Suggestions for TES 6
Hi there! This may be pretty long so don't worry if you don't want to read it all, just some suggestions I just started playing Skyrim again, and I was thinking about how brilliant the game is, however sorry to say this, but I wasn't all that impressed with the new Fallout game, which is partly due to me just not liking the setting over fantasy, but also I thought there were some pretty key comparisons to make between Skyrim and Fallout 4, as I believe that it is fair to say that the games are relatively similar (Open-world Action Adventure RPG.) Obviously these are just my opinions, so they don't mean all that much, but i just thought I'd voice my opinions on ways in which you could make sure that TES 6 is even better than Skyrim in the hopes that The Elder Scrolls series keeps on improving. The first paragraph often compares to Fallout 4, so if that is not what you want feel free to skip it.
My first area of concern is the players freedom to do as they please, be it through leveling, availability to explore, or availability of powers, weapons etc. I think it's fair to say that Skyrim almost nailed this, the only way of improvement I would like to say improving on is to have an even later game e.g. more armour sets so that you don't just get deadric armour at around level 40-ish through smithing and then just call it quits because you can't get any better weapons as this takes away from looting which I believe is a very fun part of Skyrim. Why i'm bringing this up is that I am concerned that with Bethesda's take on this in Fallout 4 was not particularly enjoyable for me, as you couldnt travel anywhere as a giant part of the map was covered in radioactivity and there was very little to actually do there, and yes I get that that is the whole point and Fallout is the name of the game, but immersion is no excuse for a lack of effort, and so I would just try to spend as much time as possible with TES 6 so you could get that feeling of run in any direction and you can do something great, which brings me on to my point about leveling.
Leveling in my opinion should work similar to Skyrim, with enemies balanced to your level instead of how you could walk the wrong direction in Fallout 4 and be killed by a man wearing slightly more clothes who has a gun with larger numbers in the name compared to a person of your level, however a more fleshed out perk system would be much better, as I believe that there are so many different things that need balancing and editing with some of the perks in Skyrim. For example in the base game, light armour outclasses heavy armour incredibly, and crafting about 540 daggers makes you a master blacksmith. There are also other things that could have been done to improve the perk system, such as having more perks having a clear impact on the game, for example maybe you could have a one time perk in enchanting that game 3 enchantments on a weapon, which would make the weapon feel a lot more special, and would encourage players to make hard choices instead of exploiting potion brewing to get godlike armour as soon as they had gathered enough ingredients. Don't get me wrong, the perk tree was done really well, however I think that possibly looking at what some of the well renowned mods have done with it may give some good inspiration for what to do next time. As well as this please don't make weapons have a level requirement as that is just beyond non-immersive, just make the good items hard to get, but not impossible so you have that small chance of finding something special like finding an ebony bow or something from a boss in a dungeon somewhere.
Again, sorry this is starting to sound like a rant against Fallout, but I do have stuff specifically about Skyrim's flaws coming up, but I did not like how in fallout you were limited with power armour, I get how it fits in with the Fallout setting, I just much more prefered Skyrim's shouting system where you did not have to lug around a ton of power cores just to feel special. Speaking of which, make the player feel special, as this is what was brilliant about Skyrim. Discovering you are and incredibly powerful person who is special in the world and no one else can do the same is great, and even better when we were encouraged to explore all the heavily detailed caves and ruins that were made for us to enhance our powers and to actually make us develop our characters. This enhanced our character development, which I think Skyrim was incredible at, as we weren't told what our past life was and so we got to decide that for our self, so by being a prisoner or by some other means, allowing us to create our own backstory again would be great.
Where I believe that Skyrim let itself down however, were some of the details in its graphics for a start, this will only be short as graphics do not mean much, however a much more detailed fantasy setting that would make even high end PC's struggle would be great, and I trust that the character creation will be a lot better as Fallout 4 nailed this.
As far as the story is concerned, it needs to be something original, dragons were cool and all and i'd love to see there return, but copying and pasting "Dragonborn" into TES 6 is a very bad idea if its done in the exact some way. I'd love to see a new way of being unique in the game, for example maybe being blessed by a new or existing God or Deadric Prince, maybe being blessed by a God as a reward for something in the main storyline to become a Dragonborn would be a great feature, but being dragonborn should not be the main feature about out character. This would make dragons a lot more threatening as whilst our character is unique, they aren't the renowned dragonslayer destined to save the world from the king of dragons if that makes sense.
As far as gameplay is concerned, balancing needs to be prioritized, as weapons outclassed magic incredibly in combat and as a tool for killing in almost any way. I have many ways that this could be solved. The first wa would be to just make magic scale with either the players magics, the players skill in the school of magic they are using, or base magica. This would strongly enhance character development, however it would need to be done just right so that novice spells such as flames are clearly novice spells, but still would be able to deal damage and wouldn't be less effective than using a splinter to try to kill enemies in the late game. Another way to improve the magic would be to just as more spells going into the late game, especially master level spells as only 3 destruction spells, none of which were as effective as something like incinerate unless you had 20 enemies surrounding you.
With followers, I believe that somewhere between Fallout 4 and Skyrim would be a good way of having followers. Obviously we need more highly detailed followers, as Serana felt like the only follower that the player could have a true connection with, which is lucky as she was really likeable as she could be sympathised with, however only having about 10 high detailed followers may not be a good idea, as you run the risk of people just not liking their followers much, which is not to say that there shouldn't be highly detailed followers, its just we still need our Lydia's and whatnot who were alright followers, but not great either. Having around 5 ish Serana quality followers, and then lots of simpler followers would not only make the good ones feel more special, but also allow people to feel more immersed in my opinion at least.
Thanks for reading! I may update with more, but seriously if you spend a few minutes of your time reading my ramblings, it means a lot, so hope some of you agreed