March 9, 2012 2:45 PM EST
Skyrim is the best RPG i’ve ever played in my life, and not only because of graphics and sceneries. This game takes to the extreme the golden rule of any RPG: simplicity in controls and interface, complexity, credibility and variety in world and character interaction. But Skyrim is not the perfect game - it’s not even the best game we can have right now. When the creation kit was launched, jcalberta posted in forum the discussion “is killable children the only essential mod so far?” and i addressed that question only superficially, because then i hadn’t grasped entirely the nature of this game. Now i think i have, so that’s the changes i think could improve the game. These changes are oriented to strengthen internal world coherence and character verisimilitude, inproving role playing experience. Maybe I should have posted it on Modders Workshop, but then there is no way in the world a pre techno like me will ever be able to mod. Only some of them could come through mod´s anyway, others are so complex they can only come through DLC’s, and others may as well be impossible or undesirable from some angle i just can´t see right now:
1 – Make the Forsworn, the Thalmor and the Silver Hands factions you can join to, and give them adequate questlines;
2 – Give the bards college a real questline, so that artistic oriented characters become viable. Maybe build others peace oriented factions and questlines. It’s not always that you’re in the mood to kill something. Sometimes you just want to be quiet and enjoy life;
3 – Give to each of the gods who have temples in Skyrim a quest, with a corresponding artifact as its reward, so that ‘good’ characters can also get valuable items;
4 – Make the vampires a secret faction, with its own questline, like the brotherhood. They can be even enemies;
5 - Make each faction take, to a degree compatible with its nature, a side in the civil war, and make your choosing a side with either the Imperials or the Stormcloaks affects your relationship with each faction and change their disposition towards you, for better or worse;
6 – Build a faction mechanism similar to that of Fallout New Vegas, with two separate reputations:
a- a general rep that affects everyone in the world, including unaffiliated NPC´s, displaying your fame or infamy, scaled so that you go from a nobody to a hero (or a villain), and having people around to comment on that;
b- a faction specific rep, scaled so that your status go through the stages: hated – disliked – despised – neutral – accepted – liked – idolized, with each faction, causing people affiliated to that faction to favor, to ignore or to attack you;
7 – Make each faction take notice of your general rep, as well as your rep with friendly and unfriendly factions, and change their disposition towards you accordingly, including the greetings dialogues.
8 – Make the choosing of a race really matters, making it impossible, or at least very problematic, to join certain factions due to your race. Create, for instance, penalties for a character who joins a faction not compatible or not friendly to his/her race, going from some harsh comments up to setting limits to quest taking and quest rewards;
9- Build small four-perk trees for all racial abilities, including werewolves (since vampires already have theirs) awarding perks that increase slightly their utility, each 15 levels or so, making viable for us to role-play without having to take main quest, but still having some useful skills, to compensate for the loss of the ability to shout.
