Just throwing a fire into a wooden building won't result in a burning city. As i wrote, massive wood needs a high temperature to even ignite, and a fire's temperature cannot be higher than it's source. You'd need a very good fire spell to ignite a large wooden structure. Furniture and straw roofs can be ignited more easily. And even then wouldn't the fire spread all over the town, it always cools down by itself. Besides, NPCs should be smart enough to react to fires .

Though causing widespread devastation is basically the whole point of it.

*gigglesnort*

But yes, starting a fire on wood or something more solid than dry thatches requires a constant flame to be held against them, unless it happens to be a really powerful fire or explosion. Just as well, guards and NPCs with high responsibility would grab buckets and start shuttling water to the site.

Don't burn your wood.

It is really more a suggestion for a sandbox game, but i think it has it's uses (aside from fun).
Fire spells would do more than just x damage for y seconds. They can ignite clothing, but not armor.
Lightning strikes can be hot enough to ignite trees instantly and could start small forest fires if it's dry, and bandit raids with fire arrows can cause utter devastation.
A simpler system without spread would be fine too, but i prefer this. I don't exactly know how GTA SA or GTA 4 handle fires, but it works very well too.

NPC behavior is really important for this, as any dwarf fortress player could tell. Fires can and will spread everywhere and the dwarven AI doesn't recognize being on fire, only to seek out flammable beds or VERY flammable booze stockpiles when they notice they are injured, causing doom and hilarity to all to many fortresses (though that's arguably the correct way of playing dwarf fortress).

Yeah, I painted it on pretty thick. I wanted a glossy coat.


Yeah, werewolves would be harder to invoke a sense of belonging to something, and to implement quests. I was mainly speaking for vampire clans. They felt so empty!

Unless, of course, you add werewolf hunting parties, new combat abilities like "Pounce" "Swipe" "Bite" "Devour", and actually get transported into Hircine's realm to hunt victims of his game from time-to-time. :dance:

But wouldn't the whole "Hircine is your boss" thing get a little overdone?
I mean, the guy's a diety, and probably a little bit busy tending to his own ego to pay attention to one out of 50,000 (or whatever) werewolves under his command.
That'd be like joining a cult devoted to Azura and getting your quests directly from her. Morrowind's interaction was different, because she was watching you - you were special.
Unless you want to imply that you're a special werewolf and Hircine thinks you're really cool.
I guess what could be more acceptable is a loose amount of vague missions, which are issued by Hircine to all werewolves. I don't follow lore much, maybe this is how it goes anyway. I want this village wiped out. They called me a meanie head. All hounds, go and kill them all. I might give you something if you're successful, like how to summon a skeletal bear.

That would actually work out well.(The vague quest notifications, not the wording.) Having to work your way into being actually noticeable via doing these "jobs" exceptionally well would be a nice element to being a werewolf.

Edit: And it wouldn't be a quick "you did five missions good. Now you're special." It'd be an actual progression. Say about 20 or so random "jobs" for the wolfs to do. And you could fail these since you'd have a huge competition for these "jobs".

Bethesda, if you are thinking of making content for TES V after you release it, please make an expansion. TES V won't benefit from just small DLC, it needs a large, seamless expansion.

I would like to see a return to some of the previous Elder Scrolls titles, like Daggerfall.

As much as I really enjoy the hand created content of Morrowind and Oblivion, these are quite small worlds which require a lot of suspension of disbelief... the Imperial City is very small... and you can spot 80% of all the dungeons in Cyrodill from it... there are like 4 guards patrolling around the Imperial City... and 50 meters from the city, there are dungeons that nobody has ever explored. Yeah, right.

I think the next game should have manually created game with random generated (procedural) content filling all the huge spaces between, creating a realistic sized world, which you can explore at your own, taking months only doing so... or you can fast travel for locations you already discovered or which are marked on your map. When fast travelling, you could get some random encounters on some locations of course.


Again, same thing on cities... I want to see huge realistic medieval cities, with CROWDS... important NPCs maybe could be highlighted if you press a key (like in the Bioware RPGs). OF course I dont expect staff members to create entire huge cities. These should be randomly/procedurally created! Important buildings/places should be manually created like in Oblivion/Morrowind, with randomly created buildings/houses, etc, filling the spaces.

Finally, I would like to see some more vertical dungeons, as I remember existed in Daggerfall (some cool vertical caves/dungeons)... the ones in Oblivion were too "horizontal". Also, I would like to see CASTLE dungeons. Every possibly cool castle in Oblivion was not actually a castle, but just a destroyed tower/castle, and the dungeon would be underground.


I think it IS possible to achieve the best of both worlds, between custom created content (Morrowind/Oblivion) and the randomly generated content of Daggerfall.

I think it would be cool if they would add more population like MCA does for Morrowind. I would be nice to have a larger population, and have them worth interacting with. I mean it was fine in Oblivion to have those people wandering the Imperial City, but dull how they had no real reason to be spoken to, and were just there to add a small amount of atmosphere. Hearing them say, "Hello!" didn't do me much good.

well, actually, nothing ANY caracther in TES games said, even the real NPCs, ever did me much. The conversation system never was the strong point of the games, imho. I would not mind having thousands of caracthers wandering the streets for ATMOSPHERE, and most of them not even stoping to chat with you. "Sorry, Im busy", "I dont talk to strangers", etc, would be a nice approach.

Again, in my opinion, a game like this must have elements simply to create atmosphere, immersion. And other elements to really tell a story. Consider a real city. You wont be able to stop everyone in the street and ask them to tell their story and their problems with giant rats in their cellar. But some people in the real world city will give you "quests", info, etc.

As they are probably going to voice act the game completely again, I hope that this time they do it in a smarter way.

For example, the combat taunt 'You move like a pregnant cow'. It was voiced for multiple races, and both genders.

My question, why? If you're going to create combat taunts and have to voice act them several times for different races, why use the exact same taunts for multiple races, when you can also create new taunts? Especially since this line is very obvious, something you'll remember. Which makes it weirder that everyone else also seems to be saying it.

Or 'I have the finest goods and lowest prices in all of cyrodiil' or similar lines. Those were also voiced several times. Why not change the line a bit? Same goes for rumours, why do males and females of each race say the exact same line, while you could just as easily have added variety without changing the subject of the rumour?

I think it would help to make the dialogue a bit less repetitive, while costing hardly any extra effort.

My problem is that in Oblivion, they got lazy on voice actors.

Male Dunmer, Altmer, and Bosmer: Same Voice

Female Dunmer, Altmer, and Bosmer: Same Voice

Male Argonians and Khajiit: Same Voice

Female Argonians and Khajiit: Same Voice

Male Nords and Orcs: Same Voice

Female Nords and Orcs: Same Voice

Female Bretons and Imperials: Same Voice

Only Redguards and male Imperials get their own voices (and major characters like Martin and Sheogorath)

This has been said before, but please, get rid of level-scaling.

They already did better with Fallout 3. They had 30 something voice actors instead of 6 or 7.

True, it felt much more unique.
Personally, I don't like the voice acting. It seems to be the new standard, so I doubt it will ever go back to text again.
R.I.P., Morrowind.

Text was good, I would like them to use text for all non essential npc's, if someone isn't involved in a quest then they should just say generic things like hello and have the rest of their conversation in text form so you can improve the level of conversation for random npc's. Quest npc's can have full voice acting if that's what gamesas are going for. This leaves more room for either better gameplay or more voice conversation options within quests.

Stephen.

There's something Oblivion desperately needed, and while mods did much to fix it the variety wasn't there.

Hairstyles and beards. Variation in hair and beard styles for each of the races will go a long way towards letting us make more unique characters. And the only hair modders in the mod community here (No offense to any of them, you're doing great work.) seem to gravitate towards the same style.

For example, Nords and Imperials shouldn't have the same hairstyles, nor should elves and orcs. Variety people, variety.

Also, having the option to change body shapes would be really cool, but I can see how that would cause problems with armor, especially modded armor. But still, it seems a bit silly that everyone looks the same once the clothes are off.

Got to disagree on the highlighted, what would prevent somebody of another race to adopt another hairstyle? OK if they don't have hair like Argoninas or their hair growth is drastically different but still.

If at all there should be hair styles that are simply more COMMON to one race (or culture) but less so to others.

I agree with this. Thats how voice acting used to be when it was beginning to be implemented in games, they just had voice overs for essential npcs instead of wasting time trying to give everyone a voice. Plus NPCs who do get voices feel unique because there arent 100 other npcs sharing the same voice actor.

A variation of this would be giving us 3 basic body types to choose from: athletic/buff, skinny, and overweight. Even though 95% of the players would go for athletic, it would still add a lot to the variety of NPCs. And you don't even really need to make seperate armor for the skiny types. At least not seperate heavy armor.

What, more importantly, it would do is to allow modders to give you fifty six new body types (fifty three of them female, and quite a bunch featuring wings, different kinds of tails, snake hair and the like) within a month or two of the release of the construction set. Which would be awesome.

:lol:

Agreed, multiple body types would be really great. If the faces for each race are unique enough, then I'd even suggest the ability to slightly change the height of the character. This wouldn't really work if height was a major factor in distinguishing between the races (such as with Nord, Breton, and Imperial races in TESIV).

Great idea. Is there a possibility of ruining the experience, if you know immediately that the NPC isn't useful when he starts spouting text? What if they implement some generic voice acting for some info, and text answers for others? Mix it up even more, so you don't exactly know if the dude you're dealing with is totally useless.

dagoth_jeff

But the last game have 30+ voice actors, it felt very nice. (Fallout 3, I mean)

You didn't really notice which voice actor did which because they would actually use a different tone of voice for each character, and there were so many of them.

I just prefer voice acting :shrug:, I'm not saying my view's the majority, so I guess I should probably just be quiet about it and sit in the corner like a good little new member.

I just like that special feeling when you connect with a character, which is much easier when they have a voice compared to text that every other character uses. I mean, look at the trend that Bethesda's been taking:

Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, WET, Rogue Warrior, Brink?

I'm not saying it isn't possible, but I don't find it very likely that they're going to go back with Text-Based dialogue if Morrowind was the last game they did it in. Besides, when they improve graphics to surpass Fallout 3, their AI will probably be amazing, their scripting will have improved, and their animating with be awesome... I don't exactly picture them going back to text. :shrug:

Back to the noobie corner for me. :ahhh: