Oblivion was boring and filled with bugs, it was also 1000x smaller than Arena.

Stephen.

Wow, is that the level of scale we're talking about? Even a small island next to anvil is actually bigger than Cyrodiil in Oblivion?!
No wonder my horse felt so slow. He was actually pretty fast for the real scale I guess.
Well, then there's no way to conjure a 1:1 scaled game world; we'd just have to settle down something bigger and more detailed than Oblivion. But still, my interest for Summerset Isle remains the same. An isolated place in a middle of uncrossable water.
The sea doesn't even have to be perilous to prevent players from swimming off. We'd just need some wave machanisms that would constantly push them back to shore, so it's difficult to swim far from the shore, and impossible to go further at certain point. If the player, using a beefed stats, try to break that glass ceiling, the game can always create a random storm or an ultra violent wave that would send the player right back to the nearest shore.
I hate that unrealistic invisible wall that says "You cannot go that way"

Oh, and the customizable body, I've aleady suggested a million years ago. Heights, muscles, fat, etc... But to see a suggestion for body modifications based on play style or stats, well, I'm rather uncomfortable. I'm sure it would be pretty interesting and make the game much more realistic and immersive, but it has a poison of restricted and rigid RP; People would be forced to either play in certain ways to keep their character in certain shape or learn to live with shapes that doesn't fit their RP perspective for the sake of effeciency.
TES is a great RP game, and there's something for everyone; and that everyone should include people who don't necessarily want to make a serious RP commitments.

Actually, you got that map open i linked?

Look at the center of Cyrodiil, in the big lake, you see that tiiiny island in the north-east of the lake, the little dot?
Acoring to the scale posted with the map THAT is big enough to house Cyrodiil from Oblivion on... about four times.

As a side note, the waters around Vvradenfell where called the "Inner Sea", if you look at the scale and see that it's about 40km at it's thinnest point and about 200km at it's widest, it's a lot more apropriate to call it that than what it appears like in the games.

What was the one thing you hated the most from the previous TES games that you would like to see them change for the next games?

I was listening to the podcast and heard Todd say "I've read many complaints about our games and we have exactly the same opinions" (or sumthing like that), But they cant have thought of them all. Why did they make the same mistakes in Fallout 3 as they made in Oblivion? If its something small that everyone has a problem with including Bethesda, why cant they fix it in a patch? There was what, 2 patches for Oblivion? And so many things were left unfinished or broken.

The one biggest problem for me was the 'Lighting'. I hated the lighting in oblivion and Fallout 3. No shadows on terrain, No soft lighting, The light colour was too orange, The dark dreas were not dark enough, and there is no shadow desnsity merging (The Closest to that was the shading on the faces which was realy just 3 shadows on top of each other and looked horrible).

What you got issues?
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Rohugh stop closing my threads.

I didn't like the lighting in Oblivion either, the only compromise between having a torch or a light spell in a cave was to use a staff of light on my everscamps and have them follow me around, worked pretty well but even then it was annoying as hell. I'd like to see some companions you can hire in TESV who carry torches for you, or to be able to summon a light source that exists somewhere other than my eyes so that there are actually contrasts and shadows when I look at something.

As for the biggest thing I didn't like, the size.

Stephen.

That could possible be fixed with "Lightsprint", it's in my signature, give it a look.
It does even more than just calculate shadows, it also calcolates radiosity and "color bleeding", that means when a bright light shines ona reflective surface it will scatter light and the reflected light color will be adapted to fit the color of the surface. Plus it can do one thing that looks much better than soft shadows, Penumbra shadows. I did mentiona problem with soft shadwos before, they're actually just a blurred hard shadow, which looks OK on objects that are further away from the ground but those directly touching what they cast a shadow on it just looks blurred out.

My biggest issue, the beast races design



What about it exactly, too small or too big?
For me it woudl be too small and with the spaces in between not done well.

Yes, too small recently, given that technology has improved, shouldn't the size AND quality of our games improve also, I'm sick of buying a new game every few years and finding that the graphics have improved at the cost of the size and content of a land. Seriously, I thought that with all the new tech coming out that we'd be exploring planet sized worlds and visiting the moons of Tamriel by now.

Stephen.

I'm sure they could generate a few billion square miles of landmass, dungeons, and towns/NPCs quite easily.

However, that wpould be a whole planet of dull NPCs in the extreme, fairly repetitive landmass, caves and ruins with absolutely no flavor (just rooms of various shapes assembled until they fit).

In short, the amount of developer attention required for 1 acre of modern game is higher than whole county-sized chunks of map required in the Daggerfall days.

Do you want size for the sake of size, or do you want the map "full of things to see and do?"

I'll point out that Oblivion had a random house in the wilderness that I found once. Explored it. Walked out the door, and it got flattened by an Oblivion gate. I never knew it existed in a pre-destruction form until that moment
THAT required building the same structure twice, but the effect in game was worth it. That's what hand-tuned maps get you.

Actually both size and a full game world are possible, not necessarily a whole continent or a whole planet but they can go far bigger than now AND far more detailed.
For NPCs they should use "personality sheets" and the like, similarly to how the actors in Dwarf Fortress as controlled (I'm working on a suggestion but need a lill bit to iron it out)
As for the game world, while many probably wouldn't want to hear that, they could resort to random generation, HOWEVER not for all of it.

They could use "Islanding" for that. For example, on a big map the towns, settlements, ruins, roads and such are all hand placed. But there are "random generation islands" in between, for example, Forests. Within a forest all the trees and plantlife could simply be randomly generated either every time you visit them or at the start of evere NEW game.
And further within a randomly generated are can be a "set" island too, like a ruin within that forests, it's position and setup wouldn't change. However it could very eaily be done that the position of certain areas within a random area CAN change from game to game, imagine in one game it's in the middle of the forest but in the next new game it's towards the edge. That could make seeking for secrets a lot more interesting as they are never in the same place for two games and STILL have them in set areas.

A big thing that can be done with random generationa re deserts as they move and change over time.


So they could have:
-Randomly generated areas that change with every NEW game
-Randomly changing locations with every NEW game
-Areas that change over certain intervalls
-Random areas within a SET area
-Set areas within a RANDOM area


Though personally one thing that bugged me about Oblivion was the random content of ruins since it made exploring or looking for quality stuff on low levels pretty meaningless.

Im all in for random properly generated landscape. Things I didnt like with cyrodill forrest was that every fort, quests, dungeon and every location was in the same spot. I hated walking from Imperial City to Chorrol on the same road, with the same goblin infested fort in the middle of the road, and the same bandit who wants to rob you EVERY FREAKING TIME I walk that road. Id like the game to be less predictable, and randomizing it a lil bit would certainly help.

I'm after size and quality, I agree that too big a world would result in endless wandering with nothing to do, but at the same time I can walk out the door in Oblivion and right next to that door is another thing to do, it's too crammed together. Random generation of wilderness areas would be nice, with a few random hollow trees and stumps, a random hole to fall into and some random wildlife. If done right we could have a world 10 or more times bigger than Oblivion's Cyrodiil with as much or more to do in game. I'm sick of walking out of one dungeon and seeing the next one less than 20 meters away. Another thing that could be done is to invent a console specifically to house larger worlds at high quality, that's what I thought we were doing with the technology of today until I played some of the games that are out, then I just found that we're focusing on graphics and not much else.

Stephen.

The fact that there's so much to do in such a small space is a good thing, and they shouldn't change that. But if they can, I'd prefer a bigger world, with even more content to make up for that bigger world. I don't mind there being a dungeon everywhere I look, because each dungeon gives me more to do.

I disagree, there were too many dungeons in oblivion, sometime it ended in actualy avoiding some of them.

I avoided them because they were the exact same thing every time. And scaled loot ensured I would find no priceless artefacts at the end.

Well as long as Bethesda starts making unique dungeons, then it will be a good thing. In Fallout 3, for example, they did a good job at making everything unique with it's own story. If they can do that with TESV then I would love to see a new dungeon everywhere I go.

Well, I'm no tech guy, but isn't one of the benefits of Umbra being able to have a much larger world? I may be wrong, but...


I like the little unlisted quests in dungeons where you need to figure it out. There were a few in Morrowind, Bloodmoon and Oblivion (love the combining lich, BTW), but they really seem to be pushing for the stars with the idea in Fallout 3 as far as I've played. I would love to see more of that.

Lighting: It's really important to the aesthetic of an area and/or scene. They really should look at Fable 2 for a good example, I really think, whatever you think of Fable, the lighting effects were phenominal.

The only issue with having unique dungeons like in Fallout3 would be that there would be less dungeons as more time would have to be spent on making them unique. I wouldn't mind as i never entered dungeons on Oblivion as they all felt the same to me which made them pointless.
Having enemies respawn in exterior cells but not interior cells is nice as well, as it opens up potential for new homes. And on the subject of dungeons, i feel that not all dungeons should be ruins, the odd deserted chapel or watchtower wouldn't go amiss.

One thing to improve dungeons dramatically whether there are fewer of them or more in the next game, is to make a more interesting cave tileset, or make at least two interesting different cave tilesets. Morrowind and Fallout 3 had very nice cave tilesets. Oblivion's cave tileset was boring. It was mostly rectangular and cut-and-dry, with almost no variation in height or slant. ThatOneGuy I believe also pointed this out very well some threads back.

I agree, maybe some mossy cave tiles that would go well with underground rivers that should have been in Oblivion.

There could be retextured caves for that too.

Overall, all the dungeons should be more "diverse". Not only the caves.

There should be more type of ruined interiors. There could be different type of rock caves depending on the depth of the dungeon or the rock type. Morrowind had 2 (dark blue rocks and brown rock / soil) while Oblivion only had the grey caves. As for the ruins, there could be different type of walls. (Daggerfall had A LOT of different ones). In both, Morrowind (daedric and dwemers) and Oblivion (ayled ruins, human ruins), only the layout of the rooms change. Variations in the architecture (walls) wouldn't hurt.

2-3 different tilesets for every dungeon type (cave, Imperial ruin, Nord ruin, Daedric ruin, Snow elf ruin or ruins of whatever used to live in Skyrim) would not be asking too much, I think.

I don't see why all the dungeons have to be ruins. There might be monasteries that have been cleared of monks and now house conjurers, for example.

"Dungeon" wise and game world size wise I'd like to see larger overworld structures. Pretty much all dungeons in Oblivion and Morrowind where underground.
I remember palying Soul Reaver 2 and they had some HUGE overworld "dungeons" so to say. I'd like to see something like that done in TES5, for that a large game world would be usefull.

Yeah, but I was thinking about the dungeons and with the exception of the Oblivion towers, the dungeons tend to be underground with close to zero differences between inhabited buildings and ruins in TES
For example, there was this monastery in Oblivion (with the blind dudes). The whole quest was still underground and it was the common human ruin dungeon tileset.

The non dungeons interiors were good (well houses were superb, castles were less diverse) in Oblivion albeit a bit small. I wouldn't have minded more overground interior action.

I believe something like this has already been done in GTA Vice City. It could work. I think your athletics would be in control of that, perhaps your strength. Something like eating would make you fat unless you train in a strenght skill like blade or train in athletics. If not, you'll eventually get fat, your muscles and strength will wain and you'll need to go out and do some caving to get back in shape.