A small thought on Armors.

Instead of armors just being different materials both the material and the kind of crafting style could influence the armors protection and wearability.
Like a chainmail armor could be made or iron, steel or elven metal, you could have various full plates or partial plates.

Also the crafting kind of armor should influence how well it protects against different weapons, chainmail for example protects quite well against blades but a blunt hit can carry over stronger due to the flexibility, plate armor is kinda the opposite. There could also be scale mail armor kinda in between (crafted in a way to be flexible but interlocking when outside force is applied to disperse a blow over a greater area).


For weapons different materials and craft types could apply too but here the material has more influence on how the weapon is crafted anyway so this may be a more minor point.


The big problem is that this would require more meshes and textures for armors of different craft and material but a lot would already do with just interchanged meshes and retextures.

I don't want to have to play the game in hard mode to use this, though.

Personally, I like to play around medium, and get harder as the game gets easier. I would love the ability to have everything in hardcoe mode, but I'd want to control the game difficulty myself, how it has been over the past two games. I would guess a lot of people feel the same.

"hardcoe Mode" should be it's own option seperate of the difficulty slider.

Yea it should be, especially since most increased difficulty is just cheap making you take more damage and enemies less damage and that's only artificially pushing difficulty.
In games like Crysis the ultra hard mode still made sense, some things where handled more realistically (like you can't use the gun turret on a car while you drive it, you have to change seats first) and enemies reacting more strategic. It did have "almost one hit kill" in that mode but this also applied to enemies so it was still fair play.

Maybe instead of calling it "hardcoe mode" it should be more along the lines of "survivalist mode".

Slightly on the topic, i mentioned this a few times before, eating and sleeping shouldn't be a hard requirement to survive, you shouldn't die from not doing that, it should just show some negative influences like inhibited regeneration or your "accuracy" being influenced.


Kinda straying off that a little, I kinda think "luck" should get a overhaul. Instead of making it a solid attribute it should be a lot more flexible able to rise and lower depending on your characters condition. To make that more plausible "luck" could be renamed, even though luck actually stems from "succeeding" (in german "glück" (luck) comes from "gelücken/gelingen" (succeeding)).
Things like being in pain could lower your luck which in turn influences all your skills somewhat negatively.

The options when selecting it should be:

Off
On - Medium
On - Extreme

Extreme would make me die when appropriate, Medium would lower my attributes. Personally, I like the fear of death if I don't eat or drink. It's actually a great game balancer.

Yea a lot of this could be made optional, and it wouldn't really require that much work i think, it could simply be tied into a INI setting meaning you could easily manually alter it in case something doesn't work right.
I'm a lot for having more simulation heavy elements play into it but there are a lot of other little kinks that need to be worked out first, for example NPCs suddenly going homicidal when they're hungry.
I'd suggest looking at Dwarf Fortress for inspiration, they have a personality sheet to control each NPC and it works quite well.

I believe that there should be scaleable weight and height for the PC character (and as a consequence some or most NPC's should have theirs randomized). Not all Nords are 6 feet tall, nor are all Bosmers 5'3. There aren't enough fat people in Tamriel for me to poke :poke:

This should of course have some restrictions, so we won't see 4 foot Altmers or 6'2 Bosmers

there should be limits comparable to the other races.

There's three heights: Tall, Medium, Short

A small race can only be as tall as an average medium race

A tall race can only be as small as an average medium race

A medium race can only be as tall as an average tall race, or as small as an average small race.

There would be a low chance of NPC's going into the top quarter or lower quarter of thier height range.

Either this randomisation technique (may need some work I thought it up in 5 seconds), or have the devs set it for each NPC manually.


I don't see why NPC's would need to go hungry and lose stats. If it's a part of their basic AI system, surely they eat on their own, and would never have those stat losses anyway? Certain NPC's don't eat, because the game would be over crowded with food, or you'd have bandits strolling around cities buying food, which could be a huge mess.

If NPC's can eat, they will eat. If NPC's can't eat, they won't.

Awesome ideas for height, exactly what I've thought to myself. There should be variation, but still withing stereotypical expectations (it's a fantasy world)

I mean, you can consider the whole scope of humanity, we have people who are 8 feet tall and people who are two feet tall...give them the right clothes, and they could represent most fantasy races. But the game has to generalize and say that all 6'6'' skinny people are one kind of elf, all 6'2'' muscular people are barbarians or half monster, all people 5'10'' are generic humans or another kind of elf, all people 5'5'' are another kind of elf etc etc etc.

And while we should have some different body types...only a few people will be at any extreme. Most will be somewhat healthy, others will be somewhat athletic and muscular, and others will be somewhat fat, others somewhat skinny. One or two characters only should be obese, a king or something (Yagram Bagarn) A few people could be very skinny, to represent poorness, but even most poor people in a fantasy setting had enough to eat...farmers and the like. You don't starve for very long in the middle ages before you are killed by disease, the cold, deficiency.

I agree with the idea of there being some variety in the shape of body types but this is going to be a fantasy game with a male teenage audience. I would expect to see far more fit and attractive people than in real life.

Also ... how about better armor design this time around, mainly in the helm department.

... looking at you unnamed bethesda artist with a goggle fetish!

I got sent this today. Its very interesting.

Its a comparison of the map sizes in RPGs that have come out recently.

http://i.imgur.com/uBWCz.jpg

I thought WoW was bigger than that.

That's the key, have it optional. I know I'd be all over a hardcoe mode like this I'm keen to see if it actually works in Fallout - New Vegas and won't just be a decreased hitpoint system

Screw WoW. I'm really unimpressed with the size of Oblivion. Now, I'm guessing no other game there is nearly as involved as say, Morrowind, but I think it would not be unfair to ask for something that is twice the size of Oblivion, at 30sq miles, such as FarCry.

That's not always a magic fix as people seem to treat it. "Make it optional/a slider/etc" comes up all the time, but it's not that easy. Difficulty needs to reflect game balance; a very simple, common example is a game setting the difficulty of a boss according to the level and amount of supplies the character is expected to have after the dungeon. A temple at the top of Horrible Pain Mountain is hard to get to, and that's the point. What if there's a powerful artifact there? Should the player be able to turn off environmental dangers, skip up the hill, and claim it five minutes after starting the game? What about the supply items, stat penalties, and balancing that need to exist solely for these features? Too many optional things and you get to the point that you're asking them to make two different games, which is a much bigger threat to the end product than this strange disk space obsession that's also floating around.

I was meaning something more like this - http://www.qj.net/qjnet/games-for-windows/fallout-new-vegas-lead-designer-talks-about-hardcoe-mode.html

A mode like that would be a fantastic addition to TES, giving a bit more realism to gamers who want it. And I don't think it's asking them to make 2 different games, it's only a couple of extra features.

Yeah well look at Daggerfall at 62000 miles squared Bethesda made that game overly large, but lots of people say Daggerfall was the best. maybe we could go with the saying, the bigger the better.

hardcoe mode wouldn't give Bethesda copyright issues would it? Knowing that they are publishing it through Bethesda's name, or are they not. I heard that they were.

Just change the name. hardcoe, Survival, Realism, You're Gonna Die (YGD), Good Luck, You Get What You Ask For So Have Fun.

I think it would just make skill values much less detrimental when dealing with NPC's and perhaps more random encounters.

ok , in my opinon, i think there should be an addition to combat. One idea is like cutting off body parts. Fallout had it, Oblivion should of. This game is in a world of swords and hammers, there should be decapatation and such( I wanna feel like Leonidas here!), Also what about the shield. Maybe you can also use it as an offensive weapon. whether swinging your shield till the guy falls, or adding spikes to get some stabs. This could also tie in with swords. Maybe they could hit a target with the bottom of the sword handle to knockout the guy or make him dizzy. I know i dont have to explain that there should more varieties of weapons( spears, flails, crossbow,etc). When i think of a medieval game, i think duel wielding. I do not know how it would work but i think it would be epic if I had enchanted shortswords or daggers in both of my hands. Finally, cinematic or just any type of kill moves. Enough said. I posted this only to speak ideas.

In my opinion, Daggerfall isn't the best. It's a fun game, but there is nothing interesting to do or see in that game. Skill-wise, it beats Morrowind and Oblivion. Setting-wise, dungeon-wise, quest-wise, and exploration-wise, it is vastly inferior to Morrowind and Oblivion. Combat-wise, I think it is better than Morrowind, but not as good as Oblivion. Magic-wise and stealth-wise, I think Morrowind is slightly better, but Oblivion is far better. Lore-wise, I think it is also inferior to Morrowind and Oblivion. For role-playing opportunities, it has many more options that Morrowind and Oblivion, but they are lacking in depth and aren't good enough to make up for Daggerfall's many flaws. Bug-wise, Daggerfall seems as if it was barely tested. Story-wise(main quest), it is much more gray and full of more options that Morrowind and Oblivion. Politically, it is superior to Morrowind and Oblivion and its reputation system is superior to Morrowind and Oblivion's.

I didn't mean they shouldn't have to eat, I meant the old AI problems the game had.

EDIT:
On the "optional difficulty" and survival aspects I'm really all for that.
They could make it into:

• Combat depth - How tactical enemies operate (one example is a Gothic 3 mod where you can select if only one, a few or all enemies you encounter at once can attack you the same time)
  
• Injure depth - How detailed the injure system is, low means universal damage, middle locational damage, high detailed locational damage and wound treatment.
  
• Survival depth - Need to eat and sleep and care for your characters health, low means no need to eat and sleep, middle stat influences, high physical influences and even death.

That way it would allow you to tune the game to how you want to play it, low injure and survival aspect but high difficulty for those who like it most in the classic TES style but with more enemy challenge for example. Or turning off the detailed injure system if you prefer to play in third person but leave the others high.

All this could be based in simple INI settings so you could even tweak them easily, like how long you can hang around without eating and sleeping.

And of course character traits and racial abilities can play into this too like being a "big eater" allows you to eat loads of food (at the cost for being a bit sluggish) so you can survive for days without eating anything "fresh". Or a insomniac trait where you're generally a more "nervous" personality but can easily spend days without sleep negatively affecting you too much.

You know, It boggles my mind how many people suggest adding hunger requirements, or an H2H overhaul that would turn H2H into 3D Street Fighter Ninja Warrior Omega and make it as effective against plate mail as bashing an unaware mudcrab with a heavy mace, or asking for body parts to fly, or they want to date and mate with any NPC, all while something goes unaddressed:

We need to have a good system for basic interactions with interesting NPCs.

That covers two fronts:

First, the ways in which we can interact with characters are very limited.
Second, even if we could interact with them, how do we fool ourselves into really feeling a bond with a collection of pixels?

Fallout 3 made two big steps with the first. Speaking in complete lines offers a bit more feel than simple keywords. What's missing is that FO3 frequently had a "polite" option, a "nasty" option, and an "other" option. This is limiting, in that I could either tell the guy off in harsh terms, or try to talk him down, but I could not offer a highly offensive backhanded compliment with a smile on my face. Even if he reacts the same way as he would to a direct and crude insult, I have a bit less control over "who" I am. Daggerfall, of course, had a lot of options, but they felt empty. I think with the FO3-style complete lines, we might finally be able to re-introduce speech styles (left/right to change tones) and adding to that the increased detail, give the player a decent idea of how the person is most responsive. (Although the inevitable haiku style mod will clearly make Bethesda look like they missed the boat)

As far as the latter goes, well, name NPCs from any TES game that did not offer any spells, goods, or services nor was a part of a quest that stand out. I'm guessing most of you will struggle badly (off-hand, only Otumeel and Thurundil come to mind, although a good number of service providers are memorable for other reasons). That's what I mean about "interesting": they stand out because they say or do something that says "notice me!".

So this shepherd asked me to beat up some bears. Yet... I can't ask ANYONE how to fight bears. Even if I usually wind up running from them in shredded armor.
Likewise, if I want a specific volume of 2920, how do I find it? (the correct answer, in the latter case, is TESCS or UESP).
Wouldn't it keep us more immersed in the game world if we could at least TRY to get some answers about such things in-game? I'm sure Mach-Na and Phintius can suggest who might have bought SOME rare books. Or they might even offer to get me a copy for an obscene sum. Likewise, the Hunter in Anvil can probably suggest a way to fight bears. Reverse the questions, and I expect some dumbfounded expressions and in-character "can't help you"s, but just being able to ask Mach-Na about rare books that are in a series would keep me going back in the (possibly vain) hope that this time she'll special order one for me, or that she knows who owns the volume I want...

So what are your ideas for making our interactions with NPCs better, and for what to do to make the NPCs worth interacting with once you know the city...

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1073698-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-153/page__view__findpost__p__15612581

While the NPCs tend to fit in the image of their respected races (Altmer tall, Bosmer short) the Player must be able to make a character of HIS/HER choice. I want to play an orc shman, who's extremely short and fat, but powerful in magic. Fine, with this sytem I'm able to.

Of course, every now and then we might bumb into an NPC who doesn't fit one's racial profile. Like the last Dwemer in TES3.

What you're forgetting is that the standard game is without any of the optional effects. When we suggest optional aspects such as hunger, thirst, etc, they are to make the game harder. Without them, the game would be of a normal difficulty.

For example, you may feel Morrowind/Oblivion are of a standard difficulty without any of the realism mods, but with the eating, sleeping, drinking, or whatever mods, it will make the game harder. If you don't want the game to be harder, don't use these mods. It's the same for optional settings.

I also doubt the difficulty slider is going, most of us love the ability to make the game harder when needed. I'm pretty sure there's a majority.

EDIT:
While we're on the topic of race asthetics, I'd like each race to be more defined. I would like to have Orcs to be so muscley that they're kinda disformed, similar to WoW (but not as exaggerated), and man races to look a lot more significanlty different to the other man races. Nords should be big and strong, Imperials should be the medium, and Bretons should be weaker. Beast races should also get thier Morrowind forms back. The helm/boot problems require the tiniest fix. I mean, if we can do it in the CS, surely Bethesda's massive team could figure something out.

Of course, with the aforementioned system, some NPC's could look different dependant on what they do. A Warrior Breton could be muscular, a Nord mage could be skinny/fat.

I think the "lazy" classes, that don't do as much physical exertion as warriors, such as mages, should be either fat, or skinny, unless they have some strength or agility. (Think battlemages, nightblades, etc)

Also, most nobles should be fat. Some should be the knightly type,, and keep in top shape, but most should be overweight, being the lazy "everyone works for me" types.

from a quick read I have to say it is quiet a good system and it has potential. I myself have suggested a form of viral spread of disposition towards the player several TES V Ideas and Suggestions threads ago, although I didn't go into much depth. I dare to say that such a system would add so much to the rp experience. However such a system would still require vast amount of content (in the form of dialog) to show. Apart from talking, what other interaction possibilities should random NPCs provide?