This has been posted befor I know I just want to say I have been playing mount and blade and a similar systium would be nice. I would like the archery to be similar but the buble not to open as fast and the movment penalty taken away for higher skilled players. Mount and blades horse combat would work real well and the combat would too.

Hope you liked my ideas and am glad I am back but I know you probly wish I was not.(seams that way I think)

:hugs:

To ad to this you can pin them to the grond like a arow threw the foot or somethong then you can knock them out and ransome them. Or a neack atack knockout or sleepr hold and ransome people.

I have to ask how a kidnap/ransom would work as a mechanic.
I can see the first part of knocking someone out and dragging them around to wherever, but I think ransom and official kidnapping would have to be scripted stuff.

It's a mechanic is Mount and Blade, actually. You never deal with the actual family of the person you kidnap.

There is a middle man, called a ransom broker, who you sell captives to.

Also, if you kidnap a famous Lord, the other Lords of that faction will pool gold together and offer it. If you refuse, they come back in a few with a larger sum.

You can keep this going for as long as you want... unless your captive escapes.

But every time you refuse an offer, it hurts your "honor" rating. It's actually really cool.

There's what hamsmagoo said, or depending on NPC AI and speech capabilities, they could be assigned "values" in terms of priority. They might stand and watch if a stranger gets in a fight on the street, or get involved if it's a friend. They might call for guards if they see you steal a valuable item, or attack if you grab a beloved heirloom despite its low monetary value. If the character is in possession of someone/something they know is important to a person, they could try to ransom them back with an adapted haggling mechanic, where in this case you can't see the "worth" of the item and what they're willing to lose. With some extra fiddling, demands could include more than just money. Maybe the NPC knows valuable secrets but you lack the exorbitant speech skills needed to get them, so you blackmail the person for information. You could even work in scripted behavior, if a simplified expression of scheduled tasks were added, like "do this" or "don't do that", by opening up the NPC's regular daily schedule and adding/removing things as part of the demands. It could be an awesome option for criminal teamwork; say a thief is planning to rob some store on a certain day, and your job is to lighten security. How it's done is up to you. You kidnap a family member of the guard, and tell him not to come in to work on that day.

Thanks. I have to add a bit of a :facepalm: also because I forgot Fallout had it partially figured out as well.

I am just going to stand over in a corner and wait to kidnap someone now.

I was just thinking about acrobatics when I suddenly realized that in oblivion there was no real use for it!!!

never did I feel a danger from a great height in the game !!! wow never thought about it before.

hmmm wouldn't you like to see more vertical environments in ES 5?? maybe even with ropes and climbing and stuff, cliffs and high towers you can sneak into/out of...

I would love to see more interesting architecture/environments this time around that's for sure. :nerd:

Yeah, acrobatics should really be the non-magic character's alternative to levitate and slowfall.

There should be situations in which a quest location is separated from you by a deep gorge. If you don't have the acrobatic prowess to jump it, and you don't know levitate, then tough for you. Guess you have to go back to the city and buy a levitate potion. Now, you've learned to be prepared.

Or, if you want to work on your climbing skill, you can climb down the gorge and back up the other side. But that's a slow and potentially deadly process, especially since I don't think they had crampons back then.

I'd suggest my "skill groups" system again where climbing could be a subskill of either athletic or acrobatics.

PS: I'd also regroup which field is in which group, jumping itself would be in athletics, acrobatics is more about tricky movements. So to be a good jumper you'd need both, athletics to make a long and high jump and acrobatics for the air control like shifting your body and even momentum a bit mid jump.

I think that the acrobatics skill was actually an on-purpose replacement for the jump skill. Because it controls your jumps + your drops from heights. So, I think having a jump skill and acrobatics skill might be a little redundant.

Athletics was kind of a way to combine the run and swim skill. I'd actually prefer that they split run and swim apart again.

Or just have a swim skill and no run skill. Have athletics control running plus the length of your jump, as you said. Acrobatics could control the momentum and ease of control in your jump, as well as the damage you receive upon landing.

I think climbing should be it's own skill, with acrobatics simply kicking in if you fall.

Yea that is pretty much what I meant.

Also I mainly mean skill groups to also contain other subskills, athletics as mentioned can also contain climbing while acrobatics also contain complex body movements like for sneaking.
There maybe should be a renaming, acrobatics would pretty much be "body control" and athletics your "physical performance".

Here are my suggestions. Please take them in the spirit of someone that loves the Elder Scrolls series venting the things that have frustrated him mightily in the last half a decade.



1. Stop making the series dumber with every iteration. I understand your main focus is pandering to the casual console market, but I selfishly want more depth, not less. I realize I'm probably wrong for not wanting to play games while lying on my couch covered in chip-dust, but stop cutting things and making things banol. Yes that was an unfair generalization of console gamers and many simply prefer a system that no additional work or expense to keep afloat. But, the general point is entirely valid.

2. Go back to the Daggerfall character creation method or at least in that direction. Its much more interesting, it results in a MUCH MUCH MUCH richer role playing experience and much more character depth. So a few console kids won't be comfortable with some added complexity (probably a few advlts too). It will be a better game. If you want me to EVER believe that "you make the types of game you want to play" stop making them solely for the consoles design-wise. You wouldn't be amiss in adding in some of the political intrigue you used to do well. Or how about this - add an option in the beginning to use "classic character creation" or "Oblivion-style character creation"? I realize this won't ever happen in the next decade for any game due to the group mind rot, but I figured I'd toss it out there.

3. Stop cutting skills and start replacing the things you've cut that add entire new gameplay elements. I know you'll never do number 1 or number 2, but I'd love to see you add back all the skills that were in morrowind, and even some that were in Daggerfall (critical striking, etc). Don't ever tell us keeping a particular skill is too hard. That's lazy and it means "we'd rather ship than get it right". Cutting levitation was lazy and don't tell me that was part of the game you wanted to play because that's bunk. I know all about ship dates. I work in the industry. You're Bethesda, make the time to get it in.

4. Expand on the Radiant AI system as its fantastic, but either cut the voice acting or spend the extra money on a reasonable pool of voice talent. Its immersion-crushing to have the same voice actor talking to you from about 15 different important quest NPCs. Oh, and please stop zooming us in to talk to people. It stops immersion like a hummingbird crashing into a windshield. I know who I'm talking to, you don't need to pull me out of the game environment jarringly to make the point.

5. No more main quest that demands your attention at every step by throwing up Oblivion portals all over the countryside. You cannot roleplay your way around that unless you are playing a specific character type that doesn't give a rip about the world.

6. Stop being lazy with your bestiary and never include monsters/NPCs that level with you in a game again. By Lazy I mean if you don't have enough creatures to challenge higher level characters, make more. I know its a lot of work to create, animate, code and work out the kinks in new game assets. But, its the "correct" way to do things. Even if you need to change model colors and change a creatures stats and call it something else, do it. At any level you should have a chance of running into something that can clean your clock. But, you should never run into a grubby bandit or rat that is higher than level 5.

7. Realize that bears, wolves, and other rational wildlife do not exist to throw themselves at you in a fit of feral rage when you walk within a thousand yards of them. They run from humans for a reason. And don't talk to me about this being a game. Not a single human being enjoyed the "walk 15 feet and kill another suicidal animal" part of either of your last 2 games. I'm sick of having to mod all your games before they are tolerable. Remember the cliff-racer fiasco? Apparently, you didn't. Try to get that one on a bulletin board quickly.

8. I've seen you say over and over that Oblvion was larger than Morrowind. B.S. Morrowind was effectively about 3 times as large as Oblivion. I don't care about what you tell me, I care about how it feels. And even without fast travel from every location in the game, Oblivion felt smaller. A lot smaller. Probably because the game was one big valley that you could see the center of from just about everywhere.

9. Dynamically light objects from a distance this time around. This is just a small request. And no smart-alec comments included. It just felt funny that from a distance, the imperial city and all other cities looked like a crypt from the outside.

10. More quests like Hackdirt. More espionage type quests (not the banol ones, but the clever ones.

11. Please come up with more than 2 dungeon templates. I know that you have limited time. I understand if this one doesn't make it. I even can make rational allowances for why most ruins would look the same, they were built by the same people. But, sometimes you'd see a bandit hideout that didn't look lik every other hideout. Just a thought here, not critical.

I have more, but I need to get some work done on the game we're developing too!

In general, if you make a game that has the following philosophical breakdown:

60 percent Morrowind, 30 percent Oblivion (mostly the fantastic mechanical upgrades), and 10 percent Daggerfall

I'd be one happy gamer.


NOTE: this entire post is my selfish viewpoint. I fully accept that it is probably unrealistic with Bethesda's financial goals and I also understand that my view isn't necessarily right for anyone but me.

I would like to see guilds limited by class (mages guild for casters and fighters guild for warrior classes). It would create replayability.

Also, have guilds compete for jobs. For example, an item may need to be retrieved for someone. The thieves guild would try to steal it, a bard may try to con/charm it from the individual, warriors may fight or use "good standing" to acquire it. The first to acquire it gets paid.

No sorry, there should be NO class restrictions, I'd generally prefer to see the entire class system being kicked or at least not mandatory (A class free system would not be that hard if not easier to do anyway).
Guilds should only restrict you by your talents, and NO I don't mean by "your skill X is 2 points too low" but by having you do a initiation test, if you fail you don't get to join.
If replayability is the thing you want have branching quest lines instead so different combinations of guild memberships give you different mission sets AND how you join them differs too. You could for example work as a middle man between two guilds or infiltrate one to sabotage it. Or work secretly for both the same time, for this you'd have to well balance which missions to take so they don't overlap and reveal you.

agreed I like the way dagerfall and morrowind did it they got something right oblivion ohh look at me I am a babarian class Im going to join the mages guild for some seriously op gear

In Mount and blade there are hero-companions. It would be cool if they were in the new game to with their own story and backround with a personality too and they spec in magic stealth or warrior stuff too.

Your major skills are all combat related. So what? That doesn't mean you can't learn magic. If you are willing to learn, it doesn't matter how good you are at it, they'll take you. How else would Tamriel pass on their magical knowledge if they said "Nope, sorry, you don't have any natural talent which is extremely rare, we can't take you."
Sure, there are some organizations that only want experienced people, but only because they strictly conduct business, not train. Mages Guild is a mixture of the two.

I was just kinda skimming, but i think it says something about me that i read that as stop cutting throats, before i was like what and jumped back and saw it lol.

Yeah, agreed. Such restricting rules shouldn't be enforced on all players, they should be roleplayed by those who want them

I'd prefer to see them do away with the whole "major/minor" skill system and just have you have "skills".
Your major ones are simply those you focus on the most. No predestined character path, just development.

Swimming occurs few enough times in a game that unless they designed the skill to be viable, it seems like everyone could get along without it. I'd say for swimming there should be a normal speed that is affected by how much you have with you, then a swimming perk available in character creation that lets you be a better swimmer all the time. Argonians would automatically get this perk.

In another aspect, athletics should allow you to sprint faster and longer as well as regulating your daily fatigue better when you carry a lot of items. I agree that acrobatics and climbing should be separate.

My feelings and thoughts and ideas go right along with yours, Zarniwooop. Daggerfall was my first game back in 1995. Was Arena yours or Daggerfall?

Bethesda, please read this mans post! Just consider how it could improve every bodies playing experience, even if they don't think they'll like it at first.


I don't know, for some reason I've always felt silly, even though I've tried to creatively roleplay, that I can be in the mages, and fighters guild at the same time (obviously things like thieves and dark brotherhood don't count since they're more secretive guilds). I think infiltration would always be a good element to add, but to me that seems that it would be extremely complicated to implement without it just being a quest (like the Blackwood Company from Ob).

I love you.
Bethesda, please listen to this person.