But ogres and horses hardly serve the same purpose, do they? My point was that horses were pretty much useless as transport mediums, which is what I believe they were intended to be. Ogres provide variety in enemies, horses were just poorly implemented.



As for armor, what about just having an "armor" skill? The direct opposite here would be athletics (which should also cover acrobatics instead of having it as a different skill) . I know it sounds simple and dumbed down but hear me out: If the PC has high athletics skill, armor skill and armor itself would be arguably useless since the player can dodge attacks instead of absorbing them as opposed to being very skilled in armor thus allowing the PC to do the exact opposite i.e. absorbing hits instead of dodging via use of heavy armor. But the extremes are simple to deal with, the real problem is the intermediary bits, like wearing armor that isn't very heavy but still has a noticeable effect on character mobility .

In this case, both skills would be called into the equation together with the weight of the armor worn and the protection it delivers. Ergo, a medium armor oriented character aims at developing both athletics and armor skills equally, allowing the use of a "best of both worlds" type of armor balanced by the fact that he has to train 2 skill to use it properly as opposed to just one for either heavy or light configurations which aren't as versatile. Use of medium armor with a lacking athletics skill would have the same result as using heavy armor that delivers poor protection, while attempting to use it with an undeveloped armor skill would result in it behaving like a very cumbersome light armor.

Now, how does one classify the armor now in game, since there's no skills anymore? Well, the defining element of armors would be the weight/protection ratio. The armor skill is essentially there to counteract the weight of the armor enough to make it practical but only to certain degree so waring progressively heavier armor denies the player the proportionate amount of mobility. This way, players wanting extreme mobility as required for parkour like movement won't use armor and thus need no skill in armor since they are supposed to dodge virtually all attacks (which is rather logical, if a bit extreme) while player expecting various amounts of damage (wearing appropriate amounts of armor) will need the armor skill accordingly.

I'm not entirely sure if training both skills is enough of a disadvantage to using medium armor considering these characters will be able to use all armors at maximum efficiency since they will reach 100 in athletics and armor eventually. I guess if using medium armor trained the skills slow enough, this wouldn't be such a problem but it looks very hard to predict without any testing.
Furthermore, maybe using a separate "dodge" skill instead of athletics is better since athletics is already advanced by simply running and, if combined with acrobatics as I'm suggesting, by jumping too.


Also, third person was dull and useless in both TESIII and IV. If they added a subtle crosshair, it'd be more useful, tho there's probably more to making it equal to first person than that.

Well, read my post above. I think everyone is too tied up on practicality when it comes to armor.

Oh god, I suggested that earlier out of sarcasm. As good a time as any for http://www.courtneyhoskins.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/DoubleFacePalm.jpg, I suppose.


I completely agree. There could at least be a better camera position. I mean, I'm in the way of myself.

Well, with the system I described, there isn't such a clear "best armor ever" since it relies on the ratio of at least 2 armor specific values instead of one.

I might have misunderstood your point but as far as I can tell, armor is, essentially, an aspect driven by practicality. The potential beauty of this is that if you want a character to look a certain way, lets say, lightly armored and very agile, your armor, or lack thereof, should reflect this leading to a sense of much needed consistency in the game, as opposed to having a stealth oriented character that uses daedric armor, because it's the best and the negative effects of wearing 3 metric tons of metal aren't represented in game.

Basically, what I'm trying to get at is that when you create a character at the beginning of the game, you bind him to a certain combat style that requires certain armor (unless he/she's a jack of all trades master of none). Ideally, there would be several options for most levels, as in armors with comparable stats. Further customization could be done via a crafting skill, or paying a blacksmith, allowing for varying amounts of ornamentation and such which could be done with just different skins to save work although this still may be a much to ask for.




But did you read the rest of the post? I might not have phrased it very well but I'm not calling for the system to be dumbed down. Read the post and if there's something so blatantly wrong with the system (other than looking simple), be nice and point it out.

I wouldn't say it's arbitrary. Leather armor is lighter and makes less noise than chain or plate. The only semantic difference I see is that rather than a positive, its really the lack of a negative.

However, if the leather is a dark color, or you wear a dark colored outfit, that should be a bonus because dark materials would absorb rather than reflect the light from candles, torches, etc.

• Continue with the random encounter method for ESV. One example I remember from Morrowind that would suit well for random encounters, was when I found a lady in the wilderness, and she told me that she lost her ring in a pond and asked me to retrieve it for her. Once you find the ring, the lady's accomplice who was invisible ambushes you and they both attack you. I just thought that was a great example of what could work well for a random encounter.

Instead of specifically glorifying leather as a sneak medium, other armors should reflect their "sneak effectiveness" with extra noise and visibility (shiny steel armor, come on) hindered.

And instead of a Light and Heavy: -> Plate vs Soft

After reading Havik's hotkey system I decided to come up with my own:
(an revision of my earlier proposed hotkey system, which was way too confusing)
(Excuse my bad attempts at drawing)

http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/vv7/altair48/TES%20rings/2.jpg

The hotkey wheel appears when a button is held down, and disappears when the button is released. (keyboard button, controller button, mouse button, whatever- can be set by player)
- Player can set the option as to whether this pauses the game or not

While the wheel is on screen, navigation would be performed with the mouse (joystick on consoles)
- Options on the wheel can either be selected by a pointer, like in Windows, or determined by the relative location of the mouse in relation to the center of the screen (relative position of the joystick in relation to the neutral position on consoles), as in Crysis.

Of course the number of options on the wheel can be customized.




Categories: An option on the wheel can be set as a "folder", which will expand to reveal more choices when activated. With this system, one can set a folder for spells, one for potions, etc.
-The folder contents will only appear when it's selected, to maintain minimalism.
http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/vv7/altair48/TES%20rings/1.jpg

A folder with a small number of options would only occupy one "ring", while a large folder would occupy multiple rings.
http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/vv7/altair48/TES%20rings/3.jpg

Folders can also have subfolders, such as a folder for each school of magic inside a folder for magic in general.
http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/vv7/altair48/TES%20rings/4.jpg

As the player accesses more subfolders and moves away from the starting ring, certain parts of the system farther away from the player's current subfolder would move offscreen/shrink
-This is more of an aesthetic thing, but it could make it easier to choose something when options get messy.

With this system the player would have easy access to a virtually unlimited number of hotkeys in a neatly structured and organized way.
Comments and critiques?

• Please, allow ESV's facegen to do http://s57.photobucket.com/albums/g235/Wesadam/Mod%20Head%20Packs/Aldaril.jpg

sheer massiveness. When I enter Solitude or Winterhold, I DON'T WANT TO BE ABLE TO SEE ANYTHING BUT HOUSES AND PEOPLE!

I would like to see mighty cliff faces which are 'sheer'...... the nature of the engines bethesda have used dont allow such terrain

Daggerfall II?

Yes!

Roads? Made of people. The Sky? Made of people. Plants? Made of people and houses. Clothes? Made of people (people wearing people!).

Hell, the houses should be made of people too. People House!

Artificial Intelligence.. A big word for one of the most complex aspects of any game.

The AI in your NPC's an creatures is what defines the feeling of your world. You can have the most amazing graphics and the best sound in the world but if your AI all but average then this will make the gaming experience no more then average.

The current AI in Oblivion is - to be honest - pretty horrible and I can honestly say that it more often then not really kills the immersion of the game which is otherwise awesome.

With that I'm not even talking about monsters and enemy NPC's in caves they are half decent most of the time but then again all they have to do is attack you. It's the friendly NPC's in cities that really bother me. And when you hear some of those conversations the NPC's have ugh.. horrible.

From all the things I mentioned before this is probably the most key aspect they will have to work on.

In life you have basically a few "core" requirements that have to be met before someone can live a normal life.

- Food and water,

pretty much all creatures need this one way or another. So I want to see NPC's go home for dinner and when I walk in to their house they should be at the dinner table with their family if they have one.

But also other creatures I mean how can a cave full of vampires possibly survive without feeding? Those vampires should come out of their cave at night and find someone to feed off.
Basic creatures like rats, cats, deer's, boar's and other forest critters also need to eat and drink so they should at one point be found at nearby stream of water or near a place where their food can be found. Wolfs and other predators should hunt for their food.

- Security

A very important aspect. People and even creatures need some form of security. People for one need financial security so they will need a source of income so every NPC should have a job or support someone who has a job.

Of course people and creatures will also need physical security, so all of them need housing, clothes, weapons to defend themselves. Creatures often opt for a security in numbers wolfs for example work in packs.

Good health, clean water, good food and nearby herbalist or doctor. So if you have a large group of bandits in a cave you would expect at least one have some understanding of healing so they can help their brothers when they get hurt in combat or become ill.

...

Because people need food, clothes, housing and good health they more often then not need a job of some sort.

I would like to see a real economy. Bread, apples, beer, weapons, armor, clothes etc don't appear out of thin air. They all need to be made and they all need certain key materials to be made and someone with the skills to create them.

Wouldn't it be amazing if the roads would be full with horses with carts moving grain to mills and flour to bakers and bread to shops? Minerals would need to be mined for armor and weapon creation so you need active mines people working every day.

and with that if for some reason the delivery of bread is stopped because the transport was robbed it should have a impact on the life of the people. If its for one day they should manage if it keeps up for weeks it could result in fighting, riots and more. So the king(s) and leaders of cities would have to send guards / soldiers to put a stop to those robbers.

I know it's probably asking way to much but I want everything to have a impact. If you steal 15 gold from someone he and his family might not have a meal that night. If you steal all the clothes in a house they shouldn't have anything to wear.

Ohh well enough dreaming..

Scrap SpeedTree, really.
Use http://pro.bistudio.com/index.php/services/linda-tree-generator.html instead.
And off course give the PC - users Multi-Core support this time, and support for 64 bit OS′s to make more RAM usable.

The Cliffs...of Insanity!

• Bring back many of the artifacts of Tamriel, such as Chrysamere, and don't involve all of them in quests. Include it with unique hand-placed loot. Hand-placed loot is very, very important, and extra fun when they are more difficult to find. That was one of my favorite things about Morrowind. Of course, some enemies may wield the hand-placed loot as well.

• Please make more interesting cavern tilesets. Oblivion's cave tileset was so boring... It was so linear, cut and dry with barely any vertical or horizontal variation. Morrowind and Fallout 3 had much better cave tilesets.
  
• Include some hard-to-find unique areas, that contain some unique artifacts as mentioned above. I also miss this from Morrowind. It was much less present in Oblivion.

• And to bring this back up again, you should either be ineffective or completely ineffective in the skills that are outside of your class unless you slowly train them in other ways. For example, if you're a pure warrior, you shouldn't have any starting spells. It's that simple. Not everyone in Tamriel knows how to fling basic fireballs and heal spells. Diversity please. This is not to say I don't want jack-of-all-trades.
  
• Something that really must be fixed is how easily alchemy is exploited. First of all, a character who does not have alchemy in their class should be very ineffective at making potions. Second, empty potion bottles should be a requirement for making a potion. These should be purchased and found throughout the game-world. Potion bottles may be reused as many times as you want. As soon as you drink a potion, you carry the empty bottle in your inventory. Thirdly, basic low-level potions should be very monetarily weak, meaning for example it will cost more to buy the potion bottle than to sell the final product. More potent potions should be much rarer and a bit more expensive, but not too expensive.

• Faction skill-requirements. Seriously.

I don't know... they don't seem to have any real in game stuff to show. The video's don't anything really different compared to speedtree's for me.

And the images are like... small.

Yes!
Please no contrived tutorial that forces every one of my characters to know a healing spell.

If there's a tutorial in the beginning, either make it subtle and blended in, like Morrowind's, or optional, and not forcing you to learn any spell or skill, just for the sake of the tutorial.

Like in Morrowind's beginning, you can choose to take a lockpick, and if you do, you get a blurb on what it's for and it's up to you whether to use it or not. And spells are handled with a magic ring you find instead of a spell you know.

They've already licensed SpeedTree, so they might as well keep it.

Yes. I can't keep saying it enough.

There is one more thing that I found The elder scrolls lacking (and I know I'll probably get corrected by some experienced player) in one very little but very crucial function which is sprint.

Morrowind had a system where runing drained your fatigue and Oblivion had a system where it only decreased your rate of regeneration or with master athletic did nothing.

Now I propose we keep the Oblivion system and only expand it to sprinting, using the Morrowind system of draining fatigue.

Why? Well honestly run in Oblivion feels like walking, not implying its that fast only that its SOOOOOOOOO casual to run I do it all the time, the Morrowind system was good and probably better because it restricted you( even if a little bit) from running all the time. And admit it, nobody here actually walks in oblivion aside from some RP thing you have going on, everybody mostly runs or sneaks.
So running feels like walking and walking is useless, a good solution would be sprint. This should be done properly, restricting sprint with heavy fatigue drain would limit the player to only using it when he really needs to! That is when chasing someone or running away obviously.

I dont have the exact mechanics for it in mind at the moment, first of all I want to see you guys comment on it and give me an opinion how this would go with the game, basically run very fast and get fatigued really fast too is the idea at the moment.

Well, I certainly want running to drain stamina this time around. It was ridiculous in Oblivion, really. If your stamina drains while running, that makes athletics a much more useful skill.

Although I don't want low stamina to restrict me from running. Just do it how Morrowind did it, and I'll be happy.

<_< you know this constant want to return to Morrowind in every single aspect of the next elder scrolls game is starting to get pretty annoying.

I presented a step forward, which I backed up with reasonable mechanics and important gameplay functions but all I ever see on this forum is "*rant* oblivion is so bad *complain* do everything just like morrowind again*whine*"

I just think Morrowind did it well. Running was very slow in Morrowind, I didn't like that, but the simple mechanics of fatigue were fine.

I personally don't want sprinting. Walking and running is fine.


And I don't see how you think running feels like walking in Oblivion. I guess it can if you do it a lot, but compared to Morrowind it was much faster. I loved Oblivion's general rate of speed. Besides you can increase the rate of speed you run at by increasing the speed attribute.