Huh. This gave me an idea for a faction. Anyone know which god oversees healers and medicine and stuff? That gods church should have a questline for healer characters.

All 8 Temples had similiar quests in TES2. Child exorcism, uncovering fraud exorcism, fetching priests who've gone piously insane, cure insomnia, banish daedra etc.
Medical skill must be expanded (first, included!) :


Priests and healers should be two kinds, those who can cast restoration spells, and those who don't. Delivering healing and curing potions and medical equipment as well as giving first aid should be the basic job healer keeps doing all the time, at least in the start of one's career. Alchemical experiments, daedra banishing, lifting curses and curing insomnias (even lychantropies?) should be something for the masters only. Very few of the quests should involve killing of anything.

After you take your quarterstaff and beat down a highwayman, you should be able to bandage him and let him go. Great way to show mercy. Stendarr's seal of approval! The thief, if he has any sense of decency, would then repent of one's wicked ways and thank you.

One great quest would be going to a house of a disformed newborn, and decide if the babe's naturally disformed, cursed, daedraspawn (not possible according to lore, but how would the parents know?) or something else, and should it live or not. Bioware could pull this through easily. Sounds like their kind of stuff.

Like in M&B, blunt weapons could first knock people unsconcious, then another strike would finish them off. Other weapons could also, rarely, leave one injured and barely alive. After battles, you could search for alive ones, and see if your skill is high enough to save them. Perfect especially after big fights, with wounded enemies as well as allies lying around! (In M&B you could try to hire captured enemies on your side)

Just a few thing from top of my brain.

The healer task suggestion sounds sweet. On thing that bethesda should focus mostly on, is to make every character entertaining. A bard should be able to do bards stuff, and mage should be ably to actually study magic, not use his spells on creatures, thats no training but self defence.

Bethesda (Like almost any rpg) focuses too much on monster slay. Thats why you alsways hear a rpg gamer go "If you ever try this game, pick mage or paladin they pwn". This always results in the archer, monk, and other characters like those being the least picked.

Pleas Beth, let us roleplay whatever class we chose.

Ok, my two cents.
NOTE: All these are lich based.


- Add the ability to become a lich through long study and a quest line
- MASSIVE magicka bonus. It should be an epic, epic bonus.
- 15 - 25 bonus to all magical abilities.
- 20+ bonus to willpower and intelligence, and 10+ bonus to endurance(You're a skeleton, don't have to worry bout silly things like running out of blood or brain damage any more.)
- Penalties to strength, speed and agility, but not to personality, as it should be irrelevant, I mean, people will either admire you or they'll run screaming.
- Some [censored]in' new robes and a bad ass crown.
- Being a bad ass skeleton.
- Phylactery that you retreat to after you die. I'd like the system to work like this: You have your phylactery, but there's no point in carrying it around with you because after you die, people will just hit it with their sword until it breaks. So you'll want to either, A. Give it to your most trusted minion(c'mon, you're lich, you have minions), and have him guard it with his life. B. Deposit it in the deepest darkest depths of your lair(c'mon, you're a lich, you have a lair), and have it guarded by a dragon(c'mon, you're a lich, you have a dragon, bonus points if it's a dracolich, which is a dragon lich. I'm not messing with you, they exist, read the Dungeons and Dragons monster manual) or what have ye. Also, in either case you should be able to enchant your phylactery with some epic shield, absorbtion and resistance spells, so it'd basicly take someone 10x your might to actually destroy it.
- You should have to quest to make a lair
- Young necromancers should flock to you as a father/mother figure(lol) and teacher. Basicly, they'll be in your sweet crib, you can teach them, or you can teach one of them very well and then get him to teach the rest. You should be able to send them on tasks and missions, and just use them in a lot of ways. also, it would be cool if one of them got too smart and became a lich, and you had to face off against them.
- The ability to create an army of undead, necromancers, orcses, etc, and storm a city, slaugther everyone, and make it an unholy fortress.
- You should have the ability to be extremely snarky
- You should be able to gather prisoners and torture them in your lair for your amusemants :3
seriously, the amount of possibilities with liches are endless, and it would take a loooong post to cover them all. I want a lich system, that is just so epic it'll shock people.
-Finally, you should make sure to get a monster in the darkness, then make sure he'll kill your second in command should he ever betray you.

Also, a lot of this might seems overpowering, but who cares if it's overpowering as long as it's fun and epic.

A thought on weapon swinging. I thought having such a huge delay between attacking and actually swinging the weapon made fighting with heavy weapons needlessly hard. Instead of having a ridiculously high swing time it should instead count into the swing-momentum and "recovery time".

Basically what this means is a heavy weapon will drag you around more as you swing it, fighting with a one handed sword you'll barely notice how the weapons momentum pulls you around but fighting with a heavy war axe it will drag you around a few steps with wider swings. This of course goes down with strength, here it could also take into account how heavy your character is, a heavier one will not be dragged around that easily.

The other is the "recovery time" which is how long it takes you AFTER a swing to get your weapon back up and ready again. That way it prevents you swinging a claymore around the same way as a dagger but with enough strength, agility and skill with the weapon it becomes easier to chain the momentum into repeated attacks.

This kinda thing would go well with having the ability to create a fat or thin character, if your character is a twig then heavy weapons are almost too useless, if you're fat then you're slow but able to weild heavy weapons. This would help determine what sort of character you become, if you're a twig then you're more likely to be an archer or a mage, if you're a great big fat beer guzzling person then you're more likely to be a warrior, or on the couch.

Stephen.

Yea kinda like that, you could possibly be able to change your weight in game too by eating lots or little and training, more muscle mass means you're heavier too. And fat shouldn't "just" be to make a big looking character, it can have other effects too like insulating against cold weather or able to take some punches better.

BTW the "skinny archer" is a bit of a stereotype, you actually need quite some muscle in your arms and chest to handle a bow well (I just shoot with some simple ones at a carnival and even they started to strain after a bit). Not as much as a boxer but still.

I don't know about the body type influence; I'm leery of anything that forces itself into customization. Particularly in something as aesthetic as character customization, I want to design their appearance for how I want them to look, not be pressured to give every class a specific look. Rather, I'd want the more realistic rules of mass and weight to apply to other things. Wearing a suit of heavy armor weighs you down, and balances you against the momentum of a heavy weapon. Use feather/burden to alter the weight of items (instead of the current narrow usage of letting you carry more), or apply them to yourself to change your own weight. Casting some self-burden will slow you down, but make you harder to imbalance.

Hmm right, i actually don't like changing your characters looks too much, but I'd still like some factors playing into gameplay. You can have a very heavy but still skinny looking character too and the other way around. Plus, it's a game, looks and actualy attributes don't have to be the same.

I'd like to see some scars and burns and frostbite and gangrene appear on my skin after a fight or a fire or freezing or disease, I'd like the visible damage to stay there and accumulate so that after a while I'll be completely and horrifically scarred. If I visit a healer I can ask them to remove my scars so that I can regain my handsome good looks, or I can choose to heal myself without removing the scars.

Stephen.

Along with the scarring idea, I'd like to get different reactions from people in the game, a shopkeeper might like me less or more depending on whether they sell books or weaponry, people in the cities will comment on my condition, saying things like, 'you've been in the wars' and 'by the divines, get away from me!'. People in certain towns might be of a warrior persuasion and they too might be a bit scarred, they'll say things like 'I respect the way you handle yourself' or 'you need to go and fight some monsters' depending on whether or not I've got scars or skin damage of any sort.

Stephen.

EDIT: sorry about the repeat post, I've been waiting a few minutes for someone else to post and assumed they would before I finished typing...

This is where NPCs having actual personalities come into play again. So far a big problem is that NPCs only have 2 things by which they react to you and that is their disposition towards you and the "attack" value and that's VERY thin for building a personality on. They should actually have more bases that determin how they act and react. Otherwise if they only have scripted pesonalities they can often hardly react to changed situations which makes them appear kinda stiff at times.

Have to say while I hate most ideas brought up, Bethesda should mark this page of this thread and read these posts over before they seal up TESV. Solid ideas, gentlemen.

Everyone in this intire thread is right if uve read though all the threads you might of see me say this but this is what i think

we need different bodys like skinny, fat ,old, stuff like that

and magic have a look at fable 2 there magic is amazing you should make magic like lifting a bolder up and throwing it at some one

also if i shoot a massive fire ball at a wall i think it should break a little and then more then more then more then it breaks apart and you can jump out
lets say your stuck in a cave and you cant be stuff going all the way back how about blowing your way out

ive seen on youtube some really cool mods like going up behide a guard and cuting his throat and blood going every were put in XBOX

i would like to have the body parts like in fallout if i shoot somone with a bow in the leg they should be limping
or scars on your body if you arnt wearing any armour

i would aslo like your amour to break i know it does already but it doesent look like its broken i wont broken blades broken shields cracks and scraches i mean make it look like it needs to be repaired

i dont care how long you take to make this game if you read this take as long as you want just dont rush it make it the best game uve ever made

Shadowstrike45 thx

In response to this, I want full nudity, gratuitous six, prosttutes, brothels, etc. I want to walk down a street and see at least 1 pair of briasts or an exposed genitalia everywhere I go. I want to find a porm studio where you can sit and watch people from various races have six, and then a quest line to join in and put on a show for people to make money. I want some more scantily clad outfits and armour, I want people to flirt with me if I look good, I want to be able to flirt with other people. Inter racial and inter species six! :celebration:

Stephen.

Of course you realize this won't happen, but it's nice to dream.

EDIT/NEXT POST: I want to be able to light fires with a fire spell, to light torches on dungeon walls and to light candles, and I want water magic to be included so that I can put fires out and douse candles and do water damage to people. Water magic could be enhanced while in or next to a body of water, you cast a spell and a vast tornado of water comes up and swallows your enemies. Also Wind magic would be nice to play with also, so that you can cast a gust spell to blow things around a room and have the air actually pick up objects for you and bring them to you.

Stephen.

Thoughts on making healers a real RPable class, derived partially from everyone else, and partially from a nasty bug I am still recovering from:

1. Morrowind classified diseases mainly by severity of effect. Oblivion did not. Bring back the classifications of diseases, but make them more than a "size of stat decrease".

Example: A severe disease is a "plague": spreads easily (and makes Redguards glad they are Redguards!), nasty effects, eventually fatal*. A nuisance disease has mild effects, and doesn't even need to be cured: eventually, the character WILL recover fully without attention.

Diseases could have an incubation range, a contagion level and period, and multiple phases. You can in fact be infected and not know it, depending on the incubation time. You may no longer be contagious by the time you exhibit symptoms (but city guards will not know this). Depending on the severity of the illness, you can be barred from cities and possibly other inhabited locations. Witches and mendicant priests will always be available to attempt to help... but can they do ENOUGH good?

2. New effects: Damage/Drain Maximum Health/Fatigue/Magicka. Also, provide for multiple stages to recover after a disease (again, applying endurance and disease resistances) where stats may not be fully restored until you rest enough/eat/whatever.

3. One-size-fits-all cures only work during certain incubation phases, and only for a specific class of diseases. Possibly for lesser as well?

4. This brings back the value of the medical skill: you can correctly identify the specific disease and concoct medicines through alchemy (or find mitigants under wortcraft).

5. NPCs tend not to get to close for ANY disease, but the minor ones are "not significantly bothersome", in that they'll still interact with you. Get the Akaviri Snake Shakes, though? If you're in town, you will be "escorted" to the temple for healing as a public safety measure**. If you're not in town, you ain't getting in the gate.

6. Each disease has a specific cure, but not one that shows up under alchemy. Only with advanced Medical skill do you realize that THIS "Restore Fatigue" potion cures THAT disease, and the rest do not.

7. Diseases can hit hard and fast, or slow and silently, or in-between, and you shouldn't notice you are diseased until symptoms show up.

* Not even fatal diseases are INEVITABLY fatal. Just that failure to treat the disease for a long time MAY result in instadeath as the infection overwhelms your heart/brain/whatever. Obviously, a strong constitution and high resistance to disease would slow your progression, and eventually could lead to recovery, particularly with use of mitigants).

** Of course, if you cannot afford healing, they will still heal you... but you'll need to pay restitution to the city coffers before they'll let you in again!

Climbing, horse back fighting and real-time boat sailing is all I'll suggest for TES V.

This. I also want to see more variety in items and more slots for armor and clothing. I want to be able to wear both armor and clothing at the same time and customize my character's looks more.

http://www.imperial-library.info/maps/n-enc-tamr-map01.gif

What's up with the idea that each game equals one whole province? Do you guys realize how big and diverse those provinces are? You could have a dozend games in just one province without having them looking or playing the same.
I don't have anything against a game featuring two or more provinces, but I prefer a more realistic scale, so this would require a border region for me (Valenwood/Elsweyr being my favorite with deserts, savannas, rainforests and the ocean). I'd hate it if they try to sell us another "huge" gameworld with cities shrunken down to five huts, all those "cities" within earshot of another.


A game with a realistic scale would need a large environment and "empty" spaces between important locations. I think maps of 10 to 20 kilometers in diameter can be very well a possibility. The empty spaces are simply large low-detail areas of wilderness that don't need every single shrub to be hand placed. Forests, grasslands, large fields, deserts, seabeds and the like can be mostly randomly generated.
A good way to create a huge world would be to only create the basic terrain structure at first, mountains, cliffs, rivers, lakes, city and road outlines. Zones for forests, grass and deserts can simply be painted directly on the finished terrain, those are then generated in the game. Detailed areas within those zones can still be hand placed.
Most of the settlements and roads should be hand placed, but interiors of generic houses in larger cities can still be made by a generator. Important dungeons should be hand made and unique, but I really would like to see a generator that can create natural caves randomly.

A idea I had earlier about the game borders was, that instead of hard or invisible borders, have endless randomly generated terrain created whereever you go outside of the normal game world. There won't be anything interesting but random creatures to find, but it's not hard to build into a game and better than invisible walls.


The draw distance should at least be a few kilometers in a larger game world. I think it is more immersive to be able to see everything in the distance from a high point. Not only mountains and cities, also distant clouds and weather, lightning, smoke, fires by night, large boats or ships, wagons and caravans, even birds and other wildlife.

One thing TES5 really needs is better LOD scaling and http://www.umbrasoftware.com/. I just recently tried a mod for Oblivion that makes almost every building and ruin visible from a distance and, purely looks wise, it's awesome to see so much stuff over a that distance.

The problem is it forces Oblivion to it's knees, and I really got a good machine that can run Crysis on full, so it's not my PC. And it even lags when there's a huge mountain in your line of sight so you can't actually see the objects behind it.
This happens because Oblivions engine renders non visible geometry meaning no matter what's in your line of sight the game will ALWAYS render what's behind it as well using unnecessary processing power. This can be fixed with “Umbra” and it looks like it will be used since it was licensed by ZeniMax so there's hope that problem won't arise anymore. This in turn can also make towns bigger again and they won't need a wall zoning them off anymore so there's only good coming out of that really.

Second problem is no LOD scaling, that means a objects 500 meters away from you has exactly the same level of detail as one 5 meters in front of you which, again, uses processing power unnecessarily. A ruin half way across the map doesn't need a 1024x1024 texture and every single edge and corner rendered, if it all it maybe needs a 32x32 texture just smudged over it (Or no texture, just a color on FAR distances) and corners reduced to sharp edges.
While the model complexity is hard and would likely require actually MAKING low detail models (though there are tools that can do that like “polygon cruncher” for 3DS, and really, the model for a house in the distance doesn't need more than ten vertexes) the textures should be simple without having to manually make them. Have a function that automatically reduces the texture size to 50% at a certain distance and again at a greater distance.


Oblivion has no real forests, only a lot of free standing trees, and that looks especially bad from a distance. There is no dense growth, no roots or underbrush, and the trees are too short. Most speedtree games and demos have the same problem. Gothic I, II and Far Cry are the only games I remember that have believable forests. Rendering large forests with all individual trees can bring a platform to its knees, even with good LOD scaling. I think it is easier to have large mesh grids that cover areas defined as forests. They are only visible from afar and cover other terrain features without needing lots of polygons. Gothic used a similar trick to render forests.


A small problem that often happens with LOD is that objects pop up instead of flowing into view. This could be solved this way, when passing over a border zone between two LOD objects, it displays both of them and slowly blends the more detailed model over the less detailed one, once the detailed one is fully visible the low detail one is blended out the same way and then fully disappears. For change from high to low detail it would be the same in reverse.
That way the sudden popping into high detail effect could be reduced, some older games actually used that method before, like Spyro 2 for example, and it looked OK. Though there it was a bit more obvious when it happened but that was PS1 level so it was excusable.
The only problem there is that for a while you have both the higher and lower detail model in view the same time, though again a part of that could be solved by Umbra since what's not in direct view wouldn't be rendered. It would just make the change between high detail and low detail smoother than just a hard popup which is quite notable if the geometry between high and low detail differs a lot.

A little problem playing into this is bad multi core support and a RAM limit, though I guess those will hopefully be improved in the future. I didn't play Fallout 3 (yet) so I don't know how well it handled in those field, I did hear they handled LOD a lot better but it still had the same problem with rendering hidden geometry, but, as mentioned, that can be fixed with Umbra.
Can anyone tell me how well Fallout 3 handled multi core support and RAM?

If you can see everything in the distance then what's the point of having a map? I don't want to see the whole world from anywhere in the game, I want to be able to climb a mountain and see a fair distance but not the whole world. Not being able to see everything is what made Morrowind feel bigger than it was. Dust storms and Mist and rain covering your view for most of the time would allow me to stand on a mountain and only be able to see the tops of another mountain, and not with full detail. In real life I look over to the mountains near my home, they are 5 km away, I can't see every tree, I can't see every building, but what I can see is that they go darker as they become more distant, the first mountains I see are green and brown, behind them 1km further they are dark green, behind those another km they are blue. So, I don't want a draw distance of more than 5km or even more than 1km or 100feet unless I climb the highest mountain in the game, then I might be able to see 10km away.

Stephen.

I guess you missunderstood a bit, i didn't mean "you see everything all the time", that would be impossible. I meant you can see as far as possible from your current location, there shouldn't be a artificial obscuration of your view unless it's apropriate like during heavy rain, but having your view distance reduced by fog during a bright and sunny day? Sure at a certain distance objects do blend into the background but that's no reason to say you shouldn't be able to see objects that are REALISTCALLY in view.
I think you confuse "view distance" and "obscured view" too, sure obscured view can limit how far you can see to a few hundred meters but your total view distance can still extend several kilometers.
BTW not sure where you live but here i can see mountains that are much further than 10km away and don't need to be on a mountain.

And "unlimited" view distance would not make the MAP useless really, honestly how do you even get that idea? There is a big difference between being able to see everything around you and finding your way around.

Particularly in mountainous or forested/jungled regions. While maximum view distance may be very far, you'd need a decent vantage point to make use of it for navigation.

Well, I'm just saying... In Oblivion the view distance coupled with the fact that the land was shaped like a bowl made everything feel too close together. I live in North Queensland in Australia in an area where the mountains are called the blue mountains, for obvious reasons. I felt a distinct feeling while playing Oblivion that I was in some sort of giant caldera, the mountains were isolated to the edges of the country, while in Morrowind the opposite was true. Another thing is that when I played Morrowind I was able to swim off the main island quite some distance before the invisible wall appeared, so when I came to Cyrodiil in Oblivion I was quite surprised and dissappointed when I found myself running up against the invisible wall and I was still in the middle of the map. I would have liked to be able to cross over into the northern parts of Elswyr and Valenwood and only run into that wall when I got to the absolute bottom of my minimap.

Stephen.

I like the idea of that, but if that's how it's going to be done, I think they need to get rid of the quest compass. I'd like to know if I'm going N or S, but having the exact location of the target is unnecessary if you can climb a nearby hill.

But my biggest idea for TESV is plot related. The Septims have quite possibly lost control of the Empire. There should be many factions fighting to resore it. I'm thinking of an either Samurai or Three Kingdoms type of plot. Basicly everyone wants to restore the empire with the empiror as emporer and themselves as the power behind the throne. Imagine the likes of a Tokugawa or a Nebunaga conquering all of Tamriel in the name of the Empire and then naming themselves as supreme warlord. A time of chivalry, yet a time of war. Every two-bit lord and duke has his own contingent of warriors and each wants control of everything. Going from one city to the next is dangerous because if you live in one city you'd be considered a potential threat in another.

For a general idea of the Sengoku period: http://www.sengokudaimyo.com/

Well the problem there as not the view distance, it was how the land was set up. Just artificially reducing the view distance wouldn't have helped much really, if you play Oblivion on PC try it be reducing the maxium view distance and turn off "distand land", you'll see it now feels even worse.

EDIT: Just tried it myself and, due to how the land is set up, now most of the time it feels like you play on a small island in some kind of void. The land is just to empty and sloping for that.