I'd say that the idea of having a security system that requires solving a puzzle is unrealistic to begin with, especially if failing to solve it triggers a trap that's either lethal or seals you in an unbreachable prison. After all, what happens if the owner gets it wrong? Keys exist for a reason, you know.

I'd say that the idea of having a security system that requires solving a puzzle is unrealistic to begin with, especially if failing to solve it triggers a trap that's either lethal or seals you in an unbreachable prison. After all, what happens if the owner gets it wrong? Keys exist for a reason, you know.

Immersion is how well you get into the game. Realism and immersion breaking events are completely different. Good examples are (Taken from Zero Punctuation)

In fallout, you're instantly stopped at the vault exit, and asked if there is any part of your childhood you didn't like and wish to alter with your time traveling device. That's breaking immersion, not being unrealistic (Though you could call it that).

Immersion is when you're playing a game of condemned, and your cat jumps on your lap, only to be launched off into the roof by a cannon of terrified piss.

Morrowind was 'unrealistic' with it's alien feel, but everyone still loved it because it was in-depth and interesting. Grand Theft Auto is highly unrealistic (Older games), but people could care less because of the comical humor and fun.

1. All I can say is that I disagree entirely, I've always found the idea of gold weight, and really, any sort of limitation to how much gold you can carry with you an annoyance in games, especially in games like the Elder Scrolls where the amount you can carry of any item is limited by a generic inventory weight. Really, in Morrowind and Oblivion, I have enough trouble carrying both my equipment and loot as it is without needing to take into account gold weight too.


2. And you've just summed up why I consider RPGs a bad genre choice if you want to make a game that focuses on realism, because doing things the way you described would ultimately reduce the importance of character stats. After all, what's the point in increasing your health if you can still be killed in one hit?

1.3 Hitpoints and Spellpoints

Player characters HP is 100+END.

Now the high level characters would be harder to kill thanks to:
-Good armor
-Reflect, shield and other spells or items
-Higher dodge skill
-Higher agility
-Small increase in HP

Instead of:
-Ridiculous amounts of HP, gained by abusing the 5x multiplier to up END early on.

A leap of faith is required for a fantasy world to appear real on the screen, and any element that hinders this transition is unwelcome. The best compliment I can imagine for it is that it should not be noticed, because it is participating so fully in the storytelling that it draws no attention to itself. The homeliness of Bag End for example, plays a crucial role in the ‘selling’ of The Fellowship of the Ring (and by extension the remainder of the trilogy) to the audience.

Fantasy worlds are usually based, at least loosely, on past civilisations familiar to us through myth and history. To organise any excursion into the land of make-believe, the designer needs to provide not so much a palette of recognisable objects as an accumulation of recognisable technology applied to an alternate reality. It is not simply a question of lifting morsels of masonry from existing sources and adding a little mortar to bind them together. Such a process results in a theme park, not a convincing [game] environment.

On the other hand, the real world is itself distorted and rearranged by passage through a camera lens. Most people have had the disconcerting experience of seeing a familiar place for the first on film: it suddenly acquires new perspectives and proportions. We gradually integrate this new vision with our experience and accept both versions, but what about places we know only through the camera lens? Even environments so foreign as to be practically fantastical are accepted at face value because of the context in which they reach us. Within the reassuring framework of a documentary, we are willing to accept extravagance and exoticism because we perceive them as real.

Fantasy [game] environments do not have this advantage. They have no reality beyond the internal logic of the [game], but must nevertheless force acceptance at face value.
The concept work can become, rather than a pure flight of fancy, the equivalent of an apprenticeship in a foreign culture.

One point I briefly mentioned before that also counts into this is making the non realistic elements believable within their own context.

Magic is in no way realistic but it is within the game setting. However in the game setting it is not done in a believable way, for one it's not really consistent, the "rules" how it work constantly change around, sometimes it's a hard to learn art that requires mastery just to use the other time it's something everyone can do with the snip of a finger.
The other problem is practical appliances are missing. Let's assume magic is in between mastery and everyone can use it, so it's available to everyone but requires some training at least. We never see it used for anything other than killing something, and even then it's not consistent.

• We see fire spells are quite common, however we never see people using it to actually make fires, burn clay into bricks, heating up furnaces...

-SNIP-

The temples do this, but they just sort of stand around saying, "I is a healer!1!" I agree, it would be cool if they actually healed you, like they used to in Daggerfall.

I think combat realism will never be implemented, and for good reason. Take left 4 dead 2 as an example. When an enemy is burned, it leaves a charred body. With a bladed weapon the designers modelled specific wounds that appear on the model such as bloody slashes. Limbs can be hewn off. I love this sort of thing, but if it were in elder scrolls it would put the age rating up to 18 and bethesda would lose sales from the younger demographic. I'd like this violence, but it doesn't make sense financially. Fortunately it will be modded in just as with oblivion so I don't think its that big a deal.

And that only happens because of the cliche associating healing magic and "white/holy" magic. Yet, since when have the aedra been associated with providing magic to their followers? Since when have they been so easy to contact and get a response from that a priest could pray for someone to be healed? Alternatively, since when have churches and other religious building in real life been where people go for medical attention?

I'll accept that some generous people with passing talent in healing magic or bandaging/medicine might make themselves available to the temple to aid other believers or those too poor to seek professional help, but there's no reason for temples to be THE official healing place.

You DO notice the Oblivion got a M rating right?
I doubt they will attempt to tune down the next game even more... at least I hope so because I don't wanna play in happy lollipop land, I actually want a world that can feel dark and gritty when it needs to be.

-snip-

Obviously you wouldn't buy a game about cats taking over the world and expect to find a life-simulator, but that's not what I'm talking about.

I mentioned GTA, which is pretty much just like real life. And everything in that game can happen in real life, with the money and luck. That doesn't mean it's not realistic.

But realism in contrast with the game's world fits together well. Being able to alter your childhoon in Fallout 3 isn't realistic with the game's world or the real-life world. Gravity being turned down in Oblivion could be realistic if it acted like so. But living NPCs being heavier than dead in mere seconds? Not realistic both ways.

But in support of my post, Realism is essentially "like real life" in a lot of ways. People complained about people in Oblivion not getting hungry or needing to take a whiz or drop a log, because it's unrealistic not to do it. So what, we're to assume everyone in the TES universe recycles wastes through the use of arcane wizardry teleporting it from the body, and sending it to Thras? (Take that, sloads!). You can say "Like real life" if the game you're playing resembles it greatly, with some generic RPG style elements that are present in most other games. (Like magic).

Well said, OP.

I agree. Realism within the rules of the game world is, in my opinion, very good for the general feel of the game.

As for the Gameplay vs. Realism discussion, I see no problem having a realistic, yet fun combat system.

Look at games such as the early Rainbow Six series for example. The SWAT games. Operation Flashpoint 1 and ArmA 1&2. Or my favorite mod, Project Reality. Those games are fun, yet they try to be realistic, and succeed to varying degrees. Realism does not have to hurt gameplay, but sadly, only few games tried to mix a fantasy setting with realism.

Take a look at good old pen & paper role playing games. There's more and less realistic ones, but most of them attempt to be somewhat believable. They have hit points and dice rolls, because those are abstractions. Because you cannot actually fight while sitting at the table.

When turning those P&P games into computer games, one should try to get rid of these abstractions, because they are not needed in a computer game anymore. A modern computer game, while of course limited in many areas, allows for entertaining combat with believable visualization. Why not take that opportunity and make a realistic, yet fun game? Why stick to health bars and hit points, when you could have a more realistic damage and skill system?

I already compared TES to this game once before in the few posts I made on this forum, and it's not because I'm a fan boy (Edit: spelling it as two words; stupid word filter turning fan boy into "really devoted fan" >.>), but I'd like to mention Mount & Blade again. A game that gets boring rather fast because of the lack and simple design of quests, but also a game with a very believable, yet skill-based combat system.

Its combat system, being easily fine-tunable as far as difficulty goes, gives the player the full control over what he does in combat. If the player performs a left-to-right movement with the mouse, his weapon will follow the same path. When he releases the mouse button, the character attacks with his weapon. Similar to the system in Daggerfall and Morrowind. The enemy then has to chose the correct block direction (on hard difficulty) or just press the block button (on easy difficulty) in time to block the strike. The one who got blocked will be stunned for a moment, giving his enemy the opportunity to start an attack, which then has to be blocked again. An unblocked attack will cause significant damage, and, mainly depending on weapon and armor, not so much on skill values, the damage is calculated. A huge two handed axe will mostly instantly kill an unarmored opponent, even if that opponent was a high-level fighter. His high level did change his attacking speed, blocking speed etc. instead. Fighting a masterful swordsman is a challenge, but shooting him in the back with a crossbow is easy, possible even without any skill points invested in crossbows, and will still kill him, unless he was wearing heavy armor.
And it works. At the beginning, the player character is untrained and poor. He'll only have a pitchfork and a wooden club, and some rocks to throw, and fights slowly. No chance against high-level enemies. Due to their better fighting skills, they'll block most of the attacks and strike back fast and accurate, and they wear heavy armor, protecting them from the laughable damage of the pitchfork and club. Would they be catched by surprise and unarmored, they'd still be dead after a couple of hits with the club.

A system like that would work very well for a TES game. Making heavy armor better and a good choice even if the player isn't skilled in wearing it (wth is that anyway? Skill in wearing armor?) isn't going to break the gameplay. Firstly, the player needs to BUY said armor. Make a full plate armor very expensive, and money harder to get, and this is not a problem. Some might argue "I want to play a fast, sneaky character and heavy armor won't fit him" - Sure, increase your dodge-skill, and dodge attacks instead! Which, of course, would be alot harder in heavy armor. And go, sneak up to enemies. With a realistic system, no matter how well trained a man is, a cut throat is a cut throat, and even a high level enemy would be dead after a critical attack from behind.
You'd have fighters wearing heavy armor and wielding huge weapons - they're slow, but take alot of damage without dying and deal alot of damage. Or you play the guy with lighter armor and a lighter weapon. Fast, a better fencer, better in a 1-on-1-fight, but screwed against an archer, unless he runs. Or you play the assassin, unarmored with only a dagger, but just as deadly.

All these things work in a realistic setting. They worked in real life, they work in P&P RPGs and they'll work in a realistic computer game.

The inventory is another thing. Collecting items is a nice touch, but ALL RPGs I know are going over the top.

Again, look at pen & paper. In a tabletop RPG, you are normally limited in what you can carry to a realistic amount. One weapon, maybe two or three. One set of armor. Maybe a couple of books and potions, but certainly not 100s. It works. It'd work in a computer game, too. Give players houses to store their stuff, make it less important to upgrade equipment all the time, give players a pack animal to carry the stuff. But most importantly, get rid of the idea of getting better equipment all the time. In a P&P RPG, my characters usually stick to the equipment they started with until very late into the game, when they upgrade a couple of times, but not all the time. And that's it. And it's no less fun.

It's always a good idea to look at a scene in a game like you'd look at a movie. Seeing that same scene in a movie, would you like the movie?
The enemy that takes 50 shots in the chest without dying - no, you'd not like that. A magical fireball? Sure, why not.

A game can be fantastic and yet believable. If it is set that the game plays in a world with gods and magic, then I accept that, as long as it remains logical. But why would anyone set a story in a world in which arrows don't kill things? Or only after 50 shots? Unless the archer is very skilled? Why not just decrease accuracy instead, and limit the amount of ammunition to a realistic one to avoid "overpowered archers"?

I admit, I am a player who wants a VERY believable game. Most players do not care about that much realism. And that's their right, of course. Maybe a difficulty setting in the next Elder Scrolls game that allows the player to chose between "arcade" and "realistic" setting would be a good idea to please most people. But that's just my two cents.

People complained about people in Oblivion not getting hungry or needing to take a whiz or drop a log, because it's unrealistic not to do it.