I wholeheartedly agree with Daniel; Cyrodiil in Oblivion was downscaled by huge ratio.

For the next TES, I'm hoping to see a game world about as big as Cyrodiil in Oblivion that covers a county or a legion. There would be one big city in the center, and a bunch of small towns scattered around.
Magic items or anything beyond silver shouldn't be available in stores, since the game world only contains an economic body only about as big as Skingrad or Anvil. There should be, however, an exotic merchant that sells (rare) imports from IC and all around Tamriel.
The most ideal location would be Summerset Isle, where the game world is confined in an island. If TES5 uses actual scale ratio for the island, it may be somewhat bigger than what we have in Oblivion as Cyrodiil.

If it were "actual scale" just that smaller squiggly island on the right of Summerset would be multiple times larger than Oblivion's Cyrodiil.

Actually, judged by the map i posted before, "Stirk", that little island left of Anvil is multiple times bigger thant Cyrodiil the way it was shown in Oblivion. Actually by the games current scale you could fit the whole of Tamriel on it a few times.
Hell i say Oblivion would have been a whole lot more interesting if they had just placed it on the central Island of Cyrodiil and made the Impreial City a giant city-state with each "section" of it being a pretty much a city of it's own. Imagine hearing about the attack on Kvatch and from that point on when you look in that direction by day you can see a pilar of smoke rising in the distance and a fain glow of the burning ruins by night and how day by day you hear news of more and more of the country falls victim of the invading armies.

EDIT: Plus it could have solved the issue of the borders since it plays in the middle of a lake so just water around it, the bridges leading into town could have either been barricated or destroyed so a invasion over them wouldn't be possible.

EDIT 2: And having seen the "Waterfront" not just as a few houses and a tiny harbor but actually a huge and quite run down looking harbor town would have been awesome.

As mentioned, I hope there will be different body sizes and heights.

The body hight isn't such a huge problem i think, they can be scaled (proportions remain pretty constant on body sizes).
But there should really be different body types, i'd say at least 4, regular (little visible muscle), muscualr (thick and pronounced muscles), thin (no visible muscle, very slim built) and heavy (thick body but not too muscular). However combinations between heavy and muscular would be good too.

Though the best would be fully editable bodies, there are some games that can pull that off AND adapt clothing to the body. There is a game in development that awesomely shows that and gets far better faces done than facegen but the name escapes me right now, gotta look around a bit.

Personally, I'd rather not choose between muscle builds, I'd rather have the amount of muscle on your character proportional to the strength attribute.

There's always the problem that a lot of people prefere to set their character at the beginning and not have it change during the game. Personally wouldn't mind if my character gained more muscle with more strength or possible gain weight by eating a lot.

And actually on the topic of strength, bigger muscles don't automatically mean more strength and slim built less strength, there are actually a lot of people who are very skinny looking but are strong as hell. It's not just muscle size it's actually muscle density that makes strength. There should be a possibility to change your body shape in game though.
Well least to say is the topic of body staying static and changing is a split opinion, ones want static, ones want change, personally i dont mind either way but kinda lean towards change.

It's not that much change. :shrug: I don't mean to have absolutely enormous muscles for 100 strength characters.


I'm not so much into this kind of realistic aspect. I'll take believable over realistic in this case.

Since appearance issues like muscle mass are purely aesthetic, it should be simple to add some NPC's to change them for you. A barber to change hairstyle, a gym to change body type, whatever. Easy enough for people who want to to enmuscle themselves as they increase strength, without forcing it on players who don't want the game to change their appearance. Likewise, since it has no gameplay impact, it would also probably be easy to make it a selectable option whether you want appearance to be fixed or to be changed by the world.

Well that's less realism but an explanation why a skinny guy can still be strong

But for the previous, sadly a liiitle change is too much for many already, there are a lot who want their character to, looks wise, remain static forever.
Personally on the topic of HAVING changing characters i'd even go a step further and have different looks for changes. When your speed and agility rises the muscles don't actually grow but simply look more defined (stronger pronounciation through textures) while strength actually makes muscles bigger.

Though some suggestions go a bit too far, somebody even suggested that a character with high intelligence should suddenly wear glasses. While i say glasses could be available in the game that would be a bit... silly


EDIT: Like Rhekarid said, changing the body type through in game means would be good too.

Going to some sort of gym and having a menu pop up allowing you to choose your body type isn't really believable for an Elder Scrolls game in my opinion.

It's like having a message pop up saying, "Would you like your body to be ripped with tons of muscle in this gym visit?"

Suggestion for "changing body appearance in game", if you must have it:

1. To get heavier in a non-muscular way, you go to a tavern, and order food. it moves the "bulk" slider to heavy ONE notch.

2. To lose that weight, you "go for a jog" with the local guard

3. To gain muscle, you see a caravansary or dockmaster for a stint loading cargo.

4. to decrease (visible) muscle, you go on an indulgence spree and do "nothing physical".

There. Now, those who want a static look can keep it, and you can dynamically alter appearance to match... PLUS! the scriptage, if available in TESVCS, would allow you to have a real-time mod that keeps your character "in shape" for those who want it fully floating.

It beat having to level up my character's Strength and suddenly, he/she becomes muscle bound, whether I like it or not. (and no, I don't like it if that would to ever happen to my characters).

Having some sort of specific scripted events to change your body muscles just doesn't seem right...

I prefer muscle to just change naturally- build up as you increase your strength attribute like the old Body Shapes mod for Oblivion that was never released. BUT, if you people really complain about that, I don't really care if doesn't get in. We can mod.

Well as it was mentioned before there could be a option in the beginning to say "Body changes" or "Body stays static", that could solve it.

I'm just trying to play "middleman" for everyone here. I have no vested interest in most of the character look arguments.

The way I see it, though, you have people who spend hours in the facegen to get a specific character look, and *they'd like to keep it*. That means we probably shouldn't do "stat-dependant bodies for all". But then, we have people who want exactly that... How do you make this workable?

The best answer we have is mods. I think we can all agree that if a game included the mechanics that are significantly different and incompatible as options, we'd make the game impossible to get into for new players: fourteen pages of gameplay options? Just in character generation? I'd quit in disgust

Now, it could be argued that some options aren't bad, and you'd be right. But that does put Bethesda in the position of saying "Your idea is more worthy of official status than yours". They probably shouldn't have to do that. One official system is all they really should have to support directly.

Against that backdrop, how do we proceed? Well, the best way is to use scripted events in the Vanilla game. Scripts that show up in the CS. This ensures that mods that generally cater to specific niches on a given issue appear "quickly" and "in quality". If they can do the CS in a TESIII/IV timetable, anyway, you could see your near-perfect mod in 48 to 72 hours.

The desirable solution would be to get the entire fanbase on one page, but with TES, that will not happen. Next best? A supermajority opinion. Not seeing it here. So? "workable" it is.

Also, there is the fact that the result of any "appearance by the numbers" will inevitably be a perception thing. Your "looks appropriately muscled" might be my "why doesn't he just carry the damn horse? It'd be faster than riding it!" Trying to reverse stats into an appearance will inevitably demand mods ANYWAY, along with a mod to strip the behavior out...

So I figured scripted events are the "best option", in that it allows everyone to start with SOME of their pie.

After trying a more interactive demo of Lightsprint i gotta beg Beth again to use that, it calculates shading, lights and color bleeding really well.

And as a side note, if you can't do soft shadows at LEAST have real time HARD shadows, that's still better than no shadows at all and, to be honest, in some case looks even BETTER than soft shadows.


EDIT: I should clarify on one thing, soft shadows kinda bug me on one point. Most of the time they're really just a blurred shadow outline which looks ok on things a bit away but ugly at a objects base. It's ok if the shadow of a person is blurred at the top but looks wrong when it's blurred at the feet too.
Penumbra shadows actually handle that better since they actually "spread" out. But i say at LEAST have hard shadows available, far less processing intense and can stll enhance the look a huge deal.

I think it would be interesting to have body sizes change depending on how you play... however, I DO NOT want to be looking like she-hulk if I choose to raise her strength. A nicely toned body would be great.

And I agree that having a character wear glasses because they have high intelligence would be silly ...but the idea of that made me laugh

Oh i found it again:

Hows http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/insane-apb-character-customization/319854 for character creation?

Only thing kinda bugging me are the overly boobular outfits for female characters, what's with the V-necks down to between the legs? I guess there are different ones but really those are silly.

That was PERFECT. Tattoos and everything...

Those kind of outfits bug me too, especially in a combat based game.
*slash*slash*slash*Opps! I spilled out of my bikini top!

Seriously. -_-

Best character creator I've ever seen, that's for sure. Obviously Beth wouldn't do anything involving outfits, but the body generation is great. They should definitely do something similar to that.

They annoy me a bit becuase they're meant to be sixy but really come over as juvenile. And sadly THAT is what many gamers nowadays associate with "six in games", no wonder that topic cant be taken seriously.

Anyway not to get it into such a discussion, it DOES show what a good editor can do even when not on the level of SPORE.
I did also suggest "hair style sections" before so the facial hair isn't just one lump but actually split into several zones over the face.
http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/3402/hairzones2.gif
http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/639/argonianconceptheaddeco.gif

For Khajiit i think they would be quite simialr to human zones. And for Argonains it definetly wouldn't be HAIR
The zones wouldn't make a hard cut however, the slightly overlap so it doesn't create a hard corner on the hair.

I say Bethesda should make it so quests could actually be completed in more than one way. For an RPG series, this is one element TES severely lacks, go back and look over the quests from Morrowind and Oblivion, how many of them can end differently depending on what you do? Very few. Beth should take a look at the Fable games and see how they make quests.

The thing that gets to me is that we have these fantastic next gen consoles and you can't fit more than one province in a game. Back in the day you'd have the whole continent fully fleshed out and we were waiting on these next gen consoles so that we could see the whole continent with better graphics, what is the point of having this 'fantastic' technology if we can't bloody well use it to flesh out entire continents... I say bring back the old consoles and start making games with really crappy graphics so you can fit entire countries and planets in games.

As for editing your appearance within the game, why not have the equivalent of a plastic surgeon in the game, a Magic Hairstylist and Body Shaping Salon found within a branch of the mages guild or whatever is around in TESV.

Stephen.

Because the old games "back in the day" were boring, randomly generated and filled to the brim with bugs. It's much better with the level of detail today.