» Tue Nov 16, 2010 6:23 am
Bethesda has obviously listened to its users in designing this sequel. I think that the contribution of modders to this dialogue is pretty substantial -- modders are some of the most in-depth and vocal users in terms of anolyzing the game, identifying areas that could use improvement, brainstorming possible implementations for those improvements, putting together mods that demonstrate those implementations, and perhaps most important, communicating all of this to other users and the developers through public community forums.
I agree with the OP that the design details released so far do seem to affirm a lot of the priorities identified by the modding communities as areas where Oblivion fell a little short of the mark, or (to put it more positively) where it had additional potential to capitalize on its tremendous strengths. Specifically:
1. PC Attribute Min-Maxing
Modders fixed this by linking attributes directly to skill advancement, with no more "+1 to +5" power-levelling stuff.
Bethesda has gone one better, eliminating attributes entirely. This is the right approach: attributes were really vestigial in TES4, with Skills being the only things that made a direct difference.
2. Cultural Blandness
Modders made some attempt to make the races/cultures more distinctive, with more pronounced special abilities, etc.
Bethesda has made some vague comments about making the races more distinct from each other -- I hope this means that there will be a real gameplay difference between playing a Nord and an Altmer at level 20 (in Oblivion, there is no difference).
3. Useless Skills
Modders recognized that a lot of skills went unused: Speechcraft, Mysticism, Acrobatics, Security, and so on. Some mods tried to beef these skills up by giving them additional benefits.
Bethesda seems to have recognized that their skill list was unbalanced, and they have seemingly consolidated Mysticism and two other skills into the others.
4. Repetitive Dungeons and Landscapes
Modders did a huge amount of work here, creating dozens of Unique Landscapes and new dungeons (and dungeon tilesets).
Bethesda has heard the call, and promises there'll be more variety this time.
5. Barbarian Becomes The Archmage
Everyone thought it was weird that someone with no fighting skills could take over the Fighters' Guild, and so on. A few modders came up with mods to limit admission to guilds and to generally make class-specific questlines.
Bethesda seems to have built these sorts of dynamic quest constraints into the narrative engine, which sounds terrific.
6. Crappy Combat
Despite the difficulty of modifying such a finicky part of the game, many modders made attempts to liven up the combat in Oblivion. Special moves, new weapon combinations, eliminating the incentive to blindly slash away with a Daedric dagger at everything you encounter -- all innovations introduced by modders.
Bethesda promises they've seen the light. A few promised features (Stamina actually matters, one item/spell in each hand) sound a lot like Demon's Souls -- if they come even close to the combat system in that game, I'll be in heaven when TES5 arrives.
7. Not Enough Quests
Oblivion turned out to have so much replay value that the essentially static world got to be a bit monotonous. Modders tried a lot of different ways to dynamically generate stuff to do, or to create dynamic questlines linked to specific character actions, etc.
Bethesda sounds like they're tying the specific choices and abilities of the PC into a dynamic quest-generator. This would be awesome if it worked properly -- it would greatly extend the replay value of an unmodded game.
8. Beards!
'Nuff said.
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All in all, Bethesda at least appears to have listened to modders, which is really just the same thing as listening to their fans (modders are sort of super-fans in this respect). I'm hopeful that they haven't just listened, but also done a thorough job of integrating that feedback into their vision for TES5.
