I disagree in the case of Oblivion... I feel like Cyrodil was such an organized/connected province, that fast travel to the main cities makes more sense that having to discover them first. I've never been to lots of places in the world, but I can buy a map and go there. That may not be the best rationale, but I think the location and way to get from Anvil to Bruma (or any of the cities) was "common knowledge" to the citizens of the province. I agree with the locations in the middle of nowhere requiring discovery, but wait, that's the way it was in Oblivion :dance:

I notice the compass/markers being brought up again, but I won't repeat my previous comment/suggestion about tying the map and compass to a "Survival" skill in conjunction with in-game maps/compass items (of varying quality).

But I will add a variation to my previous suggestion. Instead of a pinpoint/discrete point on the compass leading you to the destination, make the compass appear as a gradient or spectrum. The spectrum would contain a gradient of color(s) that represent the "hot or cold" of your heading in relation to the true map marker or destination.

A black and white gradient (for example) would be mostly white for the untrained explorer. The parts/directions of the compass shaded black represent the player getting "colder" or farther away from the destination, while the white shaded areas represent a movement towards "warm." The more skilled the character is in Survival/Navigation, the MORE black (cold) the compass would show or it might make sense for an increase in skill to increase the contrast of the compass gradient.

You might want to think of a compass showing lots of white (for novices) as being really vague in the assistance of navigation. The more skill involved, the less vague, and hence, the less white region on the compass.

You can also include things like false positive regions in the compass as well.

I really like this idea (not to toot my own horn), but to each his/her own.

agreed your guy was in Cyrodil at one point so he must have known the locations of major cities, i wouldn't be bothered if TeS V had fast travel as long as it makes sense. Since fast travel does't ruin the game since its an option if you don't like fast travel don't use it, TeS V tries to welcome many players styles and some kids don't want to explore.

One thing I really hope they add in would be mountain climbing, or climbing as a skill so you can scale the tallest picks and actually make it a fun mini game and adventure aspect instead of hop, hop, hop.


Thiiiis,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-nbkYg-q0A


or the bunny hop

Not to go crazy, but drawing some inspiration from the way Assassin's Creed handles stealth, climbing and assassinations would be pretty awesome.

If climbing were to broaden the gameplay (as a new skill or as an expanded function of Acrobatics and/or Athletics), they definitely need to address the NPC and creature AI to also perform the same feats.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to make a sneaking character invisible on-screen or as a silhouette. A master sneak NPC should be able to sneak up on the PC, but anytime an NPC did sneak it was clearly apparent from the player's perspective.

That sums up the basics

I agree with a lot of you about immersion really lacking oblivion. I'd like the option to play in realistic mode (or hardcoe mode, however you want to call it) presented before you start the game. I hope it has at least some of the following:

1. Eating, sleeping.
This is really basic of course, eat enough and regularly and you won't have any negative modifiers for stats/fatigue. Similar for sleeping, but a nice downside of not getting enough sleep would be taking longer to learn skills. So to advance your skills and levels, you'd have to be well rested, and of course leveling up would still happen while sleeping. This shouldn't be too hard to add to an ES game, as it's already done in a fallout game. There has to be a big gap between feeling the negative effects and dying of course. It's a tool to change your behaviour, not a challenge to stay alive.

2. Limited fast travel.
Walking everywhere would be annoying, but fast travel like it's now is too convenient. My idea is to limit fast travel in two ways. First of all, you'd have to be riding a horse. Secondly, you can only travel to city stables, roadside inns, and roadside villages. You also have to have visited the place before you can fast travel to it. Even if it is a big city. Preferably fast travel would also only be possible if you're actually on a main road or in/near a village/inn/city. This would be realistic because you're much more vulnerable on foot than on a horse. If a highwayman or hostile creature would attack you while you're on a horse, you can basically evade and outspeed them. On foot, you'd be forced to defend yourself because you can't just outrun them. It would be great if there's also a sort of horse rental service to make it possible for lower level characters to fast travel at a price. The story could be that the horses have a magic seal so they'd know if you steal the horse. This feature would also make people value their horses a lot more.

3. Limited saving.
Risks actually have to feel like risks, and they don't if the game has just autosaved or you save before a dangerous situation. Instead of having the option of saving your game always on the menu, you'd get the option to save your game every time you sleep in a safe location (Your house, guild hall, inn etc. NOT in a barbarian camp). Of course to make things more bearable, you'll also get the option to create a special savegame when you quit, which you can do anywhere, but upon loading that savegame, it deletes itself. With this change, going on to face a ringleader in a fortress will actually be a dilemma. Maybe you've already had a hard time, and you'll lose loot/progress if you die.

The above three features would also make inns and villages a more meaningful part of the world like they should be.

4. Limited level scaling.
For this, the normal mode doesn't have to be any different than oblivion's. All the developers need to do is add a "natural level" to every zone in the game, underground or above ground. Small barbarian camps and anything very near to main roads and cities would for example get a natural level of 1-7 while mountaintop caves and ruins, and anything deep in the wilderness would get levels like 20-30. Then, at the start of the game a "level scaling percentage" is determined. Basically, at 100% everything would be like in oblivion - leveled the same as your character. At 0% everything would be their natural level. If for example you choose 50% there would be a compromise. For example, if you're level 2, and you're in a level 10 fortress, it would most likely have level 6 enemies and loot. It would be determined by: Natural lvl + (Your lvl - Natural lvl) x 0.50 (0.50 would be the 50% lvl scaling). Then the devs could make the normal mode have 80-100% level scaling, and the hardcoe mode have 0-50% level scaling. It would of course depend on how much stronger you get every level. And they could also make it into a seperate slider.

5. More harsh encumbrance.
Whereas in oblivion you suddenly stood still when overencumbered, there could be a more streamlined encumbrance system. At 50% encumbrance you'd move at 100% speed, at 75% you'd move at 50% speed, and at 100% encumbrance you'd stand still. Also, no containers with unlimited space. Basically give every type of countainer a maximum weight it can carry. That would also encourage people to get bigger homes because they need more storage space. This feature would force people to actually travel light and choose a shortsword as backup weapon instead of a claymore.

6. No magical compass.
This is a very basic thing. Let people look for where they need to go, and only give hints, map markers or a compass point when it's absolutely necessary. Also, if you haven't discovered a location yet, don't let it show up on your compass. You'll only know that there's a cave somewhere on the map once you actually look at the entrance. Before that, it doesn't show up on your compass. It would make looking for mines, camps and caves a bit more interesting hopefully.

7. Less health, more armour.
In oblivion if you're a low level, the type of armour you have doesn't really matter because it gives a very low percentage of protection. At high levels, it's so easy to get maximum shield that you might as well be an unarmored mage. Also too many battles turn into grinds, and take way too long which really hurts archers. As a solution, lower the health for everyone. Also, all heavy armour gets a flat bonus protection to make it useful even at early levels, and light armour also gets a smaller flat bonus. The maximum defense you can get if you've got heavy armour equipped is higher (say, 85) than if you've got light armour equipped (let's say 75), which is more than if you don't wear armour at all (60 or 65?). To counter this, some more pronounced movement penalties, magic penalty and sneak penalty to heavy armour would also be nice. This would make the choice of what armour your character wears a bit more important, rather than what level you are.

8. Optional - different starting location.
Not everyone wants to start with a long tutorial section that svcks you into the main quest. It would be cool if there's a more neutral and simple starting location somewhere else, and a quest would be added to get you into the main quest if you want to do that. This different starting point would also be more suited to RPers.

That's the way I'd like hardcoe mode to be anyways. I'm fully aware that the vanilla mode of the next TES is probably nothing like this, because it caters to a more mainstream audience which is good. This would be a fairly easy way to get a completely new experience out of mostly the same game. So, what do you guys think?

This is good, this is how the game should be all the time. No armor skills, just armor types and their advantage/disadvantages.

Actually, I do think armor skills should stay, but they should have a smaller effect on the protection your armour gives. Most of the skill in heavy armour is in moving efficiently with it, being able to cast spells properly with it and maybe even sneaking with it. It was just really irritating that in oblivion all armour eventually worked exactly the same. When you choose that your character is going to get heavy armour as a major skill in the game, and is going to use it a lot, that should make a big impact on how you play the game.

That should also be the goal of a hardcoe/realistic mode. Not only making the game more believable, but encouraging/forcing the player to act more realistically or more believably. And I think the latter is a lot easier to do than the former.

It's not as if you're going to improve much when you're sneaking in ebony armor, and there's no possible way you're going to improve your movement efficiency by more than 10%. By your terms, you don't have armor skills, you have minor perks. Reducing minor penalties from armor is pretty worthless as a skill.

My new suggestion that I just thought of is you should be able to delete your spells when you no longer need them.

For cripes sake, this.
Along the same lines (spell book organization + inventory organization), the ability to sort your items/spells with more methods would be awesome.

For one, I'd like the items my character currently has equipped to be *stickied to the top of the list in inventory and the spell list.

Secondly, an option to sort spells by skill/school and affect would be a huge help for any character type. In the late game, I always end up cursing myself for having to scroll through a huge list of spells, trying to find a certain spell effect among the dozens of low level spells my newb character bought early on (like previous poster said, deletion would be nice).

It would be SO nice to be able to see all my spells w/ X effect wthout having to scroll up and down to compare/contrast.


Unrelated suggestion:

Deeper quickslot organization. This comes from a console players perspective (don't know how it works on PC), but the 8 quick slots aren't enough IMO. In Dragon Age, the player only had six, having to hold the R-Trigger to use the 4th/5th/6th slots, but why can't Elder Scrolls do something similar.

Use the 8-directons/quickslots on the controller, but also add an additional eight by linking a trigger button to it.

So you would have:

up - up/left - left - left/down - down - right/down - right - up/right

and also (RT = Right Trigger)

RT + up
RT + up/right
RT + up/left
RT + left
RT + right
RT + down/right
RT + down/left
RT + down

There, now console players have 16 quick slots

sounds like a decent idea, but i'd rather use that button for a combat action

Wow, I totally missed that, too true, lol

I guess the right-trigger was a bad idea.

The Mass Effect method is to use the shoulder buttons to access the wheel menus, and the triggers for the combat. If we were able to equip spells like we equip weapons, I think we should be able to assign the shoulder buttons to whatever quickmenu items. There would be eight or ten slots on the wheel, or however many is appropriate.

I really liked that too, I hope they will do more

I agree, as well. I also enjoyed building my stronghold in Morrowind, I've heard (but not actually did it, yet) that a colony in Bloodmoon was buildable, I've enjoyed restoring the Priory of the Nine, and I enjoyed building a new Gatekeeper. I'd like to request more constructive projects. I get satisfaction from seeing something built/improved in video games, although I assume there are also people who like to see things destroyed. In Oblivion, I really would have liked to have restored Kvatch and I felt that could have been very memorable. In Fallout 3, I gained enjoyment from getting the water purifier up and running in Broken Steel and I would have loved to just build a small colony of my own, somehow.

have you ever played that free steam game age of chivalry, i really loved how they did sword fighting and really wish they could implement in into oblivion, though sadly i cant imagine how it would work w/ a controller, i loved performing jabs heavy swings, side swings and blocks based off of different mouse actions (like using the scroll wheel)

I like Daniel_Kay's suggestion. A mode where you have to eat/drink/sleep.. but it infers bonuses when you do. After a while of not eating/drinking/sleeping, you lose those bonuses, and a while later still, you get into negatives.


I like the idea in principle, but the reality is that games crash. Often. It would really svck if the game crashed, causing you to lose a bunch of hard work because you haven't had a chance to get to some place you could rest/save. And sometimes, people like to make saves then go off and do something completely out of character, or something else of interest, that you don't want your character to "officially" do.


Not too sure about this. Although the distance to some place appearing on your compass should be shortened, there would be cues a person could pickup on to tell there's something nearby, without actually seeing it. In Daggerfall, you could "smell" when you got near dungeons, and adding a bit of directivity to that wouldn't be that far fetched. It could perhaps even be a tracking skill... at low levels, you only smell something vague. At higher levels, you can tell what type of dungeon it smells like. Higher still, you can tell which direction it is. Cities and towns you could hear before actually seeing them. Though some places you may not notice before actually seeing it.


The tutorial dungeon should definitely be optional. I actually liked it in Oblivion the first time.. being stuck underground, working my way through the cave system, having the type of character be decided depending on how I play (with an option to override later), then eventually move into a sewer system, before getting out and achieving that sense of accomplishment, and realization that the game has just barely started... along with the awe at the scenery. But it quickly lost its charm on subsequent play-throughs.

I don't much care about different starting points, as long as mods can easilly handle it. Because even if the game has a bunch of starting points, there'll always be people who would like something else.



I'd more like the ability to sort them better. That goes for the inventory as a whole. Custom sorting capabilities. If different classes of spells could be sub-grouped, it would make going through them quicker, and you would have quicker access to different tiers (eg. Defense is one tier up from Protect, yet they're listed far apart from each other; and sometimes you want to keep older spells around in case you don't want to waste the magicka for the strongest version you have, or don't have enough magicka to cast it, but you could cast a weaker version).

Absolutely NO to whoever suggested limited saving. Some of us have lives, and sometimes we have to quit the game suddenly, there shouldn't be any penalty for me which means losing some of what I have done, just because I have to quit to deal with RL - I should be able to save and come back to where I was.

Saving at checkpoints is a "feature" of some FPS games, and if I wanted to play an FPS there are plenty with that feature that I could choose between. But I want a longer, more involved, more complex game, and because I'm an advlt I need the ability to save the game and step away from it to deal with something more important, and trust me there are far more important things that go on around me that I sometimes (despite trying to avoid) have to get involved in.

I don't buy games where I can't make a save and come out at will. It's probably alright for teenagers during the school break to dedicate themselves to a game for a certain amount of time, but the rest of us have other stuff to do that doesn't neatly fit in between game save checkpoints, and we certainly shouldn't be penalised for that. Absolutely obnoxious suggestion.

Couldn't agree more with Apona. Except that I have to correct that it's not only advlts who have lives.

No, I know that, sorry if that caused any offense - but there are people who have a nice sheltered life as a kid (the lucky portion of society!) and the stuff that weighs you down doesn't truly kick in until you have kids yourself and a mortgage and threat of job cuts and failing health and then you realise that even though you thought things were bad when you were at school that's nothing compared to what you have to deal with now blah blah blah - but yeah life's not always a cakewalk for younger people, it wasn't for me, I get that and ought to remember it and I didn't mean to generalise.

But still no to limited saves, I won't buy a game that I can't save when I want to. I play the game, it doesn't get to play me

I agree, The whole idea with world wise representation of the consequences of your actions is some seriously awesome stuff that should be added more of.

I've got a suggestion: just announce the [censored] game. That's all.

If you would've read the text completely, you'd see I suggested a way to quit&save anywhere. The difference to saving while sleeping would be that you'd have to quit the game to save it, and once you load that savegame, it'll automatically delete itself. That way, you can still leave the game any time you want, but you can't load that game again and again just to try your luck. I know a lot of people don't like the idea to have to reach a point to save the game, and it does bring a lot of annoyances. However, it can also make the game a lot more exciting, and it can make you actually fear for your characters life.

Well this has probably been said but oblivion needs a next gen graphics system i like the original but it can be better i don't take credit for this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwmAIfL_yoo&feature=related

This is well done it should be on Elder Scrolls V or close to it.