In all honesty, I don't think Bethesda is going to streamline the game any further. The more plausible reason why they've pulled out features since Morrowind is because of voice acting. To keep the game marketable to a wide audience, they did away with the text-based NPC conversations and replaced it with oral-based conversations. This limited the content greatly given that voice acting is extraordinarily expensive compared to writing scripts. This is what limited Oblivion and Skyrim in terms of RPGing because there are less options for the player and less avenues to go down. I wouldn't mind text-based conversations in a game even in 2012, but that's unlikely to happen, and unless Bethesda can dig deeper into their coffers and expand the NPC content (which is unlikely), a future game will be no more complex than Skyrim.

EDIT: That being said, I think Bethesda loves giving the player as many options possible, but because of market pressures and keeping the game competitive and profitable, they're restricted in what they used to be able to do in Morrowind.

I believe training should have evolved by now into actual activities, like performing the actual perk in some fashion, somewhat akin to what you have to do to get into the guilds.

Want to get some training in Restoration? Have an NPC do something with you, like keep a target healed using Healing Hands while they attack it.

To open up Perks you could do quests, odd jobs, or actual training. Rather than just leveling up and unlocking the perk that allows dual wielding to attack faster, why not have you fight someone in the Companions again and have to beat them within a time constraint?

A quest that teaches you the Silent Roll because you need it in that quest, etc.

Skyrim is geared towards the broadest possible audience, and future games will likely be the same. Complexity is usually an anathema to a younger player base that has been trained to hop from game to game as rapidly as possible.

I for one am totally pumped for TES VI: Super Mario Bros. *sarcasm.*

I would, in turn, argue that because Fallout New Vegas and to a certain extent Bioware games are examples of good RPG voice acting while not skimping on choices, Bethesda has really run out of excuses here.

The best solution, to me, would be to stop trying to make every single character unique because by doing so you drag down the quality of dialogue for the characters who are actually supposed to be unique. Instead, decide on a select few characters who will receive good attention, spend a lot of time making them stand out from the crowd, and just keep the generic NPCs generic. This is what Obsidian did, generic NPCs would only give you a quick quip before moving on while the characters that mattered were fleshed out and well realized.

Bethesda just tries to make everyone well realized. And as a result, the dialogue gets hamstrung. Makes since too, considering how muddled Skyrim's stories were. In short, they were trying too hard.

Maybe one day Bethesda will release a game that only appeals to 1,000 people then they can say "See? We're the baddest [censored]as in the biz yo."

I reckon the simple way to look at it is that bethesda (whilst not actually like this and a little patronizing) works like a five year old child, if they see someone else doing something better than them they won't ask "can you help me make this better" they will do it their own way and just hope it is better.

Don't mean to put it that harshly but it is an anology that works

If they're creative and willing enough, they can design a game that looks simple on the surface to appeal to casual players, but has the option to delve deeper into content for hardcoe RPGers. Skyrim made a nice attempt, but it turned out a little skimpy for the hardcoe RPGer who enjoys something along the lines of Morrowind.

i.e. Pokemon.

Simple on the surface. Deep as all Hell when you actually look at it.

In fact, text-based conversations make it easier for the casual gamer to skip through unnecessary content and get to the meat of the quest. The only problem is written narratives aren't attractive for most gamers today. Fully-voiced NPCs are now almost a standard in the gaming industry.

They had comparatively fewere npcs though. Skyrim is huge with many settlements and dungeons so the voice-acting is spread very thin.
FalloutNV and Dragon Age are NPC focused games and they have noticeably fewer npcs and settlements. Its a trade off really. Skyrim offers a large world to immerse yourself in, while those other games concentrate on a more focused story instead.

Whaaaaaa?..

It's not streamlined enough. The other day Todd tried to get Kim Kardashian and The Situation to play Skyrim, and they both got brain aneurisms from having to think too much. We can't have that. Games need to be streamlined MOAR so that even plankton can play them.

There is no reason to take away anything else. They have built a huge fan base with Oblivion and Skyrim. They need to add more depth and more customization into these games now. They could add back in a retooled attribute system with general perks tied into them. Example strength 50 carry 35 more pounds. Intelligence 65 get 6 attribute points. Let willpower determine your magic resistance and the perk you can get willpower 75 get a 75 percent boost to magic regeneration.

Bring back more armor choices maybe more slots. If not increase the overall types. Also give us new weapon types.

Give us back our old spells alongside spell creation. That allowed us to mix spells to create our own unique combination it allowed us to break away from the niche mage spells. It put magic in the magic if you get what I mean.

I said that when Oblivion came out, I've learned not to expect the expected because the unexpected which should be expected, expects to be expected to the unexpecting.



Bethesda, if you're going to remove more, then please just remove everything and revamp the system, nothings changed in terms of functionality in Skills since Daggerfall, and since Skills is pretty much the only thing that matter right now just do something different with it please? yes just axe it and redoi= it in the next title, you have a Buttload of money to do it.

Right, and with text conversations, the possibilities are almost limitless. With the size of Bethesda's development team, you could have nearly 10,000 NPCs, most with unique conversations, and create a richer experience for the RPGer. All the while, a casual gamer could have the option to just skip the nonsense and get down to hacking 'n slashing. But it's just a pipe-dream because it would be suicide for Bethesda to release a game that uses 'old' concepts.

Not to mention, modifying the game would make for some interesting additions in the modding community. People could easily write their own storylines and scripts and inject them seamlessly into the game.

Well we would of got more if it wasnt for that 11.11.11 release date they could of made more armors added back some of the stuff they cut out in morrowind like spears and I know this will sound like a broken record making your own spells and they also could of taken one more month to go over everything and make sure the game wasnt as glitchy as it is now and for the love of god bethesda bring back the arena!

ok in theory two more games by bethesda and I'll be ready to take charge and bring back hardcoe rpg!

That was a major blunder too, one that has upset a lot of people, but I would blame Bethesda's marketing staff for that mistake more than the developers. Would have more content been in the game if the deadline wasn't 11.11.11? Probably not, but at least it wouldn't be so buggy. Their minds on the game's concepts were already hashed out by then.

I think Skyrim's fine and fixes a lot of problems that the previous games did. Is it perfect no but it's still amazing for what it offers.

That's very debatable.

Yeah, too much cutting.

Absolutely. Skyrim is a fine game. I've put over 200 hours into it and had a blast, but it has the same problem Oblivion did, which is it alienates RPGers who love depth and content in previous Elder Scrolls games. Again, I wouldn't blame Bethesda for cutting content in Oblivion and Skyrim. They had to do it to stay competitive in the gaming industry. That isn't to say there isn't a market for hardcoe RPGers, it's just that they had to bring in more voice acting and they had to ramp up the graphics. All that requires extraordinary time and money, which takes resources away from developing better narratives and giving players more choices. If they didn't make those changes, they'd be dead in the water.

Yep. In fact I would even say that Pokemon Black and White were actually deeper than Skyrim.

From the previous thread:


Sounds like an expanded version on what Star Wars Galaxies used to do.

Each top tier skill also came with a title based on that skill, and the class that it was within. So you could earn the titles and run around with "Master Droid Engineer", or "Master Carbineer", or whatever skill you had.

I'd also like to reply to another post from the previous thread - about the "imagination" and such driving roleplay.

I agree with that 100%. Which is exactly why I don't need an in game class label, or in game class description, to be able to enjoy my class. Because I can just as easily, just as effectively, open up a Word document, write down the title of my class, a description of the class, and a backstory of my character, and have it be just as effective towards my roleplay as if those features were in the game - features which, mind you, have absolutely no bearing what so ever on the actual game play. How exactly is your roleplay different because you wrote your backstory in a Word document, instead of in a box provided to you by the game? If anything, the Word document would expand the roleplay, because you wouldn't be limited in how much you could write, like you are in Morrowind. Why this "feature", or lack thereof, is a point of contention, I will never know.

Was the class naming and description of Morrowind cool? Yes.
Was I slightly disappointed that it wasn't in Oblivion? At first, yes.

Then I started writing my class descriptions and character back stories in Word documents, and I no longer missed it. I was now able to expand even deeper into my classes and back stories than ever before. I wasn't relying on the game to tell me how to roleplay, I was doing it myself.