I remember a while back, I read through a couple of TES timelines, and I was like, "The next Elder Scrolls game is totally going to be about Pelinal Whitestrake!" And then I played KotN. Which had been out for some time. :facepalm:

Navigating through a mess of tangled plants would have been really fun. Especially if they let you use a machete to chop down vines.

You always give these vague reasons why Oblivion is the best, like, "An endless jungle is less variety than what is currently in Cyrodiil now" without explaining yourself.

Like, how do you know and why? Jungles usually house a higher variety of fauna and animal life than forests, so what are you talking about?

Jungle, forrest, desert or whatever Oblivion could have looked like, it wouldn't be more interesting than what Oblivion became, they had too much to improve - combat, magic, stealth, npc schedule, guilds, models, quests, graphics, animation and much more. Bethesda really didn't have too much time for the landscape and choose to develop a generation system to do the job.

They couldn't use engines and technology from their previouse game, unlike Fallout: New Vegas where half of the content is from Fallout 3.

thats why i would rather have them uses cryengine or some other engine and modify it. i know they used gamebryo for oblivion which is technically a licensed engine but from what i saw on their website it looks like some kind of general all around multi purpose engine. they shoudl stick with an engine that is pure first person (and third person).

Except this time it'll be an icy boner.

If the game takes place in Skyrim, they should make the landscape/color scheme 'beautiful, but intimidating'. Beautiful in the sense that the world around me will all but captivate me (unlike Oblivion's /god-awful/ color-scheme). When I think Skyrim, I think snow-covered mountains and alpine forests, accompanied by the occasional more foreboding frozen-over tundra and the wind howling through an icy ravine.

Also, the whole 'intimidating' feel could be enhanced if Bethesda makes the region itself bigger. I remember when I first went on a trip to Virginia, and the weather during that trip was nothing but clouds, fog, and rain, with a rainbow somewhere in between. There was the silhouette of a mountain in the distance that I was driving straight towards. I got a bit freaked out after fifteen minutes of driving down that same road at 60-80 mph, and that lone mountain didn't seem to get any closer.
What I'm getting at is that if I'm going to be looking into the distance in the next game, I want to be in awe of what I'm going to have to traverse. And no cheap fast-travel system like Oblivion's, for god's sake. Morrowind nailed it almost perfectly, and they can do it in Skyrim as well.

Well since jungles can become deciduous forests rather quickly in TES, I wouldn't rule out the mood going from dark taiga to sunny Malibu in a heartbeat.

The jungles in Argonia (Black Marsh) could have a dark mood like the Flayer Jungle in Diablo 2.

Ive always imagined those two placed to be quite similar.

Even though it didn't affect me, ESRB doesn't know sh*t about game consoles when it comes to mods. Somehow Oblivion recieved the M rating on consoles.

I agree with those who are saying that it's more about NPCs than colour. I liked the vibrant colour of Oblivion. I think it could have been used as juxtaposition to make the game seem even more dire, but it fell through there.

What really got me about Oblivion was all the idiotic quest endings. It seemed to me that every quest that wasn't part of the MQ always ended with the badguy realizing the error of his ways, and saying that he's very sorry, and expressing that he wanted to make amends if he could.

That being said, there were some pretty dark quests. That one where you have to rescue the Argonian girl from the village gone mad, for starters. Still, the majority of quests felt like an episode of Full House.

Yeah, bizarre.

While Oblivion's colour scheme may have been nice when it suited, but a whole entire province can't all be a nice happy place where nothing bad happens. There needed to be more dark areas of cities, and dark alleyways, and dark roads where I'm likely to be mugged, and hillbilly homes where people want to kill me for fun. The Imperial city was supposed to be full of thieves and murderers in disguise. I never once got the feeling that someone may steal from me at any time when walking through the Imperial City. Not even in the waterfront. The most that I got was some guy saying he was a pickpoket. But then he promised me to not steal from me, because I "might take offense". Facepalm.

I was going to try to fit a 13th Warrior reference in somewhere. That's kind of what I've been thinking, and I hope that the Nordic landscapes and settlements give off a vibe similar to the Viking settlement in that movie. Viking style buildings with lots of knotwork + Erie sense of "your not safe" = Win for Skyrim.

Maybe even a quest requiring the PC to aid a band of Nord warriors in killing a large tribe of Neanderthal type enemies that wear Bear-skin headdresses........

Also, if there are no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_bear in this game, I will be disappointed.

You know, it just occurred to me, but I was never once scared to walk from one town to another in Oblivion. In Fallout 3, until I became a god, I was petrified to walk anywhere. Granted, I don't want Skyrim and the Capital Wasteland to have the same atmosphere, but I hope they can take a cue from their other franchises and make traveling an adventure again.

Hell, in Daggerfall I was afraid to go out at night