in that case...we should get rid of the elfs and half orcs and goblins and trolls and.....you get the point. while the wood elf is a bit shorter than the other races. i would not classify them as little people. dnd also has a playable cat race, and lizard race. they arent typical, and are more powerful than the standard ones. but they exist. technically every rpg game that comes out will have dnd-ish stuff. because dnd has nearly everything u can imagine in a fantasy genre. haha and if you(not you specifically) dont like dnd-ish worlds or things in your games. then you(again not you specifically) probly shouldnt play mid-evil, fantasy, rpg, action games. i say again....in TES, where are all the little people. wouldnt it be hilarious to walk into a shop. and the vendor is behind the counter on a stool. and one night you break in, and steal just the stool. next day you go back in, and the vendor is scratching their head, in confusion. and then they could be really mad and close shop till they get a new stool. or they could just sit on the counter. or just stay behind it and be pissed off all day. and mad because they cant see over the counter.
anyway, not that its huge, but how about a height slider, during char-gen.

One of the things I really hated going from III to IV was the way they dumbed down things (5 pieces of armor vice 9?) plus not wearing clothes and armor at the same time. Also removing so many skills (unarmored I missed the most) killed how you could mold your toon. I also miss the enchantments and feels like the spells were butchered. Seems like they're starting to follow the trend of making games for consoles first, then giving PC more of a port than acutal PC game.

Really? I found Daggerfalls system of custom character generation not only easy, but it was a great way to not only make your character unique (over the I have the same stats same abilities same immunities/weakness' as any other of my kind), but also determined how fast/slow you levelled. In my opinion they don't even have to go as far in depth. Let us choose our advantages and disadvantages (maybe make it if they don't influence how you level, make a weighed system that you won't progress to the next step in character generation without being within a certain balance.)

Also remember that in elder scrolls the "dwarves" are actually an elven race and aren't that small at all. IMO Oblivion nearly nailed everything down to a tee. Yes there are things that could be improved and even things in Morrowind that i personally prefer. I like how every game is unique and hope the next one is too... just better in every way compared to it's predecessors.

Sorry double post

Who says a mage shouldn't be able to dodge as well as a fighter? If a mage has a (comparitively) high agility and speed, should they not be able to dodge effectively? A low-speed, low-agility mage will not dodge as well as a high-speed, high-agility fighter in Oblivion. You move slower making it harder to get out of the way, and when you do get hit you're more likely to get staggered. Same with the block skill.. a low skill lets more damage through and ruins your shield more than someone with a high block skill. It's still quite determinant on your character skill, while being more engaging for the player.

My guess is that the dwarf is a hangover from Daggerfall or perhaps Arena weapon/ armor material. As it's stupid they had to invent a lore around it as they did pretty well in Morrowind.

As I see it combat in Daggerfall and Morrowind was pretty similar, You had to hit the target physically first and then the game calculated hit chance based on skill and you did a random damage based on the weapon. Oblivion changed this physical hit was hit and damage was weapon damage*skill. Think Oblivion system is best but not perfect. First I want randomness back in damage, second I think you should have a chance to miss because of realism, not large but a critical miss chance who is perhaps 75% at 10 skill and 5-10% at 75 skill, this is pretty realistic to.
Better use more physic in combat, enemy might deflect your leaving you exposed.
Add spread to bows, if your skill is low you would not be able to hit targets far away, fallout did this pretty well. This also apply to thrown weapons and crossbows, but bows get more inaccurate if you hold the draw to long.
Bring back spears, crossbows and thrown weapons. Crossbows is simple, use as firearm with chocking animation, a heavy crossbow is pretty easy to use, but has low rate of fire, light crossbows and many thrown weapons would be most useful for poisons.
Spears has a blocking effect an enemy would has to get around it to do damage unless it has ranged attack or is huge like a daedrot, however if the enemy get in to close you would not hit with the spear or do low damage.

Not sure about the benefit of using many skill classes for weapons. Downside is that the player would stick to one and ignore the others. In Daggerfall daggers was trade goods, in Oblivion they was useful for special magic effects in addition to your sword, to bundle short sword and daggers but not long swords make little sense to. Fighting style with short and long sword is far more similar than between shorts word and dagger.
However I think that different weapons should have different effects. Axes and blunt has bonus against armored enemies. A longsword would be more effective against an enemy with no armor but lots of health.

I think what the person meant was that "a mage without a block skill" and a "warrior with a block skill" had a similar level of protection, because the player can simply equip a shield and hold the block button. Yes, with less block skill they will take more damage/be staggered more, but it negates some of the advantage a warrior should have over a mage.

I think active blocking is a good thing BUT if your Block skill is low, your character should not always respond as fast as the player does. Likewise, if your block skill is high, even if the player forgets to block or is in mid swing, the character should (as a percentage based on skill) block the incoming attack anyway. This makes the game more fun to play without removing the roleplaying element and simply making it an action game.

As far as other peoples ideas...little people. TES does have little people. Goblins, Reiklings, Imps. In most folklore, little people weren't part of civilization on par with humans, they were mystical inhabitants of the world around us. I like that all the TES races are human sized. It makes it feel less like a cartoony fantasy ala Warcraft where you have gnomes and minotaurs comingling about.

FINALLY about the TES trend in general. I do feel as if the game has progressively gotten simpler. That is a problem. Obviously the switch from Daggerfall to Morrowind made sense, but there is very little positive difference between Morrowind and Oblivion other than graphics (which are really just a result of time and therefore negligible) and yet we STILL see the simplification of the skills system, reduction in almost every quantifiable area (skills, spells, weapons, armors, quests, factions, NPCs, dungeons) aside from a SLIGHTLY larger landmass, which felt smaller anyways (fast travel, view distance, similar terrain which was all traversable via straight lines, dialogue). In addition to this, the gameplay itself has been simplified with spelled out quests and a compass.

Now, that is not to say I don't appreciate some of the more "action" oriented aspects of Oblivion, such as the combat, magic, and stealth systems, which made for a very fun game. However, lack of certain features made even these advances bitter sweet (no mounted combat, climbing) but I feel like the roleplaying elements and especially the complexity that comes simply with variety of choice needs to make a return.

Yeah, creating a new character was always a fun thing to do in Daggerfall. I just like going through the whole process, all the options that are available and everything. I started Daggerfall back in 6th grade when the demo came out and I fell in love with it. Ah memories


All these skills and things people are wanting to see back in the series should be things that WE as modders can add in ourselves. If the constructino set was made so that we could create new skills and assign them their attributes and animations and other such calculations and scritping etc.... then we could make all the skills we wanted, from the traditional weapons and magick to the mundane, like sewing or shoemaking. Therefore, if Bethesda does axe another skill or make something not the way we want it, we'll still be able to change it. In other words, the things that have been hard-coded into the game disc should be made available on the construction set. Wouldn't that be fantastic?

As I see it Oblivion is actually far closer to Daggerfall than Morrowind is. yes the combat is more like in Daggerfall and Morrowind, however Oblivion and Daggerfall is set in a classical fantasy setting and both was pretty shallow, Morrowind had an pretty alien setting where the factions was far more detailed and realistic.
Both has lots of randomness and respawning, yes Daggerfall had random dungeons, however both had random level scaled enemies, loot and shop content. In Morrowind only monsters was level scaled with little respawning.
Yes it's parts where Morrowind and Oblivion is most similar, graphic and gameplay is more similar, Daggerfall was before 3d graphic cards and has 2d enemies, while in both Morrowind and Oblivion you see the enemies equipment and can loot it.

Level scaling is where Oblivion has got most critic. Yes it's flawed but both Daggerfall and Morrowind had level scaling and again the level scaling in Daggerfall was most similar to the one in Oblivion. Yes Daggerfall had few named enemies and the drop from bandits was random but level scaled, you got better and better items from them but the random drops kept the high level stuff pretty rare.
Problem with Morrowind was that the lack of level scaled npc made fighting bandits boring, it also lacked high level monsters so the game became far to easy past level 15.
Daggerfall was good in that it had a wider levelled lists, you had a low chance of running into a daedra lord at low level if unlucky, but it also lacked high level content. Obilvion used far to narrow levelled lists, also did the mistake of just giving enemies more health at high levels.
One idea cap character health at high levels, would keep the game more exiting, and yes high level content, have some areas where minimum levels on enemies is 20.

Fallout 3 solved most of the levelling problems, first they use a very subtle way of levelling npc, yes they level up and get better skills, but their equipment quality also go up, at level 1 raider equipment is perhaps 10% condition, at level 20 it's closer to 70%, hard to see because it takes damage in combat. This would make it far easier to level enemies as their steel swords do 10 times as much damage at 100% condition than with 10%. Now add some better equipment over time so at level 1 you only see iron except bosses, at level 10 steel is most common, at level 20 you might find mirtril sometimes and even elven on bosses while condtion has gone from 5% to 70%, now at level 30 condition is usually 100%, mirtril and dwarven start to become pretty common and you can find daeric on bosses.

Quests, here Oblivion wins, yes Morrowind main quest was better than Oblivions but far to many of the quests in Morrowind was go to A and kill X, get me 5 B, reclaim C from dungeon Y. Yes it also had fun quests but most had similar quality with Daggerfall random quests.
Might actually be an good idea to add random quests as a filler, you have scripted quests like in Oblivion but also random quests, would probably work well for guilds as you has to do a series of quest for them to advance, bring back Morrowind skill requirement for guild levels, add random quest for popularity and scripted for advancement.

FO3's levelling scheme for opponents and loot was better than OB's, but it still suffered from the same problem with items and creatures not existing anywhere in the world until you reached a certain level, and then they were suddenly "common". In MW, almost everything existed at least SOMEWHERE in the game, regardless of your level. They became more frequently found, perhaps, but didn't go from "non-existent" to "common" overnight. Just as importantly, very little, if anything, in MW vanished after a certain level, as many things seemed to in OB. You could still buy an iron dagger from a merchant, but nobody else in the game world had them anymore, once your character progressed from that to steel and chain, dwarven and mithril, or glass and daedric. In MW, many of the armor types were usable and effective from the beginning until at least mid-game, since the differences in stats weren't quite as pronounced and the opponent levelling/scaling wasn't so radical as in OB.

Combat was "better looking" in OB, but relied far more on player skill than on character skill. In terms of control, OB introduced player-activated blocking, but took away 2 of the 3 attack forms, and reduced attack speed/strength from MW's variable amount to OB's "standard or power" attacks. The strength of an attack in MW was dependent on how long you held back and "charged" the strike, giving you the option to do quick jabs and slashes for less damage each, or wind up for a full swing, or anything in between. You could also do 3 different forms of attack, although sadly, one of them was almost always "better" than the others, rather than being better against specific forms of defense or armor. In OB, you just pushed the button and waited for the animation to play. I actually felt LESS in control of the character in OB than in MW.

To me, the most glaring and disturbing trend is the gradual "simplification" of the series by removing one thing after another. In terms of diversity of items, spells, skills, and factions, DF was better than MW, which in turn was much better than OB. One would think that as the game series progressed, things would be ADDED, not subtracted.

Not sure where you get the idea that the advantage of the blocking skill is even partially negated. As someone how plays a mage, I can say that if I'm blocking, I'm more than likely at the thread's end.. I'm trapped in a corner, or got rushed, and my options are run away and regroup ASAP, kill them ASAP, or die. Blocking with a low block skill may afford you some extra time (assuming you're not staggered on every other hit), but it is far from a reliable defense. It's a last-ditch effort.

Brofist. Even though I still own my physical copy of Daggerfall, I still keep the CD from the magazine I got the demo from and played religiously. I would love to see a bit more open sourced goodness for the Construction Set (despite me not being a modder myself, not that I haven't been interested in trying) to make things easier for Modders, and to unlock more of their potential. There's some great stuff in this community for sure.

As for the level scaling issue, yes Daggerfall too had scaling, but certain areas in the main story were still littered with high level monsters and traps regardless of when you got there. Go to Dibella Tower or Scourge Barrow and see how far you get attacking the Ancient Vampires/Liches. Not only that, a lot of monsters had immunities to certain levels of materials, so the scaling was at least incorporated into some semblance of importance rather than "Hey, I got a new level so I unlocked new gear."

The little people could have lower counters or sit in high chairs.

Fallout3 lacked high level content, a late character would be equipped with special weapons and be very skilled with them and have so much health he could only be killed if somebody blow up a car next to him.
Broken steel added high level content so it obviously did not exist before the addon, downside was that the new enemies was very hard to kill for an unprepared player like me.

Agree with you about Morrowind, however it also lacked high level content, the game tend to get harder around level 4-8 as stronger enemies get more common and you start going up north. At level 15 you are very hard to kill.

Don't think any monsters disappear in OB, they become less common but you still run into imps at level 30, yes it's exceptions the weaker stunned imps are gone. yes weapon and armor changed, mostly to keep the npc from being a joke as in Morrowind, equipment is just as important as skill in the game. Instead the leveled armor became a joke
My idea of weapon and armor repair condition might solve this.

Never got the point of attack types in Morrowind, if you had different attacks they should have different weak and strong points. Strong but take a long time and leaves your open, weak but bonus against armor.

I mostly see the things cut from Daggerfall to Morrowind as unnecessary features, mostly loads of pretty pointless skills. Other things people missed like houses and horses was back in Oblivion.
From Morrowind to Oblivion it was two sort of cuts, something was cut because of time restrains and because the devs thought they was secondary, spears and crossbows are most missed.
Other cuts was to balance the game, Morrowind is extremely unbalanced, not only alchemy, but cast on use magic items was overpowered, levitation was mostly used as an exploit. other things was to hard mostly that you had to sleep to regain mana, so mages had to fall back on alchemy abuse. Oblivion is far better balanced but they went to far.

Daggerfall was as level scaled as oblivion if not more, at high level you could find daeric in the stores. however they used a more open selection for enemies so you could run into a daedra lord at low level if real unlucky. Not sure about enemies in special quest dungeon but plausible. Also drops was random so you get less full suit of expensive armor, Yes you still had a serious collection at the end of the game.