» Sat May 12, 2012 2:47 am I also love the mod support, user creations is what keeps elder scrolls special to me, and something more a more games are skipping deliberately, same thing with the console, simple addition but so useful most of the time to get out of issues, change small things to tailor the game better to your tastes…
Bethesda games or the rare single player games I played more than once, and it really says a lot for me.
But let’s talk about the issues I have with the game, and I pretentiously hope someone at Bethesda will hear about it.
I really feel they should change the engine. As always the water and sky looks amazing, character are really improved finally, oblivion was really a bad example on how to make races and faces in general.
There are a lot of nice little touches, the fog and clouds on distant mountains are beautiful, but I think the game look good despite the engine not thanks to it.
I can name at least 3 superior engine (actually more but since it’s debatable…). The ones from Crysis, BF3, and Rage, all feel vastly superior. When I say feel I mean that, it goes beyond the shaders, the textures, the 3 of them looks better to my eyes, are smoother on my pc, seem more refined, solid in the details such as shadows, none give me issues like mouse lag, physics make more sense, and all of them also run on consoles.
I understand this might simply not be possible, for many reasons, there is a huge amount of proprietary tech in the game, not present or easy to implement in other engines to start with.
But it would really benefit the future games to do this step. Rewrite and rethink some stuff that have been present forever in elder scrolls, such as pathing issues. I admit having used them to finally clear some of the trickier fights, but it just feels wrong. I’ve seen some people praising the ai but I don’t get it when I constantly see those things. Guards also are pretty bad offenders, sometimes you talk to one, he’ll tell you ok I’ll let you go, and 3 seconds later another one will just attack you, causing a massive fight, and you are left with no options, besides killing them and make things worse, die and reload a save, or leave hoping next time you come someone will ask you again for a fine.
Or all those times you have to follow an npc, who systematically runs faster or slower than what you can do (walk/run), or along the same line, having one following you, but if you go around with a horse he’ll just try to follow you walking like an idiot, or npcs getting lost or stuck with doors if you leave an area in the wrong order…
It also feels imprecise especially when you want to pick up objects. Oblivion was worse, but it still happens to steal something instead of opening the drawer you are pointing too.
I understand that many might not agree but I would like to see my hand open doors, or see blood flowing from a wound instead of a cut and 2L of blood magically appearing in a recipient. Even if it’s only details, on some important scenes I guess details are important.
Fighting is ok ish, at least for the melee part I’m more interested in, could be better, but not too bad. I’m not a fan of level scaling but the important thing is that there was an improvement since oblivion, but still, I’d love some basic horse combat for example. I don’t want to get down, every time I see a wolf following me forever, then see my wolf running around enemies randomly, having to look for him again, mount, and finally continue on my path…
Physics though often seem broken, things have no weight or rebound randomly.
All of those thing are somewhat related to the engine, and were present in the previous games, I really think it’s time to look at it please, it really feels like an unfinished product when you see the same issues at years of distance.
I won’t talk too much about the interface, but as a pc user let me just say it is really bad. Not only inherently because of the new design concepts themself but also the lack of efficiency and coherence in the implementation. Just a couple of examples: 90% of the time the mouse does nothing, which is fine but, I don’t use wasd for movement but esdf. Obviously you can’t change the interface bindings nor they do change if you change the related keys that should be associated. Then sometimes for some unknown reasons you actually have to use the mouse. Failed potion creation? Use the mouse to click ok. Why? Nothing tells you you need to, there is really no reason too, you just waste time think of what you need to do, I never pressed the wrong key so often in a game.
Favorites? Can’t even pop them up from the inventory. So for some reason a few bosses can use dragon shouts, worse case being the disarm one. In that case you need to find the weapon again. Go in the inventory, check it in the favorites again, exit the inventory, enter the favorites, assign the hotkey again, exit the favorites, just to continue the fight, come on… you can’t think of anything more painful. And the inventory isn’t even an infinite scroll, if I know the item I’m looking for is way down I still have to scroll all of it in every case instead of going up and starting back at the end of the list.
Then you have all the small design touches I can’t understand, at least some of them have been removed like the stupid npc games to seem more likeable. A few examples include the claw keys? There is really no point to them, you can’t even use the wrong one, so why waste time looking at it, turning the symbols around, it’s not a puzzle, you can’t get it wrong once you did your first one and you even have like 30sec to move out from the trap if you do something wrong, simple time wasting, just let me through if I have it.
All those closed gates and doors but with the lever in beside it? Again what’s the point? I’m not talking about hidden and secret stuff you might miss, but doors and gates you have to pass through…
False choices are also painful. Spoiler alert on the next sentence – for example in the companions quest line you can actually say you don’t want to become a werewolf, but obviously you can’t actually continue the quest line if you do, and you are told to come back when you are reading. At the end of it being a werewolf actually never has a purpose, you could do everything without being one. So give me really a choice or just make me become one even against my will. – End spoiler
More debatable is how quests are organized. The game is designed around the concept of fast travel. I’m one of those who like fast travel, though I would be happy with only the caravan between cities, it would add some immersion to the game, but my point is that every time I get a quest, every time I meet someone who ask me to do something, it is at the opposite side of the map. I can understand an occasional trip, but close to always? It would have been better to have a more progressive discovery of the world honestly. Then those who just like to randomly explore can do it anyway. But it takes away something, there are no zones, areas, kingdoms in a sense, add the level scaling and the world just get more flat than it is. Furthermore half of the time you fast travel you still need to wait or sleep just to have shops open… As much as I dislike wasting 75% of my game time travelling from a point to another, as it happen in some games, and mmos, I still feel this wasn’t as balanced as it should have been.
I could go on a lot, but there are also an impressive number of posts in the forum with a lot of valid points, I don’t want to be exhaustive, write pages and pages.
Thanks for the amazing game, for the improvements since oblivion, many of them not mentioned here by me, but details in games are important, when you start asking yourself why things have been done in such a way all the time it breaks the immersion a lot, and the overall feeling
