Lots of people want/have tattoos.
Mud wouldn't be a fine tattoo substitute. Ever.

Agreed about the good guy thing. I was kinda expecting to be able to join Dagoth Ur.

Why do we even need a good guy and bad guy?

This. Good and evil are tiring concepts in plot-lines, and I could do without them. Give me a Daggerfall-esque political all-sides-of-the-conflict-have-dirt-under-their-fingernails-equally main quest, and I'll be in heaven.

Im surprised no one is trying to shoot down my dragon idea, people usually are pretty anol about dragons in elder scrolls

Just for you:


No dragons.
Please note:
1) Dragons are, generally speaking, as cliche fantasy as it comes.
2) From a lore perspective, dragons are insanely rare, if not gone from Tamriel altogether.
3) Also from a lore perspective, here's an excerpt from http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/famed_artifacts.shtml regarding the Fang of Haynekhtnamet.

So if it took 20 men seven straight days to bring down a creature that was apparently dragon-esque, what makes you think a character, regardless of how strong they get, could be able to single-handedly take down the real deal in an epic one-on-one battle?
And please, I beg of you, don't suggest a 30- or 40-NPC raid as the solution. Not only would that many NPCS in action at once be crippling, can you imagine the pure, utter, horrifying chaos that would ensue as a result of the randomness of battle allowed for by RaidantAI?

-and-

-and-

well, i do agree that it shouldn't take an army to defeat you. but an unlockable *SHOULD be OP, thats why you strive to unlock it. I mean come on, you would be lying if you said you would not have fun burninating the countryside, the peseants, and their THATCHED ROOF COTTIGES!!!

*(sry for the caps for italics, im on a cell phone)

whod want to slay a dragon anyways?

the only place i want to see a dragon is in the sky or the mountains where no one can reach them.

besides, dragons are supposed to be mythical, not fat guys wearing t-shirst saying "HEY, IMMA DRAGON! IM SCORCHING HOT!"

Look if you want dragons make a mod for it when it comes out OR play a generic RPG

Yeah kind of what I was thinking but without the psycho cubes

I reckon they could pretty easily put this in TES 5. Just don't forget TES 6 IF it comes out will be like another 8 years or so!!!

im confused, you hate it when the devs want this in the game, but when the concept of ametures putting in crappy animations for things that could be an awesome add to the game, you say "lolz drgns r cooooul"? ...... that sounds pretty stupid to me

Not at all! First of all I NEVER say "lolz" yes dragons can be cool in some circumstances, books, games or whatever. What I'm saying is the developers should not waste their time on dragons when they could be using it to make awesome other more important stuff. Let players make it. You should check out the mod "mount of akatosh" which has extremely good animations

Yea, i guess thats true, but i also hate mods because im console.

I prefer consoles as well; however, if the game turns out to be hella-epic, (let's just say Morrowind-like, for example) I'll get it for PC. So I can mess around with mods/CS. Then I can go slay all the dragons I want to. Or ride them, or whatever.

Hmm.. yeah that brings it's own problems. Although Bethesda COULD release an official lore friendly dragon/mount of akatosh type mod I would prefer lycanthropy or something else.

Cascade, Stabilized shadow maps using PCF filtering! Including cloud shadows, should make the game's lighting look fantastic

Cascade shadow maps usable on heightmapped terrain: http://tiny.cc/nfjls
Setting up shadow maps for speedtree: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch04.html
Stabilizing shadow maps: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=538508
Cloud shadows: argh, can't find this. But take the depth map and whatever is not being shadowed by other things and just apply the appropriate shadows based on current sun position and current cloud textures. (video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGRdIUxW8Y0)

For ambient occlusion: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/siggraph-2008-HBAO.html I'm sure at 4x4 samples and 640x360 it shouldn't take up an overly enormous amount of power, and since it's almost exactly like normal ssao you could switch to that indoors. (At least do it for the Pc, which can have waaay more power than consoles)

Increase the penumbra size at dawn/sunset and decrease it when it nears noon. You'll only have to have the sun cast shadows really. Obviously the shadows at least CAN and on the PS3/360. Combine with a screenspace godrays shader to make the outdoors look MUCH prettier.
As for indoors, deffered shading should allow each window to have it's own light. Just have access to the cells outdoor parent for a color and apply it to indoor window lights/static godrays/ambient lights. Combine with sound emitters that play muffled version of whatever's outdoors and you're good.

Bonus: Much better looking shadowmapping, but takes up a lot of power:
http://tiny.cc/Vddlw

WARNING: Random list ahead!

Wouldn't it be cool to see proper debris and detritus in the water?
like leaves and bits of drift wood floating along the top of the water, moving with the current. Large logs at the bottum of the water that have started to decay. We need frogs, tadpoles and small fish to dwell in the water. Water currents should actually affect the player when trying to swim. Encumberance should fatigue the player more while walking/running/swimming. If the player is overencumbered whilst in the water the player should start to sink. Swimming and treading water should both fatigue the player.

The three most essential mod ideas are, in my opinion, Harvest Flora, Alive Waters, and Marksman Velocity.

Focusing on the second of those, it's just as Ragnalin points out, really. Water is DEAD in Oblivion, which is too bad, because I find myself using rivers as often as roads when available. Interesting, lively, and active water would definitely make that part of the world substantially more interesting to explore.

(just PLEASE don't have the encounter rate nearly as high as on land. Most aquatic life is NOT found of human as a dinner)

I was expecting to be what Caius told me to be : an impostor trying to fool and manipulate the dunmer tribes ...

Even though I really like Morrowind's MQ, it was a letdown to realize I really was the Nerevarine and yet the Empire couldn't care less what I was doing (after Caius left)



Fallout 3 had that. It will be probably in the next TES.

Yeah, but technology makes it much easier and quicker. Tattoo guns, hair clippers and plastic surgery offers a wide range of convenience to better suit your physical tastes.
In a world of sword & sorcery, I don't know what should be there for options. Hair length is obviously do-able with some primitive blades; hair dye could be a bit sketchy. Tattoos are still easily done, but probably a little more painful. Temporary face paint/body paint could be offered, for something interesting.

make-up could be awesome. Particularly if there's the option to black out your face for "night missions".

I would love it if there were less no unidimensional "dungeon crawls" featured in every TES game so far...
It's like they're present "for the lulz". From what I've seen, there are hundreds of "dungeons" featured in Morrowind.
By not playing them, I feel limited. Retrieving the dwemer puzzle box in Morrowind was quite a turn-off.

I would love it if they made some sort of non-underground "dungeons". I mean for example forts. Forts in Oblivion weren't forts. They were just basemants of biblical size. Who the heck builds a fort just to make a gargantuan basemant?? Maybe for storage, but that wouldn't mean every damn fort was built purely for that purpose.

Meh, I just want dungeons removed.
I'd much rather slip a poisonous tablet into a guy's drink during some sort of important dinner party that I had to infiltrate than go find him in some anti-climactic fort/dungeon, inexplicably overrun with vermin, some of which undead.

EDIT: While not applicable to the game, I am anxiously waiting for the day when players won't buy houses for storage...

... Really? :blink:

They just need to change how they look at the term, "Dungeon." They don't HAVE to be a random sprawling dungeon crawl with little to no relation to the world. Look at Fallout 3; most of the "dungeons" in that game all fit into the world exceptionally well and had prior reason to exist. They consisted of old office buildings, companies, sewer lines, subway systems, monuments, political buildings, military installations, etc, etc.

You cite Morrowind, if I'm reading correctly, as a detractor to the case for dungeons. I find Morrowind's dungeons to be a perfect non-dungeon design style. They are designed in a fashion to deter the description of "dungeon." Velothi tombs are the long-neglected receptacles for the Dunmer dead (as well as the family's hub for religious practices), before the Dunmer switched to worshiping the Tribunal. The caves are an almost expected formation in a land ravaged by volcanic effects. The strongholds are the old byproducts of a previous age of Dunmer house warfare, just as the Daedric ruins are byproducts of a previous age of Dunmer religious practices.

And further, even the most cut-and-dry example of that dungeon has loot, objects, and a mood that fits what the type of dungeon is trying to display or show about the world. They're not dungeons in the DnD sense; they're to-be-expected landmarks of the culture and the environments.

Now, should they cut way back on the amount of dungeons present in vanilla Oblivion, which had 192 (not counting the Daedric realms)? I believe so. Should they focus on more inter-city and aboveground quests as well as dungeons? Of course. But if you remove the dungeon from the world, you remove a significant avenue by which the world can be characterized.

This.

I loved Morrowind's "dungeons" because they were so...expected. What I mean by that is one would enter a Dwemer ruin and the loot would be all the things one would expect. Dwemer tubes, cogs, silverware, plates, armor, weapons, and coins. The enemies were mostly old dwemer constructs, attacking you because it's their duty, and tortured Dwemer spirits, attacking out of misplace fury at their death.

Tombs had skeletons or other undead doing their duty of protecting their family's tomb as charged by their code of honor. Items were offerings of jewels or ingredients and family relics of weapons, armor, and trinkets.

Oblivion? It's dungeons felt empty. Their loot made no sense. Steel weapons in an Aylied ruin? Steel Armor? Where are my Elven weapons? My Elven armor? Aylied currency? They felt like they were made for the exclusive reason of loot.

And the caves? Oh jeez, those were horrible. I miss the awesome formations that Morrowind had, like that one cave with the huge waterfall (where you could find a daedric pauldron) that had a skeleton at the bottom surrounded by potions and books and such, as if a traveler had accidentally stumbled off of the waterfall and fell to his death, his packs contents flying all around the cavern. Lots of caves were mixed in their interior, going from a winding cavern into a buried Dwemer or Daedric ruin. The sense of discovery was simply epic.