I've been inspired to write this by reading other posts, and by my own Oblivion playing experience. Sometimes I just want to fire up the game to do a quick dungeon, or speed through a quest to see the good dialogue and the actual story parts. So I can understand the console impatient players. In long gaming sessions though, I'd like the universe to be more immersive, challenging and less hand-holding, which is why I'm proposing the list of options above.

Most poll options are self-explanatory, except perhaps these:

Fast travel requiring food supplies and money for the trip, and random encounters and other consequences

Fast travel is so easy right now, fleshing it out a bit would probably be a welcome addition even for casual players. But what I'm proposing is an option that you can turn on and off, so no worries of it interfering with your gameplay.
First, for long distances it should feel like a trip and not like teleportation, so you can arrive tired, with a message telling you how your trip went and how long it lasted.
Second I think that selecting an itinerary i.e. which roads you take would be interesting, and would allow showing your traveling progress on the map like in the Indiana Jones movies. There are great roleplaying opportunities here, since a wanted thief will probably want to avoid frequented roads, legion forts, etc.
Third, random encounters: if the game tracks your itinerary you can come upon a blocked road for many reasons, and you have to fight, talk or reason your way through (or maybe walk the wilderness for a bit to go around the obstacle) to resume fast travel.
Fourth, supplies: packing food and money before leaving on a trip just makes sense, you don't stop existing during the travel...

Guilds requiring loyalty and time spent on bureaucracy as you rise in rank, making leading several guild an art in itself.

I always found it stupid that you can become master of all guilds so easily, and that rising in rank implies no responsibilities. You're supposed to be the Archmage, but you have no duties and nobody cares if you don't show up for months.

I think that as you assume positions of power, politics should come in play: jealous rivals try to point out your failures and search your past to prove you're corrupted, too much involvement with another guild or frequent absences raises suspicions about your loyalty and involvement. Of course any suspicion that you're involved in an enemy guild or in activities abhorrent to the guild should get you in big trouble and force you to abdicate your position if they are proved (or if people believe in lies about you...). On the other hand you should be able to play the same tricks on your superiors... false accusations and set-ups included.

Being present a certain amount of time should also be a requirement. I'm not actually suggesting the player should idle in the Archmage's office looking at papers, but maybe it could work like the "serve your time" feature in jail. Working in an office could also affect your stats . The main point here is that you can't be everywhere at the same time, and if two guilds expect you both to be present at some point, trying to juggle the two will get you in hot water. Maybe this should be abstracted by you actually filling an hour grid, so the parts where you're doing administrative work in various guilds are abstracted out as long as they don't conflict: you just play regularly in the free time that's left.

Of course to prevent this from becoming too heavy the player could find all sorts of excuses to go on extended vacations and "research trips". I see these features as a very interesting way of livening up guilds after their quest lines are finished: you could be busy trying not to lose your office, then regaining it by regaining the confidence of your na?ve guild members and then exacting vengeance on those who ousted you... lots of fun possible here, and it would be easier than with Oblivion to create such quests, thanks to the quest conditions system Beth has created for Skyrim.

Diseases that are serious business: contagious, require specific treatment, initial symptoms leave you guessing at what you caught

I find Oblivion diseases annoying because they damage your stats but don't really add any gameplay... just run to the chapel and they're all gone. On the other hand imagine for a moment that in Skyrim the game doesn't tell you right away that you caught a disease, and then you notice some ugly rash on your skin or your screen blurs briefly from a bad headache... "uh oh... what did I catch in that dungeon? Or in that... uh... pleasure house?" Then it's the run to different doctors and alchemists who of course give you contradictory advice and try various medicines on you... you just hope they're not crooks.

Now that's what I'd call gameplay. Of course a balancing effort is needed, since if you keep catching horrible diseases the whole game will consist in visiting doctors. On the other hand curing a particularly tenacious ones would be an interesting ongoing quest (especially if you gradually realize it's called Porphyric Hemophilia...), and you could develop immunities to some stuff you've already had.

Check out the amazing Oblivion mod http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25835 which pretty much nailed it, even though it doesn't implement all the things I'd like to see.

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Comment away and vote! If you come up with other interesting immersion options, I'll probably add some to the poll above. No promises though.

There are the obvious ones like no fast travel and hardcoe mode which most of us would love but God I loved:

"Guilds requiring loyalty and time spent on bureaucracy as you rise in rank, making leading several guild an art in itself "
and
"A more realistic life for wanted criminals (live in disguise and fear being recognised by people, avoid roads, find bandit accomplices)"

Would be super immersive and fantastic! :celebration:

Don't be shy people, post your thoughts instead of only voting. I can't believe I have exhausted the supply of immersive options that would improve this game.

@Pellias: thanks for the support, we posted simultaneously .

I voted yes to all of them, but only if they are optional,and only if they can be changed at any time. Also, I want to be able to cook my food, start fires, and have a bedroll(that doesnt heal me, only meets sleeping demands in hard core). I also hope that there is good houses in this game, thats an important part of the game for me, it helps immersion to come back from a days quest and rest in a sweet pad.

According to the podcast Beth is considering adding some crafting to the game, I think Todd even mentioned cooking (can someone else confirm?).

Regarding beds, I just remembered that the amazing mod Vector adds a chance to get diseases if you sleep in dirty places and cheap inns... adding another poll option .

I voted for most of them to be optional - however I think the guilds idea should just be a part of the game; it just seems like it would be a fantastic way to do guilds, if it were done right. Things like eating, sleeping etc. I can see why some people would find them tedious or annoying, but I genuinely think guilds would work better like this.

I agree that guilds should just be done this way. Actually it would be hard to do as an option since they'd require tight integration into the guild quest structure to be really interesting.

Anyone should feel free to start a separate topic to discuss any of these gameplay points and flesh them out: this is more of a kind of hub to bring them together.

All great ideas bro, loving the guild rise one.

LOL at Todd Howards permission. Imagine taking a note into work on the 11.11.11 from Todd giving you the day off haha :intergalactic:

You should only be allowed to Fast Travel between Towns. Fast Travelling to nearby dungeons really limited the gameworld size.

So you mean Morrowind-style travel then? It did pretty much what you said, except you had to go talk to a specific NPC to initiate travel.

For me the "no fast travel" option implies there will be some Morrowind-like travel services, at the very least.

None. I think large-scale gameplay toggles are a failure of design. Those who are so bent out of shape by the presence of fast travel or whatever can mod it. For everyone else, I feel developers should provide a firm authorial voice.

I partially agree, in the sense that options complicate programming especially when they start to interact. And you have to balance the game with each combination of options. But apart from that your response is rather arrogant. "Just mod it", yeah right. Can you mod to that extent? Can most people who desire such a change do it?

BTW nothing prevents Beth from liking one of these propositions and actually implementing it in the game's core, with an authoritative booming voice from heaven of course.

Or alternatively if they don't want it in the core game, something that complicates their life a lot less than full-fledged options is leaving scripting hooks in the code that help modders change those systems, without us having to wait for 2016 and SKSE 20b5 (assuming no technical or legal hurdles prevent that project from happening) to finally have mods that implement what I described.

I wouldn't mind a "Need to eat/sleep" being completely optional, but I have to do that too much in real life.

I only voted for the "Realistic Criminal Life", which would make the game more fun and dynamic, and the "Consume food on fast-travel or rest/wait, chance of random encounters" options, because those are really the only appealing options. I hate it when games get "padded" with "immersive" factors. I'd rather have my character have his meals when I rest (With the option to select the meal), wait, or fast travel, instead of having to dedicate actual gameplay time to such activities. In Oblivion, the lackluster system of consumption was annoying... I wanted my character to have Sweetcakes as a "Trademark Favorite Food", but there's not as much flair in pushing a button and watching the number drop while an icon pop up in the right-hand-corner of the screen and my character sits/stands there like a moron as there is in dramatically grabbing the sweetcake, and shouting "I will take my sweetcake, AND EAT IT!" before consuming it.

Option to occassionally watch my character animate eating/drinking over a short amount of time would be good as well, especially with Skyrim's new conversation system. Sometimes I want expedited mundanity, and others I'd rather watch what happens. (Especially watching my cute khajiit female fall asleep)

I dont know, but I think some people in this forum have completely thrown off the window the concept behind the word immersion. No matter how much I get around it, the phrase "immersion option" doesnt make any sense.

I agree with most of your options as long as they would be optional. Except the fast travel one because I think the whole purpose behind fast travel was to make getting from place to place quick and easy and making sure you have food and supplies to do it and getting distracted by random encounters would destroy its purpose and it would be unlikely something like that could simply be toggled on or off in the menu. Didn't vote for the Guild bureaucracy one either but after reading your description it makes alot more sense and I think that should be the way it works anyway.

That's not the point. This franchise provides players with the ability to alter the game through modding to a degree far beyond most. The vanilla game is the work as they want it to be seen; the author's manuscript; the director's cut; the album mix. If you are so unhappy with the artwork as released, you can mod it; write your fanfiction; cut a fan edit; put together a remix. You know, work at it.

A piece of art is the artist communicating something of herself to the public. It is not a negotiation.

I see your point better, but basing an argument on the definition of art (here: on what a piece of art is) is risky: there's no widely agreed upon definition of art (or rather there are several ones), as showed the recent internet controversies on video games as art.

Most importantly, though, the concepts you're listing apply much better to a work such as a song, a movie, a book, where the person on the receiving end is mostly passive, and takes in the work as it was made. In an interactive work such as Skyrim, especially with the open-world and roleplaying aspects, the player shapes the experience almost as much as the conceptors, and creates his own story within the game world.

With this in mind I think it's natural that players want the experience to be more tailored to their tastes, and game developers overall try to respond to that. An increased realism mode is rather common: you have the Ironman (death means you restart the game) mode in X3:Terran Conflict, Delta mode in Crysis, on so on. From what I remember Crysis even allows you to toggle various options such as the Iron Sights for a custom difficulty. 4X galaxy conquest games are known to have a bazillion options to shape the universe, your own race, enemy races, the technology tree, victory conditions, and they still have a distinctive identity. Then in TES games you have all the choices of races, classes, magic/fight/stealth approaches, various guilds, customize spells: no player is gonna use or see all the content. It's definitely more "Player's cut" than "Director's Cut". In a sense, a player is already "modding" at every choice her experience of a game such as Oblivion.

All in all I think Skyrim has nothing to lose by providing even more options to the player, IF they can properly integrate and test those, and they make sense within the game world. Of course they can also integrate all my ideas in the core game and not provide choices on those, I won't complain .

Isn′t this a way to create a hardcoe related post avoiding it to be closed?

Nice trolling attempt.