By Jim Rossignol on November 23rd, 2010 at 12:08 pm.
We don’t know much, but there are some clues. The most recent of these was bagged by Eurogamer.dk (via VG247) which suggests that the new game is not only in development, but is a direct sequel to Oblivion. An Elder Scrolls game had previously been touted for a reveal at this year’s E3, but did not show. Of course that doesn’t mean it’s not already a long way into development. Bethesda boss Todd Howard has already mentioned that two new games are in the works and we’re going to speculate that one of those has to be an Elder Scrolls game. The big question for many people has been whether the technology would move away from the Gamebryo engine – the recent id acquisition probably wouldn’t have provided time enough to base the game on id tech 5, but we can still dream – and a quote in this interview suggests that it is that familiar engine: “That’s our starting point – the Fallout 3 tech,” said Howard. “The new stuff is an even bigger jump from that.” Perhaps we’ll get something concrete about the release in the new year.
So, engine aside, what would you want from a new Elder Scrolls game?
Less (not more) bugs, crashes, glitches and performance problems.
Tell you what, Bethesda, just re-release Oblivion with all the problems fixed and Stephen Fry as the token famous voice over artist, and I’ll let you call that #V.
report
What an insane suggestion!
A Bethesda without shipload of bugs never fixed? INSANE!
report
Yeah, it just isn’t a Bethesda game if it doesn’t come with enough bonuses.
report
Playing with bugs is part of the challenge of Bethesda’s games! Every game is Hardcore Frustration Mode.
report
More voice actors. A sense that these “great” cities are actually inhabited. Oh God, I could go on. Somebody else continue…
report
YES
Capital cities with more than 12 houses/inhabitants please. Please see the Assassins creed series for reference RE building atmospheric populated locales.
And lose the in city load times, someone modded it for oblivion, it is possible.
report
Actually making a game that has a soul again, y’know like Morrowind…and oh, lose the level scaling, and for gods sakes, design better/more interesting dungeons. Again, like in Morrowind.
report
Further to what Foxfoxfox says, maybe Cities that actually feel like they actually evolved, rather than ones that feel like someone said ‘circles make for cool plans’.
report
And lose the in city load times, someone modded it for oblivion, it is possible.
This would probably be included in my #1 suggestion:
Make it for PCs and then scale it down for the Xbox, not the other way around.
report
@Urthman
Yes! You have achieved maximum correctness factor. Unfortunately there isn’t a chance in hell of this happening.
report
Patrick Stewart. That is all.
report
If only it were that simple.
report
He was only in the last one for about five minutes. For the rest of the game we got a phoned-in (and I mean long distance, reversed charges, not-giving-a-fuck) performance from Sean Bean.
report
Boromir! I didn’t know Boromir was in this game. I may play it for more than 10 minutes, now I know.
Also, does anyone else feel the need to pronounce “Sean Bean” either as “Seen Been” or “Shawn Bawn”? Quirky pronunciation is all well and good, but that’s too closely juxtaposed for comfort. O_O
report
If it’s simply Sean Bean you’re after, I’d suggest just watching some Sharpe instead. Unless you enjoy listening to him tiredly recite absolute gibberish, obv.
report
HmmmMm. Mayhaps when I am bored and have nothing to watch, I will investigate this Shawn Bawn film!
report
Patrick Stewart should probably just do all the voices… it couldn’t be worse the Oblivion at least.
report
@Berzee
You’re half right. It’s pronounced “shawn been”
report
Engine side? big open areas, realistic faces for npc’s that can talk, walk and have his lifes (in Oblivium you can see how people to go bed to sleep). Stability and modability.
Gamebryo is a proven tool to create worlds, and deliver all of the above. So a engine like Gamebryo.
Maybe the world building tools are more important than the engine here. If you where in need, I suppose would be possible to modify unreal to make games like oblivium. So maybe the important thing is TES, and not the engine.
report
here’s hoping it’s not gamebro apparently the still unannounced game is tech 5! WOOT http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/113/1136356p1.html
report
More of the same please.
Oh and people to be shocked/disgruntled when I break into their house at night and wake them from their slumber to ask them some inane questions about the town/surrounding area
report
This was always my favouritest part of the Elder Scrolls games.
Hey, wake up. Yeah, it’s 3AM.
Tell me about Balmora.
No, nevermind who I am.
Tell me about Balmora.
Anything you need done?
Oh, okay.
Mind if I take all your shit?
Awesome. Later.
report
Yes, and have guards stop me when I’m ninja sneaking next to a door, waiting to be invisible. Have them turn around out of suspicion, and enter the home if I left it unlocked to check if everything is alright. Have them be so smart that I hate them, and then play stealth action style correctly. ALSO! A greater sense of immersion would be helped along if you could inspect more things. If there’s a dead body, let me look the damn thing over to find out why (if I didn’t do it) rather than just letting me take the trousers and doing nothing else.
report
Fewer mudcrabs. Why are Bethesda’s beach-dwelling monsters always so annoying? (see also: Mirelurk)
report
The glorious return of A Fool in Morrowind!
report
please do :3
report
Morrowind 2 instead of oblivion 2 please!
report
This!
And I don’t mind the bugs or rough experience, just bring back a stranger, self-contained, bigger world with tons of weird quests, a PC-adapted GUI and less high elves.
report
This.
The open world of morrowind and its visual refernces instead of dots in the map and blue triangles pointing things for you were one of the greatest things i ever saw in general gaming. I really wanted a game that used this kind of design again.
report
2nd that.
report
This.
I could rant about Morrowind over Oblivion for ages (in fact I did a bit in my big love letter to Morrowind here http://www.gamingdaily.co.uk/2010/morrowind/
report
[messed up my commenting, can't delete this one. Nothing to see here, move along.]
report
@MrCraig
Really great, kind of reminds me of my time with it, though I only had one friend that played it at the time and he didn’t get really far.
As a younger teen I absolutly fell in love with it, while other people get annoyed at the game kind of making you get lost, i enjoyed every encounter I got and just loved exploring the land everywhere i go. At the time i was a really big geeky geek and it really captured my imagination.
report
“Where Is Elder Scrolls V?”
I hope it’s nowhere, after the last one. We don’t need other “immershun” rpgs, we don’t need a game that’s good because players trip out on graphics so they imagine they’re living beautiful adventures when they’re just bashing ugly cloned monsters inside cloned dungeons.
report
Why is emergent gameplay a problem?
report
because emergent gameplay lacks the emotional pull of a linear storyline, obviously.
report
With any luck, ON FIRE IN A DITCH.
report
It’s good, I suppose, because it gives Bethesda time to sack their developers, and hire new ones that can create a decent engine, and sack their writers, and hire new ones that can write, and drown their voice “actors” in a well.
report
You want to drown Patrick Stewart?
I WILL FIGHT YOU, AND I’M NOT EVEN BRITISH.
report
Well, the good thing about being based on Gamebryo is modding it is well-understood … but it better be daaaaaamn long way away from the tech they used in FO3.
report
At this point I’m not too bothered. Just release Elder Scrolls V and then give the engine to Obsidian for Fallout 4 please.
report
I think it’s one of the most overhyped games of this millenium. Still I’d love to play an Elder Scrolls game with a consistent visual style, a setting which actually makes sense, a story which exists and a system which does not make itself meaningless and/or make quests impossible to complete if you have leveled up enough and became stronger… I could go on and on…
But it all equals to NOT making an Elder Scrolls game. The last Elder Scrolls game I enjoyed playing was Daggerfall. And I probably enjoyed that because back then it was unique despite all of its flaws.
report
Good character art!
Oh who am I kidding it’s an Elder Scrolls game. It wouldn’t be the same if the characters didn’t look like they’d fallen out of the ugly tree having hit every branch on the way down.
report
Don’t really care much about which engine it uses, as long as the RPG side of things is top notch, like in New Vegas. I’d like to see them return to the character creation system of Daggerfall though, which is almost unrivaled and has been watered down through every installment of TES. If the trend continues, you’ll only be able to pick your name and 3 primary skills in TES V. Which would be…unfortunate. :-/
report
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! For god’s sake, let it not be the old engine! I don’t care how much they improve it, I still hate that unwieldy thing.
report
I’m pretty sure this is relevant to the article.
http://www.nerfnow.com/comic/416
(ps where did the CAPCHA go???)
report
The only thing I want from TES V is the following: DO. NOT. BRING. BACK. CLIFFRACERS.
report
I’d like to see one quest, featuring one Cliffracer, that you can make explode in Cliffracer giblets. BAM
report
A plot, please.
report
A plot, writing, acting and a game would all be lovely additions to Oblivion’s formula, certainly.
report
Let’s clarify that: Oblivion had writing, but it was like George Lucas vomited onto a notepad with a pen, and an overworked temp had to rewrite all of it in twenty four hours.
report
@DJ Phantoon: The writing was worse than that, it was like George wrote it himself!
report
A story in which we are not some “the one”, or in which at least people are wondering twice before trusting you. I don’t care if they saw me in their dreams, or if “something tells them that they can trust me”.
report
Would you accept “There’s something in your eye that tells me you’re trustworthy” (thanks to New Vegas for that one, at least three times)
report
I could have sworn all elder scrolls games begin this way :X
report
Diagonal run animation please.
report
Mount and Blades combat combined with Morrowinds setting
report
1. An improved Version of M&B combat while we are at it.
2.And an ironman mode making the enemies a real threat,like in Stone soup (no autoleveleling baddies plz).
3.Coop mode! maybe let others play the part of the evil ones (or get some AI worth the name).
report
PS: More weapons! (Gimme back my Daedric Spear!)
report
Hell yes with that Mount and Blade combat.
Also, no coop should be considered at all until that singleplayer is completely sold. Completely.
report
Oh, so much Oblivion hatred. I love RPS comments threads.
*group hug*
report
” what would you want from a new Elder Scrolls game?”
That it’s not crap?
report
What would I want for TES 5? Some fairly simple changes but I doubt they will happen as Bethesda, as with most companies, are very focussed on the console market. But hey I can dream:
- Less “consolised”, kid friendly interface and levelling system; this was the biggest issue with Oblivion and turned it away form being a great RPG IMHO
- A more vibrant and believable world; Although Morrowind was massively technologically inferior to Oblivion and populated by silent, wooden NPCs that doddered around in very tight circles, I still say it is by far the more atmospheric game. Oblivion’s world just seem empty and devoid of any real or believable life (an issue mostly caused by the simple dearth of NPCs – why was the capitol city a ghost town?)
- A combat system that makes sense. The woefully underpowered bows and ridiculously simplistic sword play made the entire thing a joke.
- A magic system that is worth using. If we are gonna have magic, then lets bloody have magic! The magic system has always been a bit of a shambles in the TES games: time to make a change!
- A world that cannot be traversed in 20 minutes. Being able to walk across a “continent” in under 20 minutes (you really could – I tried) was just ludicrous. Again though this is a limitation of the consoles most likely.
- A fast travel system that does not turn an already small game into one that can fit in a shoebox. Why they could not have a system whereby you could travel between major settlements by renting a horse or a seat on a carriage but smaller locations had to be reached on foot (or your own horse, ofc) is utterly beyond me.
As I say though, not only will these issues not be addressed they will be made even worse by the ever increasing focus on the 360 as the main platform. The sooner that accursed, worthless box dies the better. I am sick of good games being hobbled by it.
report
Why they allowed fast travel everywhere is because some kids complained about walking in Morrowind.
report
@Guigr
I know. Tragic innit? The exploration aspect of Morrowind was one of its greatest features and the fact that long journeys, even if you had made them previously, had to be planned and thought out was amazing.
As I say, the consoles killed Oblivion.
report
Less “consolised”, kid friendly interface and levelling system; this was the biggest issue with Oblivion and turned it away form being a great RPG IMHO
The biggest issue with Oblivion was the bloody difficulty of the levelling system. Its almost impossible to keep track of how many levels you’ve gained in each skill and how those levels will affect the number of points you’ll need when you next level up. I had to write it all down. You need to have a pretty detailed plan of how to level your character before you even start, otherwise you will hobble him/her severely by the middle of the game. While it was interesting and provided a bit more variety than your average ‘level up, add 2 points to max health, pick skill upgrade’, it was also a bit like doing maths homework.
report
There was fast travel in Daggerfall, you young whippersnappers!
report
@sredni
No. No, no, no! Oblivion’s system was a very simplified version of Morrowind’s. You did not need to monitor all the secondary skills, it was just to your advantage to do so if you wanted to power level. We need MORE intricacy and difficulty in the levelling, not less for god’s sake!
report
@Howard
Yeah, I remember Morrowind being even harder. Look, intricacy is all well and good, but the character crippling really annoyed me. I felt it was a little too harsh, but whatever, my main point was that calling it ‘kid-friendly’ seems a bit rich. Plus it hurt my smart-feelings.
report
Part of Morrowind’s odd charm was its wooden characters. In that setting, it seemed to make them more alien. Since they were all dark elves, I figured that the the strange, silent stares you got when you went anywhere were cultural. It only broke down for me at the Imperial towns.
I still remember the time I tripped over a fishing village on the northern coast of Morrowind. The sky had been so lousy with rain that day that I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Little houses on stilts seemed to materialize from sheets of rain. God, was that town a horrible place to live. I found the one bar in town and bought a drink for the Norseman cursed enough to live there.
report
Fast travelling should definitely be included. That is based on the assumption that Bethesda has the same amount of creativity in its landscape variety. Oblivion’s exploration consisted of walking 2 minutes and finding the same bland featureless cave. whoop-de-fucking-doo.
However, if the environments improve in the slightest, then fast travel should be demolished.
report
New Elder Scrolls? Hell yes I want another one. Just so long as the Gamebryo engine goes away. Not necessarily just for me, but for Bethesda’s credibility as a company.
Though I would really like to see that goddamn engine die.
EDIT: Having now read the flood of comments that happened while I was typing this, I do kinda want to see some things in particular for a new Elder Scrolls game:
* Cities that are actually cities, not tiny hamlets (compare any Assassin’s Creed city with the Imperial City or New Vegas).
* A powerful, dangerous magic system. I’d like it if magic was significantly different from other combat options. Pretty much every combat effect except for summoning could be done without magic.
* Social interactions to make more sense (New Vegas’ huge improvements on stat and perk related conversation options was a decent start, but more needs to be done).
* If the game area cannot be increased significantly, then decrease the size of the area that it is supposed to represent. Morrowind’s Vvardenfell was a relatively small island off the coast, and it still felt bigger then the whole of Cyrodil.
* A return to the depth of side quests that Morrowind saw. Oblivion had what, 4 major-esque side quest lines, one for each guild and one for the Brotherhood. Morrowind had something like 18 joinable factions with a quest line for each.
* Removal of total levelling enemies. Not only does it remove a lot of the fun of exploration, but it also makes for some dumb situations, like bandits all running around clothed in full glass armour late in the game.
* More in-game literature. The fact that most of the books and such from Morrowind were simply re-used in Oblivion makes sense, but that so little extra was added was a great shame.
* If they get in a big star actor, and publicise the game around such a feature, KEEP SAID ACTOR’S CHARACTER IN THE GAME FOR MORE THAN 5 GOD-DAMN MINUTES.
* I’d like Bethesda to lean back on nickel-and-diming for minor content. Horse Armour was really the beginning in this whole DLC debacle.
* Learning from the modders as to what people want. If a mod gets a lot of downloads, that means people wanted that feature in the game, but Bethesda didn’t include it.
* Similarly, take whatever fan-made bug fix pack comes out, and with their permission, take it apart and find out what things it fixes and whether they introduce any new bugs, then go ahead and make it an official patch. No excuse for bugged content in a game for which a fix exists.
* Oh god, there’s probably more, but I’ll stop for now.
report
Learning from the modders as to what people want. If a mod gets a lot of downloads, that means people wanted that feature in the game, but Bethesda didn’t include it.
Elder Scrolls V: Anime Barbie Dress-Up Simulator
report
@Urthman SCREW YOU IF I WANT GIANT RETARDED EYES AND GODDAMN STICK ON WINGS THAT DO NOTHING IN GAME YOU CAN’T JUDGE ME.
Also on my wish list, now that I think of it: Bigger enemies that still make sense to fight. Dragons are a good example of Things I Would Like To Kill.
report
More people in cities would be awesome. But the more that there are like the large amounts in Assassin’s Creed, the less personality and variety the people will have, which was already a big letdown in oblivion.
report
I love how some people are hilariously trying to imply there was no ‘game’ in Oblivion – I guess the rest of us who poured hundreds of hours into it must have been hallucinating.
report
Not really. Gamers pour hundreds of hours into any old shite, so it’s hardly proof of anything.
report
Rant all you like, Meat, but Oblivion was a good game. Massively flawed no doubt but there was a huge amount of fun to be had with or without mods. The one and only reason I don’t go back to it more is that I played it too much and there is nothing left to see. I have no regrets buying it or its add-ons at all.
report
Saying Oblivion didn’t have game is ridiculous. Game is all it had, it certainly didn’t have voice acting, actual writing or a plot.
report
Well sure Oblivion had game. Bland, generic and boring, but still game.
report
My favourite bit was when the leader of the fighters guild came up to me and said:
“Mudcrabs are a real threat, I wont go walking by the riverside alone anymore.” Or words to that effect. The leader of a fighters organisation, scared by some small, fairly apathetic crabs.
Another great bit was when the beggars would ask for coin in their most common of accents, before reverting the the posh female voice that every female seemed to have.
Oh! And that bit when your walking around in somebody’s house, helping yourself to everything not nailed down and the BAM “STOP. YOU HAVE BROKEN THE LAW”.
report
Arguing with “Angry Internet Men” is like trying to hang christmas lights with a slingshot.
Some guys will never be happy unless a game literally grabs them and pulls them into it’s world in some Tron-esque fashion. And even then they WILL find some minor nibbly thing to complain about for the rest of the existence of the interwebs.
Interesting article on gamer entitlement:
http://tradeskill.blogspot.com/2010/10/gamer-entitlement-going-too-far.html
I enjoyed oblivion also, and Fallout 3, I so far have hated mount and blade and numerous other “Forum Darlings”. I am well aware if I state this on a forum some other bored IT guy somewhere else in the world will write a 4000 word diatribe on how my opinion is totally wrong or I work for the distributor or something. Just look at the flack RPS took for their fallout: new vegas review.
Simple rule of the internet: If your opinion differs in any way from the Forum Troll Collective you will be abused and insulted until you leave the site in frustration. It’s allot like chain ganking someone till they log off. It gives griefers a small tingle of joy in their naughty parts.
Never talk positively about:
World of Warcraft
Oblivion
Fallout <2
Free to play anything
games for windows live
report
A character progression system that isn’t broken and exploitable, npcs that don’t act like dough-faced mannequins, a unique world that doesn’t consist of copy pasted terrain, enemies that don’t level with you.
That would be fine for a start.
report
Surely the main question isn’t what engine they’re going to be using, but whether they’re going to bother hiring actual writers?
report
RAAAAAAGE
As in the Rage engine. Ta.
Oh, engine aside. Um, dragons? Decent melee? More awesome Dark Brotherhood?
I’m not very creative and shouldn’t work in game design.
report
If you worked for Bethesda, I think you’d be burned as a witch. What is this “decent melee” of which you speak?
report
“I’m not very creative and shouldn’t work in game design.”
That’s what all the Oblivion game designers said.
report
Alternate questions for this post’s title:
* “is there anyone who actually gives a shit about a sequel to Oblivion?”
* “is there any PC gamer who actually *liked* Oblivion un-modded”?
* “Would you rather hack off your own genitals with a rusty cut-throat razor or play another game on the Gamebryo engine?”
report
Yes, hello, and no.
Those questions are not as interesting as the post title. Next!
report
Yes, hello and no but would much rather see Rage.
Oblivion was a great game, so was Morrowind, and they were different in many fundamental aspects. End of cocking story, can we all now move on and agree bethesda are rather bloody good?
report
Yes.
Yes.
I’ll play the Gamebryo game.
Oblivion was decent and of course modding made it much better. Sure, it had plenty of failings and no its not the greatest game of all time.
People love to resort to extremism when it comes to games criticism. It’s always either the best or worst game of all time.
report
Meat Circus, did Oblivion once steal your Ninja Turtles lunch-box or something?
report
Bethesda games have been milestones in my gaming life for years, so yes, very much so I care about the sequel to Oblivion.
Oblivion being released around exam period failed me a final (I probably wouldn’t have passed anyway, Biological Psychology wasn’t my strong suit, but Oblivion certainly didn’t help when it came time for studying), so yes I very much liked it unmodded. Mods improved it, certainly, but I’d be more than willing to dive back in for an unmodded playthrough.
And yeah, Gamebryo isn’t the best, but it does do a bunch of things well (aforementioned mods), I don’t really mind it. I’m rather cheerfully playing through New Vegas right now.
report
What I want?
SKOOOOOOOOMAAAA
report
Just make it heavily moddable and rely on the community to shape it into a game.
report
Fallout 3 without guns.
report
I LOL’ed
report
I want to swim in the Black Marshes unaccosted by mudcrabs of fish (once I have reached lvl 5 and/or found a reasonable long stick). Otherwise I agree with Quxxy in the first post: less (not more) bugs on release. Not keen to revisit Cyrodiil again.
report
It shouldn’t need a shitload of mods to become playable / fun.
report
hear hear.
Three ideas for TES-V:
- Triple the number of people in cities and make them look lived in – less like theme park gift shops
- bring back daggerfalls random dungeons
- Hire (or at least involve) the teams and individuals behind the best mods for oblivion, give them a say in what gets added.
report
Maybe exploring the planes of daedric planes of oblivion. A game of 5 or so mini morrowinds.
report
@Handsome Dead
Procedurally generated daedric planes! A new one every time you enter a gate.
report
I’d love a return to the sandbox and wide-open spaces of Daggerfall, the freedom to choose and to just exist.
I’d also like more of the random twists. How cool was it that, firstly, you could become a vampire, and then later you would get approached by a small vampire child who offered you a chance to join a vampire clan.
Forget the shoe-horning of Oblivion or the scaling combat so that there were no instagib fights – that’s half the point of becoming supertough. Also allow us to get our own place and quest and crusade from it. A Mass Effect style team choosing affair with a base.
Forget the big name actors, CGI cut-scenes and console related gibberish.
I can’t wait to see what they do for it, but can’t but expect it to be an awful console hash.
report
I would like there to be a questline where the Mages’ Guild has been split into two factions. The first, traditionalist, faction wants magic to remain as arkane, obscure and difficult as possible and always complain about the second faction, which has tried to make magic as fun and accessible as possible.
In the quest line, The first faction dies and dies and dies and dies.
report
Until the final mission, that is, where it is revealed that, yes, the incredibly complex and awkward system of magic the first faction uses does, eventually, yield far more powerful results than the shallow second faction’s magic but it’s just that it took until the very last mission for it to be ready.
In order to prove themselves right, the first faction choose to use their magic to destroy the entire world rather than have the second faction in it. They destroy the entire world.
report
You are asking for actual player freedom and plot.
You ask for far too much.
report
@AndrewC
I see what you did there. Funny, but you have bad taste.
report
I thought it was appropriate. And in merely poor taste, not bad taste.
report
I’d like Bethesda to step back, reiterate and take in all the help they can get from Carmack & Co. because after Oblivion/FO3/NV we all can see that they can’t release a quality engine – far from it – and are not even remotely possible to fix all mistakes properly for the next release – NewVegas is the same buggy mess FO3 was. Not to speak of their broken scripting making the game either crash or sometimes renders Quests unsolvable – that’s ontop of the technical problems I might add….
other than that if it’s more like ElderScrolls and NOT like Oblivion – I’m in.
report
What I would like to see:
The passage of time.
In Oblivion, everything happened to your schedule. The words is ending you say? Gates to hell opening outside a town? Never mind, I want to become head of the mages guild first. And the fighters guild. and the assassins guild. etc.
Why not take some inspiration from
a) Dead Rising.
b) Sid Meier’s Pirates!
So, while you can join every guild if you want, you probably won’t have enough time to become head of them all. As your character will age. And at some point, you might want to retire and live happily ever after in that castle you acquired. Add in a High Score table, and you’ll have a really nice re-playable game. In each game you have to make real choices, and you can see how they pan out.
This might also provide a way of tackling the daft difficulty/levelling scaling. If you chose to igore the main quest for years while you do sidequests, then the evil bad guy is going to carry on with his plan for world domination, and you’ll have to live with the effects. And the longer you allow him to carry on, the harder it’s going to be defeat him later in the game.
report
Hell yes. In fact I do think most RPGs do the same and shouldn’t. So well said and a heart agreement.
report
They should get rid of any pretense at a plot or main quest, and let us just get on with the interesting exploring, looting and picking flowers without pestering us about Kvatch.
If they want some sort of background then don’t have it as a linear series of quests that don’t kick off until your character gets to Plotville. They’re a tedious waste of time. Maybe have a war between two states, with strategic AI controlling the armies. Don’t force the player to join in or pick a side, let them do what they want – if that’s picking flowers or watching as the AIs fight the war by themselves, then so be it.
Somewhere between the Goblin wars in Oblivion, and Space Rangers 2, maybe.
And yes, I enjoyed Oblivion unmodded. A lot.
report
“Maybe have a war between two states, with strategic AI controlling the armies. ”
I had that idea a while ago. It would make for a brilliant game if done well…. implement some sort of Civ like metagame. Then all sorts of quests can be generated as the meta-game progresses…. you could chose to work for home country and sign on as a mercenary. Or you could become a spy, and try and sneak into an enemy city and open the city gates before an attack. etc etc etc.
report
@Colthor
Yes, this! When the developer is pouring resources into making predefined quests they are, by nature, ignoring the things that actually matter in an open-world game: interesting locations to explore, fun things to do. Also, if you aren’t afraid of ‘breaking’ a scripted quest you can allow unexpected things to happen. The player failed to close that Oblivion gate in time? Whoops, now Anvil is overrun by demons.
report
I want a decent character modeler on staff, and someone to give a crap about animations. Their games look pretty good in the screenshots. In motion… yikes. That third person camera really shouldn’t be used.
report
Wait, Meat Circus didn’t like Oblivion? Sheesh. Could’ve told us.
report
I AM NOT ALONE.
report
Nobody told me that either.
I am SO kept in the dark.
report
New TES game:
* Towns of Assassin’s Creed proportion and feeling of ‘life’.
* More quests and themed areas, not three dungeon types rehashed over and over again without any atmosphere in them except a ‘cool trap system’ which is entirely predictable.
* NO LEVEL-MATCHED mobs/dungeons, NO LEVEL-MATCHED CRAP LOOT FROM DUNGEONS.
Seriously, the level-matching of all mobs/rewards/dungeons was the single most game-breaking part of Oblivion, and that was what made me throw my copy away (console, so no nifty mod-hacks to fix those parts…).
Bandits with glass armour attacking me on the map? Seriously?
Where did all the rats go? They spontaneously evolved into bears?
Oh, and the rubber banding, my horse actually climbed a vertical city wall, then snapped and flew away far far away. While hilarious, also completely game breaking.
report
It’s my most anticipated game ever.
* Less bugs.
* Gameplay balance. (* NO LEVEL-MATCHED mobs/dungeons, NO LEVEL-MATCHED CRAP LOOT FROM DUNGEONS.) <- That
* Minigames á là GTA: milking cows, jousts, sheep herding?
* More better "life" simulation for both you and the NPCs: marriages, buy/sell every house, start a business, craft stuff…allow me go all about "The Sims Medieval" if I feel like it.
* If not armies, at least parties with non scripted smart AIs.
* Make the world more dynamic with more real time events. Even though it was covered in Oblivion most of them felt heavily scripted.
Bethesda has now a lot of references on what to do and what to improve thanks to GTA, Minecraft, Fable, Guild Wars 2, Mount & Blade and others.
report
Minecraft would be a very good thing for them to look at. As a world simulator it is unparalleled and they really should aim for the stars here.
report
Saddles for pigs?
For one, the social interactions just have to be improved. No more talking heads and time-freezing everytime an NPC wants to have a chat. You could do this with a lock-on system similar to Peter Jackson’s King Kong, added with a reply menu. This could be a useful feature for consoles if extended to locking on to foes, on a given distance, whether you wanted to engage or speak to them.
report
I was just playing Outcast and you can be stopped mid-conversation by attacking enemy forces and then hell you have to run.
That game is alive.
report
Oh, Jah’s comment on time freezing during conversations reminds me of how pointlessly broken Charm spells are in Oblivion. Why did they even put long duration Charm effects in there?
report
Things I would like to see in Elder Scrolls V can almost all be seen in mods for Oblvivion. They really ought to look there for a large amount of inspiration. What would primarily interest me:
- A more believable living world – trade caravans, affectable economy perhaps even dynamic social structure.
- Realism options. There was some effort made in New Vegas (i know, different developer) but there is still a long long way to go. And yet, again, the modders did a perfect job of it. I’d like to see an optional realism mode, or a Hard Difficulty that includes realism options would be great.
- A big bugbear for me was the way they handled quests. I’d like to still see a massive range of quests but what I would REALLY like to see is quests interacting with each other. Decisions that the player makes in one area havign an effect elsewhere, cutting off routes and opening new ones. Given the nature of the game, I’d also love to see these side quest effecting the nature of the Main Quest. And lastly, I’d love to see these side quests expanded further – becoming entire stories in their own right. I’d settle for less side quests and a few long storylines.
In fact, my big issue with Oblivion was the way none of the independant elements of the game world interacted with each other convincingly or at all. Given that the entire game was intended as a sandbox experience, I would expect the world to react as a whole to my actions and it never did. I would like that to change for ESV really. I very quickly got bored of Oblivion simply because nothing I did seemed to matter at all. There was so much potential that it was painful. It was only when the modding community really got fired up that the possabilities were realised. But it was not ideal – most mods are in some incompatible. It would be far better, naturally, if the game was feature rich and exciting on release.
report
I don’t want an Elder Scrolls V. I’d rather be completely blown away by something incredible and new from a developer I’ve never heard of… rather than see yet another incremental installment to a tired franchise that hit its peak over a decade ago.
And yet, when it inevitably is released, I’ll almost certainly buy the thing the day it comes out. *sigh*. I get what I deserve.
report
Yeah, we’re in trouble here, waiting for Bethesda to rediscover the things they used to know. They’re not an ambitious young developer anymore – they’re at that ‘height of empire’ stage, where now that they’ve attained power and money, their overriding priority has become to A) keep what they have while B) making even more. Watch for even more emphasis on the main quest, an even more generic fantasy world, and an introduction and epilogue narrated by Ian McKellan.
The next Morrowind will not be made by Bethesda.
report
Oblivion sold so well that the corporate side of Bethesda will not allow major changes to its formula (that’s why they’re making “Oblivion 2″, rather than TES 5), and they’ll be perfectly right to do so from a sales perspective, because this game will sell mega-millions no matter what they do. The auto-leveling problem will be slightly tweaked and the developers will talk in carefully modulated “enthusiastic” language about how they’ve responded to complaints from the fans while still retaining the “accessibility” of the old system and they think everybody will be really pleased with the result. Developers who don’t talk in carefully modulated “enthusiastic” language either no longer work at Bethesda or are longer allowed near the press.
For Oblivion 4 the preview buzzwords will be innovation, new leveling system, new facial technology, etc.
report
- Actual art direction. Consistent and inspired.
- Quality character models, including animation and textures that doesn’t make you cry.
- More voice actors or none at all. Either get more voice actors or save your money and just fall back on text.
Most of all I want to see inspiration. Don’t just do another game, because it’s expected of you, do it because you really want to and have shitloads of cool ideas.
report
Actually yeah… I doubt they ever would fall back on text, but I’d be cool with that. imagine how much more content they could fit if they didn’t have to fill a dual layer DVD with digitised speech.
And as for the content itself, proceduralise the whole lot. I want procedural NPCs, quests, dungeons and towns.
report
Writing that doesn’t suck.
In fact, here’s the deal: don’t let Bethesda make ES5 on their own. Let id handle the tech and the gameplay, Obsidian do all the writing, and Bethesda do the mapping/creating-a-sense-of-place. The game would probably end up pretty good.
report
Who does the QA? (Valve? Blizzard? I dunno who’s the Poster Dev for QA, really, but those are the ones that came to mind.)
I mean, id aren’t exactly slobs in that department, but with Obsidian in the picture, I just want to make *absolutely* sure.
report
I am probably really weird, but I’d like to see TES go back to its roots and get bigger. I didn’t really get anywhere in Arena, so I dunno if I would still feel this way if I had, but I think Daggerfall was the sweet spot in the series. I loved Morrowind, and it’s the only TES game I’ve actually finished, but I was kind of disappointed by how small it was, compared to Daggerfall or Arena.
The series started out with this massive (presumably procedurally generated?) world, and each incarnation has made it smaller and smaller. I know that most of the NPCs in the first two games were less individual than the NPCs in Oblivion, but they were still pretty damn cookie-cutter in Oblivion, and there were way fewer of them and a they were in a much smaller area. I don’t feel like the trade-off between smaller worlds and more personalized worlds has been a net gain. I’d like to see a return to playing in a whole continent, with different native races and different scenery.
TES has gone from a continent to a region to a nation to… a smaller nation, I guess. Oblivion was alright, and my PC kinda blew when it came out, so I’ll probably pick it up this holiday season if it goes on super-sale and try to actually finish it this time. I haven’t ever hated a TES game, and Oblivion was probably technically more fun than Arena. But it was way less interesting, and I’d rather have a game that’s crazy huge and intriguing as fuck.
Games that are small but dense have their place, but that’s not the place I’d like to see the next TES game. We already have games that are doing that, and doing it better than Oblivion did. What differentiated the series, and made it way more interesting than a lot of other series, was its scale. And the scale has gotten smaller with each entry. I’d like to see that trend reversed.
report
Idtech 5 in a TES game is pretty unlikely. lots of baked lighting so a day/night cycle would be impossible.
Really though bethesda needs to put someone who can model and animate worth a damn in the lead character artist role.
The gimp they’ve had since morrowind is awful, just horrendously awful. I’m sure most people can see this, and it’s made painfully apparent mere weeks after a new Gamebryo engine game comes out and is modded.
Seriously this is a AAA (or is supposed to be) game developer and their character art is plain not up to snuff.
It’ll never happen though, because the bloke is Todd Howard’s old highschool chum.
report
Nondrick Mode.
report
I still enjoy playing Oblivion, despite completing it for the first time almost 2 years ago now. I play on the 360, and tech-wise, there are some major hiccups with both mechanics, the archery system in particular was terrible, and the most recurring problem I had graphics wise were textures and objects like tree and shrubs popping into the frame abruptly. Speaking of archery, why is it that you cannot be shot in the head with an arrow in Oblivion? For some weird reason, if you shoot an enemy in the head or receive an arrow to the noggin yourself, it doesn’t show :-S.
Probably the biggest pitfall though, is the lackluster and boring main quest. I’ve only ever completed it once, and afterward the only quest that I enjoyed throughout the story was the battle for Bruma, an event that should have blown the minds of gamers with its scale and intensity, but was actually a laughable affair that could beat with the bare minimum of allies at level 15. And that was the best thing.
One last thing: get rid of the cursed tutorial, or at least put in the option to skip in like New Vegas. Anytime I want to experiment with different classes or races, I have to trudge though that gloomy-as-shit sewer every time.
P.S. Did anyone else hate that stupid Dunmer in the cell across at the beginning? DB=awesome
report
The last 2 times I’ve installed oblivion (I do it once a year, load it with thousands of mods and then quit after being bugged the crap out) I’ve spent more time in the first quest than ingame. I can do it almost in speedrun fashion.
report
Save game at the sewer gate.
Come on guys everyone’s doing it.
report
You cant savegame when you’re using and changing tons of mods because the game will break every time you activate or deactivate one.
report
Alternate start mod:
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11495
Arrive by ship, generate your character, answer a few questions about your character to get some starting gear, and immediately step into the outside world.
report
I hope it’s so clunky and buggy that it disgusts me, like every other Bethesda game.
Just make sure it runs like utter shit, Bethesda. I know you won’t let me down.
report
Don’t change me into a vampire in the middle of a quest and make me spend the next few game sessions on a scavenger hunt to become normal again. 5 Grand soul gems?!
Make melee combat more fun and effective. Magic was the only way to go in Oblivion.
The whole Soul Gem system of charging magic items…get rid of it.
report
For Elder Scrolls V, I want:
a graphics engine by John Carmack,
gameplay mechanics by Shinji Mikami,
dungeon design by Arkane Studios,
and writing and dialogue by Obsidian.
Let Bethesda do what they’re best at:
marketing and PR (and “radiant” AI).
report
Openworld design by the dudes of Gothic / Risen.
report
I want to see the return of Michael Kirkbride to the creative team and more of his loopy worldbuilding genius. Very disappointed by Oblivion’s lack of hermaphroditic demigods or armour made from insects.
report
Just don’t make it an MMO, and I’ll (probably) be happy.
More elaborate answer: Fallout: New Vegas is Bethesda’s best game since Morrowind (no doubt because it is an almost perfect marriage of their own tradition and the type of game that Obsidian is known for). I hope they borrow everything they can from that.
report
More Mad God, less …bad dog.
?
report
No more level scaling dungeons, totally took the pleasue out of dungeon delving for me, you instantly new what kind of creatures and what kind of items you were going to find in there.
report
Characters that don’t stare at you throughout conversations whithout looking away or blinking.
report
Less combat, which is more meaningful instead. As difficult as Stonesoup, but without the “hilarity” of Oblivion Combat (running away like a maniac while waiving around a magical stick). Not as easily breakable economy and magic systems which have some depth. Interesting dialogue and NPCs that are important for more than five minutes. More than two voice actors, or less voices conversations.
And most important of all:
A UI designed for the PC, not some Fallout3 abomination.
report
Aside from the obvious (better writing, better quest and story design, better world design – am I just wishing for the Moon, here?), I’d like to see an option to keep the world persistent for all the characters you create. So, for example, my main char could go off and save the world or defend all the squirrels in the forest or whatever, while another character of mine becomes head of the Thieves’ Guild, and another buys a house and grows crops, and maybe hears stories about the mighty squirrel-defender or the devious new head of the Thieves’ Guild who totally stole all the ladies’ underwear on his way to the top. Not with any online implementation, mind you, keeping it strictly single-player. And of course, keep it optional, for anyone who just wants to go through the game again with a different character.
Of course, knowing nothing about coding etc. I don’t even know if such a thing is possible without releasing all sorts of little game-breaking demonic pixies. But it’d be nice.
report
Better combat, not just madly pressing LMB to swing a sword until your enemy dies or you drink some potions…
Characters who don’t all sound permanently depressed.
The characters to look as nice as the landscapes.
report
A new engine, really. Gamebryo was creaking when it was released and frankly now it’s geriatric.
report
I disagee there, Oblivion was one of the better looking games when it came out.
report
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I was as impressed as hell with Oblivion’s visuals the moment I left the sewer, and with mods it’s still a genuinely beautiful experience these days. I mean simply that the engine doesn’t best support the sprawling complexity of these games anymore. When I played Fallout NV lately it infuriated me that my damn NPC companions still couldn’t jump tiny fences (or at all, as far as I can tell) and immediately charged around like lunatics around any obstacle. It looks terrible when NPCs pop out of the sky upon entering a scene, it drives me bananas to see the twitching ragdolls and the physics “unlocking” and a myriad of other really jarring faults. That’s not to say there hasn’t been improvements, but I’m starting to think that while implementing a number of hacks to get something that works 90% of the time was acceptable in 2006, it’s not so much anymore.
report
A procedurally generated world. Seriously. Forget a main plotline (as writing, acting and actual missions were all pretty unexciting in Oblivion), give me proper exploration wrapped up in some good RPG mechanics. Exploration was one of the best things in Oblivion. Once I ‘d banned myself from fast-travelling I stumbled across far more stuff. Keep it interesting and don’t let the ‘dungeons’ get repetitive (traps were good too). Think mountain pass villages, desert nomad traders, mysterious castles with no inhabitants. Make it the same size as daggerfall, which is still my favourite Elder Scrolls game (just). Learn from the ideas behind minecraft/dwarf fortress.
(This will not happen, but I can dream, can’t I? I suspect the world/quests will be basically oblivion 1.5, and I’ll still put in a couple of hundred hours across various char builds)
Also, obviously, get rid of the auto-levelling of loot/opponents. I’m actually pretty sure you will do this, as new vegas seems to have done this to great effect (Deathclaws are B^&*^&d hard if you comes across them early, and I assume they don’t scale up with you?). And part of the excitement of exploring in an RPG is coming across a tough area or a high-level bit of loot. Its fun to run away sometimes :-).
As for the NPCs, I don’t expect much improvement, as I think they are genuinely hard to do and I wouldn’t want the compute power wasted on them. Thinking back to the ‘radiant AI’, sure it was flawed, but it was still trying to achieve more than NPCs in most games do nowadays. Although it is responsible for cities feeling like they’re recovering from the black death. But they are still more interesting and RPG-y than the ants crawling around assassin’s creed. Waiting for people to leave their homes so I could rob them was genuinely interesting, and more of that sort of element would really set their game apart. If they could achieve both decent AI and large numbers of them too, fair play, but I suspect that would require more power than they have available (even if they were writing only for the top 1% of PCs).
I could ramble for ages, but I’ll stop here. I expect Oblivion 1.5 with little innovation over the previous installment. I’ll be happy with that, albeit a little disappointed. Let’s see what happens….
report
a lot of people on here saying they want procedural content.
I doubt Bethesda will go for it, but the day a dev does develop a good looking procedurally generated RPG is the day they’ll get rich.
report
At the time, I remember Oblivion looking really good, one of the best looking games out there. However, it almost seems that the engine hasn’t been changed since 2005, so hopefully they’ll come out with a comepltly new version of it, or the new ID tech.
I don’t quite get the hate for Oblivion, I think its rose tinter glasses syndrome. I much prefered Oblivion for the fact that you could travel to the other side of the map quickly, not all of us want to spend 2 hours actually trying to find a well or something.
report
A more stable savegame platform! Don’t know how many time my saves corrupted! Damn Oblivion & Fallout >_<
report
What I want: more populous and sprawling cities, mounted combat, some skill based melee combat along the model of the old classic “Severance:Blade of Darkness”, greater variety of wildlife to hunt, seasonal herbs and plants that replenish over time for the alchemy and keep the free range skills development; being able to define your own class based on improving the skills you actually use through your in game through use is definitely the way forward.
Oh and give us co-op play – my biggest gripe about oblivion (as with stalker) was that the joy of exploring a large immersive environment was always tempered with a certain lonliness, I wanted to be sharing the joy of exploring new lands with my chums.
report
I disagree about the co-op bit, that one of the reasons why I like Elderscroll games and things like Minecraft so much, it allows you to play the game the way you want to play it, not the way other people want you to play it.
report
I also disagree on the co-op I’m afraid. I do know what you mean about the lonliness but I can’t help but think that this could be better tempered by great character writing, imaginitive story-telling and a genuinely dynamic game-world (IE each independant aspect of the world affecting the others.
report
@skinlo and @SanguineAngel
Co-op would be an option and not required. Done right it would not mess with the story. Experiences are always more fun when shared with a friend.
report
Bethesda:
Fire your animators, art directors, writers, voice actors. Hire new ones. Don’t take iD’s advice on this, either.
Make a dungeon crawler. As in proper Ultima-crawling. iD DID do a fairly good job of this with their mobile Doom RPGs.
NO QUEST ARROWS. ANYWHERE. Fallout 3 makes you feel like you’re being led by the nose all the time. Keep a quest journal for me, that’s handy thanks. Heck, I appreciate a mark on a map, too. Let me find my way somewhere, and enjoy the sense of discovery an RPG should provide. Don’t dumb down.
Don’t consolify. Don’t dumb down. Please?
(Other people have spent precious time in this thread being more specific, so I’ll finish by saying: I like dungeon crawling. I don’t much enjoy trudging around an overworld, it’s something that I can take or leave. Dungeons in Daggerfall and Morrowind were good but still didn’t quite have the claustrophobia, depth or sense of discovery as Ultima Underworld.)
report
I reckon some difficulty levels would be the way to go here. Easy would include the sort of nose leading that a lot of games are coming to use exclusively. Medium would ditch the nose leading, perhaps ramp up combat and introduce some realism tweaks perhaps. Hard would be all out tough no compass, fatigue and figuring things out yourself sort of affair.
Don’t really understand why developers insist on creating a game and then telling you exactly what to do every step of the way instead of letting you figure it out yourself.
report
More nuclear sheep!
report
Top-down, ASCII-based view with turn-by-turn movement.
Oh, and an Ipad-only release.
report
Short of a new engine, i’d most like to see, in no particular order: this is a long wish-list…
-magic spells with new geometries and delivery vectors, such as cones, rings, seeking missiles, etc
-alchemical crafting of grenades/bombs/mines
-elemental effects that are meaningful and interesting, maybe like a slow or freeze effect on frost, stun and chain effects on lightning, light and a chance to ignite enemies/torches/everything with fire (without DOT pre-specified)
-sustained magic effects that can be toggled on/off instead of cast for a fixed duration
-alteration spells to repair armor/weapons, or to aid their repair indirectly
-get rid of the spell effects that serve no purpose but to annoy the player character: burden is worthless against NPCs, but could be more useful if NPCs carried some balast; attribute and skill damage spells make almost no difference to an NPC’s fighting ability, but cause the player to have to find a way to heal the damage
-just in general, debuffs should be a more important part of combat, as it is, it’s almost always easier to just kill an enemy with DPS than to soften them or hinder them with debuffs during the battle (a few debuffs might be useful, like the chain trick with weakness to magicka)
-rethink armor: fallout NV is doing better, with a damage threshold, but what I’d like is a damage threshold on heavy armor, and a %damage reduction on light and heavy armor, but with cheap light armor very fragile…it can save your life from a couple of good blows, but will be in tatters shortly in a large melee
-the difference between blunt and bladed weapons should be more than cosmetic: actually, oblivion pretty much made blunt weapons all around worse than bladed, but maybe maces could have advantages against heavy armor, and be very durable, while swords are deadlier against bare flesh, with axes somewhere in between
-spears and pikes could be fun
-player spell-crafting/enchanting that lets us craft the same sorts of enchantments and spells that we can find pre-crafted: at least, the bounds for duration/damage/etc should be 0-inf, not 1-100, and enchanted items should be able to have a variety of effects, not just a single effect: Morrowind did these things so much better than oblivion
-a feather enchantment should reduce the weight of the item, not just increase the player’s carrying capacity: fort strength already does that
-i would like some open-ended goals, that I can always pursue further because I feel like it, rather than because someone is telling me to. Enchantment crafting provided this in morrowind, plus there seemed to be interesting things hidden potentially anywhere in morrowind, so thorough exploration paid off. The ability to recruit followers, give them assignments, send them on quests, might help…at least the favors wouldn’t all go one way, maybe. Maybe building and improving a stronghold/village or something
-i shouldn’t have to strategize my skill ups to maximize my level ups–I always be happy to level up, I shouldn’t wince when it happens too soon, and I end up with bonuses to the wrong attributes (or worse, low bonuses because I only raised a variety of skills a point or two each): there are several ways to fix this
report
I like your list, especially the armour, weapons and open-ended goals points.
What this guy said.
Oh heck there is SO MUCH potential for the ES games. As evidenced by so many great ideas here. I’d really really like to see them cash in on that.
report
So, another game that will be released a buggy mess, will only ever be any good when modded to the eyeballs and will plunge screaming down into the deepest depths of the uncanny valley again. Yay… I think.
report
Have the story, not the exploration, be the focus of the game. And more interesting role playing.
Exploration is good, but having only slightly silly things to do while doeing so gets boring after a short while.
report
Get Bioware, Obsidian, CD Projekt and Valve to clobber together and make it for you.
On a more serious note as much as I bitched and moaned about Oblivion I still sunk hours and hours into it. The Shivering Isles showed that Bethesda hasn’t lost it’s quirky side either so if they just bring that back it’d all be good.
report
“They say Elder Scrolls V is in development”
“Not a bad game, if you have the stones for it”
“That’s what I heard”
“Good day”
…
report
I hear procedural generation worship has become more common in the RPS isles.
report
“If you’re looking for an adventure game review, I hear John Walker at RPS is the best place to look.”
“If you’re looking for an adventure game review, I hear John Walker at RPS is the best place to look.”
“Bye.”
“See you.”
report
Oh, yes. STOP RECORDING THE SAME AMBIENT DIALOGUE LINES WITH DIFFERENT VOICE ACTORS. Seriously, write small variations for each voice actor, having two people same exactly the same damn line is so utterly dreadful it makes me rage, let alone every single bloody character.
report
* Better writing, and a speechcraft system that isn’t as asinine as Oblivion’s or tedious as Morrowind’s. FO3 or FONV style is acceptable.
* A leveling system that you don’t have to “game”. They should just make attributes level up separately from skills altogether, and secondary stats should be based on attributes rather than level.
* Find a way to discouraging boosting skills through grinding (or rather, make it easier to boost them by actually applying them where they’re needed.). Acrobatics should be a little more useful/less boring in general (maybe expand it to include climbing, expand athletics to include parkour).
* A world that sort of attempts to make sense. Like, where every fort isn’t ruined, every mine isn’t occupied by monsters, and the number of farms seems roughly appropriate for the number of cities.
* Cohesive vision. For the most part, FONV tries to tie its factions and areas together into the main plot and to each other. In contrast, none of the main guilds seem to give a damn about the Oblivion crisis, despite it being sort of an apocalyptic thing. There’s no sense that as gates open, people are mobilizing their resources for war, becoming mistrustful, suffering materially from traders being attacked by daedra. It’s just some random dungeons for you to do.
* Characters that are memorable for something other than being annoying as shit.
* Some sort of meaningful choices in quests. Would also help if there was more than one morally justifiable decision rather than The Good Choice and Teh Evul Choice.
* Hire Obsidian do all the writing and quest design, and let Bethesda add a bunch of random, pointless dungeons to the end result.
report
Just gimme faces that don’t look like they just had their wisdom teeth removed. Also…strangely enough…I sometimes think there is *too much to steal* in these games. If I don’t steal it all, I feel like I’m wasting the opportunity. If I do steal it all, I feel like a jerk and I get bored real fast.
report
It would be nice if AI could detect suspicious behavior. Undoubtedly difficult to implement, but it would be sweet. Sort of like creeper detection. If someone crouches in the corner of your store all day, maybe you should be concerned. And possibly call the guards to have them removed from the premises.
report
Well, they sort of had that in Oblivion, where if you went out of the shopkeepers sight they would follow you and comment on it. They need to make lifting items with Z count as illegal (with, say, a verbal warning not to touch then after a short while detected as a crime).
report
A main quest line that doesn’t suck or constantly expose the limitations of the engine and design.
Melee and archery that’s fun and visceral. See Condemned 2, Dark Messiah, Zeno Clash.
A difficulty curve that’s reasonable, stable, and survives different character choices while perhaps gently shaping them. Glass armour bandits aside, I honestly think Oblivion’s levelling system was fine. All it really needed was for enemy level to be driven off an honest assessment of your character’s combat ability, not your tangentially-related experience level. At the very least the major/minor skill system needs to be dropped.
Better horses. Red Dead Redemption quality as a minimum, but SOTC’s horse.would be nice. In a game world as dense as Oblivion’s, getting around could be a fair bit more fun.
More varied dungeons. Or a greater focus on the generally better overworld quests and less on dungeon crawling.
I think I can live with the rest of Oblivion’s quirks, like the tiny and mostly vacant “cities”, the mud-crab obsessed clone-NPCs and so on. I’d just like the core gameplay of moving around and killing stuff to be more enjoyable, as I’ve already played Oblivion to death and can’t bring myself to start it up again.
report
Ditch the ‘learn by doing’ mechanic. It just encourages silly metagaming (jumping off of every statute in town, taping down the walk button to ‘sneak’ into a corner for an hour, spending an afternoon summoning skeletons only to punch them to death, etc.) and is way too easy to break, exploit, and/or stumble into a character build that is doomed without said metagaming. Stick to a level/skill progression system similar to what was used in FO3/NV.
Gamers in general are way too tolerant of ridiculously stupid rules design. (And way, way, way too tolerant of crappy writing.)
report
-bring back the Morrowind travel system (boats, caravan/silt strider, mages guild teleport, and the fairly-secret Propylon Index system).
-more interesting and unique dungeons to explore. the ones in Oblivion were horribly repetitive. Also, more dungeon types, and ruins that conceivably could have once been inhabited.
-cover a smaller area of Tamriel in higher detail. Morrowind was a far smaller area on the map than Cyrodiil, but done to a larger scale.
-actually take advantage of the vast amount of interesting history, magic, metaphysics and politics available in the TES universe. Oblivion was atrocious in this regard.
-allow quest critical npcs to die, but have a back-path for the main quest so you can still complete it even if you screw it up the conventional way (Morrowind had this).
You can tell I’m a massive fan of Morrowind =P
report
Less bland LotR style fantasy and MORE Morrowind style craziness.
report
SHADOWS
Do you know what makes that wonderfully rendered sunset immediately immersion breaking?
When that massive cathedral or tower doesn’t cast a long shadow at sunset.
Seriously, the E3 demo of Oblivion had real time environemtnal shadows, not just NPC shadows. That they haven’t been included in the Fallout games yet is a mystery. They’ve been part and parcel of basic game graphics for years now.
I’m not a graphical elitist, but it is one of those things that, once noticed, is impossible to un-notice.
Also. Stop building your game worlds out of a bunch of really bloody obvious puzzle pieces. One ruin looks like every other because they’re the same dozen pieces arranged differently…
report
Shadows you say? There is a custom build of the graphics extender for Morrowind that does something like that. Preview.
Of course I had to write it for Morrowind first *wink*
report
My main gripe with Oblivion was how much of a generic fantasy world it was compared to Morrowind. The lack of voice acting, the world levelling up with you, the extreme lack of actual content – just the same stuff repeated over and over and the lack of interesting lore just made it seem very bland.
Morrowind had more than its fair share of flaws. But it compensated for those by providing a rich and interesting world to explore. More of that please.
report
Please please please fix the dynamic scaling that had beggars running around in daedric armour by the end of the game. It totally killed any immersion for me.
report
A lot of this has been said already but I have to put my 2 cents in:
*Remove the grind: I don’t want to have to escort NPCs, fetch books, repair weapons, recharge magic items, combine hundreds of alchemical ingredients, play conversation mini-games, jump everywhere, sneak constantly, and generally do anything I don’t already want to do in order to play the game.
*Focus less on scripted quests, more on world-building: In an open-world game exploration should be rewarded. More time should be spent creating interesting things for the player to discover and less should be spent on creating side-quests. Especially if the side-quests are: go here and fetch this.
*Let the player’s actions matter: Go on, don’t be afraid. Let the player horribly break the world, it’s their world after all. This isn’t a MMO, you don’t have to worry about how the player’s actions will affect other players. Let the player assassinate the king which will then ignite a war of succession. When the player fails to close an Oblivion gate have the demons swarm out and destroy nearby towns.
*I don’t care about: fancy graphics, fully voiced NPCs, better animations. Use the same engine and spend the time creating content instead. Use text-boxes for NPC dialog, it worked for the Ultima series.
My first week with Oblivion was amazing. I thought: “this is great, it’s a fantasy world I can explore as I wish.” After that it became a chore. “I could play Oblivion but I have a pack full of alchemical ingredients I need to combine and the Mage’s guild has six fetch and escort quests lined up for me.” It’s a game, it shouldn’t have a TODO list.
In short, find a way to make TES V feel like that first week every time I play it.
report
Sorry, the next Bethesda game won’t be The Elder Scrolls 5. I unclog toilets for Bethesda so I get lots of insider info and the next game is going to be “The Elder Scrolls Adventures 2: The Lusty Argonian Maid”. Yeah they’re reviving The Elder Scrolls Adventures. Fans of Redguard will be very pleased.
report
Sweet! Thanks for the scoop.
report
As long as the Lusty Argonian Maid doesn’t face the temptation of grinding for stats, and has a much, much greater variety of enemies to face, she can talk stupid and bump into walls all she wants. Amusing, funny old girl.
report
I don’t need a sequel, I’ve still got Morrowind! ;-D
report
But imagine a Morrowind with adequate AI, a more dynamic environment which doesn’t solely rely on you to push things along. So you’ve got towns that are better protected against the increasing number of threats. Nomadic tribes that aren’t just dusty northern towns. No Cliff Racers. Better combat. A more extreme and noticeable effect of Red Mountain and / or Dagoth Ur on Vvardenfell and subsequently a more noticeable strain on Imperial presence on the island.
A remake could be good.
report
Character models that don’t look like ass. I really hate the way people look and move in their games. I don’t expect it to change though… Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3 all suffered from it.
report
Coop capable morrowind please and er… well thats it actually
report
Ahh damnit, shame about the engine. The list of what I’d like improved isn’t that long, really.
A voice acting budget
Some real effort in improving character models and animations
A little less hand-holding
Better environment variation/ world design – a return to the fantastical stuff of Morrowind basically
Everything else about Oblivion was fine really. One thing I hope they don’t do is move toward the notice board style side quests – jobs for hire basically – that seem to have been cropping up more and more in modern rpgs. Keep them interesting, and give them some context.
report
I want Fargoth back, he was cool.
report
The world of Oblivion felt like a giant plastic theme park with no other vistors but me. After wandering around from one attraction to another for some time whilst shouting “hello, anybody knows where the toilets are ? ” and kicking NPC dolls in the groin out of boredom I left never to return again.
report
I’d like to see a nice balance between Morrowind and Oblivion, to be honest. It’s idiotic clinging to a single gaming and hating everyone who likes the other one (I’m looking at YOU, Meat Circus). I’m convinced that it mostly comes down to which you played first anyway. Everyone who first fell in love with Morrowind/Oblivion saw that there was another Elder Scrolls game and thought “I loved that other Elder Scrolls game!”, but then played it and didn’t like how different it was and so decided “Everyone who likes Oblivion/Morrowind sucks!”
There were a lot of things that I didn’t like about Oblivion – a lot of stupid design choices that I think dragged the game down from greatness. But that doesn’t change the fact that I still spent hundreds of hours playing it. And that was without any mods other than interface and texture upgrades.
Where Oblivion fell flat was in its cut and paste locations and auto-leveling systems – both of which were simply time-saving techniques for the developers’ sake. All that a good sequel needs is:
-New engine (Gamebryo can’t keep up)
-Less cut-n-paste, more hand-crafting of content
-Broader gameplay options
If Bethesda bases their design on that, I trust them with the rest.
report
All the hype and constant praise Morrowind gets kind of ruined it for me. The internet led me to believe it would be like drinking sweet ambrosia the nipples of god while a host of give me an “enhanced pat-down” (*winkwinknudgenudge*) but when I finally got to play the game it just seemed like an above average RPG and now I feel kind of bad about it,. I know it’s supposed to be the greatest RPG man has ever made but I just can’t get over the slow pace or bad combat system to find the greatness that everyone else seems.
Maybe I’m just really fucking dumb or I lack the patience for it.
report
Redguard was my first TES game if that means anything.
report
Where were all of you lot when the game was released and I was the only person in the WHOLE UNIVERSE calling it a pile of shit while the media were all creaming their jeans over it?
For all of the reasons mentioned so far, Oblivion was a *massive* step backward from Morrowind and of my biggest gaming disappointments ever.
report
Some people say the same thing about Morrowind and Daggerfall.
report
So yeah you’re nothing special. Every TES fan says this about the latest game in the series.
report
It’s like a big conga line where everyone calls the guy in front shit and says the one behind him is the greatest there ever was.
report
“Some people say the same thing about Morrowind and Daggerfall.”
So?
“So yeah you’re nothing special. Every TES fan says this about the latest game in the series.”
I certainly felt special at the time. Couldn’t find anyone else who felt the same way I did. By the way, I’m not a particular fan of TES; Morrowind is the only game in the series I really loved.
It’s almost as if I can form my *own* opinion on games, isn’t it?
report
“It’s almost as if I can form my *own* opinion on games, isn’t it?”
awesome *thumbs up*
report
but that’s okay I hated it even before you did I hang out here http://www.rpgcodex.net/ wanna be BFFs i know all the cool guys there
report
Game mechanics is definitively the elephant in the RPS room, I can’t believe people are really that worried about how characters look and whatnot when Oblivion, in fact, was a non-functioning game. It simply didn’t work.
Nothing in the game made any sense whatsoever in terms of game rules. You were better off ignoring the whole “game” part, and just finishing all the quests you wanted at level 1, lest you wanted to gamble on that the game mechanics somehow managed to give you an advantage for playing the game (which it pretty much never did).
I think the thing we have to focus on is that Ken Rolston is no longer a designer at Bethesda, which hopefully means they’ve hired someone who presumably knows something about design (I’ll settle for anything, but it would be nice it it was more than absolutely zilch).
That Bethesda is horrible at almost everything other than the game design is secondary, but it would be nice if they could do something about that as well. As long as they keep the premise of a large open landscape to explore, they can do pretty much anything, and it will best Oblivion. Here’s hoping they’ve mixed things up a bit.
report
* way better animations (this can actually make up for non state of the art tech graphics)
* story/npc-characters that have their own personality
* lots of different stories to experience / be told / read about
* overall darker, more realistic atmosphere:
* unique, more hand-crafted landscapes
* darker and more uniquely designed dungeons (in type and layout), half of them with rewards at the end
* non-leveling, hard enemies, have some badass ones guard unique treasure
* complex dialogs (morrowinds dialog system is the best i’ve encountered in gaming so far, main parts were narrated, but if you wanted to really get into detail, you could read on and on and really immerse yourself into it)
* fixed travel routes instead of auto-travel
* no more compass-waypoints, but better way-descriptions and more unique landscape instead
+ a map you can put your own marks on (but no compasses, that directly point at them!)
* more believable/immersive magical effects (wobbling air instead of glowing blue bolts, for instance)
* vampires and werewolves (always loved that)
overall i think oblivion took some wrong turns over morrowind and bethesda somehow stuck with them, unfortunately.
report
“* complex dialogs (morrowinds dialog system is the best i’ve encountered in gaming so far, main parts were narrated, but if you wanted to really get into detail, you could read on and on and really immerse yourself into it)”
yeah info-dumps are pretty awesome hth
report
What I did about the map was that I never used the in-game one, I drew my own map entirely by hand over a 6*8 A4 pieces of paper joined together. There was a lot of cartography and a bit of trig involved but I had a lot of fun climbing up hills to get a lay of the land and using them as reference points.
I then simply marked places I found on the map with a pencil.
report
“morrowinds dialog system is the best i’ve encountered in gaming so far,”
Wait, what? I agree it was better than Oblivions but it was pretty terrible.
report
Morrowind World with Oblivion Mechanics + better level scaling.
report
Alright everyone I’ve said everything I wanted to say here so this comment thread has officially ended. You can still loiter around and talk about things but since I’ll no longer be here I really don’t see the point.
report
A journal system that feels like a diary rather than a checklist. Filter-by-quest, hotlinks to related incidents etc. can be added later for usability, but the primary look-and-feel, the first thought, should be ‘this is what happened to me’. And conversely for the game journal to read interestingly as a diary the game needs the right amount of incidental colour as well as events that organise neatly into ‘quests’. A card index organised into neatly-titled quests is a significant immersion-breaker, especially if you stumble upon something related to a quest but not obviously connected to the title that pops up.
If ‘achievements’ are absolutely necessary they should be appropriate to the game world (not referencing anything extrinsic such as play time, whether you walked rather than using fast travel, load/saves) and tied in to the game’s reputation system.
More opportunity to see the effect of your actions on the world would be good. Knock-on effects, small things as well as big.
report
I’d like a really dark world and back story. The imperial city could really have been something; the lore says it was an Aliad city that is now occupied by men, where are the shanty towns hugging the outer-walls, the new builds where the old city is falling down and the massive, sprawling dock yards? (it’s the capital city of a whole Empires, there should be corruption, greed and crime. I’ve been gradually re-doing the outside/water front via modding for a while, but still.).
Basically a more grown up game, look at the TV programs that have done a dark convincing mediæval society, that sort of world would have been preferable to the white-washed world of Oblivion (any hints of darkness where very mild).
I think Nehrim was a lot closer to what Oblivion could have been using that engine.
report
For all the complaining about the engine, can anyone actually cite a game engine that does the complete open fantasy sandbox better? Gothic 3 had to employ the worst depth-of-field effect ever, Risen comes closest but has terrible distant landscape and broke down squarely in the uncanny valley, Gothic 4 is essentially on-rails, and Two Worlds looks like Adventure in Sprite-land. None of them deliver the level of interactivity or detail Oblivion has.
Especially, with mods and texture packs, Oblivion still looks relevant to this day. Even without mods, it still holds its own decently against several years of new titles.
report
until you see a character model, which looked terrible even at release.
report
Ok, being a loooooong time fan of the Elder Scrolls series (Daggerfall. ’nuff said.) i’ll keep it simple and short: no DRM or at least no invasive DRM (seriously: i’m gonna be mighty pissed if they crank in the godawful GFWL). “Hardcore” mode like in New Vegas. PhysX support. A better main story (Morrowind’s was okay. Oblivion’s much less appealing, and worst of all starts slow). And for Talon’s sake, rehire the mad genius who did the art on Morrowind, I still remember my mind being blown off by visiting the ultra-crab Redoran city and mushroomhattan (like Manhattan, but with mushrooms. I mean, mushrooms like skyscrapers. It’s a Telvanni thing.). Oh, and obviously, keep it moddable. Seriously. That’s the one thing that makes the Eldes Scrolls legendary.
report
FFS, get rid of the auto-levelling enemies, and the level-matched loot!
That destroyed Oblivion for me. Half the fun in Morrowind was wandering in to a place where I got my ar$e wopped, running away, levelling up and training, and then going back to kick the crud out of my erstwhile assailants and finding some Glass Daggers or something.
Also, Oblivion was really bland. Morrowind had weird stuff in it, strange architecture and seemed, well, foreign and alien…
Hmmm…
…And get rid of the wretched consolised interface too.
…And stop watering down the skill system.
I liked Oblivion, but nowhere near as much as the larger, weirder and more complex Morrowind (which I still play to this day).
report
Move the lore back to the 1st edition of the Pocket Guide please.
report
Co-op option.
report
Dear Bethesda,
please keep you MMO out of my Tamriel.
That is all.
report
Someone else said it already, but it’s worth repeating. Beth has been playing in the big league for a while now and the character art (which should be triple-AAA quality) is sub-standard, to put it bluntly. I don’t know what’s going on there or why no one calls them out on it, but it’s something that must be changed.
But if I had to pick just one (1) thing, you know what it would be? Proper character transitions, that’s what. When a character makes use of a door, gate, or whatever, I want to see that motherfucker open the door, walk through, and close the door behind him. No more fading out as they reach the door and then respawning in the next area. We have the technology. It can be done, goddammit.
report
I just don’t want it to be based in Cyrodiil again, since it’s by far the most boring region of Tamriel. Anywhere else please. Obviously taking the engine into consideration, there are areas of Tamriel that have geographical traits the Gamebro engine is probably not best suited for.
report
the most important things have been mentioned – the auto-levelling difficulty was terrible, the game mechanics were awkward (stealth missions in a game whose stealth mechanics could be summed up as crouch or don’t crouch…), the dungeons were rinse and repeat, etc etc etc.
But no-one has mentioned the conversation pie! When you had to converse with an NPC, and you could either flatter, threaten, flirt, joke, or whatever – clicking the correct section of the pie until the NPC respected you enough, or whatever the number represented.
Maybe the worst conversation mechanic ever? please remove it next time…
report
A main quest that isn’t over in a few hours. More Morrowind and Daggerfall, less Oblivion. The return of some skills from both, like the missing weapon skills (blunt axe lol etc), no walking into yet another near indenticle dungeon every few feet (at least space things out a bit more so it doesn’t look like a randomly generated pattern of ruins..). Climbing! Verticle movement in general (I’d like my series staple levitation back please). More than 4 voice actors. Better or much fewer NPC conversations with each other. A non broken leveling system (oh hey I leveled up playing the game normally and now everything kills me in a few hits and I can’t hurt them at all for some reason, thanks first Oblivion playthrough!). Beards. Less broadly and loudly american sounding orcs, it clashes so.. ( I R A KNIGHT!).
Oh god, yes, a better speechcraft system.
Oh and not being able to pick 100 skill locks at 1 skill due to an easy minigame, but they fixed that in fallout 3.
report
Make class and acquired positions (head of a guild, etc…) have more weight in the game. I found it amusing being head of the Mages guild in Oblivion, for instance, and snooty members telling me off.
Classes should mean something, other than a set of skills one focuses on a bit more than others…let there be certain abilities only some classes can use…make NPC’s of certain classes offer special services (Rangers/scouts can reveal new places on your map, warriors could act as mercenaries and accompony you, etc…)
By latter ES games, magic became too “common”-even among the more modest of enemy bandits, for instance, were still often equipped with a healing/protection spell….make magic something earned, and performed by folks with something of a different unique worldview of life and spirit than the bandit who wants to pillage you for 100 coins…by Oblivion it became Cheap.
report
To kind of continue just a wee bit more on my last post:
Apply also what I said about magic, to “Warrior” and “Stealth” oriented classes. Warriors shouldn’t just be the best at running up to things and smashing…there could be a feature of learning fighting stances, parrying, etc….previous games handled stealth types alright, I suppose, but still, something more than just being really quick…make some use of being coy too…something of an extension on manipulative speechcraft…
report
Some sort of VATS-style (pause – target specific limb) combat!
report
Please please please dont try to appeal any more to the console market.
The quick hit of graphics mean they play it briefly and retain no loyalty.
Make the game with more content like Dagger Fall or Morrowind.
So PC friendly UI, better voice actors and more of them, Better designed and more varied world, more weapons, bring back the cut skills from earlier games, introduce new skills (Go on, use initative) and if you can cope with it, make the storyline interesting like in Morrowind.
report
Rage ID Tech 5
report
RPS have allready given a pretty comprehensive request live but… il repeat some of it anyway
Morrowind & Shivering Isles good
Oblibion bad..
needs compelling storyline, rather than a **** attempt to cover the return of the king
needs original and immersive setting, not a square inch of standard D&D (i have nothing against DnD’s world in its self, just its over use).
needs characters you actually want to talk too.
needs more interesting items, rather than tones of randomised crap ones.
report
-Hire a new goddamn character animator, and/or use an engine that lets you actually animate folks in a believable fashion.
-Hire more than six voice actors, but you already know this.
-Do not level scale enemies. Do not level scale enemies. Do not level scale enemies.
-Give enemies a plethora of abilities so that they do shit other than “run at you in a straight line to hit you with their weapon our touch spell” or “stand still and fire arrows/spells at you” or the incredible “summon a thing to run directly at you and hit you with its weapon while the summoner shoots arrows/spells at you”. Do this instead of just giving all powerful enemies the AI of a brick but the ability to plaster you in one hit and the fortitude to take seventy sword blows.
-Give the player access to said abilities. Why do all of your spells either have to have touch range or travel in a straight line? What about homing fireballs? What about calling down lightning? What about disintegrating people? What about ‘grenade’ type spells where you toss the ball-o’-whatever and it explodes a short time later? How about thinking about making magic fucking interesting? It’s magic, you can do whatever the hell you want with it!
-Don’t level scale loot either. If I manage to get into an area out of my depth and survive, I should be rewarded with awesome shit. Not a chest full of forks and tongs at the end of a long cave, like what tended to happen in Oblivion.
-Bring back the cool spells like Jump and Levitate. Why the hell did you take those out?
-More types of spells, or at least make a six damage starter fireball look different than a three hundred damage nuke.
And most importantly:
-Make the locale be something interesting, instead of the same token bullshit “forest/snow/volcano/swamp” locales we’ve seen in video games since Super Mario Brothers Fucking 3. I half expected Oblivion to have a Cloud World or Pipe World. Although, a cloud world or pipe world would have honestly been a major improvement.
-Populate the world with interesting people, and write quests that have interesting stories that have at least some level of intrigue and whose plot twists aren’t guessable by first graders.
report
Check it out, here’s a spell idea that would rule that isn’t even that original:
-A spell that lets you shrink to a fraction of your normal size, which allows you to sneak into places you normally wouldn’t be able to, and fit between the bars of a cell door or portcullis or something similar. Hell, if you wanted to go whole hog, have a gang of thieves you can join who use precisely this tactic. Be sure to include having people be able to step on you by accident, and having epic battles with small insects as part of the quest line.
That, despite being stolen from fairy tales, is already about a thousand times as interesting as anything you can do in Oblivion.
report
don’t hire that deep-voiced announcer-sounding VA again. that guy is incapable of acting.
an engine that can handle more than like 9 guys and their combat algos on screen at a time would be great too. marty’s mutant mod and phalanx were among the many mods that managed to drag me through FO3 on my 4th attempt at playing it. if i have to do without them, i can do without another bethesda impression of george lucas’ idea of a screenplay.
report
I loved Oblivion, and it is the kind of love which overlooks flaws. Nevertheless, please fix the ropey animations/doughfaced people, tah muchly.
P.
report
Make it so that anyone who uses the editing programme to do nothing but make ‘sexy’ outfits for the women and/or give them all 48FF tits and visibly shaved genitals will be electrocuted.
Probably asking a lot, though.
report
So many changes I’d ask for if I could. I will list some of my dearest wishes. Thanks, RPS!
- More character depth and a wider variety of villagers’ talk, more involved role-playing in general.
- The possibility to have spouses (of any gender) and offspring. Who wants to buy those houses and live there on their own?
- A character editor that allows you to move sliders back and forth without ruining your progress. I lost all of my character’s features when experimenting with the age slider.
- A different camera angle when talking to people, and more realistic faces.
- No more humanoid animals, please. Seriously.
- Social interaction and PC charisma that do not boil down to an incredibly dull mini-game.
- An inventory that doesn’t list goods as stolen unless they are unique or famous. In Oblivion, no one cares if you ride a stolen horse, but if you unmount and remount, you are arrested for stealing it. The same if you drop and pick up a stolen carrot. Yeah, right.
- Better playability in third-person view, improved fighting controls, especially for archery.
- Less repetitive dungeons, diseased opponents (except where necessary for the story), and rabid animals out in the wilderness (same problem in Fallout 3, a nuisance).
- Finally, no prison or sewers in the beginning. ;-)
report
no todd howard.
report
Drop the poly count on everything so we can have more stuff on screen. I want them to make a first-person RPG with cities that can be described as “bustling” instead of “barren”. Even if they have to make it about as visually complex as Quake 3. That will also mean that everyone can run it on their PC. A text parser for conversations would also be a nice thing to do.
report
I agree with this, any sense of scale is too often sacrificed for visual detail. Making everything highly scalable would be the way to go, so that you could play super-low-poly on a certain system and still see all the activity, while beefy or future systems will be able to have the same bustling activity with uncompromised visual detail.
report
Voice acting that isn’t rubbish
Dialogue that isn’t rubbish
People who talk at the same time as each other in conversation rather then politely taking turns and leaving an obvious gap when they’re supposed to be interrupting.
An environment that reacts to the conversation you’re having (think bar going quiet when you pick a fight)
Oh actually some decent ambient sound effects would be needed first, can we have those too please?
More text less speech, we all skip that nonsense anyway and insisting on recording every line limits your options and just means the voice actors get bored, sound bored, make us bored and tearfull.
A new door opening sound, although I’d quite like the squarkey bird type monster effect from daggerfall to make a comeback, that one still creeps me out.
Theme music that is used sparingly, if at all. If you have good ambient effects you don’t need a constant score.
Theme music that isn’t heavily based on the last game in the series. No sane human wants to hear the same tune over and over for 40+ hours. Especially not twice. Please god not three times.
So yes, some sort of conversational system that’s not as rubbish as every game ever. Someone on the team that gives a fig about audio.
For bonus points:
NPCs who lie convincingly, have subtle motives and are generally unpredictable.
NPCs with a sense of humour who take the piss when you say stupid hero things.
I liked the other TES games by the way, even that one with the mutants and the guns.
report
More weapons, Gear, and others
More customization for our characters
Lot’s of crafting and resources
A Quest to be able to construct a town or own a existing town.
More Spells
Hi-Res Graphics and Low-Res Graphics with Choice
Extra Modding Support
More Quests, Extra longevity (I want to beat this game with or without cheats in more then 2 weeks), CGI Cutscenes if possible (something like Starcraft 2 CGI on almost every mission if you can be able to do that).
Intelligent AI (at least give the AI a chance to Ambush or Surprise me…)
More Scenery
More Traps, Ability to use traps
An Ever-Growing City (We need this, i hate to see the same face, no children, no growth for children to become adults, adults to Elder, i want an ever-growing community of new NPC’s coming in and out of town, it add in more visual and environment on cities so you know how crowded cities and town are).
report
There are a few things I would love to see in any future Bethesda (or Bethesda-style) RPG:
Euphoria\Endorphin style physics-based character animation. The way characters move around in the Gamebryo games is pretty… shall we say… old-school? The way animations, movement and path-finding are executed really jumps out and screams “this is a game”. Nowadays there should be no need to watch a companion run on the spot into a wall or rock every time you walk over some varied terrain. I understand that path-finding is no easy feat in an open-world game, but at least code your movement so that people’s feet stop moving when they do. A complete movement-animation overhaul would do wonders, and physics-based stumbling and whatnot would add enormously to immersion.
NO LEVEL CAP! Just make the XP requirement for leveling increase (and gains decrease) exponentially after a certain point so that balance isn’t destroyed (unless the player puts in enough hundreds of hours to deserve to be overpowered, of course). Arbitrary caps make playing feel like a waste of time once the cap is reached. Additionally, there should be tougher and tougher creatures or NPCs hidden in hard to reach parts of the world.. Places that many would never reach, that most would die upon reaching, which offer unending challenge to those who would keep playing and leveling forever. You shouldn’t become a God after 100 hours.. there should always be vastly more powerful beings in the world, even if they generally keep to themselves.
NO (or better) SCALING! Beefing up any old NPC to match your level or armor class doesn’t really cut it as a believable challenge. Why level up at all if everything else does with you? I like there being areas too dangerous for me to visit, just as I like there being ones I am safe in. I like learning it the hard way and having a sense of vulnerability. At least make it optional. Pwease?
NO FORCED ENDING! Make the game truly “open world” by allowing the player to continue to explore and quest after the main quest-line is completed. Procedural NPCs (presumably with text-only dialog) and quests would really help here. Additional live-in-the-world features would go a long way too. Perhaps purchasing or building residences, defending them, farming, etc etc. Unscripted faction conflict would also add a lot, a stronger faction sending attacking parties to a weaker one, with the balance very much tippable with player involvement. Factions with variable populations.. Factions able to take over each others’ locations.. Defeated factions perhaps scattering and regrouping on some remote part of the world, potentially building strength again with player help. If would be lovely if, even after you’ve completed the main story, you could pick some weak faction and lead them to continent-wide dominion by helping them capture enemy locations, attract and train new people, etc.
Oh yeah and.. multiple voice actors saying the same line of dialog? Unforgivable. Since you’re making a new recording for the line already.. how long can it possibly take to re-word the sentence? Half the time NPCs are right next to each other when they repeat them. Ugh. Hell, send me 10,000 sentences to write re-interpretations of and I’ll do it for you for free just so I don’t have to listen to multiple voice actors saying identical lines of dialog in the next Elder Scrolls game.
Otherwise, keep up the great work! I only care because I’m already a fan.
report
A more dynamic world. I want to see economies that are actually tied to the game world. Hunters kill game, bring skins back to an armorsmith who pays the hunter for the skins and then makes them into armor to sell.
Things like random infestations of goblins or ogres in mines or forests which clearing up will gain you the affection of the town and prevent an economy from being crippled.
While I’m dreaming I’d also like a dynamic system of politics and conflict between the towns that will happen with or without you, but does allow you to affect in a notable fashion.
Right now NPC’s go through the motions, but none of them have any meaning. I want everything they do to have meaning. If I manage to deprive an NPC of water long enough, they should die. The same for food and sleep. If I muck around in their place of work and cause trouble for long enough, they should eventually go broke.
Barring all that, I’d like to be able to run my own town. Construct the businesses I want, where I want.
Not that any of this will actually happen. They still haven’t even noticed the glaring shortcomings of their RPG mechanics in the Elder Scrolls. You know. The ones where you DON’T TAG your important abilities and wind up sticking a roll of quarters on the jump button while you cast cheap spells in the corner on a table?
report
Like a cross between oblivion and fable 3? Sounds good, realism of oblivion, effects on places like fable 3 (promised).
report
Don’t tag your important abilities so that you can develop them without levelling up? That’s not a flaw in the skill system. If you choose to play the system rather than the game that’s your fault, not the game’s. Of course if the game were to modify its difficulty according to your level such that levelling up incurred a net disadvantage, that would be a significant fault in the game. But the fault would not be in the skill system.
report
To those who are convinced that people always think the game they played first is the best — false. I played Oblivion first. Liked it, and played it for about a year. Tried Morrowind second, and discovered it was superior in almost every way except graphically, and played it for another year. Now I’m playing Daggerfall, and I’m astonished at how much more interesting and innovative it is than the later two. Seriously, these games just get better as I experience them backwards, once I got past the poor graphics.
report
Things I want for TES V:
- Deadly Reflexes
- Unique Landscapes
- Better Cities
- FCOM
You can just copy/paste, Beth. Thanks!
report
they wanted Oblivion to be similar to Ultima 7. I would like to see them actually doing that with TES5 but I’m not sure they can.
report
Morrowind 2: Return of the Nerevarine.
Nah, only kidding. However, I would genuinely love a game that unites the four Player characters of pasts Elder Scrolls games (The Eternal Champion, Daggerfall’s protagonist who’s rank I forget, The Nerevarine and The Champion of Cyrodiil) to create an epic squad of A-Team style death dealing.
Again, only being half serious there. What I really want are places that more closely resemble the Carcassone than Disneyland Paris. I don’t want a bowdlerised, Americanised version of medieval Europe.
report
Just to add my voice to the weight of a lot of what is written here, the interest in exploration in Oblivion was reduced for me by two things:
- auto-levelling which took away the sense of danger, and the sense of anticipation i.e. ‘I’ll come back to that when I’m ready to take it on’
- the fantasy world being the done-to-death romantic medieval Europe + monsters. Morrowind was far more interesting than that.
report
BLAH BLAH BLAH OBLIVION SUCKS BLAH BLAH BLAH SNARK SNARK SNARK
PLEASE NO MORE ELDER SCROLLS SNARK SNARK BETHESDA SUCKS BLAH BLAH
In retrospect, it was naive for me to think this thread would actually be fans of the ES series offering constructive input onto what they’d like to see in the next installment.
I’ve only seen this phenomenon twice: once with Oblivion, and also with anything Crytek does. People feel the insatiable need to clog up any and all threads on the subject over and over with sarcastic trashy comments about how terrible the games are, even though they’ve done this a million times in every other thread on the subject.
At some point guys, can we consider the point made? We get it! You hate Bethesda/Crytek/or whatever. You think their games are trash. You will never buy anything from them again. You hope they go out of business.
It’s just frustrating that it’s literally impossible to have a constructive debate on these games because you have to scrolls through pages of haters making their ultra-repetitive posts over and over. The vocal minority who, going against all the critical acclaim and the enjoyment of millions of people, always hijacks the discussion.
report
In fariness, the majority of posts in this thread are either constructive criticism with suggestions for improvements from people who were disappointed by oblivion or constructive criticism with suggestions for improvements from people who enjoyed Oblivion but would like to see an even better game.
There is a minority of posts from haters who simply snark but even most of the haters are at least supplying reasons for their dislike and even, frequently, constructive suggestions for improvement.
There seems to be very little in the way of Oblivion Sucks don’t bother making a new one. I also notice there are a couple of Oblivion is awesome don’t change it type of posts which are surely just the same?
And these things will never be “point made” in the same way that people will always express their opinions when given the opportunity. That opinion is still held and so still valid. If the critics made their point once and stopped but the fans made their points continually then the world would be all fluffy bunnies but true opinion would go unrepresented.
report
Some type of instakill melee option on sleeping mortals. It’s ridiculous that you can’t kill some people in one hitwhile they’re sleeping. No more people waking up after I hit them and making enough noise to alarm the guards.
report