This thread is for ideas and suggestions for future Elder Scrolls games, and to keep all the discussion in one series of threads.

We have a long way to go before we get another ES game. In the meantime, similar topics will be closed and referred to this one.

Note there is a separate thread specifically for http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1609912-tes-vi-location-and-setting-speculation-35/ suggestions for future games.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1616140-official-beyond-skyrim-tes-vi-93/

I don't know what you're talking about... do you mean they have to be this way and are unfixable, or something? The neck seams in Oblivion can easily be fixed by aligning the vertex normals of the body and the head mesh to fit each other. I even did that myself in 3ds max. No big deal. No neck seams in my Oblivion. Sloppy like Frau Flodder, this Bethjob...

....and most games of this sort share body meshes for characters. I don't think I've ever played one without bad neck seams.

But I don't doubt a mod would fix it. If we're talking about Oblivion though, then I'd want to fix just about everything. lol

You people... of course mods fix it. http://img5.fotos-hochladen.net/uploads/screenshot0y4xzhwmp03.jpg's my Nord from Oblivion.

edit: sorry, bad reading from my part...

Not bad at all really. Looks close to my Skyrim character. lol

My point is though that there are so many lousy things about Oblivion visuals that I try not to bother. Sounds like a lot of work. But I could be wrong. What did it take you to get that screenshot?

No, I'm saying that the common way characters were modeled and lit led to those problems, and it plagued multiple games by multiple developers. It wasn't Bethesda just being super-lazy. Techniques that fixed it came around later on. It's fixed in Skyrim, for example, which uses more updated methods to normal map and light character models.

Unfortunately that's not how game development works. With modding you can afford to go in and hand-tweak the final result, because it's on your own time with the final models. But when you're actually making the game, you use the automated tools available to you. You don't know when a particular model is going to be final, and if you have to keep reapplying tweaks by hand every time you make a change, it would slow down work. And by the time you are done working on it, you need to be doing other things not making tweaks to it.

To me, "sloppiness" is not holding to a basic level of quality. Being plagued by issues that also plague many other games isn't sloppiness, it's par for the course.

Oblivion's development wasn't rushed. The game was even delayed, as it was intended to be an early launch title for the XBox360 but got pushed back by several months. The thing with it is, Bethesda does not focus solely on graphics. As good as Oblivion looked, it wasn't a graphical powerhouse, Skyrim also had its graphical shortcomings, and even Morrowind didn't look as good as its contemporaries. For Oblivion in particular, they instead had a large focus on AI. They put a lot of work into AI, and not all of it panned out, likely leading to the delays as they had to rework things for the simpler system the game ended up with (and is likely why it feels rushed; similar to Skyrim which had a lot of work put into the Radiant Story system, that was gutted in the final game leaving it feeling rushed and incomplete).

Defending the inexcusable... you are a lawyer!

That must have been such a huge deal inside of that company; I can hardly imagine.

"Oh crap, that thing that was going to make the factions all long and worthwhile didn't pan out and now we only have a few months to write and implement entire quest lines!"

Heart attack.

I wonder if they'll continue to develop radiant quests, or mostly scrap it like the did radiant AI.

It sounds like it would be a great leap forward in gaming if they could randomize tons of things and still have them be of good quality. Daggerfall 2 (regardless of whether or not it's actually set in Daggerfall) would be awesome.