This is inspired by the 'Is Skyrim a lackluster RPG' thread. This is NOT a thread to debate whether Skyrim is an RPG, but one where you can simply share you thoughts as to what would make it more of a traditional RPG. Try and keep it short and simple.

1) Consequences. One of the biggest complaints is that I can walk around Windhelm dressed as an Imperial. For all the praise Skyrim recieves as a 'living breathing world', oversights like this make it seem quite the opposite. Please, Bethesda.. do not be afraid to penalise the player, do not throw away the in-game lore all for the sake of player convienience.

2) Player choice. Barring children, ALL NPC's should be killable. No exception. Nothing is more patronising to me as a player than being forced to run away from a Legion camp commander because he is invinsible. (For no good reason either) Even so, if I choose to kill an entire town and sacrifice my ability to do all available quests there, then that should be my prerogative.

3) No undroppable quest items. Please remove these safety wheels and stop treating the player like an idiot. If someone drops an essential quest item, then let them learn and grow from it. These along with unkillable NPC's are really lowering the quality of the series.

4) Penalties. Diseases in Skyrim mean nothing and have no noticable impact on the game. In Morrowind, being blighted would sever you from 99% of the world. You truly felt like a freak. Be more strict with race relations. If a Nord NPC starts talking about how he hates Dunmers, dont have him give my Dunmer a quest. In fact, whatever quest he may have should be exclusively shut off from me unless I make a new character of a different race. Offer hunger/thirst/sleep/temperature penalties instead of a 'legendary mode' for increased difficulty.

5) Bring back skill requirements to guilds. Dont allow a pure melee barbarian to become archmage. Catering to the ADHD crowd who want instant gratification with no effort has done no favours for the series. If that doesn't make sense, then perhaps this pic will explain it better...

http://global3.memecdn.com/dark-souls-players-will-know_o_1337619.jpg

#1. I agree

#2. I agree

#3. I agree.

#4. I agree

#5. I agree

Now more features I will add to the list to make The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim more funner to play and features that should be removed.

#1. Adding back armor and weapons degradation and repair hammers.

#2. Remove regenerative health permanently. Only heal from eating food, using healing potions, using healing spells, resting, and sleeping.

#3. Remove level scaling of loot and NPC's permanently as well.

This a ok list for your topic?

I can't help but agree with the OP, the 3rd option can easily be done. Dragon's Dogma has that mechanic, if you sell a quest item, it goes to a shop where you can rebuy it.

I personally would like to see.

1. No Regenerating health

2. The ability to let me choose what skills I want to get bonuses in at the beginning.

3. Put Weapon/Armor durability back in.

All of this is a moot point because Beth is done with Skyrim but still there's nothing wrong with highlighting the flaws that Skyrim has so that Fallout 4 and TESVI are better games.

Yep. If We talk about the bad things that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has then Bethesda Game Studios can read what we talk about and take notes and try to improve the next new video games that they work on developing to release for sale in the future.

I agree with everything said so far aside from the scaling of enemies. I wish it wasn't so evenly scaled everywhere but I like that it is is. What I mean is tht I wish some dungeons were harder than others but I never want to walk into an area and be able to gently poke things with my pinkie for them to die.

I love the idea of bringing back items that degrade with time.... I thought that was a huge factor in Oblivion and it makes me mad they took it out at all. Along with the combat underwater... Okay, I get it: you can't use magic or a bow underwater but you could use daggers... or underwater weapons specially created to be underwater. I am so tired of searching a wreck and then having to swim away because slaughterfish are trailing me and then awkwardly standing at the shore trying to kill them when I can't even see them floating in the water five feet out.. But that's a rant for another time.

I would bring back teh different horses. Yes, the ones in Skyrim have pretty colors but not int he same sense that Oblivion did. Paint horses were the least desirable while a black or white horse was the best for either speed or strength. All the horses in Skyrim are the same.

More extreme weather changes. People say Skyrim has more weather than Oblivion but I disagree. Yes they have great snow fall and pretty sunshine and clouds... but I very rarely see it raining and I have yet to see a thunderstorm aside from once... two years ago. Oblivion as constant changing weather patterns with a regular pattern so I never really knew what I was going to face. I loved the complete downpours I was sometimes stuck in at random where I could barely see down the hill. Don't have that in Skyrim.

I miss the variety of locations and traps and enemies. Again, Oblivion felt like it had a wider variety of forts, caves, dungeons, crypts, underwater caves, etc. Skyrim has Dwermer ruins (which I shudder to go into because they all constitute of the same thing with a different layout), Crypts (where all you fight are drauger and spiders) and caves (but these all turn into crypts more often than not). I did like how Skyrim had random quests start once you got to some of these locations but the lack of variety really made me withdraw from adventuring a whole lot at the get go. Oblivion also fared better with traps. I loved them (especially the ones in the aylied runes that would slaughter you if you weren't careful). You were punished for not paying attention. Skyrim... "Oh, there's a pressure plate, better not step on thaaaat" and the trap is avoided altogether more times than not. Booooring. And, finally, enemies were a complete let down. I fought bandits, drauger, dragons, wolves, the occasional troll, and vampires. Oh booooy. To me it simply felt that Oblivion (and even more so Morrowind) had a far better host of baddies to kill.

Finally,I wish there was a system that made it so if a NPC died, one would come to kind of replace their spot. Not replace in the sense that it is the same person who can offer you the same quest but.... more like how Fable does it. If a shop owner gets kills at random because of a dragon fight in the city that was by no means the fault of the player, it would be awesome if a new shop owner would end up taking residence a few weeks later and starting the business up again or beginning a new one altogether. Yes, you lost the possible quest from the original but perhaps this new NPC has a different quest - that would be pretty cool and make the world a more realistic place. I can't tell you how many times I have lost trading oppurtunities because a dragon freaking nommed on Belathor for snack.

Annnnd I think that's my piece. We'll see when I read what others have to say. ^^

I LIED! I missed one... I miss getting random upgrades in skills at the 25, 50, 75, and 100 marks. In Skyrim I have to waste a perk to get the same freaking thing I should just get for being so awesome in a skill to begin with. Just saying. Haha.

Okay, now I am done.

I see rain and thunderstorms a lot. There's even a shout for it lol.

I agree with the 5 the OP presented and the suggested additions by others.

Here are a few from my warped mind:

9) Multiple ways to accomplish quests. Allow us to use abilities other than "kill" abilities to accomplish them.

10) Bring back "open lock" spells and the ability to break open chests and doors. NOT everyone should HAVE to be proficient in picking locks.

11) Refine fast travel. Going anywhere at anytime from almost any outside place is too much, too easy.

12) Attributes. Make a character's intelligence (or whatever) help their intelligence (or whatever) based skills. ALL of them.

13) Allow players multiple ways to carry all the loot heaped upon them in the game. It is nice that character's can actually move, even being overburdened by 3-4 times their allotted weight allowance, but bring back carts. I really dislike having my play decided on how much I can carry.

There's my five additional ways to help Skyrim a better RPG.

Dang, I knew this would happen. As I read through those 5, 2 more popped into my head:

14) Bring back the deleted schools of magic. Players can never have "too much" in terms of choices.

15) Bring back haggling and Admire/Bribe/Taunt. Gaining speecraft skills by NOT bartering is silly.

I like skyrim's level scaling to a point, it does seem to keep the low level mobs out there so you do feel like you've advanced (similiar to the fallout 3s scaled encounter). Plus there are places with fixed level mobs here and there to keep you on your toes.

For the most part skyrim did well, some more immersion or simply add options you can turn off would help.

Think of hardcoe in fallout new vegas, but give you the option to add X or deactivate Y

I think that's what all future games should do.

Want to have armor degradation, click this box

Want no autoregen health, click this box.

Best thing they did though is find a middle ground, where the community can add the things some want while still reaching everyone. (one reason the creation kit is there, they make design choices based on the mass market. But give the buyer's the tools to make the game experience what they want it to be)

I agree with the OP.

Make spells and perks unique. The necromancy line can best be described as "you can reanimate stronger enemies", and that's about it.

Less potential followers, but more interaction and with some back-stories and follower quests would be nice. New Vegas, Mass Effect and Dragon Age (out of recent games) all did this quite nicely. People still talk about Boo and Minsc; in Skyrim I took Kharjo because he looks cool.

On 5, yeah, Guild requirements, but please not [your alteration is only 48, you can't be Wizard rank yet]. Just because it was done like that in the past doesn't make it good. Find a believable way to make warriors unable to flourish in the Mages' Guild, through trials, small quests that require certain skills, demonstrating your abilities or anything other than your superior suddenly knowing your destruction is 65, not 64. Skyrim (vaguely, almost) gave a nod to this, but the effort was weak, cast a spell to get into College, put up a ward, then you can get to Archmage through loads of sneak archery if you wish.

#1 Agree.

#2 Agree, but take the kids out of the game entirely.

#3 Agree.

#4 Agree.

#5 Absolutely.

1. Bring back the attributes and skills removed from the series and have a character creation system similar to Daggerfall.

2. Better combat system with more emphasis on character skills, and more variables than just damage output (e.g. a poor archer should struggle to hit targets regardless of how accurate the player is, and a physically weak character should struggle to even draw certain bows).

3. More complex weapon/armour stats, with certain weapons being far more effective against certain types of armour.

4. Greater interaction with the the environment, again taking into consideration character stats.

5. Get rid of perk trees and instead have specialist skills and abilities you can learn from NPCs or books (like how to craft a particular type of armour, not % increases that just speed up normal skill progression).

Why is a more traditional RPG necessarily a better RPG?

1) Consequences. I completely agree. Catering to 'easy play' is killing the series IMO.

2) Player choice. I seldom received the dreaded 'Thread of Prophecy Broken' message in MW, as I have never played as a person that would just kill some random person because I wanted their boots. As far as being allowed to just slaughter a town, I just don't feel like that is the intent of the game. If someone wants a game where they can just get out their frustrations (or heaven forbid fantasies) by slaughtering pixel people then play Carmageddon, not Skyrim. I don't mind essentials remaining that way just in case I may accidentally kill one. Since I role-play this shouldn't effect me anyway. The only time it did in Skyrim was when I was playing a vampire (just to do it) and had radiant quests asking me to kill named NPC's in cities. Well, I eventually figured out exactly who in every city was essential. Just another reason DG was the worse DLC ever created.

3) No undroppable quest items. Are you serious? How do you know something is quest related? I would assume if you did this you would also give the items weight and value, meaning there would be no reason for anyone to just unknowing carry a quest item around. So they sell it, drop it, whatever, and then when needed have to figure out where it is and hope it wasn't removed from the game world from some re-spawning container or merchant? There may be a better way, but letting players lose items that they have no idea they need later just encourages meta-gaming, which is terrible game design.

4) Penalties. Completely agree.

5) Bring back skill requirements to guilds. YES! I really hate how guilds were done in Skyrim. There should be guild reactions also, so if you belong to one guild then another guild will not act favorably towards you and may even bar you from joining.

Because newer RPGs tend to fall victim to the two ugliest words in video game development: streamlining and accessibility.

By using your brain and paying attention.

But perhaps there should be a quest item tab in the invent, and you should be given a warning before you're about to drop them should you decide to.

(1) sure sounds very good. I could really get behind this. I want to have an impact on the world and people notice the stuff I've done or how I dress for good or ill.. Multiple ways to accomplish quests goes right along with this.

(2) I really can't explain how not a big deal being able to kill everyone is too me although I understand the commanders. Anyway , I would have not objection as long as we got a warning when we killed a quest giver and either they were protected from the dangers of the world at large or the quest passed on to someone else.

(3) if they aren't undroppable then they should at least be tagged as quest items and probably persistent

(4) I could get behind an optional hunger/thirst etc mode but frankly I've always just found diseases annoying so no big deal.

(5) guild requirements. Longer quest lines and the chance to advance but NOT be guildmaster . Guild rivalries, NPC reactions as you climb in the guild. I want all of it.

Lem - a Stormcloak sympathizer loves to walk around Windhelm in his imperial armor taken from the imperial dog he slew (who just so happened to be of average height and weight just as Lem). He gains many kudo's (and much admiration from the Nord ladies I might add) and offers to join "the cause".

RPG'ers must adapt. I've yet to run across the perfect game.

Lots of things, really. Chiefly, I would add that more dialogue variety is key. I'm tired of being a [censored] or being railroaded into stupid dialogue choices that don't fit my character at all. It's like they didn't even try.

You realise health in real life does regenerate, yes? I skinned my knee as a kid, I'm not still debilitated by it.

At first I hated regenerating health and thought it streamlining yadayada... but it makes much more sense to regain your composure than to run around and be one shot by a mudcrab because you didnt restore your health.

An option for both camps would have been ideal.

Seriously, if Skyrim came with the customisation options the new Thief game has, it would have been 10 times the game it is now.

I agree with the OP as well. But perhaps maybe some of these things that us gamers look at as trivial things couldnt happen due to the fact that the systems that they were released on were pushed to their limits. Perhaps if these things that were mentioned did happen, then maybe a buggy game like Skyrim would've been an even buggier game.

The game is pushing the 2-1/2 year mark. I for one dont look at the "would've's, could've's or should've's" . I simply just play the game and enjoy what I have.

If someone slashes you open with a sword, the wound isn't going to heal up on its own after a 10 minute walk. You're going to need to treat it or you'll likely bleed to death or die of an infection.

I hate the way the Thief game was designed. You shouldn't make an inferior product and then include a ton of settings the player has to switch on to actually make it good. That's so backwards. It used to be that developers didn't care much about accessibility or frustrating players. They just made excellent games and then included easy settings for players wanting a more casual experience.