#1 Random Encounters
Morrowind had a lot of quest hooks roaming the wilderness, but they were something to find once, not recurring. In Oblivion you could fast travel everywhere guilt-free because there were absolutely no worthwhile diversions between you and your destination. In FO3 however, there was always some unexpected bit of story or emergent gameplay lurking around the next corner. I hope that in future TES games there will be a deep enough supply of random encounters that I can never confidently say "I have experienced everything interesting in town/region X".

#2 Quests without invitations
In a lot of places in Morrowind and Oblivion, you'll find something cool, with an NPC idling next to it, but you don't get any dialog topic to talk about the cool thing unless you happen to already be on the quest to find the Cool Thing ™. In FO3, if you stumble across something interesting, you can get involved right on the spot. To be fair, this is mainly because of the general lack of factions or multi-step quests in FO3, which is not something that should carry forward into the Elder Scrolls. I hope that in future TES games, if you stumble across a quest objective you will be able to perform the quest on the spot even if its normally in the middle of a 15 quest series, or if that's not possible, at least get a dialog topic so you can find out where to start the chain.

#3 Dialogue trees, not topic lists
Bethesda games have been using a potpourri of dialogue models, where sometimes you are picking from a library of words to ask about, and other times there is a scripted set of actual dialogue trees as seen in classic BioWare RPGs. The proportion has been shifting towards trees over the course of several titles, and hopefully it will settle 100% into that style for the Elder Scrolls. Whatever you do, please do not go the route of having presumably illiterate players pick "moods" rather than actual dialogue lines, as BioWare and Obsidian have been experimenting with.

#4 Humans that look human
Between Oblivion and FO3, someone figured out how to use Facegen. Make sure you don't backslide.

#5 NPCs with lots of personality or none
People with names either have a quest or something unique and entertaining to say. People generically named "settler" are there to make the place look more lived-in. Use this delineation in the Elder Scrolls as well to separate notable NPCs from those that are just there to chat about mudcrabs. Don't skimp on the number of named characters and associated content, though.

#6 Make big cities big
If there's a city of millions in the lore setting, it should either not appear in the game, or take up a quarter of the play area as with DC. Don't mismatch the notional size of a city with its in-game implementation as badly as happened with the Imperial City.

I approve of the above post.

I do as well but this could easily http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1099525-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-169/

This thread is basically like TES V ideas & suggestions that should be retained from Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 definitely excelled in some areas where I hope ESV will too. One of them is, the quest compass didn't always directly point you to the next objective. (Spoilers about Arefu quest ahead):



Now, that was definitely enjoyable, and was pretty much absent from Oblivion. I REALLY hope Bethesda continues with this, but I hope they do this kind of thing even more in ESV.



Fallout 3 also excelled with enemy leveling. There were areas that you would absolutely get slaughtered at lower levels, and even at low levels, high-level enemies would randomly spawn in areas you thought were safe, and that was definitely an exciting challenge, although the high-level enemy in this case was a deathclaw with a crippled leg, which was fine.



The random encounters were definitely awesome too.

Morrowind had trees. It was just a different interface and a lot of one-branch trees.

One thing I want to see in TESV as well as see improved is the way towns get assaulted by raiders.

It happened in Big Town a lot (in fact, raiders and scorpions had killed off that whole town by the time I was level 15) and it started to happen in Megaton after I killed the sheriff there.

The thing is, it was too sporadic and the raiders were way too stupid. They would attack Megaton one or two at a time and get gunned down immediately, and they didn't work together at all, they just blindly charged, oblivious to the world around them.

The opposite was true in Big Town, as it was overwhelmed even after I trained them.

I think the best way to improve this would be to focus on battle tactics when designing the AI. Make them work together and understand basic tactics like flanking and bottlenecking and make them aware of their environment beyond what weapons are lying nearby.

An archer who runs for higher ground instead of just runs away or marauders who stand their ground at the city gate in order to avoid being surrounded by the guards would be very cool.

More like what TES should retain from TES, because they made Fallout TES style. And yes this should be in suggestions, LOCK! LOCK! LOCK! LOCK! LOCK!

A reasonably detailed distant landscape.

Dismemberment!

Perks. Or at least something to make me look forward to leveling and make me plan my character.

Fist Weapons. You can never have enough weapon types in a RPG

LIBERTY PRIME, mehrunes dagon can kiss his ass.

Isn't this a suggestion? I suggest putting it in the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1099525-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-169/

Beards.

I'm not sure on this. I agree with most of your other points, however this one sticks with me a bit.

For example, if the facegen from FO3 was used, I don't think you could make a sufficiently Elven looking elf. Please correct me if I'm wrong as I've not played around with the FO3 facegen as much as the Oblivion one.

Also, bear in mind that while FO3 is set in a more modern day era, Oblivion and the TES series are in a different universe entirely. This could account for the different facial features. Although, having facial hair would be nice. Interchangeable, not like on Morrowind where a beard would come with a certain hairstyle.

Edit - Typo

Beards came with a certain face. Not with a certain hairstyle.

I want Morrowind's facegen system to come back, where I an choose a face I like with the possibility of facial hair, and then to go on to Oblivion's facegen feature. I could start off with a nice looking face, and create my own from there. It's a great starting point, and if I svck at facegen (I do), then I can just leave my character at the original look I chose. What I had as a starting point in Oblivion was always awful, and randomising it made it even worse.

I like it. And I don't think that this is the last time I'm going to have to say this, but nobody wants to use the [censored] suggestions thread.

Thanks for correcting me. It's been a very long time since I played Morrowind.

This is not a thread about TESV, it is about TES in general and therefore does not necessarily belong in the official suggestions thread.

OT: I agree for the most part with the OP, and would like to add that TES should find a way to combine FO3's repair system with the hammer system.

Most important thing to borrow:

The skill/perk/attribute dialogue options.

Instead of having to make someone like you in TES to get information, you should be able to intimidate them with your 80 STR. Or your 75 Blunt skill (because that Elven mace at your belt isn't for show...)

Isn't that technically what randomize does? (edit:nevermind, duh)

I like Morrowind's system for the quality and uniqueness of each face. But, then again, Oblivion's facegen done better, like in FO3 or, ever better, Mount and Blade, can make for a lot of cool-looking faces. Either way, I would like to choose my face, then choose from beards, separately.

P.S.
It's cute how the only thing some people have to contribute is "this is in the wrong place, lock it." I thought that was the mod's job to decide. Get over yourself? Perhaps?

FO3 did a few things much better than OB, but still carried on a few of the same problems.

The facegen thing was really nasty in OB, and the best I've seen with the (unmodded) sliders was still rather "cartoony". The ability to add facial hair in FO3 was a big step forward, but I'd still like to see a few more "default" face choices as starting points, so you'd have a wider overall range. I was less than impressed by the actual choices in facial hair than by inclusion of the ability to add it, as most of them were pretty far "out there"; I couldn't find more than a couple that didn't make me think "weirdo" on first glance.

Spawning of higher-level creatures at low levels on rare occasions was interesting, but the game still suffered from OB's "replacement" of weaker opponents by stronger equivalents, instead of "adding" them to the list of possibilities. After a certain point, the more basic versions just didn't appear all that often, if at all. When you CONSTANTLY had high-level creatures and raiders appearing directly in front of Megaton, it became ridiculous, with the inevitable result that the defenders eventually got overwhelmed. The only solution was for the player character never to go back after a certain level.

Combat was, if anything, even more of a "grind" than OB's, with many opponents taking 20-40 shots to kill (unless you sniped from hiding, in which case a single BB was sufficient to kill and make body parts fly). I don't advocate insta-kills, but there shouldn't be any mortal and more-or-less unarmored opponents who can withstand being shot with a large-calibre firearm (or hacked at with a large sword or axe) 20 times and still stand.

The biggest thing that FO3 did wrong, in my opinion, which it essentially carried forward from OB, was the lack of FAILURE at things which your character was unskilled at. That was TOTALLY contrary to both the spirit and the basic POINT to the original FO games. At a skill of 24 in the new games (OB and FO3), you weren't even allowed to attempt certain tasks; yet at 25 you couldn't possibly fail at it; there was no "gray area" where you could attempt it with a chance of either success or failure. MW had the opposite problem where failure was TOO frequent, and you had no way of reducing the difficulty except by incrasing your skills or attributes; there was generally no way to try a "simpler" or "lower grade" solution to reduce the difficulty. OB sidestepped the entire issue (and point of playing a RPG) by making all actions succeed, regardless of the character's skills and attributes, and used mini-games based on player skills in place of a few of them. FO3 at least added a YES/NO check to see if your stats met the minimum requirements to even play the mini-games. Unfortunately, the DIFFICULTY of the mini-games was still not really affected by the character's skills, merely whether or not you were allowed to play them.

The use of generic NPCs to fill out the larger towns on FO3 was a step in the right direction, otherwise the effort to turn them all into fully fleshed-out characters would have been enormous.

im not sure if you could call oblivions blobular super wide faces with the practically vertical eyes "elven" looking. ill take the FO3 facegen over oblivions any day of the week. also if you go by star trek, lotr, or DnD then elves are basically humans with pointy ears.

i also tend to agree that not everything needs to be thrown into the suggestions thread. lots of ideas get passed over cause everyone and their cat is supposed to put their idea in that thread and most people dont read all of the pages. considering that this board is very slow now (compared to when they release a game) i think they can manage a few extra threads once in a while.

Well, what he thought most probably was taht the NPC and also the PCs (without mods) looked bad. Not unique, not elven looking, but just bad and unrealistic. The Fallout NPCs looked more like "people" not in the people vs. elves way, but in the realsitic vs. unrealistic way. In Fallout 3, the facegen is quite limited, I'll give you that (I think it might even be on purpose so that you resemble your dad at least a bit), but the results seemed more life like. I definitely hope that in TES V the models and textures will be better (to be expected), that each race will have its own head mesh (or several) and then you will be allowed to tweak those in some sort of FaceGen. Beards, tattoos and jewelery (on face and body alike for the tattoo and jewelery) would be very nice. And sure, beards should not be tied to the hairstyle. Not by model and not by colour.

One off the good things that oblivion needs from Fallout 3 is the attributes and skills to play a role in quest dialog.

Example: (for those who haven't played Fallout 3)

Quest: You need a key from a person who won't hand it to you.

You can eaither tell him:

- [Strength] Give me the damn key or I'll ripp you head off!
- [Intelligense] You can save us from death if you give me the key.
- Will you give me that key?

Random encounters between towns stands out for me, mostly because I agree with a previous poster that "completely exploring" an area really svcks it of all its fun. I want to travel to an area and expect something new - Fallout 3 handled this nicely, but Red Dead Redemption handled it even better.