Elder Scrolls V anounced!

[Jacen]

A bitter part of me wants to rant how much better this game would be if they were developing it solely for the PC :P

Here's my wishlist:

1. Very first and foremost, a better story. Better quality writing for the main quest and the sidequests. Attempt to make every quest in the game feel like it received their full attention and wasn't tacked on. Balance the huge size of the setting with quality and uniqueness to the people, quests, creatures, environments, etc. In fact, I'd be completely fine if the game took place in an area smaller than Oblivion's, if every part of the world was meticulously crafted to be unique and special.

Fallout Las Vegas had superior storylines and interlinked quests and was much more complex than Fallout 3. They need to emulate that attention to detail and character building.

Basically, if they can nail this aspect, the rest can be shit and the game will still rock.

2. Combat : It sucks, it's not fun, its not dynamic, they need a better melee system (possibly encorporating the 3rd person view more, since it seems hard to have decent swordfights from the first person perspective), as it is, it just sucks. Find a way to make it more exciting and give the players more options. Choosing different fighting styles or special moves would help. Adding mounted combat would be a huge bonus as well.

3. More variety and unique items: RPG's need to have strong loot, and the problem with the Elder Scrolls games is there is very little variety in the items. One glass dai-katana is the same as every other one. There should be more visual differences as well. Why must every ebony breastplate look the same as all the others? How about some variants? More unique stuff helps give the player motivation to go into Cave no. 35.

4. Make the classes more distinct by giving them special abilities or perks. Limit the players ability to become a God-like warrior while also being a badass archmage. Daggerfall had a cool system were you could give your character bonus abilites, but you had to balance this out with weaknesses. Something like that would be a welcome return. Either way, they need to make it so that a character can't be a jack of all trades and a master of all.

5. Add in an optional hardcore mode like in Fallout New Vegas. This would require you to eat, drink, and sleep, or suffer consequences, including death. They should also allow you to specify how "hardcore" you want it, from infrequent need to eat/drink/sleep to more realistic modes.

6. Hire a graphic artist that can actually create good looking people. And no, I don't mean every NPC should be beautiful, but they should at least look REALISTIC and proportionate, not like circus freaks. Every Bethesda game that comes out, there is always a mod to alter the appearances of the NPCS, because they are always god-awful looking and just badly done.

7. Make sure every damn book from the other games is in this one.

8. Some people wouldn't like this, and it would add to their work, but I definitely feel it helps a game when you can hear your character speak the lines you choose them to say. I can't say enough how much this adds to the immersion. It's great fun in Mass Effect when you get to hear Commander Shepard actually say the lines you want him/her to. This would get very complicated with this game though, since you can be and elf, argonian, orc, etc. Still, one can dream.

[WrightOfWay]

8. Some people wouldn't like this, and it would add to their work, but I definitely feel it helps a game when you can hear your character speak the lines you choose them to say. I can't say enough how much this adds to the immersion. It's great fun in Mass Effect when you get to hear Commander Shepard actually say the lines you want him/her to. This would get very complicated with this game though, since you can be and elf, argonian, orc, etc. Still, one can dream.

Judging by previous Bethesda games, the less voice work in Skyrim the better. They not only blow their entire VA budget on a single celebrity but the other 4 people they picked up to play every other role in the game are awful. I don't know if this is down to the actors or just bad direction (the horrid writing certainly doesn't help) but it's just bad.

Everything else I agree with you. I would especially love Dark Messiah of Might and Magic style combat.

[Eurytus]

The main things I'd like to see back are a few features/characteristics from Morrowind. The two aspects of that game that I enjoyed the most were;

1. The number of unique objects or places in the world. Most of which were little hinted at, if at all. Like the viking ship buried in an underground lake miles underground. Like the underwater city with the talking statue. Like the flooded Dwarven grotto at some random offshore crag of rock. I liked the fact that most of these required a lot of luck or wandering to find and sometimes required pretty high end spells or equipment to get to (like lenghty underwater breathing abilities). It meant that you never knew what you would find, and that made wilderness wandering very fun.

2. Allied to this is the fact that you never knew what creatures you would discover. There was always the chance to encounter something much, much higher level than you. And that made dungeons very tense.

When I first played Oblivion I was unaware of the scaling so when I, early on, visited a vampire fort it was very tense. Because I assumed they were much more powerful than me and therefore creeped around the whole fort. Only attacking with stealth if at all. When I discovered I could have taken them all out with little effort the tension was lost.

Oblivion did have some of the fear/excitement at the unknown. You had some odd little gems in there. Like the ghost of the boatman. Like the suicide note on the troll under the bridge. Like the fact you could get rival Goblin clans to attack each other's bases by moving staffs around. But ultimately it didn't fear anywhere near as unknowable as Morrowind. And that's what I would like back.

[Werthead]

News on combat.

Apparently your shield will not be an impenetrable barrier of infinitum this time around. Blocks, attacks and movement are all combined with the physics engine to make stuff more realistic. You won't be able to backpedal away from enemies shooting them with fireballs and arrows as you go any more. Equipping arrows to bows won't take as long.

Positive-sounding stuff.

[Thelonious]

Was thinking of playing Morrowind again myself. Any advice on which mods are good?

Tamriel Rebuilt. I'm biased because i'm involved with it, but it's honestly the best fan expansion of the game in existence.

[Thelonious]

4. Make the classes more distinct by giving them special abilities or perks. Limit the players ability to become a God-like warrior while also being a badass archmage. Daggerfall had a cool system were you could give your character bonus abilites, but you had to balance this out with weaknesses. Something like that would be a welcome return. Either way, they need to make it so that a character can't be a jack of all trades and a master of all.

I think they've done the right thing by abolishing classes altogether. It doesn't fit with the 'do anything' ethos of the series.

7. Make sure every damn book from the other games is in this one.

Much as I love, for example, the 36 Lessons of Vivec, that was distinctive to Morrowind and wouldn't fit the new setting. We need more new writings along the lines of The Seven Fights of the Aldudagga.

8. Some people wouldn't like this, and it would add to their work, but I definitely feel it helps a game when you can hear your character speak the lines you choose them to say. I can't say enough how much this adds to the immersion. It's great fun in Mass Effect when you get to hear Commander Shepard actually say the lines you want him/her to. This would get very complicated with this game though, since you can be and elf, argonian, orc, etc. Still, one can dream.

Definitely not! I'm roleplaying a character of my own creation, not one who has a set voice and a choice of three lines of dialogue for any given situation. I also want a game that can be modded easily, and full voice work isn't really compatible with that.

[Medieval Housefly]

I hope they don't make a mistake like they did with the newest Fable. Fable II was awesome in that there was a lot of opportunity to make choices and it was a long game. Fable III took away a lot of choice and the gam was much shorter.

Which would be a better platform to buy it on, PS3 or XBOX?

[Werthead]

New screenshots.

Looks a bit like Oblivion, only with slightly less crap facial features. So far this new engine isn't exactly blowing me away.

[Vegan Rob]

Since it has to run on 360 and PS3 I wouldn't expect the engine to be that much of an improvement. I'll be playing on 360 since my PC isn't really a gaming machine.

Impressed: Todd Howard talks dragons in the GameInformer podcast. If even half what he said makes it, they'll be the nuts.

Not Impressed: Todd Howard says level scaling is out but then talks about how "dungeon X" will be set to "player level +/-". I'd much prefer if the entire world were levelled from the outset. Set foot in the wrong place too soon and you're dead. Hopefully we won't have hordes of bandits in Glass armour this time round though (seriously dude, you want money? There's a merchant in Cheydinhal that'll buy your boots for 1,000 septims. That'll let you buy 200 loaves of bread!)

[Merentha]

The leveled caves thing was the implementation in Morrowind and FO3, where each cave had a range of levels. If you were below that range, it just defaulted to the lowest in the range, above, the highest. So area x has a 5-10 level range. You stumble there at level 1, its a level 5 cave and will probably be rough. You stumble on a level 25-30 area, and you're in a world of hurt. So, some scaling, but caps on it. Worked nicely, in my opinion. Good sense of progression (I didn't even notice the scaling in Morrowind) and more fun combat, so you aren't entirely overleveled.

[Vegan Rob]

I remember Morrowind having exterior levelling where some areas (the Ashlands, Molog Amur, the Grazelands) were tougher than others (Ascadian Isles, Bitter Coast), but you're right, it was the caves with named NPC's that were at set levels, the others were scaled. It was a better system than Oblivion and I hope they return to it.

[Thelonious]

I remember Morrowind having exterior levelling where some areas (the Ashlands, Molog Amur, the Grazelands) were tougher than others (Ascadian Isles, Bitter Coast), but you're right, it was the caves with named NPC's that were at set levels, the others were scaled. It was a better system than Oblivion and I hope they return to it.

I remember the horror of accidentally blundering into an Ash Vampire's(!) cave as a level 1 character, and the thrill of stealing some of his bling and making it out alive.

[The Fan]

Am I the only one who loved Oblivion? I mean, yeah, the end of the game kind of sucked, but I still played it for an absurd amount of time. Of course, I never played Morrowind, so maybe it's the comparison that kills Oblivion.

Same here, I am currently playing Oblivion, about 160 hours so far, and it's far from perfect, but a lot of fun. I also never played Morrowind, but I did play Daggerfall back before they invented fire, and liked that quite a bit.

One of the chief complaints about Oblivion I do have, is how it looks, which is partly my fault, the game DID drop in 2006 and I picked it up nearly 5 years later, so my expectations were overset. That being said, if the NEW Elder Scrolls game still looks like that, WTF? Even if they do create it for the console market, they should be able to do substantially better. Right?

[Merentha]

Not necessarily. Even if they've managed to squeeze more out of it, 360s are still mostly the same platform they were in 2006. You can only go so far on a 512mb graphics card, for instance. And without requiring a hard drive, since some 360s don't have them, texture sizes or area sizes are also effectively locked. You have to be able to load everything off the disk, which, again, means that areas on multiplatform games are a lot smaller than they could be on a PC.

So, long story short, no, don't expect it to be that much prettier than Oblivion. Certainly not the difference between a 2006 PC game and a 2011 one.

[Jacen]

Fuckin' consoles, you're killing me.

[Poobah]

Yeah consoles :(

Edit: I would point out that Crysis 2 looks fucking amazing though and that's gonna be released on consoles. From some screenies I've seen from within their level editor and shit the PC graphics look massively better than anything either the PS3 or Xbox can do.

[Migey]

Can i ask what these games actually are? A few years ago, i played Oblivion, i think, and remember not liking it - combat felt clunky, stupid and awkward, i was confused, had no idea what to do, how, or if i was doing it right, or anything else. I quit after a few hours, i think in some snowy city up north (although i remember being in some very demony place, and getting halfway through some castle that kept fucking me over).

Can i ask what the games actually are? I didn't play Oblivion long enough to get a sense, since i really had no idea what i was doing. Also, are these playable on computer? I've seen references to Oblivion being worse then the others, so i might give them a shot again if they are avaliable on computer. (I don't have a 360 anymore)

[Anatole Kuragin]

The main things I'd like to see back are a few features/characteristics from Morrowind. The two aspects of that game that I enjoyed the most were;

1. The number of unique objects or places in the world. Most of which were little hinted at, if at all. Like the viking ship buried in an underground lake miles underground. Like the underwater city with the talking statue. Like the flooded Dwarven grotto at some random offshore crag of rock. I liked the fact that most of these required a lot of luck or wandering to find and sometimes required pretty high end spells or equipment to get to (like lenghty underwater breathing abilities). It meant that you never knew what you would find, and that made wilderness wandering very fun.

2. Allied to this is the fact that you never knew what creatures you would discover. There was always the chance to encounter something much, much higher level than you. And that made dungeons very tense.

When I first played Oblivion I was unaware of the scaling so when I, early on, visited a vampire fort it was very tense. Because I assumed they were much more powerful than me and therefore creeped around the whole fort. Only attacking with stealth if at all. When I discovered I could have taken them all out with little effort the tension was lost.

Oblivion did have some of the fear/excitement at the unknown. You had some odd little gems in there. Like the ghost of the boatman. Like the suicide note on the troll under the bridge. Like the fact you could get rival Goblin clans to attack each other's bases by moving staffs around. But ultimately it didn't fear anywhere near as unknowable as Morrowind. And that's what I would like back.

I agree with all of the above. The only issues in Morrowind that I can remember feeling an improvement in Oblivion were combat and NPC interaction, both of which were still pretty shitty in IV.

[Returned]

Can i ask what these games actually are? A few years ago, i played Oblivion, i think, and remember not liking it - combat felt clunky, stupid and awkward, i was confused, had no idea what to do, how, or if i was doing it right, or anything else. I quit after a few hours, i think in some snowy city up north (although i remember being in some very demony place, and getting halfway through some castle that kept fucking me over).

Can i ask what the games actually are? I didn't play Oblivion long enough to get a sense, since i really had no idea what i was doing. Also, are these playable on computer? I've seen references to Oblivion being worse then the others, so i might give them a shot again if they are avaliable on computer. (I don't have a 360 anymore)

They're sandbox style RPGs, being almost revolutionairy with their quality and innovation.

[Zoë Sumra]

Can i ask what the games actually are? I didn't play Oblivion long enough to get a sense, since i really had no idea what i was doing. Also, are these playable on computer? I've seen references to Oblivion being worse then the others, so i might give them a shot again if they are avaliable on computer. (I don't have a 360 anymore)

The Elder Scrolls games are massive open-ended RPGs with multiple threads of quests to do: Morrowind's range from pick-the-flower-and-give-it-to-the-wizard to wipe-out-the-vampire-nest, with a main quest running through the middle. Hundreds of hours of gameplay, learning curve steeper than some players like, lots and lots of things to do and see, lots of in-game customisation. Basically, run round being a hero. If you like that sort of thing, and can get into the games, you'll probably like them a lot. If this kind of RPGing doesn't appeal to you, the games won't do anything for you in the end.

Morrowind and Oblivion are available for PC. I've racked up over a hundred hours on Morrowind; my PC's too old to run Oblivion - it sits in the pile of console games I've bought myself and haven't had time to play because I've been too busy finishing my novel, planning my wedding and playing Morrowind.