LOL! I could totally picture that in my head xD

What is (hopefully) my final suggestions post before the game is announced!

Concerning Combat:
Melee:
So, how do you deal with damage? I.E. what enemies can dish out. All considered I can think
of 3 ways.

Blocking. That's a skill, and honestly should have more to do with context and timing.
Context as in what you are holding. If you are holding say a shield, well a shield can
block swings from a melee weapon, it can block arrows, it could even block a fireball.
But let's say you're holding a weapon, weilding a sword and dagger? A two handed weapon?
Either way while you can parry a swung sword, parrying an arrow or fireball would be
much harder. Thus, how effective your block, and what you block should depend on what
you have!

Second concerning blocking is timing. Obviously a shield you can just hold up and move to
block a hammer of blows. But a weapon, a weapon is smaller, and harder to block with.
As where timing comes in, timing your block to an enemies swing is in fact what you do when
parrying with an actual sword. It should also work well in TES, if you get it just right you
swing the enemies blade out wide and open them up to a counter attack. Much the same could
be done with a shield.
So, time blocks to swing your opponent wide and open them for a counterattack. Also, no
picking arrows out of the air with your sword (unless maybe you've maxed out block).

Damage sponge:
Now damage sponge is always a class in an rpg. But in TES almost everyone is a damage sponge to one extent or another. Instead I would suggest relegating the "damage sponge" status to those who concentrate on the endurance stat and wearing heavy armor. This makes the status more unique and makes room for the final way.

Dodging!
Assassin's Creed 2 had dodging. Zeno Clash had dodging. So TES can definitely have dodging. Athletics? Acrobatics? Agility? Anyway assuming they finally prevent running backwards at full speed doding should be simple. You just press the "jump" button and a direction that's not forward, then you hop out of the way. It could even involve some extra strategy by say giving enemies a "heavy blow" attack with a certain animation. If you dodge out of the way at the right time during the attack they might stumble forward, off balance and giving you a chance to conk them one.

Melee:
Ok, there's several things to cover here. Remember it has to fit on a control pad! Besides its not like us pc players really want to memorize a hundred buttons either.

Different weapons, different handling:
A short blade can slit someones throat if you sneak up on them, but blocking one with a shield means it's not really going to do any damage to your opponent. Conversely you can't slit someones throat with a giant hammer, but blocking it with a shield is still going to hurt alot.
Same thing goes with dodging, armor, and knocking enemies over. A single handed blade isn't generally going to knock anyone over, a smash with something heavy just might. Differences just based on what type of weapon you are using is something all shooters do, so a melee
system should be no different.
I.E. A dagger will have a high sneak attack multiplier, no chance to knock someone over, is easily defended against by heavy armor or a block, but is fast and hard to dodge away from. A large mace has a low sneak attack multiplier, a good chance of knocking an enemy over, is not affected by a block or armor much, but is slow and easier to dodge away from.

Context:
What are you doing when you press the attack button? If you are sprinting forward your attack will probably be quicker. If you're coming down from a jump you'll have more force and do more damage. If you're dodging or moving backward it probably has less force, but since your retreating you'll probably want to be attacking faster. All of these choices available just based on what you are doing when you attack.

Press, verse Press and Hold
Press, you do a standard attack. Press, hold for a second, and release and you get to take a heavy swing at your opponent. Two attacks with one button!

As you can see this would offer plenty of choices while adding no new buttons whatsoever. Easy to remember, easy to control, and hopefully fun to use.

Ranged:

Again, we can take some things from shooters. Moving while aiming is hard, you'll probably wobble your aim compared to standing still. Timing is also key. We can take a page from Team Fortress 2 and the "Hunstman's Bow" here, as in you'll be most accurate as soon as you pull back the arrow, and lose accuracy the longer you hold it. This, as it turns out, is the same in real archery.

As for what levelling up can do besides increase damage and decrease "aim wobble", it could also increase reload speed, arrow speed, and range. Speaking of which arrows really should go down as they travel. Oh, and of course if you arrow kills your enemy and sticks out into another enemy it should do damage to them as well, because that's just funny.

Finally, why only bows and arrows? Imagine if you could throw any weapon, how far and well you fling it depending on your ranged skill and strength stat. YOu probably don't want to lose your weapon, but it could be useful for finishing off a damaged and fleeing enemy.

How about a little height/size variation between people? I mean, High Elves are tall, but mix it up a little. Average them higher, but not every one has to be 6'6. I want realistic size variation. Maybe this would make everything a lot harder for Bethesda, with issues like clipping, etc...

:laugh:
Yeah, it would make for some great one-liners.
Could smack him with a rowboat and say something like surf's up, pal! (Got that from Bruce Willis.)

I'd like it to feel like I'm actually moving in the world, not just a floating camera with arms. I want the camera to rock a bit when I'm running (I.E. Battlefield 1943 when your running, not sprinting) and I'd like to look down and see my body, legs, and arms.

My work here is done.

Until next time :foodndrink:

Make bars more real. I want bar fights. I want it to be hard to walk after drinking like in GTA4. I want blurred vision. I want to pass out after 15 beers and wake up with temporary (6 hours) damaged fatigue. Bars should be fun, not just a place to sleep and buy a watermelon.

Anyone impressed by how Risen handled bastard swords and two hand swords? I think Beth should look into it because it would be so cool to use a huge sword like that with a sheild, sure, asking to dual wild those beasts may be out of the question (not for Nords or Orcs IMO), it'd be cool to see the larger and stronger races use those beasts in one hand, it is plausible.

Ok, I haven’t read the past 170 threads, so forgive me if I’m repeating something someone has said before.

But about healing.

I would like to see wounds, caused by specifically intense strikes, which cause a constant loss of health, although slow.
I want to see potions and low level healing spells only top up HP not cure wounds.
High level healing spells, or injury healing spells, or injury kits, or doctors in cities could all heal wounds.

Maybe, low level injury healing skill would only slightly patch up the wound, slowing down the rate of health loss but not entirely heal larger wounds.

Its just an idea. But I think its not a major shake up to health and healing system in TES. It could add a little depth and intensity to fights.

One draw back I can see about it is: Imagine you have a fight in the middle of nowhere, no where near a doctor and have run out of injury kits. You would slowly bleed out, maybe you didn’t really get too hurt in the fight, but you die 15 - 20 minutes later. That could get annoying.

So if you die from blood loss due to an injury, not a direct strike then you get a difficult to cure status ailment, and a cap on your max HP which requires a high injury heal skill level, or a doctor, or a high level spell.

This isn't runescape.

No, but it's a roleplaying game. I want to play the role of a fisherman, or a crafter, or a blacksmith, or whatver possible. Making my own items would also be cheaper (hopefully the economy is fixed, so it would actually matter).

The problem is that if you want crafting skills then you need materials. Which may require mining, ore extraction or some other gathering skill.

But if there was a skill for adding or upgrading weapons or armour, that would be cool.

So I'm a first time poster, long-time player of TES games. I love the crap out of them. I have played oblivion and fallout 3 i don't even know how many times over, spent hundreds of hours of my life playing these games.

I love the world, the characters, the gameplay, and so on, but of course there are in my opinion some things that could be, with slight tweaks, vastly improved.

First and foremost is the diversity in the gameplay experience. I have played all kinds of different race/class combinations, tried to approach the game from all kinds of different angles; yet in the end, every single time I wind up getting what is basically the same experience. If you level efficiently, by the higher levels you will largely be just as good at any given skill... It seems like no matter what "class" you choose in the beginning, the experience and method for playing through the game remains the same, making the whole intro portion of the game and choosing your main stats and abilities almost pointless - except of course when it comes to efficient levelling, which isn't even a feature that they make known to the player.

My solution to this problem is simple: yes, all the skills available in the game are available to the player no matter what thier preferred play-style is. However as you progress further down the path of each skill, you are forced to make sacrifices to other abilities for what would be increased benefits in any particular skill.

Eg. In Oblivion, the fireball you cast as an apprentice of destruction magic is the same one you cast as a master. You may be able to get spells with different effects and so on, but it looks exactly the same, does exactly the same thing (you fling one ball of fire/ice/lightning that travels in one direction, etc.) The point is, you don't really feel all that much more powerful - there is no in-game representation of your increased abilities other than the fact that they do more damage and so on (which is compromised slightly by the fact that creatures level with you and your spells aren't really THAT much more effective at master level than they were back at apprentice).

With my suggestion, characters would be able to unlock devastating new abilites by progressing further in particular areas, while having to make sacrifices to others. A mage-character could go balls out on intellect and willpower attributes, but have to make sacrifices to thier strength and agility.... or whatever you chose to do. you could progress everything to say expert (75 skill) level, and just be a well-rounded character who happens to lack the end-game abilities of people who chose to specialize in one or more areas. You could also choose to have multiple skills (4-5) that progress further, or even just narrow down to maxing out in one or two (maybe you could max out 3 skills, in order to create a real "class"). This would diversify the gameplay enough that whatever path you choose to go down, you would get truly different play-styles and experiences.

Of course this would necessitate some small changes in the functionality of questing and dungeons and so on - there would need to be more ways to complete any given task in the game (an acrobatic rogue-ish character would be able to access areas other characters would be unable to; a warrior could just barrel through certain areas that other classes would have to find ways around).

The long and short of it is though, that when you master a skill, you should really feel in-game like you have taken your character to a whole new level of skill, and have abilities that were comlpetely unavailable at lower skill levels - alterations mages should be able to straight up fly around, mysticism mages might be able to teleport freely from place to place (they could place markers wherever they want to be able to go and choose from a list), destruction mages would have massive area-of-effect damage spells, their fireballs would have heat-seeking or rapid-fire or streaming abilities, warriors could have area-of-effect damage abilities and thier swings are much more powerful - and actually look different in-game, rogues would be incredibly fast attackers, and able to jump and dodge around opponents with ease, maybe even able to scale buildings and trees and such....

If i choose my class as a "paladin", a warrior with healing abilities, I shouldnt be able to be a master of destruction magic - perhaps, depending on the way i want to work my class, i could still use destruction magic effectively, but i would not have access to the end game abilities of a master magician.

Anyway that's my two cents, I've got some other ideas I'll share in the future but that's it for now.

I'm not asking for an MMO for TES V, but I would really like some online play such as duels, free mode with friends, and also duel teams such as 2v2, 3v3, 4v4, or 5v5.
Too bad we wouldn't be able to add our ingame charaters into multiplayer because people that own PC versions mod the hell out of it :/

Have you played Morrowind? That game has a skill system close to what it seems like you want. Which in my opinion is by far better than Oblivions.

I would deffinately recomend you play Morrowind, if you can get over the tbh quite poorly aged graphic and gameplay, as an RPG it seems like its more your thing.

I love the crap out of that phrase :laugh:

Here's your http://www.mwmythicmods.com/fishy.htm!

So I'm back for another one, and this particular suggestion is less a suggestion as it is, in my opinion, a requirement of making a successful and genuine addition to the series: the actual gameplay, meaning the way your character moves and physically interacts with the world around him/her, including the functioning of combat has so far in Bethesda games been extremely robotic. This has to change - modern games are doing some really radical things with the movement of characters and combat systems, and I really hope this series can keep up in that regard.

The improvement of the melee combat from morrowind to oblivion was absolutely one of my favourite features of that game... when you absorb a sword strike on your shield in Oblivion, you can almost feel it in your arm, simply because they did the movement and reaction of the game so perfectly... Yet in Fallout 3, which is stylistically more of a typical shooter than Oblivion, they basically used the exact same system present Oblivion, and didn't seem to improve the mechanics of movement or combat at all.

Specifically, I think in terms of a first-person shooter, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has one of the best systems I've ever played, and I think TES could learn a couple things from it;

First off, when it comes to movement, the animation and the functioning of running in TES IV svcks... the fastest run looks and feels like a good-paced jog, even when you reach the higher levels of speed in the game. The sprint function in CoD solves this problem and could easily be incorporated into the controls of TES - and of course, could be affected by in-game stats - obviously sprinting would be a drain on your endurance bar, and the speed of your sprint could get large boosts from your speed attribute. The other problem with movement is that there is no visible effect of movement from first-person view (camera shaking, movement blur, bobbing side to side in jog), and its even worse in third person - your character appears to be skating over the surface of the ground, not actually walking on it. Improving these two areas alone would go a long way to bringing the player even further into the gaming environment.

I also find it wierd that you can look all the way down in the game and not see your body at all - it would be nice to be able to not feeling like a disembodied head with arms attached while in 1st person view, and, while I feel that this last part might get a little complicated, I would love to see your hands actually reach out and grab things when you move them around - in TES IV, holding in the right anolog stick "picks up" and object, but it just hangs there in mid-air as if your character has some unexplained telekinetic abilities. A small part of the game, and perhaps an unnecessary complication, but would be an extremely cool feature IMO.

Second is combat. Honestly, there is nothing more frustrating IMO than attempting to go through combat as a caster or ranged melee in the TES IV. Cast spells travel in one direction, move fairly slowly, cost large amounts of mana, and do not really do all that much damage... it seems the only way to be an effective caster in the game is with high alchemy skills to create mana restoring potions, to make up for all the spells you'll miss. Once again, CoD has the solution (Red Dead Redemption also uses this system); with a quick click of the close-up focus button, your cursor will auto-lock on any target that is close to it and follow that target as long as it is in your field of vision (and the "focus" button is depressed). For magic, this could be made even better by having your cast spells continue to curve towards whatever target you were locked on when it was cast, and the effectiveness of that heat-seaking function could also be determined by in-games statistics (skill in that type of magic, as well as either intellect/wisdom) and the effectiveness overall of that lock-on feature; how well it tracks a target, how accurate your shot will be when it is actually taken, and right up to the lethality of the shot - will it hit the head, body, etc. Once again, a fairly simply augmentation of what is already present in the game that would make the combat so much more intuitive and engaging.

That's it for now.

I'll see all of that and raise you
1) varied mounts (that you could fight from the back of, and would also have thier own attacks)... including, dare i say it, flying mounts.
2) flight. that's right, i said it. alteration magic should have a flight ability, allowing the character free-flowing 3D flight.
3) the ability to choose from a range of hieghts and body types (fat, thin, athletic, muscular) for each race.
4) more high-end armor sets. Oblivion had one light and one heavy armor set... lets get some different looks in there.
5) online combat, against other players characters, in the arena. it could just be a feature of the arena, it could be the whole thing. you battle online players and earn titles, money, and prizes for your single person game - your performance is rated and you get paired up against other players with similar ratings.

shabooya, i got more, but there's some stuff i'm gonna get into deeper in future posts.

Some nice features to include would be:

fishing in a little rowing boat
ability to write using a quill and parchment
play the lute (?) or anything, flutes too maybe

These are just little features that i think would add something different to the game.

Dual-wielding two-handed swords? Now hang on a minute! But in german, so "Eine Minute bitte! Ich habe eine kleine Problem, mit deine verrückte Idee." But I'm not even German, so forget all that.
Anyway, no matter how strong you are, wielding two two-handed swords is basically impossible, and even if you manage to do that, it would be horribly impractical.
Now, I'm all for a tad bit of... "unrealism", for the sake of making the game fun. In other words, I don't want everything to be just as in real life, unlike some fools from around here I could mention. But still, it's basically ridiculuos (a word I will never learn how to spell) to even dual-wield longswords, let alone two-handed swords. Nonono, for a fantasy RPG I can accept longswords, but two-handed is way over the edge.
A dagger and a sword is a fine combination though.

Probably already mentioned but it could use another.
Casted spells should travel like the needler or plasma pistol from halo. Enough travel so that an accurate cast cant just be side-stepped and not as much to make it a heat seeking doom rocket.

I hear you. And I would love these additions. But I think that this is simple part of the course of the advancement of the seriese and technology. I personally would rather they concentrate on the depth of the RPG elements than anything else. These improvements should be incorpirated, but only if it dosent take away from development time of the more important stuff.

EDIT:


I love the idea. Maybe this should advance with the level of the character. Low level spells will "spurt" out of the casters hand, maybe even dropping like an arrow. But high level spells should shoot out of the hand and keep a straight line.

My idea is that Bethesda could really put more humor in TES are not easter eggs... Like joke books, funny NPCs (eg drunk) and/or even quests (examples: search the pants stolen from NPC X, search for lost underwear from NPC Y).

Another idea is that Bethesda put religion as separate from normal factions, in which the player joins and you have to pray in a period X, to receive a type of bonus (skill/ability boost, items, etc) from god Y.

Throw in some fishing tournaments and I'd do it all damn day.

I'd like them to combine the best things from Oblivion and Morrowind

Morrowind -
Limitless training per level - In Oblivion you were held to 5 instances of skill training per level. This FORCES you to powergrind which is the bane of every RPG in existence. If I go through the motions to get buttloads of money I want to use it to strengthen my character so I don't have to waste time grinding.

Fixed Difficulty - One of the best things about Morrowind as opposed to Oblivion was that you actually felt like you got stronger. In Oblivion everything was always essentially the same difficulty since the world leveled with you.

Changing the World - This one might be a false distinction. I do not remember about Oblivion but I know in Morrowind there were many quests that changed something concrete in the world (Getting a Stronghold built by the three houses, Solstheim East Empire Company always changed, at least one Daedric quest built a shrine) whereas I can't remember Oblivion ever having a dynamic change like a new house popping up.

Open Towns - This one is a must. With Oblivion the towns felt so contrived because they were all closed off. I'm sure this had to do with the engine but I wish they were open so they would feel more natural.

Unique/Creative Town Architecture - Every time I play Morrowind my heart jumps upon going to new towns. There were at least 7+ differenct architectural styles. In Oblivion I felt like there were only 4 (all of them very contemporary as well). In the next one I hope they return to the Morrowind level of creative town design, they showed that Towns needent be made from stone and wood like each town in Oblivion but can be made from mushrooms or exotic hollowed out shells.

Taunt - Come on, let me taunt people. There is always some troublesome quest or a difficult to access area that taunting just solves.
Weapon/Armor Variation - I was reading a website earlier that said Morrowind had 27 different types of armor compared to Oblivion. That just made me wince. More variation gives people more to collect and more replayability.

Sell Stolen Items - What is the point to being a thief if you have to search out specific people to buy things. How would a merchant know something was stolen?

Oblivion -
Automatic success - One improvement from Morrowind to Oblivion was the abandonment of dice rolling in combat. This made combat flow much more naturally (although it did make the variable strengths of weapons more ambiguous).

Compass Ticks - The crack of RPGs. Obviously has to be back.

Physics - The physics in Oblivion were very good. Coupled with the ability to directly manipulate the world (which was invaluable when you are trying to furnish your house) the physics were as good as I'd need.

Real-World Traps - Pressure plates, triplines, swinging logs. These had a novelty that is irreplaceable.

Skill Perks - Just one more reason to keep leveling your skills.

Horses - The more non-fast travel options the better.


Debatable
Fast Travel - Morrowind helped immerse players by limiting their travel options while Oblivion lowered the learning curve by letting people go anywhere instantly. Personally I prefer Morrowind's but it is up for debate. At the very least leave Mark/Recall and some sort of other spell travel in.

Dynamic AI Time - This is more of a personal gripe. Kinda tired of having to wait for a shop to open =P

I'm sure I am missing some things but this is all I can think of now.