» Tue Jun 23, 2015 5:33 pm I've had this brewing for a while now. I don't expect a major response, or any response at all, but i want to get this off my chest in the one place it might have even the slightest effect. It might feel ranty, that's because it is - Please bear with me, i'm not much of a writer 
Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim have all followed the same basic formula. You start as a prisoner, are told you are the destined one (at some point very early on anyway) and you have to save the world.
The games then let you loose to do whatever you want. The thing is, the games have all tried to hurry you along somehow. Do this quick, or the world ends. Injecting the feeling of 'epic' forcefully by constantly saying that you're the only one who can save the world.
Add to that that the games all play very similar. Nuances exist (and they are nuances - i'll get to that later), but they're insignificant when put against the actual feeling of the game itself.
I won't have to explain much about these games on these forums, so i won't do it. However, i hope i can convince some people that the series needs to change - Not in a major way, but the nuances have to evolve and the rest of the game has to grow with them.
1: The main story
To be sure, Morrowind implemented the main story the best of the 3 'modern' TES games. It's far more integrated into the plot and leaves the question of who you are pretty much open untill the very end, leaving a bit to interpretation rather than telling you anything straight out. However, it still carries the same problem as the other games:
- You are the 'chosen one'.
- You have to save the world.
- You are the only one who moves the world forward.
Some of this can be explained lore-wise, but it's far too buried in speculation (if it even was a thought in the writer's minds), and it forcefully tries to inject 'epic scope' into the game by simply using the concepts of 'chosen one' and 'save the world'. Frankly, the main story is boring as hell in Oblivion and Skyrim, and Morrowind is saved only by it's much slower pace (and more branching paths, even though they do converge they give the story a much grander sense of scale).
What TES VI really needs to do: Come up with a story that isn't (just) about saving the world. Look at Ultima IV as a great example: You're not saving the world, you're changing it. The world goes on it's own and you don't need to do what you're doing, but you do it anyway because you feel it needs to be done, to change the world for the better.
Other ideas could be that the story is more intimately tied to your character, depending on what race you choose (a family member gone rogue, or died), or you happen to get involved in some political plot (GoT style) simply as a messenger, a bodyguard or a random bystander (that last one would fit the best for an intro obviously).
It comes down to making you care about the world without resulting to cliches. Caring about your place in it, giving you a connection to the main plot without making it all about destiny, chosen ones and saving the entire world from certain doom. A main plot that follows the pace of the player, not the other way around.
2: The gameplay
Character progression: TES has always changed it's game systems, but it did stick to the core idea (which is good): You are what you do. No predetermined classes, no rigid structure where mages cant use swords and warriors cant cast spells. You do what you want to do and the game rewards you for doing it, especially when specializing in it.
This has to remain the core of the game (and is also a reason why i personally vastly prefer Skyrim's system over the previous game systems, as it emphasizes this design goal by far the best). How exactly it is implemented doesn't matter too much, as long as the experience remains the same.
Combat: The combat is where the game loses a lot of momentum. Skyrim's combat is the best by far out of all the games, since it provides proper feedback (rather than using Oblivion's random damage and Morrowind's... Yeah, you know....). It's visceral, without removing all the tactics and challenge. However, it would be better.
I wanted to say 'Dark Souls', but that goes too far in one extreme i think. Still, it's a great inspiration for a new way to do fantasy combat in Skyrim, making it a lot more challenging and rewarding. Of course, this also requires a redesign of the AI... Still, it's a logical next step for the series, rather than trying to refine a system that was already somewhat outdated in 2002.
3: Environment and level design
The world design of Skyrim, and to a lesser extend of Oblivion and Morrowind, is excellent. Especially the verticality in Skyrim gives the game world an amount of depth and sense of scale that hasn't really been matched anywhere else (sorry Dragon Age, Witcher 3).
Sadly though, the detailed level design is crap. Linearity is through the roof and sometimes feels worse than Call of Duty. The one-track dungeons are especially horrendous. While it's understandable why they were designed that way, i'd classify the reasons more as excuses rather than well thought out design decisions.
There are no dungeons you can really get lost in, but there should be. Dungeons feel safe, because you can always go out the way you came. You can always just quit and go somewhere else. They're comfortable loot boxes, nothing else.
This really needs to change. Mind you, not to the level of Daggerfall (that was just stupid a lot of the time), but at least close - Dungeons have to be dangerous place that aren't explored in half an hour, but they still have to feel like they have purpose (which they really don't in Skyrim). How was the place used when it was still actively used? How would it be defended, if it was even necessary to do so? Was it even designed with that in mind by the in-world creators?
Dungeons also need a far better sense of place. A lot of them seem to be a hallway that stretches all the way from Solitude to Riften, but they have to fit in a hill, or underneath it, that's far smaller than that. Dungeons need to feel like they fit in the place where you go inside.
And please, don't patronize players with making all exits connect to the end. It makes them feel far too game-y, beyond the normal problems.
4: The game world
Basically: It needs to be bigger.
Mind you, not everything has to be designed by hand. Large plots of land may simply be grass- or farmlands, nothing more, nothing less. It's not necessary to make 'every inch count'. That just causes you to make the game world smaller and smaller, just to make sure everything is filled to the brim, and also makes the game world feel more game-y by constantly inducing the feeling that 'this area is tied to a quest later on' (anyone who played World of Warcraft will know what i mean very well).
Make it a combination of procedural and hand-crafted. Make the important bits by hand, but there's no reason to let large parts be procedural, possibly even unknown to the designers themselves. Give the game world a sense of scale that hasn't been seen since Daggerfall, without falling into that game's trap of 'random everything'.
Skyrim's world design was, as mentioned, already awesome, but imagine what the game world would feel like when it would be scaled up just a bit - The views, the exploration, how it would feel. Places could feel truly remote and special, players can more easily carve out a piece of land for themselves.
Cities: Just a short one: Make proper city sized cities. The only proper 'city' (if you could even call it that) in the modern TES games was, imho, Balmora. No loading screens, just a large town that actually felt 'lived in', as opposed to the pristine villages you would find otherwise.
I personally miss the feeling of walking into Daggerfall and simply getting lost... And enjoying it, especially after you start recognizing certain neighbourhoods.
5: The lore
I can be relatively short for this one:
The lore in the games is nice, but it's presented like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwM_-jyKQIs
It's a fun joke in Family Guy, but it's the de facto manner of how EVERY SINGLE NPC spouts their life's story at you whenever you come within a 10 mile radius. It's not immersive, it's grating and just reminds you that you're playing a game, nothing else.
Characters should not always tell the truth. They should hide things. Say things without words, through emotions, body language. They should try to manipulate you while making you believe they're your best friend.
I hate to mention Dark Souls again, but it has to be done. TES doesn't have to go to that extreme of course, but the lore holds no secrets, no mysteries, no 'community fodder' when it's all spelled out matter-of-factly. It just becomes boring filler. Here's a video that explains it more (especially the middle part, which sort of mentions Skyrim): https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=823&v=Y7Td0aesimw
And, please make us care about characters in the game world. Give them a more direct connection, or let the player form one. Currently, all characters have just been cardboard cutouts, even the celeb voiced ones.
6: The small stuff
Things that TES VI NEEEEEEEEDS to fix:
- Rain and snow should not ignore the laws of physics and fly through roofs and walls. Seriously, it's been a problem for so long and it's never been fixed. It ruins any immersion you might have during any weather that isn't sunny.
- Don't make indestructible doors that look like they're made of 2 pieces of firewood. LET US BURN THE ******S at least. Or kick them in. Don't make (high level) quests which cause your fully Daedric equipped bad-ass to stand there scratching his butt while a door that's flimsier than a card house stands in your way, because you don't have the key. It's a major immersion breaker. And just stupid, imho.
- Overlapping terrain. OVERWORLD CAVES. Non instanced caves, if you will. Structures like Solitude which look and act more believable with actual terrain rather than thousands of stacked rocks.
- Mentioned before, but here for clarity: Dungeon design has to make sense. Let players 'feel' that the places they go to are actually used (or have been used) by the npc's.
- Motherfreakin' outhouses. Farmlands which look they could sustain the population. Things that make the game world more believable, like it seems it's been there long before you and will be there long after you're gone.
- Proper stealth gameplay. Quiet takedowns would be a good start.
- Invisibility is cool, put it back in. But, not without giving the areas, monsters and npc's the means to detect and defeat it where needed.
- No reason to not put levitation back in once all the cities and stuff are free of loading screen chains. Magicka/second is the best inhibitor you could have for those and, like invisibility, there's no reason why areas that need it could have magicka (or levitation) dampening effects.
Well... Thank you for listening, at least the people who have made it this far. I once again apologize for the ranty nature of the post, i just wanted to jot down some thoughts before they fly away again. I just want the next TES game to be the greatest game of all the time. Sort of.
