind infinitely? That's the exact reason I DESPISE MMOs with the blazing passion of a million suns. People hate being in a restricted area - that's why they're so relieved to finally be rid of that crap. I pick on Bethesda's mistakes a lot, but if they were to do that, they would be truly dead to me, and beyond trying to save. (Much the same way I am completely uninterested in ever playing anything Blizzard has made in the past ten years or will ever make.) I don't want to play a Bethesda game to play the sort of thing Blizzard makes - I don't buy Blizzard games for a reason. There are some companies that Bethesda could learn from, certainly, but Blizzard is not one of them.

And, I want to go back to this again, you are saying what you really want to encourage is the sense of exploration, but nothing discourages exploration more than making any path outside the beaten trail random sadistic death. Sure, to the die-hard fan who already knows everything he needs to know, they can handle that just fine, but that's not how the new player sees things. And again, expanding the audience is the ultimate goal, here.

That's not saying they're dumb - that's saying that new players, by definition, don't understand the world around them. One of the worst things to do in fantasy is to just dump a huge load of exposition on a player or the audience right at the start, because they don't care because they can't relate to anything being told to them. You need to bring the player in by giving them a hook to get them interested enough to learn a few things, then letting them play around with it to test it out, and master what you gave them, then giving them another hook, and letting them go on. Whacking them in the head with a punishment for breaking some rule they were never told about because you told them to go and freely explore, but then kill them for exploring just turns people off.

Now then, to the second half of that, about the immersion breaking: It frankly comes off like what you're saying is that you hate level scaling simply because you know there is level scaling at all. It's practically just reaching tautological status at that point. Maybe you don't like it, but I like to know that I can actually find a challenge when I go into a dungeon. Again, the problem with Morrowind is that at a certain point, nothing could really touch you anymore. You had to attack whole towns just to have a threat that lasted more than 3 seconds. If that's the ultimate problem to you, then I guess the only solution would be to simply remove levels and skill improvements, entirely, and make it more like a first-person shooter where only your equipment changes, but your basic character does not, because that's the only way to balance the game in any way at that point.

On fast travel:

Look, the trip TO a new location? Yeah, that's the time when you're exploring and everything is fresh and new. The trip BACK? That's the boring part - it's not exploration, you've already seen it all before. I don't know if you have fun running back and forth on the same roads, but I can assure you the majority of the gaming public does not. That's why having locations that you can quick-travel to after you have been there once fundamentally makes sense. Because treading the same ground for the fiftieth time isn't exploration, it's a commute. If I'm not driving on my commute, I bring a book to read, because there's nothing there to see I don't see every day.

You also cannot say that people don't mind loading screens. Especially having to sit through what may be three or four loading screens in a row when they don't even want to be in a place for more than a second. That's simply not true in the least, and you only have to look at the MANY complaints about current-gen games and their enormous load times that litter every game review site on the Internet.

People like fast travel because it takes out the boring parts of the game where they weren't making any real decisions other than to continue putting one foot in front of the other, and exchanging that for sitting in front of repeated load screens where they aren't even making that much of a decision is a step in an even worse direction.

_________

As for the pack mule thing? Actually, yes, there is something I'd like to see about how that could be done - you could hire a bunch of teamsters or a wagon to wait at the entrance, and you could dump things at a guy standing at the door if you were encumbered. Then, if you completely clear a dungeon, you could even tell them to send in all the haulers to time-skip the act of hauling up any loot that isn't nailed down or on fire so that you don't have to do the inventory management parts yourself. Then you could take the whole wagon back to town. That would save a lot of time on that whole looting part, and let players go back to doing the things they enjoy in the game.

_________

There is, however, one compromise I think may make some decent sense. Since we have this overhead 3d map now and everything, then, especially if we are traveling with a wagon. we could, instead of just appearing some time later, have an Indiana Jones style red line that travels across the map (or some equivalent), with the passing of day and night to give at least some sense of the passage of time. It could potentially help, as well, if you could get into random encounters along the way, especially if you are riding along with a caravan that brigands might attack.

McDonalds is selling millions of Hamburgers. Does that demonstrate that Hamburgers are top level cuisine? Chinese chop shops probably sell way more speakers and headphones than Bose and B&O taken together - does that mean that what they do is superior design? There is a reason why people who did NOT come to RPG through MMOs often scoff at the very concept of calling MMOs RPGs. They are the very extreme of what in one roleplaying theory is called the "gamist" outlook - looking at the game in a mechanistic perspective in which characters are a tool to achieve goals which are more or less on a meta-game level. Of course, it is a valid perspective to have on RPGs, you going for it in the extreme will alienate people who are more interested in a simulational or narrative experience. And regardless of what people are claiming, Bethesda is NOT providing an open world simulation, because any simulation comes with plenty of limits about what you can and cannot do, and to hell with "Hey it's no fun". Yes, it would be great fun to make 25 G turns in a flight simulator and get away with it. But it wouldn't be a simulator if it let you get away with it. What Bethesda is doing is providing a playground with scores of little challenges to beat and scores of medals to acquire. But just because there's plenty of things to do doesn't make it either a world or necessarily an RPG.



I think there's a perfectly valid way to introduce scaling, some of it was even already shown by other games such as Two Worlds: If you were clearly better than that bunch of bandits, they'd say something to the end of "Oh, it's you, sorry, we mistook you for someone else". and stood down. On the other hand, a matched opponent wouldn't. I perfectly agree that scaling by giving people better and better equipment is highly illogical. At the same time, if people CAN get way in over their heads you have to include a way to recognize that in time and turn around. I actually think there were some pretty good aspects to this in MW - in the beginning, you were constantly watching the skies and running from Cliff Racers, near the end, they were merely a nuisance. On the other hand, unless you actively sought them out, it was fairly unlikely to run into Ash Vampires and Ascendeed Sleepers early in the game.

So in terms of scaling, I think equipment- and HP-scaling should be removed. You could possible include a scaling-by-numbers. A single bandit is unlikely to charge the archmage, a whole group of them might try their luck. But here, too, things need to make sense.

According to what was told the main reasons for change in the game where about "Streamlining"
By what this means :

nothing wrong in that , I actually too think and tought that the system in morrowind wich allowed you to pump every skill to 100 was not really good ...

so a new change of direction was desiderable , but , the error that IMO Beth did was to use too much simplification , wich is not always a better thing ... Elder scroll shoudln't not be a Apple device app , but a deep and entertaining experience that is not just limited to read what the developers have written for the quests or look at what the artists have done with the engine ....but offer alsoa very deep and satifying gameplay experience ...


This in my opinion is obtained by operating over the above quoted points...
1 Character creation


the first thing that comes when playing a RPG is the character creation and customization ,this makes the player feel different . Make the player feel to create something unique to his own taste , to detail it as much as possible to obtain that "role" involvement that is not possible with other kind of games like fps or adventure games where one single player is gived and you have to live with that...

Unfortunately with the decision of cutting the attributes , birth signs , classes, and other stuff the developers have reduced a lot the amount of options , now you can agrgue theat those selections where useless as they basically did the same thing of influencing the base attributes of health , magika and stamina , but is not true ...
Those little things gived "customization feel " even if in the end didn't matter much ...

so the direction to "Streamline the game " shoudl be taken in another approach , revolutionize the system instead of just dumbing down , just change it with something new instead than a derivate of an already old and broken system ....

My idea for that woudl be to have a more physical representation of what you are or wanna be ...
you do not have to really have your numbers to make it more deep but features like reflecting your attributes in the shape , look or background of the character coudl work ..

imagine for example if you want to make a warrior sicne the beginning , you can design your character in order to be high , tall , big , muscled .. etc but those features could on the other side reduce options or points to spend for intelligence , knowledge , background and other things , so basically you could have a pool ofpoints to spend in the beginning on features on your character ... that woudl influence his background , aspect and abilities ... this way you could have also a physical reflection on the very same character...

if you make a supersmart mage with an uber knowledge of lore , magic and stuff you may risk to consume all ur points and then have few to give to health , carisma or strenght features that will influecne the very same look of the character , and viceversa....

Aspect could so reflect the physical attributes of strenght , agility , resistance tc ... the background could fill in for knowledge , intelligence , erudition etc ... spirituality could make for willpower , sinsibility , empaty , charisma , wisdom etc ... so you won'0t have a load fo stats to display and numbers to count on but you could have a direct physical reflection of the character by moving here or there sliders , chosing some basic abilities and knowledges , by backgrounds and cure the spirit form of the character by chosing some other sliders or abilities .. ofc my suggestion is far from beeing a direct overhaul proposal but could be the base for a discussion , ( hopefully civil and free of trolls saying go play COD and crap like that ) ...

I will address those in a second time ...
2 Magic system

3 Combat system

4 Crafting

5 Alchemy

forgive my spelling as I am typing on a broken keyboard..

Fortunately, now, I can get back to some of the things I agree with you on...



Perhaps I should say I approach this idea more from the perspective of games like D&D. (The older D&Ds, not the 4th ed stuff where it's all about combat, but where you could actually learn non-combat spells and have non-combat solutions.)

D&D, incidentally, has very obvious level scaling - it pretty much tells you in some of the DMGs exactly how much of what levels of threats you should throw at the party. And that doesn't mean that everything will be easy - as I said before, level scaling doesn't have to be that blunt. A "hard" encounter can simply be an encounter made for someone 10 levels higher. And with the dungeon level locking, you still CAN return to a dungeon later to take on the enemy you had to run from initially.

In any event, I may say "dungeon", but I don't always mean "instanced area for fights", as I think my later comments on skills should show. I guess it would perhaps be more accurate to call it a "challenge". A quest, random location, or some sort of procedural world event (Radiant Story improvements) that requires the player to use their skills to achieve their ends is a "challenge".

Now, then, when we call a character a level 10 character, that means they should be capable of overcoming a level 10 challenge with some sense of threat, but where the average player should be able to comfortably prevail provided they perform no major screw ups. A player focused on combat skills would only have the ability to bludgeon its challenges into submission, but a player with non-combat skills would have alternative means of achieving their ends.

Like I said before, the game is more interesting when you have a sneak skill that lets you overcome the challenge of a guard by simply getting around him undetected. That overcomes the "challenge" of the guard. In order for that challenge to still maintain a challenge, however, guards need to actually have scaling levels of observation to challenge the player's skill.

This is, in fact, the most demonstrable reason why we need level scaling - things which have no level scaling result in the likes of a stealth skill that is nearly useless early on, and all-powerful later on. You can "sneak" in broad daylight five feet in front of a guard with no cover. (And that's not even the worst a game has done - in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, max stealth meant complete undetectability - you could literally stand in the way of a guard, have them trip into you, try to shove past you, and never think anything was wrong with the fact that the space they were trying to occupy seemed unusually solid.)

It was also in D&D's 3.5 ed DMG II, I believe, where they start talking about ways in which you can challenge a player whose use of certain skills or spells keep breaking the defenses of your dungeons or challenges in a manner that makes sense in-game: If players use invisibility to sneak past sentries, then they should just get some dogs who can catch the players by smell. Of course, by that time, there had already been introduced a spell called "Remove Scent" designed specifically to prevent your character from being tracked by a bloodhound. It kind of led to an arms race of detection measure vs. countermeasure - an invisible, scentless, silenced character could only be detected through touch, tremorsense (use levitation), blindsense, and the likes of Detect Magic. Unless, of course, you used spells that put you into parallel planes like the ethereal or shadow. It winds up with the players and enemies playing an unusual game of Spy vs. Spy where, even though the players may be able to win by simply knowing the location of the enemy's lair and teleporting directly there, the mere act of getting that information becomes the adventure itself.

Still, if we are talking about athletic acrobatics as a skill, it has no meaning unless the game is designed so that using some feature of it (say, rock climbing to get up to an otherwise inaccessible ledge) gives you an advantage that allows you to either overcome the challenge in a nonstandard way (which means making the AI actually built to react properly to a PC that is not within reach) either by having an alternate, nonlinear path around a threat, or better yet, incorporating it into combat reasonably.

As for this... well, I think perhaps some hardware limitations may be at play, honestly. Keep in mind that your mining town was essentially pre-designated. It's like the houses you can buy in the current games where they start out empty, but you buy furniture, which are put in pre-determined locations that you can't change.

Having a system that would let you build a city in a manner like a city-builder or RTS game, where you are just given a clear patch of ground and are told to just zone for residential, commercial, and industrial activities would be beyond fantastic, but probably also beyond the ability of a current-gen console to wrap its silicon head around.

It also takes rebuilding the entire quest system around having an entirely procedurally (or player-built, which basically also means "random" as far as scripting and pathfinding goes) built town, the way that Daggerfall was built. This is obviously possible, but it takes an entirely different state of mind in terms of game design direction when writing out plots and quests. I certainly hope they do this, but I honestly won't hold my breath.

I think part of the problem in level scaling is that the game is essentially ABOUT combat. There was very little to do in the game that didn't involve bashing something in the face with very large weapons. If that's all you have, than it's going to be obvious when you scale the levels. If it's a dungeon with traps and secret passages and puzzles -- it's a different game. The level scaling doesn't matter so much because the combat is secondary to figuring out how to get where you're going. If I have to figure out a sequence of buttons (kind of a hacking thing, but YOU do it rather than the computer) with clues hidden all over the place, that's fun no matter what bloody level the bandits are. If I have to find some way to cross a ravine based on finding a rope, figuring out how to attach the rope so I can cross over the rope, and so on, then it's an interesting location. I'll still have fun no matter what. If I have to fast talk to get something I need for a quest, than choosing the right dialog options is a fun game -- without drawing my sword.

If you have 2 puzzles that are easy to solve and maybe 3 types of traps, yeah you better get the enemies scaled right, because you won't have anything fun to do outside of the combat.

I like perks, and I'll tell you why -- it makes it impossible to legitamately learn every perk in a given tree. You therefore have to make real choices, and they will have a consequence. Now leveling isn't a boring sidelight of deciding to mindlessly pick whatever your biggest bonuses were, you have to actually think about what skills you have and need in order to make a character work. Having that stuff done by a class system just removes your need to think. I'd rather suffer for having made a wrong choice and leveled my skills in a way that makes me more vulnerable than have the machine tell me what skills to use. It's silly really -- in Oblivion, you didn't really have to make that choice at all EVERYBODY took the biggest stat increases, so why bother asking. It's not unlike how Wheel of Fortune used to work -- you picked for letters and a vowel. It was boring as heck, because everybody picked the exact same letters every time (R-S-T-L-E) because those were the most common letters. eventually they had to change that and hand them those letters and force them to pick others so that the game was interesting. That's what the oblivion and morrowind level up screen was -- everybody simply picked the biggest multipliers and went on. No point to asking, not real consequences to that choice. Boring.

tl-dr. Im pretty sure if you dont like the way things are going you can just not buy the next game and move on to the other hundreds of options in video games. Sitting around discussing how YOU would make the game is really quite pointless since you have 0 input on how the games are made. And dont give me that horse crap about how "you just want the game to be better" or something, theres a reason you arent video game developers, you're probably not any good at it.

Nuff said?

I'll add my two cents. I don't believe fast travel is the problem, it's just a symptom. The real problem was extremely highlighted in Oblivion. With the implementation of fast travel, walking from place to place simply became unnecessary. Sure, the system made sense, but Bethesda realized that it was a very small contingent of people that were going to walk normally. And so the result was an extremely less varied environment, randomly generated dungeons with scaled loot that all felt like doing the same thing, over and over. With fast travel, all those things are okay because nobody is going to see them anyway. It makes actually walking from place to place horrendously boring because there is nothing in between. No quest starters, nothing. Exploring is boring because everything feels the same because...Well, it is. I'm somewhat happy with Skyrim in this aspect however, because exploring is actually somewhat interesting. The dungeons feel like they have some semblance of thought put into them. Looking at some of the maps for the dwemer ruins is really quite impressive. The sense of déjà vu that was so prevalent in Oblivion is gone.

But those are the environments. The people populating them however are an entirely different matter. I'll concede the level scaling is damn well improved from Oblivion. I no longer face bandits donning their full sets of daedric armour, who I'll break my sword on before they'll lay down and die. I don't need to point out that the scaling in Oblivion was probably the worst implementaion of a level scaling that has ever been, and will ever be. But in Skyrim I'm still facing Bandit Johnny, and his closely related cousin "Bandit Outlaw". The dungeons, the environments, might feel unique again but may Sheogorath drop a rock on my house if I'm not sick of fighting the same thing over and over. I understand completely why it feels like that, however. Bethesda games have, lets face it, never had a particularly good combat system. Our hopes were raised when rumour was spread around that Arkane would be making the combat system in Skyrim, only to have those rumours shot down months later. The reason everything feels the same is because of a lack of varied combat. At it's core, it hasn't changed much from Oblivion. If you have the patience, most fights can be won by simply blocking, hitting twice, and going back to resuming to block. With the removal of weapon and armour degradation, this grim fandango can go on until the Sload release another plague. Sure, a draugr might shout at you once in a while. Maybe you'll get disarmed every so often. But the combat system is still terribly simplistic and as such doesn't allow for much in the way of variation and so the player is always going to be stuck in this feeling of fighting the same thing over and over, only sometimes they may have more health. Even the magic system has been simplified. I was quite pleased by the new display of destruction spells in the game footage, but when you play the game? You realize that there's bugger all spells to work with. Even after Scripted spells, after LAME, after Midas Magick...No, we still get the same old "burn things with fire for x damage".

I mean the only real addition was the use of rune traps, which are admittedly pretty nifty. Being able to shoot fire out of your fingertips is swell, but it's basically just a touch spell that lasts for y seconds. The shock spells? Neato, I get to drain magicka from enemy mages? Oh, they have limitless magicka, making it relatively useless. Ice can slow things, which is pretty nice. But then after examining all these things, the realization hits you like a broken heart. All of those things were in Morrowind and Oblivion, only now they've inexplicably been shuffled into the destruction school. You'll recall the outrage over the removal of Mysticism, yes? The subsequent argument that Mysticism was a useless school and that the spells weren't getting removed, they were geting put into different schools? Well I could have sympathized with that line of thought. I mean after Oblivion and the addition of fast travel, spells like Almsivi/Divine intervention or Mark and Recall hardly seemed needed, right? I mean you could teleport anywhere. Sure, that makes sense. But then in Skyrim half the spells are simply gone, vanished like an old oak table.

Levitation? Well no surprises there, closed cities still render it either unusable or immersion breaking. Was already gone in Oblivion, though it sure would have been handy for these accursed mountains literring the landscape in Skyrim.
Unlock/Lock? Gone
Absorb heatlh/magicka/stamina? Gone
Chameleon? Feather? Silence/Noise? Waterwalking? Slowfall/Jump? Burden?
Damage health/stamina/magicka are all gone as far as spells go, now they're all poisons. Same could be said of feather, I suppose.
Instead we get spells like Clairvoyance which aren't exactly useful because the dungeons are hardly a maze in the first place.

As far as destruction goes, we get fire/ice/shock. Shock gives magicka draining, ice drains stamina. That's all well and good, but all those effects could have been gained from spellmaking anyway (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Useful_Spells). Don't get me wrong, I perfectly understand the notion of spellmaking being an overpowered system. But that means that spellmaking itself needs to be adjusted, not outright removed. Though I'm not particularly complaining about spellmaking being removed outright. It seems that over the course of three games we've just had spells and spell effects removed yet nothing really reasonable to replace them. I'm apparently archmage, with level 100 in every school of magic. Why can't I create ten illusory clones, or disguise myself as someone's relative with illusory magic? Why can't I walk into a dungeon and turn the walls into fires hotter than the magma of Red Mountain? But since this is a thread about the worries of what is wrong with what we have and not what's wrong with what we don't have, I'll digress. The problem with level scaling as a whole is that it never makes the player feel any stronger. I might be level 50, but now everyone else is too. Sure, in Morrowind by the end of the game it was a little lacking in terms of challenge, but in a way that's a good thing. I was the damn Nerevarine. I don't need to feel threatened by a bandit. I can't help but agree with Ope in this sense.

The most obvious example of a system where the lack of level scaling works well is the Fallout series. Lets take one of the most obvious examples, New Vegas. Starting out in Goodsprings, you're faced with two choices. You head North, directly to Vegas and face the hardest, one of the most difficult challenges in the game, but it'll get you to Vegas the quickest. Or you head south, a choice that has the whole game gearing towards you going that way and as such is quite level 1-friendly. Same thing applies to Fallout 1. If you've played the game before you'll know exactly where Necropolis is and you can head there right off the bat and if you're really damn lucky, grab the water chip and go home.

The approach of non-level scaling could work well. You go into a duneon filled with level 50 enemies and there's a level 50 reward at the end. To a level 50 PC it might not mean much, but to a level 30 it's a damn achievement. People argue that level scaling is needed to keep the game interesting. I can see where they're coming from, but it's simply not true. I played through Skyrim on the hardest difficulty, and dragons simply become a chore. It's like "Oh boy, another dragon. How exciting" Didn't matter if it was the super elder dragon of a million fires of doom, it was still annoying as wandering to Ghostgate trying to avoid Cliff racers. The reason level scaling doesn't work is because the AI and combat system are so limited in Bethesda that all level scaling amounts to in Bethesda games is "Okay, we'll give this guy better armour, or more health, or more damage". It's artificial difficulty.



Now, onto settlement creating and factions and such. To my eternal disappointment, the guild advancement requirements are still not back from Morrowind. It's a shame, really. It's not the requirements themselves that were so important, but the effect of pacing and relevance that they added to a faction. In Oblivion you could hit the rank of Arch-mage without casting a spell. The feeling is not all that alleviated in Skyrim, either. I headed to the Stormcloaks, and we ended up conquering the whole of Skyrim in an in-game week or less. Same thing applies to any guild, you fly up the ranks like you're trying to climb the proverbial mushroom tower. At least in Morrowind you had to do a certain number of quests, do favours, make sure people liked you and most importantly made sure that you had the skill to back up your rank. There's also the incredibly irritating oversight by Bethesda that even as Harbinger of the Companions, guards will still call you the companions mead-fetcher, or Ria will still claim that she'll "show you the ropes" and so on. Not dreadfully important, but just irritating enough to get on my nerves. Something that would have been incredibly easily corrected, too.

I definitely share the sentiments on settlement creation and guild mastery. Always felt like you hit Archmagister or Archmage and...That's it. You have nothing to do. You get a swell quarters or stronghold, but that's it. I could name a numer of mods that alleviate this problem somewhat effectively. Uvirith's Legacy, Building up Uvirith's Legacy/Grave and Rise of House Telvanni are all fantastic choices. They really do a great job of reinforcing that feeling of "Yeah, I'm someone that matters." Raven Rock was also a great example. What should I build? Why should I build it? What's going to be more important for the people in this place? Seeing the colony grow and flourish was a great feeling. I don't even think it would be terribly hard to implement, either. It could be anything as simply as owning a mine, shop or warehouse. Raven Rock was perfect because it achieved that feeling of contributing and feeling like you were doing something important, but it didn't pull you away from your travels every other second with a "NEREVARIIIIIIIIIINE, THE TOILETS CLOGGED AGAIN". It wasn't intrusive, but it was always somewhere to come back to.



As for speech, I don't think I need to add anything. As I understand it, Todd Howard adopts the view relevant to NPCs of "more NPCs with less unique dialogue" rather than "less NPCs with more unique dialogue". A viewpoint I've always found perplexing, to be honest. I mean any classic RPG ever argues with that sort of claim from Baldur's Gate to Arcanum to Planescape to the Witcher. But that's another story. Speech has never been well implemented in a TES game. Even the most honour-bound NPCs will accept bribes, and so on. Everyone who isn't you can hire the fighter's guild to deal with some threat. Every house councillor who isn't you can hire the Morag Tong to deal with some nuisance.

I use to comment on long posts like these
but

Daggerfall already had a system like that, which could have been developed and expanded, but was instead scrapped. You could distribute points between your attributes in such a way that a level 1 character could start with a score of 75+ in several attributes, but the others were bound to take a big hit, since the total "score" of attribute points had to equal 0.

Similarly, when making a custom class, you could select between a set of "perks", or advantages, but you also had to balance the advantages with disadvantages, or you received a penalty to leveling speed. You were not able to choose too many advantages or disadvantages either, as a way of stopping you from making too overpowered characters. Admittedly, you could do that anyway, but with more balancing and testing a system like that would be great in my opinion.

As far as fast travel goes, I personally feel that yes it ruins some of the immersion, I think limiting where you can fast travel to is a good idea or even having random things interrupt your fast travel like bandits or some kind of random event.

There are creative ways around fast travel, Horses are nice and simple change but only seem useful if you are gonna travel along the roads if you travel cross land your horses sometimes make it hard to get around certain geography or you run the risk of killing the damn thing. The carriages outside the cities is nice and makes travel amongst the cities quick but it cost you money to do so. One thing they could add is the ability to use canoes, I see row boats all the time why can't I use them, It would be cool to travel along rivers in a little boat and would open new options for little random events.

I haven't read all these posts, but I did read the OP first post in the original thread. That being said, I have to say that you are looking at this a bit wrong.
The reason Morrowind is so "complicated" it's because it was made, first and foremost for PC, pretty much like Daggerfall. Bethesda saw the rise and popularity of consoles, so they decided to focus primarily on that market. Console users first, PC users second. You can clearly see this thing in Oblivion. The UI just screamed "console" in your face. Skyrim repeats this formula. Usually, RPG games that require a lot of reading and clicking, aren't really a good idea to put on a console. This is why you will never see Diablo on console or Starcraft (I know that Starcraft isn't a RPG, but it requires clicking and reading).
It also seems to me that Bethesda doesn't really try to make their games for PC users more user-friendly. "Why should we?" they will ask "PC users will just mod it, anyway." I still don't think this is the right attitude. When you have to expect from modders to fix your things, then why am I even paying you for these games?
Another thing is that people (especially kids of today who never really played pen and paper RPG-s) got used to it to fast-action, quick leveling, hand-holding, amazing graphics and amazing voice acting in their games. And Bethesda makes games for these kind of people.
About fast traveling - yes, I hated it, but I actually used it a lot in Oblivion - just because there wasn't much to see when traveling on foot from town to town (unlike in Morrowind). Everything was green and flat. What bothered me however, was the fact that you had all these locations on your map from the beginning of the game! They could have introduced some kind of a caravan-system like silt striders in Morrowind.
And these leads me to Skyrim. I still don't understand what's the purpose of horses and caravans when you can fast-travel on any location you want, for free? And what about beds? Why sleep in a bed now, when everything regenerates?
Skyrim is actually the first TES game that I will actually mod because of these things. There is a lot more that bothers me about Skyrim (no classes, attributes, atronomical signs etc), but I still think is a slight improvement over Oblivion. So let's hope that TES VI is more like Morrowind, although I won't hold my breath.

there is a lot of things they changed or removed from oblivion that were annoying
acrobatics, armorer, mysticsm which were either pointless, did nothing or was a chore to do in the game, in turn we go smithing which is not only fun, its helpful
attributes that felt worthless, in oblivion they were near pointless, basically i just picked the higher + numbers no thought at all. in skyrim the removed worthless attributes and we got perks, which for the most part are amazing
garbage dungeons from oblivion, not only were they boring but most had traps that either did nothing, killed u in one shot no matter what, or came from no where which is "shocking" which is a bad form of scaring the crap out of you.
non-existant water physics it really bugged me that minecraft has better water mechanics then oblivion. but tbh its better then skyrims water also =\

am i worried about TES? nope because for every good thing removed 10 bad things are fixed. sure i hope they bring back spears and other stuffs but people who claim the series is dead, or that the game is going down fast or something are seriously mental or need to get off the "morrowind is teh best rpg evearrrrr" crap.

morrowind was fun
oblivion was fun
skyrim is fun

never even touched the other TES games so idk

Well, i do think there's a few people stuck in the past around here when it comes to what they expect. However the following are what i believe are musts for futures TES'.

Guild ranks, seriously there was no excuse for removing this as it shows you're progress in the faction. Maybe it's because they were so short in Skyrim they tried to hide it.

Guild requirements, i can become Archmage of the College Of Winterhold without having a clue about magic, so there's something wrong there.

Hand placed unique items NOT related to a quest, for a game that advertises itself as an exploration big open world game etc. Most of the unique stuff in Skyrim is tied to a quest. Probably because Bethesda knows a lot of people just do quests and don't explore much

The utter simplification of levelling, alright, perks DO work (in my opinion) but there has to be more to levelling besides choosing 1 icon to slightly improve. I find levelling more boring than even Oblivion where i got to upgrade various ATTRIBUTES (remember those?).

So just a few things i think needs to be looked at.