Why only those four from Oblivion team?

I start thinking that the biggest flaw of my poll is to have questionned people with various experience of the TES serie by giving them the same choices.

I should have asked :
Question 1 : if you have played the WHOLE TES serie, which dev team would you choose for next TES
Then question 2 : If you have played MW and Oblivion only, which team would be yours
Question 3 : You only played Oblivion...

I seriously doubt that someone will vote for DF if he has never played the game (which means that the minority of old TES fan is probably mostly in favor of DF design team). Though, what is interesting, is that while merely everybody here have played Oblivion, there is a very minority of supporters of its devs team.

Which is also quite interesting considering that MW and Oblivion teams are merely the same. It is a clear demonstration of the general reproval of Oblivion design choices in favor of MW ones.

I believe daggerfall has by far the best and most interesting MQ.I think oblivion has the best gameplay(besides the oppresive lvl scaling of course).I think morrowibd has best guilds.So i want a combo of all three

Do I have to pick just one?

I'd prefer to have Oblivion's lot for the gameplay, (combat, physics etc, minus the obnoxious level scaling) and Morrowinds lot for the atmosphere, story and detail. With dabs of Daggerfall's cooler features.

I want MK to have absolute control over everything that even hints at lore.

LEVELDESIGNER#13: Ho-hum, I'm putting some cups on a table in a High Elf's house.

[MK barges into the office]

MK: Stop! You're doing it wrong!

LEVELDESIGNER#13: Huh?

MK: You're not putting the cups down upside-down! The Altmer always put their cups upside-down to keep stray Creatioidatrons from drifting in and causing Daedrites from growing in them!

LEVELDESIGNER#13: :confused:

MK: And why in Resdayn isn't there any wheel imagry in that table?!?

We are not comparing each game in a straight manner, but their dev team originality and creativity. What you point for Oblivion benefit are technical improvements. 3D engines by the time of DF were far less performant. As I said, imagine what each TES dev team might do with present day tech and engines. If it was possible to add physics in DF engine, they would have do it.

I think we should mainly focus our comparison to non technical parts: storyline, dialogs, RPG rule set, lore... Those are atemporal. This is this part that most old gamers criticise in Oblivion. Its dev team was good in using all the present days technology to build a technically clean game. But it was a shame that on something that people were able to do perfectly centuries ago : writing a scenario and dialogs, they utterly failed.

On the other hand, technical and financial means were lacking by DF time, but it provided some quite interesting dialogs and questlines. Moreover, it had an ambitious and original design for its time.

He is the Cy Twombly of words.

Morrowind team, DEFINITELY.

I was really disappointed at the lack of skills in Oblivion. No throwing ranged weapons, and melee weapons are either blade or blunt.
No more enchant skill either. :banghead:

The storyline was also unimpressive in Oblivion and there were no choices with lasting consequences. If you picked certain choices in Oblivion, the storyline would effectively throw away your choice to make a linear and unimpressive story.

The guilds in Oblivion were a complete joke. Storylines were way too linear, and only having 4 really functional guilds really hurt the game IMO. TES V needs at least 15-20 guilds. They could be scripted to fight each other randomly throughout the game(would make it a bit more immersive). And this means that there could be a quest where you go through each guild's storyline, become grandmaster of each guild, and then they would stop fighting and you get +50 reputation for removing a source of conflict or something.

Morrowind did a good job with all the guilds, skills, and stuff. Very well thought out. I would like to see more of this in TES V. Hopefully they can come up with as good a storyline and quest line as Morrowind, and that they haven't run out of ideas yet.

Another thing I would like to see is more variety in monsters. Sure, Martigen's Monster Mod did a good job, but I would rather see 160+ monsters in the original game. Perhaps they could even have monsters with scripted attacks or spell effects? Just a thought.

Perhaps a good idea would be to have the Morrowind team work with the Oblivion team. The Oblivion team can design the combat(although I think the character skill needs to be applied a bit more, the complete FPS system was a bit too much for a role-playing game.) Maybe novices and apprentices could have a slight chance to miss, which would be eliminated at higher levels. Much more realistic as a complete novice would find wielding a heavy claymore to be difficult. The Morrowind team could handle the quests, skills, and storylines as that's what they do best.

I also miss the levitation effects(which is why I got Midas Magic). Please bring levitation back in TES V. Could be great combined with the Havok physics engine.

A random quest generator would be nice.

100% chameleon should also be weakened or somehow balanced, it is WAY too easy to ruin the game.

However, there is still one thing missing.

I think the experience system from Arena needs to be brought back. I really didn't like the concept of "to train your skills, use them". I would prefer a more standard level up system: gain experience from monsters and quests, then spend the experience on your skills. I have no idea how this would be implemented, but we should leave that to the Morrowind team. The current leveling system with the 45-60 level cap is really broken. You end up with power leveling and people having to be careful what skills they advance.

EDIT: The choice is obvious, from the poll data.

Arena-Daggerfall Bethesda and Morrowind-Oblivion Bethesda are two completely different companies.

Daggerfall was ambitious and had good ideas, but due to lack of time ended up being bug ridden.

Morrowind was a significant step away from the path that Daggerfall had started upon. Instead of improving upon the design set by Daggerfall it reduced the complexity, the roleplaying, choices and consequences, skill set etc, of the series. Despite this it was still similar enough in spirit to Daggerfall to be considered a sequel.

If Morrowind was a step away from Daggerfall then Oblivion was a giant leap. The game's shortcomings have been said so many times I don't even need to list them any more.

It can all be tracked to when Todd Howard become the project lead of the Elderscrolls series. Instead of someone with much more experience and knowledge of game and RPG design (Bruce Nesmith) they gave the position of project lead to Todd Howard. We wonder why Oblivion was so dumbed down and focused upon consoles. but what can you expect when the executive producer openly admits that he finds reading boring?

For the next game they should bring back the people who made the Elderscrolls series good originally. They should rehire Julian LeFay as the executive producer and rehire Tedders as the Lead Designer (note that if Emil Pagliarulo does a decent enough job with Fallout 3 then he could be able to keep his position as Lead Designer for TES V). Most importantly they should get rid of Todd Howard. I know it is a kind of mean thing to say but the fact is that while he has been in charge the series has progressively gotten more focused upon action gaming than roleplaying, and moving further and further away from what made the Elderscrolls unique.

Very well put :foodndrink: I agree

DF was the catalyst of the elder scrolls series
And it's a shame that such a smart idea is getting dumber and dumber!

For everything crazy thing MK comes up with, we need Kurt Kuhlmann bringing us back down to earth. It's the mix of escapism high fantasy and an almost sociology-based approach to setting that makes Tamriel great.

And I would definitely like to see the expansive, "why not?" approach of the Daggerfall team brought back, the one that filled the game so chock full of content whether it worked or not. If all that bountiful miscellanea was bound by the same sense of setting and lore that we saw in Morrowind... booya.

The developers need to go back to the http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleofCool and move away from the http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic. They should just go back to making things just because they're cool, and not pretend to be realistic, which, believe me, it is not, and never will be. The day I come across a game with realistic sheathing sound effects...

DF was plagued by bugs because Bethesda had not the cash by this time as it has today. If DF team had been as numerous as Oblivion one, the result would have been the pinnacle of CRPG!

As you, I think that DF had setted a really unique game design, background and system. It was unperfect, but was already a great leap away from the approximative Arena. It could have been improved, it should have been improved. But instead of this, Todd prefered to wisdraw in front of this huge challenge and slowly brought the serie mainstream.

Oblivion neither have the original game design as DF had, nor the exotism of MW background and esthetics. It was the most immature game of the serie, with dialogs that should perfectly fit in the mouth of Mickey Mouse.

The original Arena/DF team greatly improved the serie between the two game it produced. The MW/Oblivion one dumbed it down.

I could more easily trust the first team to improve the serie for TES V than the second one.

I'll Take this team please.

Daggerfall

Project Leader: Julian Lefay
Lead Programming: Hal Bouma, Julian Lefay
Design: Julian Lefay, Bruce Nesmith, Ted Peterson
Additional Design: Todd Howard, Kurt Kuhlmann
Graphics: Ryan Chapin, Mark Jones, Don Nalezyty, Hoang Nguyen, Louise Sandoval
Music: Eric Heberling

Thanks Freddo, let me know when they show up.

Well, currently they are neither following the rule of cool or the reality is unrealistic! They are somewhere where they do obviously unrealistic stuff to please easy gamers and look cool, while thinking they fool people with their realistic light effects and physics.

What should be realistic is not, what should be cool neither!

i voted Daggerfall team.
If the next TES will have half the features that Daggerfall was intended to have, it sure wuold be the best TES ever.

That is right! If DF got the quality of technical realisation, finalisation and trouble shooting Oblivion had (which is mainly a question of means rather than ideas), it would have been an awesome game.

All I hope for next TES is to have the complexe and ambitious ideas frame of DF with the production quality of Oblivion.
Lets keep the big programmers team of Oblivion and bring back DF lead design one!

I shuddered to think what we might get with an entirely new team given what I have heard about what Oblivion was and what it was cut down to.

But there again you have to look at the techniocal hardware and software parameters, where TES V will be and what race before you can decide a lot of things.

It does seem that one reason Oblivion was made into what it became was because they wanted all four major platforms included. And I imagine that each platform has different technical limitations. Look at 'Space Sims' - they have all but disappeared. Why? Could it be that the open-space format cannot work so well with the consoles?

Answer that question first.

Then - Which Province or area of Nirn and the Planes will it be on?

That tells you which race is the home 'team'.

So then you want to look at the past?

What was good in Daggerfall? The Snow ... the Music and sound effects ... the way the creatures and music combined to surprise and even frighten ... the sheer immensity of the area covered ... the first real attempt to give TES racial in-depth character. The Character Creation and Magic Systems. The weapons and stuff ... the revelations about Orc society and other matters. The different races and monsters were patchy - some good and some needed a bit more work. The climbing in the dungeon interiors = wonderful!!! More ....

What was good in Morrowind? The Scenery ... the Music ... the Social Structures = we had a far more complete society ... the maintainance of Lore and its developement from a different race's point of view. The Houses and their interiors - I did the Stronghold Quests for each House (even the hated Hlaalu) because I really wanted a home of my own like that. The GREAT HOUSES - The TRIBUNAL and their writings. Levitation! The Weapons and Armour. The sense of destiny. Character generation and the magic system. The sound and look of the different races. The characters who I liked and I felt were friends. The colour of Dunmer skin!!!! More

What was good in Oblivion? Heh - I never bought it. Partly as finance got very tight, but also because what I learned of it put me off playing it and I was deeply involved in modding new provinces instead. I have seen the screen pics and u-tube and such, read the new Lore and learned of the combat system etc, but I just felt that this Cyrodiil was not what ES is about. It feels more like a province than the heart of the great Empire to me both in social structure and in presentation.

How can you make a sartisfactory Heart of Empire before you know what all the races are about? Well you could, but only where you have equally not done the other parts of the Empire. Otherwise you get the current imbalance. Plus the current Hardware Mediums and Software Engines are simply not adequate to do it justice following the scale of previous releases. And you see ES is not about the highest quality graphics for me. It is about the feeling of the society in which one finds oneself. To satisfy me you would have had to tone down the software demands on graphics and such and concentrate on balancing and presenting the place, the people and the gameplay.

So my team would be about the journey and not merely about the pay off at the end.

Oh dear, I guess there goes my chance to lead the Developement of TESV - but I am looking to set up the stuff to mod it even now

I would like to think that's what games like these are suppose to be about GETTING DEEP IN THE DEEPNESS
:bowdown: DEEP game play mechanics
:bowdown: DEEP game balancing
:bowdown: DEEP RPG mechanics
:bowdown: DEEP Stories
:bowdown: DEEP and intelligent views on societies




And that's why I find Oblivion so disappointed and frustrating to play.
(It's very shallow! With its very abstract pointless dungeons :ahhh: where the hell is the kitchen!)

DF was far from perfection, but at least it was much more ambitious on all the good points you gave than most other CRPG.

If ambitious and creative people are given the means to reach their goal, the result is always better than giving everything to conformists and mainstreamers.

That is what makes the difference between DF and Oblivion team. DF had good ideas but not what they needed to achieve them. Oblivion had the team, the equipement, the money, the time, but were glued in mainstreaming a big sale console game.

It may be that there is enough cash in the kitty now to do something daring that could set the scene for the top end of th egames market from here on:

Make more than one version.
Make a version as Bon Bon says ... for the PC with a PC balance
Make a second version higher on graphics etc with a focus on combat system/action for the consoles

There are games out there already that have more than one version so that you can play the game from the point of view of one race or another - but really they are mirror images

Now is the time to make truly different versions that will make the best of the different media on which they are supported and that could include from the point of view of different characters and races.

You might end up with people buying for both PC and consoles because they really want to play both ways at different times.

Also you could embed the strict 'Console' version in the open-world PC version from yet another point of view so that the choices the player has are not the choices the Console options and give the greater flexibility that the PC users require without diverging from or altering the outcome of the Console version. While ensuring that the PC gamers were unable to learn what the outcome of the Console version actually was through gameplay ...

Games children, let's play games

Maybe is it time to create new spin off of the serie as Redguard or Battlespire. If there are people interested in TES and action gaming, instead of slowly turning the RPG TES into an action game, they should create a spin off in the form of "Dark messiah of TES". A real action game, with a gameplay completely and seriously focused on action gaming, maybe with a slight touch of RPG, but still action gaming orientated.

If some gamers like to be told nice stories, to solve puzzles, then they should create a TES adventure, with a good, classical adventure gameplay. Again, it would be better than slowly drifting from the RPG gameplay (where the player chooses the way the story evolves) to the adventure one (where the player just slowly unlock the prescripted story).

If Devs created a trilogy of games, fitting the various gaming tastes, it would allow them to seriously focus on RPG gameplay in the next "true" TES, and avoid emptying it to make the game compatible with opposing gaming traditions.

How good it would be to have inspired lead designer, with an ambitious vision for the TES serie! Maybe it won't be you, but I hope it will be someone with a deeper vision of fantasy than the now famous "a guy with a sword riding his horse and killing things".

TES used to be innovative and amibitious. They went mainstream with the last installement. Lets hope it will be back to its tradition next time!

meh if u ask me oblivion was a failure compared to morrowind and the old games 1 main quest way to short beet it in 3 hours first time ...but just to put something morrowind was my favorite outta them all =D

Have you discovered the whole serie or just the last two ones? And if you have played the old ones, did you discovered them by the time they were released, or retrospectively?

Remember that the main point was not to say which was the best in the serie, which is biased because of the technical evolution and the lore support old games provided to the new ones. The point was to decide which team, with the means it had by its time, was the most ambitious and creative, and therefore, which of them would develop the best TES V if it was given the means to do so, today.