Short answer, no.

Long answer...its slightly more complicated then that. Frankly, I find Dark Souls combat boring above all else. Even the Witcher 3, which is a more reactive, improved lite version of that methodology gets old after about four hours into the game, and what is actually taking place (Guard, Roll, Counter, Attack, Sign, rinse and repeat) isn't particularly engaging. Its also worth nothing that unlike Dark Souls and the Witcher where no matter what your build is, the core experiance of the game is going to remain the same, TES's builds jut out every which way, to the point where entering straight up combat can be detrimental for some players. Its a totally different mindset.

What does TES combat needs to do? Well, more options of how we the player can avoid taking damage would help. I frankly find rolling for ever and ever to be incredibly boring, but I wouldn't mind a quick dodge ability to get out of the way of an opponents big attack, or being able to parry an incoming blow as opposed to directly blocking it, staggering the opponent if timed right. Those two facets of gameplay alone open up for different build opportunities for melee focused characters, on top of what's already there. The only other issue I think TES has thus far is the lack of reaction, from the enemy and the player, when generally being struck. That's something I do think needs addressed.

If I had any take away from the Witcher...I guess being able to use multiple power attacks in a row, at the cost of stamina in TES naturally, would be a good fit.

Its literally a worlds difference. While I do find general combat in the Witcher 3 to be repetitive, there's no question that Geralt looks awesome preforming his moves, and that his controls are tight and well focused. A few enemies (Olgerid, vampires, anything that you don't encounter multiple times really) are also a blast to fight against, if only because watching them and Geralt trades blows is legitimate fun.

The Elder Scrolls video games definitely need better combat and I hope Bethesda Game Studios develop a better combat system for The Elder Scrolls VI.

I expect they'll improve the combat, just like they did with FO4.


I'd like to see more enemies with less health. In my opinion, it would make sneaking better too, as sneak attacks would be harder to do unnoticed. That would require changes to level design though.


I wouldn't like to see too much arcade-ness, like characters staying still for 0.2 seconds after sword swings or swords leaving trails for no reason (trails because of magical reasons are of course okay).

EDIT: Also, faster switching between spells would be nice. I don't know how Doom's radial weapon switching menu with slowed down time works in action, but it looked pretty damn good in a gameplay video.

I hope they expand on all NPC interactions. I was extremely excited when they added marriage into Skyrim, even if I knew it was going to be a very shallow feature, simply because it meant they were looking into stuff like that. Unfortunately, the weird design choice they made with dialogue kind of hampered the potential for those interactions in Fallout 4, so that is something they will have to revisit if they are going to make strides on that front for ES VI. Luckily, they have plenty of time to hammer it out.

I think more rich interaction with and within the game world is the next major point I'd like to see them bridge. The settlement building stuff was nice but it is honestly a little too tedious, especially since it lacks any tangible rewards. I really hope they abandon that whole functionality and focus on developing a world that has intriguing characters who we can interact with over a period of time and not for just a few scripted events. A tall order, but for the type of games Beth makes, it would be an invaluable addition. And if they just keep polishing it up as they go along it would only get better over time. They have to start with this next game though. At least make the attempt if nothing else.

I agree on npc interaction


Companions/followers need to at a minimum as good as fallout 4 companions but i slso want them to strive for dragon age companions (betrayal, romance and more interactions woth othe companions ). F4 does this when you switch companions



More tolfdir type npcs where they want to talk to you like a collegie and not a new recruit . Favtions/guilds treat you like dirt and the dialogue was awful in Skyrim


Race tailered dialogue


Deeds have consequences/reputation. Eventually nazeem or whoever should change their tune


If/when f4 allows us to control a raider group then theres no reason couldnt do domething similar


Personality of traveling traders-see f4


If we make a deal with a daedric lord then maybe we get a special ability like the mysterious stranger in f4 where they sometimes send a temporary summon/daedra depending on the lord to help us. Maybe tie to prayers


Eso familiars.


Maybe filling up empty prisons with radiant

Prisoner quests (named npcs from say skyrim assassin quests/thieves guild etc) or convince them to joing your bad guy group

We all want more dialog and interactions with the NPC's in The Elder Scrolls video games.

We should have choices and consequences.

I think we all 100% agree on this.

Depends. Define Choice and Consequence. Overly direct and deterministic outcomes like The Witcher, absolutely not.

In many ways, I would say that i want Impact, not Consequences. Consequence has come to mean some sort of permanent negative impact. Things like choosing who lives and who dies, what faction wins and which is disbanded, who becomes King and who rots in the dungeon. As i've said in the past, i don't think those types of Choices, and their attached Consequences, have much of a place in TES.

Similarly, if you say something to someone that they may not like, it should be very, very rare that it permanently impacts your relationship. Unless you murder someones mother, there are few things which should permanently impact your disposition with someone, in either direction.

Choice, similarly, is a far more difficult to define or discuss, because it means so many different things. Is it absolute choice, or meaningful choice? Is it branching choice or participation choice. What about the illusion of choice?

In general, i think there are many parts of the rather broad 'Choice and Consequence' concept which i think have little to no place in TES. So i wouldn't say that we all 100% agree.

Dialogue in particular is difficult to deal with, as we've picked at for the last 4 threads. This is, very simply, because of persistence. In games like Dragon Age and The Witcher, characters rarely have any presence, or even persistence, beyond their relevant quests. In most cases, they either despawn, or just become non-interactive. At best, they just repeat a closing message until the end of time.

TES can't have that. The open ended nature of TES doesn't permit the same obsolescence of NPCs like other, more story driven RPGs. So the NPCs need to have some sort of dialogue system, and responses, which A; requires some significant work, and B; requires an entirely different approach to how dialogue and conversation is handled (at least to be good, you can just copy-paste The Witcher's clunky dialogue interface and make it functional).

The Elder Scrolls video games can have dialogs with choices and consequences. Bethesda Game Studios quests designers just need to take their time and writing.

I'm sorry but The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's dialog interface is not clunky at all.

Neither was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's, dialog wheels are the dialog interfaces that are clunky. Both Mass Effect's and Mass Effect 2's dialog wheels are clunky, even though BioWare does a pretty good job with their dialog.

This is why I like Daggerfall's reputation system. It's a continual sliding scale of favor with individual factions and regions that changes through relevant "radiant" quests, but never gets so bad that it's impossible to repair through hard work (i.e. more questing), nor does it ever get so good that it's impossible to ruin (if you start doing badly and disappointing everyone). Faction relationships also play a part, where if you help one faction to get rep for it, you may also receive a slight rep boost for other factions that are friendly with that faction (and sometimes get negative rep for that faction's enemies). Some quests will even have a more direct impact on your reputation beyond +rep for success and -rep for failure, with certain ones starting out by tanking your regional reputation (which in turn causes guards to come after you and most people to stop talking to you), and finishing the quest gets it repaired.

Saying that, though, I think the main reason why a system like that worked is because of the world size and NPC count. If your reputation with a region or faction was bad, so most people would stop talking to you, you could keep trying to find quests and eventually get enough done to improve things. There were so many places and people that you would be statistically guaranteed to find someone who'd give you quests (and if it really got bad for an area, you always had the option to jump ship to another region and basically start over since the regions were functionally independent). But the smaller world and personalized disposition of later games kind of prevents this. Specific set people are quest givers, and if you can't talk to those specific people, you'd be out of luck with doing anything. Being unable to quest in specific regions would be a problem with how quests are set up to send you all over the world (to say nothing of how small they are, so not only would be it a notable chunk of potential quests you'd get locked out of, it'd feel silly that your reputation could change so much just by walking down the road a bit). And no matter how bad things may get, you can always talk to and persuade an NPC to raise their disposition. That ability pretty much negates the reputation mechanic, since you always have the option of getting someone to talk to you and give you what you need through money.

You could kill two birds with one stone by just expanding dialogue with NPC's in general. It in turn gives us more content with people living in-universe, which generally help to improve even simple narrative and one shot quests extensively. I'd say the Witcher 3's Contracts would be down right terrible and monotonous if it weren't for the fact that dialogue with the contract issuer and Geralt's own musings did help make each moment seem like it was new. What makes Mass Effect and the Witcher seem (because I don't particularly think its that high quality, except one or two instances) like they're better is because of the sheer amount of content in dialogue. Bethesda had never done well on this front, and really does need more content in this regard at this point.

Personally, on top of making Speechcraft a viable part of gameplay, I'd add many more general Skill checks in dialogue as well. Skyrim played with it once or twice, but it would really help define our character by introducing a lot more instances of it happening.

The clunkyness isn't in the inherent characteristics of the List, but how its been used in games. It relegates conversation to what amounts to a mini-game, totally co-opting controls and then preventing any sort of non-conversational options.

The Witcher 3 is a great example of this problem, and why i referred to it's system as clunky. When you're in a dialogue menu, you can't do ANYTHING but choose dialogue. You can't even look around. Its dialogue totally detaches your actions from the rest of the gameplay. You can't even leave dialogue without saying goodbye. Its forceful, restrictive and does't really offer any diversity in either approach or reaction.

Can you do it better with a List? Quite likely. We've never seen it, but we've had more than enough discussions about it to show it's possible. But the biggest benefit of the List, full-text options, isn't necessarily the best option for TES. Particularly considering the issue we're talking about.

When I say I want consequences for actions, I mean for something to actually happen depending on your choice. In Skyrim, you can choose to call a Daedric Prince your Lord or an evil piece of trash, but it'll have no impact on what happens other than one line of dialogue. It completely breaks the immersion for me, as it doesn't matter what you choose to do because the outcome is almost always the exact same.

Except for usually meaning that either someone dies or abandons you, or you lose access to an artefact.

No. You it almost always ends in one line of dialogue being changed. At least ten of the Daedric Princes don't do anything different when you call them disgusting to when you call them your Lord. Same with most dialogue. The outcome doesn't change. The quest goes about in the exact same way with one piece of dialogue changing. I just did Clavicus Vile's and Hermaous Mora's quests today and they give you a variety of speech options where you can be horrible to both of them but the outcome doesn't change. Except Clavicus, where the very last piece of dialogue influences what reward you get. Everything else doesn't matter. It's the illusion of choice. Give the player many options of dialogue for their character to say, but the outcome is almost always the same, so there's no point in choosing anyway.

Hircine's doesn't. You disobey him, and you lose the Saviour's Hide (you get Hircine's Ring instead) and Sinding lives. Vaermina's also changes, since if you disobey her you let a potential follower live.

There's a difference between saying 'You disgust me' and actually doing something different. In Azura's quest, if you corrupt the stone you get the Black Azrua's Star, but she condemns you, and her priest refuses to fight for you. With Vaermina, if you choose to take the staff, you have to kill the companion who helped you get there. If you kill Barbas it changes your reward. Just because EVERY quest doesn't have the same scope of change for a decision doesn't mean the options, and the consequences there of, aren't there.

Hell, most of the Princes are more likely to be amused by your defiance (despite just doing work for them anyway) than angered at your lip.

Not everything needs an A or B outcome. In fact, some quests, like Molag Bal's, are far more appropriate without one.

I love the physicality of the Souls combat, it fits so well the general atmosphere of their world, but for TES I prefer a faster paced melee combat and (hopefully) emphasis on how to use the environment in your favor. Cranking difficulty up should open new, more deadly combat moves for the other characters, not just reduced player damage or more HP.

Give the ai a special attack instead of regular generic attacks... animals could maul you if they sneak up on you and if it doesn't immediately kill you you'd need to fight them off by pressing the left and right triggers or whatever the keys are now. Sentient creatures if they're attacking in a group will try to outflank you or surround you and cut off your escape. Or actually steal your money then try to run away. Depending on how high your pickpocket skill is you might get a head's up that you've been pickpocketed or you might not. And make pickpocketing a little less obvious like instead of crouching casually "bump" into said target while holding the sneak button to pickpocket without the needless crouching.

Except that most games don't do anything different either. Even in the Witcher 3, aside from the obvious "who lives and dies", which only matters in cutscenes, what you actually do matters very little in actual gameplay. The most you actually get is the battle at Khaer Morhen, and even that will play out mostly the same, or whether you fight the Barons wife as a Water Hag. It makes a little more sense for the Witcher, given that its narrative is arguably way more important then the actual gameplay, but its still not that great of an impact in the when it comes down to you. Most you really get is what slideshow you end up with. 90% of the game is basically just choosing if you want to kill someone/something or not, and it basically doesn't matter in most cases.

I mostly agree with the overall sentiment though. Especially concerning Daedric quests where your character might not be down with smashing an old mans skull in for a rusty mace, and having closure to that chain as opposed to ignoring it outright is infinitely preferable. The rest though should be based on the context of what's happening.


Frankly though? I prefer the old mantra of "Its not the destination that's important, but the journey to get there" over anything else. Especially since it fits much better within how TES does things. Especially concerning the MQ.

I understand the point you're trying to make, but...you still wound up doing the quests of your own volition. The Princes usually don't care about what others think of them, and likely already are counting on the promise of power luring you in anyway.

This is one of those things where conversation with godly entities and expecting something radically different is going to play out, because most of them flat out do not care what your opinion is. You have to actively muck with them if you are to expect a different outcome. Having an optional choice in the active quest as opposed to directly carrying it out would be more preferable, because while you can still go out and preform the quest grumbling all the way, you can instead screw them over matching your opinion of the character. Its more in line with your characters personality, and its more organically integrated into the game. Actions sometimes speak louder then words and all that.

Well, yeah, but its not a game that's supposed to really be built around doing your own story. Its Geralts, and the likelihood of him up and walking out of the room mid conversation is unlikely. And it still doesn't have any bearing on those who frankly find a wheel to be distracting or ugly as sin.

There also has to be better companion dialogue and remove the dog vs taking a human companion


Companions shoould acknowledge each other in some way even if it means reducing the overall number. F4 does this slightly better

They could bring back refusal like in Daggerfall. Refuse the request of a Daedric Prince and they get all pissy and summon a few high level daedra around you instead for wasting their time. I don't think you get a second chance though, so that likely conflicts with most playstyles.

it could be argued that just seeking out the daedra princes is agreeing to their quest to begin with though.

on another note:

I'd like to see guild quests split between the political story advancement, and just regular radiant jobs to earn cash and reputation. the radiant quests are always available as long as a player is in good standing in the guild. the political side which drives the story should have more requirements met for such special duties. that would do a lot in itself, where those that join a guild as a means wouldn't necessarily aspire to lead the guild, while those that want to dive into the politics can get their hands dirty one way or another through their affiliations with greater impact. a player would no longer be a hero of circumstance in a guild -- they'd have to actively involve themselves in the special duties.

In the debate about whether Skyrim has consequences for actions, in some cases I think either side can be right.

There are consequences for many actions in Skyrim. The quests for Azura, Vaermina, and Clavicus Vile are good examples of ones where your choice does matter. Also, if you are wielding a daedric artifact, I believe you can sometimes run into Vigilants of Stendarr who want to take it from you, although this has never happened to me.

Sometimes though, there are some consequences that either should happen or are not completely fleshed out.

-In the case of the former, since Lachdonin brought him up, let's use Molag Bal as an example. Molag Bal and Boethiah hate each other. Let's assume you do Boethiah's quest(s) first. I don't think Molag Bal would be so willing to take you into his stead. If you do Molag Bal's quest first, I don't think Boethiah would be quick to talk to you.

-In the case of the latter, the Civil War is a good example in some cases. Depending on whether the Imperials or Stormcloaks control a hold, their respective jarls will be in charge. The leadership changes if control of the hold changes, but you don't necessarily feel a big change. There doesn't need to be some catastrophic change, but it can often times feel like business as usual with little to no noticeable change except for a change in leadership. More people should react to your actions in the Civil War (of course, when there is a reason for them to know how you participated in it; not every single person should know or care what you did in the Civil War).

I think you can point to instances like that in all of the games really. The game were this appears to be the least issue is Daggerfall.

Although like Huleed said, I also think Daggerfall did the best job for when it came to consequences for your actions. Interestingly enough, Skyrim had a somewhat similar system in the sense that your reputation varied by hold (or in Daggerfall's case, region). With the change to smaller, more detailed worlds you probably can't quite implement a system like Daggerfall's, but I think it has a few good pointers to look to for the reputation system in the future.

True, but i never made a judgement on the Wheel vs List, rather it was about The Witcher's system specifically. within the context of Wild Hunt, it's not terrible, because it's inherently about Geralt's story and not our own. Bioware does the same thing, in which you're not so much driving character interaction, but rather picking scenes to act out. But that type of dynamic isn't really appropriate for TES. It's functional, but extremely restrictive because of it's focus. Skyrim's model is functionally better, but still had it's own problems.

True enough, but there are also those who find the List to be distracting and ugly as sin. Visuals can be tweaked somewhat to alleviate those problems. https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--TZeAd2Hy--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/abim6bixpphszsyk6pes.jpg, for instance, is simply a 'Wheel' that looks like a 'List'. At the end of the day, you can make anything pretty, but it's harder to make something functional.

And even then, making something functional is largely dependant on what you're trying to achieve.

Some do. Admittedly, it is rather infrequent and not nearly fleshed out enough, but the Smiths apprentice in Windhelm is a good example, If you side with the Imperials, and kill Ulfric, she hates you. More of it would definitely be welcome, but the issue isn't so much with the complaint against more, but rather the notion that there's none there to begin with, or that mutually exclusive outcomes for everything is necessary or even really that useful.

I think actual taxation should exist in-game. an annoyance to pc's and npcs', each region or hold could have different taxation rates, and also different corruption thresholds. this would of course also lead to smuggling. definitely would like to see bribery mean more than just disposition raises.

I been saying for a while that The Elder Scrolls video games should have taxation a % of the Gold pieces you earn you get taxed and the Gold goes to the cities, towns, and villages and you can actually see the guards protect the citizens and actually have a fully functioning economy.

A lot of us have been wanting banks to be in The Elder Scrolls video games again.