You might have something there Sycandre - Might and Magic did something like that successfully with Heroes - too bad they quit the old-style M&M. Like amny companies they have one main line for each series and sooner or later they make one change tooo many and it no longer works ... so if there is still some life there they try to rebrand ... and drop the original structure bu tkeep part of the Lore - what a waste.

I would expect more from Elderscrolls if they start branching, but there is no knowing what Beth will decide to do next. In any case I and some friends are looking into creating an ES modding Uni over at The Wormhole, so hopefully we will be able to adapt to whatever comes next.

My dream team is this,
Project Leader: Julian Lefay
Lead Designer: Ken Rolston
Lead Artist: Matthew Carofano
Lead Character Artist: Christiane Meister
Music: Jeremy Soule, Eric Heberling
Writing & Quest Design: Michael Kirkbride, Ted Peterson, Ken Rolston, Emil Pagliarulo, Me (Seriously, I'll do it for cheap).
Dungeon Design: I don't know, maybe some new talent would be nice and refreshing.

But if i had to pick a pre-established team I'd go with daggerfall's people.

I think the DF team should come back. When in OB, I frequently give a horse 255 speed and no collision, so I travel through every province, and they're all (asides from Hammerfall) appropriately textured. Ob feels like (at least, to me) an attempt to revive DF, but they scrapped the idea for some reason.

I would like todd and other guys that made morow and obli with the guys that made Daggerfall.

I reiterate my previous statement in the where will TES V be located as it applies here.



Personally I think everyone should wait to see what they have done with Fallout 3 before you dismiss the MW/OB team. Also given the overwhelming amount of feedback they've gotten from us it's likely they will give us something that is somewhere between what we want and what sells enough to keep this series going. If any team came in here and gave us hardcoe's exactly what we wanted there wouldn't be a TES VI because like it or not there isn't enough of us to support that kind of development. Unless of course your willing to pay a 1000$ for your copy of TES V, then it might just work.

You do realize Morrowind sold 4 million copies?

Not in the first two years it didn't and that was the money that paid for Oblivion's development.

But modding has its limits. If there are not enought dialog choices in the game, it will need a huge dev team to correct this. If dialog system is not made to support NPC psychology and PC talking tone, modding wont save it. If there are not enough skills and possible actions to do with them, it is hard to mod them...
I've seen no mods for Oblivion that really corrected the many game structural flaws.
A good and creative modding group is great, for it will expand the game lifespan and give it different falvour, but the core is that the developpement team works seriously to give the most satisfaying result.

Maybe If Bethesda could do some spin off to please mainstream gamers and earn money, they may be also able to produce a serious TES.

All of the teams should work together.

I fear there may be some uncompatibility between the points of view. Beside pure technical considerations, I do not see what Oblivion team could bring to the design quality of next TES. On the other hand, being given a solid team of extra programmers, Arena/DF team would probably do something amazing.

I'd like to see an easter egg like M'aiq, except of a developer. I..uh..that's all.

Oblivion developpement choices were probably much more expansive than what we, hardcoe fans ask :
- Paying "famous" actors for voicing the game instead of authors and dialogists to feed the game with content.
- Paying for a physical engine and speedtree and other middlewares to finish with a game world broken scale and architecture.
- Developping stupid minigames instead of thinking of a complexe and challenging dialog system.
- Developing a RAI not to use it and to power a ridiculous number of NPC with nothing to say.
- Making a purely cosmetic character customisation system while the ingame character management system and the RPG rule system are flawed.
- Paying a "well known" musician to make a single repetitive theme song instead of having various musics fitting the various situations as in DF...

What we say is that with the same means, the same cash, DF team would have done a more ambitious job than Oblivion one.
When you say we should be happy they made the serie crappy to save it, that is to play crappy games, I think I would have prefered them to produce a final high quality product before disapearing! I want to play TES not because they are TES, but because I remember TES used to be passionating games. If they become mainstream and unchallenging, I see no point in playing them.

I see your argument a bit as if you said : we should accept democracy to turn into dictatorship because it is the only way to save democracy!

There are more and more people playing games. I think devs can make a "specialised" product and still sale it enough to survive. But they should put more on quality than on peripherical marketting elements. I think there are enough independant computer games magazines and forums to acclaim and spread the name of a great game, not to rely on superficial communication. The Witcher is having good sales because it is a good and ambitious game. Testers were happilly surprised and gave it great ratings and the first players became fans and spread this game name over the net.

TES have a name today. They can sale on it, and if they do a high quality work, they will sale even more. There is no need for another EA.

I have to say MW.However the OB team did some great stuff too.So how about the OB team handle the combat(MARKSMAN which was flawless in OB).And the MW team handle lore and adventure.

morrowind as long as you can hit everytime just not very strong.

And why nont DF team handling role playing?
Marksman was flawed in Oblivion, in the sense that even the beginer character could aim a shot in his ennemy head dozen meters away. It was flawed as melee combat was flawed in MW : the first main problem of missile weapons is to hit, not the amount of damages done by the missile. Oblivion never took it into account, and never considered who the character was in using missile weapons, beside the changing damages, which were as much abstracted values as MW melee combat hit dice rolls.
Marksman was also flawed, as melee combat, as you could merely never kill a foe with a single hit, while in real life, a simple blade or missile can kill even a strong guy with a single hit.
So no, I wouldn't specially like Oblivion team to manage combat in next TES.

Morrowind team!

It is interesting how different Oblivion and MW feel like, though they were produced by merely the same group of developers. The trend is similar, toward more action-adventure gameplay, probably due to the influence of Redguard and battlespire teams which also joined TES developpement afterward. But MW had an exotism Oblivion completely lacked. MW emphisised alot on the lore, while Oblivion merely sticked to the action.

Again, back to the topic start, I see here a big difference between TES 1 and 2 team on one side, and TES 3 and 4 on the second. It is their evolution, and the evolution they gave to the serie between two games. While the first team greatly improved the game, gave it more personnality, deepened it to make it out of the crowd, the second team slided to the mainstream, and a more simple game. Unless Oblivion team "regressed" to its original MW mentality and creativity, I fear it will do a poor job in producing next TES.

But another solution, off course, as what happened between TES 2 and 3, would be the creation of a merely brand new team under a new leader. It is not guaranted to be successfull, but at least, It may break with the trend from MW to Oblivion, which the current team risks to follow.

I wish I had voted for the DF team. <_<

Maybe!
It is hard to get rid of the overall technical evolution when judging the creative progess behind a computer game, especially when you consider so old ones as DF or Arena.

Most MW and, even more, Oblivion players (I refer to those who joined with those games), can't really take the old games into account in their statement. The oldies can, because we see those games in their historical context, with their time limitations in mind.

The long time between two TES is not helping in this process! If they had used to be released every 2-3 years, maybe it would have been easier to consider more than 2 TES at once when judging the serie. I do not hope young players of today to consider a game from 96.

ok here it goes:

george lukas on story development and design
donald trump on marketing (if he can promote the s**t out of nothing than he can promote the s**t out of something)Jim Rygiel and Randy Cook on graphics (lord of the rings special effects guys)
311 on music

Well, that is already pretty much the Oblivion team composition!
Seriously, Lucas for the story? I doubt he would be the man to move away from Oblivion manichean drift!

the daggerfall team was very ambitious and had a lot of great ideas. Personally, I'd like to see a game which could be both simple and complicated depending on what they player wanted to do. Had daggerfall done everything it did perfectly without glitches, it would have come very close to that.

I think that in a RPG, playing a straight, simple guy who do not like to get into complicated intrigues should be possible. Therefore, I have nothing against being able to play the Oblivion way : do what you are told to; trust everybody; investigate for nothing; go straight into the fight.

But, a RPG should also leave place for the more tortuous players, those who want to intrigue, investigate, betray, manipulate.

TES will become good RPG when they will allow for many different approaches of the story. DF, by its time, at least allowed to take the main story from different ways, depending on your sensitivity. You could also choose a tone during dialogs. Those simple elements make an enormous difference with Oblivion. This difference is that DF could have been considered as an RPG (not perfect, not the ultimate one), while Oblivion not.

Because I want TES to be RPG again, I think the developpement team should change, for the current one is too much adventure/action oriented, and ignore what is RPG.

I think (depending on where the game is decided to be set in) eg. if it's in Cyrodill or wherever, the hosting team should be the ones to make it. If Cyrodil -> Oblivion Team, if Morrowind -> Morrowind Team. If you want a full view of what I'd like then read my post at the bottom of this post. The only thing not added in it is what I'm saying should be in the new TES V : New Race: Daedra; Chaitiff, Dremora, etc.

Following post. In prelude to the post I've already made in another place -> Morrowind and Oblivion Teams should group together (Afew people from both teams).

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They should really make the game expand over all of Cyrodil. I also think that the leveling should be more like Morrowind's. I great after putting a lot of time into a game feeling a sense of superiority, rather than taking your Imperial Dragon armor and fading back into the world as a common citizen who receives various greetings...