I started playing ES with Daggerfall and one of my favorite things to do was to scale walls of cities at night and leap across the roof tops until I find the town jeweler.

When Morrowind came out and there was no longer a climbing ability I was saddened and slowly with each release realized that it was never coming back and by Skyrim I had almost forgot that ES had climbing once upon a time.

Until this E3.... LINK CAN CLIMB?!?!?

I really hope they implement a climbing ability regulated by stamina like the new Zelda is going to. It really helps with the immersion with a thief character or a ranger type.

If Nintendo can get climbing into their games why cant Beth?

Opinions?

Climbing was a really cool feature. It would be neat to see it make a return if it is implemented well. You shouldn't have been able to climb walls as easily as you could in Daggerfall, especially city walls. You would think there would be at least some guards patrolling to stop possible criminals from getting into the city. The cities would have to be bigger and actually close their gates at night to really make it work to make the feature more useful too. Also, your armor, carry weight, and stamina, and--if attributes were to make a comeback--agility and strength would need to affect your climbing ability.

If climbing were to be added again, I think it would work better in dungeons. Find some rocky outcroppings to pull yourself up to sneak past traps or NPCs, or to find a shortcut. More big dungeons would make climbing a bit more worthwhile. Still, I don't think you could implement climbing in a way where it warrants its own skill, because in Daggerfall it made a negligible difference if any to increase it.

Maskar implemented climbing in his Oblivion overhaul. It worked fairly well and didn't seem OP at all. It allowed NPCs to climb up rocks so the strategy of jumping on a rock and avoiding attack wouldn't work, which is a good thing IMHO. The only drawback was there was no animation for climbing so it just looked like walking or running up a wall, rock, etc. but the natural physics prevented too much abuse by the player.


I'd love to see something like this return to TES, complete with proper animations.

there wasn't that much opportunity to climb in daggerfall, except perhaps city walls, and certain dungeon parts, but it was really niche.

climbing trees, swinging from branches, could be entertaining if there is enough use for it. just being able to grab a ledge to climb up would open up a lot of possibilities.

If it makes you feel a tiny bit better there is a mod to climb in both Oblivion and Skyrim. One is Maskar's Oblivion Overhaul. The one for Skyrim I made myself and is called "OldSchoolStatsClassesAndClimbing". Mine works as similar to Daggerfalls as possible, and the higher your stamina the better your climbing ability is. (And if you only want the climbing feature from my mod you can merely select the Adventurer class). Also Khajiit even get a climbing bonus so they climb better than the other races. Sneak Tools for Skyrim has a way to climb as well- it doesn't scale with stamina like mine- and is a lot less similar to Daggerfalls climbing but instead relies on using arrows as consumables to climb. Both are 100% compatible with each other btw. Fortunately Skyrim's Open Cities mod work amazing in conjunction for alleviating that partially.

Anyways,,, That all aside... It still just is NOT THE SAME as a game DESIGNED with climbing in mind. Sadly climbing mods can make Skyrim- and probably Oblivion as well buggy at times. And sadly to this day AFAIK there is no proven to be BUG FREE open cities mod for the Imperial City in Oblivion. Vertical exploration is SUPER important to me in Elder Scrolls games, and it makes me sad not being able to climb or levitate or super jump. I will be very sad if TES 6 is designed similarly, and possibly might even make a Youtube video mourning the loss of climbing teleportation and super jumps from the TES series if TES 6 has the protagonist be just as vertically immobile as in Skyrim and Oblivion.

This is also part of the reason I feel like Stealth characters feel like they went three steps forward and two steps back- stealth in general is better since Oblivion/Skyrim but without vertical mobility it just isn't the same. And Skyrim just feels very biased in favor of Warrior characters to me. Oblivion, at least I think it had a FAIRLY good magic system and there was at least a spell to run faster- and it still had Acrobatics albeit super nerfed compared to Morrowind.

being at it already, i'm hoping for "real" crouching in future games...

in a manner so that collision would know of it, too, i mean (so you could crouch to pass through low openings etc)

can't count the times i couldn't, despite a meter headspace, shuffling my feet against an inpenetrable opening...

I really wished Skyrim had a climbing skill. So many mountains, and yet no way to climb them except for horses. I really hope they bring it back. That or levitation.

? there's no mountain in skyrim you couldn't get up on foot -

more a combination of constant jumping and a lot of shuffling sideways than anything like actual climbing though, but you do get up

(and on high levels, even without much shuffling anymore)

(...and if may suggest another horse alternative, try the donkeys from my donkey king mod.

it's not so much that they're better climbers (though they are, by far),

but most of all, they're better descenders, you'll have to put up quite an effort to break _their_ legs

No.

My God, Bethesda would never make climbing dependent on stamina. That would cripple those poor kids in China, who never put points into stamina. The next ES game will have bullet drop, however. Rest assured.

So much this!

I'd like to see climbing make a comeback, but don't think it will. The non-collision detecting crouching pisses me off. It makes no difference whether you stand, jump, or crouch. There are some places you just can't get to

Well, that's because it's Sneaking, not crouching, silly.


More seriously though... I fully expect Climbing to return at some point, it's just a matter of Bethesda devoting the time in creating a system that doesn't require scripted access points to work. The climbing systems in games like Assassin's Creed and Dying Light aren't scripted environmental interactions, but reactive algorithms that detect colision and reaction, in a similar way to how the game recognises when your weapon hits an enemy. Designing a program that recognises the environmental collision in that way isn't as easy as it used to, what with game world's having plenty of irregular shapes now. Those games make sacrifices in terms of environmental design to acomodate the system, but I don't see Bethesda making the same sacrifices.


Some day, it will happen... We'll just have to see when

But I'm pooping!

Climbing worries me, though. I haven't played enough Daggerfall to know how BGS handled it, but I fear some kind of quicktime events or platformer type jumping games. Remember, my fear is totally unfounded

I'd love to see a climbable ladder in a TES game, as minor as it sounds. Tbh Acrobatics was always a slightly underused skill, it could be awesome if Acrobatics could go from simple jumping, to turning you into an Assassin's Creed style, building-climbing master near the top of the skill.

i don't think anything like this would even be applicable.

you could do it for, like, climbing a ladder or whatever has a fixed height.

for anything like a mountain though, you'd move an unknown route and exit at an unknown point, not exactly screaming for a video "solution" (hate these just as well)

but i don't really see where the big problem would be anyway?

i mean, the game detects when you bump into a wall, as well as into a ceiling (and if you want "platform", you can get up pretty much everywhere by just jumping frantically enough already anyway), so collision shouldn't be an issue -

so what's wrong with, instead of the bumping into, and if it doesn't happen to be, like a mammoth or something, just playing a "climb" animation and moving the player upwards during that

in combination with pretty much everything having a "material" since fo4 (where there actually was a different type of "material" flag in nifs already, but that wasn't necessarily reliable or even connected to the optically presumed material), this could even be refined in a way so that certain materials (say, ice) would be "unclimbable", or different material types could trigger different climbing animations.

...but if all fails with the cimbing - just give us "blink"

Since the climbing in the new Zelda game was brought up, it might be good to show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siFKP7slPbE (EDIT: fixed link...). It looks pretty flexible, not relegated to preset points or flat surfaces. I see no reason it couldn't work for TES, in first-person or third-person. and I could even imagine a skill and/or perks affecting it (reducing stamina drain, allowing greater angles for climbable surfaces, making new surface types climbable, the ability to catch on to surfaces from a jump, etc).

Because collision is already a default function of majority of engines, there's almost literally nothing to do there. Climbing would require making actual animations, and making markers that NPC/PCs could interact with, which is more work than no work at all.

don't really see why that would necessarily require markers of any kind?

if player's walking along a slope <30°, play walking animation,

if they move along a 30°-60° slope, play climbing ani1,

>60^ play climbing ani 2,

>90 tell them to go screw themselves

done.

...?

I've been thinking about this and think I'm ready to reply

The problem I foresee is the collision detection. It svcks in the present engine BGS uses. Armor clips. Players go through walls or fall through the ground to their death, sometimes. I have been stuck trying to go backward over a 3" stair and miss getting out of the attack's way. One of my most hated areas in the game is the damned 7000 steps. Rarely do I follow the steps directly, but instead run on the "more even" ground beside them. Otherwise, I am hop-skipping up the steps in order to clear their massive heights

This does not bode well for my faith in BGS's ability to implement climbing without changing something to make it easier like obvious platforms that we have to traverse, like a side scroller.

I'm not familiar at all with the Creation Kit, so you have me there

The climbing I have experienced in games is very limited, but do enjoy the Thief games way of it. Ropes on arrows and climbing the rope is good. I'd like to see handholds/footholds that can be climbed. But this requires quite exacting collision detection. A whole lot of work for something that may not be used much

And.... just to be ornery...

I can see that last animation as your character looking behind him/her and flipping you off

i forget, in daggerfall, how do you climb down? just walk off a wall and then run towards it, hoping for the best? haha

perhaps if rope, or climbing picks where used more,climbing could have a greater role

good thing you're bringing that up yourself

definitely agreed: wonkinesses.

also definitely agreed: climbing or anything added - more wonkinesses.

but if you ever just fire up ck and pay a couple closer looks to any spot of the game world, you'll come across an _immense_ number of separate objects it's put together from. we're talking tens of thousands even in interior cells, just for the visible parts, more n exteriors where larger areas need to be loaded at the same time (it's pretty much in skyrim already, and it gets entirely excessive in fo4, i got NO idea how in the world they even manage to RENDER the incredible amount of objects _everywhere_ at runtime)

and that's where we're getting to the real issue: there's nothing technically bad about the collision. it could easily be set to be 1:1 precise with the object's actual 3d - just that the sheer amount of stuff to check collision for at any time would exceed any existing machine's performance multiple times.

for that reason, most objects don't have collision to their actual 3d, but to invisible rough geometric shapes in them that represent their actual 3d. like, say you had a dresser, with legs and bends and all, the collision object would just be a straight box, for a basic example. less polygons, less collision calculations to do.

it's totally not that the engine wasn't capable of precise collision anyway.

it's that the machines it runs on are not.

no objections to this.

there's no valid excuse for the absence of climbable ropes or ladders.

(they're just fixed objects after all, an entry point, a straight animation, an exit point, nothing different from what happens when you enter a furniture etc, except that you'd have to make it exitable at any point maybe so folks won't get, like, shot while stuck in climbing animation

I very much hope so.

Because you'd then run into a slippery wall made of marble under 60 degrees, or a sloped road sign, or just about any other weird object, and your character will start climbing it like an idiot, and very bumpy surfaces like cliffs, or ladder, or mentioned ropes, that are under 90 degrees won't be climbable, even though they easily should be. You either need markers or objects with special functions in the data (which is basically still markers), otherwise the PC (and NPCs alike) won't know which objects to interact with, and which not. Engine can't work in such a general way, because you'd end up with characters doing some really weird stuff, while not being able to do some very basic stuff.

Yeah I noticed that too, but I also noticed they fixed this issue in fallout new Vegas using the same engine. A few pipes, especially the ones in the big mt dlc have parts where they're too close to the ground and you can't run under them, but you can crouch and fit under some of them.

I wonder why Bethesda didn't put this in skyrim.


But yes, as for climbing, I want it back in. It adds a lots to thief and agile characters. And while they're at it, bring back levitation and jumping spells

Not even related to the engine. In Skyrim it's one of two things, possibly both: objects even have collision meshes covering the holes (collision mesh is often a separate mesh from the actual model, a simpler version of the model), or the collision box doesn't shift according to the character's movements, so when you crouch it's equally tall as when you're standing. I guess they didn't think it mattered in TES, but I think it would work well with sneaking around and whatnot. It would be cool if we could hide from the bandits by crawling inside a hollow fallen tree, Metal Gear Solid style.