The Elder Scrolls is Awesome

And you know it.

I love The Elder Scrolls games. I've been playing them since The Elderscrolls II, Daggerfall, and I've eagerly awaited each installment. They come in four year intervals, so I eagerly await them for quite a while each time. Luckily, these games are HUGE, so I usually have no problem filling those four years with hours upon hours of questing across Tamriel, and thanks to the post-Morrowind advent of modding, I never run out of content to explore.

Just like Morrowind, I've been playing the crap out of Oblivion. I have the game so heavily laden with mods, you can barely recognize it as the original game anymore. Looking ahead, TES V looks to be about two years away, and in the meantime we get to play Fallout 3 in Fall of this year (probably.) It's only natural to wonder what awaits us in the next Elderscrolls installment.

The original Oblivion team has split into two groups since the release of Oblivion. Half of them went off to work on Fallout, while the other half moved on to the preproduction of TES V. Fallout 3 has, however, been given priority until it's release, leaving TES with a barebones development team until Bethesda puts their full force behind it's flagship series once again.

Bethesda has always gone with the idea of total reinvention when making TES games. With each installment, they scrap everything but the lore and the concept, and they begin working from scratch, using licensed middleware to ease the transition. Personally, I hope they go to less extremes this time around when "reinventing." I'd like to see them build from the foundation they've already established with Oblivion, allowing them to make an even better game, while decreasing development problems, as many of them have already been solved with the design of Oblivion.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see yet another Oblivion. Much of the game should still be reinvented. But if they didn't scrap everything, then they could spend more time on content and actually making the game more fun.

I would like to see them bring in some outside animation talent. Animation has never been Bethesda's strong point. It was terrible in Morrowind. A little better, but still pretty bad in Oblivion. The animation of these games still doesn't hold a candle to other games, and could stand some serious improvement.

I would like to see them make an honest effort to include the features that were the most asked for by the fans after the release of Oblivion. On the top of the list, obviously, is mounted combat. People have seen mounted combat done right in the indie game Mount & Blade, and mods have added mounted combat to the game (albeit messily.), but we need some REAL mounted combat in a TES game.

One of the most irritating aspects of Oblivion to roleplaying game aficionados is the scaling of enemies. The enemies you see are scaled to the level of the player, so you never see a challenge worthy of worrying about. It's impossible to stumble into a situation that presents any serious danger. To top it off, at very high levels, low level enemies simply don't exist. This ruins immersion for many of us who play the game as a roleplaying game, and not an action hack n' slash. I would like to see them remove enemy and item scaling, and instead place enemies and items in an intelligent manner.

Oblivion featured voice for every spoken word of text in the game. This voice was accompanied with subtitles, but they could be turned off, allowing you to play the game without so much as reading a word of English. Modders had to either include voice acting in their mods, or trick the system by putting in blank audio files so the player had enough time to read the text. While this worked, having a non-voice acted character in a fully voice acted world was silly. To top it off, the voice amounts for a HUGE amount of data on the game DVD. If Bethesda scaled back the voice acting a little and used it just for greetings, idle chatter, key phrases, and probably key moments, using text for the majority of the spoken text, development time would become easier, and the game would suddenly become easier on modders, as the included voice acting could be recycled and text could be used for the meat of the mod. Of course, the canned voices would have to be diverse enough so as not to get repetitive.

Morrowind had very open environments. The outside world was one environment, and indoor places were another. The only transitions you experienced were when you went inside or out. In Oblivion, every city has a gate. Entering this gate presents a loading screen where the player transitions to the interior of the city. Indoor places present yet another transition. To prevent problems with the player hopping over city walls with no city behind them, Bethesda removed all flying and jumping spells. Bethesda should open the world back up, and if they can, open up interior environments too, much like the Gothic series. There are tricks they can use to prevent lag, such as "fading in" interior environments as you approach them. It's all a matter of optimization. Opening up the world in the manner would allow players to see out the window of every building in the game. Of course, something would need to be figured out to prevent rain and other weather from entering the buildings. Something as simple as switching off the rain when you cross a threshold would suffice.

In Morrowind, armor was pieced in a manner which allowed some pretty extensive customization. The player could equip just one pauldron for a unique look, or different gauntlets per hand. In Oblivion, this was reduced dramatically, grouping gauntlets into both hands, and lumping all upper and lower body armor into three groups (cuirass, greaves, boots, helmet.) Split the armor back up. Let the player wear only one boot if he so desires. Character customization is half the fun!

Oblivion's locations seemed pretty random. Dungeons and such didn't really seem to have a purpose other than to be a location for you to loot. All forts are ruined and ruins seem to be haphazardly scattered across the landscape. Give locations some purpose. If something is in ruins, there should be a story behind it's demise. Some fortresses should still be functional.

Modding Oblivion is similar to modding Morrowind, but the modular pieces of Morrowind was gimped in Oblivion. Most houses are one big piece, reducing the ability to create your own house using the toolkit. The lego mentality should be brought back in TES V. Houses should be composed of several pieces instead of just one big one.

Valar Morghulis