I love what ive seen so far from far harbor trailer


Companion tied to dlc

Great fog

Creatures attack from underwater

New npc animations

Looks like an underwater suit-hoping for better water

I wouldn't go that far. Wearing Armour is basically just an athletic action, based on moving with a weight. Combining Armour and Athletics (which it's self should be a merger of the old Athletics and Acrobatics) also solves some problems with the Armour skill, particularly it's passive leveling.


My problem with it, however, is two fold.


First, as with Weapon skills, the range of potential options and specializations could quickly become cumbersome. Especially if you're handling multiple types of armour (Maille, Leather, Plate etc. not Light, Medium and Heavy).


Secondly, it focuses too many defensive options into a single paradigm. It would put Passive Mitigation (Armour) active mitigation (blocks and parries) and active avoidance (Dodging, climbing, running away) into a single paradigm. That would leave the Thief light on defensive options, impairing its viability as a core approach.


I do definately think that Athletics and Acrobatics, rolled into a single skill, still has value, mind you. Its just a matter of tweaking it to make it less automatic fluff, and more competitive with other skills.

the thing is, fantasy and magic will clash with realism, and basing too much on realism will make the fantasy quite lame and understated.

underwater combat may be difficult to a novice, but there's water breathing, water walking, swift swimming, etc, spells that place the advantage to the experienced player. touch spells are effective underwater, since it's magic after all, even fire. thrusting with a blunt weapon or axe will still hurt underwater, may even give rise to use of spikes and spear tips on these weapons. or bring back spears! the choice of weapon for underwater though should be dagger class weapons though.

at least in morrowind, underwater combat did make your character less effective as swimming and swinging a weapon really depleted your fatigue,and low fatigue exacerbated how much you miss. however, easily overcame with enchantments or spells, or high athletics.

they could make fatigue loss while underwater also effect your breath which then places more concern on what you do underwater. and also have encumbrance make you sink, that was present in daggerfall even -- can't swim when you have a lot of inventory.

Realism, to me, is more about being representative of the particular universes rules than following those of our own. Yes, Magic can be used to offset certain things, but a well constructed world behaves in a particular way, and ignoring that for no better reason than 'Its fantasy' compromises the plausibility and cohesion of that world.


There is a lot of things you can do go make Underwater combat meaningfully different, evoke the same sense of hesitation and offering a greater range if character options. The point wasn't that it can't be done, it was that just bringing it back does nothing to deal with the issues of the system.


IF it comes back, it needs to be done in a drastically changed way to make it functional, distinct and interesting. Just like with Spears, Athletics, Acrobatics, Throwing weapons etc. addressing some of the deeper, core mechanical issues of the game sets a good foundation for thir inclusion, but just tossing them back in without addressing their issues, simply for the sake of having them, is superficial fluff that adds nothing of relevance. It's like painting your car and saying it's been fixed, without doing anything about the rust.

ah, what you mean is consistency with the lore. I agree with that. I don't however agree with realism in that, it's it that way on Earth, then it must be that way in game. Magic is a HUGE part of TES lore (probably more important than the physical world), it's not just 'something' that can offset realism momentarily.

underwater combat was already different from regular combat -- no ranged attacks, and more difficult movement. one of the biggest complaints in morrowind early on is that slaughterfish swarmed and off'd early characters fast when they swam in water. in daggerfall, a big complaint were the lamia would make you drown by sapping all your fatigue.

if the only complaint was the representation of melee in water, that's relatively an easy fix. the only thing i'd add would be that the more you use fatigue in water, the faster your underwater breath depletes.

It's really getting into semantics, but I don't think it's about following real-world rules, but rather having consistent and logical follow through of rules within the setting. Realism isn't about objects falling at 9.8m/s squared, it's about not having something float while everything else falls without an explanation for why.


Talking about specific solutions to the underwater combat thing isn't really going to work, though... Simply because it depends on how other systems function. No ammount if tweaking to Skyrims under water combat (or lack there of) is going to resolve the issue (for me at least) because the base system needs such an overhaul. From resources to basic actions, damage types to speed calculation, the only part thats really salvageable is the ability to control hands independantly. Untill that basic foundation is done, talking about how to adapt combat to be more interesting underwater is something of a wasted effort.

Personally, I don't really like having so many active quests at once. The later games give you a list of active quests that is ridiculously long, and when it gets to a point where you have to sort them by city/area, that's indicative of a bigger problem (and probably one of the reasons the quest journal has devolved into a quest log like it has, because there's so much going on at once a longer more verbose journal becomes unwieldy to find the actual information you need). It really harms the immersion factor when quests are just a long list of tasks to complete at my leisure, rather than be a mercenary job or a favor that someone expects to have done in a timely manner. Whether the quest itself has a timer or not, I shouldn't find myself having to manage my time and travel plans to optimize the dozens of things going on at one time, as it takes me out of the mindset of being an adventurer in the world and more like a time management specialist trying to optimize my game time.

Not exactly. The world and dungeons in Daggerfall were static. That is, the layouts are the same for everyone each time. Towns, cities, and dungeons were all in the same place with the same placement of architecture. Though it did get clever with reusing and "remixing" objects based on various factors, which would be the same on each playthrough (e.g. the same model may use one texture set in one region and another texture set in another region). The wilderness had more randomization involved, but it wasn't a significant gameplay or world presentation difference.

I was under the impression that it was a new world each time. Your post made me check, though, and it looks like it probably uses a fixed seed to generate the same world each time and fit on the disk, with some additional handcrafted stuff. Still, it shows the problems with relying that heavily on procedural generation, namely having very samey towns, NPCs that have even less personality than the current ones, and dungeons that look like they were made on drugs. Also, side quests are generated fresh each time and are like the radiant quests in Skyrim, but for basically everything. Still, I think the smaller, mostly hand-crafted worlds are more interesting. Heavy use of procedural generation would require giving up a large degree of detail and result in a smaller selection of NPCs with well defined personality and I just don't think it's worth it.

I'm guessing you might have meant to write "random generation" here. Procedural generation is a one-time operation during development that results in a fixed game world (as in Oblivion). Random generation results in a new game world each time (as in the Diablo series).

I'd not be against some procedural generation to expand the size ever so slightly, but I much prefer hand-crafted stuff.


Random thing I'd like to see: bring back the mudcrab merchant (or descendant of them).


Would be funny to me if, in a political faction questline, if one had met the mudcrab merchant, one had a dialogue option to jokingly nominate them for some seat of power, just as a random line of comedic dialogue.

Yeah, there's definately a problematic element to having so much to do. The Wotcher 3 ran into similar problems, it's journal system devolving into just a bunch of tabbed spreadsheets about treasure hunts and minor tasks.


The traditional RPG journal system just doesn't really worm in such an open ended, activity saturated environment. Just like no quest markers is too cumbersome an option for a world with randomly generated objectives, the throughtfully written and immersive Journal quickly becomes impractical.


Which is why some measure of both is necessary, I think. An abreviated quest log, and an optional full on Journal.


Of course, just like with quest markers and directions, the system needs to be able to accommodate interaction between them, and exclusive use of one or the other, which further complicates things.


Having a quest log, similar to Skyrim and Fallout 4, seems fine as far as that mechanic goes, and can double as the control interface for (optional) markers. Divide it up between Quests (complex, multi stage story arcs) Missions (shorter, more personal adventures you do for people) and Jobs (bounties and other one-off, usually radiant money makers) for added organization.


The Journal, then, is a separate tool. For the sake of function, I'd make it locked into the inventory and autosorted to the top, but it's a usable item that you record stuff in. When you get a quest, you enter in Tue objective (I'd even make it optional, but it can be automatic) and that's it.


If Mrs. Monroe asked you to locate her missing sheep, that's why your Journal says. Directions, New developments, weird occurrences, none of that is automatically included. If you want it in there, then put it in yourself (an edit feature should definitely be part of the package).


This gives you an easy organizational tool (the Quest Log) as well as a way to keep more in depth details, without automatically rendering one or the other an overburdened wall of text. It allows the Journal to be as detailed or as vague, as useful or as useless, as generic or as personal as you want, without sacrificing the function and brevity of the Quest Log.

As far as Procedural Generation goes... No Man's Sky is right around the corner. I will wait until i see how it looks before i pass further judgement on it versus full hand-crafting.

Growth: I enjoy things when my characters grow.

You can grow in a number of areas:

1) physical stats and skills: The mainstay of RPGs these days

2) Material Growth: Again done too much in my opinion. The benefit of material things should be more reliant upon the skills of the person using them

3) Understanding / Knowledge: This is the plot lines generally, and your understanding of what is happening. A good plot see your character grow in understanding

4) Social / political: These are where you get recognised, in things like guilds, and factions, and generally standing in communities. Factions should be strong with good political interweavings, and growth up certain social or faction pathways need to be limited by skill, communication, deeds, and relationships. There is great room for improvement in this area.

5) Emotional: Darkest dungeon is a great example. You could look at how a character responds to the world around them emotionally. Do they tend to depression or anxiety. Do they get PTSD? Do they learn coping skills to manage the mental health. Perhaps something that might be looked at in future games perhaps?

6) Moral Development: How does the character grow. Usually this is a 2 dimensional thing: good and bad. But perhaps we need shades of grey as well. Having the character develop empathy, and how does the character interact with his environment. Does he prefer to kill or just knock unconscious, or to sneak past, or to communicate. OPTIONS are the name of the game when it comes to RPGs.

So growth is important.

Also consider:

1) VR support

2) More NPC interactions that use different skills of the character... the more the merrier. Increase NPC variability / behaviour.

3) Make factions more interesting with more politics, and divisions with factions, and in-faction fighting / plotting, and interfactional relationships etc....

4) IF you go with a voice over: Give the voice a personality attached. This is something that wizardry 8 did well, but dragon age inquisition did very badly! Maybe you need to reduce the amount of voice over, to enable more voice choices. Voices and personalities are highly linked!

5) Maybe consider a non-massive online game. for example have 10 different characters online in one game. Group them with others that are online around the same time. Make it so they don't NEED to interact but can. When you are offline, give the character an AI based upon their choices so far, and if needed some pre-set choices. Also give them jobs and things to do, like hunting, or blacksmithing, or running a shop, or farming, or being a guard, or a teacher at the mage college, etc.... This is just a thought!!

Cheers, and Good luck and have fun developing this game!

No, I mean procedural generation. Random generation is actually random with no pattern and is rarely used; it's basically just using a random number generator to determine what's at each coordinate. Procedural generation uses algorithms to reduce the randomness and create something with a pattern and may use a random seed or fixed seed. Minecraft, Diablo, Dwarf Fortress, and Civilization use random seed procedural generation to create new worlds that have some logic to them. No Man's Sky uses fixed seed procedural generation to create the same world for everybody. That way, they don't need several zettabytes (at least) of server space to store a galaxy several thousand times the size of our own. Oblivion's world was procedurally generated in-studio once, then touched up by hand with the end product shipped on the disk with none of the procedural code remaining. Spore has the code for procedural generation included and uses it to generate new species on the fly. If you export a species to share, the file simply contains the seed number used to create it.

I guess we'll agree to disagree on definitions then.

They're specific technical terms. If we're debating their merits, then we need to understand what we're talking about. While often used to refer to each other, they mean different things, like how people tend to call models sprites.

Anyway, I do think that using procedural generation to create a sort of rough sketch of the world and then completing it by hand, like they have been doing, is the way to go. I do not think that continually generating new land as you keep moving, like Minecraft, would turn out well.

I didn't know that's what they had been doing.


But yeah, definitely not a fan of Minecraft's style of generation.

Post limit