Hello,

Many of us here will agree that the Elder Scrolls has vast and original lore, which is often poorly capitalised upon by Bethesda's writing staff. With a back-locker of lore comparable in size perhaps even to LoTR, it seems a shame that we get handed shoddily written characters - serving only to move the player from objective to objective - or outhright joke characters which seem so ridiculous that it shatters immersion.

This is why I think the "big focus" for the next Elder Scrolls game should be STORY. Bethesda need to look at the state of the TES universe, and create a convincing and intriguing plot, not one wherein you are "prophesied hero X, fated to do/save/slay Y". While I can see that many gamers desire only combat,you've created an engaging combat system for Skyrim (perhaps a bit dumbed down) which will satiate their appitites. The focus now needs to be on story. With the sales of well written games like Mass Effect (no ending discussion please), Deus Ex and even the Witcher skyrocketting - the gaming Market clearly has the appetite for a good plot to enjoy their game with. To avoid falling behind Bethesda, you need to address the writing situation, and even hire new writers with experience beyond games (movie writers with a passion for games). The universe is there, but you need to do it justice with plot.

Thoughts, anyone?

Well, I would not use the examples you used from the Western market, although Mass Effect is okay and I give Bioware the edge (over Bethesda) for addressing social issues in games as a pedagogical tool.

However, the Japanese (and East Asia, in general, now) gaming has always stressed story and character over fancy technical effects. Epics such as Xenosaga and the more recent Star Ocean and Tales of Vesperia (or the related franchises, in general, I suppose) have very deep, philosophical foundations that make them excellent pedagogical tools. Interestingly, such games are sometimes faulted for combat mechanics.

Likewise, there are Western gamers who refuse to recognize narrative as a key game design element and claim that Japanese game genres such as visual novels and adventures are not games (they are, obviously, and are classified accordingly). In such games, or even hybrids such as Langrisser and Growlanser, story and character writing are given far more effort than combat mechanics or technical effects.

Of course, this is precisely why there are also Western gamers such as myself and my sister (5 years older than me) who prefer Japanese games, at least when we want story and character rather than technical effects.

There are also Japanese and East Asian gamers who enjoy Western games and their technical capabilities, of course.

Ideally, you'd have more collaboration so that higher quality games are released globally and the medium would evolve. It seems that there is too high of a focus on competition rather than collaboration, though.

Agreed.. Bethesda's stories' are horrible.. I like how when they announce the game they give a little hint about what the story is going to be, then you just make some guess that the entire story will revolve around killing the one guy who they said, and thats about it.. When they were speaking about Skyrim's story I kinda just expected it to be something more than that.. It was very flat and lacked any quality.. But Bethesda doesn't have any good writers to begin with.. They really should invest some of that money they got from Skyrim into writiers and not into advertising.. It would actually help a lot