Hello everyone. This is my first post here and I hope you all like me because it will defiantly not be my last. I have been an Elder Scrolls fan and player since Daggerfall. I have modding the game since Morrowind for personal enjoyment.

Lately, I have enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins (not 2) and The Witcher 2 (not 1) immensely. They both are great RPG games in every aspect except one...

I cannot live there.

This is why I still play Oblivion (mainly). I like to immerse myself into The Elder Scrolls lore. I like to walk to place to place instead of fast travel just so I can see something I have missed. I like to collect things to craft. I like hanging out in the middle of nowhere.

I am so excited about Skyrim I can barely contain myself. I hope that this will be the best Elder Scrolls yet and I hope that it is as open and free as previous titles. I also cannot wait to see what the modding community does with it.

Is anyone else not interested in “finishing” Skyrim, or are you like me and just want to “live” there?

I get what you're saying about living there. I personally love to boot up Bethesda games to just to pick out a comfortable place (any forested area with a few and some water works best for me, in Oblivion, for example) and relax or just live there. I love being able to traverse across the gameworld and stop at any point just to be able to admire it, grab a bite to eat, talk to someone, or rearrange some things. I don't always have any goal in mind when I do these things other than to relax, be a part of the world, and live there. Sometimes, I'll bring a favorite book. I don't use mods, so I can't really relate all too much there, but Skyrim will most certainly be just as open as past games. I've no doubt about it.

I know exactly what you mean! Though I wish this were the case, I'm not a particularly avid fan of fantasy (in fiction, games or otherwise). The writing can be spectacular, the characters witty and engaging, but to me what really matters most is how easily I can lose myself in the world or not. Whilst there are countless RPGs with a fair amount of polish, they still tend to feel "detached" from the player by the very nature of their gameplay. As engrossing as games like Dragon Age and The Witcher are, they feel more like watching a movie than living a world to me.

I've found that in the end as much as I love to complain on these forums like everybody else here, the gameplay of the Elder Scrolls games have never really meant too much to me - when we discuss Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion, I don't think "oh yeah I remember Daggerfall, it was the game where you could climb walls!" Instead, I remember it for spending entire weeks on end (sometimes in-game, sometimes in real-life) inside the city walls, performing miscellaneous tasks for the merchants and checking the library every day for a new assortment of books.

The atmosphere of the Elder Scrolls is unparalleled in this regard - it may not have the most advanced engine technology, but it isn't uncommon to see me hide away in a corner of my character's bedroom and read a book - and then get (actual) chills after stepping outside into the dead of night. Maybe, when I'm in a tavern, I'll just sit beside the windows and watch the other patrons go about their business. I even do silly little things like hide enchanted weapons and other keepsakes under the furniture in my house!

I love getting "cozy" in different areas of the game and paying as much attention as humanly possible into little details. These games are almost like a second home to me, with everything laid out just the way I like them. Lots of games do this, but TES is the only series where the personal touches are just as well-developed as the proper story/gameplay, so you don't really feel as if one thing is more important than the other. It's great.

I honestly cannot think of a fantasy world more perfect and complete as realized by its developer than Tamriel, and I truly give Bethesda my fullest appreciation for knowing this and designing their games for escapists such as ourselves.

We are discussing atmosphere... AND YOUR FORGET TO MENTION ARENA!?!?!?!?!?!?!?



What's creepier and more likely to induce a race to the nearest warm, cozy tavern than wandering the streets of a city in Arena at night?

If only Skyrim's map was the size of Daggerfall's... then I really could live in the game.

But I know exactly what you mean. This is why I have such a problem with most other RPGs. I don't care how good the story is, I don't care if the graphics are amazing, I don't care how cool the characters are or how flashy the combat is. If the world isn't as open as in an Elder Scrolls game, i'm not interested.

Doors that are as wide as they are high? How am I supposed to feel comfortable there? :stare:

You do bring up a good point, though. I severely miss the little villages and farmhouses you could encounter in Arena's wilderness. Quite a shame that they were full of skeletons.

Now you can actually live there more than ever. You can get a job, buy food, cook, fish, hunt, buy a house, save your friends when they are trouble.

Check out the local tavern to see what's going on.

When you are done playing, you travel back to your cozy home and go to sleep.

It depends on what you mean. If by "finishing" you mean completing all the side quests and main quests, then I'm definitely interested in that. But if by "finishing" you mean playing Skyrim, completing the quests, then going on and playing something else, then no. From your descriptions, I play similarly to you, where my characters live in Cyrodiil. They stop to eat and sleep, if they're walking from Chorrol to Bruma and a storm breaks out, they set up camp or duck into a nearby cave for shelter. They have friends and rivals. They live in Cyrodiil. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the potential Skyrim has for the same type of situation.

I like this topic! Some days I spend hours not fighting or doing quests, but arranging housing decor or wandering aimlessly.

I just like the taverns... I really like the taverns. What happened to them? Daggerfall's weren't quite as good, but they retained some of the charm. Then Morrowind and Oblivion's taverns (I can't even recall any taverns in Morrowind... strange) lost that style entirely. Here we are, 17 years later, and Arena's remain uncontested in detail and atmosphere, I'd say. What gives?

Well, one thing I liked about Arena was all the bizarre characters you had, like the shifty thief playing with his knife and the scantily-clad women in the taverns. Also, everybody was a jerk and didn't want to talk to you which actually kind of helped the atmosphere a bit there.

Most of Morrowind's taverns were called "clubs", where all of the elitist elves would hang around eating bread and drinking mazte. I think Pelegiad had a semi-lively one, though. Oblivion's felt like snooty country clubs to me, with the exception of some of the more populous ones out in the countryside (the one with the Nord giving you that quest to kill a troublemaking necromancer comes to mind).

Also, it wasn't the same once they threw out the cheery tavern MIDIs from Arena/Daggerfall. Whenever I entered taverns I could practically imagine people lined up along a great table clanking tankards sloshing with ale about, making a mess everywhere. I'm hoping Skyrim's bards will play music that's just as kitschy and annoying. If most of it is civilized minstrel stuff, it just won't feel the same. :sadvaultboy:

Yeah, I just posted similar sentiments on another thread, I just like to hang around doing my own thing without being forced into doing any quests or participating in a story. Loving TW2 btw but it's a different type of experience, and what I love most about TES is that I can just potter around and do my own thing - for hundreds of hours - and as you say, live in the world, not just do quests and play the story.

You will never see vistas like this in Skyrim at its current scale.
http://www.nzencounters.com/photos/mtcook_1_.jpg
http://cache.virtualtourist.com/2178000-Travel_Picture-Blue_Mountains_National_Park.jpg
http://i372.photobucket.com/albums/oo162/liliaferrando/mountains.jpg
http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lagmhnuD2E1qbd38ro1_500.jpg

We could always mod a tavern.

Lol I know what you mean. To be able to go out and explore and when you encounter danger try to use the land to you advantage but you can never know with 100% accuracy what's over the next hill. Or if your a their like I usually am check every nook and crany of a empty house to make sure you have every thing of value.

I instantly thought of the music that played in that bar on tatooine in star wars...


No clue why...

My concern is that whilst the towns and landscape are all still "condensed" like they were in Morrowind and Oblivion, it feels as if the mountains are going for a slightly more realistic scale - or at least a greater surface area. So we have our Skyrim tundra and then we have mountains that are disproportionately high compared to everything else.

There were also so many of said people... and they were all animated... and random jobs could be taken from the taverns... and there were choices in available rooms (single, double, king, etc.)... and I liked Arena's inn theme that just doesn't seem to play in Daggerfall's (the non-annoying one), but I can't bring myself to switch away from my current sound settings (think I'm using soundblaster, but I'm not sure).

Regardless, the club comment reminded me of a tavern in Cheydinhal near the west gate (Newlands Lodge) that was a popular hang-out location for a local gang (the Orum gang; Orcs). It had a Dunmer bartender who told me that the bar was specifically a Dark Elf bar. The exact quote is as follows:

"Welcome to Newlands Lodge, the best place to drink in Cheydinhal. Not counting the Chapel... haha. I'm Dervera Romalen. This is a Dark Elf bar. Cursing, spitting, and screaming? No problem. Fighting is fine with me, too, only the Guard objects, and they'll fine you or lock you up. Not my call."


I want to see and hear the cursing, spitting, screaming, and fighting and I would think such a thing would no longer be an issue with the AI Bethesda's conjured up, so I think it's time that AI was put to good use. I'll be expecting amazing taverns, Bethesda. :stare:

Oh! One thing I miss, although it's probably too oldschool to ever be done again now that Bethesda seems to be interested in hiding stats and making everything more seamless - the descriptive text messages that appeared whenever you entered a building in Arena, or stumbled upon a dungeon in Daggerfall's case. Those really helped to make the graphically limited settings a lot more vivid. One thing I dislike about newer games is that, as the graphics get more distinct and realistic, I see them more for what they truly are. If I were to daydream about Morrowind or Oblivion right now, chances are it'd look exactly how it does when playing the game - my character would be walking around, my framerate would be in the twenties, there'd be bloom everywhere. :bonk:

In the older games, a lot of the atmosphere comes more from what your imagination makes of it since there's less "actually there". If I think about my Arena/Daggerfall characters' antics, I may imagine them and the events surrounding them as if they happened in real life. I attribute a lot of this to how the simple yet characteristic animations and textual descriptions in the older games seem to try and appeal more to your senses, in an awkward way of phrasing it, than modern games often consider.

I think The Witcher did the "alive" thing rather well, even if it restricts the player movements and isn't open as TES. Vizima is still the most "alive" game town I've seen, with kids playing in the streets (and laugh), people covering for rain, bards playing in the taverns and so on.

It was a great thing to see, I remember asking for that kind of stuff even back when Morrowind was in development as it was the thing that impressed me the most with Daggerfall. It felt very "alive" back when it was released, while I think Morrowind did not.


The Morrowind taverns were useless. One of the main reasons to go to the Tavern and sleep, even if you don't roleplay that the character needs sleep, is to quickly wait until it's day and everyone else are awake, like merchants.

But in Morrowind everyone were awake 24/7. There was never any reason to sleep from a game mechanics point of view.

Yeah, that isone of the reasons I would have really liked Skyrim to be about twice Oblivions size or so. But oh well. Limited resources I guess.

By the way, I've been to the 3 sisters (the second one).

That is actually one of the things that I like about Oblivion that Morrowind doesn't quite work with. Morrowind's world is actually better designed, but the combination of NPCs with AI and schedules, voice acting and better graphics make the world feel much more "real" to me and makes it feel like I really could live there. Skyrim will be better than that in pretty much every regard, which means I will enjoy it even more.

Riften looks like a really nice place to live. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4lrm97dBqNo/TUFlf8E0PZI/AAAAAAAAAYM/zpU1C-tvpWw/s1600/artofskyrim_004_town.jpg

Imagine, going inside of a videogame tavern and seeing something new each time.

Are those 2 people on the top of that concept art humans?

I think so. They look kinda short and/or stocky but that's probably just because the artist was focusing on the architecture rather than character design.