I actually second this one with a passion. However, I assure you there were hardly enough players complaining about lack of dialogue, and those that did, didn't point out that they'd be fine without fully voice acted dialogue, as such, due to the fact that this is a modern release, and full voice acting is becoming a sort of modern necessity in gaming, I severely doubt we'll ever see a TES game where quantity of dialogue is more important then the polish added by voice actors.

Just dont play the hardcoe mode if you dont like it. some people including myself enjoyed it and it could be fun if it was there for skyrim too

I would prefer if they gave us options but didn't force things on the player. Typically their games are mod-able for a reason.

I think your question is faulty. I find that it decreases immersion to have to interrupt what I'm interested in doing to fuss with mechanics.

"Hard-core", I suppose.

In other words, a RPG. As opposed to, you know, a scripted walkthrough with minimal meaningful input.

Night on Tamriel probably isn't as dark as night in reality because of the multiple stars and moons, but caves and some mines should be really dark, basically requiring torches or magic (and if bandits are in the cave they should carry torches around with them).

Forts and other mines (that haven't been abandoned that long) could have torches lit on the walls making them not quite so dark but still more than oblivion.

Ditto, with the emphasis on it being optional.

I haven't actually used hardcoe Mode in New Vegas, but I was delighted it was there. I used survival mods in Morrowind, but not in Oblivion.

Its funny I've been playing RPGs for over 30 years, and in all various games, groups, places I've played no one tracked food unless there was a survival sub-plot. You throw 10GP down for iron rations when you make your character as a nod to buying food and then you move on. I am sure there are groups that do track this. Heck I tracked material components when I played mages which again most people seemed to skip, but I don't think tracking it somehow makes it a RPG. If a bit of accounting and tedium is what defines RPGs to you, hey have at it. Me the defining thing has always been the character stats define success, not the players. You want to schmooze the bartender for info, well I hope you have a decent charisma(personality/speech craft). As games move towards action based formats, they have been moving away from what defines an RPG to me, they can still be fun they just are not RPGs anymore.

Honestly I don't like Modular optional gameplay. I feel that its best to form a firm design of your game mechanics and then refine upon it, rather than try to cobble an elegant game out of a Swiss Cheese framework of mechanics that may or may not be present on a per player basis. Complexity always breeds errors and faulty design, and a game series like TES is complex from the outset. I have never understood why design has become so political, and why designers have seemingly begun to be pressured to offend no one even at the expense of quality.

Why not approach design with the intent of creating a solid system the just works really great (IE. really predictable to the designer), and let the individual players either enjoy it or not? Those that love it will really love it; those that have peeves will get over it, and those that can't get into it will buy something else :shrug:

**And with TES, because they are nice, you'd still get the tools to tinker changes into the base design.

Eye of the Beholder comes to mind though... (as well as Arx Fatalis)

Same here ~abysmally so.

people seem to think that have hunger/thirst/sleep in a game somehow makes it super difficult........its not. there was tons of different food items in morrowind and oblivion yet they had virtually no use whatsoever unless you had a fetish for making potions out of everything you see. simply adding a hunger mod meant that i actually used some of the food i came across and i carried some with me. i also used a drinking mod although i had to scrap it because of conflicts but up till that point it worked well. fill up the canteen and you take a chug once in while. you wouldnt die from not eating and drinking but you would take some stat penatlies which makes sense. i never used a sleeping mod for oblivion but i had no issues with new vegas hardcoe mode (in fact it was way to easy for my tastes) but call of pripyat had a great sleep system. if you went without sleep for to long you vision would periodically get blurry and it affected your stamina and i think your aim as well. you only needed 3 or 4 hours a day so its not like you had to sleep an entire 8 hours away.

its time game developers stopped designing games around people who always want everything easy and simplistic all the time. i want a challenge and i want the game world to make sense for a change. "Oh i have to go all the way over there, but im soooo lazy and i dont want to hop on a silt strider or a boat or go to the nearest mages guild and beam somewhere else........no ill just hit my magic teleport button that takes me there for free and magically keeps me safe from enemies." how the hell is that NOT the same as using the moveto or coc console command. outside of some time passing there is literally no difference whatsoever.

does that entire huge second it takes to switch between combat and magic stance always end up getting you killed........dont worry its not your fault that you svck at games.........well just remove that and let you cast the most powerful spells by simply moving your wrist even if you holding a sword and shield as well. this is demonstrated by the Society for Easy Gaming at one of their conventions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_XIe60LkN4&feature=related here are some argonians casting some spells. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3ZPew3cvIQ&feature=related

and why should you not be able to constantly cast spell after spell after spell............your not using guns so there is no ammo so there should be no restrictions on how much and how often you cast.....that would make the game way to hard for the SEG memebers out there.

it would be nice for a change if people were forced to step up and improve their gaming abilities instead of people having to constantly play dumbed down games.

Fast travel in TES is broken ~not wrong. The fact that time passes at all (i wasn't sure that it did), is enough to demonstrate that it represents the player setting a destination, and the PC's implied travel time. Gameplay resumes after they arrive. The only problem with it is that strength enhancements wear off only after the entire trip is complete (instead of during the trip) ~meaning that the PC should not be allowed to buff up, then max out their weight load, then cross the continent under the full effects of the spell until they arrive. They should also not be guaranteed safe passage on all trips, and through all territories. That the travel takes only seconds in real time is moot; it has nothing to do with laziness and is not the same as a cheat; nor even similar.

Voted for the 1st option although I think most of those things should be part of an optional hardcoe mode just so everyone is happy.

Every morning the player should be required to go for a poo, to avoid stat penalties. There should be a random chance (maybe also based on food types eaten in the last 24 hours) that the poo is really satisfying, which would then give bonuses to levelling major and minor skills all morning.

More seriously, I think a hardcoe mode is a good idea if and only if it doesn't feel 'glued-on'.

Make the game work and feel coherent with survival stuff, dark nights, stats-not-minigames, more dangerous combat and anything else 'hardcoe' that fits the setting...

and then - IF there's time at the end of development - have a toggleable option to make food and drink not matter, bathe everything in rediculous ambient light, have potions that heal almost instantly, allow the player to run backwards at 100km/h while wildly throwing fireballs to avoid ever actually dying, and implement a Tetris-style lockpicking challenge mode.

Because I'd love it if everybody was happy. But failing that, I'd rather that I'm happy.

then explain to me aside from time passing how oblivions fast travel is any different than me opening up the console and typing in coc"destination" with morrowinds system you had to find a boat or silt strider and then pay a fee. daggerfall had the instant menu but it didnt guarantee safety and it cost you money. oblivions systems is no different than console cheating. is it really that difficult for todays gamers that they cant be bothered with stuff like this. is this why we get fewer and fewer weapons and armor pieces in game now......cause some people dont want to be bothered with having to put on 2 gloves instead of one set of gloves. is this what gaming has devolved into just one super lame easy fest after another.

I see this opinion a lot... and to date I've never understood equating fast travel with instant teleport/cheating. I don't think I really know what your contention is, I have assumed in the past that some just perceive it as bypassing the walk from point A to point B... What I find odd, is that that is somehow viewed (rather often) as a cheat or the player (or the Dev's!?) being lazy. :shrug:

Large scale RPG's can take a lot of time to play, but would take a lot longer to play in realistic 1:1 time (or even 30:1 as in Oblivion). The original Fallout had the PC walking across the wastes for days or weeks to find a settlement. Fallout [rightly IMO] handled it with an overland map. the PC started the trek and only paused for unusual events (like being attacked, injury, or finding something odd). To not handle it this way would mean real time traversal of a bleak and barren waste with nothing (I mean NOTHING) of interest for days... In Oblivion's 30:1 time that would be like walking with no encounters , gates, or forts, for 8 hours of actual time playing the game. RPG's generally allow for uneventful travel to pass quickly by means of some kind of "time compressed" travel. In Morrowind you could walk or you could ride (compressed); In Oblivion you could walk or you could travel "time compressed". In Fallout New Vegas they did something silly... in HC mode you could limp all day to the next town, but could not use 'time compressed' travel get there; the irony being, that this situation is exactly what 'time compressed travel' exists for.

The only thing wrong with "Fast travel", is what I said before... It takes no account of terrain and attacks; no account of expiring spell effect. Its broken in this respect, but otherwise just fine, and just what you'd expect in a polished RPG.

we arent that far apart then. i simply want a method of transportatioin evident in the game instead of just clicking on a map icon. i wouldnt even mind fast travel if it was only limited to a few major locations. when you had boats and silt striders in morrrowind it gave the illusion of a bigger game world as opposed to oblivion where apparently walking across the entire empire of cyrodil is an everyday occurrence for even feeble old people because they dont have any form of transportation at all. i just makes everything seem even smaller and more pushed together. its about the atmosphere in the end for me. i want the game world to appear as big as possible.

i hate to keep pointind to them but both morrowind and stalker had great fast travel systems. everyone know morrowind and for those that havent played stalker you had specific guides that took you between regions and you could ask random stalkers you encountered to guide you to a local area for a price........sometimes you ended up in a fight when you got there. it was so much more fun than just clicking an icon and seeing a loading screen and POOF your there.

When it comes to travelling, my general opinion is this.

I think it should be relatively straight-forward to move between large towns, either by Mage-guild travel, or by Caravan etc. Eg (Morrowind style).
I think it should be relatively straight-forward to exit the wilderness via spells/scrolls (Intervention - Morrowind Style).
I think it should be relatively difficult to enter the wilderness. If there is a ruined fort in the middle of a forest, I should be required to brave the dangers of that forest no matter how many times I've been to that fort. When the NPC says, you need to go back to X, my reaction should be, "AGAIN?!? But I nearly died last time just getting there."

In both of the first cases, there is a cost involved. Insta-travel should be expensive. The problems with Oblivion in this sense were:
Firstly, it was cost free and risk free.
Secondly, you ownly ever had to find a location once meaning you could skip any challenges on the road and more importantly, were never encouraged to take multiple routes to a single location.
Thirdly, many quests became the silly situation of travelling from one place to another instantly to progress a single quest. In Morrowind I often would delay making journeys until I had multiple excuses to visit a city.
Finally, the game came to rely too heavily upon fast travel such that without fast travel it's all an exercise in tedium. A single quest shouldn't have you visiting twelve different locations unless it's important. Fast travel encourages ridiculous gopher quests...

I dont care if they include all that "realist" stuff in a hard-core mode, just don't put it in real play! I find it all a waste of my time, i play games for fun, not to be bothered by stupid things like"you need to drink, or you need to eat". I, and im sure there are others, find games fun when I can do what I want and live in a world where its fantasy, fake everyday requirements dont apply.

Sounds like you don't much like RPGs

1 word: optional.

I think the best solution to dark nights would be having a 'dynamic glare' for lack of a better word. as in, if there are not light sources around, your eyes should adjust to the dark, meaning you can slowly see better, if you ignite a torch you can see clearly around you, but outside of the torch light would become much darker. basicaly simulate what happens in real life reguarding low light.

One of the things I loved about Fallout was that the entire world was open to you at the start of the game. If you wanted to set out for the coast, your PC would start trekking over hills and plain, mountains and valleys, and not stop until they reached the coast (or were mugged, or stumbled on something too interesting to pass by). I don't dislike games that unfold the map as you explore it, but I prefer it the other way if its an open world game. Now Fallout 1&2 let you walk across the State lines, but certain areas of interest only became known to you from dialog with NPC's ~cities you could find on your own. In those games travel was dangerous, and you could hire on to a caravan as a guard, and be let go later where you arrived. I'd like to see regular caravans travel the lands and accept paying passengers and hire on guards that need work; (and have the occasional ambush to deal with ~but with help).

This is very subjective, and there are many that would often (or always?) prefer to just assume the PC made it there alive, and resume play then (skipping the walk). Not everyone will do that all of the time, but most will want the option some of the time. So long as its no longer a 'get there free and clear' exploit, I would prefer to have the option intact.

I'm heartily against this form of abuse.

Why wouldn't you need to drink or eat? Traditionally RPG's had the PC's delve into dank underground lairs and old dungeons ~places where casual eating could not be assumed to take place unless you brought your own lunch. Places where running out of food would put you in a bad way, and would certainly limit the amount of time you could spend down there. Many players like the challenge. In games like these Food plays the part of the timer just the same as the 'air supply' that runs down when you are under water too long ~would you also call the whole breath holding mechanic needless or a stupid detail? Broadly calling it all stupid implies that those who enjoy these aspects are wasting their time on silly trivia (instead of bashing heads?).

Your on a roll Gizmo, don't lose momentum.