» Mon Jan 13, 2014 2:35 am I'm having an immensely good time playing Skyrim again especially using the Realvision ENB and all its recommended mods (flora, weather etc). Truly amazing. The new Legendary difficulty setting keeps it challenging too much more fun. These are a few things I would, however, like to see addressed in the next TES installment:
Fast travel and journal
This time round I have not used fast travel at all and stagecoaches rarely and only for business trips to the capitals (except where more or less forced to such as the Barnabas quest). The game has been much more immersive and interesting as a result for me and I will never use fast travel again in a TES game. However there is a problem in that without sufficient details recorded in the journal I lose the narrative of individual quests as I travel around doing various parts in the area I happen to be traveling in. I would like to see the journal significantly upgraded along the lines of the upgraded Morrowind journal: A complete temporal record of every incident in my adventure plus an index of all entries by individual quest plus an index of all important characters, items, places and events cross referenced to journal entries. Yes fast travel should be there for players who like to zip through individual quest lines, but IMO quests should not be designed on the assumption that you will use fast travel and the journal should support those who would rather ride or walk the land.
Crafting, loot and wealth
Personally I have enjoyed developing my craft skills and making my own gear just as much this time as last time I played, although this time I have taken it slower and more realistically to avoid getting too OP too quickly. However I know a lot of people don't and feel cheated by the miserable quality of loot as found in Skyrim which you can't improve without the very trade craft skills you wanted to avoid grinding up in the first place. The problem is we have a zero sum game here: either you can craft better equipment than you can buy or find, in which case it's the only game in town, or you can't, in which case crafting is a waste of time.
Aside from Skyrim more or less forcing you down the crafting route, willingly or not, the big problem is that, after you've found enough items to disenchant all the enchantments you need, there is no loot or reward worth anything other than the gold you get for it and there is nothing you can buy with all your mountains of gold to match what you can make yourself, except perhaps daedra hearts and black soul gems (which are about the only finds I can get exited about now). It doesn't help that there is no house available that remotely matches the overall convenience and utility of Breezehome (especially if you don't use fast travel) and you can't buy businesses without wasting priceless points on useless perks to do so.
This is not an easy problem to solve, I will only say that IMO key headings for the initial specs for TESVI should include "What makes for good loot?" and "What to spend money on?". My next issues are actually directly related to this very issue which indicates how important it is to solve.
Useless perks
IMO far too many perks are to all intents and purposes redundant (aside from specialized role playing). Why would I invest in lockpicking skills if I can easily open any lock in the game with just 60/70 skill level and a 25% buff item? Why would I invest in critical hit damage buffs when they are calculated on a weapon's base damage which is dwarfed by my smithing and my weapon skill modifiers? There are far too many to list in detail, but all this seems to me to come from two sources:
1. Some perks are made redundant because of the crafting system's damage modifiers (e.g, criticals)
2. Some were nerfed to make them non-mandatory for quest resolution (e.g locks, speach)
In other words it seems to me they just ended up that way and it wasn't WAD. I'd like to see a lot more thought put into this next time to avoid these traps.
Daedric quests
I am more disappointed with these than anything else in Skyrim for two reasons: aside from Azura's Star the rewards are useless and offer no real temptation at all and in many cases there are no scripted opt-out/refusal resolutions, just "quest failed" or leave it dormant on the log. I find this deeply unsatisfying and annoying. I knew in this play through not to read the book that kicks off Boethia's quest since there is no way out of it, but playing a dual dagger wielder this time I decided to go for Mehrunes's Razor. The item is useless since it does not work with Elemental Fury and even if it did I think I'd take my chances with my 84 (so far) damage ebony daggers over this razor's miserable 24 (or whatever it is if you upgrade it a bit) and a 50/1 shot at an instakill (how useful for survival is that?).
Aside from Azura's Star the only challenge is how to avoid having anything to do with these quests since the game rams them down your throat as though there is some reason to do so, some tempting reward on offer. Annoyingly this often requires reloads and retries to figure out how to avoid them getting into your quest log.
The reason for this is again the crafting system which renders the rewards from the Deadric gods junk. My characters are on the whole Ordinary Decent Criminals and their mileage varies on how far they will go to appease these Daedric Demons and what sort of victims they consider fair game, but none of them are up for ritual murder or cannibalism at any price and few of them would consider even a mercifully quick throat job on innocents for the derisory rewards offered.
In future I would like to see meaningful and tempting rewards (or meaningful penalties for refusal) for selling your soul to the devil and I would like to see quest resolutions that involve telling said devil to go to hell.
