What would you want in Elder Scrolls V?

Bottom line, people need to stop living in the stone age if they want to game on computers. I've met a lot of people who weren't able to play a 12 year old game (Ultima Online) because their computers weren't good enough to play the upgraded client, then blasted the company for not making it so they could play. People demand more these days from games, especially ones like Elder Scrolls. You either have to evolve with the games, or you need to get a console like Xbox360 or PS3 and settle with the dumbed down console version.

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I'm not living the stone age, but I still had problems with some of the graphics out in the wilderness, even when I toned them down. And a lot of people can't afford to constantly evolve with the systems so they always have the best graphics to keep up with the games. I know I can't. One of the reason I generally play PC games is because up until a few years ago, I could still get most of the games I wanted for $20, or wait a few months after they come out and get them for $5-$10. Now, a lot of the games I want are $30-$40 dollars or higher, and I have to buy new graphics cards or sound cards. It's too expensive if you don't have a decent income. And the other consoles are just as expensive, from what I can see. That's pretty much my complaint - the graphics are nice, but it's not nice when I can't play a game I want to because I can't get the graphics card updated enough.

The lock picking system. I'm not as big of a fan of Fallout 3 as I am Oblivion, but the game developers had it figured out with the lock picking system for Fallout 3. So much easier! In Elder Scrolls I'd be pulling my hair out if I had to rely on the lock picks! Thank God for Alteration.

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Autopick was the only saving grace for that. Picking locks any other way was too difficult. How that even got passed through testing is beyond me.

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I loved the lockpicking system! I was pretty good at the mini game, so I could pick locks fairly easily, even if they were more difficult than I was supposed to be able to manage. Besides, I thought it was fun. Oh, well. Different opinions.

Kaylin said:

I'm not living the stone age, but I still had problems with some of the graphics out in the wilderness, even when I toned them down. And a lot of people can't afford to constantly evolve with the systems so they always have the best graphics to keep up with the games. I know I can't. One of the reason I generally play PC games is because up until a few years ago, I could still get most of the games I wanted for $20, or wait a few months after they come out and get them for $5-$10. Now, a lot of the games I want are $30-$40 dollars or higher, and I have to buy new graphics cards or sound cards. It's too expensive if you don't have a decent income. And the other consoles are just as expensive, from what I can see. That's pretty much my complaint - the graphics are nice, but it's not nice when I can't play a game I want to because I can't get the graphics card updated enough.

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You can pick up a geforce 8800 for next to nothing anymore. I was able to run Oblivion on my 8600 with no issues at all at medium graphics. We're not even talking about the best graphics cards, we're talking about upgrading your computer to work with present games once every few years. The 8600 came out well over 4 years ago. If my computer is 4 years old, I shouldn't expect new games to play on it. It's time to get a new computer.

I heard the same argument for Windows Vista. People were mad because Vista wouldn't run on their 5 year old computer. You can't expect technology to stand still because you refuse to get a new computer and keep up with it.

TerraSin said:

That is true in most cases. Wouldn't be too bad if they made the cities interesting. Putting the same shops all over the city = boring.

I just hope they make it more lucrative to be a thief.

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The problem is that the current population system in the Elder Scrolls is not believable, nor is it effectively able to immerse a character in a world. They're just little outposts between quests and never adventures in themselves. Even the villages are too small. Ten people does not constitute a collective farming community, especially if they somehow exist in the middle of nowhere without a blacksmith and manage to live as bachelors. The inn system may resemble a shred of reality (ala Japanese inns along roads, Mongolian and Incan relay stations), but there are not quite enough of them to create a rest-stop system typical of well connected empires that Cyrodil should be.

The small, numerous cities have never done it either. Vivec gets points for artistry in its numerous, enclosed cantons, but the illusion of an alien metropolis quickly wears off. To use a historical example, Medieval European cities were crowded cities with houses leaning on eachother at every alley, if not outright collapsing. The roads were dirt and muddy in and after the rain, with livestock and pedestrians plying the narrow roads and shoving into eachother to their destination. Even in smaller cities, those of nor more than ten thousand souls, one could easily be overwhelmed by the vocal nature of the inhabitants. The market screemed with animal calls and the advertising of the shop keepers, curses filled the air as the apprentices slept on the job and the frequent repetition of wastewater from second or third story windows broke any silence on an unwitting passerby. Tanners kept busy outside with the awful stench filling their quarter of the city without fail, and the smell of freshly baked bread filled the other side.

In the Elder Scrolls? People walk around aimlessly (if outside at all), there are just as many guards as there are city goers and even the taverns are empty of drunken townsfolk as the innkeeper washes the same glass over and over again. There is no suspense as a Khajitt thief is chased by House guards on the rooftops of Balmora. There is no comedy as a horse cannot panic in the market at Cyrodil. There isn't even excitement in the miniature arenas as a crowd is absent in the stead of a few cloned onlookers while amateurs fight to the death.

You have to remember though that this is a fantasy game, and with that comes cities made of marble and so fourth. While there is plenty of poverty in fantasy games, there is also that aspect of unreality from things like medieval Europe.

As for the large cities with tens of thousands of people... computers have limits and if you had a screen full of people like what you're describing, your computer would freeze up at the amount of resources that would be needed to create such a feat. Then there is the issue of giving each person a personality, which how many recycled phrases would you hear walking by them?

There is only so much a game can do. Things like this will always have limitations.

Kaylin said:

I loved the lockpicking system! I was pretty good at the mini game, so I could pick locks fairly easily, even if they were more difficult than I was supposed to be able to manage. Besides, I thought it was fun. Oh, well. Different opinions.

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That was why the lockpicking system was stupid. Once you figured it out, the Security skill became useless because even if it was very low you could still pick even the most complicated of locks through the mini-game.

Also I hope they'll stick with the game world they've created this time. A lot of people were angry with Oblivion because in previous games Cyrodiil had been described as being this dense, exotic jungle province, and the Imperial City was massive, made of gold and was filled with intertwining canals and that sort of thing. Imagine their surprise when they played the game only to find that every single thing that been previously said about the province had been ignored and instead it was filled with a load of cheesy, stereotypical fantasy rubbish.

And to me the graphics has nothing to do with whether or not people can run it. To me the issue is that truly great graphics take a lot of time, energy and resources to program, which means that the more time and money they spend on great graphics, the less they're spending on great gameplay

TerraSin said:

You have to remember though that this is a fantasy game, and with that comes cities made of marble and so fourth. While there is plenty of poverty in fantasy games, there is also that aspect of unreality from things like medieval Europe.

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I didn't suggest adding scale cities, I suggesting possessing the proper knowledge for the appropriate illusion of size. Morrowind had people living in hollowed out crabs and in tree houses, after all . . .

The key is actually utilizing the existing AI doctrines (primarily the radiant features) and expanding them. Instead of scripting for a finite set of characters, there should be a engine generator that should provide for a randomized set of NPCs based on parameters (such as the region, actual city, locations within the city and building cells). AI should be able to use the randomly assigned commands they have been given and proceed to execute them with a minimum of interaction to eachother by virtue of restrictions.

For example: A programmer is tasked with populating a Nordic city. We should expect most, but not all, of the population to be Nordic and thus provide the engine with instructions to ensure that X amount of Nords should populate every demographic within the city. Furthermore, there will be X amount of individuals, and they would execute sets of randomized chores depending on the parameters set for the city (such as wealth, occuations and public facilties).

Each time the game would load a city cell, characters could be generated on the fly representing the engine's output of these parameters and thus fill a market square with thieves, shoppers and even different farmers selling goods at makeshift stalls. The primary purpose of such a system would simply exist to create pedestrian traffic and sense of interaction, with primary characters and important shop-keepers being written directly into the game. Although there does exist the possibility of populating a swath of shop with a "living" population that would exist past their engine generation. This is nothing new: Games have been using procedural generators for simpler concepts since Elite: And that game had thousands of different worlds on 8-Bit machines.

The act of making a city seem large, by comparison, is an art. It is easy to make lots of doors that don't open (or rather, open to randomly generated rooms if possible), but even a modest city could be a bit difficult for travel if sized to thousands of inhabitants. Rather, a player should be able to proceed into a city and take some time. If the individuals buildings are made larger and taller, this makes it a bit easier. The effect is even greater if the streets are narrowed: Oblivion had remarkably wide streets that were open to sunlight and open to see the other end of entire cities. In Morrowind, at least, the Telvanni cities had interesting architecture that obscured views of all but the immediate structures, and the "fog" and actual widness of Balmora made it seem a bit more impressive then it actually was (well that, and loading took too long in Morrowind).

Ahh, that makes more sense. I think it's possible, but most games want a more static city that is always the same rather than randomly creating inside buildings and so fourth. I think it would be way too easy to exploit something like that as well, but I could be wrong.

The other problem you tend to run into with smaller streets is that the camera angles start to suck really bad not being able to move the view around. The only way to go through small alleys would be a first person view or very close 3rd person in said alley, which I'm not opposed to, but some people hate.

I totally agree on the "nationality" issue. I'm really hoping that is another thing they add to the next game as well as other actual nations. The map in Oblivion was incredibly small. I'd love to see a map much larger in size which included ocean travel.

KingCrimson250 said:

And to me the graphics has nothing to do with whether or not people can run it. To me the issue is that truly great graphics take a lot of time, energy and resources to program, which means that the more time and money they spend on great graphics, the less they're spending on great gameplay

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Depends on the company. If a company has a while team dedicated to only graphics, then it usually works out very well.

Kharak said:

For example: A programmer is tasked with populating a Nordic city. We should expect most, but not all, of the population to be Nordic and thus provide the engine with instructions to ensure that X amount of Nords should populate every demographic within the city. Furthermore, there will be X amount of individuals, and they would execute sets of randomized chores depending on the parameters set for the city (such as wealth, occuations and public facilties).

Each time the game would load a city cell, characters could be generated on the fly representing the engine's output of these parameters and thus fill a market square with thieves, shoppers and even different farmers selling goods at makeshift stalls. The primary purpose of such a system would simply exist to create pedestrian traffic and sense of interaction, with primary characters and important shop-keepers being written directly into the game. Although there does exist the possibility of populating a swath of shop with a "living" population that would exist past their engine generation. This is nothing new: Games have been using procedural generators for simpler concepts since Elite: And that game had thousands of different worlds on 8-Bit machines.

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Maybe, but TES has already had a lot of criticism for having "cardboard cutout" NPCs and that's not even with a random generator. I think that's even why they cut down the number of NPCs for Oblivion, so they can make each one more unique.

I don't think your idea is a bad one, I think it's great. But there are a lot who wouldn't share my opinion on that, and who get sick of all the generic people. Frankly I don't even see why someone would need to talk to everyone anyway, but whatever.

Staccato said:

It to not be a MMORPG, which it looks like it might be

Get rid of the features that were added to make Oblivion viable in a console market, such as a small number of guilds (along with prescribed promotions not based on skills), very little dialogue (in fact, I could happily go back to there being very little spoken dialogue at all. Bring back the Morrowind conversation essays!), increase the number of skills again (differentiating small/long blades and axe/blunt. Bring back spear skill and medium armour too) and, most importantly, DO AWAY WITH LEVELLED CREATURES AND NPCs. I don't care if I run into a flame atronach at level 2, I want to have to run away screaming in fear. I don't want to be safe in the knowledge that bandits and marauders will fall to my sword regardless of how prepared I am. Dispose of levelled rewards for quests that encourage delaying them. Make all NPCs killable by the PC, regardless of their quest involvement, but render quest-specific ones immune to AI creatures and other NPCs killing them. Make enchanting customisable again instead of being fixed values.

Include more quests that encourage creative thinking with multiple ways to solve (ie the Dark Brotherhood storyline) instead of linear hack 'n' slash all the time. Keep the skill perks introduced in Oblivion. Keep the NPC routines. If you're going to have NPC-NPC interactions, make the conversations more varied than endless discussions on mudcrabs. Make the physics engine non-hyperreactive (I pick a fork off a table and a plate goes flying across a room. What?). As has been said already, more depth. Morrowind felt like a world. Oblivion felt like a stage.

That's just a few off the top of my head, if I thought about it a bit more I'm sure I could come up with a laundry list

To summarise, Morrowind > Oblivion in all but minor gameplay areas. Synthesise the best parts of both and you're in for one awesome game. Bethesda has to resist the lure of cheap novelty additions, they just need to stick to what they know best.

As long as it's not an MMORPG ¬_¬

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Actually, the leveled quest don't need to be completely removed, but what few there are should have items which function like the Knights of the Nine equipment which grows stronger. Also, some leveled enemies, but also area enemies. The first old castle you come to will be leveled (up to so high). But that old dungeon WAAAYYYYYY over there will have Minotaur no matter one's level.

TerraSin said:

Agreed, there is so much in the game that is mainly decoration. Every resource you pick up should have a purpose. Cloth should be able to be made into clothing through a tailoring skill, armor made by smiths.


Smarter AI would be a must. I'm hoping for it.


That was the bane for me as well. I was booted from the assassin guild many times for things like that.


Autopick was the only saving grace for that. Picking locks any other way was too difficult. How that even got passed through testing is beyond me.


This is my one disagreement. Games like WoW that have targeted attack and magic cheapen the skill for the gamer. I actually like that Oblivion had no targeting system. It made room for mistake which could cost you quite a bit. Magic took a bit of skill and practice, but it's easy to master once you go at it for a few hours.

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As to the lockpicking game, there was a trick to the harder locks. I am decent at it, but my friend almost never fails it. The trick is simple: the speed at which one of the things falls after you 'bounce' it determines how fast it goes up the next time. (Highlight if you want to see.)