Time for ideas on TES VI

[Boombro]

They got to fix their Ff$#R%$#iing pathfinding. Navmeshing is (mostly) horrible and the technology hasn't budged an inch in what..10 years? F3, FNV, Oblivion, and now Skyrim, all suffer from an exceedingly poor pathfinding system. Their navmeshing technique is so poor, it would have killed lessor titles than the ones I mention. A new whole new model and overhaul of NPC movement is long overdue and desperately needed.

Because it old lol. Skyrim is built on the same game engine as FNV, same for the CK. That way some of the Navmsh bug get imported to Skyrim. The npcs in Skyrim are more advance than in oblivion, and we can count that they will be more advanced in the next game. AI is became better in the years Skyirm was out, but it still slow, and maybe it is the slowest compared to anything else in terms of gaming development.

[daventry]

I just got an Idea for a Quest in TES6.

 

You know how Quests are build around the player in witch you find dead adventurers that explains so much in Skyrim, hence how your the only person being able to accomplish something.

 

So now what im hoping for is, you pick up a Quest and go to said Quest Giver, then you are told its done or the Object is retrieved in witch you ask Who did it as in who is stealing your spotlight.

 

I want a Quest like that in TES6 where you hunt down the spotlight stealing Quest Completionest only to find he is some bad guy or something.

 

You know, a little twist that your not the only Hero in the Game.

 

=================

 

I hope in TES6 that when we come to the first town and meet the Inn-Keeper, he doesent lay All the Quest Rumors on me as if its so important that it has to be done NOW.

 

I would prefer a way that certain types of Rumors and Quest Starters should happen in that Town/City Region.

 

Visiting Riften - Heard about the Dawnguard Vampire Hunters = Quest Starter

 

Visiting Windhelm - Heard theres a Boy trying to call the Dark Brotherhood = Quest Starter

 

You know, Quests for Those Locations Only and would make for a much greater experience then to cram it down your throat at the Start of the Game within the first town you arrive.

Edited January 12, 2015 by daventry

[Ronaldspuesens]

Hi people,

I am new here, my name is Ronald and I would like to join in if I can in the TES VI brainstorming session.

Please allow me to share with you my ideas on what makes an RPG truly enjoyable and even unforgettable (Baldur's Gate!)

In my humble opinion, what is needed first and foremost, is immersion. Sounds straightforward and easy enough right? Sadly, we (and by we I do mean designers and players alike) seem to have lost the very meaning of immersion.

 

Simple example: When I am walking through the beautifull Skyrim world, let's say, from RIften to Markath (nothing better to do...) I can not help but think: am i in the game now? Or (sorry here comes the painful part) ... am I just guiding my avatar through a 3D wallpaper that serves as a 3D MENU SCREEN for the next in-game mini action sequence (referred to as quest but that is not what a quest is)?

By this I mean: manouvering your avatar through the game world feels just as non-eventfull as looking at your inventory, or at your loading screen. Why is that?

 

That is because for all the magnificence in graphic design and artwork, the [ gameplay ] consists for 99% of looking at things, instead of experiencing things, (well, your avatar I mean). Right from the start, every area on the map is accessible (design mistake nr. 1).

That is called freedom. But if I can see everything right from the beginning, without having to do something for that, it takes away all the anticipation, surprise, and build up. The sad truth of Fast Travel seems to be that walking through the beautifull world of Skyrim is actually not that different from looking at your main menu screen. Even worse: the Skyrim world IS the menu, from which you embark on a series of completely inconsequential activities. If this sounds harsh, it's because I think Skyrim is beautifull. But that is just the physical game world. It's a beautifull background, but without content that is truly immersive, it's just a painting.

 

Now let's talk about immersion for a minute. In his review of Fargo, Roger Ebert (movie critic) writes: Fargo is why I love movies.

What he meant was that the movie, with all his strange characters and unrealistic events, is truly immersive. You get drawn into it.

You identify with the people in the story, as crazy and unpredictable they may be, they feel totally familiar and real.

 

Now, bare with me, on the other end of the spectrum we have Skyrim. Yes I also have the Dynamic Snow mod installed, and genetically improved fish etc., and yes I tried Frostfall and a truck load of other great mods. But that does nothing for immersion.

It's mostly a mix of photo realism and simulation. If want to look at a perfect sun or realistic water surface all I have to do is look out the window. Gameplay immersion, the feeling of being there with your character, caring about your character, planning your next move or thinking of an effective strategy to solve something, has nothing to do with looking at your character chopping wood.

 

Aha!, I hear you say, but that's why we have Quests ! Fair enough, but there lies the biggest problem: both the Vanilla quests (yes even the main story line) and even the best mods out there are not logically connected to either the physical gameworld (which is close to perfect really) OR the in game progression of the player character. They are mini games, beautifully crafted, marvelous, but for all their ingenuity and beauty, they can not escape the sandbox that is Skyrim. It is an empty shell. An empty canvas.

 

Let me explain by comparing these 3 realities:

 

1 Real life: -> You are the actor, you are it. You decide, you interpret, you choose and you feel

2 Movie: -> you watch someone else act, decide, choose and feel, and you identify with him/her and FEEL for him/her

the story is written for you, so you can not choose, but you can feel and experience through the actor's eyes

 

3 RPG: -> well, ideally you would like to see a combination of 1 and 2. So, there is a story, a plot, a mystery, perhaps several, and it is up to you to go out there and explore, solve, rescue etc. This however, is not found in any of the quests in the Vanilla game. Nor is it found in any of the quest mods. Not that they are bad. They are just not RPG. Remember Baldur's Gate? Remember how suddenly Imoen was abducted? And then it was your (team's) mission to find her back. And that became your main quest throughout the whole game, and everything you did in between was part of fulfilling that grand task. The voice acting, story telling, humor from that game, the intricate dialogues, I haven't seen that yet in any of the NPC mods, including Vilja, Arissa etc.)

Why is that? The game design technology is there. The need for an immersive RPG is there. The talent is out there as well.

PC's are stronger than ever. And yet there is still no mystery, no exciting character progression TIED to the gradual discovery of a game world. We must be able to rise above this "o I'm so grateful for getting that golden claw back to me" level.

 

I have some great ideas. But first I wwill see if anyone has similar views.

 

 

 

 

[Daggdag]

1: More realistic fast travel.

I have never liked fast travel in these games. It has never felt right that you can just move to one city to another via the map. I loved how they did fast travel in Morrowind, as a purchaseable mode of transportation (Silt Striders, boats, etc...), that could go to certain places, but you could not just teleport to a place because you had been there before. The wagons in Skyrim are the only form of fast travel that I like in the game.

 

2: More Variety in Armor.

I hate that there are only a handful of armor styles. I want to see things like chain/scale mail, regular/studded leather, and other types of armor, instead of a 1 or 2 types of armor from each materral. Look at the armor types from DnD, and imagine if you could that many armor types.

 

3: Realistic Economy

I would like to see a more in depth and realistic economy in the game. Has anyone ever wondered why you have to pay the same for ignots in a mining town as you do in places that have no mines? Prices in the world need to go by supply and demand.

Also, I would like to see a better currency system. Why does everything, even the most mundane items, cost gold? There needs to be copper and silver coinage too. It doesn't even have to be that in depth. Look at how they did it in Dragon Age.

 

4: Larger Cities, and More NPC's.

Look at any "city" in any TES game, and you see a place that is barely big enough to be called a town. There are barely 1000 people in any game, including gaurds. There needs to be a more robust populations and bigger cities that are worthy of the name. Imagine walking through a city that is as big, or almost as big as one of the cities in Assassin's Creed.

[daventry]

I hope for Quests with a Failure to respond quickly kind of thing and i think this was in Oblivion.

 

In Skyrim, you would get Quests that needs to be done quickly before said target is Killed, yet you never have to worry about it as it lays back in your Journal as a yea i'll get to it in 3 Days.

[moose109]

Personally the main thing for me is that they go back to their roots and design a PC game for the PC, rather than trying to reach every market and ending up with a game that at least from a UI perspective is very much a console game ported to the PC

A proper PC game?!? When that happens I'll sell my soul for a copy. But who are we kidding, it'll never happen. So the best we can hope for is a passable PC port.

 

Other than that, generally the OP's ideas.

[Lachdonin]

*snip*

 

I'm going to be entirely honest with you... You kind of lost me when you talked about Baldur's Gate being immersive. That game, beloved though it may be, was menu heavy, clunky and overall lacking in identity. It was Dungeons and Dragons on PC, and while I love D&D, I've never found it immersive, particularly with its constant needs for checks against this or that.

 

Immersion, for me at least, is tantamount to realism. The more honest and realistic something is, the easier I find myself forgetting I'm playing a game. I don't want to get jumped every 30 seconds wandering around in the woods, I don't want my every action to radically shape the world (that just highlights player focus and detached your avatar from being part of the world. Instead, they become the center of it) and I most certainly don't want any more of that spread-sheet nonsense or absurd restrictions that Classes bring to the table.

 

It is true, TES has some major problems in its story telling. Their hasty and linear approach have been a bane to their world for years, but they accomplish something that Baldur's Gate never achieved. A feeling of urgency (even if there is no actual need to rush, since nothing is timed).

 

That said, I would be interested in hearing more of your input, even if, at first glance, I disagree. You may he surprised where common ground can be found...

 

*snip*

1: frankly, I don't understand the griping about Fast Travel. As someone who walks most places, whenever I can anyway, I can safely say that I might as well be fast traveling. Unless something radically unusual happens, I don't pay a lick of attention beyond not stepping into traffic, and the monotony of the simple act of travel is very akin to the 'Bam, your here!' Of fast travel. Should there be some more options for those who want to leg it? Sure... But Morrowind was literally the only game which did not have proper fast travel, so when people complain that it's 'Not TES to have fast travel'... Well...

 

2: now, this is something of a contention for me... In fact, I'm increasingly of the mind that there should only be 6 armours. Leather, studded, scale, mail, plate, riveted-plate. This is the (very) basic paradigm of armour development, and practically every armour ever made fits into it. For the record, Fur is not an armour. Within this scale there is plenty of potential for different materials and artistic styles, but those should be more about particular aesthetics or non-linear progression. On the whole, I think it's about time we disgarded the current armour system altogether.

 

3: absolutely. We've had fnctioning trade and economic simulations in 4x games for almost 2 decades, it's time it made the jump.

 

4: Difficult, considering how Bethesda populates its cities. Each and every one of those people would need an identity, a home, a job, an actor etc... Which is a system I personally prefer. Assassin's Creed and it's cities, despite people everywhere, seem so dead and lifeless. Dragon Age and the Witcher have similar problems. I can never being myself to be concerned for anyone in them beyond my own remediate compatriots, because no one else has any identity. If I had to pick between a thousand blank slates I couldn't care less about, or a dozen people who have some (admittedly shallow) personality, I'll take the scaled down everion in an RPG any day.

[Notanon81]

I'd make TESVI 64-bit only. That would help to take care of any memory-related issues, particularly with people loading up 4K textures and so forth. Support for audio hardware acceleration would also be nice, as Windows 8 onwards reintroduced it, so there wouldn't be any excuse not to do so.

 

Other things like medium armour, the ability to add addtional perk trees for mods, being able to temper whatever you like (arrows and bolts in particular) and old spells from games like Oblivion being available again, pauldrons and greaves being added back in, mithril armours being added back in and so on would be appreciated as well.

[Lachdonin]

Alright, here is something I brought up on the Bethesda forums, but have yet to put into the quite-put-of-date mega-post...

 

Stagger Stacking. Stagger in Oblivion was too much, Stagger in Skyrim is almost insignificant. Staggering an opponent in combat is a key component to landing fatal blows, or dealing with multiple combatants, but we've seen two rather inadequate implementations of it. At the same time, using a sloppy spam-option like Condemned's kick adds little depth and turns combat more into just a repetitive cycle of actions and times by.

 

My solution? Stagger effects which stack to different results, and varying ways to cause them. The 'stacks' would he short lived 2-3 seconds, and require a chain of specific actions to trigger desired effects. The first level would have no outward effect, but leave you (or an enemy) aware of their vulnerability. The second level would be a stagger, like in Oblivion. The third would knock you down, forcing you to get back to your feet.

 

Things like parrying attacks, shield bashes, kicking, landing power attacks etc. So, to knock someone down, you would have to do something like parry, shield bash and kick them in rapid succession. This would allow for a new combat dynamic without it becomming frusteratingly simple to just keep an enemy down or staggered all the time.

 

At the same time, combat perks in certain trees could increase the stagger effects applied, such as Bullrushing while blocking inflicting 2 or even 3 levels, while armour or athletic perks could counter some and make a character more stead on their feet.

[Moksha8088]

Wonder if they could use the Unreal 4 engine?

 

The days of PC games are gone. We will be lucky to get a PC port that has not be delayed for a year due to some prior agreement with a Pacific Northwest OS producer in order to sell the lastest smart toaster/TV appliances.