LordKaT said:
1) Third Person - first person is good for twitch games, but RPGs tend to require a third person POV, and I think this allows better immersion versus first person.
2) Lock on - One of the things I hate is the arcade-game feel of fights in TES3/4, in my experience the handling of fights tends to really suck (for me, at least). Locks on would allow the player to stay focused on the enemy, and possibly to more easily perform acrobatic moves to avoid being hit (great for the otherwise useless acrobatics skill).
3) Auto-Attack - Please give my left mouse button a vacation. If I'm in range and locked on, there's a good chance I want to smack something with my stick of death.
4) Tracking Spells or auto-hit spells - Having spells with linear paths is fine, but we need some spells that auto-track enemies (like fireballs in WoW), or auto-hit enemies (like spells in Final Fantasy), otherwise playing a mage ends up feeling like a really slow FPS.
5) New Sneak System - Let's face it: the stealth system in TES sucks. You're either too clumsy to sneak around or you're a fucking god and invisible to everyone around you. Sneaking is as much as skill as it is the ability to take advantage of your surroundings.
6) Enough with the omnipotent guards, already - Seriously, every time I get caught I *have* to go to prison, otherwise I'll be fighting these damn guards until I'm dead.
7) Let Cooler Heads Prevail - Why does every person in these games love me, or pull a sword on me and want to kill me? If I fight someone for a bit but then run away, the same person shouldn't automatically attack me on sight (or follow me to the ends of the earth) unless he's got some kind of frickin' psychosis.
Here's exactly why I hate them using the exact same versions for consoles and PCs. For the console, I think suggestions 2-4 would make sense for the most part. For the PC I would absoultely hate them and I think it would ruin it.
#5 I agree with for both. I think it should be a factor of skill and shadow. You shouldn't be able to sneak in broad daylight. They also needs some funner sneak quests... like have to get into a town undetected and steal something. As in sneak through the ENTIRE town, or something similar, those would be fun and challenging.
#6 The guards should be pretty strong, but shouldn't scale, but they should be varying levels (maybe by random), so you never really know if what you're going to get, but they should be beatable at higher levels.
Things others posted I totally agree with:
"Skills. Longblade, shortblade, axe, spear etc etc etc... I hate the dumbing down of Oblivion,"
"The ability to wear clothes under armour and robes over the top, or just mix and match. Another of Oblivions fail points." Plus, the armor looked way worse in Oblivion. Who actually like how glass looked?
"No more scaled levelling"
"Voice acting"
"More unique dungeons and caves. So many of Oblivions caves were copy and paste jobs, crates were always found on the raised bits in the corners surrounded by stalagtites and stalagmites."
On this one though:
"New artifacts and special weapons, not just rip-offs from Morrowind. Oblivion stole, amongst other things, Azuras Star, Necromancers Amulet, Umbra......and on and on and on..."
That's a motif from all the games. Most of the artifacts you mention are the Daedric artifacts that are known throughout history as the most powerful and indestructible artifacts around. They appear in all the games.
For me, what made Oblivion bland vanilla was mostly the auto-scaling, the cookie cutter dungeons, and the lack of a real world. Inside the walls everyone was nice, outside everyone killed you. What happened to the caves and buildings outside the cities that had non-hostile people? What happened to the mines with workers, forts with other characters and fighters, huge and complicated old cave/daedric ruins, dwarven bases hidden underneath a cave structure, vastly different ecospheres (btw auto travel was a bad idea)? You couldn't know for sure if you were walking into a friendly or hostile place, while Oblivion you always knew. Flying was great, the tree houses of the mages were great. Morrowind had character and a believable, immersive environment, Oblivion was bland and not very believable, and completely cookie-cutter.
Anyway, new improvements, aside from going back to the old style, that I think would be great:
Different bounty/reputation for different areas/cities. For small crimes, word shouldn't travel all across the country, just stay local, and as said before, perhaps over time it should fade, proportionally for the crime. For large mass murders perhaps word will spread after a bit, maybe you'll see portraits of yourself pop up soon. Maybe they could implement a way to change your face if that happens, like pay a mage a large sum of money to manipulate it... With a fame/infamy rating within each province/city, it would open up for different gameplay in different places. Maybe if you have a quest in a city you have a bounty for, you have to sneak around and stay out of sight to complete it without the guards coming down on you. I also liked the storyline much more in morrowind, it was longer, more interesting, more in depth, and it wasn't so crystal clear, bonk you over the head with whats going on. Anyway, long post.
