Keep lvl scaling to some extent in some areas. Thats actually more realistic then non at all. Realistically your char should not end up a walking god you will need some challenges from time to time, lvl scaling adds that.

I understand what you mean, but at the same time I have to disagree to some extent.

Why not have lots of enemy types, as you explore, you'll run into beasts you cannot defeat because you are too weak, so you don't explore those areas until later on when you've levelled up a bit, this way you'll have to come back later and try your luck in that dungeon that stopped you before. I believe though, that level scaling for the creatures you can easily defeat to begin with would be nice, so that if you run through a dungeon full of mudcrabs and wolves as a level 1 character and can easily defeat them with 2 hits then come back as a level 99 character, the enemies should still take 2 hits but from hand to hand combat or something, so they aren't like flies that need to be swatted.

Maybe a minor bit of level scaling for things like minotaurs and dragons etc, but not much, so that at level 1 they are impossible, level 50 they are hard, taking maybe 50 hits, then level 99 they are still very hard but not as hard as they once were taking only 30-40 hits.

Stephen.

Or for some random bandit or vampire boss at the end of a cave or dungeen lvl scaling would work.

I want a new beginning that ties you up into the MQ without you realising it, I can't stop saying it origin stories should determine where you start in the game world and some event triggers you to end up in the MQ. You could start in the one main factions of the MQ or just start as a regular person who gets affected by it.

I've always had a problem with level scaling because it's horribly unrealistic and immersion breaking. This the anology I use:

Real World - You're a high school baseball player who practices and practices until you're the best 1st baseman in your conference who bats .400 and hits the ball 400 feet. After you graduate you're signed to play A-ball in florida in a MLB franchise system. You continue to improve because you're playing up to the better competition. Then after three years in the minors working your way up to AAA, you're signed to a pro contract with a MLB team. You're just a really, really good baseball player. When you go back to your home town during winter you visit your old high school and all the kids look up to you as a hero. Before spring training you go to a few HS practices to watch and you smile remembering what it was like to be this young. You point out some things for them to work on, and you chuckle to yourself as you see them make the same mistakes you made all those years ago.

Oblivion - You're a high school baseball player who practices and practices. You get better and better each week, you get your average up to .400 and hit the ball 400 feet. Strangely though, one day when you get to practice, instead of all your HS teammates, it's a bunch of guys from the local college team. Suddenly, you're not such hot sh*t anymore. You still are really good though and it's not long before you're just as good, if not better than them. It doesn't end here though, before you know it, it's not even the local college team anymore that is showing up for practice, but instead it's a MLB team. You freak out and go for a drive and as you go by a few other schools you notice that there aren't any 16 year old kids playing baseball ANYWHERE anymore. They're ALL major league players. You suddenly realize that no matter how good you get, you'll never really be that much better than anyone else, reguardless of your genetic make up, dedication, and hardwork.

I don't know about you, but in my fantasy world, I want to have the option of becoming kick-a** and not constantly reminded that the entire world hinges on my every level gain.

Non-player characters that aren't omniscient. How is it that if one person sees me transform into a werewolf, the whole population now knows as well? Why, when I'm in werewolf form, and run past Erna the Quiet's lover does he know that I'm a werewolf even when I change back? He didn't even see me transform! How does he know?

I think if somebody sees you do something, they should have to run and actually tell a guard something, that way if you manage to kill them before they can get away, then no one else knows. ANd when someone goes to tell a guard something that you did, only the guards in that city know anything, until a courier from the city is sent to other cities, so that if you intercept the courier and take him out, then only one city knows about what you did.

The worst thing is the entire world knowing something you have is stolen. That was such a broken idea in Oblivion. I can see how a merchant who you stole something from could tell that an item was his. You could rationalize that all merchants, blacksmiths, etc... place their own mark on something. How, on the other hand, could somebody in an entirely different city know you are selling hot goods? It's been said many times before but that idea has to go. They did it so they could have this fence(fense?) concept and the thiefs guild, but that should only be for certain items that are unique and well-known. The reason there are fences today is because the way retailing is set up you can't just show up to a best buy with a palet of blu-ray players and say, "hey, want to buy off my supply?" In a less complex economic time a fence would not have been necessary.

You could actually make use of the fence concept if none, or very few merchants purchased goods off the street. Then it's not so much they can tell it's stolen, but rather legit business ONLY buy from their supplier. Now if you could find their supplier...that could be interesting.

In Morrowind you could steal something from a shopkeep and try to sell it back to them, if you did this though they knew it was stolen from them, but if you went next door and tried to sell the stolen goods you'd get away with it.

Stephen.

Another reason Morrowind was better.

Inter faction back-stories and discord to feel like you are part of a web of drama I find that aspect of tes games to be immersing.

i still think my idea for being sick was cool. your guy/girl sneezes and coughs. lol
OH! i think they should keep the fact that you can jump in circles and to great distances in the air and come back all in one jump on the next one.
i like that.
and! when you fall off a small cliff your guy goes "EEEEEEEEUUURRRGGHH!!!!!"
hahaha fun times. also, personally i dont think music should change when your near an enemy.
And i also still like my gladiator quests idea. to do the quests you must be in prison because thats what gladiators were. And youre like sitting in your
cell and a old guy of "power" comes to your cell and proposes a "deal"
OH! and make the spells more "Eye Candy" instead of just gassy colored balls. thad be cool.
And last but certianly not least. KEEP the glitches. i would love if the next TES wasnt like super duper extra polished and smooth. the buggies is one of the things that makes TES
fun as hell

I enjoyed this aspect of Morrowind also, during the thieves guild quests you were asked to kill certain members of the fighters guild and I think the mages guild also, which, at the time made me question whether I should just go ahead and do it or whether I should finish the fighters guild quests first, although it turned out it didn't really matter, there were some things I was asked to do by the fighters guild member/s that affected the thieves guild. This sort of thing would be nice to see in TESV, lots of crossover quests that directly affect the outcomes of your interactions in various guilds. And I also would like to be able to join guilds such as the Morag Tong, Camona Tong and Dark Brotherhood all at the same time so that none of the guilds have a clue that you're a member of the other guilds, while when you join certain factions everyone is aware, so some factions can't be joined... With the factions, there should be several groups of factions, and by that I am suggesting that there's maybe 3 or 4 factions like the houses found in Morrowind, you join one then you are excluded from the others, then there's 3 or 4 more factions which are mutually exclusive so you can join one of these even if you're in one of the first group of factions, then maybe another set of factions and another, until it gets too complicated to keep putting them in.......

:) I'd love to see that sort of complexity!!!

Stephen.

id like more options with food, like peeling onions, roasting meat, cutting into cheese wheels, cutting bread loafs in half to make sandwiches etc

Hey heres an idea, insted of Level scaled creatures, which we all hate, how about level scaled quests.

e.g.
level 1: Go kill 1 bandit and bring back token (reward: iron sword),
level 20: Go kill army of 30 bandits and bring back magic sundries of zenthar (reward: ebony sword).

I think TES could really transcend the need for base dungeon filler enemies. Instead, I think it'd be a lot cooler if there were a finite number of npcs in the game world (who might change over time, traveling intermittently between cities perhaps), and that there was little actual incentive to kill the npcs, unless they were really psychopathic. I think it'd be nice if even bandits had their own personalities, and that you might not have to kill everything you come up against, but rather "defeat" them. Maybe even killing a bandit could be considered a crime. Obviously there would be differences if there were actually two warring factions, but this system would definitely give the game an excuse to keep certain characters alive (including the player's character.)

On that note, it'd be nice if magical creatures were made far rarer, and if they presented opportunities for characters with the right attributes. For instance, high intelligence/willpower characters might be able to "trick" or manipulate magical creatures into helping them in certain ways, be it through casting a certain spell when asked, or by becoming a summonable entity (like a Jinni). You might be able to request the aid of a lich for a specific instance (e.g. if you discover the lich wants someone killed, and you allow the lich to teleport into the person's home by creating a gateway).

"Conjuration" could develop a whole new side to it, where you try to manipulate the politics of certain groups to do things for yourself. When tasked with stealing something from somebody (or killing someone), it might be beneficial to look through the books to see who this person annoyed, which would allow you to pull off some pretty crazy things without necessarily the means to do them yourself (for instance assassinating a count or something).

Suppose you play the game for five years, in that time you kill every npc in the game just for fun, or for quests, if you wanted to keep playing the same game with the same character you'd be living in a world devoid of life, we need npc's to generate randomly, if a house is unoccupied it should be rented by a randomly generated character or family who may generate random quests so you always have something to do even if you kill off the first lot of npc's. Npc's who are directly related to main quests and faction and guild quests should be unkillable (but you can knock them unconscious) until the completion of said quest at which point the npc becomes useless for further quests and can be killed.

The Dark Brotherhood or Camona Tong or Morag Tong, or whatever they come up with, should give you random npc's to kill and random ways and times of day and situations to kill them in, this way they never run out of things for you to do after you complete their main quests.

As a guildmaster or faction master you are given the ability to give quests to people in your guild, you'll have a room full of hopeful recruits you can choose from if some of your guild members die during your quests. You'll be able to choose from a list of quests to give your guild members at different levels of difficulty depending on how generous/cruel you feel. You can promote members once they complete a certain number of quests for you and at higher levels you can recruit them as followers. You'll have a 2nd in charge guy/girl who will give you reports on your guild members activities so you know if they have killed anyone or stolen, or broken the rules, and you'll know who has been behaving well. Occasionally your new recruits room will contain a spy from a rival guild, you may recruit them with or without knowledge of this and this will cause certain events to happen randomly such as an assasination of your guild members, an attempt on your life, the theft of the guild flag or some such. You'll be able to send spies to other guilds to be recruited who may either get in and send reports back to you or they are found out and killed or sent back to you. You will be able to send messages to your spies in rival factions/guilds to get them to do some things for you, either kill someone, rob the guild or steal the guild flag or some such, and they may simply steal supplies for you. There should be a budget system so that as guild master you can accept money from your guild members as joining fees and monthly fees, this can go towards buying necessary supplies for your guild such as food and reagents, weapons, spell research, books, etc.

You should be able to buy shops, or a shop, and stock it with all the rubbish you can't be bothered carrying around. Occasionally people will sell things to you through your shop which have some value such as rare books and materials, most of the time you'll just cycle through your rubbish and the rubbish they sell you. You'll always make a profit from your shop but you'll make less by stocking it with rubbish and more by stocking it with expensive and rare items, and by stocking it with expensive stuff you are more likely to recieve nice stuff when people sell you things. Things that are sold to your shop while you are away are kept out of the store inventory until you visit again and choose what to put back in and what to keep. You can hire a store clerk or two store clerks who are very honest, they will not steal from you, however your shop may be burgled by common thieves.

There should be more than one Thieves Guild, one guild you can join and do a main quest story and then the subsequent quests I've mentioned above, and another one or two independently operated guilds who compete with you. By having your agents in their guilds you'll be able to find items that were stolen from your shop or from other people, and you'll be able to track them down, say you wanted to get back a magic sword that was stolen from your shop, your agents found out that x guild stole the item, y guild had nothing to do with it, but later x guild sold the sword to mr calmly in reagent street, you go there only to find out that he was burgled in the night, your agents in y guild then tell you that they found the sword but it was sold to a mr angry in elbow close so you go there and you buy the sword back or steal it... etc. Oh, and by finding items stolen from random npc's by x or y guild you get the option of keeping it or returning it to the original owner for reputation or reward.

Stephen.

I like the idea posted about actually being sick. It would be nice if the game portrayed your illness more: you limp a lot with damaged speed; hard to keep your guard up if you have damaged endurance; strength makes you take a lot longer to attack and you attack in a weak looking state - etc.

While playing Oblivion I got sick once in the entire 3 or 4 years I've been playing that game, and that was vampire disease...

While playing Morrowind I got sick at least 20 times in 5 days...

I'd like more diseases in TESV, more susceptibility to disease, more variety of diseases, not just stat changing diseases, but diseases which change the way you look and the way people react to you, like chicken pox which gives you spots and people shy away from you a bit until your spots sprout feathers and you grow a beak and people make comments about it. Mad cow disease, where you start spouting curses randomly at people so they dislike you, then you grow a tail and some udders and have long ears and a big nose and swear at everyone you meet. I'm thinking you could come up with 20 more diseases like this and have maybe 10 or 20 diseases which affect your stats like the last 2 games.

Were there actually any diseases in Oblivion? if so, what were they???

Diseases are meant to be annoying, so I want to catch one every day at least, until I learn some magic to cure them or prevent them. Oh, and if you have a specific disease and let it run its course then you will be cured of it over time, say 2 weeks to a month game time.

Stephen.

Getting diseases in MW was both entertaining and annoying because it seemed like I never had a cure disease potion, and I usually played characters with only minimal magic. It was fun though because I would start searching around like mad trying to find a potion. I'd go to shops I rarely visited, towns I hadn't really explored much yet, etc... It was one of those things in MW that wasn't scripted which really added immersion to the game. I don't remember getting diseased in Oblivion very frequently at all. Maybe by a rat at some point. While I would not want to get a disease every day, it should be a real possibility.

Well FarCrap 2 gave u Maleria at the start of the game and having Malaria isnt very much fun.

I definitely think they need to focus on characters. See, Martin's heroic sacrifice should have been a tear-jerker/Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, but he just wasn't enough of a character to make me give a damn beyond "OOH SHINY DRAGON MESSIAH!"

So, make sure characters, important and otherwise, are given lots of attention to detail. With improvements on Oblivion's AI, it could be easy. Just make me care, make me feel like an [censored] if I decide to kill them.

Total Offtopic:
You know that it's really funny, and often annoying when people use LOTS TVtropes terms, and it's so obvious for some reason .

The problem with diseases as with a lot of things was that they where a instant stat punishment with a instan cure. If anything they where a sudden annoyance that either stuck to you for an eternity or was cured in a blink of an eye.

They should make diseases actually have a incubation time (varying depending on your immunities and the kind of disease) in which they gradually show more symptoms and get worse and afterwards a cure time where they slowly get better again. So it's possible to walk around with a disease for a while and not even know it.
Similarly for poisons they should slowly take effect (too depending on the kind of poison and immunities), some poisons maybe taking up to 2 or 3 in game hourse to how effect with only minor symptoms before. For them it should be that the longer a poison was in your system the longer it takes to cure the effects afterwards.

There also shouldn't be universal "cure poison / cure disease" potions but some for more spciffic cases or to calm the symptoms. Otherwise you COULD say there's a potion that kills pretty much all bacteria in your body but also has negative effects since it doesn't differ between ones that damage you and ones that are good for you, plus it could make your immunity actually go down for a while since it also affects your antibodies. Similarly for a cure poison potion since it upsets your chemical balance. Those where good if you took them and then went to bed for a few days to cure out any negative effects. For that there should be a "sleep till cured" option which simply simulates your character going into curing out whatever plagues him.
Also poisons and diseases slowly cure over time as they are healed or broken down and slowly lose effect.

Also immunities should work different, they don't offer 100% immunity but more a stronger resistance against the symptoms and infection (you can still get sick but it cures a lot faster, it might be gone in an hour when it would otherwise last days) and while you don't get sick you still carry the infection, meaning you can spread it getting someone else sick and if something affects your immunity you can get sick quite suddenly.


While this is a bit off that topic but on other immunities there should be a difference between immune to fire and immune to heat, a dunmer could very well have fireproof skin that doesn't burn but that won't mean that heat won't get to him.