[Natalie J Webster]

You know what I'd like to see make a return? Those messages you'd get at the top of your screen whenever you arrived at a dungeon site in Daggerfall, but have them orated so that they play once you get close to a location so it kinda' sounds like an old-school D&D DM hamming it up for his players.

Been watching 'lets paly Morrowind' and thinking "How could they have gone so wrong?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt5YKmP7ecY

It's Youtube. 95% of LPs on there have gone so wrong.

[electro_fantics]

I definitely still think there should be an overall level to your character. That was part of the idea: your overall level should determine things like your health, fatigue, magicka, and overall ability to battle higher level enemies without being squashed. I just don't like that the overall level is tied to skills. I think skills should be completely separate from gaining experience and leveling up.

As for the related skills, I think that having two related skills as key class skills for your custom class level faster than normal is a great idea. That way, if your playstyle is hack-n-slash, you can gain your skill in longswords, shortswords, blunt, etc., quickly and mold your character into exactly what you want. This comes at a cost, however, as this would mean that armor skills, mercantile skills, stealth skills, and so on would level much slower than usual, so your abilities to mitigate damage and surprise enemies are held back. I'll spend some time thinking about a way to make the system work in detail, and any suggestions are welcomed.

I also thought of another cool spell for necromancy: Damage Mitigation. Your summoned minion takes a percentage of all damage dealt to you (the percentage grows with your necromancy skill). Lasts for a certain time duration or until minion is dead. Would be pretty sweet to have a scamp take half of all my damage

[Leonie Connor]

I definitely still think there should be an overall level to your character. That was part of the idea: your overall level should determine things like your health, fatigue, magicka, and overall ability to battle higher level enemies without being squashed. I just don't like that the overall level is tied to skills. I think skills should be completely separate from gaining experience and leveling up.

As for the related skills, I think that having two related skills as key class skills for your custom class level faster than normal is a great idea. That way, if your playstyle is hack-n-slash, you can gain your skill in longswords, shortswords, blunt, etc., quickly and mold your character into exactly what you want. This comes at a cost, however, as this would mean that armor skills, mercantile skills, stealth skills, and so on would level much slower than usual, so your abilities to mitigate damage and surprise enemies are held back. I'll spend some time thinking about a way to make the system work in detail, and any suggestions are welcomed.

I also thought of another cool spell for necromancy: Damage Mitigation. Your summoned minion takes a percentage of all damage dealt to you (the percentage grows with your necromancy skill). Lasts for a certain time duration or until minion is dead. Would be pretty sweet to have a scamp take half of all my damage

That last bit really reminds me of the Warlock class from World of Warcraft. Not a bad idea, since all but 2 of the conjured creatures in OB were absolutely useless, and died within 10 seconds.

[Klaire]

I still think level could be tied to skill gains, maybe not as strongly though, and I'm not sure about what to fill the void with...fame, quests, experience, time, feats, interaction...most of which are the same thing in another light.

% level due to skill gains could be tied, somehow, to the rate at which the levels gain?
The more I think about it, the more I think about DF. I never got into the game, but the character creation was extensive, and good. So I am thinking that a few main / specilized skills decide leveling as is, and the rest are dropped to 50 or 25 percent of the current level gain. Going back to DF, 3 main skills sounds reasonable. Then 7 or 10 major / minor ones...

Is this at all where you were headed?

[TRIsha FEnnesse]

It's Youtube. 95% of LPs on there have gone so wrong.

I was meaning "how could they have gone so wrong" (in oblivion).

Just from watching the character creation and start of the game and the dialogue system, How could they screw that up? but they did. Oblivion was a pretty good game for the time when it came out, but looking back at morrowind now (I've never played it) makes me wonder why they took such an awsome system and changed it to what oblivion ended up being.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRJZ295sU2A&feature=related

Look at 6:00, when he uses the lock pick, he equips it and thrusts it into the key hole like one would expect. what happend to this?
Look at the UI, its just 3 health/magic bars and a weapon icon. Nothing else. We dont need a huge bar that covers half the screen with some useless crap. And that quest jounal is actually a journal.

Why dont they just remake Morrowind with better graphics? I know I'd play it.

Also I would like to see silver and bronze coins in the game. No way is a pewter knife worth 1 gold and neither is an apple worth 1 gold, nor a ball of yarn, or a corn cobb. They'd brobably go for a couple of shingles, not gold.

[Kayla Keizer]

I'd rather do away with leveling as it is, there isn't a lot of point. Make HP directly connected to constitution, have stats increase directly by use of relevant skills, and there you go. Same result without suddenly needing to find a bed in the middle of a dungeon, and no high-pressure incentive to powerlevel for max multipliers. Still, there are useful aspects to showing a total level, aside from people who simply like to have it there as a general "power level" measure. For one thing, mind-affecting spells and such. Willpower can't handle it alone, otherwise you'd have a low-level mage running around commanding a legion of extremely powerful ogres just because they're dumb. If they implement more abstract effects on the player like pain and fear, total level would be an effective "resistance" against that too. The game itself needs it too; it's a lot easier to tell an area to spawn "level 10 bandits" than to have to individually set their stats and place them one at a time.

It would probably be easy enough to tie it to chosen stats. Like every 10 major skills is a level, every 15 minor, every 20 miscellaneous. Just an example, of course. An alternative could be to not have it related to skills, but tied to accomplishments; quest rewards, discovering artifacts, killing rare and powerful monsters. I'd rather keep it tied to skills than do that, though, for the sake of roleplaying...otherwise characters will be indirectly forced to do "everything," including stuff that character normally wouldn't do, if they want to be a higher level.

[jaideep singh]

Woops.

[luke trodden]

Been watching 'lets paly Morrowind' and thinking "How could they have gone so wrong?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt5YKmP7ecY

Just recently finished watching the series (first 108 episodes). Best series I've seen thus far. Gix did an amazing job. It's the closest thing any Morrowind vet can get to re-experiencing the game for the first time. :goodjob:

[kasia]

The following would be MAJOR (and a few minor) things I would like to see (that I have not seen mentioned, although I'm sure they probably have been):

- Options at the start of each character to play with non-levelling loot and non-levelling creatures (with accompanying explanations of exactly what these options mean). These should be separate so you might have levelling creatures but non-levelling loot, or vice versa.

- Assuming the engine technology in TESV is far advanced compared to Gamebrio of TES4 or FO3, then the entire world should be one, persistent, open, world. Not only should the entire mainland continent of Tamriel (not Vardenfell and not Summerset Isles...expansions) be available for exploration but I don't want to see a single fade-out/loading-screen/fade-in. This would require a veritable miracle of game design, programming, and hardware implementation, but I have a feeling it could indeed be done, especially since it is not (please please please don't be) an MMO, world-streaming technology has become very advanced and there is tons of middleware that could help.

- A birth/growing up style intro/tutorial sequence similar to the concept behind FO3 but transplanted into the TES setting. No more 'Oh I'm a random prisoner who happens to be the chosen one.' Let's be the chosen one from birth, thank you very much. (I have what I think is a REALLY awesome 'prologue' idea for this the tutorial section but i'm gonna keep that under wraps for now)

- Each race has a separate starting place and origin (first act, after prologue) story: Dunmer from Morrowind, Bretons and Altmer from High Rock, Nords and Imperials from Skyrim, Redguard and Orcs from Hammerfell, Khajitt from Elsewyr, Argonians from Black Marsh, Bosmer from Valenwood.

- Story incorporates three major acts (takes place thirty or so years after the end of TES4), first takes place in your home lands where you do something amazingly heroic or menacingly evil (or just damn interesting) that is intertwined with the primary 'problem' and then you are summoned/brought to the Imperial City (which has been vastly improved and changed after the Oblivion crisis) because of this and are given a mission by a member of the elder council (depending on your character class, race, gender and the choices you made in the first act) that leads on to the rest of the story.

- Characters that really MEAN something to you other than yourself, that you can really get attached to, care about, love, hate, etc. You can probably tell I'm drawing a bit from Bioware here and as much as I loved the story and character elements of Dragon Age I often caught myself wishing the immersion and combat were like Oblivion. It would not be easy, but some kind of companion system where there are people in the world you have known and fought alongside. People who are helping you instead of you just helping everyone else and feeling more like an errand boy than a great hero or treacherous villain.

- Good voice acting and many more voice actors. Voice acting is NOT hard and NOT expensive if you know what you're doing, but the key is variety and having a director who is an actual director (not a game designer or writer, someone who knows how to work with actors) because the previous games could NOT have had one - and if they did, he was a fraud, ha!

- The option to have your character's own voice for certain situations, again much like Dragon Age, chosen from a variety of male and female race and personality based voices with about 50-60 lines each for various situations. You can also choose to have no voice for those who prefer the strong, silent types.

- Body-morphing as well as face-morphing, and different body morphs/height ranges for NPCs (finally fat-faced people will have the body to match, and all you would-be assassin's can be lithe and wirey!). Yeah sure, then all the clothing armor would have to morph too...whatever, Bethesda, make it happen, you got money!

- Some kind of improvement to the system of conversation. Not sure quite how this would be done but the zoom in to the single static character's face is getting stale, not to mention making it impossible for there to be conversations with more than you and one other person. And since this is supposed to be a first-person game (please don't take that away) IE you ARE the character as opposed to being a camera watching the character from behind, or worse yet, from above like a puppeteer...ugh...it would have to be a very advanced first-person cinematic system, where the characters you talk to could move around, as could you, but you would still be engaged in conversation with them and have dialogue prompts on the screen. We can't just resort to the Bioware cinematic camera cuz that'd be lazy and breaking the fourth wall.

- If for some crazy reason (ok not crazy, a lot of people want it) they decide to add a third-person view that actually works properly (IE you can reliably engage in combat while in it) then it must not be a replacement for the first-person system, only an addition. I know I personally stay first-person the entire time playing.

- That said, mirrors and other reflective surfaces so first-person purists like myself can get a glimpse of our awesome new armor or weapon without opening the inventory screen. Ok that's not why, but it would be nice to have mirrors in game, real-time reflection in general (and then when you contract vampirism you no longer show up in them, haha!)

- Major combat overhaul for melee classes (minor overhauls for ranged and casters - but mostly just in the form of more options) but for melee classes, we need a system that is more visceral, combining a more tangible stat-based system with full-contact combat, similar to the only good part about Dark Messiah, where when you stabbed someone you actually stabbed them, or lopped their head off, or kick them off your sword into a rack of spikes (that was tons of fun). Also weapon stances and button combinations for advanced moves would be nice, and a larger variety of weaponry (of course, that's a given). Others have proposed more elaborate systems along similar lines and this is just my way of saying 'I agree.'

- Highly customizable HUD system, similar to what you find in current hud customization mods for Oblivion, just give us that.

I basically want Bethesda to work harder than any development team ever has and produce the greatest game ever and have it come out in a year and beat COD6's record for largest entertainment launch in history. KTHXBAI :bolt:

[Richard]

I don't enjoy feeling like I am falling behind my enemies in leveling. When a rat, which took 2 swipes with a rusty sword at lvl 2, requires five or six swipes with a glass longsword at lvl 25, I feel like I've been sitting around eating potato chips while the rats all went to the gym and did steroids.

Well said! The level scaling is ok in TES2 and 3, but huge fail in TES4. So, don't get RID of the level scaling, just make it better.

[Lavender Brown]

And that quest jounal is actually a journal.

And with the expansions, it's practical, too. That's why I think we should just keep Morrowind's old journal system. When it has the functions from Tribunal, it works just as well as in Oblivion, but it's actually a journal, instead of just another poo menu.

Why dont they just remake Morrowind with better graphics? I know I'd play it.

MGE. I still play Morrowind, and with MGE around 70% of the time is just me looking at the awesome scenery.


I'd like to see the ability to knock enemies over randomly when fighting, say around a 5% chance per hit, and even higher on those who you are a higher level than. For example, if I'm fighting an enemy on a cliff, I should be able to knock them off the edge. Even better would be a kick attack, that does a small amount of damage, but knocks them back. Some would be immune, of course, simply kicking the main bad guy off a cliff would be terrible.


I'd like to state that, I think Vivec should be a main bad guy in the next game. I suggested a few threads back, but I thought I'd get the message out again

Vivec was taken by daedra, but what if, it wasn't to kill him? Maybe there was a deal taking place? Perhaps Mehrunes Dagon, not being able to come back to Nirn (I think), would make his move through Vivec. Vivec was strong before coming a god, so it makes sense that he would be a tough bad guy. I'd like to see the Tribunal temple siding with him (although the majority would leave the faith, of course, but some would still remain), and casting Almsivi Intervention could easily get you killed. Vivec, like other demi-gods, may have gone insane due to his loss of power, and his time spent in Oblivion.

Vivec may have also borrowed some power from Mehrunes Dagon, or any other Prince, to become just as powerful as before, and be a major threat.

I love the idea of a previously good guy, who saves millions, and helped whoever he could, turning into a bad guy due to his insanity, similar to Almalexia.



I also want to see a few good easter eggs. I know there where in Morrowind and Oblivion, but personally, I'd prefer to see even more. They just add a bit of humor to the game. There needs to be fishy stick references, and more similar to the star wars scene in Bloodmoon. (The skeleton encased in ice, reaching for his sabre, I believe)

People say that they didn't like how you had to avoid walls in dungeons in Daggerfall, due to climbing, but what if they have the same system, with the need to jump into the wall first? Pretty easy to avoid, and we still have the climbing we all know and love.

[Rob Smith]

The following would be MAJOR (and a few minor) things I would like to see (that I have not seen mentioned, although I'm sure they probably have been):

- Options at the start of each character to play with non-levelling loot and non-levelling creatures (with accompanying explanations of exactly what these options mean). These should be separate so you might have levelling creatures but non-levelling loot, or vice versa.

- Assuming the engine technology in TESV is far advanced compared to Gamebrio of TES4 or FO3, then the entire world should be one, persistent, open, world. Not only should the entire mainland continent of Tamriel (not Vardenfell and not Summerset Isles...expansions) be available for exploration but I don't want to see a single fade-out/loading-screen/fade-in. This would require a veritable miracle of game design, programming, and hardware implementation, but I have a feeling it could indeed be done, especially since it is not (please please please don't be) an MMO, world-streaming technology has become very advanced and there is tons of middleware that could help.

- A birth/growing up style intro/tutorial sequence similar to the concept behind FO3 but transplanted into the TES setting. No more 'Oh I'm a random prisoner who happens to be the chosen one.' Let's be the chosen one from birth, thank you very much. (I have what I think is a REALLY awesome 'prologue' idea for this the tutorial section but i'm gonna keep that under wraps for now)

- Each race has a separate starting place and origin (first act, after prologue) story: Dunmer from Morrowind, Bretons and Altmer from High Rock, Nords and Imperials from Skyrim, Redguard and Orcs from Hammerfell, Khajitt from Elsewyr, Argonians from Black Marsh, Bosmer from Valenwood.

- Story incorporates three major acts (takes place thirty or so years after the end of TES4), first takes place in your home lands where you do something amazingly heroic or menacingly evil (or just damn interesting) that is intertwined with the primary 'problem' and then you are summoned/brought to the Imperial City (which has been vastly improved and changed after the Oblivion crisis) because of this and are given a mission by a member of the elder council (depending on your character class, race, gender and the choices you made in the first act) that leads on to the rest of the story.

- Characters that really MEAN something to you other than yourself, that you can really get attached to, care about, love, hate, etc. You can probably tell I'm drawing a bit from Bioware here and as much as I loved the story and character elements of Dragon Age I often caught myself wishing the immersion and combat were like Oblivion. It would not be easy, but some kind of companion system where there are people in the world you have known and fought alongside. People who are helping you instead of you just helping everyone else and feeling more like an errand boy than a great hero or treacherous villain.

- Good voice acting and many more voice actors. Voice acting is NOT hard and NOT expensive if you know what you're doing, but the key is variety and having a director who is an actual director (not a game designer or writer, someone who knows how to work with actors) because the previous games could NOT have had one - and if they did, he was a fraud, ha!

- The option to have your character's own voice for certain situations, again much like Dragon Age, chosen from a variety of male and female race and personality based voices with about 50-60 lines each for various situations. You can also choose to have no voice for those who prefer the strong, silent types.

- Body-morphing as well as face-morphing, and different body morphs/height ranges for NPCs (finally fat-faced people will have the body to match, and all you would-be assassin's can be lithe and wirey!). Yeah sure, then all the clothing armor would have to morph too...whatever, Bethesda, make it happen, you got money!

- Some kind of improvement to the system of conversation. Not sure quite how this would be done but the zoom in to the single static character's face is getting stale, not to mention making it impossible for there to be conversations with more than you and one other person. And since this is supposed to be a first-person game (please don't take that away) IE you ARE the character as opposed to being a camera watching the character from behind, or worse yet, from above like a puppeteer...ugh...it would have to be a very advanced first-person cinematic system, where the characters you talk to could move around, as could you, but you would still be engaged in conversation with them and have dialogue prompts on the screen. We can't just resort to the Bioware cinematic camera cuz that'd be lazy and breaking the fourth wall.

- If for some crazy reason (ok not crazy, a lot of people want it) they decide to add a third-person view that actually works properly (IE you can reliably engage in combat while in it) then it must not be a replacement for the first-person system, only an addition. I know I personally stay first-person the entire time playing.

- That said, mirrors and other reflective surfaces so first-person purists like myself can get a glimpse of our awesome new armor or weapon without opening the inventory screen. Ok that's not why, but it would be nice to have mirrors in game, real-time reflection in general (and then when you contract vampirism you no longer show up in them, haha!)

- Major combat overhaul for melee classes (minor overhauls for ranged and casters - but mostly just in the form of more options) but for melee classes, we need a system that is more visceral, combining a more tangible stat-based system with full-contact combat, similar to the only good part about Dark Messiah, where when you stabbed someone you actually stabbed them, or lopped their head off, or kick them off your sword into a rack of spikes (that was tons of fun). Also weapon stances and button combinations for advanced moves would be nice, and a larger variety of weaponry (of course, that's a given). Others have proposed more elaborate systems along similar lines and this is just my way of saying 'I agree.'

- Highly customizable HUD system, similar to what you find in current hud customization mods for Oblivion, just give us that.

I basically want Bethesda to work harder than any development team ever has and produce the greatest game ever and have it come out in a year and beat COD6's record for largest entertainment launch in history. KTHXBAI :bolt:

For your first point about turning leveling mobs / lewt off andon; This wouldn't work. What made Morrowind superior to Oblivion wasn't only the fact taht the world didn't level,but also that the world wasn't designed to be leveling. In oblivion nothing explorable is unique, and nowhere acn you find a unique item, exactly because everything needs to follow your level. In Morrowind however everything feels uniquely designed by hand, and you could run into some guy wielding the sword "ZOMGAWD" if you weren't careful... THIS was one of morrowinds best features by far. Now, let's say that you implement a system where you can choose to have the world level with you like in OB. This would mean the world would have to be designed to do this, and essencially making the static world completely pointless.


I do like some of your other ideas tho; Third person is utter useless for combat... I don't think anyone ever used it other anything other than looking at themselves, so this could need quite the makeover. However I too prefer to stay in first person, but again, we haven't really tried having the possibility of using a decent 3rd person yet, so who knows.

Your comments on the conversation system make sense too, the whole "freezing the world"never thrilled me, I didn't mind it as much in morrowind since you had to read everything, so it made sense to give you time. In OB it stood out a bit more since you actually heard what people said in real time, making the fact that everything else seemed to stop stand out more. But yah, something that made multi-npc conversations possible would be awesome.

I also think the only good part bout Dark Messiah was the feel of the combat, when you actually felt like you were doing an impact, I do fear that this would make TES 5 become even more "action rpg" 'ish, which frankly made OB so mainstream it wasn't fun in the long run.. but hey, just my opinion..
.
Not Sure i like your growing up thing tho, I actually really like the "you're just some random prisoner" start... makes everything seem strange, and TES games are supposed engage you in a strange strange world.

[Darian Ennels]

I was meaning "how could they have gone so wrong" (in oblivion).

Just from watching the character creation and start of the game and the dialogue system, How could they screw that up? but they did. Oblivion was a pretty good game for the time when it came out, but looking back at morrowind now (I've never played it) makes me wonder why they took such an awsome system and changed it to what oblivion ended up being.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRJZ295sU2A&feature=related

Look at 6:00, when he uses the lock pick, he equips it and thrusts it into the key hole like one would expect. what happend to this?
Look at the UI, its just 3 health/magic bars and a weapon icon. Nothing else. We dont need a huge bar that covers half the screen with some useless crap. And that quest jounal is actually a journal.

Why dont they just remake Morrowind with better graphics? I know I'd play it.

Also I would like to see silver and bronze coins in the game. No way is a pewter knife worth 1 gold and neither is an apple worth 1 gold, nor a ball of yarn, or a corn cobb. They'd brobably go for a couple of shingles, not gold.

In don't know if you noticed this, but that guy actually said the conversation-system wasn't all that better in Morrowind. He also could understand why they introduced fasttravel.

Also, the lockpick-system changed because people were complaining about it in Morrowind. I actually liked the system (mini-game) in Oblivion, though it could have used a bit more diversity (different locks, for instance). And they also should have made some cap or make you do something really special or have it as a special item for a quest ('golden lockpicker' or something), but where it still had a chance of breaking it, after, say, 20 tries. As it was now, the skill of thief in opening locks became pretty much useless once you had the skeleton key. I mean, even a stupid Orkisch grunt could pick open any lock if he tried a lot, with more success (in the long run) than a 100% skilled thief. If something is *unbreakable* it just doesn't matter anymore, does it?

Also, about the fast-travel: I actually liked that. I also do not understand some people saying it shouldn't be in there, even if optional. That doesn't make sense. sorry, but it doesn't. If YOU (I'm directing it at anyone who doesn't want it there) want to explore the surroundings and strolling the countryside, fine. I do that too, sometimes. But sometimes, I also want to be back to the city in a quick way, and if you're out in the open, there wouldn't be any equivalent of a silth strider or carriage or whatever. It's not instant transportation, it's just fast travel, after all. If they would abolish the latter, they should introduce the first again. Without transportation and recall spells, fasttravel will do the trick. (Though they might have implemented it a bit better, with at random meetings of animals or bandits along your way to where you were heading - decreasing the chance the nearer you are of 100% stealth and luck, for instance.)

But anyway, point being: with an optional fast-travel system, we don't force other people to use it. Without it, you ARE forcing other people to walk in a slow manner, at least most of the time. And yes, I've seen the argument of "Even if it's optional it shouldn't be there, because otherwise I'm going to use it anyway'....but that doesn't make any sense as an argument. Then you're actually forcing other people to go your way because you have a too weak of a character/personality NOT to use fasttravel. Well, I'm sorry, but that's your problem, not mine. If you're really so 'into' exploring and detest fast travel, you should simply muster the will not to use it, and do as you actually enjoy the game the most (dixit yourself). I find it hard to believe that the fact that some people are so weak-willed they are using the fasttravelsystem (what? 'against their will'?' for f- sake ) actually being used as an argument for not letting fasttravel be an option. Let me restate it clearly: if you don't like the system, don't use it, period. If you can't keep yourself from using it, it's your problem, not that of someone else.

I could go with the suggestion there should be other modes of transportation (I liked the silth riders of MW too, after all). But to argue that fast-travel shouldn't be there because otherwise you won't be able to keep yourself from using it, is just nonsensical: that's not a problem of the system, but of your own self.

They could make more transport-modes, and make the fast-travel and compass optional, but it should remain so it can be used for those that want it. Those that don't want it, shouldn't use it. If they don't, it's an indication they don't really mind it all *that* much. It's as simple as that.

All in all, I think Oblivion did an admirable job of improving upon MW. Many things were changed just because of complaints about what was wrong in MW (just as we are doing now with Oblivion). In most cases, the changes were an improvement, at least in principle, BUT the actual implementation of the changes could have done better (the levelling system, for instance).

[Sxc-Mary]

The following would be MAJOR (and a few minor) things I would like to see (that I have not seen mentioned, although I'm sure they probably have been):

- Options at the start of each character to play with non-levelling loot and non-levelling creatures (with accompanying explanations of exactly what these options mean). These should be separate so you might have levelling creatures but non-levelling loot, or vice versa.

- Assuming the engine technology in TESV is far advanced compared to Gamebrio of TES4 or FO3, then the entire world should be one, persistent, open, world. Not only should the entire mainland continent of Tamriel (not Vardenfell and not Summerset Isles...expansions) be available for exploration but I don't want to see a single fade-out/loading-screen/fade-in. This would require a veritable miracle of game design, programming, and hardware implementation, but I have a feeling it could indeed be done, especially since it is not (please please please don't be) an MMO, world-streaming technology has become very advanced and there is tons of middleware that could help.

:rofl:
You're asking the impossible, my friend. I don't know any game who could do that, not even in the near future of where gaming is at the moment. Completely open one cell world?
I hope you like 30 min load times before you start playing I guess. Even then, I'd imagine lag would be ridiculous, especially how detailed interior places would be. It's virtually impossible to do that, which a place so big as TES.

[Andy durkan]

For your first point about turning leveling mobs / lewt off andon; This wouldn't work. What made Morrowind superior to Oblivion wasn't only the fact taht the world didn't level,but also that the world wasn't designed to be leveling. In oblivion nothing explorable is unique, and nowhere acn you find a unique item, exactly because everything needs to follow your level. In Morrowind however everything feels uniquely designed by hand, and you could run into some guy wielding the sword "ZOMGAWD" if you weren't careful... THIS was one of morrowinds best features by far. Now, let's say that you implement a system where you can choose to have the world level with you like in OB. This would mean the world would have to be designed to do this, and essencially making the static world completely pointless.


I do like some of your other ideas tho; Third person is utter useless for combat... I don't think anyone ever used it other anything other than looking at themselves, so this could need quite the makeover. However I too prefer to stay in first person, but again, we haven't really tried having the possibility of using a decent 3rd person yet, so who knows.

Your comments on the conversation system make sense too, the whole "freezing the world"never thrilled me, I didn't mind it as much in morrowind since you had to read everything, so it made sense to give you time. In OB it stood out a bit more since you actually heard what people said in real time, making the fact that everything else seemed to stop stand out more. But yah, something that made multi-npc conversations possible would be awesome.

I also think the only good part bout Dark Messiah was the feel of the combat, when you actually felt like you were doing an impact, I do fear that this would make TES 5 become even more "action rpg" 'ish, which frankly made OB so mainstream it wasn't fun in the long run.. but hey, just my opinion..

1. They fixed it in Fallout 3, it's a lot better in the game.

2. They fixed it in Fallout 3

3. They can't really change that unless they make conversations impossible if there's an enemy nearby or if you're being attacked, which could work.

4. The game shouldn't be around walking around looking at things either. I like roleplaying as much as the next guy, but making combat "less fun" so that it's less "mainstreamed" doesn't mean the quality of everything else will go up. And by the way, in most of my roleplays I work in an inn or try not to fight much, I think that making fighting "less fun" won't help, it'll just make things worse, and I don't even like fighting.

:rofl:
You're asking the impossible, my friend. I don't know any game who could do that, not even in the near future of where gaming is at the moment. Completely open one cell world?
I hope you like 30 min load times before you start playing I guess. Even then, I'd imagine lag would be ridiculous, especially how detailed interior places would be. It's virtually impossible to do that, which a place so big as TES.

Not to mention how you couldn't have changes like what happened in the Temple District because of the cells.

[joeK]

Also, about the fast-travel:

Considering how recently the last thread about fast travel was locked for people screaming mindlessly at each other, it probably shouldn't be brought back up for now.

I hope you like 30 min load times before you start playing I guess. Even then, I'd imagine lag would be ridiculous, especially how detailed interior places would be. It's virtually impossible to do that, which a place so big as TES.

As a sidenote, I don't think it's something that could be changed much via suggestion anyway. I have to assume that Bethesda will push toward that as technology improves, but if current technology doesn't allow it, asking won't change anything.

[Camden Unglesbee]

1. They fixed it in Fallout 3, it's a lot better in the game.

2. They fixed it in Fallout 3

3. They can't really change that unless they make conversations impossible if there's an enemy nearby or if you're being attacked, which could work.

4. The game shouldn't be around walking around looking at things either. I like roleplaying as much as the next guy, but making combat "less fun" so that it's less "mainstreamed" doesn't mean the quality of everything else will go up. And by the way, in most of my roleplays I work in an inn or try not to fight much, I think that making fighting "less fun" won't help, it'll just make things worse, and I don't even like fighting.

1. No they didn't.. I agree fallout 3 was a vast improvement, and I'd love TES V to be like that, but keep in mind i was responding to his point about it being switched off and on.

2. Not quite, fallout 3's thirdperson is not very good either in my opinion.

3. Maybe I did forget to mention tha I have no idea how this would work... I just pointed out it would be cool if they succeeded in making such a system.

4. I agree, and i think I may have expressed myself a bit unclear... My point wasn't to dumb down the combat I just ment that combat shouldn't take over the game.

[Kirsty Wood]

1. They fixed it in Fallout 3, it's a lot better in the game.

2. They fixed it in Fallout 3

3. They can't really change that unless they make conversations impossible if there's an enemy nearby or if you're being attacked, which could work.

4. The game shouldn't be around walking around looking at things either. I like roleplaying as much as the next guy, but making combat "less fun" so that it's less "mainstreamed" doesn't mean the quality of everything else will go up. And by the way, in most of my roleplays I work in an inn or try not to fight much, I think that making fighting "less fun" won't help, it'll just make things worse, and I don't even like fighting.

1. No they didn't.. I agree fallout 3 was a vast improvement, and I'd love TES V to be like that, but keep in mind i was responding to his point about it being switched off and on.

2. Not quite, fallout 3's thirdperson is not very good either in my opinion.

3. Maybe I did forget to mention tha I have no idea how this would work... I just pointed out it would be cool if they succeeded in making such a system.

4. I agree, and i think I may have expressed myself a bit unclear... My point wasn't to dumb down the combat I just ment that combat shouldn't take over the game.

[Jamie Moysey]

1. No they didn't.. I agree fallout 3 was a vast improvement, and I'd love TES V to be like that, but keep in mind i was responding to his point about it being switched off and on.

2. Not quite, fallout 3's thirdperson is not very good either in my opinion.

3. Maybe I did forget to mention tha I have no idea how this would work... I just pointed out it would be cool if they succeeded in making such a system.

4. I agree, and i think I may have expressed myself a bit unclear... My point wasn't to dumb down the combat I just ment that combat shouldn't take over the game.

2. You can actually aim in Fallout 3 in third person. :shrug:

4. And I agree that combat shouldn't take over the game either, I misinterpreted.

I'm not attacking you, just wanted to point out some things. No hard feelings.

[Leah]

Well said! The level scaling is ok in TES2 and 3, but huge fail in TES4. So, don't get RID of the level scaling, just make it better.

The reason I say scaling is a bad idea is that it disables any real tangible effect of leveling; when I turn level 20, I want to kill the rat in one hit, even if I'm slapping it with my bare hand. It's a rat. Enemies later in the game, however, like daedra and trolls, should be harder to kill, requiring better skills and higher level to engage them. This mechanic can be used to open the world more slowly, as a reward for leveling and improving skills. This, coupled with the inability to fast travel to cities without first walking there, would make the game world seem larger, since there would be a progression to the game world opening up. The final thing this allows for is unique artifacts, ones that don't level as you level. There could finally be "best weapons in the game" that are worth going after, and high level and great skills would be necessary to acquire them. Even accessing the areas where these weapons are found could require high skills, like high destruction skill to annihilate a magical barrier to some new area.

As for the key class skills idea, I think I have a decent start: we already have skill sets that contain related skills: Combat skills, Stealth skills, and Magic skills (referring to OB manual). When you create a class, you have the ability to choose one skill from each skill set, which will affect the rate at which the levels of other skills increase from those skill sets. Basically, there is one other "aligned" skill for each key skill you choose, and one "degenerate" skill. Every other skill in the sets are unaffected by your choice. A rough sketch of how this should go, in order of key class skill, aligned skill, degenerate skill:

Combat skills
block, blade, hand-to-hand; armorer, heavy armor, blunt; heavy armor, blunt, athletics; blunt, athletics, armorer; blade, block, hand-to-hand; athletics, blade, block; hand-to-hand, athletics, heavy armor

Magic skills
destruction, alteration, illusion; alteration, illusion, mysticism; illusion, mysticism, alteration; conjuration, destruction, restoration; mysticism, illusion, alchemy; restoration, alchemy, conjuration

Stealth skills
Security, sneak, mercantile; sneak, marksman, acrobatics; acrobatics, light armor, speechcraft; light armor, marksman, security; marksman, sneak, speechcraft; mercantile, speechcraft, marksman; speechcraft, mercantile, security

There's also the possibility that the player can choose a key skill, aligned skill, and degenerate skill from each skill set, which could add a little more strategy to the game and allow the player to tailor their character to their playstyle. Finally, the player must choose which skill set is key, aligned, and degenerate, which would further differentiate the character and keep me from being the great stealthy heavy armor-wearing magical warrior that does everything. I should have a skill set that levels quickly, so that I can build a character into something formidable in some way from the start, and as I work, the character becomes noticeably stronger (getting rid of scaling and skills with serious effects will accomplish this).
Any suggestions welcome.

[Katharine Newton]

When a rat, which took 2 swipes with a rusty sword at lvl 2, requires five or six swipes with a glass longsword at lvl 25, I feel like I've been sitting around eating potato chips while the rats all went to the gym and did steroids.

Aw, quit exaggerating! Not counting NPC's, there are only a few kinds of creatures -- 7 according to the UESP -- that actually go to the gym and use steriods. All the rest spend even more time eating potato chips than you do. That little flare spell that blasts rats dead at level 0 kills rats just as fast at level 50.

The worst aspect of Oblivion's scaling may be how it limits variety. I'd like to see the flavor-of-the-month leveling scheme replaced by something that offers a wider variety of creatures, NPC's, and loot at all times.

[Cameron Wood]

Aw, quit exaggerating! Not counting NPC's, there are only a few kinds of creatures -- 7 according to the UESP -- that actually go to the gym and use steriods. All the rest spend even more time eating potato chips than you do. That little flare spell that blasts rats dead at level 0 kills rats just as fast at level 50.

The worst aspect of Oblivion's scaling may be how it limits variety. I'd like to see the flavor-of-the-month leveling scheme replaced by something that offers a wider variety of creatures, NPC's, and loot at all times.

Haha, actually the UESP corrected the number: it is now 5, 2 creatures were found only abusing bovine growth hormone. You can find out which in the Mitchell report.

Anyway, the point was more about being able to kill the same type of enemy faster. I don't want to spend the same amount of time killing an enemy at level 20 as at level 0. That just makes me feel like my character isn't changing at all, hasn't really become any stronger since I took the secret door out of my cell. I just want to feel like my work is going towards something, not just higher numbers, but actual results. I feel like, after doing things the all natural way, eating whey protein and creatine chips and putting in the work, I should get a bit stronger over time.

[Connor Wing]

What would really be great.... legs. Every PC in a first person game i've played just don't have legs when i look down in first person mode. I know there is a mod for Oblivion that fixes this and it is a great improvement qua immersion. (Though i must add that it is a little buggy.) Why is it so hard to make a PC have legs? Otherwise it would already be in all the games, i think.

I haven't read all the 160 threats so there's a good possibility it was already discussed, please let me know if that's so. Thx.

[jason worrell]

Something that could be interesting is to add tolerance thresholds to creatures regarding various elements. It would be separate from resistance, which gives a basic % damage reduction, and focus more on the secondary effects of things (assuming that, too, is added). Hot/cold attacks would probably refer to things like body temperature. For example, fire damage below the threshold would cause basic burns and damage. Once it crosses over it's increasingly likely to outright ignite the target. Cold attacks past the limit would start to freeze creatures solid. It would give a definite feeling of improvement for masters of destruction, compared to a novice who currently gets the exact same result by using Fire Bite a few times. It would also allow some more realistic representations of resistance; a polar bear is made to live in the cold, but it can still freeze to death. It lives in that cold constantly, so repeated smaller doses of "not that bad" level frost wouldn't have the same effect as one dramatically over its limit. Aside from direct Destruction attacks it could potentially apply to other things, like severe poison causing paralysis and convulsions, or an extreme burden effect crushing the target with the pressure.

[Laura-Lee Gerwing]

Daedric and Glass armor should be very rare. Bandits/Marauders should not be wearing it. The game should only have, at the very most, 3 sets of Daedric armor and 4-6 sets of Glass armor. Also, bring back the three "Daedric face of-" helmets. It adds that much more customization.