ITT: We fix the Bethesda Games Genre one mechanic at a time

>ladders

Are you fucking crazy? That would take years to implement.

I seriously can't wrap my head around their ladder problem. They already have AI move up and down slopes and stairs. Making a ladder behave as a particularly steep "slope" should not in any way affect the AI behavior.

Implement the Dark Souls combat system and iframe rolls, and remove enemy levels from the game. Make it like Dark Souls, so that a good player can easily take on late game stuff early if they're good enough.

The farther away you get from the central cities, the harder enemies hit and the more complex and difficult they are, yet you can still beat them even with the starting gear.

So you're implying for the second time that these are the same people who would dumb down Elder Scrolls?

Does this include Dishonored? Because Dishonored is the only Bethesda game I've played, and I enjoyed it immensely.

I have no desire to play Skyrim or Fallout; running around an open world doing lulzy shit never appealed to me.

We're talking about the engine where it's easier to make an NPC wear a train as a hat than it is to make a train move.

- they acknowledge their own god damn lore
- make games vertical, don't give me this ladders are limitation bullshit
- game design philosophy that extends past 5 quests and you 'win' the faction/guild/free house/title
- if you're going to use romance; characters that don't fall head over heels for you after you pick 10 locks.
- pete hines should not be allowed to talk in public ever again
- new writer(s)
- quest design that goes beyond go to X and kill raiders
- dungeon design that goes beyond box of goodies at the end with secret door to the start

Any game without vehicle mechanics may be like that. And Bethesda's train hat was a clever solution no matter how silly it looks in the CK.

Sorry OP, your thread is already fucked.

I'll summarise.

>1. AI capable of surrendering, and non-lethal mechanics to suit.

>2. Proper, extensive playtesting.

My addition

>3. More quests with less emphasis on combat.

Stats affect more than numbers, and open up new possibilities outside of dialog.

For example, high agility and decent strength = character can climb over some walls. New Vegas kind of had the right idea with the unarmed moves thing, even if they were pretty cumbersome and poorly animated.

Note, this could be included as perks. I want perks that let your character move and behave in new and different ways, to tackle problems differently.

Movement is such an ignored aspect of FPS so often, even outside Bethesda games. After playing Mirror's edge I felt so fucking restricted in Deus Ex. How is a fucking military grade cyborg unable to clamber over a chain link fence? 8 year olds can do that shit.

1) The hand to hand combat is redone to be exactly like in Mount & Blade

2) No quest icons on the screen showing you where to go. NPCs will give you plain, easy to understand instructions. The map, towns and characters are designed with this in mind. Example, if you are told to find someone it will be obvious. Like the red headed Nord who runs the smithy under the old windmill in this specific town.

3) Characters don't have names floating over their heads. If a character is actually important you will remember their name. If I don't remember their name, the character is either bad or not important enough.

4) Quivers are belted to the person's hip. Short bows are carried on the other side in a gorytos.

5) spears, polearms, longbow and greatswords are casually carried in the off-hand when not in use. Nothing just sticks on to someone's back.

6) No harmless underwater enemies that do nothing but distract your follower and make it impossible to quick travel since technically a hostile is nearby.

7) Armour that actually looks like it would protect the wearer and would be possible to move in

8) Swords and axes are not the size and shape of paddles. Maces, hammers and swords shouldn't look like they are made of thick styrofoam for LARPing with.

9) Mannequins stay where they are supposed to. Weapon racks don't disappear weapons.

10) Strangers don't say random annoying shit for no reason

11) Guards actually police skooma possession. You can make your own, and sell it to NPCs for gold. You can recruit dealers to sell it for you

12) Argonian females don't have breasts, not even tiny ones

13) Bows don't have ugly spikes all over them

14) Followers don't get stuck on things.

15) You can have a small troop of followers based on your charisma/speech score, allowing for a less combat oriented style

16) High speech skill brings up extra dialogue options but you still have to pay attention to detail and common sense to pick the right one to bypass the situation

>Does this include Dishonored? Because Dishonored is the only Bethesda game I've played, and I enjoyed it immensely.

They only published it.

This picture is exactly what I want from Bethesda.
An Elder Scrolls, Fallout crossover game where you can use swords or guns or magic or whatever the fuck you want to fight Radioactive Dragons and shit...

...I can dream.

>to be exactly like in Mount & Blade
Well they have the shit animations part down.

>3) Characters don't have names floating over their heads.
This doesn't happen unless you mean the MMO.
>7) Armour that actually looks like it would protect the wearer and would be possible to move in
Realism is overrated.
>12) Argonian females don't have breasts, not even tiny ones
Let the furries have a little fun. If mammals can lay eggs lizard people can have tits.

You want a fat cat from Bethesda?

I meant OP's picture. But yea... Fat radioactive feline Saber Cats would be amazing too. Cool idea.

17) People can be stunned or knocked out instead of just killed. They can be picked up (not like objects but in a fireman's carry) and moved easier. This allows for rescue missions, rather than just kill the bandits. Stunned people can be put on back of mounts for travel

18) Hire wagons to take you somewhere in real time. The wagons go fast since they uses common routes. Sometimes bandits on horses try to chase the wagon and rob it and you defend it with projectiles, like Cremia's milk wagon run in Majora's Mask.

19) Finishing the main quests actually changes the world.

20) You can't always become the leader of every guild, at least without being qualified.

21) Every Daedric involving quest has a reject the Daedra or worship Daedra option.

22) Make some people in the Vigil of Stendarr capable and strong for once.

23) But first... The whores!
youtube.com/watch?v=zA2VQb37O0w

24) When you gain a title, it grants you lands with their rents and incomes, as well as a responsibility to the lord you swore realty to.

25) You can tell a blacksmith to make an item for you, instead of looking all over for a smith who just made one

26) More realistic carry and weight system. The more weight you carry the slower you run

27) One click way to tell follower to pick up something

28) You can send follower on small tasks like returning a found quest item to someone. Eventually the NPC rejoins your small party.

>Realism is overrated.

I don't think so. I was fine with the armour and weapons when I first started playing but I eventually started to notice how bad they are. Especially after installing mods that add realistic sized weapons and armour from Witcher 2 and historical armour. In a side by side comparison the vanilla stuff is absolute garbage. It looks clunky as living hell. It's cartoonish and belongs on the LARP battlefield.

>19) Finishing the main quests actually changes the world.
Any change of the world is welcome. I'm looking at you New Vegas, with your eternally burning town and eternally crippled nigger not dying in the department store.
>20) You can't always become the leader of every guild, at least without being qualified.
You shouldn't even be able to join without qualification.
>24) When you gain a title, it grants you lands with their rents and incomes
As nice as this would be the Bethesda Game map is usually too cramped for this to work alright.
>27) One click way to tell follower to pick up something
Wasn't this implemented in F4?

>I don't think so
I do. Realism is nice and I prefer it, but you're asking for a change to suit your personal visual preferences in a game that doesn't fit them. Neithe Fallout nor Elder Scrolls are remotely realistic.

>You shouldn't even be able to join without qualification.

I agree. I didn't think of that. There are so many flaws to fix.

>As nice as this would be the Bethesda Game map is usually too cramped for this to work alright.

It doesn't need to be big. It can be as small as something like Rorikstead. Like when you are made a "Thane of Whiterun" you are actually the Thane of Rorikstead and you get a small tower to live in.

>Wasn't this implemented in F4?

Never played it.

>I do. Realism is nice and I prefer it, but you're asking for a change to suit your personal visual preferences in a game that doesn't fit them.

It wouldn't change the visual style. Just make the armour thinner. Just make it so that giant pieces of thick leather don't sit around the person's waist in a way that would make it impossible to run. Don't add three layers of 1 inch thick metal on the shoulders. Don't make giant pauldrons for no reason.

>Neithe Fallout nor Elder Scrolls are remotely realistic.

There are some things that are supposed to be consistent even when you add a premise like magic or funny science. Stuff like the physics of how a metal set of armour protects you. How the human body is shaped and how solid objects have to fit on it so that you can move. It doesn't have to be exact, historical armour but if you make a game revolving around pre-industrial combat the weapons and armour should at least not be total jokes.

>12) Argonian females don't have breasts, not even tiny ones
That's just wrong. We know for a fact that Hist can literally transform Argonians to have tits and there are Milk-Drinking live-birth giving Argonians.

They are not lizards, they are lizard tree bio-weapon survival machines.

>playtesting = casualization
kys

>1) The hand to hand combat is redone to be exactly like in Mount & Blade
stopped reading

Actually, you don't think so either, because W2/3 are only realistic in comparison to other shit fantasy games.

NO LEVEL SCALING

There's no point in exploring when everything in the world is always going be the same strength compared to you and you're guaranteed to never find anything valuable until the game decides you're leveled enough.

That is true until a certain point.
Then you get Malachite which is light as plastic and is super durable at the same time, it would look completely different from conventional armor.
Daedric Armor on the other hand almost does not give a fuck, when you infuse Daedric essence into Ebony it starts to twist and turn on it's own and there is little you can do after that...I mean it's an armor made of blood of a God with a demonic soul inside of it.

Nah, not really user. There's magic in the world. There's zombies and power armor. I personally prefer realistic designs, but there's nothing wrong with their middling fantasy type of designs.

This isn't a matter of internal consistency, like you're implying. This is simply the chosen visual style.

29) The Lore is the lore. It shouldn't change. It should be consistent and adhered to.

30)Most combats between living people shouldn't be fought to the last man. A battle ends when one side loses the will to fight and retreats. This can make combats cooler. The enemy force can be larger without making the game way more difficult.

Roughly guessing using my historical knowledge, the losing side in pre-industrial combat usually suffered about 30% casualties. Most of them during the rout.

Which is more cool? Being attacked by four four bandits and killing four, or being attacked by 12 and killing four before the rest run away? The latter is more badass because there are more enemies, but it's not as hard as killing all twelve.

31) Wearing faction armour makes you treated like the faction member. Faction armour can be used as disguises.

32) There should be an inner layer of clothing and an outer layer. You Dark Brotherhood outfit would have to be worn under a civilian disguise to avoid being outed as an assassin. Walking around in public wearing a leather murderer suit with the DB symbol on it is ridiculous. Guards would arrest you on the spot.

33) Take stealth mechanics from the original Thief game and maybe MGSV. Like using the dark more, crawling in grass, creating distractions and avoiding hitting noisy objects.

34) Climb walls using stealthy with a grapple hook, bring back levitation, add some climbing method for warriors.

35) Lock picking is for thieves. Locks should be able to be smashed, loudly, so that warriors don't have to invest in lockpick. For doors and chests. Mages should have unlock spells. Lockpick skill gives the advantage of silence, that should be the reason why you'd invest in it, not because it is the only way.

fuck off
i-frames are ruining souls games
It changes combat from methodical and tactical into QTE press one button not to get hit xD

>Then you get Malachite which is light as plastic and is super durable at the same time, it would look completely different from conventional armor.

It still has to fit the body in a way that allows for movement while still covering the parts it is meant to protect.

>30)Most combats between living people shouldn't be fought to the last man. A battle ends when one side loses the will to fight and retreats. This can make combats cooler. The enemy force can be larger without making the game way more difficult.
>
>Roughly guessing using my historical knowledge, the losing side in pre-industrial combat usually suffered about 30% casualties. Most of them during the rout.
>
>Which is more cool? Being attacked by four four bandits and killing four, or being attacked by 12 and killing four before the rest run away? The latter is more badass because there are more enemies, but it's not as hard as killing all twelve.
The low enemy count isn't a matter of difficulty, it's a matter of Gamebryo shitting itself trying to work several npc's in the same area.

>29) The Lore is the lore. It shouldn't change. It should be consistent and adhered to.
This is not entirely true considering the fact that Aurbis is unstable and fucked. There are a lot of cheap retcons everywhere but I would never want them to remove Warp in the West which ultimately made lore better.

If a writer gets ideas on how to improve lore without fucking up core parts of it why shouldn't he use in universe methods to change things up? And I am saying this as a lorefag of 12 years now.
Being in absolute constraints often kills the lore.

31 and 32 have been partially implemented at different times.

>Nah, not really user. There's magic in the world. There's zombies and power armor.

That's fine. I'll suspend my disbelief for that. I'll pretend that the universe has an extra physical force called magic.

>This isn't a matter of internal consistency, like you're implying. This is simply the chosen visual style.

It is. The materials for the armour are ostensibly used because they are hard, stiff or will absorb the energy of the attack. It is also placed on the body. The vanilla armours place the materials on the body in ways that would greatly impede the movement of the body.

It is the exact same materials that are used to make the hard, stiff, unyielding weapons.

It isn't consistent. Either the material changes its properties of hardness, elasticity and stiffness or the person's body does. The physics are not consistent. That is beyond suspension of disbelief.

>That is beyond suspension of disbelief.
No user, you're just going full /k/ on this shit. It's fantasy armor. It's not meant to look realistic, often not even practical. Again, chosen visual design style. Even if you don't like it or think it's stupid, this doesn't make it internally inconsistent.

-make all enemy encounters unique and thrilling. finding room after room of generic raiders and then a boss at the end isn't fun.
-make crafting more interesting than adding increasing damage/armor integers
-bring back mysticism

>That's fine. I'll suspend my disbelief for that. I'll pretend that the universe has an extra physical force called magic.
This is a bit besides the point but it doesn't have an "extra" force called magic. It has only components, magic, memory and anuic remnant, and it has only two real forces, Anui-El and Sithis.
Rest is bullshit imposed by Ehlnofey and it's often easy to negate, and even then not all of the laws exist by Ehlnofey, genetics does not seem to be a thing...or at least it works very differently. For example the "race" of a creature depends on how said race stabilized, Bosmer are bound to Y'ffre, Argonians are shaped by the Hist etc.
When a child is born it seems that the spirit comes from the Dreamsleeve and stabilizes it's form in the mothers womb according to the laws that she was stabilized with...and because of that child is almost 100% the race of a mother no matter what with few traits of the father.
It takes decades of interbreeding for the traits to properly mingle and it seems that even then mostly the magical qualities of the soul itself, like the capacity to store Magicka, are the more likely to transmit.

>-bring back mysticism
Schools of magic are not a real thing, so I never cared for their removal as long as the spells themselves stay.

If anything the schools will slowly disappear as the Mages Guild is losing power, hell if anything more traditional tribal magic should slowly resurface more, like Reach Magic.

No more loading screens for one

>skyrim
>npc surrenders only to try to fight me again 2 seconds later

>fallout 4
>I find out the brotherhood grunt's secret
>tell him I won't snitch
>I turn around
>he doesn't try to kill me

I ended up snitching but regardless he should have tried to kill me to keep his secret secret

No, fuck off. Loading screens between dungeons and overworld/larger buildings of the city make sense, I would do it to remove the heavy workload from the game.
Cities to overworld and smaller buildings should be open, yes.

>No user, you're just going full /k/ on this shit. It's fantasy armor. It's not meant to look realistic, often not even practical.

It's not even armour though. It's a costume.

>Again, chosen visual design style. Even if you don't like it or think it's stupid, this doesn't make it internally inconsistent.

When the person shouldn't be able to move in the outfit then the implied physics are inconsistent. Metal armour has to be specifically shaped so you can move in it. The only reason a person can move in it in the game is because the character mesh with the armour on is moving in a way it should not.

I literally think, "The mesh is moving in an unrealistic way. You can see the texture of hammered steel stretching like fabric. This is a bad design."

It is like seeing the boom mic in a movie. It's distracting. It's like the actor's costume being faulty. It detracts from the story, from the experience. It could only be a visual style in a couple very specific scenarios. If Mission Impossible 4 had the boom mic in half the shots you wouldn't think it was a visual style.

>It's not even armour though. It's a costume.
Don't be a dumbass.

>When the person shouldn't be able to move in the outfit then the implied physics are inconsistent.
The existence of dragons implies physics aren't consistent. Again, you're going full autistic nitpicking over games that have never tried to be remotely realistic. Are you one of those people who also spergs out about the combat shotgun?

That said, poor mesh animation for armor isn't new or exclusive to Bethesda game. Even games with realistic armor like Dark Souls suffer from the rubber plate effect due to how animation is usually done. That's a more valid complaint, though it's a problem with animation and models, not visual design nor internal consistency.

The existence of dragons implies physics aren't consistent. Again, you're going full autistic nitpicking over games that have never tried to be remotely realistic.

Dragons can be consistent. Let's just pretend that the dragons exist. That is part of the premise. Do you understand what the word "consistent" means?
>always acting or behaving in the same way
The unrealistic idea of dragons can be consistent. You just have to suspend disbelief that the physics doesn't work when you crunch the numbers. There are always dragons, dragons always exist, they have certain properties that are consistent.

For armour to actually work in Skyrim the premise would have to be that the matter that makes up the armour or the person underneath has inconsistent physical properties. There is no consistency because the armour is not...
>>always acting or behaving in the same way
Sometimes it's rubber, sometimes it's implied to be hard. The steel swords are always hard, never rubber.

I'm not nitpicking. I didn't have to think about this at all. It's just instantly obvious to me. The armour designs are obviously flawed. It can be fancy, exotic, non-historical, creative, new, distinctive and all that. That's great, but also has to make sense. Otherwise it's like a serious King Arthur movie where King Arthur is wearing a t-shirt with armour print on it.

>That's a more valid complaint, though it's a problem with animation and models, not visual design nor internal consistency.

Some of the Skyrim armour, especially the steel armour and orcish armour are so badly designed that animating them in a way where there is no rubber-like stretching would be literally impossible.

the pc controls for FO4 are utter garbage.
>no hold to sprint
>no diagonal sprinting
>no toggle aim down sight
>press R for inventory AND reload
>same button for grenade and melee

>Even games with realistic armor like Dark Souls suffer from the rubber plate effect due to how animation is usually done.

Dark Souls isn't really realistic armour, but they do a really good job of making fantasy armour that is actually designed to sit on the body in a way that allows for movement. Almost all of the Dark Souls armour looks like it can be worn without steel bending or stretching like rubber and plates of steel passing through each other like they are immaterial.

It just works. The designers display a knowledge of human anatomy and how solid, immaterial pieces of armour would have to be shaped for it to work.