What are you looking for in the next Elder Scrolls?

[Olurum]

The UESP Gripes pages are a good source for finding out what's wrong with the game and what should be improved for future games. Bethesda should have a good long read there.

 

As for my own views:

 

• More quest options and less hand holding. Everything should be in place from the get go. Items don't just appear when you need them for a quest. Accidentally sold a needed heirloom for a quest by thieving it earlier in the game? A new quest opens to track the heirloom down, did anyone see someone buying it? Finally found the new owner? Give him a quick stab in the back with a knife or scam him out of it or buy it off him, your choice....
  
• In relation to the above: Some sort of system that solves quests being broken due to dead NPCs. No more 'essential' NPCs.
  
• Less fedex quest! Noone likes being sent to a random generic cave where you have to fight through every level/area because the item just so happens to be at the very end of the dungeon. Snoooore, boring!
  
• More voice actors (less famous ones!). This is pure assumption on my part, but it couldn't have been cheap to hire Sean Bean and Patrick Stewart. Save the budget for a bigger voice acting cast to get some diversity.
  
• More variation in character appearances. I swear to god that all imperial males looks the same to me. Women should be a little more feminine without the need for mods.
  
• Get rid of the shoddy levelling system. I hate how my character affects the entire world's abilities/availability of items in shops. Same problem persisted in Fallout, Horrible! Goblin takes 4 hits to kill when you're level 1 -> Goblin takes 10 hits to kill at level 20, why?
  
• Getting +5 attribute modifiers in the level up screen made the character do some incredibly strange things. Needs serious reworking.
  
• Again related to levelling, quest rewards should be a fixed value/item. It made me level myself up to a certain level while avoiding quests. Why should I be punished for doing a quest early?
  
• Good and Evil paths for everything. I don't care about canon endings, maybe I'm not the destined hero to save the world... it's an RPG after all, I can be anyone. I'd love to have told Jauffre to "Get lost! Send your blades to find Martin, I'm not your errand boy... I'm out of here!"
  
• Realistic guild promotions. I don't want to end up as the master of everything. That poor dude whos been in the Fighters Guild all his life is suddenly outranked by someone who joined yesterday? Maybe you could help a long standing member become the new master in promise of becoming his 2nd in command etc (which could involve less honorable methods such as murder/blackmail).
  
• Make it possible to somehow form your own 'quests'. You should be able to send people about to do things and thus become the 'evil scheming dude' yourself by plotting to become the new master of a guild/local town guard or overthrow towns/empires. Or frame a murder/fake a suicide to get hold of people's property.
  
• Real differences between Blunt and Blade and other weapons. So far I've never seen the use in having a dagger. Archery needs a serious reworking. I don't think hunters should have to carry 1000 arrows around just so they can take down that big ogre.
  
• Spells need a major overhaul (evident by the many, many magic mods). Spells need major variance in appearance and function.
  
• Less useless enchants. Finding an armor with "+5 speechcraft" and such are just bizarre. The stat system didn't work in a way to allow "+5" to any stat to be useful in the first place, plus they become worthless once you reach skill level 100.
  
• NO DIFFICULTY SLIDER! An RPG with a difficulty setting has fail written all over it, in my opinion. If everything is balanced and works correctly, without a broken/bizarre levelling system, then a slider shouldn't be needed. If you wanted challenge, then you should be able to go 'high level danger zones'... etc.
  
• Travelling NPCs should really be able to fend for themselves on the roads. Plus the roads are patrolled regularly, yet minotaurs and such still appear near them. NPCs make it fine between cities if you're not there to witness it... but if you follow an NPC then he'll be dead within 2 minutes after leaving the city gate.
  
• More realistic monsters/wildlife. Everything is out to kill you, all the time. They must have rabies!... well, except for deers. But seriously, you should sometimes come across a passive minotaur because he's already had a tasty snack out of the poor fellow that travelled the road before you.
  

[spookycandy]

I agree with what most of the people here said. I'm not sure about multiplayer, but I would like a co-op option available.

 

List of requests:

• More variation in roleplaying. Unless you want to be a pirate or a hunter there's really not much else for you to do outside of the guilds. What about ninjas or assassins? The Dark Brotherhood was a bit too evil for my taste. I'd like a thief option that wasn't considered "totally evil". The black and white mentality is quite hindering. I'd like to be able to farm, or be a ninja, or be a merchant, or do whatever. Variation is key.
  
• Take away fast travel and replace it with something a little more interesting, like getting on a ship.
  
• More variety in wild life and monsters. There should be more gentle wildlife than just deer and I shouldn't be fighting an array of wolves, bears, imps and trolls for an entire game.
  
• Farm animals. Sheep and horses? Really? That's it? :(
  
• Less run down cities. Bethesda seems to love the "run down, but formerly glorious" formula. I can understand having a slum or two, but when every city is run down and full of abandoned houses, it makes you wonder. If you're going to do that, at least give the character an opportunity to rebuild or improve.
  
• No more loading screen between cities.
  
• Variation in skeletal structure or at least a tool that let's players alter the skeleton easily. Males and females have very different skeletons, as should completely different races like argonians.
  
• Horseback combat, better combat.
  
• A similar first person/3rd person formula as oblivion. They ruined that formula in Fallout 3. 3rd person was far from perfect in Oblivion, but when I wanted to use it I could without being annoyed.
  
• Alter the leveling system. While creatures in the general game world should level with you, certain dungeons should be status. I don't want to be surrounded by level two wolves all the time, but I also don't want to deal with never being able to have an advantage.
  
• All of Tamriel Playable.
  
• Children. Enough said.
  
• More available player homes with less annoying "haunted" quests involved. Imperial City should not have just had one shack for sale. It's a city. And it was full of doors that were boarded up that could have been player homes. Several of the player homes had some "lift the curse off the house" formula which got very annoying. Also, I shouldn't have to choose between a shack and a manor. I should be able to get a middle class house in each city, and I should be able to run a farm if I wanted.
  
• Horses. More of them.
  
• Better character customizing. It took hours to hit a sweet spot in the middle for characters because the colors were totally off. I could barely have pale skin without being totally whited out. When I tried to smooth out the cheeks they either became chunky or way too gaunt. Or gaunt and chunky. Mods have fixed this, but it shouldn't have been a problem in the first place. Games came out before Oblivion that had better character customization.
  
• More seasonal changes.
  
• Make food and drink useful.Allow the player to cook and actually get benefits from what they cook. Show eating animations when the player eats something. My character should be able to sit down in the bar and have a drink, and I should be able to screen shot this.
  
• More books with better writers, plz. Many of the lore books contradicted each other or were very poorly written.
  
• Fill the game world more, or at least make cities worth traveling to.
  
• More trading and merchant stuff.
  
• etc.
  

[forli]

All of Tamriel playable? But I'd like to see the game within the next decade..

 

I think bethesda need more time only for new cities and for "special" dungeons.

The forest and the landscape are auto-generated. Maybe they only need 1 year (max 2) to create the whole Tamriel.

[ub3rman123]

But people complained about the auto-generated terrain in Oblivion. Imagine how much people would be upset if they did that for 7 times the space? Sure, we die-hard fans would love the extra lore and explorability, but 90% of the people who bought Oblivion just installed, played the MQ and some of the sidequests, then never touched it again. Heck, I recall being irritated I had to walk all the way from Leyawiin to that one Ayleid ruin in the FG questline.

 

But if they added in pre-generated terrain, that'd be very handy because mods wouldn't have to all be bunched into tiny Cyrodiil.

[spookycandy]

But people complained about the auto-generated terrain in Oblivion.

 

Really? I thought the terrain made things convenient and easy. I don't mind a little auto-generated terrain if they focus on putting detail into everything else...

 

Imagine how much people would be upset if they did that for 7 times the space? Sure, we die-hard fans would love the extra lore and explorability, but 90% of the people who bought Oblivion just installed, played the MQ and some of the sidequests, then never touched it again. Heck, I recall being irritated I had to walk all the way from Leyawiin to that one Ayleid ruin in the FG questline.

 

I agree about the irritation. I don't think it would be as irritating if they actually put things in the game world that made the walk pleasant.

 

 

 

 

[Ferryt]

I absolutely hate the distance scale in Oblivion. There are cities in the U.S. bigger than all of Cyrodiil -- counties bigger than all of Tamriel. This was a severe immersion-breaking feature of the game for me. What I'd like to see in the next ES is a complete remake of Tamriel. Yes, bigger. Much bigger and including the entire continent. Make it actually seem like a real land mass and not some tiny island. Spread the cities out accordingly. Give me space to roam and explore. There'll be plenty of room for lots more caves, forts, ruins and settlements without the place seeming crowded. I have a problem when I can stand on a mountain and see several of the major cities of Cyrodiil. Speaking of scale, a somewhat related point is voice acting. It had Good, Bad, and Ugly moments, but there were far too few voice actors to give the impression that Cyrodiil was actually populated by more than just a handful of people. It's not that difficult to find voice actors and it's not that difficult to become one. High schools and colleges are full of kids learning to act on-stage, and many would jump at the opportunity to lend their voices to a major gaming project and many of them would be willing to work for a pittance just to get that chance.

 

What's the fetish that game developers have with "main quests", anyway? Give me a game where I don't have to be the Savior of the Universe -- a totally open-ended game where I can choose to do whatever I please, whether for Darkness or Light, and then deal with the consequences of my choices without having to worry about some world-shattering enemy that is going to overshadow everything else going on. I beat Oblivion. Compared to the veritable web of adventures the secondary quests offer the main quest was a complete dud. I felt the same thing about Borderlands when I played it. Let me try my hand at playing a beggar in the Imperial City, or a farmer in Weye, or a just make a living burglarizing homes (which would have to respawn stuff which doesn't happen, for the most part, in the game). Or I should be able to set up shop as a traveling alchemist, or maybe buy a building in Skingrad and sell custom enchanted armor and weapons -- or smuggle Skooma into Morrowind.

 

Some aspects of the game design, itself, are terribly wanting. Why are axes blunt weapons? Why can't I use a staff as a weapon? What about dual-wielding. Why can't I make my own magical scrolls? Why does my otherwise cute Bosmer (yes you can make pretty female elves in this game -- its just freakishly difficult) have a dude's body, and why can't I make short dumpy character or a tall skinny one? And where are the children? And puppies? And foals? Why don't Khajiiti and Argonians have digitigrade legs and tails that actually move like tails? Why don't Khajiiti have whiskers? So I pick the last Nirnroot and the species is extinct? What's with that? Kvatch and the Bruma Mages Guild will burn forever. The Temple District will never get cleaned up. I've seen bodies laying around that never go away, not even game-months after they were killed. How about sailing ships that actually set sail? That would, of course, require Bethesda to be more careful about how they design the world, of course, seeing that they left the Niben completely land-locked! (the river doesn't bypass Leyawiin -- it just stops at the city in both directions). You can't release games with errors like that. I'd like to see a little more care taken in the next ES game with respect to details like this. There are even remnants of uncompleted quests in the game, including at least one ruin which, itself, is incomplete. Clean-up is important and I don't understand how things like this slip past their beta testers. I could on and on about what I consider to be major and minor design flaws in this game, but I won't. I think most of them have already been covered by other people, anyway. If Bethesda pays attention to the really serious mods that have been made in the game, mods that introduce modding resources, fix bugs, tweak balance, and introduce options it would go a long way to showing them where the gaming community wants them to move with further ES development.

 

Maybe the developers had modding in mind when they developed this game, but the CS is one of the most user-vicious programs I've ever used. Yes, I know. It was probably never designed to be released to the public, but after Morrowind and Oblivion, surely Bethesda realizes that the single most creative influence for the Elder Scrolls games is in the modding community. Let's see a construction set that is comprehensive, well-designed, and has most of the bugs fixed. They need to take a long look at COBL and OBSE, too. That's the wave of the future for ES, or at least it should be. And while we're at this point, how about a mod manager that combines the best of OBMM and Wrye Bash, and how about forcing modders to release their resources as .bsa files, rather than overwriting data files (and make it easy to create them)? The CS can be used to create completely different worlds that are totally unlike Morrowind or Oblivion. That is, perhaps, the most significant gift that Bethesda gave us, but it could be better.

[ub3rman123]

YOu think the CS isn't user friendly? You, my friend, have yet to attempt Dragon Age: Origins modding.

 

I wager we'll receive Ma'iq in the next game to explain to use simply why we don't get all these things we're begging for.

 

"A whole continent? Ma'iq's legs would tire attempting to cross that. You wouldn't want me to be tired, would you?"

 

"I heard rumors that some citizens wanted more monsters. I think we have enough. What sort of insane person thinks that more monsters is a good thing?"

 

"Ma'iq enjoys his travelling method, for his legs allow him a smoother ride than some strange contraption build of wood and wheels."

 

"Who would want to be evil? Evil people get killed by guardsmen, a very short life indeed."

 

"Mudcrabs are interesting. Why would the citizens be bored of them?"

 

"If people wanted more weapons, the weaponsmiths have to take longer. Cities lose wars because of weaponsmiths take too long."

[Ferryt]

*chuckles*

 

M'aiq is my favorite NPC in the entire game of Oblivion, and I've only had the pleasure of meeting him once. I'm sure he'll be in the next installment of ES, and I can't wait to see what his dialog is. It will give us an idea, I think, just what Bethesda thinks are all the non-issues that a great many of the fans of ES think are real issues. Basically, they're going to do what they want to do regardless of what we, their bread and butter, want because they know they have a captive audience. They broke a lot of things in Oblivion, compared to Morrowind, and failed to develop many things in that game in ways that Morrowind fans would have preferred for Oblivion -- and M'aiq is their way of poking fun at us because of the complaining we did about it. Expect more of the same. I prefer M'aiq The Cynic over M'aiq The Liar, anyway.

 

As for Dragon Age: Origins modding, no, I've never played that game. I've tried my hand at modding a number of other games from Star Trek: Armada and Conquest: Frontier Wars to Half-Life 2 and Borderlands, and a few in-between. Some make the CS look really slick and professional, I'll admit, but that's because their modding tools tend to be created by the fan base and/or require in-depth knowledge of how the game-engine works. The CS actually insulates us from most of the inner details of the game engine and makes some very complex things very easy ... while making some things that look like they should be trivial to implement into adventures of frustration. Even that isn't my main problem with it. It's just not ... polished. There are inconsistencies in the user interface, places where it's too simple, places where it's overly complex, and its buggy. Again, though, expected since it was never intended for public release and was undoubtedly being modified on the fly during the entire creation of Oblivion. I just really hope that Bethesda does an official public release of a complete CS with the next game. At least it will enable us to quickly "fix" the things they choose to break, or to not fix themselves. Don't count on crossbows, or children. Somebody will add them, anyway -- in time.

[Daledge]

I'd LOVE to be able to like, temporarily, join my friends session and adventure, fight, or even just see my friends in an actual world. Or even an arena where you can fight people online would also be awesome! Hopefully Skyrim will have that!

[Daledge]

I agree with what most of the people here said. I'm not sure about multiplayer, but I would like a co-op option available.

 

List of requests:

• More variation in roleplaying. Unless you want to be a pirate or a hunter there's really not much else for you to do outside of the guilds. What about ninjas or assassins? The Dark Brotherhood was a bit too evil for my taste. I'd like a thief option that wasn't considered "totally evil". The black and white mentality is quite hindering. I'd like to be able to farm, or be a ninja, or be a merchant, or do whatever. Variation is key.
  
• Take away fast travel and replace it with something a little more interesting, like getting on a ship.
  
• More variety in wild life and monsters. There should be more gentle wildlife than just deer and I shouldn't be fighting an array of wolves, bears, imps and trolls for an entire game.
  
• Farm animals. Sheep and horses? Really? That's it? :(
  
• Less run down cities. Bethesda seems to love the "run down, but formerly glorious" formula. I can understand having a slum or two, but when every city is run down and full of abandoned houses, it makes you wonder. If you're going to do that, at least give the character an opportunity to rebuild or improve.
  
• No more loading screen between cities.
  
• Variation in skeletal structure or at least a tool that let's players alter the skeleton easily. Males and females have very different skeletons, as should completely different races like argonians.
  
• Horseback combat, better combat.
  
• A similar first person/3rd person formula as oblivion. They ruined that formula in Fallout 3. 3rd person was far from perfect in Oblivion, but when I wanted to use it I could without being annoyed.
  
• Alter the leveling system. While creatures in the general game world should level with you, certain dungeons should be status. I don't want to be surrounded by level two wolves all the time, but I also don't want to deal with never being able to have an advantage.
  
• All of Tamriel Playable.
  
• Children. Enough said.
  
• More available player homes with less annoying "haunted" quests involved. Imperial City should not have just had one shack for sale. It's a city. And it was full of doors that were boarded up that could have been player homes. Several of the player homes had some "lift the curse off the house" formula which got very annoying. Also, I shouldn't have to choose between a shack and a manor. I should be able to get a middle class house in each city, and I should be able to run a farm if I wanted.
  
• Horses. More of them.
  
• Better character customizing. It took hours to hit a sweet spot in the middle for characters because the colors were totally off. I could barely have pale skin without being totally whited out. When I tried to smooth out the cheeks they either became chunky or way too gaunt. Or gaunt and chunky. Mods have fixed this, but it shouldn't have been a problem in the first place. Games came out before Oblivion that had better character customization.
  
• More seasonal changes.
  
• Make food and drink useful.Allow the player to cook and actually get benefits from what they cook. Show eating animations when the player eats something. My character should be able to sit down in the bar and have a drink, and I should be able to screen shot this.
  
• More books with better writers, plz. Many of the lore books contradicted each other or were very poorly written.
  
• Fill the game world more, or at least make cities worth traveling to.
  
• More trading and merchant stuff.
  
• etc.
  

 

That's a long list, did you even like Oblivion?