I read on a topic that said "What do you think The Elder Scrolls needs most improvement on"

A lot of people chose "Character Animation"

I decided to play Oblivion again and I hated the fact that eating, and drinking, you do nothing. I think it would be better if you actually picked up the food and ate it or drank.

Doors...

I would also prefer instead of fading away and going into a room, you OPEN it!

Such things I would prefer.

Stealing

Opening

Eating/Drinking

What do you guys think? Anything to do with "action" I guess.

There's several games that do this. It doesn't actually tend to work very well - it looks very, very silly in first person, and while it can add a bit of flavor early on the animations tend to start getting tedious. Also doesn't work well if they want food to be usable in combat (which they probably do).


This is an issue with how they handle interior/exterior regions in their games. It's not really something they can get around without smooth transitions between the two, which would require either changing the way regions are loaded (maybe streaming in nearby interiors as you walk past the doors that connect to them) or just making interiors part of the exterior maps (which would require far simpler interiors, something I don't think Bethesda's going to do).

I feel like that's too much effort that would be better expended somewhere else, plus there are all the drawbacks that rabish mentioned.

Some of it isn't really too much effort. The loads between interiors and exteriors are a relic from Morrowind that I don't think any other developer in the industry would actually do something like that without hanging their heads in shame. Load times in general (except at the start of a play session) are actually started to become increasingly taboo, especially in sandbox games, so Bethesda really should be doing something to try and address them. That's not to say that Bethesda doesn't have to overcome some unique challenges to actually deal with the interior/exterior transitions, but it being uniquely challenging does not make it any less important.

The same goes for character animations in general. While I can certainly understand not animating every single action that the player does, Bethesda's frankly been very near the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of character animations for a long time. They don't need to have astounding animations, but the quality of the animations in most of their games is outright embarrassing and that's something that really does need to be dealt with.

Drinking with drinking horns!