@OP

I thinkt the story will be greatly improved. Yes, I'm looking at you Fallout 3 story.

Probably animations.

Maybe hair.

Probably lighting tech and shadows on PC.

simplicity

A forumful of insipid threads.

I personally don't view "trying to make a game most people like" as being a weakness.


Most PCs wouldn't be able to handle it either, so you'd end up with a game that very few people could play.


That's kind of insulting, suggesting that anyone who doesn't have a top-spec PC is the "lowest common denominator". I remember having to upgrade my PC just to play Oblivion on minimum settings. I shouldn't have to spend hundreds of pounds on hardware just to play a ￡30 game.


There's a very funny .jpg out there about the "toggle" requests. If you're going to spend many years and tens or even a hundred million dollars making a game then it should be aimed at what most people want, rather than just a few. They're not going to please everyone and can't have a toggle option for every single capability.

One thing I'd find interesting - not that we'll ever know - is how many people completed Fallout: New Vegas in hardcoe mode. Even having catered to a minority demand, it would be intriguing to see how many people actually took them up on the idea. I'm speaking as someone who used the NOM mod for Morrowind but didn't bother with hardcoe mode for FONV because it just seemed like more hassle than fun.

Morrowind's quests, apart from the main quest, were almost completely isolated incidents, with the exception of ultimately insignificant disposition changes. And what involved quests they were - kill that guy, escort that guy or get that item, with no narrative cohesion whatsoever. The closest you got to two quests actually relating to each other was in the Thieves and Fighters questlines:

Thieves guild: KILL the heads of the Fighters guild!
Fighters guild: KILL the heads of the Thieves guild!

Yawn?

I wish Morrowind purists would be more honest about Morrowind's shortcomings. It was a great game, but it also had some MAJOR flaws (which, unlike many of Oblvion's flaws, still seem to be untouched by modding) that its rabid supporters never admit to. Hell, they won't admit to ANY flaws in Morrowind, including cliff racers!

I really hope its not story line. That's my number 1 concern. :cryvaultboy:

First and foremost, I will love Skyrim, and I'll lose many, many hours of my life in the game. However, there will be many faults - there's no helping it.

For example, the battle system. It looks like it will be much better than Oblivion's, but that's not saying much. For example, as I understand it, you will only be able to block with a two-handed weapon or a shield. So if you dual-wield, you can't block? Makes no sense, and it'd be an easy fix, but apparently they won't change it (please do correct me if I'm wrong).

The lack of stats might be a problem, I really don't know. It's possible.

The utter lack of climbable ladders is of course ridiculous, it's actually pretty pathetic in this day and age.

The graphics coding might be a problem, especially on consoles.

Then there's the classic problem of towns. 5 major cities and... what, 7 smaller towns? I imagine those smaller towns to be, like, two houses or something. It's not that this is that terrible, but calling it a "town" - and calling the bigger things "cities" - is just silly, I'm sorry.
Which leads me to the problem of city economy, which they're exploring. It sounds like a dead end, to me.

Then there's the radiant story. Anything with "radiant" in it makes me cringe nowadays. I just don't trust Bethesda on Radiant systems.


That's just off the top of my head, there's bound to be more. Can't wait for November!

There are 20+ smaller towns, and, IIRC, in order to qualify as a "smaller town", they have to have 10+ buildings. So that's one fear we can put to rest!

I'm concerned about the economy. It sounds like they're changing it up an awful lot, which is good, but it's been consistently broken in Bethesda games since 2003. And the stuff about affecting it by doing certain things to a settlement sounds a little too good to be true.

Wow, that's really impressive. If that's true, it's a huge improvement over Oblivion. :twirl:



Exactly, this system sounds much more advanced than earlier economy systems in TES, and even in Oblivion they made big rookie mistakes. I very much doubt this will work well, if it'll be implemented at all (still working on it, right?).

I'm guessing some RPG elements, sincve thats the general direction of RPG's these days. BUt usually the real weaknesses wont be apparent till the actual release

I guess the obvious rebuttal would be the entire House Hlaalu quest chain, which is both extensive, features that neat Camonna Tong connection and involves a reasonable amount of choice and consequence. And I am no Morrowind purist, no sir.. like BG2, its has flaws both large and small. But I guess my point is both games are beloved for at least those six reasons (more or less :wink_smile: ) which I feel are mostly absent in their sequels. And my guess is Skyrim is gonna skimp on at least one of them.. I hope its just one :unsure2:

I personally think Beth will get cocky ,hopefully not thought

Well, I played through the Hlaalu quests not a month ago, and I can't even remember any larger Cammona Tong context, so I'll have to take your word for it. That's a bit of the problem though - so few quests stick in your mind, because once you're thanked for them, they seem to become little more than a completed journal entry. It's true that Oblivion was also lacking in significant consequences due to the player's choices, but I found questlines like the Thieves guild and Dark Brotherhood to be much more satisfying and memorable in a narrative sense. In those quests, the importance of seemingly random item-retrievals or assassinations in earlier quests would become apparent in later quests, which I hardly ever noticed in Morrowind.

I'm hoping Skyrim's new AI will make the quests themselves much more dynamic than in either Morrowind or Oblivion, with more divergences and consequences than merely "mission accomplished" vs. "oops, quest giver died", and some differences in disposition and reward cash which really has no bearing on the world itself. I'm at least excited to see what modders can make of it.



Ok, then. It just seems like people who prefer Morrowind over Oblivion often does so with every fibre of their being, as if Morrowind possessed some mystical dimension of transcendent gameplay which Oblivion, being made for 11-year olds (according to the Morrowind purists), didn't. I really don't see those supposedly enormous differences myself.

Again: Unlike Morrowind which had a flawless economy system? Morrowind's system was equally annoying and merely stupid in a different way.

Graphics. It already looks outdated in my eyes, in comparison to the modern graphics standard. That will be Skyrim's great weakness I think.

Story sounds AWESOME so far I think. Much better than Oblivion's. Oblivion's story was bad, Morrowind's was amazing. So far Skyrim's story is leaning towards the awesomeness of Morrowind.

I guess "broken" is a pretty strong word, but so is "flawless". For instance, if you were willing to steal some silverware, very powerful gear is accessible in the first hour of the game. That's not as bad as the issues Oblivion had, but it was still goofy.
And, of course, there's the ever-present issue of being wealthy enough to make Solomon blush by the time you're level six.

Immersion. It'll be 'fun', no doubt, but it'll feel like a game.

Animations, how they handle dialogue, story, level scaling and disappointing the ridiculous expectations placed upon them.

Well, both have their problems. I'm not sure what economy mods exist for Morrowind, but Oblivion's problems were largely fixed by "Enhanced economy". In both games money indeed ceases to matter after a while, since there is not enough to do with the absurd amounts you can amass.

Excuse me, but I wrote "Trying to please the most users" . . . which is not exactly the same thing as "trying to make a game most people like."
Trying to be all things to all players is not necessarily a good thing.
My point is that Beth has apparently lowered the bar yet again, so that gamers who just want to play yet another combat action game will snap up Skyrim.
If the series becomes so simplified that it is only a shadow of the RPG that it should have been (had the focus been on making the best RPG . . .what I call a true RPG, instead of yet another FPS/RPG hybrid), Beth will once again alienate the users who are expecting Skyrim to be a more complex RPG than its predecessor.


Most of today's top games allow the user to either use DX9 or DX11, and add enough graphics options/settings to make the game playable on the PCs that most people are playing games on. If you do not FULLY support the latest technology that is available while the game is being developed, the game ends up being dated graphically very soon after its release (when compared with the other top games that are being released).


the XBOX is the issue here. My Desktop is 4 years old . . . with an updated graphics card (that is over a year old now) . . . so I don't own a "top-spec PC," but my system far exceeds that of an XBox 360. Apparently you missed this part of my post: "The game should have been made for today's top end systems (DX11 gaming PCs), and then ported over to the consoles."


You're suggesting that hardcoe gamers are "just a few?" . . . I think you're totally off base. The TES modding community wouldn't be nearly so active if there were only "just a few" gamers who wanted a more complex, more difficult game than what Beth ends up releasing. Just look at the base here, who are VERY concerned about the way Skyrim is being "Streamlined."

There are plenty of very popular mods that include an option menu to toggle off things that make the game more difficult than what everyone wants . . . for example OOO and MMM for Oblivion; MMM and FWE for Fallout 3; Project Nevada for Fallout NV. I made my Realism Tweaks (for FO3 and NV) modular and include a large Options Menu because not everyone wants to play with the maximum amount of difficulty enabled. The difficulty slider is not nearly comprehensive enough . . . the game needs a real gameplay Options Menu. If you make a game that is not VERY challenging to the average player it is not going to very popular with the harder core gamers (until the large overhaul mods are released . . . and these mods take months to create). If the average gamer is pushing the difficulty slider up to Hard or Very Hard, because the game is too easy (or adding mods that make the game more difficult), that is a pretty good indication that the game was not even targeted at the average gamer.


NV's hardcoe mode was a joke to most NV gamers . . . it was done very poorly. The Needs rates are ridiculously low and free water, food, and places to sleep are so abundant that the Needs end up being more of a nuisance than adding any kind of a challenge to the game play. And the Needs were based on real time, instead of one the game's Timescale . . . which means that you are stuck using the default 30 Timescale (1 real hour = 30 game hours), or your character will die of dehydration whenever they sleep a few hours. There's a large demand for eating, sleeping, and drinking to implemented into RPGs . . . but it has to be done properly . . . where it actually makes the game play more immersive and more challenging.

This thread is: "What will Skyrim's weakness be?" and what I posted is my opinion, based on the information that has been released so far. You don't have to agree with me, but I don't feel that I'm all that far off.

I really want to know what you consider a "true RPG", because pretty much all TES games were FPS/RPG hybrids...

I won't be able to tell what is good or bad about the game until I play it. Even if I know what features are in it and how things are to be done, I can't say if I like until I see how it is implimented in the game. Some things sound great on paper but fall on their face when in the game and vice versa.

no spears.. :violin:

Let you know after my first playthrough.