A Skyrim (or Elder Scrolls in general) wishlist
By ahoodedfigure 58 Comments
My progress in Morrowind continues. I've probably achieved more in this game than I ever have in any game previously, despite a few crashes (one of them completely new to me that told me my disc was damaged when it bloody well isn't. I wonder if the disc reader is failing). I've "liberated" many artifacts, including stuff I haven't ever seen before (though I remember my trusty Skull Crusher, I haven't seen the Staff of Magnus since I saw it playing in old Arena), and I've actually taken the time to read a few books, many of which are actually pretty enjoyable if you take the time to read them.
There have been some crazy-broken quests, though. People mentioning things they have no way of knowing, conversation items not popping up unless I do things the way the designers planned even though I pretty much did what they said, obscure quest orders that, if done out of order, leave you lost.
With that in mind, I've come up with a sort of a wish list to the Elder Scrolls makers that I hope will in some way be fulfilled. But like wishes in general, it's more an expression of need rather than expectation of anything actually happening. I'll probably say a few things here that may ruffle a few feathers, I dunno. I'll try to start with the most important stuff first. Here goes--
(1) Do Your Best to Make Quests Withstand Player Tinkering (aka Busted Quests Are a Bummer).
The Elder Scrolls has a reputation of being an open world series, with players ostensibly able to do just about anything they want. I'll argue that you may be able to do anything you want, but many of the things you do will break the game.
I'm not just talking about killing major NPCs here. I've had incidents where talking to a character and refusing an earlier quest will make it impossible for me to heal them with the gift of a potion because they refuse to talk to me, which doesn't seem intentional. Many of these quest breakages could easily be explained with a sentence or two from the game: "I don't care you want to heal me, I'm too busy looking for this stupid nick-nack to talk to you right now"... *doom*. It means tying up loose ends and making sure that the player is at least told somehow that what they're doing, while not optimal, isn't going to make the entire quest hang up forever.
The solution to this is much easier than it sounds. These are computers we're dealing with, and they're designed to handle this kind of abuse when it's hard for us humans to wrap our mind around the possibility monster we've created. There's one scripting language that's absolutely brilliant at keeping track of player possibilities that would actually be damned useful for folks at Bethesda, or anyone who wants to make a complicated game. I present to you:
Inform 7
For those of you who aren't slapping your heads, this is the seventh generation of code whose origin lies in games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's a text adventure game creation engine. I know, "eeeee!" and all that. It's got a brilliant feature that will make my point for me if you watch this short video (the debugging starts at 3:10, but the really cool stuff starts a few minutes later).
Inform 7 has a mode that lets you keep track of input possibilities you've made, then allows you to instantly replay up to that point in the game to see if anything's not acting the way you want. It lets you set an optimal path, called a "blessed path," so that when you're adding other possibilities you'll know if you accidentally screw up the this path for a given set of variables. While I don't understand the limits of this system, this or another scripting system, with no graphics to complicate things, would be a very useful way to keep track of all the possibilities; rather than creating quests in isolation you start working on that tapestry from the moment you begin, as it seems like was happening in my potion example above.
Adding this safeguard doesn't mean you have to forbid players from alternate solutions, but what it does is help you ACCOUNT for them, so that when you're polishing the code you can at least add explanatory text telling them they're doing it wrong, or even add a side event you didn't even imagine doing before that accounts for the player's unwillingness to conform to your narrow script. This opens up the world more than having a wide playground to play in, since it interconnects things.
(This is what I've been trying to talk about with Bioware games I've played and seen: while Bioware tends to provide a decidedly linear experience, it feels less linear because they account for specific player actions, even if they supposedly break sequence. I've seen such things in Jade Empire, where I deliberately went out of my way to see a place I'd long ago liberated from monsters and was rewarded by some spirits for my troubles, or Baldur's Gate, which actually had quite a few ways which the player could handle a main quest line, none of which broke the quest. I suspect Bioware maps things out similar to a scripting system, if they don't already use one themselves.)
(2) Let the Game Check Savegame, Item, and Quest Integrity
More than once I've had games crash or become unplayable in Morrowind, and I wonder if sometimes it could have been avoided by the system if it checked to see if there were invalid item placements, missing NPCs, weirdly placed NPCs, that sort of thing. I would rather see an NPC pop back to where they were supposed to be than have the game be ruined because stupid NPC decides to stand in a doorway and never move, or fall through floor into the abyss and become unkillable.
Connected to the scripting system above, when a player does something that causes an error, the game should, when reloading a save, check to see if there's a sequence problem. If said NPC no longer exists in the game world without having been removed by legitimate means (it's out of bounds, for instance), return them there.
Perhaps it's not true with Oblivion, but I found in Morrowind that errors seemed to pile up upon each other, to the point where crashes became more frequent. There's a rather famous error where NPCs actually move north a few steps every year, to the point where they disappear. This is not the most encouraging of timing elements.
(3) Don't Be Afraid of Spreadsheets. Just Make them Pretty, and Let Us Cross-Reference.
Information organization is one of the most daunting aspects of any Elder Scrolls game, and I think that while the games have become more deliciously varied over the years, the amount of information you have to keep straight can be overwhelming.
Morrowind tried to simplify all the quest organization by allowing you to look up keywords by their first letter, but if elsewhere a person is referred to by their last name, that sort of doesn't work. Many times I wanted to figure out where I was supposed to find person X and found that they were usually mentioned by a last name, making it impossible for me to look up. A knowledge base would be much more helpful.
A knowledge base would be a supplementary form of information that reflects everything the player has been told. This has arguably already been done in Morrowind, but it wound up being really hard to navigate. Rather than making it linear (and making the inventory linear) it should be organized as a tree. I imagined this while scrolling through my (admittedly ridiculous) potion collection. Since it already classifies items in the game, why not let those classifications be represented visually. Instead of scrolling down, in the case of Oblivion, through several item types to find the thing you want at the bottom, why not have a list of classes, and within those classes a list of alchemical components, or potions, or quest items.
Then, and this is the scary part, let the player pick how they're organized. Sometimes, alphabetical order is the absolute worst way to do it.
Similarly, you could have quests and encounters listed in a tree format, organizable by the player such that you could look for conversations only with a certain faction, events that only happened in a certain region, and a few other headings that the player would find useful.
(4) Let the Easy Stuff Be Optional, Allow Hard Stuff for Those Who Want It
Hardcore mode in New Vegas was a bust according to some. It had you heal slower, drink water, sleep, and eat food, but many of these things were a bit too easy to keep up with, so there wasn't much of a challenge there. For me though, such things don't need to add challenge so much as add a bit of texture to the game. Even if it doesn't make the game much harder, I think it would be cool to have to do these things in an Elder Scrolls game-- including with fast travel.
I've heard people say that if you don't want to use fast travel don't, but the idea of saving thirty minutes of walking time is hard to avoid. In Morrowind there was fast travel of a sort, but it required the player to actually master it, which I find much more satisfying than being able to teleport anywhere without risk of encounter. Even the overmap in the older fallout games allowed for random encounters, and some of the most charming incidents in the game were in those isolated spots. Random encounters are not a bad thing; they break up gameplay and provide the player with challenges they didn't expect.
Make fast travel a bit more challenging than just beaming from one place to another, and I don't think too many people will complain. Even Daggerfall's fast travel made you pay to stay in inns, let you choose between reckless travel to speed up time and safe travel which cost less but took longer, and pay more to travel quickly by sea. Morrowind's is still my favorite just because it feels like it's part of the world... but the problems of organizing information (see point 2 above) that make it a bit of a pain to find things NOT on the fast travel hubs.
You could even have these textures/inconveniences extend to other processes, like the journal. At least for systems with keyboard input, being forced to type out journal entries MIGHT be interesting, if you're allowed to hook back up to the knowledge base if you get frustrated.
There is some hope on this front, if only in the news that the HUD doesn't have to be up at all in Skyrim. Makes me wonder if the compass will at least allow for you to pick whether or not the quest marker is there, but I don't know enough to say.
(5) Don't Let the Music Suddenly Stop During an Encounter
It's a bit weird to hear pleasant music when you're being gnawed to death by a wolf, true, but the alternative, for the beautiful orchestra to suddenly put down all its instruments and stare at you when Monster Y has noticed you and is slowly bounding toward your position sort of ruins the element of surprise. As much as I complain about Cliff Racers pecking at my head, I think it's OK to let the music reflect player awareness of a threat, rather than be the source of it.
The way it works in Morrowind is that once a threat has noticed you, the ambient music screeches to a halt and the drums of war begin. This could be if a little mudcrab is trying in vain to climb a huge hill that's standing in between.
Instead of this, let it key on player sight: If a threat is visible, the music gives you a warning that stands for player instinct kicking in. You could also allow for audio cues to stand in for this change in music (increasingly loud footfalls, growls), and let the music only kick in when attack rolls begin (or actually attack attempts, if they really did get rid of attack rolls for good). That way it more reflects the player experience, rather than directing it.
This does create a side issue that I just realized, in that if you hear the battle music it won't be a good idea to save until the battle's concluded. If you save in my version of things, you might put yourself in a bit of a bad position. If the game refused to let you save, or at least warned you of the threat, then you could use trying to save as a way to detect threats (although I guess this isn't too big of a deal, since the ability to know if animals were around was already there before).
Maybe a "check surroundings" command would help with this. You spend a minute noting what's around you, and this will let you identify plants you've seen before, identify any animals nearby, and any places you've been to before (along with "some sort of temple" and the like standing in for the stuff you haven't visited yet). Any threats will become fully known at this point, even if they're stalking far away from the player, and you'll also get to note things you can see with your eyes that aren't necessarily on the map. Sorta like real life.
(6) We're Getting People to Do Activities in ES, Why Not Animals?
Not talking about [insert offensive term here] so much, shame on you for thinking it, but can we get animals to do more than list about waiting to run into the player? Have them forage, have them maybe have a den with their offspring. I know that in Oblivion they can attack each other, but wouldn't it be neat if a player going out of his or her way to exterminate a certain type of creature actually affect the food web, such that some animals wind up being more populous over time? Or how about some creatures that are usually not hostile attacking, with other animals that are usually hostile sated by a kill and thus uninterested in the player? They'd seem less like MMO mobs that way.
(7) Don't Be Afraid to Let Alchemy Get Crazy Complex
It's fine if you're looking for a known effect to be able to only see the components that will work for that effect, but please let us combine stuff in weird ways and possibly find new properties. Experimentation is damned fun.
Would also be neat if some common alchemical components still took a bit of doing. Diving for pearls is a nice little sub-game, but why not make a lot of processes like that? And varying sample quality, with degrading quality over time (the higher your skill the longer you can keep components before they spoil) would be nice for a Hardcore sort of setting (when combining components, you can tell it to start with the worst components first (for practice) or best components first (when you don't have many components and are trying to create something good)). It would also be neat if some items, when they spoil, actually gain properties (that's where alcohol comes from, kids).
It doesn't have to be a discrete minigame, but it would be fun to have a pretty deep combination system, sort of like the stuff you find in Diablo II, allowing for a bunch of different ways to customize the experience if you're willing to put in the time, but still allowing for some useful potions if you can't be bothered.
Yeah, I like alchemy.
--
Well, I'm getting a bit exhausted, but these were the ideas that I came up with just sitting here. Feel free to correct anything I missed or mis-wrote, or add your own suggestions in the comments. I may make another one of these if more occur to me (or I remember all the ones I thought of before starting to write this!).