This is a bit of a mammoth post, outlining various thoughts I've had over the year about TES. In some ways its a bit of TES6 wishlist and I'd like to hear your thoughts on some of the ideas.
Story, pacing and the world
Bethesda should concentrate on the pacing and urgency of the main quest as it can be a difficult thing to balance in a free roam experience. A plot needs urgency to drive it forward and give it meaning but at the same time the player needs to have plenty of opportunities to see the rest of the game whilst they travel without feeling like a dick for putting off saving the little girl from the burning tower. She may not be scripted to start choking on the smoke fumes until the player arrives but while he's at the table crafting potions it can feel a little odd to put such things off.
Morrowind achieved this quite well. There was no big catastrophe at the start of the game to make you feel the need to charge right in to the main quest and there were plenty of points where the main quest givers advised you to look around and learn about your surroundings rather than simply, "Go here, kill him, fetch that, now you're a hero." This really helped you feel your character progress and enabled you to take in a lot more of the game in a way that felt natural.
Where urgency is needed the big set pieces and catastrophes are something that Bethesda seem to be getting a lot better at in the past two titles. They should however stop putting them right at the beginning and let the urgency and momentum in the main quest build gradually to a more climactic end.
One of the things that I felt made the pacing much better in Morrowind was the way the player traversed the world. Now, I know there are those that feel like fast travel is something that was a huge improvement from Morrowind to Oblivion but hear me out. In Morrowind the world 'felt' so much bigger because different areas were harder to get to. When a quest took me east across Vvardenfell to the islands I felt like I was going a long way from home (Balmora). I felt it important to sell off all unwanted loot, get my armour and weapons in top shape and stock up on potions as I wasn't going to be able to just nip back if I forgot something, travelling had consequence. I recall in the main quest when Caius sends you North to the Ashlander camp, he says that it's going to be a long journey that you need to prepare for, and it really was. I trekked up, doing some odd jobs in the towns I stopped at on the way without feeling rushed and not once did I go back home until I'd dealt with everything I was able to in the north. I felt more adventurous without the safety net of fast travel and the world felt bigger.
In the same vein the geography of the world can really lend itself to a greater sense of adventure. Barren, desolate landscapes or nigh impassable mountains are a great way of making the player learn to be self sufficient. If you can't get back home to stash all that loot without traipsing back the way you've just spend ages battling through, you're less likely to pick up everything of value you see and become the richest dude in Tamriel by level 15. Nor are you as likely to chug your last four health potions unless you absolutely have to, sure there's a brood of vampires in that cave, but it won't be an easy fight and even if you survive, there isn't a shop for miles to restock...
...But at the same time, this place won't be easy to get back to so maybe it's worth risking dealing with it now? These kinds of decisions are less prevalent in Skyblivion, as its never too hard to get to the nearest town and you can just fast travel straight back! I'd love to see Bethesda come up with a way to give travel more meaning in TES6.
Gameplay
Bethesda will hopefully continue its trend of improving the combat mechanics. I should mention a couple of issues I had with Skyrim’s combat system as while it was better than Oblivion and a million times better than Morrowind, it wasn't perfect, so here goes...
Dual wielding didn't feel great to me, it was the first time Beth had done it so I was expecting it to be on par with what they're used to, but it really didn't feel fluid enough, the way the animations and attacks worked meant you were forced to fight on the spot in a static way which allowed enemies to dodge you and then you were left open for counter attack after you missed. I'm not convinced that wielding two weapons means that you can't achieve any form of blocking as well.
The equipping of one spell in each hand works ok and makes more sense than firing a spell from the same hand that's holding your sword, ala Oblivion. What I didn't like so much was the way staves worked. They simply fired a spell that you could just as easily fire from your hands. True they use no magicka and therein lies their advantage but since you received no experience for using them, I found myself largely ignoring staves in Skyrim, which was a shame because they would have greatly improved the aesthetic of my mage characters, however they just weren’t worth using. They should definitely have some melee capabilities also, I'd be much happier to be a mage with a backup melee if it were a staff rather than a sword/axe/ mace/ dagger etc.
Finally I hope they fix the time it takes to switch weapons in the next elder scrolls. The three(ish) second pause when switching between spells and weapons for example was something inexplicable that got me killed several times. 2 seconds for sheathe/draw animations is fine, but the extra pause was bad.
One change I would like to see to gameplay in future is, granted, more of a console issue than for PC players, but I would love to seen a greater amount of hotkeys available to the player. Just off the top of my head, modifying Skyrim’s controller setup slightly could give the player access to up to sixteen hotkeys! Have the D-pad be the first four and hold down LB to access another four that all map items/abilities to your left hand, then have two further sets by holding down B (Circle on Playstation) and RB (this is assuming that you do not use shouts in the next game) totalling eight more that map to your right hand.
Now you have a wide variety of tools at your disposal that keeps combat out of the menu! Having potion-taking or applying poisons something that you do with hotkeys, showing a quick animation of your character performing the action, would add a strategic dimension to the game that is far more interesting than stopping time to enter your inventory to eat ten wheels of cheese!
To make this work BGS should make a slight change to the way potions and poisons work that I have been waiting for since I first played Morrowind. For potions, one bottle should contain multiple ‘doses’ so you aren’t magically carting around 100+ bottles all the time, something like twenty discrete sips would be sensible I feel.
Poisons should be similar, you get a bottle-full and when you apply it to, say, a sword, an animation shows your character pouring the whole bottle on the blade, but instead of it only working on the next swing, let the poison last for multiple swings (fifty or so) with diminishing returns, so the potency of the poisons wears out over time. Now for arrows, you dip your next arrowhead in the bottle before you fire, with one bottle letting you poison multiple arrows before it runs out (again, say thirty-fifty uses). For soul gems since they really are used one at a time, it would be unreasonable to need to hotkey them, but perhaps have a cool animation of your character smashing the gem on the item they want to recharge after you have selected it from the inventory.
Another gameplay feature I would see return is the need to use a silver, deadric or enchanted weapon to harm ghosts and deadra. I would include the need for enchanted weapons to have charge left in order to do damage though. It was just a nice way of demonstrating character development, it felt good to graduate to a level where you didn’t have to run away from these enemies because you couldn’t hurt them (of course you then find out that they’re hard as nails and you run anyway!)
Having dark dungeons that you need some form of light source to see in is a great idea and really immersive. Torches have developed nicely since Morrowind and this is how I would like to see them improved in TES6. When you draw a torch out, don’t have it instantly lit, if the player is able, let them equip a fire or shock spell in the other hand to ignite it. If the player does not use magic, have them need to locate a source of fire, so the torch lights when you get close enough. This would bring the act of using a torch more to the forefront of players’ minds and make the act of exploring a dark cave more atmospheric. Also, make is so we can swing a torch rather than block with it, we could use them to scare off weak animals and put some distance between us and stronger foes. A power attack with a torch could make us throw it at the enemy, setting them on fire and staggering them to give us the edge in combat. Finally, if we have a lit torch in hand, switching to another item/spell/ or taking a potion should make us drop the lit torch, so it still lights the area, and if we pick it up, it is still lit so it is auto-equipped.
Wardrobe
Here is an area where I really have a lot to say, some good, some critical. One thing I will say right now is that I fully appreciate that Beth needed to reduce the amount of items a player could equip to free up enough memory to have multiple characters on screen, the last generation of consoles couldn’t handle that many apparel slots and that's just the way it is.
Comparing the armour sets to the Morrowind and Oblivion equivalents shows that Skyrim's armour was MUCH better, it really was. So many people have complained that the deadric armour looks silly but compare it to the previous versions, seriously, it is much better. The reason why it feels wrong when you wear it isn't because the armour itself is poorly designed, it's because it doesn't even slightly match the tone of the rest of the game world. Oblivion and then Skyrim's world design became so heavily influenced by medieval Europe, the more exotic fantasy elements that made Morrowind such a rich offering look completely out of place in the more recent titles. If Bethesda set the next instalment in another exotic, alien location and designed the world to be more Tamriel and less medieval Europe, these familiar old armour sets will feel right at home again, of this I am confident. One of the most unfortunate plot elements in Skyrim was the commonplace disdain for anything magical. It meant that the world itself was less magical and it affected the whole tone of the game.
Now my biggest gripe with Skyrim without question, is not the fact that they reduced customisation by removing armour slots. As I mentioned, that was a necessary evil due to technological limitations. It was the fact that despite having to cut back, the developers lacked the consideration to make sure that what we ere left with was seamless. When offering minimal freedom of choice, what you do have should be of high quality. Instead, what we had was items that clip with other items, making mixing and matching what we had very frustrating. Also, many items were given properties that meant they wouldn't be useful to most PCs, case in point being the Dragon Priest masks; mostly featuring enchantments to aid magic users, yet all of them were were either light or heavy armour, meaning that anyone playing a mage that wears robes and uses alteration for protection, couldn't use them as they would actually lower their defence!
Now had such items been more thoughtfully designed, I'm more than happy to see Bethesda introduce new and powerful artefacts into the lore of the series. What I didn't like about Skyrim however, was how many of the famous weapons and armour of Tamriel were absent from the game. I find it difficult to comprehend how the developers spent so much time crafting the game, never once thinking that they ought to get round to including Umbra, Goldbrand, the Helm of Oreyn Bearclaw or the Ice Blade of the Monarch (Skyrim sorely lacked unique 2 handed swords) to name but a few. At some point a decision was made to not include these, which baffles me, as in my mind they are quintessential features of the ES universe, and add to the rich and detailed lore that makes the series so unique and engaging for players both old and new.
Although I already mentioned what a shame it was that the apparel of the game was limited by poor design, I feel the need to go into a little more detail on this point and get a little anecdotal. Say you want to make your Skyrim character something of a Battlemage. Sounds like a good plan, Battlemages are part of the lore, the combat system is designed so you can use both weapons and magic freely, so now you start to look at how your character should dress. Ok so you remember from Oblivion that the Battlemages at the arcane university wore heavy armour, replacing the helmet for a mages hood. Well we all remember how awesome those guys looked and Skyrim has specific mages hoods with magicka boosting enchantments so lets grab some steel armour and a hood and start adventuring! No wait! Whoever designed the armour assumed that players would only wear matching sets apparently, because all but a small number of armour sets clip with the hood, so now every time you look at your character, you see a graphical glitch that no one in the many months since 11/11/11 has bothered to fix. I know the phrase 'immersion breaking' is probably thrown around too much these days, but come on.
Also, there are more than a few higher level clothes and armour sets that don't look quite right. As an example I'm going to talk about the Archmage's Robes. Now they are totally unique, have an interesting design, and a powerful enchantment. Now some would say that's exactly the type of reward you want for a guild quest line. However there is a problem, it comes with a hood whether you like it or not, and personally I think the hood looks a bit rubbish, like it hugs the PC's head a bit too tightly, and it is also basically an adorned poncho, which in 3rd person wiggles rather comically when you run. So here is the issue, while many players may think the robes look awesome and go on their merry, there will be many that will not like them, or won't feel that they are quite right for their character and will have to find something else. The problem is, though, that they are the ONLY unique high end robes in the game, any other robes look less interesting and have less powerful enchantments, unless you enchant your own but that means you are stuck with the plainest robes in the game that aren't pre-enchanted. Two other robes that the player can acquire that are special both require you to have the Dragonborn DLC. One is Miraak's robes, which while they look quite good, feature an enchantment which would be detrimental to any mage that conjures up deadra to fight with, and the other is the Telvanni robes, which again, look great but the only set you can acquire in game are pre-enchanted with a fairly weak enchantment, which rules them out as end game attire for many players.
Now while most of my examples are mage based, these aren't just issues specific to a minority group of players. I've already explained how the most powerful set of heavy armour (deadric) feels out of place in Skyrim, and I have read and heard many accounts of people that don't like the look of the dragonplate armour. The stealthy players have the gorgeous nightingale armour, but it is a levelled reward, something I hope Bethesda will have abolished utterly by the time ES6 is released, and the highest tier set is bugged so that for many players it cannot be upgraded through smithing.
My basic point for the attire of Skyrim compared to Morrowind and how I hope Bethesda will improve in the future is that if it is indeed necessary to scale back on options due to technological limitations, it is so important to ensure that what we are left with is designed thoughtfully and avoids issues such as the embarrassingly bad clipping. Oh and give us capes/cloaks, you know someone will mod it almost immediately if you don’t and the console players miss out.
Realism
Realism is a double edged sword for sure. If your character needed three square meals and day and eight hours of sleep we'd never get any adventuring done. So sometimes you have to remove aspects of real life in order to make the game more exciting.
On the other hand, you can go too far the other way, removing so much that you no long feel you're adventuring in another world, rather you're participating in consecutive fights punctuated by occasional loading screens.
Having just received a new copy of Morrowind GOTY Edition for Xbox and started replaying a game I haven't played in years I felt compelled to make another direct Morrowind/Skyblivion comparison. I know I come off as a Morrowind fanboy, constantly bashing ES 4 and 5 and praising everything that Morrowind did right, but remember, I LOVED Oblivion, and I LOVE Skyrim. Years after its release I still play Skyrim most days and enjoy doing so.
So to my point, namely, fast travelling. Now this topic has been the subject of many an argument on forums all over the Internet, but as I'm currently playing Morrowind and Skyrim alongside each other, with no rose-tinted nostalgia specs, I can honestly say that the direction Bethesda have taken in allowing the player to fast travel to any location once discovered is awful.
Even before getting my new copy of Morrowind, I have been playing Skyrim for months as many others do; namely by forcing myself not to fast travel. I like to actually exist in the world my character is playing in, not just hop around from towns to dungeons collecting and selling loot. Fast travelling completely removes the exploration element and players that use it miss out on so much I feel.
Obviously people will argue that they prefer having fast travel and that the option should be there, leaving those of us that don't like it to not use it. But for me that doesn't really work. The game needs to be designed to make sense based on what the player experiences. If they present the option to experience less, then the story and general development of the world as a character has to make sense even to the person that is only seeing the parts with the most monsters and then the shops to sell their loot. This is a lot of the reason, I think, that people have described Skyrim as "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle."
In Morrowind, there is no option to magically warp to the nearest location to your objective. You either have to negotiate the public transport systems, planning a route based on what destinations are available from which towns or simply walk there yourself, dealing with whatever adventure and weirdness you encounter on the way. So basically, you need to either expand your knowledge of the game world to effectively use the transport system, or expand your knowledge of the game world to get to where you are going in one piece.
It also gives the player a much deeper sense of satisfaction to figure out the fastest way of getting from A to B. Between a good public transport system, guild guides, intervention and mark and recall spells and propylon chambers it was always possible to get around Vvardenfell fairly quickly, you just had to put it all together in your head, actually learn the game, rather than being spoon-fed.
Another very similar point that I won’t need to go in to so much detail about is the quest marker system. Basically, my view is that a magical floating marker pushes the player to complete the quest without understanding it. It goes back to my point above about designing the world based on what the player experiences. For the game to make a reasonable amount of sense for the player that just chases that white arrow on the horizon, rather than following directions, observing and understanding their surroundings, it loses depth somewhere along the way, and it is often the plot that suffers.
Magic
I often play mages and Battlemages and all of my ES characters usually have at least some magical ability so I have a few things to say here. What I plan to outline is basically my vision for how magic would work in TES: VI. Firstly, I like the Skyrim style of equipping a spell in your hand just like a weapon, what I would love to see is a way of casting a spell even when you are holding two handed weapon. Obviously you could only do this with the left hand, but it would add options for people to develop play styles that we haven’t see in ES games before (without a clunky unequip - reeqiup process).
Dual casting is something that I actually hope doesn’t make a return in the next ES. Casting a more powerful version of the spell with both hands has a tendency to make the one hand version obsolete, which in turn means that you don’t tend to have a different spell in your other hand, thus limiting the variety in play styles. I think it would better to have certain higher-tier spells that you equip in one hand (so you can have a second spell or whatever in the other) that take both hands to cast, with some kind of charging-up animation perhaps.
I thought wards were a fantastic idea in Skyrim, just not as fully realised as they could be. First of all, they cost too much, if this cost came down a bit so they didn’t sap your magicka dry in seconds they could do so much more. For example, why not remove the Shield spell from alteration altogether and have wards block magic AND physical damage like a shield? If your mage wants to have a passive armour bonus that lasts a certain amount of time, that is what bound armour is for! Considering how awesome the bound weapons looked in Skyrim I would love to see them bring back bound armour in a similar stye.
This leads neatly on to conjuration, very simple really, more variety of creatures. We should be able to summon all kinds of deadric creatures again, not just the elementals. Similarly for weapons, there should be a spell for each weapon type in the game, not just the sword/battleaxe/bow/dagger we had in Skyrim. As I said, bring back bound armour and make it look awesome like the weapons. Necromancy was quite good in Skyrim, although I wasn’t much of a fan of it being a projectile. I would rather see it as a concentrated cast, like flames and shock were, and for higher level corpses it takes a longer cast to raise them (meaning that you have to have more magicka and higher skill in conjuration to raise a high level corpse). This would then mean that you don’t have to pause and go through your spell list to find the version that handles that level of enemy, it all gets handled by the same spell.
With the removal of the Shield spell, you might think that leaves the Alteration school a bit lacking, but with the reintroduction of certain spells, that needn’t be the case. Burden and Feather are spells that could be fun and quite useful if used well, water breathing and walking are always useful and I would reintroduce a spell to give the player spell absorption. Other than that I would bring back the teleportation spells, so Mark, Recall, and Intervention spells would return to help the player move around the world. Paralyse would again be an Alteration spell as would Telekinesis. Now Telekinesis is a spell I would add a new dimension to. It would become the spell that opens locks. Similar to the necromancy spell, it would be a spell you hold as it was in Skyrim but if pointed at a lock, it would unlock it, taking different amounts of time depending on the level of lock. It would be a noisy option for unlocking however, so as not to render lockpicks obsolete, NPCs would react to the sound of a lock being undone magically. As for magical effects introduced as shouts in Skyrim, two that I would like to see included as Alterations spells would be Elemental Fury and Whirlwind Sprint. Slowfall and Jump could also make a return to the school as a possibility.
Obviously that was a lot to go through but if you made it to the end, well done!
Comments
I'd advise you to post this somewhere else, maybe as a general discussion. I'll delete this in a day if you do not.