I was wondering if anyone else thinks that their is just TOO much gold in past elderscrolls games. I mean i know they try to balance it, but i was thinking, for TESV that would be a cool fix.

Morrowind was, OK with the gold situation, if u played it really well you could easily grab more than you need, but in Oblivion, you kill 10 bandits at level 25 and you make min of 6k.

Does anyone else think that their is just too much gold in past games? or just right? or do you hope they change it in the next game?

Well, seeing as I had over 3 million gold pieces in Morrowind, that might be too much. What Bethesda needs to do is to actually make us want to spend some of our gold to buy some unique things, houses, etc. Bethesda should make us want to buy armor and weapons and trinkets throughout the game.

Gold kind of became obsolete in Oblivion anyway, because all you had to do to get the good armor, weapons, potions, or anything else useful for your level was walk into Rockmilk cave and wait for the bandits and marauders to kill eachother.

Well, Daggerfall used massive amounts of gold, but there was a fair economic balance to explain that massive usage of gold. In example, the cheapest house in any city cost upwards of 200,000 septims. Some higher-quality weapons and armor (but nowhere near "the best" or "better than most" cost around 1,000 to 10,000. Magic was fairly expensive.

I think Oblivion's problem was that everything felt so damnably deflated in its economy. You could accrue hundreds of thousands of septims and instantly become a land-baron, and then within a few in-game weeks or months accrue yet another hundreds of thousands of septims. If prices were adjusted to fit with the ability to earn that said hundreds of thousands, then there would be little problem. Instead, the player ends up with vast amounts of coins with which they can do almost nothing.

So the actual amount of gold isn't what worries me. What worries me is the ratio between average amount of gold attainable (coupled with how level affects gold-harvesting) and how much things cost in the world.

The house thing in Oblivion was a great idea/gold drainer, but at one point, you just start making easy gold fast to replace the lost gold on the houses/horses.

Yeah, if Beth gave us more houses and variety of furniture/decoration you could put in your house, then that would be money well spent. B)

There was definitely too much gold in Oblivion, you can pretty much just kill something, sell all its stuff, and suddenly you're rich. Maybe in the next game when you buy a house there could be an option to hire servants, who you have to pay. Also another way could be that you need to repair your house every once and a while, which would cost quite some coin.

I seriously had so much of the stuff that i pretty much just used it for bribing and paying fines.

[EDIT]: Also, if the only way to fast travel were to be to buy teleports or maybe have a carriage driver drive you around you could burn off a lot of money that way too.

:thumbsup:

While I agree about houses being a major way to add something for the player to spend money on, there are some other subtle tweaks that could revitalize what the player must buy and what-not.

Firstly: Torches. Imagine if torches were not easy-to-find filler-loot in any dungeon or cave-entrance. Imagine instead that the player would be forced, most of the time, to buy them, as the odds of finding them in the wilderness would be slim. Therefore, the player would have something else they would have to spend money on in preparation for dungeon-delving.

Secondly: Potions of all types, but particularly healing potions and the like. Imagine if finding a health potion in the ES world was NOT like finding a drinking fountain IRL. Imagine that potions now only turned up as random loot in places where they made sense, IE rogue mage hideouts and conjurer dens, etc. And further imagine that the chances of finding random health potions even in those areas would be gimped. So the player would yet again have something they would have to spend money on in preparation for dungeon-delving.

Essentially, what this gets down to is one of the major problems of Oblivion: flinging either 1) excessive loot in dungeons that negates the need to spend money and resources planning and prepping for those dungeons, and 2) valuable loot at somewhat decent levels that just ruins the sense of "Hey, this is a rare and valuable item" by five minutes later dishing out yet another item in yet another dungeon with similar value and rarity. I should have to pay for both menial dungeon prep (remember when scrolls were useful and worth purchasing?) and rare and valuable enchants; they should not just be thrown at me by virtue of my exploration.

Hm, not sure about the torches part, I'm sure there would logically be some torches in dungeons where bandits stay. I agree with the rest though, but of course you should still be able to find some rare trinkets and such while exploring dungeons, but of course they should be fewer, and the ones in shops should be comparable or better.

I think people would have less gold if there wasnt fast travel, with FT you can zip between dungeons and shops and sell everything that was in there. Without FT, people would have to hike back to the city first, which may take ages if the next game has a big environment.
Plus there are too many things that be exploited to get you loads of money. In Obliv, everyone had levelled items, so in later levels, you would substansially increase the income of gold. Another thing that I use is good charm spell (100 pts), this gives me max dispostion with the NPC, so I can sell for the best price. If the charm effect had more magicka to cast, then this would only be availible to the best. Levelled enemies need to go IMO, and so does fast travel.
And as I said earlier in this thread, give us more variety, maybe 2 choices of furniture for each house, that would give me something to spend my money on, I could hire a bodyguard to escort me on my travels. I just want to spend my gold.

Quite so, I would also added when I was enchanting things in Daggerfall, I spend about 100k on that just one trip alone!

Also, weighted gold comes into mind......

That is one thing that keeps me from having so much money in Daggerfall. Then again, it also have a bank system that I exploited (though it cost money to have a weightless credit).

When it comes to potion making in Oblivion, I would assume that they would have to trim the price level of player-made potion as well.

You have the option to USE fast travel, or not to use it though. And the leveling of items was a good idea, but it deffinently can be improved upon Leveling/Worth of items.

If we are talking about the fast traveling I am thinking of (Oblivion), do not go down that road. Ya will be mauling on how pathetically use of transportation in Oblivion was and how very limited it is. The point is that adding service would cost to travel. Fast Travel also cost a few coins to travel, just like in Daggerfall, for faster, safer travel.

They did add horses though, (and a world where all the roads and terrain is pre-mapped for you)

The horse was crap, even a runner with decent can outrun a dam horse. And that like the only other traveling service there is. That or fast travel. Selection is very limited.

Yeah, that's a true point regarding the torches. Yet I still remember walking into caves in Oblivion that drew solely from generic animal/creature lists, and there would be a crate at the entrance with 2 or 3 torches sitting inside it. Perhaps my thing on torches also stems from my personal idea that the amount of dungeons should be thinned from what they were in Oblivion. Oblivion had 192 dungeons last I counted, not factoring in the 60 Oblivion gates that used the random 7 Oblivion worlds. You leave a dungeon and walk over a hill or two, and lo and behold! There's another dungeon! Reducing dungeons overall will not only allow them to better proliferate depth and unique qualities within dungeons, but it will also cut down on the amount of necessary loot the player can obtain (lockpicks, torches, repair hammers, potions, ingredients, etc, etc). By dropping the overall availability of such things via killing, you set up a scenario where the player will have to consider buying those things from shops instead. I, for one, never had to purchase a lockpick in Oblivion. I never ran out, thanks to the goblins always having them as loot and finding them in loot chests that didn't even make sense (of course, that was aided by the fact that Oblivion's lockpicking was easily overcome by player skill).

And I agree, finding rare things should still be there (though rare things should be hand-placed in my opinion and the usage for leveled lists for rare to semi-rare items should be drastically cut). But that way, the player will, upon finding that rare thing, be immensely pleased and be like "Aw SWEET! I totally just found something awesome and didn't have to cough up a mini-fortune to get it from shops!" As opposed to "Meh, whatever, I'll add it to the ever-growing pile of spammed "rare" things."



Not to descend this into a FT debate, but FT is not optional when your alternative is to walk through a world where most quests and events are designed with the premise that the player will use FT. And further, just because a game mechanic is optional doesn't mean it's perfectly OK to add that game mechanic. Should we be given an infinite-use kill-scripted dagger at chargen and be told that it's our option to use it or not?

And besides, if we're looking for a way to give money some more value, limiting fast-travel and adding cost to it is the perfect way to do just that. Convenience oft requires payment, after all. You want to go somewhere quickly? Then cough up some coins. This way, the player has a constant detraction applied to his gold pile, which will further prevent the massive buildup of worthless gold later on in the game.

I agree 100%. Reducing the amount of dungeons, but at the same time making them more unique and larger would be wonderful. The amount of lockpicks also bothered me, they should not nearly be found as generously as they were found in Oblivion. And I'm ecstatic about hand-placed loot. It is an absolute must. It was one of my favorite aspects of Morrowind.

Morrowind had just a TAD to few dungeons for its landscape/modes of travel, and they did get repetetive. Oblivion for its size had tons of Dungeons, with a large diversity to them. In TES V, it is really hard to say how many dungeons you think should be in it. The landscape/terrain/culture/province of the game your playing in, can alter the size/number of the Dungeons/caves. But as far as creativeness/diversity and size, i hope this is always being improved on, as it always has been in the past.

The problem isn't that there is too much gold, it's that there isn't enough things to spend it on.

In Oblivion, you could spend gold on:
1. Houses
2. Armor and weapons (I've only bought like one weapon before though, all you need to do is kill something.)
3. Potions and chemicals (Again, all you need to do is walk outside a city for about 5 minutes and you have all you need)
4. Horses

Of coarse I forgot some things, but the list is still extremely small.

Add in things like Mercenaries-for-hire, rent on your house, taxes, people stealing your gold, etc. , and you would never complain about having too much gold.

A good way to give gold more "value" is just to have more to spend on like others have stated above, have shop vendors have one to three extremely valuable weapons, potions, armor, spells ect.. that are worth buying even after you have aquired artifacts. In oblivion the shop vendors "special items" where pretty pathetic. Another idea would be to have blacksmiths customize your generic armor and weapons with insignias, gems (giving them an actual use), or trims. This process would be costly but it would allow the player to immerse oneself into the game better. Maybe one could pay an alchemist a large sum of money to custom brew potions (within limits of course). Finally pets and such could be sold for a large quantity of gold as well. These pets could simply stay at home or have a basic combat AI similar to companions in TES IV for example one could buy a tamed wolf for 5k or a beast of burden for 10k ect.

Umm, ya forgot Oblivion get repetitive as well, much faster rate then that of Morrowind. The mode of travel in Morrowind is much more reasonable as to that one can ride by post to post, ship port to port, walk/run/mount, mage service of teleporting, and self teleporting. And most of them requires something in return ie money.

We definitely need more money sinks in the next game, like how Daggerfall had purchasable homes and ships.

Even Morrowind's economy wasn't perfect. After my very first trip to a Daedric ruin, I was pretty much set.

I always end up having a ton of Gold in both Morrowind and Oblivion. I don't mind. But the only reason I end up with that amount of gold is because there's nothing to spend it one

Im going to have to disagree with you all on this one. Oblivion i think balanced gold fairly well compared to morrowind. In morrowind there was just nothing to buy or spend your money on once past level 20 or so, Plus you had the creeper and mudcrab merchant to give you millions of septims within about two or three hours. In oblivion you couldn't get a full price on the item and there was just more things to spend your money on like houses, horses, and furniture which really drained you of your coin.