Perfect opportunity for murderrrrrrrrr!

Exactly.

A lot of the effort to make realistic stuff, doesn't necessarily need to actually be functional for the PC. for example, just making a bathroom, that maybe the NPC's use, will make the game more believable, the need isn't required as long as the world is build as if the need was there. After all, the games is just a model, of the "actual" world of TES. Kind of like how the games already have kitchen equipment.

Good point.

Putting a bathroom that nobody goes to just seems a little dull. What if you're a thief, and when the shopkeep goes up to the bathroom, you loot his secret stash?

I'm not saying let the player see the events of it, just have them go inside and close the door, then have an unpickable lock on the door.

Besides, in Deus Ex, you can intrude on a woman in the woman's restroom...and she hates you throughout the rest of the game for it.

Yea, and toilets for example wouldn't have to be in every house, back in the middle ages there usually was just a public toilet which pretty much was just a hole in the ground with a board to sit on. Could just do with having a public "out house" or something like that. Hell it wouldn't necessarily even have to have a interior like the cellar doors in Oblivion, just a small "house" NPCs from time to time used and that you could "rest" in if you clicked it... in fact that would have been rather hilarious, interacting with it simply brings up the "rest" option, how you "rested" in there is open to your interpretation :woot:
And now that you bring up kitchen equipment, it would be nice to see some actual kitchens as well, at least in bigger houses. They where just a collection of useless rooms mostly but no kitchen, no bathtub or anything (just a tub made of wood possibly). Felt kinda like the fort ruins really, just a bunch of useless rooms and hallways with no function, no armory, no mess hall, no barracks, no hospital rooms, no food storages... just endless winding hallways with meaningless rooms that couldn't serve any logical function.



Yea pretty much that.
See this is why I'd like to see some Realism/Believability, not "just because" but because it offers some new possibility that where not there before.
Hell based on that example you could sneak a shopkeeper something in his drink that gives him diarrhea or just makes him feel so sick he doesn't dare to leave the toilet, gets him out of the way for a while

I agree with that, except that most bathroom doors you can unlock from the outside with a butter knife. So, I don't know about an unpickable lock.

In the Hitman games, npc's used the bathrooms, and worked great as a tactical advantage.

Bathrooms for common people were often chamber pots in their bedrooms, which they dumped into the street or local latrine.

The room of the house that they generally don't include in the games is the kitchen. Most houses in the cities also need a livestock pen, and a garden.

Well question is what would you rather see, a put house people sometimes went in to or someone dumping his crap on the streets from the top window?
But anyway at least seeing a indication that people there have a "working digestive system" would be a advantage, the out houses and people actually spending time in there would as mentioned even be usable for the PC sometimes.

And yea there where things missing, like cold storages for food. You some times saw some garlic hung in a room but how about going in a cellar and seeing a ham hung there and jars of fruits and maybe marmalade somewhere?
Again this would be a good reason to have larger cities and a larger game world, you can simply place more in it making it feel more real and more alive.

this

hehe loved the ear piercing joke, now I know why there are no earrings in counterstrike (lame joke I know, sue me)

For a medieval setting, yes. A few chamber pots lying around in Oblivion would have been a nice touch.

In Morrowind, though, it would have worked really well to have public latrines a mile or two from each city. Because that's how they did it in the classical near-east.

I keep saying that Tamriel's culture is closer to the classical era. So Imperials, being like the Romans, could have had latrines too. I think a latrine or two would have fit well into the Imperial City. Maybe with a butt-wiping sponge you could find as an easter egg, and use as a weapon.

Ya I too found the lack of kitchens, wash tubes, and other important rooms and buildings (vaults, banks!!!!!) very very damaging to the game, I mean I had this a amazing house/quest mod in oblivion Shadowcrest manor it BLEW ME AWAY, the house had a FUNCTIONAL kitchen where u can cook,wash,and make cheese... A bath tube where u wash all illness, a functional wine cellar, enchanting room, alchemy lab...etc, I spent more time in that house than I did in the other parts of the a game .
So i know from experience that more functional real things are wayyyyyyyy better in a fantasy game like ES.

Somewhere else, you talked about magical non-combat applications. Now that you say cold storage, it would be nice if for example, the royalty or upper class, had contracts with the local mage association for them for maintaining cold enchanted storage rooms.

Would be nice for a low level quest to assist in a routine maintenance of such a chamber in the local castle.

Yea an idea would be that they have a constant low level "cold" effect on a item like a cupboard, a coffer or maybe a room powered by soul gems possibly. Generally I'd really like to see soul gems used as "batteries" for certain things, like maybe a non fire based light source (net necessarily a light bulb though) like something that creates a small constant electric arc between two pieces of metal or a stove that doesn't need fire but has a small heating plate that can be turned up or down. Something like that would be a good adventurer cooker too, don't need a fire, just turn it on and it heats itself, just recharge it if needed.
Though that would really be the upper class and expensive gear, not the every day stuff.

These types of specific applications could be endless.

The point is that heat and cold should do more than damage. They should freeze and burn things, too.

burning and freezing are not ES style and using spells in such a fashion is Hersey of the greatest magnitude. <<<< joking of course

Particularly since low-grade enchantments would presumably be comparably cheap and easy for mages to create, whereas powerful ones may not even be readily for sale, being dangerous and all. It could even be a major source of income, from those citizens who aren't magically adept and don't buy spells. Skill seems to be necessary for enchanting, but everyone seems able to use magic items, so "triggering" those enchantments is probably easy with minimal training/effort. A theory I made up when working on my own magic system was that enchanted items recharged because they were made with a soul; since magicka naturally flows into living things on Nirn, it continues to pass through the soul and renew the enchantment. Things made purely from magicka would be one-time things that burn out and that's that. The Mage's Guild (or comparable groups) could sell lesser soul gems carrying tiny non-soul enchantments as battery-style objects...little use for the adventurer seeking to set his enemies on fire, but affordable for many citizens to use for household convenience. Upper classes might be able to afford soul-based, constant effect minor enchantments for fancy refrigerators and always-lit indoor gardens and such.

Although this brings to mind...have we ever gotten any lore as to what soul gems are, where they come from? They don't seem to be mined like regular gems, and are a lot more common, suggesting that mages make them somehow. It would be interesting to get some info on that.

I just downloaded and played that mod and, HOLY CRAP, that was just beautiful. I actually felt a bit woozy when playing it because that was just so amazing.
I especially liked the extra that it temporarily raised your skills when you stood at one of the work stations like the alchemy lab or the smithy in the cellar, THAT is a good way to simulate having a completely arranged and well equipped workspace in game btw.

I really hope the Devs will play that mod and take some inspiration from it, THAT is what I'd want a upper class house in game to look like. Hell that house was better done any ANY of the in game castles. So much working and interactive equipment, especially the ideas that the washing bowl increased your disease resistance slightly and you could recover from status effects in the bathtub.

Hell such things would even work for low class houses, like having a small open fireplace and a frying pan you can interact with to cook food.

Though this is going away from the realism part a little but that is just a mod I can so recommend, it just made everything feel more "alive".

that's the best explanation I read in ages.
hope they take this into heart when making ES 5.

on a side note magic should also be more powerful, but MUCH harder to use and get, a well aimed fire ball should explode and send enemies flying, BUT this fire ball will also kill you if u fire to close, and u won't be able to spam the spell no matter how much mana u have, it will have a cooldown (time to recover from casting it), as I said before in countless posts magic should be diverse and fun and powerful but balanced and not instant God mode and not lame like in ES 4 and 3.

glad u liked it, for me I can't play oblivion without it anymore

"Realism" can mean many things to many different people, and these are just a few of my "peeves" with situations where realism is either needed or is applied in a way that breaks immersion or gameplay:

Gold should have weight to avoid unreasonable amounts of cash being carried, but there should also be items (gems, jewelry, works of art) that have a much higher value-to-weight ratio, so you don't need to carry 200,000 Septims around with you.

NPCs should have jobs, and occasionally DO them. Morrowind had a decent number of farms and mines, but the slave laborers were on perpetual break; they never actually lifted a spade or shovel. Oblivion had working and believable farms just outside Skingrad (I believe there was only ONE other farm in the entire game that actually funtioned, even if the farmer was invisible), but was there even a single mine that wasn't merely a Goblin den?

Supply had no effect on price in either MW or OB, and there was absolutely no demand other than by the player. You could sell a weapon or piece of armor to a merchant, who would pay the same price for it regardless of whether it was the only one in the game or if he had 20 of them in stock already. That turned the already unrealistically easy and lucrative selling of home-made potions in MW into an outright game-breaker, since the same merchant would buy 200 of them at full price, even after buying 600 of them previously over the last week of gametime, while never selling a single one of them over the entire course of the game. The odd concept of merchants in OB having unlimited amounts of gold, but not be willing to spend more than a set amount on a single transaction was also absurd; the ability to "barter" goods to sell items for more than a merchant's current cash-on-hand was a huge plus.

Food, drink, and sleep could be included in a manner which makes it preferable to deal with them, but not absolutely essential. That would slightly reward those who choose to mind the details, but not severely punish those who couldn't care less about it. Having food as "healing potions" that instantly restore hitpoints, like in FO3, is simply not "plausible".

Having elemental spell effects do damage or otherwise affecting things in ways other than removing hitpoints would be a HUGE boost to realism, and could have many side uses. Of course, that's a whole new level of processing to determine the proximity to everything in its path or area of effect, and apply suitable changes both graphically and stat-wise.

At the one end of the spectrum, we have MW's unrealistic situation where items left lying in the middle of the street would still be lying there untouched 6 months later. At the opposite extreme, we have OB's case where everything would return to its previous state in exactly 3 days. The former case caused saved-game bloat, since EVERYTHING you affected had to be saved in memory with every save for the rest of the character's existence. The latter caused your character's very existence to be pointless, since there was never a reminder of your previous actions. Some balance needs to be struck.

Yea on that a thought was to simply have the coinage in different values like copper, silver, cold and platinum. Also coins could have a higher markup value than 1.
Also Letters of Credit would be nice to have for large sums of money, possibly even able to trade them for other letters, in fact paper money was created that way.


Exactly, we never saw fishermen to go out and fish, hunters actually hunting AND bringing back their game. Carpenters and smiths actually working on things.
And guess what, GOTHIC, a game that came out several years before that, had NPCs actually working on things and even MAKE things, a smith didn't just hammer on a anvil randomly, at the end he actually created things.


Merchants should have a limit, not just how much total money they have but how much inventory they are willing to buy and WHAT they are willing to buy. A clothing and garments salesman will not buy your swords... scissors maybe.
A good idea there would be setting up your own store and putting the stuff you get on display to be sold over time for possibly a better price than you'd get from other traders.


Food, water and sleep could be necessary to upkeep natural regeneration, that way they don't have a immediate punishment but rather a long term negative effect when ignored. Generally most effect should be more on time base and not just instant.


This so much, so far you could replace EVERY attack spell with "reduce health by X", there was nothing that made one more effective or more useful than the other really.


Yea also the times and effects should differ depending on where the situation is. A dead body in the middle of a city will likely be gone within a day, a dead body in the wild will linger around longer but slowly get eaten by animals, could say that 2 weeks afterwards you only have a few scattered bones left. Ones in a very remote area or wasteland will likely be around for a long time but "mummifies" or fully skeletises.
Items will likely vanish quickly in towns too, in the wilderness they will probably lie around a while, natural materials would likely rot though and metals "rust" (those that can oxidize only though, no "gold rust" )

I just recently downloaded and installed Necessities of Morrowind and I have to say that I think it works quite well. I haven't experienced any severe effects from hunger, thirst, or fatigue (yet), but I like how it applies penalties to your character when you don't manage your character's needs (up to, and including, death). It adds yet another layer of challenge and believability to an already-immersive gameworld. I hope that Beth includes something like this, as well as something similar to GCD, to ES:V. I would rather game mechanics such as these be included to make the game more challenging than to include bigger, faster creatures with a plethora of hitpoints.

in my opinion, nothing subtracts more from the realism and believability of the Elder Scrolls Games (Morrowind and Oblivion only) than having a WHOLE continent that is 8km wide... where the Imperial City is home to 100 people only... where major cities cant even be considered hamlets... etc, etc.

that makes me like more games like Dragons Age and similar games. Because those games LIMIT what you can see and where you can go. Thus, they DO maintain the realism and believability of large, real size areas. You just cant see it all.

its much worse, imho, in a sandbox game where you can go everywhere, but everything is reduced in size to unrealistic proportions!

But, the game you describe above is not a sandbox game.

Just the opposite for me. Because the cities in Dragon Age were limited to only a few select portions, it felt much more constricting and compact than the cities in Oblivion, like you're on a stage with a city backdrop. Removing the problem of "you can see it but you can't get there", except for the extremeties of the game world, is what makes Oblivion's world feel more complete and less staged, compared to other games.