To me, the relevant question is how is TES going to morph in order to take advantage of next generation consoles.
It took them 2 years from Oblivion to Fallout 3. FO4 can thus be fairly expected in late 2013 or early 2014. That means there's a fair chance it will hit the stores on existing consoles, XBOX360 and PS3. Now, on the other hand, TES VI will probably launch around the 2016/2017 mark with both XBOX Next and PS4 already in place.

What do you think is the tech quantum leap that next generation consoles allow and that TES needs to take?
Other threads discuss new or improved features wish lists. What I'd like to read about is the relationship between the foresseable new tech specs and new or improved features. Issues such as Graphics, gaemplay and AI are all welcomed. I'll roll the ball:

1. Graphics
Implementation of DIrectx 11 or 12 or homologous, more RAM and more powerful CPU/GPU will allow for decent hair and cloth handling. Ran and snow should also finally not go through surfaces. I can see texture and skin handling beefiting from the 10 fold increase in RAM.

More dialogue, resulting in deeper characters, hopefully.

my hope is for a larger world, imagine if fallout 3 and new vegas were combined the size would be wonderful, this means there can be completely differnt environments in the same game, skyrim did it decently but it doesnt feel as good as i would like and even though skyrim is huge, the bigger the better.

more dialog would also be good.

What I'm about to say is so revolutionary that it will fus ro dah your socks off.............. better rpg elements and deeper, more complex character development :whistling:

My number one hope would probably be a decent dialog voice generation algorithm that can realistically emulate emotions and exotic actions like singing in a realistic way.

This way we can advance toward phenomenal leaps in procedurally generated dialogs, adaptable dynamic quests, and realistic AI responses.

I always love it when people use quantum leap to describe changes. Soo, you want to take one of the smallest possible step in nature.

But anyways, procedural generation of dialogue would be damn amazing.

Who was writing about quantum leap here?

The OP. In the thread title

Many times more objects. Basically, cities that look like cities and not 5 houses, 2 shops, one guild, one temple and 10 NPC. As much as I love TES, the post-Daggerfall cities always bothered me.

I think i might have been misunderstood or hve misixplained myself.
Indeed, I am talking anout quantum leaps - which implies a qualitative rather than an incremental change.

I'm thinking about big improvments, ones that significantly impact gameplay and otherwise wouldn't have been possible due to software/hardware constaints.
Having more spells, for example, is not dependant upon the arrival of the XBOX Next or the PS4. On the other hand, procedurally generated dialogue would be and it would certainly change interaction with NPCs in a big way.

Let's try to establish a correlation between, say, a 10 fold increase in RAM and deformable environments or other improvements that woud meaningfully change TES.
Thanks a bunch.

*Edited for typos and clarity*

I want to have the world change in some way because of the stuff that I did. I'd like quests for different guilds and factions that aren't similar (i.e if you play the two factions in Skyrim, you have almost identical quests, even when it's not necessary) and frankly I want my choices to effectively prevent me from making a choice later on. I'm not expecting 'blow up megaton' but I shouldn't be able to be in all of the guilds and factions in the same build. I doubt the Imperials are keen on having thieves in their castle.

I want harder puzzles, or at least intelligent ones. If there's a code for a door, it doesn't go on the key -- for some reason such security makes me think of the airlock code in Spaceballs. And remind me to change the combination on my luggage. I want some deformable environments, or at least a few places where a well placed spell could cause a cave-in or security breech. I don't know what happened to some of the oblivion traps -- rolling the logs on bandits, tripwires, etc. but bring them back.

Hopefully, next-gen changes Bethesda's mindset. "We're making a next-gen game, so let's make a next-gen effort."

procedural generation for landscape- but perfected. Nothing like oblvion. Imagine the game going "in this area we can have so many types of tree. this tree here could have x many combinations and we randomly generate the patern of it's roots visible around the base, it's branches, it's textures (procedurally changed by weather which is changed by the seasons) etc!!

procedurally created armour and weapons and people and enemies!! procedural animation too!!

best tech (rendering individual hairs on fur armour!! subsurface scattering

procedural dialogue and filters for every character.

mass ai!! it always annoyed me how we got stronger enemies instead of more



oh.. .and the game should be optimised and less of a [censored]storm bug mess

Care to explain?

DO i see a smirk there?

The only thing that next generation hardware can bring to the game is stuff like better graphics, better animations, and possibly better AI possibilities.

Anything else that is improved in the future could also be improved right now.

i dont care how much better or in depth it will be all i want is to have my spear again.

Once again, graphics will be the only important thing.
Don't know why most of the budget gets spent on it TBH Graphics don't make the game



(Personally I was happy with Morrowind graphics... )

People's expectations always change, and that can bite Bethesda in the butt if they aren't careful. They need to innovate. Right now they are only copying what other developers are doing.

I want news headlines like: "Bethesda creates a revolutionary new combat system that blows everything else away."

**** dzouble ****

I'd love that myself.
Any ideas on how to be revolutionary?

Things that would only be possible on nextt-gen hardware?
Locational damage?

Hit an enemy in the leg, and he can no longer walk.
Wound an enemy in the arm, and he holds on to his arm in pain.
Throw sand into an enemy's face and he can no longer see.
Set up a rope and enemies will trip over it.
Swords will clash.
Catch an enemy on fire and he will try to put it out while screaming in pain.
Push over enemies by running into them.

Good ideas, all in all.
For some time now I've been convinced locational damage is the way to go.
I just want it integrated into the RPG model, so the character progression is not lost.