I dont want new dialogue options for each and every NPC depending on what underwear I wear, I want quest people to aknowlage my most notable deeds and have differant conversation depending on them. This isnt realy that hard to program someone to notice that Im the arena champion and having a guy think twice beafore wanting to kill me. Bethesda is huge, they have resources, and they have time, so altering ONE strict line of dialogue of ONE NPC depending on whatever Im known as a skilled fighter to make only TWO possibe outcomes of ONE quest wont be much of a sweat to them.

And I still stand by my point on main quest.

What I feel more unrealistic about factions is the fact that you can climb up to lead them without too much effort from your part. I only can imagine the previous leaders saying "I had to work for 14 years to reach leadership of this faction, and this &%$#@! does half a dozen of missions and he's already the boss!". That has always broke inmersion for me. That, and the fact you can lead EVERY faction of the game.

It's more inmersive for me to be a regular Imperial Legion Champion than the Knight of the Imperial Dragon.

by immersion, i hope you mean realism (In a fantasy context) pretty places to explore and good dialogue/faceposing

Not exactly... There's nothing realistic about the scene from Lord of the Rings of Gandalf fighting the Balrog in the Deep Roads, however, the illumination of his spells consumed by the darkness of the deep, and the fire of hells boiling from beneath with the rumble of the oncoming demon rising from below, and breaking the silence in a moment of fantastic climix, only made that much better by the ensuing fight... Yeah... Not realistic... However, EXTRAORDINARILY immersive, that's what players want, immersion, to get lost in the scene, and lost in the story, to forget for awhile what's real and what's not, but in true euphoric pleasure. Absolute consumption of their minds. Movies are less interactive then games, therefore shouldn't games be better at drawing this sort of effect? Until they are, they have not yet provided enough immersion that is my argument.

I think that the best way to immerse a player into the action is to make it somewhat challenging (so that they have to focus 100% on the game). That obviously means that the player has to decide what difficulty setting is best for them.

I think that OP is talking about simply the believability of the world. Although it's a fantasy setting, the people are still people, and we expect them to act like people. This is why awkward animations and strange dialogue detracts from the game. It's also why we expect the people to react when something major happens (like the fighter's guild gets a new leader). It makes us wonder why bandits have godly gear and equipment on them, and why guards from across the world know that we've done something bad.

Bethesda has gotten better in some things when it comes to immersion, but not in others. Things in Oblivion that ruined my immersion were:

-Exotic materials (ebony, glass) appearing in great quantities on common bandits and marauders. According to lore, the lava found at Red Mountain is exceptionally thin, and under the right conditions, it can form relatively large deposits of green, glowing volcanic glass. Therefore, glass can only be found at Red Mountain. Ebony is also rare, but can be found at other sites (like Solstheim for example). Looking at how few sets of glass armor we saw in Vvardenfell (the source of all glass mining), it's surprising to see nearly every bandit in Cyrodiil wearing that stuff.

What FO3 did: Obviously, we see less "uber armor" in Fallout 3. I can't honestly say I've ever seen a raider in power armor. Perhaps a few too many BOS members had it, though. I kind of like how armor was handled in FO:NV, however.

-Childish jokes. Why do Khajiits lick their butts? Lady RogBUTT? I see a pattern here! You can make jokes that don't use real world profanity, but also cater to a more mature audience.

What FO3 did: Better. I actually laughed at the humor in Fallout 3. I liked the return of dark humor, the sarcasm, the Moira, etc. Let's just hope that real world profanity does not actually make it into the game, unless they're OLD words (bastard for example) that feel like they fit in. Also note that I liked the humor in Shivering Isles... though I can't say for certain that it would always be appropriate for Skyrim, but it was perfect for Sheggy :-3

-No political conflicts: So... where did Nibenay and Colovia end again?

What FO3 did: Well, at least there were more in the way of competing factions (Talon Company vs. Super Mutants vs. BOS). Sadly, many of them were borderline "stupid evil," like how Talon Company would just shoot anyone on site. How do they know I don't wish to join? Or perhaps I want to hire them? It would be fun to learn more about TC, too. The super mutants also lacked any ideology at all, unlike the Fallout 1 or FO:NV super mutants.

-Stupid Evil: Let's worship Sithis! Okay, so it's really more of a concept than a god, and by our beliefs he will give us nothing but pain and suffering. The people we murder will supposedly face an eternity of pain and suffering too. Even though we get paid well, we're expected to live in a damp hole in the ground with a bunch of weirdos who talk funny. Wait... why did I join the Dark Brotherhood again? Oh, that's right, I'm supposed to be eeeeeevil! You'd also think that there would be a happy medium between people who think ALL necromancy is evil, and those who wish to worship the dark Mannimarco, he who became a god through the use of the First Numidium in Daggerfall, eh? How about those who wish to study necromancy for scholarly purposes? Take for example, that orc in the Balmora GoM in Morrowind.

What FO3 did: Ugh... the whole "good" vs. "evil" things lives on here, too. Most of the evil decisions were pretty stupid evil in FO3, too (Let's blow up the BOS citadel! Why? Because I'm eeeeevil!). At least FO:NV was more grey. Heck, it was hard, if not impossible to even be pure good in FO:NV .

I have more complaints (lack of variety in armor/weapons, no medium armor, etc), but those don't exactly break my immersion too badly. Those can be easily fixed with mods, too.

If Skyrim is not as immersive as I like it, which I pray it will be, there will always be player-created mods that you can install to change that factor. However, I have faith that Bethesda will make Skyrim immersive enough :happy:

I agree with the original poster. I feel the same way... I guess we wait and see.

What I'm concerned about is how Bethesda will handle the terrain and animations in Skyrim, there are more than a few ways to break immersion and having my horse standing on a steep mounting based on just one of its hooves while the rest of it is apparently standing on thin air detracts from things somewhat. I'm also worried about weather effects and diversity, once again Skyrim is apparently this snow-capped land where it's freezing cold all the time, if the game ends up taking the Oblivion root of Forest, forest, forest, forest, forest, castle, forest, forest, forest, forest, forest, forest, fort, forest etc. (Swap the forests with snowy wasteland and you'll get what I fear of encountering in Skyrim. While Oblivion's world was bright and active enough in places to keep me hooked and in the game, the constant repetition of trees, trees and more trees as well as identikit dungeons, towns and NPCs would sometimes rip me out of it.

Honestly now I doubt you'd ever walk into a town and find half the women wearing one outfit and half the women wearing another outfit... or talking to themselves about themselves about what they did to themselves. Oblivion had so many right ideas but fell flat in so many other areas, I'm just concerned about how the landscape in Skyrim will actually be made interesting when almost everything will be covered in snow.

Hello this is my first post sorry if I accidentally break a few taboos

I didn't get on with the idea in Oblivion that you could become heads of all four main guilds at all... I thought it completely unrealistic.

I would like to think that the amount of specialisation one would have to put in to be even a senior member of any of the guilds would mean that you simply don't have enough time in your life to specialise enough in another discipline that would allow you to achieve highly in another. For example it's unlikely that if you're an Olympic-standard 100m sprinter, you are so focused on achieving and maintaining that standard, that you probably don't have any opportunity to achieve the same standard at tennis Top of the Mage's guild and the Fighter's guild too? I just think that's daft.

I think there should be more trade-off and specialisation, one path reduced your chances of being good at the other.

I also don't like the idea that you can become the top of the faction. my preference is that you should have to complete a very large number (maybe 4 or 5x as many as in oblivion) of pre-determined quests for each faction to reach maybe second or third from the top, then thats your limit, but you can maybe do randomly-generated quests for the guild to keep your place in it, or so free-lance work but make a financial contribution to the guild from that, or something.