Vinny's recent Souls streams gave me the bug and I finally picked up Dark Souls. It's punishing but something about it appeals to me. After playing for a while and getting to grips with the combat I think it would be a perfect style to build into the next Elder Scrolls games. It would require way more precision than just mashing the right trigger.

Then I realised that you would need to play the whole game in third person for it to really work well. Is the first-person nature of the Scrolls game something that defines the series now? 3rd person was just about ok in Skyrim.

I also loved the combat in Reckoning which is pretty casual but I found I had a lot of fun with that game.

I don't think being first person is important to Elder Scrolls. I think what makes Elder Scolls is the vastness of the world and the (supposed) amount of things you can do in it. Combat has always been the poorest aspect of it, so I think sacrificing first person for good combat is actually a smart decision. The question is whether they can figure out good combat.

I think the combat in Skyrim had its interesting aspects. It required the player to put effort into experimentation, though, and it wasn't very balanced. Its biggest problem is that swinging a sword with one hand and healing with the other practically guarantees that you can win almost any fight. I think it could be a fine system if they had a group of people dedicated to balancing encounters and tried to get people to experiment with different abilities, especially summoning monsters to fight with you and magic. Also, having a universal cooldown for shouts hurt the game's combat in the end. I would rather have seen a separate bar, like magic, that refilled over time and that you could dump points into.

The second part of this is true, but the first part is not something I agree with. I'm not usually one to throw the word "immersion" around, but the first person view did a lot to get me invested in the world of Skyrim and did a lot for placing me in the shoes of my made-up character. Giving that up just to get better combat isn't what I want. It's not what I come to the TES series for.

@mattf87: Well, since the next game will most likely take place in Hammerfell, combat would be much more fluid and faster (like the Prince of Persia or Assassin's Creed series). Unlike most Nords, Redguards actually dodge and focus on speed and skill. Because of the sandy environment, wine, sabres/scimitars, camels, and turban-wearing Khajiit would be the next big thing replacing mead, battle-axes, and Nord wenches.