This is a fair point. Time would likely have to be frozen for the Magic menu. Changing spells is "in your head", so to speak, and so is legitimately a zero-time action. My main game-mechanic purpose with avoiding freezing time is to prevent silly potion-spamming and zero-time clothes-changing and armor-changing. Even changing weapons should take a second - which of course it does in the game, since you have to re-draw the new weapon.

But yeah, switching spells/powers/shouts should be a zero-time action.


That's another fair point. One suggestion has been to simply disallow certain actions in combat, just like waiting is disallowed in combat. One disadvantage of that, though, is that if you're getting shot at by an archer 50 meters away, you'd be prevented from drinking a potion even if you dropped behind a rock, or blocked with your shield, and I can actually see that as a viable tactic if your opponent is at some distance. My main problem is with freezing time and spamming six potions while in close combat against an opponent two feet away who's in mid-swing.


Well, to argue the other side now, one argument against animations and in favor of simply disallowing certain actions in combat is that animations can at times become annoyances. It would depend on how long the animation was. A changing-armor animation would have to be lengthy enough to impede people from completely changing armor in the middle of combat, while still being short enough not to become a real nuisance out of combat and ticking people off.


That's something of a fair point, but then look at the pointer as somebody saying "I need you to go to Fort XYZ and clear the bandits out. Here, let me mark it on your map for you." And then you just go to where the map marker says. I can see the value and interest of having some quests contain situations where the person giving the quest can't tell you exactly where to go, but can give you a general area, with some general sort of directions. "You need to go to Fort XYZ and clear the bandits out. Fort XYZ is somewhere in the wooded hills west of the River Blort, South of Fish-Stink pond, east of Hurgleblurgle Cairn, and north of Blargleburg. Fort XYZ has a tower and a moat, so you should recognize it when you find it.


I remember getting books out of the library about medieval armor when I was a kid. I'll have to look up more on the internet.

One solution might be to have the length of the animation increase when you are in combat and decrease when you are not in combat, kind of like the way your health and magicka regen rate slows down in combat. That way the animations would be less of an annoyance when you are not in a combat situation where it would be relatively easy to undertake the desired action and the animation would zip by quickly. I prefer the animations to simply disallowing certain actions during combat because there are situations in combat when it would be realistic to drink a potion or two, and I can even imagine situations where you technically could be in combat, at least from the game's point of view but would still be in a position to do more complicated tasks, maybe even change some armor, for instance if you were well enough protected or hidden from enemies who wouldn't or couldn't chase you down right away. There could also be an option to exit the animation, like exiting a conversation, so you could stand up and fight half dressed if one of those hostiles you thought you were protected from managed to get close enough to engage you in melee.



Honestly, I would prefer that to having to go into the menu and turn the quest arrow on long enough to get a bead on the fort I need to go to, cause having to do that ruins immersion for me. I realize that there is not much difference between someone putting a marker on your map and having to toggle the quest arrow, but checking my map feels like a natural part of adventuring, whare as toggling the quest arrow feels pretty artificial.


Having more quests like this would be ideal. What I do now is toggle the quest arrow just long enough to look at the map and get a general idea of where the fort is. Then I turn the quest arrow off and go looking for it. It works okay, but it is a little immersion breaking and having some general description of what you are looking for would be so much better for those of us who prefer to play with the quest arrow off, and it would not harm those who prefer to have the quest arrow turned on.

Because sometimes I'm in the middle of a long, important dialogue, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to repeat it, so I don't want to cancel dialogue, but my baby starts crying and I need to go feed him before he wakes up my other two kids, but when I come back the dialogue auto-cancelled anyway, and I missed what was said.


Walked away IRL.

Yeah, how to deal with armor is tricky and I'm still struggling with finding an easy answer. I like the idea of animations for it in principle, but as has been pointed out, think it'd become a frustrating annoyance as the game went on.

Restricting it during combat seems simple enough when viewed against Waiting, but even the Wait feature is non-realistic in some circumstances (e.g., if there's an enemy on the other side of a closed door) and I think its problems would be dramatically inflated when it comes to armor changing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a critic of the principle idea, I just haven't gotten my head around a way to implement it in a satisfactory way yet -- i.e., one that doesn't cause annoyance problems outside of battle (animations for it) or shift from overly available to overly restrictive.

If it's tied to enemy distance, it could be overly restrictive when it comes to doors, around corners, even upstairs/downstairs or simply on a different level if the distance calculation treats height the same as lateral distance. And depending on what distance was chosen as the cut-off, it could easily penalize melee-orientated characters substantially more than range types.

If it's tied to awareness, then stealth characters would seemingly be immune from this restriction. (Although, if armor change was given a noise factor, this might somewhat revoke the immunity.) On the other side, there's already been a couple of obvious situations illustrated where boot or helmet changes would be realistic despite awareness (e.g., enemy is at range, maybe even engaged with an ally, and the character is behind cover.)

The only half-fleshed-out idea that I have is that it could be tied to the already existant mechanic behind Wait, but instead of simply restricting the equip change, require that those swaps take time. This time allotment doesn't necessarily need animations and if it only kicks in similar to Wait availability, it wouldn't become an overbearing annoyance.

An example of what I'm envisioning:
The character is walking along the road near a fort when Shock Mages start bombarding the character. One mage is at the entrance, two are on the rampart above. The character's companion rushes to engage the first mage at the entrance, allowing the character to rush to an alcove against the wall providing cover. Temporarily safe, the player tries to switch to boots with shock resistance. When the player makes this switch in the inventory, a warning box pops up saying, "This action will require 10 seconds to perform and carries risks if unsuccessful due to interruption ... Do you wish to continue?"

The player chooses "Yes" and a little, transparent countdown box pops up while the world continues. While the box remains counting down, the player is frozen. The action will be interrupted by either an attack (friendly or enemy, melee or ranged) or the player choosing to cancel it (due to a perceived threat, e.g.). If the action is canceled, and thus not completed, there's a risk that the character will now be left worse off than before -- without any equipped boots at all.

About the menu pausing the game in combat - that's actually the most realistic way of doing it.

If you're in combat, and need to drink a portion, you're not going to go into a menu, scroll until you find it, then drink it.

No, you're gonna grab it off your belt and drink it.

Same for weaponry. You're not going to go through a menu to grab your weapon. You're going to grab it and pull it out of your sheath.

Weapon animations make up for drawing your weapon. The menu needs to pause the game so you aren't just unrealistically standing there while someone controlling the character unrealistically scrolls thru a menu.

I can see some of this, but two points before dinner:

(1) Armor boots should be far less feasible to change than regular, non-armor boots and shoes. You might have some leather boots that you just slip into - I do - but even modern, non-armored combat boots have to be laced and aren't all that quick to change, unless you're a tanker; they prefer boots with buckles on them, which are just as slow to change. Armor boots have buckles and straps and things to keep them on properly, just like the rest of the armor does.

(2) The player shouldn't be able to do anything during that countdown while he's changing boots, because that requires his full attention.

But you can carry literally a hundred potions with no problem. Are you supposedly carrying a hundred little glass bottles on your belt for use in battle? How are you doing this with a shield in one hand and an axe in the other?


That accounts for your equipped weapon. The rest of your stuff is being carried in a pack. Having the menus freeze time means that everything you are carrying is instantly available in literally no time. You can freeze time completely, change every stitch of clothing from a bunch of sneak-boosting enchanted clothing to a full set of health-regeneration boosting enchanted heavy armor, just as the enemy gets to melee range. Then, midway through combat when you and your opponent are getting low on health, you can simply freeze time again, swap your magic-resistance-boosting enchanted ring for a heavy-armor-skill-boosting enchanted ring, guzzle ten health potions and a Boost One-Handed Skill potion, switch from your axe-and-shield to a greatsword, then resume the battle with no time taken except the half-second it will take to draw the greatsword. If you had kept the same weapons it all would have happened in zero time, which is absurd.

While I can accept having more than just the one or two weapons or weapon and shield available - I suggested eariler that perhaps you should be able to have two weapons on your belt and one item on your back, whether it was a two-handed weapon, bow or shield, and be free to swap between them in-combat - having complete access to your entire inventory for zero time cost in the middle of battle is simply dumb. It invites ridiculous actions that play the game system, rather than the game.

Ditto for potions. Wanna keep two on your belt for quick use in baltle? Maybe viable, although there should be a chance of them getting destroyed by a weapon hit. Want instant, zero-time access to all your potions in your inventory, as well as everything else? Crazy. Makes no sense.

Why not just role play this? I mean, if I have a sneaky character, I'm not going to swap armor just for a bonus. I will try to sneak attack or run away if I get over powered. It's about self control. A sandbox game is designed to let power-players powerplay and roleplayers roleplay.

But this brings to mind a mod that I very much enjoyed for Oblivion called the Tamriel Immersion Experience (TIE). Weight was added to all things, lockpicks, arrows, etc. Weapons were given a much higher weight - not so much to reflect a realistic weight of certain items but how much they would encumber you (e.g. you would have a hard time carrying more than one warhammer). Health potions were altered so rather than heal you immediately, they worked over time. You tend to change your play style when you don't get all your health back at once. You could only take so many potions at a time. This reduced potion spamming and made you fight tactically.

But much of this comes from certain players desire for certain playstyle. Whereas, TES has always been about painting with a broad brush and appealing to hardcoe and casual gamers alike. And usually irking both sides.


This doesn't address the time-stop issue, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were some mods that deal with this. Of course, this assumes you have a PC.

EDIT: moved paragraphs around for clarity.

Well, that raises one of my pet peeves in general. I've sort of expected somebody to come in here and give the same argument they give whenever somebody brings up the point that there are things you can do that will make the game challengeless at even Master difficulty level - such as the alchemy-enchanting-smithing loop. Whenever somebody says this is silly and that they shouldn't have things in the game that will remove the challenge, even on the hardest level, somebody else will wander in and say "Just don't use it. It's a single-player game - why do you care what others do in their game? Take responsibility for your own actions in the game. GOSH!!!"

At which point I usually get a headache THIS BIG that has Excedrin written ALL OVER IT.

Players shouldn't have to impose these sorts of things on themselves, really. It shouldn't be possible to do impossible things - in general. I mean, obviously magic is in the game, so people will be shooting fire from their hands and such, but there's no "freeze time for no magic-power cost and root around in your inventory and change equipment all you like while spamming health potions" spell that I've ever seen.

I agree, I don't do that anymore myself, but it's kinda silly that the game allows you to do so. People can call themselves "powergamers" when they do that sort of thing if they like, but really what they seem to be are people looking to REMOVE the game from the game, because as I've said before, if you have no challenge, you have no game, you have a toy. Think Spore as an example. It's simultaneously one of the greatest computer toys ever made, and one of the lamest games ever to have made a profit.

Well, I'm tryint to be somewhat practical here in recognizing that this game is meant for the general public (and not just hardcoe RP'ers), so invoking too much realism would probably get our "cause" nowhere fast.

I think that any kind of brief pause would at least reflect that those actions take time without slowing the game down too much. The amount of elapsed time required could simply be a multiplied weight ratio. Well, maybe not. Then I could change into elven armor as easily as iron boots. But maybe something like 2 s. for a ring or necklace; 4 s. for gauntlets and helmets; 6 s. for boots; and 10 s. for armor -- not suggesting I'm firmly with these figures, mostly just throwing numbers against the wall.


Agreed. The *player* can cancel the action, but the character is frozen. As I said before though, if the action is interrupted by either the player or the game environment, there's a risk the character may be left equipmentless in that location.

Something like that could work. I forget which of you it was that suggested taking the animation idea and adjusting it for whether the player was in combat or not. In combat, the animations take some time, to prevent illogical changing-armor-in-close-combat BS, while out of combat, the animation works more quickly in order to avoid being annoying for people who understandably don't want to sit there watching a ten or twenty second animation just because they wanted to see what they looked like in a certain suit of armor.


lol

Yeah, I can see somebody ducking behind a boulder while their follower/followers engage the enemy, start to change out of clothing and into armor - and then get interrupted halfway through, while they're standing there in their Olde Timey Barbarian Boxers.

Also, and this is just a random thought that came to me, it wouldn't be bad for there to be a damage bonus if an NPC attacks a player who doesn't have a weapon (at least bare fists) drawn. Changing clothes should prevent having anything (spell, shield or weapon) equipped in your hands - and so if you get interrupted while making the tactical mistake of trying to change your pants behind a boulder during battle, you kinda get clocked upside the head for bonus points until you can get a weapon in hand, or at least "equip" your bare fists into a combat stance.

One thing I should note here: I'm not particularly a role-player type, at least in respect to more mundane actions. When I started the game and got a house, I actually went so far as to sleep eight hours a night, even undressing for bed. I did that like three times before I said "Oh, to hell with this" and just clicked on the bed to sleep, and only one hour when I found out one hour is as good as eight as far as the Well Rested bonus goes. I do role-play my character's type, so to speak, and his basic morality - he doesn't do the Thieves' Guild or Dark Brotherhood quests, and doesn't deal with Daedra - but I don't eat three times a day, sleep eight hours, bring some fur armor to change into when I go into cold areas, and that sort of thing. Just not a fun aspect to role-playing, in my book.

I generally am tackling this subject from a game-playing angle. While some of my concerns are oriented around immersion, I myself have few problems in regards to immersion. Skyrim is so beautiful visually and so well-crafted a world that I have no problem feeling like I'm there. My only immersion-related quibbles relate to time-freezing menus interrupting immersion in combat because they interrupt the flow and rhythm of combat, and that's something that ideally I'd like to fix, at least in the next TES game.

And from a game-playing perspective, to me, challenge #1, the top priority, is to prevent people being able to use silly things like spamming potions in combat, carrying multiple sets of armor with differing enchantments and swapping them out in combat, using the alchemy-enchanting-smithing loop to attain such levels of power that even Master difficulty is easy and you're one-shotting dragons and giants and Ultimate Doom-Draugr Deathlords of Undying Painful Horrible Nasty Chilling-Doom Hell-Death and the like. People call that "power-gaming", I suppose, but I think that by doing so (1) they are playing a game-system rather than a game (think "efficient leveling" from Oblivion) and they are (2) likely removing all challenge from the game, meaning that they are no longer playing a game at all, but rather playing with a toy. I like toys fine, myself. I've mentioned Spore before, and it's an amazing toy that I have gotten many hours of enjoyment from; it is not, however, a particularly fun game. And in Skyrim, if you "powergame" to the point of removing the challenge, you're ending the game, essentially. So while Skyrim can and should remain a "toy", so to speak - I still get enjoyment from just wandering and looking at stuff - why not make it in such a way so that it also remains a game, with challenge present at least in the harder levels.

Yeah, animations would be nice, but the reason I mentioned the "Countdown Box" as an alternative was the disillusioned hope that it'd be easier on the developers and therefore more likely to make it into a patch or dlc. (Yeah, I know, even with BOTH my fingers and toes crossed, I'm more likely to win the lottery regardless of perdy graphics or not.)



2x damage or something would make sense. Of course, if the game ever used stealth attacks against you, that extra damage potential could skyrocket. (Why am I suddenly thinking of the mantra: Be careful of what you wish for ... lol.)

I'd be gloriously happy if they added such a time constraint (damage bonus?) to swapping gear just as an option that one could enable/disable or tied it to the higher difficulty levels. I suspect that once most gamers (exhibisionists?) experienced the tension of huddling behind a rock, holding their breath while the animation or countdown played out and fervently hoping they wouldn't get caught with their pants down would, well, wonder how they ever lived without it in the game.

Then again, maybe I'm just weird.

Sometimes I wish the entire crop of younger gamers could experience playing the original Doom back in the day. Walking into a room, having the door close behind you, then the lights go out, there's just occasional bits of light at some points...and you start hearing Cacodemons hissing. Fear indeed.

And while part of me would like to think that some sort of revisions might be made in the way of a "hardcoe" mode, I accept anything beyond bug fixes and a few rebalancing tweaks is probably quite unlikely. Perhaps some of these suggestions might make it into TES 6, but then given the amount of dumping on Skyrim that goes on around here, I couldn't blame the developers if they never read another thread after day one.

I would abosultely adore this. How immersive. Reading a book in the wilderness, then a wolf attacks you and you need to scramble for your weapon. REAL TIME POTION DRINKING. Would be a fantastic addition.

Maybe make it part of a toggleable hardcoe mode though, because not everybody would want it.

lol

I thought you were being sarcastic at first.

But yeah, I think some of these suggestions could aid people's sens of immersion by altering some of the factors that interrupt that immersion, as well as fix some things from a game perspective.

Well, see I'm the type who does most of that. I don't denounce anyone who doesn't (whatever floats one's boat), but it makes me feel more connected to my character ... as stupid as that may sound. That's also the reason I may be a bit more hesitant than you when it comes to animations for (un)equpping armor because I'm quite certain I'll see those animations in abundance.

And the funny thing about game restrictions and limitations is that sometimes they can lead to more, not less, options for the player. As suggested above, time constraints with armor changing and potion/food imbibing can lead to more strategy, more thinking when it comes to pre-battle preparation, equipment choices, and even perk choices.

Each of the heavy and light armor trees could get a "Quick Change Artist" perk that halves the needed time to swap gear. If potion belts were required to use a potion without delay, there could be a quest (available to all player builds) that provides a somewhat better belt, and the Alchemy tree could have perk(s) that add more *slots* to the belt. If that was a low-hanging perk in the Alchemy tree, even those builds not invested in the skill might strategically use the perk (if/when available) just for purchased or found potion availability during combat.

I guess what I'm saying is I think that this is one of those areas that at first-blush seems only restrictive, but if thought and creativity are applied to its implementation, has the potential to expand both rp opportunities *and* excitement to the game.

I agree. While the game has to be careful not to overly-restrict the player, if everything you want to do seems possible, then the game probably isn't challenging, the things you want to do are probably cosmetic, and the whole things starts to take on an air of unreality, so to speak. I mean, if there's one thing in the game that people know is real - at least, as real as anything in a computer game - it's that damn snow troll on the way to High Hrothgar, because most people run into him at a reasonably early level, and the damn thing is hard. It lends an air of solidity, tangibility to things, which aids immersion, and constitutes a challenge, which makes the game better.

I suppose this is why some people complain about the food in the game - it's purely necessary, and so people eat for purely cosmetic reasons. I remember one thread where a guy was saying he'd like to eat, but given that it's totally unnecessary and isn't even that good a way to heal, he just couldn't be bothered. So while I kinda resisted the idea of making eating at least once a day a necessity, in retrospect it might not be a bad idea. Carry some bread and cheese and dried meat in your pack, and eat a little once a day.

The only downside would be that Lydia might starve herself to death, unless she grew a brain.

The problem is that you have 8 hotkey buttons: bow, sword, shield, heal spell, soul trap bow, detect life, aura wisper and night eye.
Yes I could include healing potions, dropping detect life, both night eye and aura whisper uses Z, need shield as one because sometimes I equip heal in both hands for some reasons. also to return shield after using other spells like transmute or flames.

Now you can not pause WOW at all, and I don't miss it as you can assign more hotkeys than you need yes including ctrl or shift an key and an simple system to assign.

Without this you has to stop the game so we fight enemies and not the GUI. Why should the inventory take up all the screen anyway?

Now books should not pause the game, reading a book while you wait for a shop to open makes much sense.

I think having a potion belt would be good then, so you could fit say 10 potions of restore health in it and hotkey them..
I also think poisening multiple weapons would be needed (different arrows etc).. hotkey which ones you're using.

Theres probably a bunch of things, but if it were properly implimented it would be cool.

This would be a fantastic feature, it would certainly add a new level of difficulty to stealth classes! It would also be a nice wayto kill time for "meet me at night" quests, to just read a book in game, knowing that an hour has passed.

IT also would mean no more hanging around at the bottom of a lake looking inside a chest that magicaly removes your need to breathe.

My only problem is that in cases where you want to use certain in-battle actions, such as potions and changing spells- that the current interface is a little clunky.

With an interface optimisation, and a toggled "no pause" effect, immersion of the game would be much better.

True. While I use the "Wait" function myself, the idea of non-pausing menus fills several needs: passing time for those who don't want to use the wait function for immersion purposes, preventing spamming of potions in battle and swapping armor during battle (both horribly, absurdly unrealistic) and the like.


Yeah, it would make it so that there are some things that some characters just can't do, while others can. Lockpicking is far too easy as it stands, and any character can pick any lock at any time, especially since lock picks are so abundant in the game. If my warrior character with no perks in lockpicking can pick a Master lock with the loss of 3-10 picks (usually more like 4-6) then what in the world is the point of bothering to expend perk points on any lockpicking perks? With non-pausing menus, chests underwater and in places exposed to enemies might be only feasible for serious thief-types to open. Plus they just need to make lockpicking much harder so that the perks aren't a waste of perk points.


Regarding spells I agree with you. I originally said that ONLY the system menu should pause, but I've since amended that to include the Magic menu. Changing spells/shouts/powers is "in your head", so to speak, so that makes sense to be a zero-time action. But potions, I have to disagree with you there. Being able to drink potions in the middle of battle is often going to be infeasible. While I can agree with you that perhaps drinking a potion could be feasible and believeable during ranged combat (duck behind a rock or something) or in a battle with an airborne dragon (wait for it to pass, then drink the potion quickly) I can't agree that this should be available EVER during melee combat - and non-pausing menus are a way to do that.


Agreed. In addition to game-balancing effects like preventing armor-swapping and potion-spamming during melee, I always figured that immersion would be aided by non-pausing menus. In fact, this was the very first point that came to me. I thought "Well, what if you wanted to read a book or check a map while you're in the middle of the deep forest or out on the tundra? If the menu didn't pause, it would be to your benefit to make sure the area you were in was relatively secure. Drop behind a rock, move into a little valley or a ditch, or at least crouch into sneak mode." I imagined opening a book and reading it, then hearing a wolf howl and having to close the book fast and draw a weapon.

Maybe certain actions - checking a map, reading a book, drinking a potion - should automatically un-equip what ever is in your hands, or at least one of them, even if they automatically re-equipped as soon as it was done.