So here we are, eagerly awaiting The Elder Scrolls V. Sure, it hasn't been announced yet, but they might as well. Nothing newsworthy about that except that they finally came out with it. The forums are still rife with Oblivion vs Morrowind threads and you can definitely see a pattern emerging here. Morrowind was loved for the way its world was built and the excellent writing, and Oblivion was more eye-candy and the more physical combat. But we have all discussed that subject to death, and so I will leave that equine corpse to pummel for other threads. Instead I'd like to ask for your expectations. I'm not talking ideas and suggestions, but I'm talking about the learning experience from the development of the last two games. Allow me to elaborate.

Though Daggerfall had a world of sorts with towns and wilderness, it wasn't nearly as detailed and immersive as its successor, Morrowind. Morrowind was a game with a fixed 3D landscape, cities painstakingly hand-built by the developers and with some real personality. Oblivion expanded on that later on by making the cities larger and add more realism to them. However, with the larger, more crowded cities of Oblivion also came the issue of walls. In order to save your computer from blowing its cycles on crap it didn't need, cities were placed in cells that required loading.

Another example was voice acting. Morrowind didn't have much voices. Oblivion improved on this by giving every single NPC out there a voice. But this backfired in a different way. The voices quickly became stale - after all, voices were shared between races and thus NPCs. And there were so many of those!

The cities and the voice acting are just two of the many examples, but we can definitely see how improving something on Morrowind had backfired in another way. Todd Howard's team, a group of fantastic programmers with some amazing RPG titles firmly under their belt, will have learned from this. This will be their third modern open world game, and they have now experienced that there's no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to making games like these.

How do you think Bethesda will use this newfound wisdom? What have they spent their time on? For example, I recall them mentioning they revamped their engine to be a bit more modular, so they're able to take out one part, modify it and plug it back in without causing a total collapse of the rest of the game.

What do you think they have learned from Morrowind and Oblivion?

There is a http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1120296-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-183/ topic for this kind of discussion. Sorry but we don't want any more TES V topics atm.