Rather than change the compass, why not keep the current version, but add a less precise one?

For, say, Oblivion, it would only show you the general region unless you're in it (say, Colovian Highlands would be highlighted until you enter it). Then the Highlands could be subdivided, and one of those areas could be highlighted. Then it finally goes active within, say, an arrow flight, and shows you the actual door/cave/person.

Then make this selectable at run-time.

In doors, the less helpful one would point to ALL exits to the current level that stay in the ruins until you've explored more. Fully explored floors then indicate the best route known to get to unexplored territory. Although quick exits could impair this... but there could be a workaround for that, too.

That way, when someone sends you somewhere, you can actually get a description, and the map shows you how to follow those... sort of. Additionally, it opens the door to telling yopu to find Dungeon 14 in Region 7. But you only know the region. You can go to towns there and get hints that narrow it down (ie, "Never heard of it, and I know every cave in the Northeast of this area" = de-select the north east cells of the region on the map)

yea my main problem was the fact that the ONLY way to travel was by fast travel, if it could have other ways like carraige, carriage, (dunno how to spell it ) i'd be much happier. it would also be cool if they could have it travel in real time cause then you could watch the scenery or be attacked by bandits or something

Just a random idea I was thinking of last week, what about real drugs in the game. They give temporary boosts, but you suffer drawbacks afterwords for withdrawl. There should also be realistic effects when you take them. For example a drug (you'll know what it is) changes the colour scheme and gives boosts to random stats, but everytime you take it your intelligence is permanently damaged.

Customizable inventory / HUD:

Something that was nice in Morrowind but again was oddly missing in Oblivion was the possibility to customize your inventory layout and HUD. In fact from the basics customization options there you could go even further and add more elements to it.
The way it could work was simply like in Morrowind, you can freely resize and push the inventory windows around as you wish, then you can click a box in the corner which fixes it there and is also visible in the normal game. That for example allowed you to have a nice minimap on screen the whole time.

It could again be done a similar way but feature even more elements you can freely play with like your health and energy bars, one click and they're not visible in normal gameplay anymore and you can freely place them on screen as you wish.
Doing it like that it would allow you some level of customization and you could even "buy" HUD elements in game. For example when buying a pocket watch you could select it and always have the current time on screen. If the time is in the wrong place simply drag and drop it somewhere else or resize the display to what you need.

One step up from that would be having different looking windows to chose from. Like for the map, in Morrowind you could either have the tiny near area map in the bottom right or, when clicking the "lock" button, a big map you could freely switch between world and near area.
But what I really mean is switching between different styles, again with the map being able to switch between a square and a round map and also the "needle orientation" between always facing north and the map turning (like in GTA) or the map remaining fixed and your pointer always turning (Morrowind).
Or for the health bar it could switch between the real bars or even a miniature view of your character showing how well he is. With the pocket watch example you could switch between it just showing the time in numbers or actually show the watch on screen.


I don't think implementing hat is too hard, especially seeing how they already HAD something like it in Morrowind, I don't need a overly fancy looking inventory, I'd rather have one that's functional and can be customized how I need it.

What I specially miss is the "all is on screen" option you had in Morrowind, no clicking and browsing though different inventories, you just opened it and it was THERE.

They should have a "No UI" option, or a very minimilist UI. The UI in farcry 2 was great. the only UI elements in the game was a little number on the side that showed your ammo when you fired your gun. Everything else was shown on your character, e.g. to chek your map, you would actualy pull out a map and hold in front of the camera. (Its just a shame that the rest of the game svcked).

Sorry but I just think after playing oblivion for a year and a half + fast travel is simply a bad idea it is unrealistic and removes exploration from the game which is a key element of gameplay.

Morrowind had fast travel as well.

Oblivion's problems were that there was absolutely no destination-arrival limitation, it cost absolutely nothing, and there was no attempt to give it immersive qualities.

That's why i suggested the fast forward travel method, you simply travel along a path VERY fast (like needing 10 seconds from town to town) and you can jump out of it at any point.

Not good enough for the traveling NPC's. You'd be surprised how many travel in Oblivion, but of course, it's something you won't see if you fast-travel. It also doesn't help that NPC's don't travel in real-time - probably to keep the game from bogging down. Make the compass toggleable - problem solved.

So tighten up AI packages, stress-test for inconsistencies and add fail-safes to relocate people if they are dynamically off their schedule. Add dialogue topics for neighboring townspeople to indicate the days of the week the NPC in question travels to other cities, and when they are expected to return. If the player doesn't want to try to track them down, then they can wait for them to return.

And the quest compass can only be toggleable if they are going to make sure every quest objective in the game can be found without the compass - meaning clear directions given to the player for every instance a quest marker would be there. And if Bethesda's going to go out of their way to do that, then it's more than likely they were aiming for an overall design philosophy in which the quest compass arrow itself wouldn't have a place in.

Well here are a few ideas:
-When a NPC has a normal sceduel people will tell you he's either at home or work so those are the most logical places to try, if you can't find him there check taverns.
-When a NPC is out of town and people know it they will say he traveled to X and will likely be back in a few days but you can follow him. If the location is another town you can ask around there.
-When a NPC is was not seen for longer than 2 days without any note people worry and will tell you where they saw him the last time, from that you can try to piece together where to go.
-And of course some NPCs like shop owners will leave a note directly saying where they went if they are gone a while like "Away for a week for business in town X"

Throw in the chance to be forcefully interrupted by attacks and the like, and I could see that working. Though I still would want to see limitation placed on it.

I'm also very open to the "you can only travel on main roads" idea.

I don't really like the "your travel can be interrupted" thing, the main roads should be a relatively safe place after all. And i don't really see why there should be a "punishment" for using fast travel, there already could be one that when traveling on foot you don't regenerate health and you're tired when you arrive.

Also i did mention this before, Fast travel shoudln't simply be as NECCESSARY anymore, Oblivion made it neccessary because every mission was so spread out. There was no "go to the other end of town" or "that place in the area" quests, almost every single one sent you all the way over the whole map for a fetch quest. If they fix that they can very well have Oblivions system because it's simply less required to use it.

If roads are intended to indeed be safe places in the next game (i.e. well-patrolled, complete with waystations for guards and the like), then I have no problem eschewing forceful interruptions, so long as such fast-forward travel is only on those well-protected main roads.

It's where you have four or five bandits parked alongside one of those main roads, yet you fast-forward right by them with no consequence whatsoever that I foresee problems.


I do heavily agree with this. Much of FT's problem also resided with how the world itself dealt with the believability of distance. Instead of having the player remain in one city's guild hall for the duration of several quests, the guilds send you bouncing around to different halls after every event. Instead of having lots of misc quests deal with things within the immediate countryside, quests send the player to the ends of the earth. Instead of NPCs in the game cautioning the player about the dangers of far-off wild regions, everywhere is treated the same, because distance isn't factored in.

Change that, and you take a bigger chunk out of people's complaints about FT.

Well the general idea was that it IS a more immersive version of Oblivions system, i see where you get with the "it has problems" though. But honestly just getting interrupted like that isn't much fun.


A problem there is also the game worlds size. In Oblivoon if you used fast travel you started early morning and got to the othe side of the map by mid afternoon, that doesn't quite say "big world". Imagine if it took a in game WEEK to travel from one end to the other, that would make a difference. Especiallyif like in Daggerfall you had the choice to just travel hard or stay in inns and take regular breaks (with the consequences for oyur character).

whoa, Hang on why would we want to relocate people? thats terribly immersion breaking. In real life people don't magically teleport if they get behind schedule. The world doesn't revolve around the player. Well it shouldn't do

The game already does relocation. It happens whenever NPCs change AI packages dictating what and where they are supposed to be doing. They get up naturally and go out to do whatever it is they are being told to do.

However, say you've got an NPC who is supposed to be in City X. Everything points to them being in City X. NPC dialogue says they are in City X. Yet if you travel to City X, they are not there. This could have happened for a variety of reasons, such as:
They are still en-route to City X.
They are now en-route back to City Y.
Some more pressing AI decision has interrupted and derailed the original AI package.

Now, the first two are not examples of the NPCs being off their AI schedule. It is part of their schedule (or the fulfillment of their schedule) to travel back and forth.

However, it's when the NPC inexplicably abandons trying to follow schedule that instant relocation needs to occur (keep in mind that NPCs traveling when the player is not around isn't real-time, so they will not literally be disappearing in front of the player and rematerializing at their intended destination). NPCs varying inexplicably from their AI packages is not an example of immersion. It is a bug, a glitch. Relocation would be a way to fix that bug or glitch by moving them to either their destination or the closest segment of road that leads to their destination. It would essentially be an AI reset. And it would be there to avoid random inexplicably lost people.

From what I understand, Oblivon already does this as well, to an extent. I believe that AI resets after 3 days, meaning that an NPC who's gone quirky would be back on a normal schedule after 3 days.

dont think of it as a fast travel, think of it as a portal spell you learned somewhere....err something... who cares its optional you dont have to use it if you dont want to get over it :brokencomputer:

No.

I will think of it as fast travel, a game mechanic without cost, without limitation, and without immersion. Because that is what it is. No "lame thinly-veiled RP to cover up for the half-baked mechanics" here.



Oblivion's style of fast travel is a fundamental design choice in the game. And by including that design choice which is "optional," they eliminated the option of hiring a ship to sail between ports, hiring carriages (as supported via in-game books) from city to city, using spells such as mark/recall or intervention, using Mages Guild guides to jump between guild halls using magickal means, etc, etc, etc, as backed up by LEGITIMATE game mechanics. So no "bribe a guard and pretend!" If that's how we dismiss mechanics we disagree with, then if TES:V removes Oblivion's fast travel, I might as well say, "Open up the console, type COC [Name of Cell] and pretend you've got no-cost Fast Travel! Pretend!"

The "its optional" argument is tiring and fallacious. Perhaps we should give the player both a regular iron sword and an iron sword scripted with an infinite-use kill-on-strike command at character generation? And then we'll tell them it's optional whether they use the regular blade or the uber cheat blade?

What they need to do is implement a fast travel system that puts you near the location instead of on it. When traveling to a revealed, but still unexplored location, it'll travel you to about five minutes (minimum, but you can set it to a larger distance) away from the location. This does a few things: it brings back a sense of exploration that is lacking, and it also lets you carefully approach a location without having enemies spawn next to you. When traveling to already discovered locations, it will know when there are enemies at the location and put you down a short distance away so you have the element of surprise. Now, the gameworld would have to be much, much bigger for this to work as I imagine it. It would also fix a seemingly minor, but incredibly annoying problem in MW/OB: time. The passage of time is almost non-existent. I should preface that statement by saying I have no knowledge of the actual scale of provinces in TES lore, but when you spend only a few in-game hours traveling between major towns, in what is supposed to be a pretty massive landscape, you can't appreciate the immense amount of time that would normally take, or the reach of civilization. Time is something that bugs me in many open world games, but when you can become the leader of a guild in less than a year, I begin to question.

What would be neat is a map/compas like the map in Farcry 2. only a magic compas that points in the general direction of your objective.

So imagine you get told to go find this woman in this general area and ask her about he lost sheep. So you pull out your compas (an actual compas not just one in the UI) like Farcry2 and start heading in that general dirction. The compas could be held in your off hand like a torche, and points at what ever your objective is. Rather than having the exact location on your map allready. That means you dont need a compas on your UI.

For Fallout 3 I accedentally downloaded a mod that completely removed the compas, and I would have to pull out my pip boy to see what direction i was heading. As frustrating as that was, I felt it more immersive than that damn bright green UI with needles green lines all over it. That was terrible, useless UI art for the sake of having a useless UI. Same problem with the UI for The Witcher, there was tons of useless art on that UI that served absolutely no purpose at all and got in the way.

All you realy need on the UI is a health meter, and a magic meter, and maybe duribility meter, (Diablo did this realy well that little warning sign that your armour was gonna break only showed up when your armour was gonna break, it didnt need to be there all the time), and Nothing else.

My suggestion is that Bethesda double their employee base. So instead of alternating between releasing Fallout and TES games every 3 years (with a wait of 5-6 years between Elder Scrolls titles), there will be a new Fallout or TES twice as frequently.

That seriously needs to be tightened up - or the forums will be overloaded with bug complaints due to NPC's not showing up as expected. I rather suspect that's part of why the quest marker system was implemented to begin with - so the player can track down NPC's who've gotten themselves stuck after fleeing into a cave, etc just because the player had unknowingly entered a cell into which they were loaded. I've seen it happen.




Won't happen. You don't churn out a game as complex as an ES game like you would a linear shooter.

I'd like a TES as often as Final Fantasy games are released.

Simple solution to appease everyone: Have both OB and MW's methods of fast travel. There's no reason why both can't co-exist, and both could be added in a tiny amount of time.