I don't know, I think Szass Tam might be the Greatest Lich ever. He almost Did the ritual of Unmaking.

Szass 8is awesome, but his got nothin' on Xykon. Xykon wiped out the greatest army in the World with a bouncy ball.

The liches in OB did have unexplored potential as more complex enemies than the usual brainless hack & slash types. Maybe a good nemesis.

They could act as evil quest givers if you agree to serve them or attack/run away if you don't.

Liches definately did have potential, why couldnt they recruit you into a legion of scourge t oultimately wipe hte mortals off the face of the planet (and give you the ability to be a lch yourself). but then again Oblivion was VERY onesided and because of that a legion of undeath just wouldnt fit into the game.

Why would a lich want to wipe out the world for o apparent reason?

Well, being an enemy does not make you a brainless monster. If nothing else, yu should have a possibility to interact with at least some o them, the rest should be intelligent enemies (a concept non-existent in Oblivion)



I fear there are lots of people here who think that role playing is a waste of time. Most of them are the people who say taht Morrowind was boring and Oblivion was a perfect action game, or so it seems to me.



I'm not sure. I'd say taht the NPC liches you come across are rather old ones. Now, you appear, a brand new lich. I guess they would not feel threatened by you. They would concider you hardly better then the mortals. In their eyes you would be something like a nether-lich a newborn that can still be used and abused. Somethink like: "You think you have a power now new-born? Let's talk about this in half millenia and perhaps then you will have the ability to see how superior I am to you." I think that the old liches should bevery wain, at least most of them.

Well, like i said before, it's all speculation on the social nature of Liches. And i think Ascension should depend on how you were in life, if the ascension went right and you were powerful before it then i think you could pose a physical, if not political threat to an older lich. Probably not though, those guys have a lot of them to perfect thier skills. Maybe if you had political leverage in life...Anywho, like i said; Speculation.

If they spend time on liches im all for it, if it turns out garbage like Oblivions vampires it would be best to leave them out so a maybe from me.

agreed, if bethesda just half ass' it than they might as well just leave it out.

If the whole game is half assed, then it fits the style perfectly. In that case it's better to have it

Well than lets all pray that tes 5 isnt one giant half-ass phailure.

:(

Indeed.

Although it can be better to have overall 80% done game than a perfect 100% game with some major failures. Feels more complete like that. Oblivion has few of those huge flaws, which puts off so many.

It'd be interesting if there were actually only around 4-5 "real" liches in the game (as in, unique persons) who control all other unnatural undead (as in, undead not summoned of their own will) other than those controlled by necromancers, or if the necromancers were really under the control of the liches. That would explain all the easy-to-kill liches in oblivion as mere shades of the real liches (or as undead necromancers serving them under the name of lich). That way, the liches could convene every now and then at some dark meeting place to discuss their various objectives (or scheme against absentee liches). I think it'd make more sense if the real liches are ex-mortals cursed by all daedra and divines simultaneously for the most horrendous crimes (basically, for just acting against absolutely every powerful being at some point or another), and that they scheme to exact revenge. That way, the player can become a "lich" no matter what character type, with the lich characteristics being determined by his or her skills. Also, it would allow for the liches to welcome your character into their midst as part of their grand revenge scheme. You'd basically get to inhabit some sort of base of operations (there'd be a finite number of possible places scattered across the map: e.g. an abandoned castle, the heart of an ancient tree, maybe even a floating asteroid in the sky, vivec style), from where you'd slowly build up strength and manipulate politics resulting in an extremely hot war between whatever political factions there are in the game and you. (only you'd play as various npc "heroes" under your command).

I likey! Make them major plot points one way or another, with the option of joining their ranks. Aren't a lot of the undead supposed to be mortals who, in death, are being punished for their sins? (eg: wraiths)

But within that liches are supposed to hate everything and destroy everything. But then again this is TES what am i saying im all for it! =D Too bad i dont have PC (N) But all for the lich part in the download Battlehorn Castle wasn't one of the secret rooms held with a lich and the old ruler of the castle? So technically he was bounding his soul that that area or the world? All i'm saying is why can't a lich kill something then pretty much bring it back as its minion. Sooner or later you got an army of undead creatures. Go unleash havoc everywhere =D.

That could be said about every single aspect of the game. Certainly noone wants the lichdom to be half-baked nonsense with huge bugs as vampirism was in Oblivion.



Yeah, let us hope! and moreover, we could hope that every single aspect of the game will be well thought through and prepared with care. Well, one can always dream, right?



With some maybe, but being a lich definitely is not a punishment. It is a decision. A living mage transforms him/her self into a lich willingly. Therefore he/she retainshis skills, memories and ability to think, unlike other undead, who are either brought to unlife by the will of others as minless slaves or as a punishment by divinities.

Also for the sake of those who are not interrested in liches, I would not make tem too much of a part of the main plot, although it depends on what the main plot is like. I guess this speculation is very ... well ... speculative with the lack of information we have.

Well if you read everything I said, you would see that this was only part of the requirement not just waiting. :rolleyes:

if you become a lich you must be a master of necromancy and cannot talk to people who don't like necros'.

but if you could choose to become a lich, then the game would be too boring. It'd be just like any one of the other many aimless features of the game which don't actually go anywhere (people don't like "getting more powerful," they like character development). If you "chose" to become a lich and the feature wasn't attached to any ingame quests, then you'd simply... be a different model for a character who did a time warp 10 hours into the future, when he or she would have the same skills anyways. Only now, the character can't talk to anyone, finish any quests, or in short do anything complicated (the "fun" would be limited to going on sporadic "sprees" through towns, until you got bored and reloaded from before you turned into a lich), because the game would simply go no where from that point on.

If becoming a lich is a quest event, then the player feels more secure that he or she actually has a purpose. I was thinking that maybe the lesser liches (e.g. necromancers who go undead using the power from a real lich) would have a decision to make and a process to go through, whereas the real liches are just trying to get back at the daedra for essentially trapping them in eternal boredom... forever, even though they get to toy around with reality (think of Dr. Von Braun from Fallout 3).

That's why you add cult management to the list of things a lich can do.

Yeah I agree it has got to be apart of a quest in order to have meaning.

That might restrict too much.

I liked how I randomly became a vampire in Morrowind, maybe became a part of clan or not. Much better than the DB vampire gift or having to have corprus in Morrowind.

I don't like the idea. It should be a completely optional decision and want.

Yes and No. I wish that there was a "Lich City" or something like that. Basically a GIANT underground city that you can own a house (basically a cave or something) and trade, and do stuff like in other cities with lots of quests. That way you didn't need to deal with the negatives.

If you never had to deal with the negatives, there would be no challenge in life.

well, disregarding everything else--- arguments for AND against, it really comes down to the game bieng severely limited by current technology. NPC's cant think for themselves, the game atmosphere isnt dynamic--- NPCs will react to you depending on how they are programmed to react, the game will change depending on how its programmed to change. My point is, even if you were a 'good lich' (yeah, discount the oxymoron) and did your best to convince the townspeople that by doing all sorts of good things, they will still kill you, and you couldnt do good things in the first place because the world is limited in what you can do. If the game were a deep RP MMO, then it may work because teh PC's would determine for themselves how to treat you, but for now, NPCs are just to friggen stupid to make those offhand or indepth decisions.