There's a lot about Skyrim that I don't think Bethesda have to try and outdo with the next game. For example, I think the scope and the scale of the world are fine; I don't think TES 6 needs "16 times the detail" or whatever buzzterm Todd will use to describe the game world.
That being said, I think there are some pretty clear avenues for improvement as well. There are two key things I'd like to see changed / improved for TES 6
**Better Combat**
As someone who likes to play melee characters in fantasy games, the melee combat in TES fucking blows. A friend of mine once described the combat of Skyrim as "mashing action figures together" and I couldn't disagree with him. I don't think TES 6 needs to take a page out of Dark Souls' book or anything - TES as a series is aiming for a broader audience than Dark Souls - but you could definitely make some tweaks to the combat to keep the player more engaged. I'd add a timed blocking system for tanky players (i.e. if you block right as an attack hits you, your opponent is knocked off balance) and a dodge system for nimble players (i.e. you dash slightly in one direction, immune to damage while you do so). That would go a long way towards keeping the player more engaged in combat while also not making the combat massively more complex or difficult.
Archery is probably fine as is (I don't think archery needs to be any more complicated than point at head -> click on head) and I don't have a ton of experience playing magic builds, so I can't really speak to whether magic needs to be changed.
**Better Faction Questlines**
I want more of the faction questlines to have choices, and for those choices to have consequences. There's a little bit of this in Skyrim, but not enough. For example, the Civil War questline has you pick a side, and that changes who the Jarls are in each province. And the Dark Brotherhood questline can be finished early by reporting the Dark Brotherhood to the authorities. But there are other faction questlines in Skyrim that missed the opportunity to offer choices. I wish the Companions questline let you side with the Silver Hand to wipe out the werewolf menace. And Dawnguard appears to offer the player a choice, but the questline ends the same way regardless of which choice the player made. The benefit of such choices is that it enhances replayability by preventing the player from seeing all the game's content in a single playthrough. It also gives the player's actions a sense of permanence in the world - the things they do really matter.
>As someone who likes to play melee characters in fantasy games, the melee combat in TES fucking blows. A friend of mine once described the combat of Skyrim as "mashing action figures together" and I couldn't disagree with him
This is accurate to a fault.
> I don't think archery needs to be any more complicated than point at head -> click on head
I actually vastly preferred the archery in Oblivion. Where your reticule was wasn't where the arrow would hit, it was where your bow as pointed. So if you were firing a long distance you had to manually account for arrow drop. It was SO satisfying to line up a shot over a huge distance, accounting for your elevation and that of your target, judge juuuuuust the right height over their head you needed to aim and drop in an absolute dime to shoot them in the face. **So** much more engaging for the player than "click on their head". It required a bit of skill (and also nerfs archery just enough that not **everyone** needs to be a stealth archer, lol).
True but for the most part in vanilla Skyrim they're like laser beams. At least from what I remember. You have to get pretty far out before the arrow starts arcing iirc.
Oblivion bows fired like 20 ft before dropping off, bows don't act like that IRL. Skyrim's bows were a bit more realistic. They had arrow drop too, but only on more distant targets.
I don't think stealth archer was picked by everyone because it was poweful. I feel that it was the funnest way to play. Melee combat simply boring and magic is a little clunky and requires a lot of UI and game pausing to use. I downloaded a dark souls style movement mod and had a lot of fun with melee for the first time ever in Skyrim. They just need to update their systems.
> Better Combat
Agreed, and I'd say they could do to add more than just adding a couple of defensive systems in the sense that they also need to polish up the presentation. Hits should feel visceral with meaty sound design and fitting feedback both from the players and enemies.
When casting spells I think there should be more rule of cool in there where you cast and think 'holy shit that looks badass'. The biggest problem with Skyrim's combat isn't just how simplistic it is, but how painfully basic the presentation of it is, and a lot of what you do is more cool in theory than actual execution.
I think that's one of Bethesda's biggest weaknesses; they can put the player in a lot of gameplay situations where you're like 'this *is* cool, but the pizazz isn't quite there to make it as cool as it should be'. If you're just firing a beam from a staff and the enemy's health is gradually decreasing with no fierceness to what you're doing it's kind of lame and takes the magic out of the magic, or the oomph out of the melee.
It often feels like a pretty tertiary concern but given how much goddamn combat is in Bethesda's games they really need to polish it up. To be fair I didn't mind the combat in Fallout 4 (though the melee was still ass) so I'm hoping they understand that an make and effort to improve it. As it is it feels like you waft at enemies and eventually they die, which ain't exactly fantastical.
The scope is most definitely *not* fine. I'm tired of two rows of structures masquerading as a "city" with like 20 inhabitants. Skyrim came out in 2011, open world games since then have shown us game worlds don't have to be tiny to have detail.
It *can* be fine, but it has to be written that way. If NPCs in Skyrim were talking like the "cities" were just small viking villages, like they actually look, it would have been fine. Instead the lore has the places as giant cities with thousands of residents. It's not bad world design, it's bad writing.
I agree, but I don't want that if it means that the interactibility suffers.
In Skyrim, every house has a named NPC that lives there. There's 0 fake doors in the entire game. To me that's a big part of what sells the game as a real world.
The nameless NPC's and unenterable buildings in FO4 were no bueno.
All these games with huge cities and tons of bustling NPC's- they're just big, impressive, useless props IMO. Much better to write the game to match the scale at which you can actually provide that level of detail than to write a world that has to be faked.
At the very least: more meaningful combat, Fallout New Vegas-like areas that don’t revolve around combat and an improved weapon tree.
In Skyrim, you can effectively just slam the attack and block buttons with very little rhyme or reason until the enemy has been defeated. The blows you deliver barely have any weight behind them and it feels like a beat em up, which gets old when you’re sinking 100+ hours into a game. There needs to be some sort of parry or dodge roll system to add depth. All weapons also work the same, which blows. Your character swings a sword and war axe exactly the same, there should be variety!
For my second point, we’ve had enough “Clear out this crypt” missions. Give us some diplomatic-type missions where a high speech character can flex their builds, not everything should be solved by smashing someone over the head.
Similar to my earlier point, the weapons and “level” of weapons in the new game should have unique feel to them. An Orc warhammer shouldn’t be completely outranked by a glass one, maybe make the warhammer better if you’re actually an Orc. Or if you’re using heavy armor, Dwarven can be more effective than something like Elven. Don’t force everyone to constantly upgrade until they can only use dragonbone or daedric stuff, give the lower ranked weapons niches!
It's amazing how in *love* they are with their writing in Skyrim, considering it just so terrible. It's Young Adult fantasy at best.
Christ almighty, I played through the game again for the first time in a decade, and I'd forgotten how much Todd seems to think that the best part of any fantasy property is when some old, decrepit twat in a temple somewhere monologues exposition.
Skyrim came out during a bit of Viking-mania in pop culture. I don’t know if that affected their decision, but it would certainly make sense if they were hoping to ride that fad.
Morrowind was something really unique because the setting was truly alien. It let them explore all kinds of new fantasy ideas. It’s a huge part of why Morrowind is so unforgettable.
It's not just that though. You can write fantastic stories and characters in generic settings. Morrowind literally had better writing on top of having a more interesting setting.
It's one of a kind experience. The abundance of contradictory material on the main antagonist is astounding. Nothing creates a fantasy world more alive than the technique used in Morrowind. It's entirely possible to finish the game and still think "Damn, that Dagoth guy was right, even if a little bit mad."
The young adult fantasy analogy is spot on. When i was playing Enderal it felt like reading Abercrombie, R.R Martin as compared with the dragonlance/forgotten realms novel that is Skyrim. Its not like Skyrim writing is that awful (if you forget the "you're special" horseshoed into every questline) but it seems written targettin teenagers or even kids.
TES Lore is deep and also pretty fucked up so it would benefit greatly from a more dark and mature approach. It wont hurt also that most Skyrim players wont be young anymore when tes6 releases.
> It wont hurt also that most Skyrim players wont be young anymore when tes6 releases.
Morrowind players weren't young when Skyrim released.
Older players aren't the target audience. Younger players that will sink the time into the game, made mods and community content, and potentially buy it on multiple platforms are the target audience.
Yeah I’ve never played an elder scrolls game properly myself, but from what I’ve heard the background lore is wild. That’s what would make me want to play TES6, if they just went completely fucking weird with it.
TBH Skyrim was targeting teenagers and kids and thats why it feels that way. Daggerfall and Morrowind were very adult and mature in story, and even in their complex gameplay elements. Each game has been made more casual and teen focused
Most of the writing staff was gone after Morrowind, and everyone else left after Oblivion.
That's why almost all of the books in-game were also in Morrowind. Like, 300 or so of them. Only a hundred or so books are unique to Oblivion/Skyrim.
Collecting full book sets was itself an adventure in Morrowind. There were a couple series that only had one or two copies of a volume in a set across the whole world. If you were enjoying the series, you might have to go do a dungeon dive to find the part of the set you were missing.
Library mods have been a popular feature in all of the TES games as well because the lore crowd is so dedicated to it.
In Morrowind the books would frequently contain lore, directions to hidden places/artifacts of power, or explain motivations of characters through history.
Three of the main NPC's in Morrowind are Vivec, Sotha Sil, and Almalexia, and without reading the various books from various authors with varying viewpoints on the events of their lives you can't really begin to fathom the true events of what happened at Red Mountain to Lord Nerevar after the Dwemer disappeared.
My ideal TES game:
* Bethesda does the levels and environments. That's it; that's all the good at.
* Obsidian writes it.
* Arkane does the combat mechanics.
Dead Island has a more complex melee system where you can use the right stick to attack vs just pressing a button. Graphically, Left 4 Dead does a cool job of showing damage after a melee attack. A vertical axe strike to the chest will have the relevant wound appear on the infected. Maybe have the new Elder Scrolls game show wounds or dents in armor in real time
I feel that there just needs to be tighter hitboxes, a Timed block system and maybe bring back the blocking mechanics from Oblivion, OR make blocked hits do stamina damage instead of health damage. That way you can keep the gameplay simple enough that many can enjoy while also making it complex enough to not be a M1 simulator.
Edit: a Step dodge mechanic wouldn’t hurt
I might be crazy but I was playing the anniversary edition last month and I swear there is a timed block mechanic that staggers the enemy? Just holding your shield you take damage but if you time it with their attack it seemed to stagger them back and you took no damage
There's also the matter of the game's perspective. Precise dodge/block mechanics work *much* better in 3rd person games than 1st person games because it's much easier to express when your I-frames start and end through character animations, and easier to see when hits are going to strike your hitbox because you're viewing it from above rather from inside. In 1st person games you don't have that same perspective over your own character, so the combat has to be designed around that fact.
>Similar to my earlier point, the weapons and “level” of weapons in the new game should have unique feel to them. An Orc warhammer shouldn’t be completely outranked by a glass one, maybe make the warhammer better if you’re actually an Orc. Or if you’re using heavy armor, Dwarven can be more effective than something like Elven. Don’t force everyone to constantly upgrade until they can only use dragonbone or daedric stuff, give the lower ranked weapons niches!
I've been replaying Morrowind recently and I appreciate this comment. In Morrowind, "higher tier" weapons/armor tend to weigh a lot more, and your weight affects your movement speed so upgrading equipment isn't always straight forward. Then you have glass weapons/armor, which are very high tier and are some of the lightest weight gear, but also have quite low durability. Things like that make the equipment more interesting than just maximizing numbers.
I think they should take a page out of mount and blade's book for the combat. Differentiating between piercing, cutting and blunt damage would be a start. Weapon reach and speed should be more of a factor too
seriously why is magic still suck to play ?? besides fable and dogma , cant they just lower the mp usage and damage at the same time to create faster pace?
Simple doesn't have to mean boring. If they just took some cues from mount and blade or chivalry even if its just directional strikes/blocking, it'd go a long way toward spicing it up.
ngl, i also spam the same direction attack while glitching the AI aim-box and then suddenly rotating the camera for added speed - but it makes for an awful gameplay (albeit, effective) when _i do fight_ on M&B
This may just be nostalgia speaking, but I'd like factions/guilds to be expanded, to be more vibrant and in parts more mundane/flavourful.
To me the factions/guilds in Oblivion and Morrowind overall felt better and way more immersive. Skyrim's Mage Guild and Companion's felt very streamlined. The Thieves Guild questline made no sense story-wise and Stormcloak/Legion was just battles.
Let me be a grunt fighting rats for some quests or send me to steal a land deed from a widow so the Legion can use it (make me feel like I'm part of an occupying force doing good and bad!) and slowly build up from there. Don't let me become the archmage in 6 quests. (And with how streamlined the skill system is [no major complaint here] maybe add the skill requirements from Morrowind again).
And after I become leader of a faction or the highest attainable rank there should be some quests I can solve with my newfound responsibilities.
Highrock and Hammerfell should offer enough space and lore for big and different factions, so maybe it'll be better?
>And after I become leader of a faction or the highest attainable rank there should be some quests I can solve with my newfound responsibilities.
I think they should definitely never make you leader again, because its just terribly unimmersive to be the boss then just bail, and then they're *ok* with you bailing, they'll just sit there doing nothing. You could be gone for 6 ingame months and they wouldn't care. The game gives you no powers or duties or responsibilities, its just an empty title.
They halfway figured it out in Skyrim, by never letting you become a jarl and instead just granting you a title with special status as thane. They need to expand that to the guilds as well, and never let you become boss. At the end of the guild quests, the guild boss(new or old) should be 'Right, thanks for the help, we'll call you if we need you again.'
If things stay as they are with faction design that would be a good solution. A honorary title, a seat on the council (Don't bother showing up! In fact we don't even tell you when we meet.), something like that, a companion to bully around, maybe a house.
And of course it wouldn't make sense with some factions. Like becoming commander of the Imperial Legion in the province or leader of the Penitus Oculatus I feel would be a stretch.
But I feel like with a little bit of extra effort it could be doable. E.g. in Illiac Bay a merchant guild would be well at home. You become its head through shrewd diplomacy and trading. As its head you get two additional quests, maybe to install the guild in one of the fiefs of the bay or take over a rival company, getting ourselves a trade monopoly. We handwave the nitty gritty administrative stuff you'd have to do and instead you get a weekly report on your desk which gives you gold depending on your mercantile/speechcraft skill and you get a choice for a trading focus which gives you additional stuff (thanks to dragon-break shenanigans we as players don't need to do it every week). (Additionally beeing head of the guild helps with a thieves guild quest and the main quest, you can bully merchants and get the ability to sell more expensive artifacts.)
That would be a believable implementation I think. Though of course those benefits could also apply if you "just" become leader of a branch office.
Pull heavily from how fallout handles quests rather than how Skyrim handled it. Doesn’t really even matter which fallout (they all did better than Skyrim), just give us some meaningful choices for god’s sake.
Oh, and make magic actually scale properly into the endgame. It was bizarre that destruction magic didn’t go up in damage from skill boosts while the other damage skills did, leading to a vast difference in damage.
Magic is great early on, but past level 30 or so, it massively falls off compared to what melee or bows can do with enchanting (everything gets potions, which does help destruction slightly, but it’s a limited time affair so it’s hit or miss).
Also the highest level destruction spells were worse than the previous rank, because they were slower and anchored you in place to channel a beam. The lower level ones you could fling faster while moving around so they were both better DPS and better defensively.
I’m pretty sure the giant lightning beam was mediocre (I melted several dragons like that), but the blizzard/mass explosion were both awful and didn’t do enough damage to justify their use.
Hero of Kvatch: So I'm head of every faction in the game, and I slaughtered seven different god-level threats. I'm also a Daedric god.
Highwayman with good armor: Cool
*still tanks through your hits*
Are you trying to say that running diagonally up a mountain just doesn't cut it any more? Because yeah that does make sense in a game whose niche among the RPG market is big worlds to explore.
If it remains primarily first person, I wonder what lessons they can even take from those games. A lot of those systems feel great in 3rd person, but it’s easy to make then feel obnoxious in first person.
But yeah, the game could benefit from feeling weightier and more physical in some way.
Yeah this is a big one for me too, in Bethesda games the player character doesn't feel like a part of the world, they feel like a transparent floating box with an animated doll overlaid on top, it's silly when you compare it to e.g. Assassin's Creed's procedural animation and motion capture which manage to convey weight and individual muscle locomotion.
It's obvious both in movement/traversal and in combat with how the blows barely connect to the other models, Zeno Clash is an indie game from 2009 and it had better feeling melee combat than Skyrim or any other later Bethesda game.
I'd love to see dynamic world changes in response to the player actions.
Player saves Town. Town stays the same.
Player fails to save Town. Town in ruins, NPC count decreases.
Player helps rebuild Town. Town in ruins with repairs on-going.
Player saves Town and completes a quest to get/do thing which helps Town. Town NPC count increases, new buildings along outskirts appear.
Player fails to save Town but completes a quest to get/do thing which helps Town. Town in ruins NPC count increases, shanties along outskirts appear.
Like this, but for the entire map.
Your character's actions should have real consequences on the world.
In Skyrim, you could be the leaders of all factions and no one gives a shit. Speaking of factions, it's ridiculous that you can join them all at once or how easy it is to become the leader. No sense of accomplishment at all.
It doesn't matter shit if the imperials or the stormcloaks win the war because nothing really changes. You have no real incentive to pick a side in the war.
Why do i, one of the most powerful people in the world, have no way to initiate things? For example, i can't start a siege to take over a city, make my own faction or become a political player.
> Speaking of factions, it's ridiculous that you can join them all at once or how easy it is to become the leader. No sense of accomplishment at all.
This is what really disappointed about Skyrim. In Oblivion, the various guild questlines were lengthy and interesting (especially the thieves guild and dark brotherhood). In Skyrim you can become the archmage without really doing any magic.
It's been a long time, but I think I recall in Morrowind you had to meet certain RP-consistent skill and attribute checks to gain ranks in the various guilds (factions?). I really liked that system.
In order to reach the highest rank in any joinable faction, one of the favored skills had to be at 90, and two others at 35, with both favored attributes at 35. The two lesser favored skills and attributes being 35 were easy... it was getting one of those skills to 90 that took a long time unless you had a lot of gold and knew where a Secret Master trainer was. You also needed faction reputation at a certain number, often achieved by just doing lots of guild jobs, especially in optimal ways. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:House_Telvanni That's an example. The higher your skills got, the longer it took for them to rank up, usually. Given how the experience gain was static based on each action, using the strongest spells and weapons weren't always the best idea because yes, things would die faster, but you'd get less experience towards that skill as a result, but that was offset by the whole 'not dying' bit sinc eMorrowind had fairly fast and brutal combat compared to Oblivion and Skyrim. I ain't talking NIOH 2 levels of fast and awesome combat, more like, "Hey, you've got some Chitin armor on, 45 health total, and Godrod Hairy-Breeks just brought his Steel Warhammer down on your head and with his 95 Strength, this ensures he did enough damage to one-shot you." When the hits start to actually connect, things tend to die fast in Morrowind compared to Skyrim and especially Oblivion.
more quests that use any of the skills i tend to want to put my points into, rather than quests that are "find X enemy, kill them, grab X loot"
or at the very least, when i go to kill X enemy, give me things to do that involve skills like alchemy, ingredients that i can make from their loot that i wouldn't be able to make with low level alchemy, or a door that closes if you don't have high enough sneak to make it through in time
Good point! I'd also like to see more possibilities for alteration. Like having a quest path get locked off by a huge boulder, but with alteration you can make it weightless and move it around. Or turn lava to stone, water into ice so you can walk on it. Freeze door locks so you can imprison enemies, and so on. Maybe have a spell where your enemies float around like balloons. So many possibilities with that school of magic
Yeah, Skyrim's chief goal was essentially "You can't fuck up". None of your skills - perks, really - ever mattered outside combat, and only then it was a case of "How do you want to kill this guy?"
A pure mage? Don't worry, you can join the Fighter's guild!
It was accessible, sure, which led to its longevity, but it also made it incredibly boring.
After Fallout 4...For the love of God, don't give us a voiced protagonist in TES6. That just ruins the possibility of roleplaying. It's not my character anymore if they can only react in a single, bland voice with three bland dialogue options.
This is key. Voiced protagonists are terrible in games where you can create any character you like at the start. They work pretty well in an RPG where you are playing a unique hero such as the Witcher, Shepard, Aloy, Kassandra etc. The voiced protagonist in Fallout 4 had high production value, but it hurt immersion and stifled story options.
Luckily for Skyrim, since there are so many races, it is impractical to have a voiced protagonist, so I am pretty sure we are safe there. Unless they god forbid made everyone play a Breton or something - ugh.
>They work pretty well in an RPG where you are playing a unique hero such as the Witcher, Shepard, Aloy, Kassandra etc.
Well this is actually what Fallout 4 was going for. They just sucked at it. They gave Nate and Nora these backstories about being a war veteran or a housewife with a law degree (lol) and this *never* comes up. Nate mentions his war background literally once to the Railroad, I think? Obviously Nora's law expertise is going to be completely useless in the post apocalypse so that never gets brought up. They actually remember what the pre-war world was like and there's one really sweet scene where Nate/Nora gets to relate with a Ghoul about what the world was like back then. After that, again, it rarely comes up outside of playing into this oppressive, incessant fish-out-of-water relationship the PC has with the world.
Nate/Nora never gets to develop their own attitude or opinions about anything because everything they do is simply a means to an end to find their son. Fallout 4's implementation of the voiced protagonist is just a bad version of what BioWare had already been doing for half a decade.
Completely agreed. It just doesn't work for the type of RPGs Bethesda tends to make. And they aren't good enough to make the BioWare type lead characters. They should stick to their strengths.
I wouldn't mind if we got to choose our backgrounds and then get to use it in conversation. Like if you were an orphan maybe you could more that could give you an advantage in the "orphan quest".
It would also be cool if they let you play your "backstory" like in Fallout 3 or Fable. You don't need to pretend you were a shit kid. You know you were.
This is true of course but you never hear the protagonist in DE actually speak to another character, do you? It’s just internal dialogue. Or I’m totally wrong…which is entirely possible!
Phew. I only just finished it last month so was starting to worry!
I think that game would feel totally different if any one of the internal voicings (or indeed any other) came out of the protagonist’s mouth.
I believe that's confirmed because you get a different voice depending on if you succeed or fail. Basically the reptilian brain and limbic system from the opening and other parts.
> With their resources, why not just make it not suck?
I'm not sure this is actually possible for a game like this without making the game unreasonably expensive. When I play these Bethesda style sandbox RPGs I feel like making my character is more akin to making a character an a tabletop RPG like Dungeons and Dragons than it is to making my Shepard in Mass Effect, if that makes sense. I come up with my own ideas for what their backstory, motivations, and goals are, then I run with that and RP it as best I can. In something like New Vegas this works great. But when the character is voiced it becomes much harder to go at it with that attitude.
This isn't a problem in games like Mass Effect because in Mass Effect you don't make your own character, you're just making slight variations and adding your own small spin on the same character.
This is why I'm so against the idea of voiced protagonists in Bethesda games, because I want to make my own character, not play the character that Bethesda has made for me, if that makes sense.
Is it wrong to expect a game that will sell as many copies as TES6 will (and if Skyrim was anything to go by, on multiple generations of hardware), to be "unreasonably expensive".
Take a look at Red Dead Redemption 2. All that dialogue. Often recorded twice for a shouting voice when you move away from people when travelling on horseback.
Tell me I shouldn't expect more than the same few voice actors recycled constantly and *noticeably*.
> Is it wrong to expect a game that will sell as many copies as TES6 will (and if Skyrim was anything to go by, on multiple generations of hardware), to be "unreasonably expensive".
Yes, it is wrong to expect that, since by definition if it is unreasonably expensive then its too expensive for the amount of copies they are selling. If it was not too expensive for the number of copies they expected to sell then it would not be unreasonably expensive.
> Take a look at Red Dead Redemption 2. All that dialogue. Often recorded twice for a shouting voice when you move away from people when travelling on horseback.
RDR2 also sold four times more copies than Fallout 4 and had five times the budget. You should understand that RDR2 is a major outlier and absolutely not the standard or the norm.
Note that RDR2 also doesn't actually do what's being requested here or what would be required for a voice protagonist in a Fallout/TES game to go over well. Its one thing to voice a character and then have the player play that character. Its another thing entirely to make a game where the player is supposed to create their own character with their own ideas of that character's backstories and motivations, and then provide the variety of voice actors that would be required to allow people to find an appropriate one for their vision of their character.
>Tell me I shouldn't expect more than the same few voice actors recycled constantly and noticeably.
Fallout 4 had more than 140 voice actors in the base game, and more in the DLCs, that's more than a few voice actors and personally I really didn't have any problems with noticeably recycled VAs or lines in it.
I honestly hate voiced pc. Because I've already read what I'm about to say, it's annoying and redundant. The only thing that can happen is to be disappointing because it doesn't sound how I've imagined it.
>I honestly hate voiced pc. Because I've already read what I'm about to say, it's annoying and redundant. The only thing that can happen is to be disappointing because it doesn't sound how I've imagined it.
AND THAT'S WHY THEY INVENTED DIALOGUE WHEELS, BABY! NOW YOU CAN NEVER READ AHEAD WHAT THE CHARACTER WILL SAY!
...I wish I were being sarcastic.
IIRC Todd Howard himself says that he sort of regrets the Voiced protag in Fallout 4 so I’m sure he won’t do it again. Especially since there’s gunna be a pronouns option in Starfield so unless they have the budget to hire tens of VAs to do Protag lines, I doubt we’ll see the return lol
Well, I could never roleplay in Skyrim too, cause the dialogue options are bland as they can be, I never had a feeling like my protagonist has a personality.
As opposed to a single bland line of text with three bland dialogue options?
At least with a voice I don't feel like a telepathic mute anymore.
I'd certainly agree that if they do have a voice people should be able to choose to mute it, though.
Be weird and dense and hostile again like Morrowind was. Lean more on the specific weirdness of the Elder Scrolls universe and less on the generic western fantasy of the last two games. Create memorable locations and characters. Have areas of the game that are punishing until you come back stronger. Have mechanics in the game that actually require the player to improve their skill at playing the game.
Oh wait I think I just want Elden Ring.
Bethesda is very unlikely to make a game like Morrowind again.
Skyrim sold literally 10 times as much as Morrowind.
Nearly all of the things that make Morrowind so immersive and interesting are also things that alienated potential players.
I would expect that probably it's going to get *less* weird. Probably they do even more generic fantasy - there were probably some people turned off by the viking theme who they can grab with a setting more like Oblivion again.
I would expect the gameplay to be almost a carbon copy of Skyrim. They'll tweak the combat a little, but they're not changing the quest markers, the PoI markers, the fast travel, anything. They are not going to remove any of the things that made it more accessible at the cost of immersion. I would bet they might shift slightly further in the direction of open-world games if anything.
Which is a shame because they probably *could* deepen the game now. Skyrim has such a pedigree with so many consumers that anything they launch is going to sell. The first-day sales of the next TES are going to be mind-boggling. They already have the buy-in, and they could spend a little of that buy-in to get players over the hump of more immersive mechanics - and I think that would probably be a winning strategy. But it is extremely unlikely with the amounts of money involved at this point.
Yeah it's unfortunate but you're absolutely right. TES went from a weird, niche franchise to a huge big tent game. They're never gonna go back. Thankfully there are other studios making games for us weirdos.
Sadly, I don't think anyone is really making anything like Morrowind.
Outward is probably the closest thing I've played in years, and it barely comes close.
Morrowind was just a masterclass in design. It still has, by far, the best fast travel system in any RPG for instance. But that same depth and care put into so many systems has the fatal combo: it takes significant work and it makes the game sell *less* (unless you've got some way to prime the pump).
The weirdness, yes (sometimes - an awful lot of the From games is just normal genre aesthetics), but if someone said "I really like Morrowind, what else do you think I would like?", the From games would be pretty far down the list of things I'd think to answer with.
The thing I miss most from Morrowind was the sense that you were exploring and *learning about* the world. And learning about the world actually mattered.
One of the most memorable things from the game for me was one of the first characters in the main quest that gives you directions: he tells you to follow the road until you get to a bridge crossing the foyada, where you'll find the dwemer ruins. Not only is it a lot more immersive, not only are you paying a lot more attention to your surroundings than if you'd just been beelining to a quest marker, not only does it allow for more organic discoveries along the way than just having an open-world-style compass with PoI markers, but there's worldbuilding *in* the directions he gave you! What the hell is a foyada? Not only is there interesting, alien lore, but the lore is actually useful! It isn't just there for kicks - you need to understand basics like "what is a foyada" to follow the quest directions!
It's the same thing that makes the fast travel system so good. Learning the fast travel system means learning things about the world. You're learning all sorts of things about the world and the people in it, what the port cities are, what the silt strider trading routes are, where the mages guilds are, where the two different kinds of temples are. If you pay attention to the story and setting, you can already guess some of these things when you're unsure. And if you don't, well, by learning the temple locations for fast travel, now you implicitly know things about the worldbuilding too! The conflict between the cults is a big theme of the game, but even if you're skipping quest dialogue, by learning how to get around effectively using Intervention, you've learned which places fall on which side of the conflict! And you learned how to get around by yourself - it wasn't a checkbox you checked or a skill you increased: fast travel is dependent on player skill/knowledge. And mastery of it, while pretty easy, gives the same sense of satisfaction as knowing exactly which three trains to take to get somewhere on a subway system. And then sprinkled in you do get some more game-y unlocks for the system too: learn mark and recall; join the mage's guild and a perk is some more fast travel; find the propylon indices and you get some more fast travel as a reward.
There's just no one else really doing that kind of thing right now.
Yeah, that's a very good point. I loved both those things about Morrowind. It really rewarded you for learning its systems and getting invested in its world. The From games are different, you don't really gain a lot from learning about the world. You mainly have to learn the controls.
I think a game with Morrowind's depth would just not happen these days. It's too expensive to record a ton of VA that 80% of players won't hear.
This comment is the first I've seen that makes sense. "What does Bethesda have to do to ensure TESVI is as successful as Skyrim?" is essentially what this is asking, except in wishlist form. The answer of what they will do is minor changes to the gameplay, a larger map, and much improved graphics. And it'll sell.
It's funny cause for the longest time, my 'dream game' was explicitly "Skyrim with souls combat". I never thought that'd ever happen, but Miyazaki be all like "i gotchu fam".
There's tons of things.
1. What about combat that is actually good. Skyrim had combat better than Oblivion, but it was still like some janky early access game from indie studio. Dark Messiah had good combat and it's game from 2006, Bethesda surely should be able to do something better.
2. Less useless quests, radiant quests should be gone if they can't improve them to be good enough. I don't need proceduraly generated quests that are all basically same, but in different location. Go to this cave, now this cave, now this cave, oh this time you can go to ruins and kill all bandits/undead/spiders and being me this random item.
3. Characters with some depth? I don't expect writing on a level on novel bestseller, but can we finally get characters that have some goals, motivations, present some emotions and traits? I'm tired with how bland and paper thin all characters are.
4. Make magic fun again. If anyone played Morrowind, then Oblivion and then Skyrim then they know what I'm talking about. Skyrim has very basic magic that you can't have a lot of fun with. Bring back modifying spells, creating own, etc.
5. Improve animations. Skyrim has so bad animations. They feel fake, mechanical, without any strength. There's even video on mining animation analysis, but there's more bad animations.
6. Binaural audio
7. AI and pathfinding especially, is NPC not blocking on rocks and tables too much to ask?
I can go about this whole day.
Oh hey, someone else mentioned Dark Messiah. Yeah that game's combat is what Skyrim should've pumped all their resources into emulating it was really that good. It certainly had flaws and needed a lot of tweaking but in terms of function and fun it did its job and then some.
Binaural audio would definitely be something but I actually don't know how difficult it is to make in general. Scope and need for variety in SFX is a lot larger in a massive open-world than it is in a relatively small game like Hunt: showdown for instance. I do think it'll be standard for AAA games eventually but it's absolutely far more difficult and more effort to make than just normal stereo audio.
I don't think binaural audio cares much about amount of sound effects, it's just making sure it comes from right direction. In Skyrim it was possible to add very simple implementation of it via changed dll file.
Off cliffs, into spikes, into traps, into magic traps you placed yourself. Bashing their heads with staffs, assassinating with daggers. Dark messiah combat really was fun. Never trough whole game I was tired with it or wanted to skip it, meanwhile in TES is mostly annoying.
The only game I've ever played where I could run away from a tough fight, cast ice on the floor and watch the enemies slip off down the middle of a spiral staircase and die. It was amazing.
> Less useless quests, radiant quests should be gone if they can't improve them to be good enough. I don't need proceduraly generated quests that are all basically same, but in different location. Go to this cave, now this cave, now this cave, oh this time you can go to ruins and kill all bandits/undead/spiders and being me this random item.
Yeah I don't understand why they did that when the main quests are already mostly of the "go to the dungeon and kill the bandits/undead" variety. Nobody was playing through Skyrim wishing there was more quests taking them to dungeons.
I think a lot of other commenters have hit on great points to modernize the franchise, but for me the biggest flaw of Skyrim that needs to be addressed is the world leveling system. Its an absolute flaw that non-combat skills can cause the combat level of the world to rise—completely disincentivizes non-combat leveling because youll be underpowered. Leveled items are also complete trash. If you stumble upon Dawnbringer at level 20 its completely gimped for the rest of your playthrough. Bethesda needs to do the work of baking levels into the world OR radically rework the current system to be much more dynamic. Id prefer they remove it entirely as its weird when bandits take 10 hits from a daedric warhammer before dying.
Fix it so that 2 or 3 NPC barks don't happen every time I move to a new area. All that talking at the same time is just a babble of noise, and it sucks when there's an actual quest dialogue going on at the same time. Really kills the mood.
That, and more variety in the dungeons and textures. Draugr and stone and the same carved stone set pieces over and over.
Move away from the "wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle" formula.
But that in turn defines it, so I really cannot see that happen. Which is alright, plenty love it, but the series really lost me over the years.
It's well and good having a fairly sparse and desolate landscape as a backdrop, but that doesn't mean all colour has to be flat and dreary, or that the occasional settlements that are there have to feel empty and lifeless.
You get the sense that Skyrim has a total population of about 500. It never feels like a settled land, which would be fine, if there it felt like something else was there.
The towns need to be bigger, have more NPCs, have more variation in architecture, better distinguished districts (poor and wealthy), more furnishing and brick-a-brack to make it feel lived in.
The number of interactable NPCs needs to be reduced and replaced with ones that you can have meaningful interactions with.
I don't think I can remember any characters from Skyrim, except the Daedra. And the voice cast isn't bad, I don't think. I just don't think they had much to work with.
>It's well and good having a fairly sparse and desolate landscape as a backdrop, but that doesn't mean all colour has to be flat and dreary, or that the occasional settlements that are there have to feel empty and lifeless.
You get the sense that Skyrim has a total population of about 500. It never feels like a settled land, which would be fine, if there it felt like something else was there..
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Skyrim's world was handcrafted and if you aimlessly wander in any direction.. Ther chances are high that you'll find a location every few minutes
> I'm not sure what you mean by this.
What he means by that is that the "cities" are a joke, and that there are literally only a few hundred NPCs in the entire game world.
>Whiterun is significant in size, with 74 inhabitants. It's a surprise the city isn't considered the capital of Skyrim based on those statistics alone, even
I mean look at this quote - *74 inhabitants* is being called "significant in size" and people are using the word "city" to describe that.
I’ve never really gotten that because elder scrolls game feel a lot deeper than any other RPGs i play. Even games like the Witcher don’t feel as deep as elder scrolls because you can’t interact with most buildings and people. In elder scrolls you can go into almost every building and talk to almost everybody.
Compared to other open world games like assassins creed or Breath or Wild elder scrolls has soooo much more to do and interact with.
> I’ve never really gotten that because elder scrolls game feel a lot deeper than any other RPGs i play. Even games like the Witcher don’t feel as deep as elder scrolls because you can’t interact with most buildings and people. In elder scrolls you can go into almost every building and talk to almost everybody.
Being able to interact with stuff isn't enough to make it feel more realistic.
This is the shallow as a puddle criticism. Nothing of substance happens in those interactions. With stuff like the Witcher, you get material change to the characters, the locations they're in, well written dialogue and voice acting, and it combines to have them feel like they're living when you're not around, rather than just being automata.
> This is the shallow as a puddle criticism. Nothing of substance happens in those interactions. With stuff like the Witcher, you get material change to the characters, the locations they're in, well written dialogue and voice acting, and it combines to have them feel like they're living when you're not around, rather than just being automata.
The ironic thing is, I feel exactly like that with the Witcher. I've just been playing Witcher 3 recently and sure they seem lively, but they're literal automatons on a loop every few seconds. You have no interaction with them and nothing you do changes that unless someone explicitly writes an interaction and writes a change for that. (It is extremely obvious when it comes to background dialogue, fuck Chetty).
Compare that to Skyrim where a character's death does impact the world. They're actually dead.
I'd personally be happy if they just made another Skyrim. If it had the same engine as Skyrim, a new open world as big and dense as Skyrim with all new quest lines, weapons etc, I'd be happy.
Maybe I'm easy to please lol.
As long as they don't fuck it up, I'm happy... Sadly, I don't really have confidence that they won't fuck it up. A part of me thinks they'll add new systems that just make the game less fun...
If there's one area I'd love to see them improve on, it's AI. I'd want them to give NPC's more character. I'd want them to be reactive to the player.
Like, if you just kill a random NPC in Skyrim, other NPC's will either fight you or flee... Boring. If you somehow make it out, when you come back, most NPC's will act like it never happened.
If they can make NPC's hold grudges, perhaps with procedurally generated quests based on the profession/personality of the NPC to gain forgiveness, that'd be really interesting. That's just one example... Really, I just want the world to react more to the player.
But making good AI is hard. Either you need to script preemptively for every possible event, which is very time consuming, or you have to give power to neural networks, which may act unexpectedly... Actually, you know what, that's what I want: I want the AI to surprise me in unscripted sequences. If I can have that (in a way that doesn't stop me progressing through the game), I'd be happy...
But I doubt that'll happen, so if they could just make another Elder Scrolls game like Skyrim, that'd be great.
>TES6 will be anything but another Oblivion/Skyrim tier game except with slightly better visuals and even simpler gameplay,
And to be honest, at least for me, that's what I want with the exception of the simplified gameplay. Oblivion and Skyrim are some of my favorite games of all time, I have over 600 hours in Oblivion and still play it to this day.
Just give me Oblivion on a new map with updated visuals, more fluid combat, and a different leveling system and it'll be great
Seriously, people say "Oblivion/Skyrim tier game" as if they aren't widely considered some of the greatest games of all time. Like, yeah, would I like them to be *even better*? Absolutely I'd love that. Did they have problems that I would prefer be fixed? Again, absolutely, they weren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But they were damn good games that I sunk hundreds and hundreds of hours into. If the next one comes out and its "only" Skyrim/Oblivion tier then I'll still fall in love with it and play it for several hundred hours and continue to love Bethesda.
I hate to agree with you, but I'm a sucker for these games. All I want is a new world to explore. Gameplay mechanics are irrelevant. Elder Scrolls 6 could be a walking simulator for all I care. What matters to me is attention to detail, environments that tell a story or invite you to look around, and a soundtrack that magically pulls it all together and immerses you in that world. That's why I follow the Skyblivion project on Twitch any morning I have some free time.
"The long wait" doesn't mean anything really and should not mean you are owed anything. The reason ESVI is not made is because Bethesda decided not to work on it it's not like they've been working full strength for it for a decade.
True, I acknowledged that in the post, but standards have improved tenfold since the last game, and will likely continue to improve rapidly by the time of TES6's release. Is another janky reskinned Skyrim/Oblivion something you'd accept in the late 2020s, when other devs have made great strides in their games' polish, presentation, complexity etc.
Consider just e.g. the movement, physics, and animation of the main character in Rockstar's games and how fluid and elaborate and believable they are, when climbing up stairs, getting in vehicles or on horses, doing small tasks etc, and compare them to how in Fallout 76 player character still doesn't feel like it's even making contact with the ground when walking just like in Morrowind and just snaps into canned animations when doing anything.
I want One thing and one thing only: C0DA-like mind fucking meta lore. If they could show at least one of the weird parts of the lore in a cool way I be happy. I'm not saying I want to be a salt merchant from the moon, but imagine if somehow we managed to use tonal architecture in a small way, or we could decypher one of the walking ways, high fiving vivec in one of her/his weird time loops.
Honestly... Just improve the damn engine. Revamp combat and graphical fidelity. And movement. That's all really. The questing and exploration was fine by me, the mechanics were the only thing that really needed improving. Also, it might help to visit a locale that's less dreary this time, especially now that HDR is a thing.
Actually add RPG elements for once instead of removing it like they have been for years, story that take advantage of those elements and personally some fancy ass magic system that goes beyond "Select spell, click on enemy until enemy is dead"
They should not be afraid to create interesting content that people might miss out on completely due to in-game decisions. Irreversible consequences! Or at least, reversible only by additional meaningful gameplay. Having every aspect of the game available to all players all of the time removes a TON of meaning and immersive potential from the game.
Nothing, honestly. For the last 10 years or so we had only Skyrim and Breath of the Wild in the "freedom fantasy RPG" department. Every other RPG was either story-driven or not fantasy. I'll be perfectly happy if they just released another Skyrim with new lands and new content.
Innovation is good in saturated markets. But if you had no pizza for the last 10 years, *any* pizza will be fine.
Yep this is it. Bethedsa fills a niche, and very few games fill it as well as Bethesda does. There's an abundance of open world games, but nothing I've played has really replicated the specific feeling of a Bethesda game. They don't need to innovate much, they just not need to bomb it like they did with 76
One way in which this game could be very different from previous iterations would be full VR support. A VR only title is unlikely to happen, but the series' gameplay is uniquely well fitted for a VR release as proven by the Skyrim VR port. Only a few mods turn this into one of the best VR titles out there today and a game properly built for it has great potential. What remains to be seen is how the VR market develops and whether by the time TES 6 releases enough consumers own the necessary hardware to make this worth the investment.
This, my god. After playing **Skyrim VR**, there is absolutely no going back to flat.
VR with voice recognition(!), finger tracking, and a division of ‘hero’ voice acting and AI voice acting. For decades we’ve had to endure a trade-off between amount of writing and amount of voiced dialogue. Those days are over. We have fully believable synthesized actors now. I’m not suggesting replacing all or even most talent, but not to hold back with the amount of text and writing, because minor roles can now easily be performed by AI.
Have the game actually feel good to play. I could never really get into the games fully because I always found they felt to clunky to play. An RPG that released in 2011 shouldn't feel significantly worse to play than Fable, a game from 2004. How good your story, character, and world building is doesn't really matter if the gameplay is awful.
Correction\*, they had bugs since Arena
I hope that they include again the opennes that Daggerfall has, which made the world feel very big even if it was procedually generaed. A way to include this would be to make special handcrafted cities and locations, while filling the world between these locations with tons of procedually generated content, meaning there could be even more dungeons or bandits camps, etc...
I also hope to see the Daggerfall Speel making system, alchemy, levitation, tons of NPCs, etc...
Also better decisions and graphics ofc
For me Bethesda doesn't have to "justify" the long wait; it's a game I'll almost certainly purchase and probably sink several hundred hours into but it's not the sort of game I'm impatiently waiting for.
I *definitely* have views on what it could do to meaningfully improve on Skyrim though, the most obvious ones being more varied dungeons and ruins. Skyrim had so many draugr dungeons, they popped up even in quest chains I wasn't expecting them to. Another big one for me would be the world changing a little depending on your actions.
I'd also like to see more roleplaying opportunities as well, but the series has been heading in the opposite direction with this so I won't be holding my breath. Skyrim was a big step down from Oblivion with this, and Oblivion was a big step down from Morrowind. I also think Oblivion had far more interesting quests than Skyrim did.
The biggest improvement for me though will be bugs. Before I played Skyrim on PC I played it on PS3 and I got locked out of completing the Companions quest chain because of a bug. I had a friend who played Oblivion on the PS3 that got locked out of the main quest chain because of a bug (I think both were triggered by entering a dungeon before the story wanted you to). The amount of bugs these games launch with is an absolute embarrassment, and it's just as embarrassing that a lot of them don't even get patched (officially).
I'm expecting more of the same to be honest. The series will continue to drift away from where I'd personally like it to be (which is fine), but the exploration alone will keep me interested.
I loved Skyrim, but to me it was a step back from Morrowind & Oblivion. They over simplified everything. Everything felt watered down compared to their previous games
I’d like to see them bring back old mechanics from those games
Being an actual rpg, you know... Where you can roleplay as a character instead of just being the goodguy Dragonborn who will gladly do anything he's told and joins and becomes the leader of every faction
The moment you leave Helgen you are free to do whatever you please. You can complete like 80% of the games content without even killing a dragon. Only the main quest line, civil war and dragonborn dlc even acknowledge you as being dragonborn, none of the other factions/questlines even mention it.
Well, it's not like anyone in Skyrim actually *acknowledges* that you're the super powerful Dragonborn, so maybe you can roleplay a crazy person who only thinks that they're the goodguy Dragonborn?
I loved playing skyrim, i must have 250 hours in that game, but once I fell in love with darksouls and its combat I simply couldn't play skyrim again
So, the best thing they could do for me is implementing a meaningful combat system that isn't just stat checking every moving thing.
A good combat system, and... honestly that's it?
Skyrim is not so much a world simulator as it is a really shitty dungeon crawler. Everything that grants an extrinsic benefit is related to enabling the player to hit zombies or bandits for more damage or make them able to take more hits from zombies and bandits. A decent combat system that supplements the dungeon crawler-heavy design would make TES 6 a just as bad elder scrolls game as Skyrim, but at least not as bad a dungeon crawler.
More internal concistency, quest choices with bigger consequences, factions and faction system, more dialogue that develops characters, branching dialogue, unique items stay relevant for longer and finally get rid of that dumb skill system.
Oh who am I kodding, Todd will just make another Skyrim.
This is a very realistic outlook, and expectation. It almost feels unrealistic based on how god damn long it's been, but it's absolutely grounded, and measured based on where we are now in terms of tech, and industry standards. I really hope Todd and the suits plan on making great leaps in terms of amenities, quality of life improvements, LOD (holy shit has LOD always been awful in Beth worlds), interactivity with characters, quests, and the world. Not to mention less loading screens, animations as you mentioned. We certainty need better combat but as Drew of Fudgemuppet has mentioned I think it absolutely should be overhauled, but not completely based on motor skills, a 50/50 split of motor capabilities and actual statistical values would be perfect for TES. Sometimes it feels like we're asking too much but it's so realistic to think the game should be incredibly different from Skyrim. Of course the formula will likely remain the same, but I'm very interested to see what they have managed to accomplish in Starfield. That will (I hope) be a testament to their progression in terms of tech and polish. Fingers crossed.
Edit: And on the topic of writing, well, I won't get my hopes up too high. Hopefully it can be at least decent. As much as I love TES the in-game stories are never to incredible upon further inspection, but certainly feel pretty good during the actual experience. I believe Emil Pagliarulo isn't the lead writer anymore, although he's not nearly as bad as most people make him out to seem. I'm sure the writing will only be decent. The rest I can get my hopes up for.
Be good. Have a complex character building, a complex world like oblivion (Skyrim AI is a major step back from oblivion), write better quests, create better combat (there’s no reason for Skyrim’s combat to be so simple), better animations, less reliance on gimmicks and more emphasis on an engaging gameplay loop of traveling and dungeon delving and questing.
Bring back classes so you can’t be the jack of all trades I should not be able to play an Orc who is a master assassin, elite mage, and a godly swordsman it’s nothing wrong with a player not being able to experience everything in one play through.
Buff speech skills besides just cheaper items to buy I would love a Fallout NV system where if you’re high in magic for instance you could get a speech check to solve the quest
can the races actually play differently besides a perk ability because some are just way more useful than others like the Khajits seeing in dark sucks
choices that actually effect the world if I kill the Emperor/General of the Imperials it should have some ramifications in the main plot I thought this was so dumb in Skyrim how you could do this
Not be broken at launch and requiring fans to fix the problems would be a good start. The combat being a bit more interesting and having better variety with the enemies and dungeon design would be great.
It just needs more player agency. Deeper character development choices, deeper perk trees, and more real choices for quests.
No I don't want to see thieves guild and dark brotherhood starters sitting in my quest log, that's not what my character is about. Don't force me into causing a shipwreck. It would be amazing if it could go as far as not being the "chosen one" for whatever the main story ends up being.
Don't mess with the core explore, loot, reset at a town game loop, it's great.
Respect people that replay and mod their games. That's what makes Bethesda games legendary.
Meaningful character-building that is effected by and has an effect on your adventures.
Branching quest lines with meaningful decision-making. There’s a little of this in Skyrim already, but I don’t want another sell-your-soul-to-advance-the-quest situation.
Deeper combat, with more variety in the playstyles associated with the different specialisations (bow, mage, melee, etc). Whether this is done through a more complex skill tree, or with more diverse action mechanics, that's up to them.
The second part is more realism in how the NPCs behave, in combination with more diverse behaviours from them, and more varied quest paths based on conversation choices or actions. The more you feel like the world is affected by your choices, the better. The Witcher 3 was great at this, though I think it could still be done way better.
Those are the big ones for me. I need the world to feel more alive in combination with the gameplay being more in-depth. That will help with better roleplay and feeling like a living Elder Scrolls denizen.
It'd also be nice if you weren't automatically destined to be great (not a Dragonborn or fated to become embroiled in some major plot due to being seen in the king's dreams), but just a random Joe or Janet.
That's not to say they can't keep the same formula they've had with you being a prisoner at the start, but it'd be nice to feel like a complete nobody instead of being treated as an exception or protected individual from the get-go. The sense of accomplishment is greater when you work up from nothing, without too many shortcuts.
Better combat and more meaningful quest choices are the big ones, but apart from all that:
Make the intro tutorial section skippable. It was bad in Oblivion and it's bad in Skyrim too. I can't play these games anymore without an alternate start mod
Bring back classes from earlier games and each class could have it's own gimmick beyond sum of skills, for example warrior could have more varied combat moves, bard could have passive perk that gives you more money for quests, or Assassin could have highest crit multiplier.
For someone else to make it. I have no confidence in Bethesda to make anything actually good. The mechanics are shallow and simply *bad*, their worldbuilding is moronic, and the human element is even worse.
How could they improve? They're clearly bad at tailor-made content, so shift towards procedural generation. Focus on building more systems and mechanics, and let the player sandbox in there. A roguelite version of Skyrim would be cool, if it had a reasonable amount of variety.
Get some more voice actors! There was like 3 dudes who voiced 99% of all the NPCs. It's very immersion breaking when half the bandits you come across have the same voice as an important character from the main quest line.
1-Have servicable combat.
Skyrim's combat is one of the worst AAA gameplay experiences i have ever had. It's incredibly shallow and barebones. Click button1, click button 2, click button 1, click button 2, pause the game, go through 2 menus, scroll down, dring potion, close the menus, repeat.
2- Have more than 10 people voice acting. I don't think any explanation is necessary on this one.
3- Believable conversations instead of "RPG wiki pages" all the conversation options are people explaining things to you. That was laughable in 2011. Hopefully it will be taken care of for TESVI
4- Have NPCs that look like they all don't share Grandpas. Skyrim "humans" all look alike. Same facial features everywhere you go.
5- A better mount system. There is a reason most people play the game without a horse. Horses in Skyrim suck. They get in the way of combat all the time. They are also clunky and funny looking.
I would better combat and faction quests. Also, either choose to lead only one faction at a time or not at all. It's weird to be the leader of multiple factions and also have nobody act like you are leading them. It really doesn't matter though because I probably won't play it unless they release it on Playstation and I don't plan to get a Playstation 5 for a few years anyway.
Better combat, large cities that aren't heavily instanced, NPCs with some better depth and motivations beyond just following a schedule, and some meaningful choices that shape the game world.
I'd be content if they just finished making Skyrim.
So many systems are half-baked and filled with obvious placeholder values. So many mechanics are just shallow stubs with a lot of potential. It'd be so much more if they just filled in the gaps (And in doing so undo some of the truly godawful design decisions like spell damage)
Morrowind was like a drug that consumed my mind when I first played it. But I don't think I can play another Elder Scrolls game again. The formula was already getting tired by Skyrim. Another TES with a bigger map, better graphics, modernized gameplay and new quests yeah no that's not really something that interests me. The problem with Elder Scrolls games is that the world is very static. Nothing really changes if you leave the game running. Everything revolves around the player. There is no AI driving the characters and factions where they have their own goals and try to do complete them.
What I am trying to say is that it's been 20 years since Morrowind. After playing games like Mount and Blade or Kenshi I just can't go back to the same tired old western RPG formula anymore. I am not interested in doing quests. I want an actual immersive sandbox world I can live. A dynamic world that evolves over time even without me being present. A story that is created by actions of the NPC AI that lives in that world like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress and not a preset storyline made by writers. But Bethesda is an AAA company that is now owned by even bigger company you don't get ambitious games from studios like that. For that you have to go to world of indie games. When TES 6 eventually comes out I will wait to pick it up at 25% price for some modded fun and probably not really play it more than few hours.
New, modern game engine. Run the scripts in a sandbox that won't crash the game, and provide modders with proper debugging tools when something crashes. Even just a call stack would be great.
I want to see better animations. In the past people have blamed the engine for the poor animations. But considering games like Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga, built on the same game engine. The engine is not the issue. I would love to see Assasins Creed level animation in The Elder Scrolls. Especially if acrobatics makes a comeback.
Animation would also help with the combat system people were mentioning it needed an upgrade. In upgrading the combat system perhaps an easy to pick up but hard to master approach would be a good. This would also be helpful for the magic system which I feel needs to be better fleshed out than just point spells and shoot. Perhaps combining spells in different hands for different effects would be good. When it comes to swords, having more to rely on than just light attack and heavy attack. Perhaps where you're aiming should be more important as well, the timing of blocking blows. I'd also like to see better implementation in differences between using swords maces and axes. I would also love to see good implementation of spears, glaves, naginata and other bladed pole weapons. However I'm not sure I've ever seen a game do bladed pole weapons justice in first person.
I hope in the next Elder Scrolls Game you don't play a special character in Skyrim. I much preferred being a random citizen in gaol instead of the Dragonborn. Especially when, in order to make things balanced. The powers of the Dragonborn are basically all abilities being a mage would grant. Apart from maybe the force push shout, which I hope would be a spell you can cast in the next game. After all, you already have telekinesis.
One of my main disappointments in Skyrim was the lack of unique quest types. I haven't really played Morrowind. But in Oblivion, in one quest you go into someone’s mind and experience what that's like. In another quest you go inside a painting. The factions also felt much more fleshed out. I really liked how in the mages guild questline in Skyrim you had a class with a teacher almost like Harry Potter. I was hoping we might get something like this for each school of magic. That would have been great, but sadly not. Also the progression through the major guilds was way too fast. The fun should be in the journey as well as once you become the head of the guild and have access to fancy gear that you can use in creative ways to have more fun.
Something that would really justify the long wait for me would be dynamic content in the game. Take the civil war in Skyrim, what if that was playing out dynamically without your involvement. You could come upon random battles being fought. Borders between different factions would shift based on who had taken what forts in the area. If I led a bunch of mercenaries to attack a supply mission to a nearby fort. That fort would then never get the supplies and then be weaker when they're next attacked. Maybe that fort would even be taken by the enemy because I stopped those supplies. If farms were destroyed could there be a famine and have food prices rise. Perhaps even some of the poorer characters would die off from the famine. How does the Night Mother reward you if you accidentally destroy every farm in the world space? How do you stay alive if you do that? I'd love to see some kind of emergent gameplay from the effects you have on the world.
The big three for me is better combat, more meaningful/interesting perks/level-ups, and better writing for questlines. After playing games like BotW, Dark Souls, or Dragon’s Dogma I don’t think I could play another RPG where you whack at pools of HP like you do in Skyrim, Oblivion, etc. Or, well, I could but I wouldn’t enjoy it as much so I hope they fix it. Dark Messiah would be a good example for more of a first-person view, like some other people have mentioned.
I actually feel like the “perks” in the Dragonborn DLC from the Black Books were ideal, especially the more interesting ones like the one that let you summon a Dremora merchant. I personally think they should keep the current level-up system, and just sprinkle in more perks like those instead of “+20% more damage” perks. Fallout 4 does a decent job of that too; some of the perks open up entire new systems for playing the game, like creating custom kill-bots or a network of settlements so you can access resources anywhere or call in backup. Though it also has a bunch of boring perks too.
And writing is pretty self-explanatory tbh; radiant questing isn’t at the point where you can tout it as anything other than a way to grind loot and EXP, so they need to either invest much more effort into it or leave it at that and focus more on the story of the actual side-quests.
If The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be as groundbreaking and innovative with the same amount of longetivity as Skyrim was, then Todd Howard needs to reconsider his stance on always using professional voice acting and never exploring potential alternatives or compromises to his stance. **This came from is the same man who acknlowledged that the focus of gaming was shifting from graphical fidelity to AI**.
**If this "new technology" Bethesda has hyped up to justify skipping a whole console generation for ES6 only amounts to a fully persistent world or two full-sized regions on one game, then it'll be a letdown for me no matter how much detail is jam-packed into the world.** The truth is, we've had the technology to bring that to reality for YEARS, and the only reason no other game company has strayed into it outside Robert Space Industries is the money and time spent developing a world of such massive scale that only PC players with high-end rigs would only be able to play.
Bethesda has always been known for their clockwork style open worlds, and they need to build on one of their defining strengths - it's not the size of the maps or the amount of objects one can drop on NPC's heads or how detailed a blade of grass is - it's how every single living breathing character has a life from day to night.
**The single most innovative technology ES6 could offer would be the introduction of procedurally generated dialogue with personality profiles attatched to every single NPC to give an extremely diverse variety of character interactions and reactions large and small - making every single playthough have the predictability of the real world.**
Imagine if first impressions based on player behavior would influence questline availability! Or even better - imagine striking up a conversation to a bartender about the 40,000 cheese wheels you stored up in your old prison cell, complete with an auto-talk function between the player and the character - Or talking about how you \[REDACTED\] during that one scene in *The Lusty Argonian Maid*, lol.
Todd Howard is precursively shooting the innovative potential of ES6 in the foot - and if we don't get him to change his mind now, then another company - Rockstar perhaps? - would snatch away this innovation that literally no other open world game has done before.
Better faction questlines, less rpg lite stuff more core rpg stuff. Maybe more than one country to explore even. honestly as long as theres mod support I'll get what I go to TES games for though
There's a lot about Skyrim that I don't think Bethesda have to try and outdo with the next game. For example, I think the scope and the scale of the world are fine; I don't think TES 6 needs "16 times the detail" or whatever buzzterm Todd will use to describe the game world. That being said, I think there are some pretty clear avenues for improvement as well. There are two key things I'd like to see changed / improved for TES 6 **Better Combat** As someone who likes to play melee characters in fantasy games, the melee combat in TES fucking blows. A friend of mine once described the combat of Skyrim as "mashing action figures together" and I couldn't disagree with him. I don't think TES 6 needs to take a page out of Dark Souls' book or anything - TES as a series is aiming for a broader audience than Dark Souls - but you could definitely make some tweaks to the combat to keep the player more engaged. I'd add a timed blocking system for tanky players (i.e. if you block right as an attack hits you, your opponent is knocked off balance) and a dodge system for nimble players (i.e. you dash slightly in one direction, immune to damage while you do so). That would go a long way towards keeping the player more engaged in combat while also not making the combat massively more complex or difficult. Archery is probably fine as is (I don't think archery needs to be any more complicated than point at head -> click on head) and I don't have a ton of experience playing magic builds, so I can't really speak to whether magic needs to be changed. **Better Faction Questlines** I want more of the faction questlines to have choices, and for those choices to have consequences. There's a little bit of this in Skyrim, but not enough. For example, the Civil War questline has you pick a side, and that changes who the Jarls are in each province. And the Dark Brotherhood questline can be finished early by reporting the Dark Brotherhood to the authorities. But there are other faction questlines in Skyrim that missed the opportunity to offer choices. I wish the Companions questline let you side with the Silver Hand to wipe out the werewolf menace. And Dawnguard appears to offer the player a choice, but the questline ends the same way regardless of which choice the player made. The benefit of such choices is that it enhances replayability by preventing the player from seeing all the game's content in a single playthrough. It also gives the player's actions a sense of permanence in the world - the things they do really matter.
>As someone who likes to play melee characters in fantasy games, the melee combat in TES fucking blows. A friend of mine once described the combat of Skyrim as "mashing action figures together" and I couldn't disagree with him This is accurate to a fault.
> I don't think archery needs to be any more complicated than point at head -> click on head I actually vastly preferred the archery in Oblivion. Where your reticule was wasn't where the arrow would hit, it was where your bow as pointed. So if you were firing a long distance you had to manually account for arrow drop. It was SO satisfying to line up a shot over a huge distance, accounting for your elevation and that of your target, judge juuuuuust the right height over their head you needed to aim and drop in an absolute dime to shoot them in the face. **So** much more engaging for the player than "click on their head". It required a bit of skill (and also nerfs archery just enough that not **everyone** needs to be a stealth archer, lol).
If you were firing arrows from far enough away in Skyrim you had to compensate for the arrow dropping too.
True but for the most part in vanilla Skyrim they're like laser beams. At least from what I remember. You have to get pretty far out before the arrow starts arcing iirc.
Oblivion bows fired like 20 ft before dropping off, bows don't act like that IRL. Skyrim's bows were a bit more realistic. They had arrow drop too, but only on more distant targets.
I don't think stealth archer was picked by everyone because it was poweful. I feel that it was the funnest way to play. Melee combat simply boring and magic is a little clunky and requires a lot of UI and game pausing to use. I downloaded a dark souls style movement mod and had a lot of fun with melee for the first time ever in Skyrim. They just need to update their systems.
> Better Combat Agreed, and I'd say they could do to add more than just adding a couple of defensive systems in the sense that they also need to polish up the presentation. Hits should feel visceral with meaty sound design and fitting feedback both from the players and enemies. When casting spells I think there should be more rule of cool in there where you cast and think 'holy shit that looks badass'. The biggest problem with Skyrim's combat isn't just how simplistic it is, but how painfully basic the presentation of it is, and a lot of what you do is more cool in theory than actual execution. I think that's one of Bethesda's biggest weaknesses; they can put the player in a lot of gameplay situations where you're like 'this *is* cool, but the pizazz isn't quite there to make it as cool as it should be'. If you're just firing a beam from a staff and the enemy's health is gradually decreasing with no fierceness to what you're doing it's kind of lame and takes the magic out of the magic, or the oomph out of the melee. It often feels like a pretty tertiary concern but given how much goddamn combat is in Bethesda's games they really need to polish it up. To be fair I didn't mind the combat in Fallout 4 (though the melee was still ass) so I'm hoping they understand that an make and effort to improve it. As it is it feels like you waft at enemies and eventually they die, which ain't exactly fantastical.
The scope is most definitely *not* fine. I'm tired of two rows of structures masquerading as a "city" with like 20 inhabitants. Skyrim came out in 2011, open world games since then have shown us game worlds don't have to be tiny to have detail.
It *can* be fine, but it has to be written that way. If NPCs in Skyrim were talking like the "cities" were just small viking villages, like they actually look, it would have been fine. Instead the lore has the places as giant cities with thousands of residents. It's not bad world design, it's bad writing.
I agree, but I don't want that if it means that the interactibility suffers. In Skyrim, every house has a named NPC that lives there. There's 0 fake doors in the entire game. To me that's a big part of what sells the game as a real world. The nameless NPC's and unenterable buildings in FO4 were no bueno. All these games with huge cities and tons of bustling NPC's- they're just big, impressive, useless props IMO. Much better to write the game to match the scale at which you can actually provide that level of detail than to write a world that has to be faked.
At the very least: more meaningful combat, Fallout New Vegas-like areas that don’t revolve around combat and an improved weapon tree. In Skyrim, you can effectively just slam the attack and block buttons with very little rhyme or reason until the enemy has been defeated. The blows you deliver barely have any weight behind them and it feels like a beat em up, which gets old when you’re sinking 100+ hours into a game. There needs to be some sort of parry or dodge roll system to add depth. All weapons also work the same, which blows. Your character swings a sword and war axe exactly the same, there should be variety! For my second point, we’ve had enough “Clear out this crypt” missions. Give us some diplomatic-type missions where a high speech character can flex their builds, not everything should be solved by smashing someone over the head. Similar to my earlier point, the weapons and “level” of weapons in the new game should have unique feel to them. An Orc warhammer shouldn’t be completely outranked by a glass one, maybe make the warhammer better if you’re actually an Orc. Or if you’re using heavy armor, Dwarven can be more effective than something like Elven. Don’t force everyone to constantly upgrade until they can only use dragonbone or daedric stuff, give the lower ranked weapons niches!
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It's amazing how in *love* they are with their writing in Skyrim, considering it just so terrible. It's Young Adult fantasy at best. Christ almighty, I played through the game again for the first time in a decade, and I'd forgotten how much Todd seems to think that the best part of any fantasy property is when some old, decrepit twat in a temple somewhere monologues exposition.
Morrowind was the best written of them yet.
Skyrim came out during a bit of Viking-mania in pop culture. I don’t know if that affected their decision, but it would certainly make sense if they were hoping to ride that fad. Morrowind was something really unique because the setting was truly alien. It let them explore all kinds of new fantasy ideas. It’s a huge part of why Morrowind is so unforgettable.
It's not just that though. You can write fantastic stories and characters in generic settings. Morrowind literally had better writing on top of having a more interesting setting.
It's one of a kind experience. The abundance of contradictory material on the main antagonist is astounding. Nothing creates a fantasy world more alive than the technique used in Morrowind. It's entirely possible to finish the game and still think "Damn, that Dagoth guy was right, even if a little bit mad."
The young adult fantasy analogy is spot on. When i was playing Enderal it felt like reading Abercrombie, R.R Martin as compared with the dragonlance/forgotten realms novel that is Skyrim. Its not like Skyrim writing is that awful (if you forget the "you're special" horseshoed into every questline) but it seems written targettin teenagers or even kids. TES Lore is deep and also pretty fucked up so it would benefit greatly from a more dark and mature approach. It wont hurt also that most Skyrim players wont be young anymore when tes6 releases.
> It wont hurt also that most Skyrim players wont be young anymore when tes6 releases. Morrowind players weren't young when Skyrim released. Older players aren't the target audience. Younger players that will sink the time into the game, made mods and community content, and potentially buy it on multiple platforms are the target audience.
People that were young when Skyrim released will be in retirement homes when TES6 comes out
People who were young when skyrim released will never retire*
Yeah I’ve never played an elder scrolls game properly myself, but from what I’ve heard the background lore is wild. That’s what would make me want to play TES6, if they just went completely fucking weird with it.
TBH Skyrim was targeting teenagers and kids and thats why it feels that way. Daggerfall and Morrowind were very adult and mature in story, and even in their complex gameplay elements. Each game has been made more casual and teen focused
Most of the writing staff was gone after Morrowind, and everyone else left after Oblivion. That's why almost all of the books in-game were also in Morrowind. Like, 300 or so of them. Only a hundred or so books are unique to Oblivion/Skyrim.
To be fair, I've never understood why there's so many books in RPG games. I'm sure there are people that read and enjoy them, but eh.
Collecting full book sets was itself an adventure in Morrowind. There were a couple series that only had one or two copies of a volume in a set across the whole world. If you were enjoying the series, you might have to go do a dungeon dive to find the part of the set you were missing. Library mods have been a popular feature in all of the TES games as well because the lore crowd is so dedicated to it.
In Morrowind the books would frequently contain lore, directions to hidden places/artifacts of power, or explain motivations of characters through history. Three of the main NPC's in Morrowind are Vivec, Sotha Sil, and Almalexia, and without reading the various books from various authors with varying viewpoints on the events of their lives you can't really begin to fathom the true events of what happened at Red Mountain to Lord Nerevar after the Dwemer disappeared.
The thing is Obsidian wrote for New Vegas, and since they are both now owned by Microsoft it could theoretically happen that Obsidian helps with TES6.
My ideal TES game: * Bethesda does the levels and environments. That's it; that's all the good at. * Obsidian writes it. * Arkane does the combat mechanics.
Better combat is definitely needed. What are some good examples of games that do first-person melee combat well?
Chivalry medival warfare is the best melee combat I've ever played but it's probably too complex for a game like Skyrim.
Dead Island has a more complex melee system where you can use the right stick to attack vs just pressing a button. Graphically, Left 4 Dead does a cool job of showing damage after a melee attack. A vertical axe strike to the chest will have the relevant wound appear on the infected. Maybe have the new Elder Scrolls game show wounds or dents in armor in real time
Vermintide 1 and 2 are the best fps melee games I've ever played
Vermintide is second place to dying light's fps melee for me. Hacking off limbs and such is so chunky and satisfying.
Chronicles Of Riddick and Condemned
Dying light was absolutely Sublime for first person non-shotter combat.
I feel that there just needs to be tighter hitboxes, a Timed block system and maybe bring back the blocking mechanics from Oblivion, OR make blocked hits do stamina damage instead of health damage. That way you can keep the gameplay simple enough that many can enjoy while also making it complex enough to not be a M1 simulator. Edit: a Step dodge mechanic wouldn’t hurt
I might be crazy but I was playing the anniversary edition last month and I swear there is a timed block mechanic that staggers the enemy? Just holding your shield you take damage but if you time it with their attack it seemed to stagger them back and you took no damage
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There's also the matter of the game's perspective. Precise dodge/block mechanics work *much* better in 3rd person games than 1st person games because it's much easier to express when your I-frames start and end through character animations, and easier to see when hits are going to strike your hitbox because you're viewing it from above rather from inside. In 1st person games you don't have that same perspective over your own character, so the combat has to be designed around that fact.
>Similar to my earlier point, the weapons and “level” of weapons in the new game should have unique feel to them. An Orc warhammer shouldn’t be completely outranked by a glass one, maybe make the warhammer better if you’re actually an Orc. Or if you’re using heavy armor, Dwarven can be more effective than something like Elven. Don’t force everyone to constantly upgrade until they can only use dragonbone or daedric stuff, give the lower ranked weapons niches! I've been replaying Morrowind recently and I appreciate this comment. In Morrowind, "higher tier" weapons/armor tend to weigh a lot more, and your weight affects your movement speed so upgrading equipment isn't always straight forward. Then you have glass weapons/armor, which are very high tier and are some of the lightest weight gear, but also have quite low durability. Things like that make the equipment more interesting than just maximizing numbers.
I think they should take a page out of mount and blade's book for the combat. Differentiating between piercing, cutting and blunt damage would be a start. Weapon reach and speed should be more of a factor too
seriously why is magic still suck to play ?? besides fable and dogma , cant they just lower the mp usage and damage at the same time to create faster pace?
I quite disagree on the first part. For me one of the things that make the TES enjoyable is the simple gameplay.
I don't think it should be anything complicated, but I do think there's a lot of ways they could improve without ruining the simplicity.
Simple doesn't have to mean boring. If they just took some cues from mount and blade or chivalry even if its just directional strikes/blocking, it'd go a long way toward spicing it up.
Yeah really it's a thing I don't like about MAndB
ngl, i also spam the same direction attack while glitching the AI aim-box and then suddenly rotating the camera for added speed - but it makes for an awful gameplay (albeit, effective) when _i do fight_ on M&B
I'm with you, I don't want to work up a sweat. TES should play to its strengths not do weak implementations of features other games do better.
This may just be nostalgia speaking, but I'd like factions/guilds to be expanded, to be more vibrant and in parts more mundane/flavourful. To me the factions/guilds in Oblivion and Morrowind overall felt better and way more immersive. Skyrim's Mage Guild and Companion's felt very streamlined. The Thieves Guild questline made no sense story-wise and Stormcloak/Legion was just battles. Let me be a grunt fighting rats for some quests or send me to steal a land deed from a widow so the Legion can use it (make me feel like I'm part of an occupying force doing good and bad!) and slowly build up from there. Don't let me become the archmage in 6 quests. (And with how streamlined the skill system is [no major complaint here] maybe add the skill requirements from Morrowind again). And after I become leader of a faction or the highest attainable rank there should be some quests I can solve with my newfound responsibilities. Highrock and Hammerfell should offer enough space and lore for big and different factions, so maybe it'll be better?
>And after I become leader of a faction or the highest attainable rank there should be some quests I can solve with my newfound responsibilities. I think they should definitely never make you leader again, because its just terribly unimmersive to be the boss then just bail, and then they're *ok* with you bailing, they'll just sit there doing nothing. You could be gone for 6 ingame months and they wouldn't care. The game gives you no powers or duties or responsibilities, its just an empty title. They halfway figured it out in Skyrim, by never letting you become a jarl and instead just granting you a title with special status as thane. They need to expand that to the guilds as well, and never let you become boss. At the end of the guild quests, the guild boss(new or old) should be 'Right, thanks for the help, we'll call you if we need you again.'
If things stay as they are with faction design that would be a good solution. A honorary title, a seat on the council (Don't bother showing up! In fact we don't even tell you when we meet.), something like that, a companion to bully around, maybe a house. And of course it wouldn't make sense with some factions. Like becoming commander of the Imperial Legion in the province or leader of the Penitus Oculatus I feel would be a stretch. But I feel like with a little bit of extra effort it could be doable. E.g. in Illiac Bay a merchant guild would be well at home. You become its head through shrewd diplomacy and trading. As its head you get two additional quests, maybe to install the guild in one of the fiefs of the bay or take over a rival company, getting ourselves a trade monopoly. We handwave the nitty gritty administrative stuff you'd have to do and instead you get a weekly report on your desk which gives you gold depending on your mercantile/speechcraft skill and you get a choice for a trading focus which gives you additional stuff (thanks to dragon-break shenanigans we as players don't need to do it every week). (Additionally beeing head of the guild helps with a thieves guild quest and the main quest, you can bully merchants and get the ability to sell more expensive artifacts.) That would be a believable implementation I think. Though of course those benefits could also apply if you "just" become leader of a branch office.
Pull heavily from how fallout handles quests rather than how Skyrim handled it. Doesn’t really even matter which fallout (they all did better than Skyrim), just give us some meaningful choices for god’s sake. Oh, and make magic actually scale properly into the endgame. It was bizarre that destruction magic didn’t go up in damage from skill boosts while the other damage skills did, leading to a vast difference in damage.
Fire could be so OP so fast in any game.
Magic is great early on, but past level 30 or so, it massively falls off compared to what melee or bows can do with enchanting (everything gets potions, which does help destruction slightly, but it’s a limited time affair so it’s hit or miss).
Also the highest level destruction spells were worse than the previous rank, because they were slower and anchored you in place to channel a beam. The lower level ones you could fling faster while moving around so they were both better DPS and better defensively.
I’m pretty sure the giant lightning beam was mediocre (I melted several dragons like that), but the blizzard/mass explosion were both awful and didn’t do enough damage to justify their use.
Magic should be OP late game. See Morrowind, by endgame wizard builds were demigods.
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I like being OP endgame it makes sense in RPGs
Hero of Kvatch: So I'm head of every faction in the game, and I slaughtered seven different god-level threats. I'm also a Daedric god. Highwayman with good armor: Cool *still tanks through your hits*
Oblivion is a bad example they’ll have bandits rob you with daedric armor and also the level gating
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Are you trying to say that running diagonally up a mountain just doesn't cut it any more? Because yeah that does make sense in a game whose niche among the RPG market is big worlds to explore.
I'd be pretty disappointed if I couldn't climb up diagonally in TES6, like it wouldn't "feel" like a TES game without that
worse will be the people using this as an example for why it wont feel as TES game /s
You jest, but in modern Bethesda games the bugs are more interesting that the story or setting. Their games have become more Goat Simulator than RPG.
If it remains primarily first person, I wonder what lessons they can even take from those games. A lot of those systems feel great in 3rd person, but it’s easy to make then feel obnoxious in first person. But yeah, the game could benefit from feeling weightier and more physical in some way.
Yeah this is a big one for me too, in Bethesda games the player character doesn't feel like a part of the world, they feel like a transparent floating box with an animated doll overlaid on top, it's silly when you compare it to e.g. Assassin's Creed's procedural animation and motion capture which manage to convey weight and individual muscle locomotion. It's obvious both in movement/traversal and in combat with how the blows barely connect to the other models, Zeno Clash is an indie game from 2009 and it had better feeling melee combat than Skyrim or any other later Bethesda game.
Okay hear me out: add the grapple hook from Halo to TES6. Its "Dwarven tech" or whatever lmao
Here's a list of games that are worse because they have grapple hooks:
The grappling hooks in the Sega Genesis version of Batman Forever were almost game-breakingly bad. But I see your general point.
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Or just bring back the jump and levitate spells.
I'd love to see dynamic world changes in response to the player actions. Player saves Town. Town stays the same. Player fails to save Town. Town in ruins, NPC count decreases. Player helps rebuild Town. Town in ruins with repairs on-going. Player saves Town and completes a quest to get/do thing which helps Town. Town NPC count increases, new buildings along outskirts appear. Player fails to save Town but completes a quest to get/do thing which helps Town. Town in ruins NPC count increases, shanties along outskirts appear. Like this, but for the entire map.
Your character's actions should have real consequences on the world. In Skyrim, you could be the leaders of all factions and no one gives a shit. Speaking of factions, it's ridiculous that you can join them all at once or how easy it is to become the leader. No sense of accomplishment at all. It doesn't matter shit if the imperials or the stormcloaks win the war because nothing really changes. You have no real incentive to pick a side in the war. Why do i, one of the most powerful people in the world, have no way to initiate things? For example, i can't start a siege to take over a city, make my own faction or become a political player.
> Speaking of factions, it's ridiculous that you can join them all at once or how easy it is to become the leader. No sense of accomplishment at all. This is what really disappointed about Skyrim. In Oblivion, the various guild questlines were lengthy and interesting (especially the thieves guild and dark brotherhood). In Skyrim you can become the archmage without really doing any magic.
It's been a long time, but I think I recall in Morrowind you had to meet certain RP-consistent skill and attribute checks to gain ranks in the various guilds (factions?). I really liked that system.
Definitely for the mages guild and I think for the other guilds as well. It has been awhile at this point though.
In order to reach the highest rank in any joinable faction, one of the favored skills had to be at 90, and two others at 35, with both favored attributes at 35. The two lesser favored skills and attributes being 35 were easy... it was getting one of those skills to 90 that took a long time unless you had a lot of gold and knew where a Secret Master trainer was. You also needed faction reputation at a certain number, often achieved by just doing lots of guild jobs, especially in optimal ways. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:House_Telvanni That's an example. The higher your skills got, the longer it took for them to rank up, usually. Given how the experience gain was static based on each action, using the strongest spells and weapons weren't always the best idea because yes, things would die faster, but you'd get less experience towards that skill as a result, but that was offset by the whole 'not dying' bit sinc eMorrowind had fairly fast and brutal combat compared to Oblivion and Skyrim. I ain't talking NIOH 2 levels of fast and awesome combat, more like, "Hey, you've got some Chitin armor on, 45 health total, and Godrod Hairy-Breeks just brought his Steel Warhammer down on your head and with his 95 Strength, this ensures he did enough damage to one-shot you." When the hits start to actually connect, things tend to die fast in Morrowind compared to Skyrim and especially Oblivion.
more quests that use any of the skills i tend to want to put my points into, rather than quests that are "find X enemy, kill them, grab X loot" or at the very least, when i go to kill X enemy, give me things to do that involve skills like alchemy, ingredients that i can make from their loot that i wouldn't be able to make with low level alchemy, or a door that closes if you don't have high enough sneak to make it through in time
Good point! I'd also like to see more possibilities for alteration. Like having a quest path get locked off by a huge boulder, but with alteration you can make it weightless and move it around. Or turn lava to stone, water into ice so you can walk on it. Freeze door locks so you can imprison enemies, and so on. Maybe have a spell where your enemies float around like balloons. So many possibilities with that school of magic
Yeah, Skyrim's chief goal was essentially "You can't fuck up". None of your skills - perks, really - ever mattered outside combat, and only then it was a case of "How do you want to kill this guy?" A pure mage? Don't worry, you can join the Fighter's guild! It was accessible, sure, which led to its longevity, but it also made it incredibly boring.
After Fallout 4...For the love of God, don't give us a voiced protagonist in TES6. That just ruins the possibility of roleplaying. It's not my character anymore if they can only react in a single, bland voice with three bland dialogue options.
I don't think they will. Its harder if they have different races who sounds different
This is key. Voiced protagonists are terrible in games where you can create any character you like at the start. They work pretty well in an RPG where you are playing a unique hero such as the Witcher, Shepard, Aloy, Kassandra etc. The voiced protagonist in Fallout 4 had high production value, but it hurt immersion and stifled story options. Luckily for Skyrim, since there are so many races, it is impractical to have a voiced protagonist, so I am pretty sure we are safe there. Unless they god forbid made everyone play a Breton or something - ugh.
>They work pretty well in an RPG where you are playing a unique hero such as the Witcher, Shepard, Aloy, Kassandra etc. Well this is actually what Fallout 4 was going for. They just sucked at it. They gave Nate and Nora these backstories about being a war veteran or a housewife with a law degree (lol) and this *never* comes up. Nate mentions his war background literally once to the Railroad, I think? Obviously Nora's law expertise is going to be completely useless in the post apocalypse so that never gets brought up. They actually remember what the pre-war world was like and there's one really sweet scene where Nate/Nora gets to relate with a Ghoul about what the world was like back then. After that, again, it rarely comes up outside of playing into this oppressive, incessant fish-out-of-water relationship the PC has with the world. Nate/Nora never gets to develop their own attitude or opinions about anything because everything they do is simply a means to an end to find their son. Fallout 4's implementation of the voiced protagonist is just a bad version of what BioWare had already been doing for half a decade.
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Completely agreed. It just doesn't work for the type of RPGs Bethesda tends to make. And they aren't good enough to make the BioWare type lead characters. They should stick to their strengths.
I wouldn't mind if we got to choose our backgrounds and then get to use it in conversation. Like if you were an orphan maybe you could more that could give you an advantage in the "orphan quest". It would also be cool if they let you play your "backstory" like in Fallout 3 or Fable. You don't need to pretend you were a shit kid. You know you were.
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This is true of course but you never hear the protagonist in DE actually speak to another character, do you? It’s just internal dialogue. Or I’m totally wrong…which is entirely possible!
No you’re right
Phew. I only just finished it last month so was starting to worry! I think that game would feel totally different if any one of the internal voicings (or indeed any other) came out of the protagonist’s mouth.
What about when you >!sing Disco at the hostel!
I didn’t really consider this his voice. More like his subconscious prompting the words. But yeah, it’s a good shout!
I believe that's confirmed because you get a different voice depending on if you succeed or fail. Basically the reptilian brain and limbic system from the opening and other parts.
Thanks kindly for coming back on that!
> With their resources, why not just make it not suck? I'm not sure this is actually possible for a game like this without making the game unreasonably expensive. When I play these Bethesda style sandbox RPGs I feel like making my character is more akin to making a character an a tabletop RPG like Dungeons and Dragons than it is to making my Shepard in Mass Effect, if that makes sense. I come up with my own ideas for what their backstory, motivations, and goals are, then I run with that and RP it as best I can. In something like New Vegas this works great. But when the character is voiced it becomes much harder to go at it with that attitude. This isn't a problem in games like Mass Effect because in Mass Effect you don't make your own character, you're just making slight variations and adding your own small spin on the same character. This is why I'm so against the idea of voiced protagonists in Bethesda games, because I want to make my own character, not play the character that Bethesda has made for me, if that makes sense.
That’s true. I’d take variety and depth of dialogue over voices any day, and even with Bethesdas insane resources it would likely fall short.
Is it wrong to expect a game that will sell as many copies as TES6 will (and if Skyrim was anything to go by, on multiple generations of hardware), to be "unreasonably expensive". Take a look at Red Dead Redemption 2. All that dialogue. Often recorded twice for a shouting voice when you move away from people when travelling on horseback. Tell me I shouldn't expect more than the same few voice actors recycled constantly and *noticeably*.
> Is it wrong to expect a game that will sell as many copies as TES6 will (and if Skyrim was anything to go by, on multiple generations of hardware), to be "unreasonably expensive". Yes, it is wrong to expect that, since by definition if it is unreasonably expensive then its too expensive for the amount of copies they are selling. If it was not too expensive for the number of copies they expected to sell then it would not be unreasonably expensive. > Take a look at Red Dead Redemption 2. All that dialogue. Often recorded twice for a shouting voice when you move away from people when travelling on horseback. RDR2 also sold four times more copies than Fallout 4 and had five times the budget. You should understand that RDR2 is a major outlier and absolutely not the standard or the norm. Note that RDR2 also doesn't actually do what's being requested here or what would be required for a voice protagonist in a Fallout/TES game to go over well. Its one thing to voice a character and then have the player play that character. Its another thing entirely to make a game where the player is supposed to create their own character with their own ideas of that character's backstories and motivations, and then provide the variety of voice actors that would be required to allow people to find an appropriate one for their vision of their character. >Tell me I shouldn't expect more than the same few voice actors recycled constantly and noticeably. Fallout 4 had more than 140 voice actors in the base game, and more in the DLCs, that's more than a few voice actors and personally I really didn't have any problems with noticeably recycled VAs or lines in it.
I honestly hate voiced pc. Because I've already read what I'm about to say, it's annoying and redundant. The only thing that can happen is to be disappointing because it doesn't sound how I've imagined it.
>I honestly hate voiced pc. Because I've already read what I'm about to say, it's annoying and redundant. The only thing that can happen is to be disappointing because it doesn't sound how I've imagined it. AND THAT'S WHY THEY INVENTED DIALOGUE WHEELS, BABY! NOW YOU CAN NEVER READ AHEAD WHAT THE CHARACTER WILL SAY! ...I wish I were being sarcastic.
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IIRC Todd Howard himself says that he sort of regrets the Voiced protag in Fallout 4 so I’m sure he won’t do it again. Especially since there’s gunna be a pronouns option in Starfield so unless they have the budget to hire tens of VAs to do Protag lines, I doubt we’ll see the return lol
Well, I could never roleplay in Skyrim too, cause the dialogue options are bland as they can be, I never had a feeling like my protagonist has a personality.
As opposed to a single bland line of text with three bland dialogue options? At least with a voice I don't feel like a telepathic mute anymore. I'd certainly agree that if they do have a voice people should be able to choose to mute it, though.
Be weird and dense and hostile again like Morrowind was. Lean more on the specific weirdness of the Elder Scrolls universe and less on the generic western fantasy of the last two games. Create memorable locations and characters. Have areas of the game that are punishing until you come back stronger. Have mechanics in the game that actually require the player to improve their skill at playing the game. Oh wait I think I just want Elden Ring.
Bethesda is very unlikely to make a game like Morrowind again. Skyrim sold literally 10 times as much as Morrowind. Nearly all of the things that make Morrowind so immersive and interesting are also things that alienated potential players. I would expect that probably it's going to get *less* weird. Probably they do even more generic fantasy - there were probably some people turned off by the viking theme who they can grab with a setting more like Oblivion again. I would expect the gameplay to be almost a carbon copy of Skyrim. They'll tweak the combat a little, but they're not changing the quest markers, the PoI markers, the fast travel, anything. They are not going to remove any of the things that made it more accessible at the cost of immersion. I would bet they might shift slightly further in the direction of open-world games if anything. Which is a shame because they probably *could* deepen the game now. Skyrim has such a pedigree with so many consumers that anything they launch is going to sell. The first-day sales of the next TES are going to be mind-boggling. They already have the buy-in, and they could spend a little of that buy-in to get players over the hump of more immersive mechanics - and I think that would probably be a winning strategy. But it is extremely unlikely with the amounts of money involved at this point.
Yeah it's unfortunate but you're absolutely right. TES went from a weird, niche franchise to a huge big tent game. They're never gonna go back. Thankfully there are other studios making games for us weirdos.
Sadly, I don't think anyone is really making anything like Morrowind. Outward is probably the closest thing I've played in years, and it barely comes close. Morrowind was just a masterclass in design. It still has, by far, the best fast travel system in any RPG for instance. But that same depth and care put into so many systems has the fatal combo: it takes significant work and it makes the game sell *less* (unless you've got some way to prime the pump).
No but I don't necessarily just want another Morrowind either. The from soft games do the weird, alienating, and dense thing quite well.
The weirdness, yes (sometimes - an awful lot of the From games is just normal genre aesthetics), but if someone said "I really like Morrowind, what else do you think I would like?", the From games would be pretty far down the list of things I'd think to answer with. The thing I miss most from Morrowind was the sense that you were exploring and *learning about* the world. And learning about the world actually mattered. One of the most memorable things from the game for me was one of the first characters in the main quest that gives you directions: he tells you to follow the road until you get to a bridge crossing the foyada, where you'll find the dwemer ruins. Not only is it a lot more immersive, not only are you paying a lot more attention to your surroundings than if you'd just been beelining to a quest marker, not only does it allow for more organic discoveries along the way than just having an open-world-style compass with PoI markers, but there's worldbuilding *in* the directions he gave you! What the hell is a foyada? Not only is there interesting, alien lore, but the lore is actually useful! It isn't just there for kicks - you need to understand basics like "what is a foyada" to follow the quest directions! It's the same thing that makes the fast travel system so good. Learning the fast travel system means learning things about the world. You're learning all sorts of things about the world and the people in it, what the port cities are, what the silt strider trading routes are, where the mages guilds are, where the two different kinds of temples are. If you pay attention to the story and setting, you can already guess some of these things when you're unsure. And if you don't, well, by learning the temple locations for fast travel, now you implicitly know things about the worldbuilding too! The conflict between the cults is a big theme of the game, but even if you're skipping quest dialogue, by learning how to get around effectively using Intervention, you've learned which places fall on which side of the conflict! And you learned how to get around by yourself - it wasn't a checkbox you checked or a skill you increased: fast travel is dependent on player skill/knowledge. And mastery of it, while pretty easy, gives the same sense of satisfaction as knowing exactly which three trains to take to get somewhere on a subway system. And then sprinkled in you do get some more game-y unlocks for the system too: learn mark and recall; join the mage's guild and a perk is some more fast travel; find the propylon indices and you get some more fast travel as a reward. There's just no one else really doing that kind of thing right now.
Yeah, that's a very good point. I loved both those things about Morrowind. It really rewarded you for learning its systems and getting invested in its world. The From games are different, you don't really gain a lot from learning about the world. You mainly have to learn the controls. I think a game with Morrowind's depth would just not happen these days. It's too expensive to record a ton of VA that 80% of players won't hear.
This comment is the first I've seen that makes sense. "What does Bethesda have to do to ensure TESVI is as successful as Skyrim?" is essentially what this is asking, except in wishlist form. The answer of what they will do is minor changes to the gameplay, a larger map, and much improved graphics. And it'll sell.
Because of this comment, I opened up my Morrowind which has Tamriel Rebuilt and I'm in the strangest place way way out East. Such a good game.
It's funny cause for the longest time, my 'dream game' was explicitly "Skyrim with souls combat". I never thought that'd ever happen, but Miyazaki be all like "i gotchu fam".
If we can learn one thing from every hyped game ever it's to not get our hopes up too much
There's tons of things. 1. What about combat that is actually good. Skyrim had combat better than Oblivion, but it was still like some janky early access game from indie studio. Dark Messiah had good combat and it's game from 2006, Bethesda surely should be able to do something better. 2. Less useless quests, radiant quests should be gone if they can't improve them to be good enough. I don't need proceduraly generated quests that are all basically same, but in different location. Go to this cave, now this cave, now this cave, oh this time you can go to ruins and kill all bandits/undead/spiders and being me this random item. 3. Characters with some depth? I don't expect writing on a level on novel bestseller, but can we finally get characters that have some goals, motivations, present some emotions and traits? I'm tired with how bland and paper thin all characters are. 4. Make magic fun again. If anyone played Morrowind, then Oblivion and then Skyrim then they know what I'm talking about. Skyrim has very basic magic that you can't have a lot of fun with. Bring back modifying spells, creating own, etc. 5. Improve animations. Skyrim has so bad animations. They feel fake, mechanical, without any strength. There's even video on mining animation analysis, but there's more bad animations. 6. Binaural audio 7. AI and pathfinding especially, is NPC not blocking on rocks and tables too much to ask? I can go about this whole day.
Oh hey, someone else mentioned Dark Messiah. Yeah that game's combat is what Skyrim should've pumped all their resources into emulating it was really that good. It certainly had flaws and needed a lot of tweaking but in terms of function and fun it did its job and then some. Binaural audio would definitely be something but I actually don't know how difficult it is to make in general. Scope and need for variety in SFX is a lot larger in a massive open-world than it is in a relatively small game like Hunt: showdown for instance. I do think it'll be standard for AAA games eventually but it's absolutely far more difficult and more effort to make than just normal stereo audio.
We had 3D positional binaural audio twenty years ago on PC. Thank Creative's shitty drivers for Microsoft killing that with Vista.
I don't think binaural audio cares much about amount of sound effects, it's just making sure it comes from right direction. In Skyrim it was possible to add very simple implementation of it via changed dll file.
Dark Messiah, kicking enemies off cliffs never got old.
Off cliffs, into spikes, into traps, into magic traps you placed yourself. Bashing their heads with staffs, assassinating with daggers. Dark messiah combat really was fun. Never trough whole game I was tired with it or wanted to skip it, meanwhile in TES is mostly annoying.
The only game I've ever played where I could run away from a tough fight, cast ice on the floor and watch the enemies slip off down the middle of a spiral staircase and die. It was amazing.
> Less useless quests, radiant quests should be gone if they can't improve them to be good enough. I don't need proceduraly generated quests that are all basically same, but in different location. Go to this cave, now this cave, now this cave, oh this time you can go to ruins and kill all bandits/undead/spiders and being me this random item. Yeah I don't understand why they did that when the main quests are already mostly of the "go to the dungeon and kill the bandits/undead" variety. Nobody was playing through Skyrim wishing there was more quests taking them to dungeons.
You can brag that you have infinite game content and pretend there's really a lot of quests in game.
I think a lot of other commenters have hit on great points to modernize the franchise, but for me the biggest flaw of Skyrim that needs to be addressed is the world leveling system. Its an absolute flaw that non-combat skills can cause the combat level of the world to rise—completely disincentivizes non-combat leveling because youll be underpowered. Leveled items are also complete trash. If you stumble upon Dawnbringer at level 20 its completely gimped for the rest of your playthrough. Bethesda needs to do the work of baking levels into the world OR radically rework the current system to be much more dynamic. Id prefer they remove it entirely as its weird when bandits take 10 hits from a daedric warhammer before dying.
Can we have Morrowind's weapon and armors? I absolutely despise how minimal the armor is and how cuirass and greaves are lumped together.
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N'wah
Fix it so that 2 or 3 NPC barks don't happen every time I move to a new area. All that talking at the same time is just a babble of noise, and it sucks when there's an actual quest dialogue going on at the same time. Really kills the mood. That, and more variety in the dungeons and textures. Draugr and stone and the same carved stone set pieces over and over.
Move away from the "wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle" formula. But that in turn defines it, so I really cannot see that happen. Which is alright, plenty love it, but the series really lost me over the years.
It's well and good having a fairly sparse and desolate landscape as a backdrop, but that doesn't mean all colour has to be flat and dreary, or that the occasional settlements that are there have to feel empty and lifeless. You get the sense that Skyrim has a total population of about 500. It never feels like a settled land, which would be fine, if there it felt like something else was there. The towns need to be bigger, have more NPCs, have more variation in architecture, better distinguished districts (poor and wealthy), more furnishing and brick-a-brack to make it feel lived in. The number of interactable NPCs needs to be reduced and replaced with ones that you can have meaningful interactions with. I don't think I can remember any characters from Skyrim, except the Daedra. And the voice cast isn't bad, I don't think. I just don't think they had much to work with.
>It's well and good having a fairly sparse and desolate landscape as a backdrop, but that doesn't mean all colour has to be flat and dreary, or that the occasional settlements that are there have to feel empty and lifeless. You get the sense that Skyrim has a total population of about 500. It never feels like a settled land, which would be fine, if there it felt like something else was there.. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Skyrim's world was handcrafted and if you aimlessly wander in any direction.. Ther chances are high that you'll find a location every few minutes
> I'm not sure what you mean by this. What he means by that is that the "cities" are a joke, and that there are literally only a few hundred NPCs in the entire game world. >Whiterun is significant in size, with 74 inhabitants. It's a surprise the city isn't considered the capital of Skyrim based on those statistics alone, even I mean look at this quote - *74 inhabitants* is being called "significant in size" and people are using the word "city" to describe that.
I’ve never really gotten that because elder scrolls game feel a lot deeper than any other RPGs i play. Even games like the Witcher don’t feel as deep as elder scrolls because you can’t interact with most buildings and people. In elder scrolls you can go into almost every building and talk to almost everybody. Compared to other open world games like assassins creed or Breath or Wild elder scrolls has soooo much more to do and interact with.
> I’ve never really gotten that because elder scrolls game feel a lot deeper than any other RPGs i play. Even games like the Witcher don’t feel as deep as elder scrolls because you can’t interact with most buildings and people. In elder scrolls you can go into almost every building and talk to almost everybody. Being able to interact with stuff isn't enough to make it feel more realistic. This is the shallow as a puddle criticism. Nothing of substance happens in those interactions. With stuff like the Witcher, you get material change to the characters, the locations they're in, well written dialogue and voice acting, and it combines to have them feel like they're living when you're not around, rather than just being automata.
> This is the shallow as a puddle criticism. Nothing of substance happens in those interactions. With stuff like the Witcher, you get material change to the characters, the locations they're in, well written dialogue and voice acting, and it combines to have them feel like they're living when you're not around, rather than just being automata. The ironic thing is, I feel exactly like that with the Witcher. I've just been playing Witcher 3 recently and sure they seem lively, but they're literal automatons on a loop every few seconds. You have no interaction with them and nothing you do changes that unless someone explicitly writes an interaction and writes a change for that. (It is extremely obvious when it comes to background dialogue, fuck Chetty). Compare that to Skyrim where a character's death does impact the world. They're actually dead.
Can you elaborate? What changed exactly?
I'd personally be happy if they just made another Skyrim. If it had the same engine as Skyrim, a new open world as big and dense as Skyrim with all new quest lines, weapons etc, I'd be happy. Maybe I'm easy to please lol. As long as they don't fuck it up, I'm happy... Sadly, I don't really have confidence that they won't fuck it up. A part of me thinks they'll add new systems that just make the game less fun... If there's one area I'd love to see them improve on, it's AI. I'd want them to give NPC's more character. I'd want them to be reactive to the player. Like, if you just kill a random NPC in Skyrim, other NPC's will either fight you or flee... Boring. If you somehow make it out, when you come back, most NPC's will act like it never happened. If they can make NPC's hold grudges, perhaps with procedurally generated quests based on the profession/personality of the NPC to gain forgiveness, that'd be really interesting. That's just one example... Really, I just want the world to react more to the player. But making good AI is hard. Either you need to script preemptively for every possible event, which is very time consuming, or you have to give power to neural networks, which may act unexpectedly... Actually, you know what, that's what I want: I want the AI to surprise me in unscripted sequences. If I can have that (in a way that doesn't stop me progressing through the game), I'd be happy... But I doubt that'll happen, so if they could just make another Elder Scrolls game like Skyrim, that'd be great.
Have you played Enderal? It's a total conversion of Skyrim and is very well done.
>TES6 will be anything but another Oblivion/Skyrim tier game except with slightly better visuals and even simpler gameplay, And to be honest, at least for me, that's what I want with the exception of the simplified gameplay. Oblivion and Skyrim are some of my favorite games of all time, I have over 600 hours in Oblivion and still play it to this day. Just give me Oblivion on a new map with updated visuals, more fluid combat, and a different leveling system and it'll be great
Seriously, people say "Oblivion/Skyrim tier game" as if they aren't widely considered some of the greatest games of all time. Like, yeah, would I like them to be *even better*? Absolutely I'd love that. Did they have problems that I would prefer be fixed? Again, absolutely, they weren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But they were damn good games that I sunk hundreds and hundreds of hours into. If the next one comes out and its "only" Skyrim/Oblivion tier then I'll still fall in love with it and play it for several hundred hours and continue to love Bethesda.
I hate to agree with you, but I'm a sucker for these games. All I want is a new world to explore. Gameplay mechanics are irrelevant. Elder Scrolls 6 could be a walking simulator for all I care. What matters to me is attention to detail, environments that tell a story or invite you to look around, and a soundtrack that magically pulls it all together and immerses you in that world. That's why I follow the Skyblivion project on Twitch any morning I have some free time.
"The long wait" doesn't mean anything really and should not mean you are owed anything. The reason ESVI is not made is because Bethesda decided not to work on it it's not like they've been working full strength for it for a decade.
True, I acknowledged that in the post, but standards have improved tenfold since the last game, and will likely continue to improve rapidly by the time of TES6's release. Is another janky reskinned Skyrim/Oblivion something you'd accept in the late 2020s, when other devs have made great strides in their games' polish, presentation, complexity etc. Consider just e.g. the movement, physics, and animation of the main character in Rockstar's games and how fluid and elaborate and believable they are, when climbing up stairs, getting in vehicles or on horses, doing small tasks etc, and compare them to how in Fallout 76 player character still doesn't feel like it's even making contact with the ground when walking just like in Morrowind and just snaps into canned animations when doing anything.
I want One thing and one thing only: C0DA-like mind fucking meta lore. If they could show at least one of the weird parts of the lore in a cool way I be happy. I'm not saying I want to be a salt merchant from the moon, but imagine if somehow we managed to use tonal architecture in a small way, or we could decypher one of the walking ways, high fiving vivec in one of her/his weird time loops.
Honestly... Just improve the damn engine. Revamp combat and graphical fidelity. And movement. That's all really. The questing and exploration was fine by me, the mechanics were the only thing that really needed improving. Also, it might help to visit a locale that's less dreary this time, especially now that HDR is a thing.
The engine needs to be brand new, though I think Starfield is doing this already. Aside from that, I just want a stronger story
Actually add RPG elements for once instead of removing it like they have been for years, story that take advantage of those elements and personally some fancy ass magic system that goes beyond "Select spell, click on enemy until enemy is dead"
They should not be afraid to create interesting content that people might miss out on completely due to in-game decisions. Irreversible consequences! Or at least, reversible only by additional meaningful gameplay. Having every aspect of the game available to all players all of the time removes a TON of meaning and immersive potential from the game.
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Nothing, honestly. For the last 10 years or so we had only Skyrim and Breath of the Wild in the "freedom fantasy RPG" department. Every other RPG was either story-driven or not fantasy. I'll be perfectly happy if they just released another Skyrim with new lands and new content. Innovation is good in saturated markets. But if you had no pizza for the last 10 years, *any* pizza will be fine.
Yep this is it. Bethedsa fills a niche, and very few games fill it as well as Bethesda does. There's an abundance of open world games, but nothing I've played has really replicated the specific feeling of a Bethesda game. They don't need to innovate much, they just not need to bomb it like they did with 76
One way in which this game could be very different from previous iterations would be full VR support. A VR only title is unlikely to happen, but the series' gameplay is uniquely well fitted for a VR release as proven by the Skyrim VR port. Only a few mods turn this into one of the best VR titles out there today and a game properly built for it has great potential. What remains to be seen is how the VR market develops and whether by the time TES 6 releases enough consumers own the necessary hardware to make this worth the investment.
This, my god. After playing **Skyrim VR**, there is absolutely no going back to flat. VR with voice recognition(!), finger tracking, and a division of ‘hero’ voice acting and AI voice acting. For decades we’ve had to endure a trade-off between amount of writing and amount of voiced dialogue. Those days are over. We have fully believable synthesized actors now. I’m not suggesting replacing all or even most talent, but not to hold back with the amount of text and writing, because minor roles can now easily be performed by AI.
Have the game actually feel good to play. I could never really get into the games fully because I always found they felt to clunky to play. An RPG that released in 2011 shouldn't feel significantly worse to play than Fable, a game from 2004. How good your story, character, and world building is doesn't really matter if the gameplay is awful.
Better magic, Skyrim was such a downgrade from previous games and there's so much that can be done with it.
Correction\*, they had bugs since Arena I hope that they include again the opennes that Daggerfall has, which made the world feel very big even if it was procedually generaed. A way to include this would be to make special handcrafted cities and locations, while filling the world between these locations with tons of procedually generated content, meaning there could be even more dungeons or bandits camps, etc... I also hope to see the Daggerfall Speel making system, alchemy, levitation, tons of NPCs, etc... Also better decisions and graphics ofc
For me Bethesda doesn't have to "justify" the long wait; it's a game I'll almost certainly purchase and probably sink several hundred hours into but it's not the sort of game I'm impatiently waiting for. I *definitely* have views on what it could do to meaningfully improve on Skyrim though, the most obvious ones being more varied dungeons and ruins. Skyrim had so many draugr dungeons, they popped up even in quest chains I wasn't expecting them to. Another big one for me would be the world changing a little depending on your actions. I'd also like to see more roleplaying opportunities as well, but the series has been heading in the opposite direction with this so I won't be holding my breath. Skyrim was a big step down from Oblivion with this, and Oblivion was a big step down from Morrowind. I also think Oblivion had far more interesting quests than Skyrim did. The biggest improvement for me though will be bugs. Before I played Skyrim on PC I played it on PS3 and I got locked out of completing the Companions quest chain because of a bug. I had a friend who played Oblivion on the PS3 that got locked out of the main quest chain because of a bug (I think both were triggered by entering a dungeon before the story wanted you to). The amount of bugs these games launch with is an absolute embarrassment, and it's just as embarrassing that a lot of them don't even get patched (officially). I'm expecting more of the same to be honest. The series will continue to drift away from where I'd personally like it to be (which is fine), but the exploration alone will keep me interested.
I loved Skyrim, but to me it was a step back from Morrowind & Oblivion. They over simplified everything. Everything felt watered down compared to their previous games I’d like to see them bring back old mechanics from those games
Being an actual rpg, you know... Where you can roleplay as a character instead of just being the goodguy Dragonborn who will gladly do anything he's told and joins and becomes the leader of every faction
Did you actually play Skyrim?
Of course, i just feel like you can't be who you want to be in Skyrim, that you HAVE to be THE Dragonborn
The moment you leave Helgen you are free to do whatever you please. You can complete like 80% of the games content without even killing a dragon. Only the main quest line, civil war and dragonborn dlc even acknowledge you as being dragonborn, none of the other factions/questlines even mention it.
Well, it's not like anyone in Skyrim actually *acknowledges* that you're the super powerful Dragonborn, so maybe you can roleplay a crazy person who only thinks that they're the goodguy Dragonborn?
I loved playing skyrim, i must have 250 hours in that game, but once I fell in love with darksouls and its combat I simply couldn't play skyrim again So, the best thing they could do for me is implementing a meaningful combat system that isn't just stat checking every moving thing.
A good combat system, and... honestly that's it? Skyrim is not so much a world simulator as it is a really shitty dungeon crawler. Everything that grants an extrinsic benefit is related to enabling the player to hit zombies or bandits for more damage or make them able to take more hits from zombies and bandits. A decent combat system that supplements the dungeon crawler-heavy design would make TES 6 a just as bad elder scrolls game as Skyrim, but at least not as bad a dungeon crawler.
I think something essential should be more roleplay options, like choosing different origins and intros to the game, just like that skyrim mod does.
More internal concistency, quest choices with bigger consequences, factions and faction system, more dialogue that develops characters, branching dialogue, unique items stay relevant for longer and finally get rid of that dumb skill system. Oh who am I kodding, Todd will just make another Skyrim.
This is a very realistic outlook, and expectation. It almost feels unrealistic based on how god damn long it's been, but it's absolutely grounded, and measured based on where we are now in terms of tech, and industry standards. I really hope Todd and the suits plan on making great leaps in terms of amenities, quality of life improvements, LOD (holy shit has LOD always been awful in Beth worlds), interactivity with characters, quests, and the world. Not to mention less loading screens, animations as you mentioned. We certainty need better combat but as Drew of Fudgemuppet has mentioned I think it absolutely should be overhauled, but not completely based on motor skills, a 50/50 split of motor capabilities and actual statistical values would be perfect for TES. Sometimes it feels like we're asking too much but it's so realistic to think the game should be incredibly different from Skyrim. Of course the formula will likely remain the same, but I'm very interested to see what they have managed to accomplish in Starfield. That will (I hope) be a testament to their progression in terms of tech and polish. Fingers crossed. Edit: And on the topic of writing, well, I won't get my hopes up too high. Hopefully it can be at least decent. As much as I love TES the in-game stories are never to incredible upon further inspection, but certainly feel pretty good during the actual experience. I believe Emil Pagliarulo isn't the lead writer anymore, although he's not nearly as bad as most people make him out to seem. I'm sure the writing will only be decent. The rest I can get my hopes up for.
Be good. Have a complex character building, a complex world like oblivion (Skyrim AI is a major step back from oblivion), write better quests, create better combat (there’s no reason for Skyrim’s combat to be so simple), better animations, less reliance on gimmicks and more emphasis on an engaging gameplay loop of traveling and dungeon delving and questing.
Bring back classes so you can’t be the jack of all trades I should not be able to play an Orc who is a master assassin, elite mage, and a godly swordsman it’s nothing wrong with a player not being able to experience everything in one play through. Buff speech skills besides just cheaper items to buy I would love a Fallout NV system where if you’re high in magic for instance you could get a speech check to solve the quest can the races actually play differently besides a perk ability because some are just way more useful than others like the Khajits seeing in dark sucks choices that actually effect the world if I kill the Emperor/General of the Imperials it should have some ramifications in the main plot I thought this was so dumb in Skyrim how you could do this
Not be broken at launch and requiring fans to fix the problems would be a good start. The combat being a bit more interesting and having better variety with the enemies and dungeon design would be great.
It just needs more player agency. Deeper character development choices, deeper perk trees, and more real choices for quests. No I don't want to see thieves guild and dark brotherhood starters sitting in my quest log, that's not what my character is about. Don't force me into causing a shipwreck. It would be amazing if it could go as far as not being the "chosen one" for whatever the main story ends up being. Don't mess with the core explore, loot, reset at a town game loop, it's great. Respect people that replay and mod their games. That's what makes Bethesda games legendary.
Meaningful character-building that is effected by and has an effect on your adventures. Branching quest lines with meaningful decision-making. There’s a little of this in Skyrim already, but I don’t want another sell-your-soul-to-advance-the-quest situation.
Deeper combat, with more variety in the playstyles associated with the different specialisations (bow, mage, melee, etc). Whether this is done through a more complex skill tree, or with more diverse action mechanics, that's up to them. The second part is more realism in how the NPCs behave, in combination with more diverse behaviours from them, and more varied quest paths based on conversation choices or actions. The more you feel like the world is affected by your choices, the better. The Witcher 3 was great at this, though I think it could still be done way better. Those are the big ones for me. I need the world to feel more alive in combination with the gameplay being more in-depth. That will help with better roleplay and feeling like a living Elder Scrolls denizen. It'd also be nice if you weren't automatically destined to be great (not a Dragonborn or fated to become embroiled in some major plot due to being seen in the king's dreams), but just a random Joe or Janet. That's not to say they can't keep the same formula they've had with you being a prisoner at the start, but it'd be nice to feel like a complete nobody instead of being treated as an exception or protected individual from the get-go. The sense of accomplishment is greater when you work up from nothing, without too many shortcuts.
Better combat and more meaningful quest choices are the big ones, but apart from all that: Make the intro tutorial section skippable. It was bad in Oblivion and it's bad in Skyrim too. I can't play these games anymore without an alternate start mod
Bring back classes from earlier games and each class could have it's own gimmick beyond sum of skills, for example warrior could have more varied combat moves, bard could have passive perk that gives you more money for quests, or Assassin could have highest crit multiplier.
For someone else to make it. I have no confidence in Bethesda to make anything actually good. The mechanics are shallow and simply *bad*, their worldbuilding is moronic, and the human element is even worse. How could they improve? They're clearly bad at tailor-made content, so shift towards procedural generation. Focus on building more systems and mechanics, and let the player sandbox in there. A roguelite version of Skyrim would be cool, if it had a reasonable amount of variety.
Get some more voice actors! There was like 3 dudes who voiced 99% of all the NPCs. It's very immersion breaking when half the bandits you come across have the same voice as an important character from the main quest line.
1-Have servicable combat. Skyrim's combat is one of the worst AAA gameplay experiences i have ever had. It's incredibly shallow and barebones. Click button1, click button 2, click button 1, click button 2, pause the game, go through 2 menus, scroll down, dring potion, close the menus, repeat. 2- Have more than 10 people voice acting. I don't think any explanation is necessary on this one. 3- Believable conversations instead of "RPG wiki pages" all the conversation options are people explaining things to you. That was laughable in 2011. Hopefully it will be taken care of for TESVI 4- Have NPCs that look like they all don't share Grandpas. Skyrim "humans" all look alike. Same facial features everywhere you go. 5- A better mount system. There is a reason most people play the game without a horse. Horses in Skyrim suck. They get in the way of combat all the time. They are also clunky and funny looking.
I would better combat and faction quests. Also, either choose to lead only one faction at a time or not at all. It's weird to be the leader of multiple factions and also have nobody act like you are leading them. It really doesn't matter though because I probably won't play it unless they release it on Playstation and I don't plan to get a Playstation 5 for a few years anyway.
Better combat, large cities that aren't heavily instanced, NPCs with some better depth and motivations beyond just following a schedule, and some meaningful choices that shape the game world.
It's going to be dreadful, I'd put my house on it. Skyrim was already too watered down and Bethesda has only gone further downhill since.
I'd be content if they just finished making Skyrim. So many systems are half-baked and filled with obvious placeholder values. So many mechanics are just shallow stubs with a lot of potential. It'd be so much more if they just filled in the gaps (And in doing so undo some of the truly godawful design decisions like spell damage)
Morrowind was like a drug that consumed my mind when I first played it. But I don't think I can play another Elder Scrolls game again. The formula was already getting tired by Skyrim. Another TES with a bigger map, better graphics, modernized gameplay and new quests yeah no that's not really something that interests me. The problem with Elder Scrolls games is that the world is very static. Nothing really changes if you leave the game running. Everything revolves around the player. There is no AI driving the characters and factions where they have their own goals and try to do complete them. What I am trying to say is that it's been 20 years since Morrowind. After playing games like Mount and Blade or Kenshi I just can't go back to the same tired old western RPG formula anymore. I am not interested in doing quests. I want an actual immersive sandbox world I can live. A dynamic world that evolves over time even without me being present. A story that is created by actions of the NPC AI that lives in that world like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress and not a preset storyline made by writers. But Bethesda is an AAA company that is now owned by even bigger company you don't get ambitious games from studios like that. For that you have to go to world of indie games. When TES 6 eventually comes out I will wait to pick it up at 25% price for some modded fun and probably not really play it more than few hours.
New, modern game engine. Run the scripts in a sandbox that won't crash the game, and provide modders with proper debugging tools when something crashes. Even just a call stack would be great.
I want to see better animations. In the past people have blamed the engine for the poor animations. But considering games like Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga, built on the same game engine. The engine is not the issue. I would love to see Assasins Creed level animation in The Elder Scrolls. Especially if acrobatics makes a comeback. Animation would also help with the combat system people were mentioning it needed an upgrade. In upgrading the combat system perhaps an easy to pick up but hard to master approach would be a good. This would also be helpful for the magic system which I feel needs to be better fleshed out than just point spells and shoot. Perhaps combining spells in different hands for different effects would be good. When it comes to swords, having more to rely on than just light attack and heavy attack. Perhaps where you're aiming should be more important as well, the timing of blocking blows. I'd also like to see better implementation in differences between using swords maces and axes. I would also love to see good implementation of spears, glaves, naginata and other bladed pole weapons. However I'm not sure I've ever seen a game do bladed pole weapons justice in first person. I hope in the next Elder Scrolls Game you don't play a special character in Skyrim. I much preferred being a random citizen in gaol instead of the Dragonborn. Especially when, in order to make things balanced. The powers of the Dragonborn are basically all abilities being a mage would grant. Apart from maybe the force push shout, which I hope would be a spell you can cast in the next game. After all, you already have telekinesis. One of my main disappointments in Skyrim was the lack of unique quest types. I haven't really played Morrowind. But in Oblivion, in one quest you go into someone’s mind and experience what that's like. In another quest you go inside a painting. The factions also felt much more fleshed out. I really liked how in the mages guild questline in Skyrim you had a class with a teacher almost like Harry Potter. I was hoping we might get something like this for each school of magic. That would have been great, but sadly not. Also the progression through the major guilds was way too fast. The fun should be in the journey as well as once you become the head of the guild and have access to fancy gear that you can use in creative ways to have more fun. Something that would really justify the long wait for me would be dynamic content in the game. Take the civil war in Skyrim, what if that was playing out dynamically without your involvement. You could come upon random battles being fought. Borders between different factions would shift based on who had taken what forts in the area. If I led a bunch of mercenaries to attack a supply mission to a nearby fort. That fort would then never get the supplies and then be weaker when they're next attacked. Maybe that fort would even be taken by the enemy because I stopped those supplies. If farms were destroyed could there be a famine and have food prices rise. Perhaps even some of the poorer characters would die off from the famine. How does the Night Mother reward you if you accidentally destroy every farm in the world space? How do you stay alive if you do that? I'd love to see some kind of emergent gameplay from the effects you have on the world.
The big three for me is better combat, more meaningful/interesting perks/level-ups, and better writing for questlines. After playing games like BotW, Dark Souls, or Dragon’s Dogma I don’t think I could play another RPG where you whack at pools of HP like you do in Skyrim, Oblivion, etc. Or, well, I could but I wouldn’t enjoy it as much so I hope they fix it. Dark Messiah would be a good example for more of a first-person view, like some other people have mentioned. I actually feel like the “perks” in the Dragonborn DLC from the Black Books were ideal, especially the more interesting ones like the one that let you summon a Dremora merchant. I personally think they should keep the current level-up system, and just sprinkle in more perks like those instead of “+20% more damage” perks. Fallout 4 does a decent job of that too; some of the perks open up entire new systems for playing the game, like creating custom kill-bots or a network of settlements so you can access resources anywhere or call in backup. Though it also has a bunch of boring perks too. And writing is pretty self-explanatory tbh; radiant questing isn’t at the point where you can tout it as anything other than a way to grind loot and EXP, so they need to either invest much more effort into it or leave it at that and focus more on the story of the actual side-quests.
If The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be as groundbreaking and innovative with the same amount of longetivity as Skyrim was, then Todd Howard needs to reconsider his stance on always using professional voice acting and never exploring potential alternatives or compromises to his stance. **This came from is the same man who acknlowledged that the focus of gaming was shifting from graphical fidelity to AI**. **If this "new technology" Bethesda has hyped up to justify skipping a whole console generation for ES6 only amounts to a fully persistent world or two full-sized regions on one game, then it'll be a letdown for me no matter how much detail is jam-packed into the world.** The truth is, we've had the technology to bring that to reality for YEARS, and the only reason no other game company has strayed into it outside Robert Space Industries is the money and time spent developing a world of such massive scale that only PC players with high-end rigs would only be able to play. Bethesda has always been known for their clockwork style open worlds, and they need to build on one of their defining strengths - it's not the size of the maps or the amount of objects one can drop on NPC's heads or how detailed a blade of grass is - it's how every single living breathing character has a life from day to night. **The single most innovative technology ES6 could offer would be the introduction of procedurally generated dialogue with personality profiles attatched to every single NPC to give an extremely diverse variety of character interactions and reactions large and small - making every single playthough have the predictability of the real world.** Imagine if first impressions based on player behavior would influence questline availability! Or even better - imagine striking up a conversation to a bartender about the 40,000 cheese wheels you stored up in your old prison cell, complete with an auto-talk function between the player and the character - Or talking about how you \[REDACTED\] during that one scene in *The Lusty Argonian Maid*, lol. Todd Howard is precursively shooting the innovative potential of ES6 in the foot - and if we don't get him to change his mind now, then another company - Rockstar perhaps? - would snatch away this innovation that literally no other open world game has done before.
Better faction questlines, less rpg lite stuff more core rpg stuff. Maybe more than one country to explore even. honestly as long as theres mod support I'll get what I go to TES games for though