What I'd like to talk about is realism and how I would like to see it in future installments on the Elder scrolls series.

I've play many games through the years and most of the games I've played tend to have some sort of realism in it.

• Fallout 3 & New Vegas - Breakable/Loss of limbs and body parts.
  
• Monster Hunter - Realistic monster behaviors, breakable limbs, scars, and a realistic ecosystem.
  
• Red Faction - Destructible Environments.
  
• Grand Theft Auto - Player able to change appearance based on food and exercise.

Most people that play TES like to roleplay.

Well, realism adds to roleplaying.

People on this forum will tell you that realism is a bad thing and no one wants it.

Well, I think that people do want it.

Takes these things for example:

- Your character slams his/her warhammer against an enemy's head and their helmet shatters into pieces.

- Your character shoots a fireball and it disintegrates your enemy's arm, leg, or even head.

- Your character slashes an enemy's steel armor and sparks fly.

Do the above examples sound like something you would like?

Well, that Sir/Madam is realism.

Skyrim is a good game, I am not saying it isn't.

But it is not a perfect game.

What I do not like is how everyone in Skyrim is like a Barbie doll.

No matter what happens to them they do not show any signs of damage.

You can head-shot someone and you get to show for it is the person saying "What was that?"

To me that does not seem fun. Some people find that fun, I do not.

What I would like to see is:

- Better mechanics

Temperature affects the character. Wearing the wrong type of clothing may have negative effects.

Basically realistic consequences when using spells.

For example, accidentally light a house on fire with the Flames spell.

Shoot lightning into a river and have it become an AOE.

Use frost spell while it is raining and watch the raindrops turn to hail.

Why just chop wood? Why not chop wood, place it in a pile, and light it on fire using the Flames spell? Build a camp fire.

Fishing. Nuff said.

Spears. Nuff said.

- Time play a major role in the game.

Start you character off as a teen and watch him grow as time goes along.

Watch how he goes from a boy into a man.

- Scars/Loss of limbs sustained from battles.

Say you are at an important battle and you are face to face with a close rival.

You epicly defeat him and have a X shaped scar below your right cheek.

That scar would be a reminder, a memory of that epic battle you had with your rival.

Some people might not like this because they like barbie doll characters.

But let's say the game had a "Doctor" who could remove the scars using some sort of medicine.

After thousands of hours of game-play, you will have a old character who you raised from a boy, who has endured and fought countless battles and has scars to tell the tale, has aged and become wiser.

A character that you can truly roleplay and call your own.

There is few more things I would like to say but would be a bit too much to type.

Maybe you agree with most of what was said, maybe you disagree with everything that was said.

I am just trying to share my thoughts on how the game could be improved and become a truly perfect game.

Too long, didn't read?

And weapons and armor should take months to smith, as they do IRL.

I agree with pretty much all of this, but sadly I doubt much of it will ever happen.

Probably would be able to apply such changes in the next generation of consoles.

Loss of limbs?

I used to play Skyrim. Until all my PC's lost a limb.

Scars are also kind of meaningless to me - I play in first person, so I'd never see them.

Some of the area effect comments are interesting though. As is making an actual campfire - which you could then cook on. Would help if cooking and eating mattered.

Fishing . . . ehhh, we can fish. Just grab 'em.

Spears - I've never understood the fascination. Sure, they're a realistic weapon, but I don't see what they add to gameplay. But that's just me.

Some nice ideas, some I have no interest in.

would love a destructible environment, and yeah, usually, if somebody got shot with an arrow, they'd be saying something along the lines of " Ow!" at least haha

Sometimes realism needs to take a backseat to gameplay for the sake of enjoyment. People go on and on about how they want to be forced to eat, drink and sleep, but do t hey want to have to stop periodically to use the restroom? Or do they want to be forced to sleep 8 hours every day or suffer a cumulative penalty? Probably. They'd prefer to just sleep a couple of hours and wipe away any penalties. People want limb and other locational damage, but do they want to be laid up for a few months while their broken leg heals? Probably not.

Like I said in another thread, as much as people claim to want realism, they really don't. No, they want an idealized version of realism that really isn't.

Wouldn't the things you listed add to roleplaying?

S.E.R= Selective Entertainment Realism.

To me, it'd just be inane upkeep. I don't need things like that forced upon me to roleplay.

Monster Hunter is about as close as one can get to a approachable hunter simulation... because have you ever played a Hunting simulator? They're hard. Fallout 3 only has breakable bones in VATs IIRC (I haven't played in years as I never cared for it). BF3 (and Bad Company 2) also had destructible environments which changed the dynamics of each game. My point is there is nothing to really gain for Skyrim if they added realistic elements to the game. Wait for mods.

and, of course, the actual simple solution to satisfy all is to have a mode that is, yes, optional. a mode with the kind of realism that actually adds value/depth to a game like skyrim (and advances the system in newvegas.)

things like: potions over time, weather/equip effects, degradation of equip/skills, etc.

those add the kind of mechanics that many would find very entertaining and worthwhile.

One of the series. Out of how many? Abandoned thereafter.

I would like alot more out of the realism side, but honestly do you even realize how long it would take to implement half of your ideas?

I like most all of those as ideas, but I'm afraid I have to agree with Mitheledh's point. Realism does have to take a backseat to gameplay, if not just for technical or complexity's sake also frequently for fun and practicality. Time sinks are some peoples' thing, but too many forced upon you and it can distract from the story developement or other aspects of gameplay. I mean, I find vampires awesome, but how often have you heard people complain of the simple but consistant need to feed every few days to interact with merchants? And that's fairly minor in my opinion.

Personally, I lament their decision to remove item degradation as that was an aspect of realism that tied directly into a skill. It made for the realisticness of a person roleplaying an adventurer out on an extended trek having to stop for the night and hone their blades or even choose to take up an enemy's weapon that was less battleworn. But I can see that it could be as annoying and distracting to some people that were just interested in the journey, not the forced time sinks.

So was it a good thing that they decided to remove and shouldn't have? Or was it a bad thing they shouldn't have done to begin with and finally "fixed"? Neither can be absolutely true as it depends on who you ask. Thus the real question is how much. How much realism and how much "suspension of disbelief" mechanics should go into a game? What's the "just right" balance point?

You expect any decent roleplaying game to have an answer that falls further on the side of more realism than other types of games (save maybe very specific focused games, like hunting games in their particular focus). I admit that I like others had the feeling that Skyrim was going further away from RPG and more towards adventure game when reading about the abandoning of armor degradation and loss of stats. But having played it now for quite a while, I can say it definitely has a depth of overall complexity and involvement I expect from an Elder Scrolls game.

Did they get it right? Many ways to answer that. You could look at the incredible sales worldwide, you could consider how often you've replayed it, but in the end they kinda have an ace in the hole that other games don't. At least for those people who bought it on PC, there are mods. This is a perfect answer to the variety of answers different people will give. I recall there was a realism mod requiring food and sleep (NOM if I remember right) made. I think it was for Morrowind, but it as a mod was a better place to put that level of forced realism in my opinion than the base game. When I consider that the forced realism aspects you put in the base game are "inescapable" for people that couldn't stand them, some of the decisions made for Skyrim make a lot more sense. It's not that I agree with all of them, but I get it now.

The degree of realism that you want would...

- Seriously damage the gameplay for a lot of people.
- Make the game harder to play.
- Make the game harder to make.
- Force every player to realistic roleplay, even if they didn't want.
- Affect Sales.
- More Features = More chances of bugs and unbalanced features.
- Etc...

Some Examples:

- Many people would dislike a dismembered and full-of-scars character.
- Many people would dislike to have to wait months so that their broken leg heals.
- Many people would dislike dying from a not-treated wound.
- Many people would dislike the fact that from a realistic point-of-view, bandits (in group) should easily own you most of the time.
- Etc..

You don't want a game, you want a simulator. That maybe seem good to you, but would hurt the game of many people.

the "realism" this game needs is, obviously, the kind that improves gameplay.

make it optional. problem solved.

What you're describing isn't roleplay, it's rolesim. You have to draw a line somewhere. Forced eating/drinking/sleeping is repetitive, not exactly entertaining, and would get annoying pretty fast. In fact, I think that when you strive for too much realism you risk losing that wondrous sense of fantasy that stimulates our imagination and makes roleplaying fun.

I would like there to be more importance placed upon eating and sleeping but I'm not sure it should be programmed into the game. My character eats and sleeps already. I don't need the game to tell me to do these things in order to make my experience more fulfulling. Similarly, there's nothing to stop my character heading home and recouperating after a particularly tough fight rather than heading right back out into the frey. At the same time, the players who don't care about the mundania of life aren't penalised for their preferences and are free to enjoy the game their way.

I wouldn't complain if cooking (and food in general) was buffed a little though. You get the 'Well Rested' boon after sleeping after all. A little boost to food might encourage players to invest some time cooking/eating.

what i'm talking about is a hardcoe mode option with many of the things that people have been asking for and got a taste of in vegas.

i'm tired of everything being left out for consoles and the excuse that pc modders will do the job that beth should have done.

it doesn't have to be as much as modders, but, not having some basic gameplay features and options like: degradation of equip/skills, potions over time, weather penalties, real-time lockpick and other no pause aspects, and, other "realism" aspects is getting more than irritating in 2012.

i'm not talking cosmetic realism. i'm talking adding to the gameplay.

The fact is everybody wants a different amount of realism. Developers generally draw the line where they think they can satisfy the greatest number of people. There's food in the game if you want to eat it, but it's utterly irrelevant to gameplay. Sleeping gives you a bigger bonus, but it is also arguably more important for maintaining immersion for more players than eating.

If you increase the benefit you get from eating, you run the risk of confusing players into thinking they're supposed to be eating to 'play the game the way it was meant to be played' and then people complain that it's boring eating food all the time. Skyrim is already full of ambiguous signaling systems like this: they put in fast travel and people complain about it because they feel like they're being forced to use it. They're not, but its presence signals some players in a way that makes them believe it is necessary for gameplay. Potent food would have the same effect. And even though repairing weapons and armor is sensible, common for many RPGs, and fits perfectly with the crafting system, they axed it because many people feel that it is boring. Boredom is death to a game, so developers generally try to avoid features that players will find boring. Most of the 'improvements' to game mechanics to make them more realistic cross the line between what most people enjoy and what most people find boring.

In Fallout 3, food serves an important purpose: it allows you to heal your players without having to use a stimpack and without having a regeneration function. I bet a lot of players just found it tedious to scrounge for food and eat all the time. Does it add to gameplay, or take away from it? In Oblivion, players would just spam the heal spell. In both games, you can also wait. Here are three mechanics that replace regenerating characters. All of them require the player to engage in a repetitive activity to achieve the same effect. In Skyrim, they just cut out the repetitive eating/healing/waiting and automated the process for the player. The end result is the same, and a lot of players probably like it a lot better, but it's a long way from being realistic. The parts of reality that games don't simulate are usually the dull, repetitive parts.

Some of the stuff just isn't really feasible to throw into a single game. Look at the 4 game examples. You listed a few things that each game did very well (with GTA I would have chose the extremely well built and entertaining stories instead of a feature that was only in one game, but that's me).

So, how which one of those had the features from the other games? GTA didn't have breakable limbs, a highly destructable environment, or a realistic ecosystem (as most of the game takes place in a city). Fallout didn't have the things the other games did, except for the one shared with Monster Hunter. Red Faction didn't have any of the things from the other games.

It takes a ton of cash, time, and effort to build those systems into the game. I'm going to now use my example for GTA because as far as customizing a character's appearance, Skyrim did it better (except for not being able to change a lot of it after making the character). The GTA story is extremely well done and pretty close to realistic (minus the fantastic situations you can find yourself in). GTA's script is extremely long, and that's following a basically linear path. Imagine trying to do that and giving the player lots of choices, one of the key playing points for an RPG. Not to mention GTA's extremely well done, realistic voice work that would go with it.

Removable Limbs means animation combinations for missing an arm or a leg or both. And that means hobbling animations, probably crawling animations animations with crutches. It also means being able to modify the body on the fly and have them adapt. Not only is that modifying the body mesh and textures, it means modifying armor textures and meshes too. The same goes for destroying armor and weapons realistically. You need to build an entire system into the engine to handle that. Keep in mind I'm just looking at a technical standpoint, most people who lose a leg playing this game is just gonna reload. Hell, scars are too much for some people. Like you said, scars can be removed using some sort of in game device, but people would still have a problem with it. That being said, scars are much more feasible as far as design.

Sparks from armor and weapons would be easily added if we could assign material properties to armor. Right now the only "Steel" part of Steel Armor is the fact that the word Steel is in the name. It has no inherent properties of steel.

Temperatures affecting your character means a temperature system for the entire game world, as well as adding that to fires (I assume that you'd want fire to stave off cold as that would be realistic), the player, and weapons and armor. All coded into the engine. Beyond that, it means a massive amount of new gear that players would need just to play. Can't wear just your steel armor up the mountain, as it's -23 degrees, making the armor freeze. It also could mean a character gear overhaul in the sense that would allow for multiple gear layers (although many of us would love that).

Lasting and spreading fire affects takes a lot of RAM/CPU to do right. So does destructive environments. Most engines with destructive environments are based around having that feature. They skip past a lot of other features just to have that in the game. Lightning in water is possible, but keep in mind that it would be directly proportionate to the size of the pool and how powerful the electricity is. An entire river wouldn't go up from a basic shock spell. Heck, it would barely charge more than an average sized swimming pool.

Making a fire with a fire spell is actually easy enough. It could be done in Skyrim. Just add a script to the game (probably in the base properties of fire or in the log itself) that says if a piece of firewood is hit by a fire spell it is disabled and a lit log is moved in it's place. As for fishing, it could be done, smaller games like OoT have had a fishing minigame. But to do it well would take a lot of code, new animations, and new items (the fishing rods would need to be rebuilt as items). Same with spears. Depending on how they are used (throwing vs stabbing vs slashing) they need new animations and spear items as well.

Finally, growing from a teen to an advlt. Possible, but this requires quite a lot of character changes and that, once again, is a feature that needs to be coded into the engine to be done well. What's more, what about the people that want to play as an old wizard or a paunchy, middle aged merchant? Can they start middle aged or elderly? Will they just keel over and die eventually, just because it is realistic? Besides, on the default time scale (1 IRL minute = 30 game minutes), it would take over 200 hours on a single character to play a full game year not including waiting and Fast Travel.

I have to leave for work now, but you get the point. There just isn't enough time, money, and manpower at Bethesda to do this. Besides, the game already suffers from a lot of things to do that aren't as thought out as they could be. Do you want that problem to get worse?

i think it would take a few of us about 1 hour to come up with some creative, logical and fun ideas to implement into an optional "hardcoe" mode that added gameplay value. and, lots of it.

not the types of choices that people can do or not and doesn't really have any COMPOUNDING gameplay effects.

by having realistic weight totals, weather/racial/equip penalties, potions over time, no-pause effects, degradation, etc. the gameplay drastically changes and isn't purely cosmetic like whether to use fast travel or not, sleeping and eating, though, those particulars could have been developed to become meaningful in such a mode.

yes, beth would have to develop the system so that it's worthwhile, but, that what dev's do, right?

these hardcoe features have ALREADY been discussed for years. all beth had to do was the code stuff or whatever, lol, that i have no clue about.

i hear what you're saying, but, i'm tired of letting beth and others slide.