And they were still there when i came back again after having travelled half-way around the world.

Nothing special right? we've seen that all before, why am i even mentioning such a mundane occurrence? WELL! as silly as it sounds, that simple act of leaving an item somewhere in the in-game world and finding it again in the same place later was a very rare thing to happen in any game before the xbox360 generation, in fact it was Oblivion that wowed me for the first time with that particular feature.

Then of course i was immediately gobsmacked, MESMERISED! by the way the shadows flitted across my sword arm and hand as i moved, "the tree shadows are moving across my hands!" i thought in amazement, now in Skyrim it happens all the time, yet again i am used to these things and have almost forgotten they were once new and exciting.

Like a fat king feasting on the finest food my palate has become jaded! even though i am still eating the very finest fare.

Anyone old (like me) who used to play mainly on consoles will hopefully know what i'm talking about, before that generation of machines, items always disappeared if you walked away so much as a few metres, nothing remained., even the way arrows stuck in doors, or gems fell to the floor and bounced, or could be kept in a container, all these super advanced physics were totally new to me, Skyrim has them all, yet i've become accustomed to them and no longer notice.

Skyrim did have one amazing novelty at least, and that is the mountains, never have i seen such beautiful mountains in a game before, that's definitely a first and they managed it on the same platform that Oblivion came out on, impressive.

Which leads me on to this question, it's entirely/more-than possible that the next elder-scrolls will be made for a new generation of console, do you think we are going to experience ground breaking stuff once again?

Will there be hundreds of NPC's walking around at the same time in a market square all pvssyring away like in real life, with their own daily movement patterns much enhanced as we watch on in amazement? will all cities and the windows of buildings be seamlessly open? will the NPC's dialogue be far more intelligent?

What technological marvels await us in the future? what possiblities will increased processing power and ram allow for? or have we reached a plateau do you think? have we already climbed the highest hill, are we at the peak of gaming with no new ground-breaking things left to be experienced?

What do you think?

A TES game could be amazingly fantastic if the future consoles move into a motion control that includes both Kinect (visual) and Wii/PSMove (using a controller).

In Morrowind items always stayed were you put them not only that but corpses did to and you could safely use any container for storage.

I believe, but am not for certain, that Diablo and Diablo II did the item thing as well.

Not any, just most. Some things did respawn, such as guild supply chests. Also, most corpses vanished after 3 in game days away, the editor had a "Corpse Persists" flag for a reason. I am unsure about items, but I think they do stay as it was possible to crash the game by placing down too much stuff.

The game wouldn't crash, but too many items in one cell would spawn an overflow loot bag that contained all the items that were in that cell.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Glitches Very bottom of the page.

Ahh yes I remember that now, it's the only object already in game when the editor loads. Never saw it though as it takes so many items to do it (on PC) that it's hard to do by accident.

Considering the first graphical fantasy computer game I played looked like this:

http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/daggorath_troll_club.gif

... I don't take any of the gaming advances over the past couple decades for granted

I don't know that troll looks pretty boss.

Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80. Epic time wasted on that.
In the pic, "A R" was someone typing "Attack Right" (with his wooden sword - a pitiful weapon).
And yes, you had to type 'A' [space] 'R' [enter] to attack. Each time. You got really good at it. There were 'blobs' at higher levels that would take 20-30 'A R's to kill.

Now I spam fireballs with a mouse click. Times, they have changed indeed.

Fixed.

Fixed.

I remember the first time I played Morrowind GotY Edition and I dropped some random items after contracting a STR disease in the Foyada Ashur-Dan. I was probably level 5 at that time.

Ages later when I was around lv 46 I came across those items again. Took me a second but I recognized the relics from my low level past.
Pretty cool moment.

I read this in Calixto's museum tour voice.

Fixed.

There are still room for improvements in a TES game. Better real world to TES world scale ratio for one. A capital city should be a large city, not a few blocks of houses

It'd be foolish to expect a TES game with a world as crowded as a Grand Theft Auto world, but that, I think, is the goal to reach. A game with a world as big as an Elder Scrolls, but the population of a Grand Theft Auto (note that I'm only taking the population aspect). Each person with their own lives to live

That'd be grand indeed

Usually, I try to stash dropped items, whether from enemies or the pc, in containers/corpses so I'm not always walking around, seeing weapons flying in the air. It can also slow down game performance if too much junk is left lying around.

Finding dropped items 100 hours later certainly is different, when compared to other games where "dropped" items are instantly deleted from the game.

I've played games on the Atari back in the day. Games certainly have come a long way from moving some square around the screen, which was your character. Often in Skyrim, I can't help but stop and watch the scenery, especially the waterfalls and rivers or looking over a cliff and seeing everything in the distance.

the technology of game development won't stop till we have holodecks or something a kin to the matrix.

Most gamers come home after working a long day and don't really want to move around any more, they just want to relax... And if they don't work, they still don't want to move around, and juts want to relax.

Sports are for moving ^^

Nintendo lost me when they made Mario & Zelda with the wii remote

http://i.imgur.com/ncuzm.jpg.

Probably why a lot of gamers are very out of shape, because they never move.

I think what would take my breath away would be a genuinely large city full of interesting people all doing their thing, a really big city that felt alive, i think that would equal the awe i felt when i first played Oblivion.

Oh and for some reason, being able to look out a second floor window at the people walking down below, don't ask me why but i'd find that fun lol, or seeing rain and storm out of a window whilst inside a house.