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(This topic is going to get very technical with design, so if that's not your thing, you might want to bail NOW.) Surely I'm not the only one who's noticed, as much as the lore is great, and the visuals are beautiful, and the music is inspiring, et cetera et cetera, as much as we love a TES game, the design... the actual game design is... well... bloody atrocious.

Swearing is not allowed on UESP.

Even just taken in the abstract, the design is utterly broken. There is a lack of cohesion. In fact, it's really split into several different games which only loosely impact each other. There's the combat game, the stealth game, the levelling game, each of the mini-games in later titles, the inventory management game, and more besides.

Each of these games is shallow to the point where they barely manage to not evaporate entirely. There are no meaningful decisions to be made. The difference between a big spikey spike that deals lots of damage slowly and a wee slicey slice that deals little damage fast is not a meaningful one. The end result is the same - a certain amount of damage in a certain amount of time.

TES (along with most RPGs, for that matter) is basically comprised of either this type of false choice or entirely choiceless labour, like "go to point A. Button-mash until enemy dies. Go back to quest-giver. Collect reward." There are no choices to be made, and so as far as game design is concerned, the entire exercise was a waste of time. This essentially turns TES into a very badly made Skinner box.

But we know, outside the abstract, that TES is all about exploring a world. If that is the core of a TES game, then that must therefore be the core of its system, right? Wrong. If anything could be said to be at the "core" of this mess, it would be killing things.

What in Oblivion does killing things have to do with exploring a world?!

The core of the system is totally misaligned with the core of the overall work. When we play TES, it not because of the design but in spite of the design that we play. Therefore, this design must be completely scrapped and we need to invent a new one from the ground up, knowingly only that exploring a world must be the core of this new system.

Any ideas anybody?

Exploration, in general, can be a pretty dangerous affair. In real life, there are more issues with things like hunger, shelter, warmth, etc (such survival aspects can be added, to a degree, with mods), but, depending where you are, killing can be a strong aspect too.
While again, irl, the issue would be more with wild animals, seeing as the TES games are set in a simpler and wilder world, it instigates the need for more of a defensive stance; protecting your belongings, fending off criminals, etc.

In terms of the non-animal kills, apart from bandits on the roads (comparable to real life muggers), the only kills originate from exploring ruins and buildings and such. If these places were devoid of anything to kill, they would be easy to explore and not challenging. Admittedly, they could add obstacles and puzzles to make things harder; those are things that I think the game needs.
And bottom line - people like killing things. RPGs with killing in are popular, so they're going to have a decent amount in to cater to what people like.

I agree with the choices thing. There needs to be more of them, as well as consequences. I think Oblivion provided these much better than Skyrim did (I haven't played other ES games). I think Oblivion is also harder and you do need to think of tactics and skills way more than Skyrim. The latter is fairly easy in that regard.
Imo, Oblivion did well with quests, in terms of variety, outcomes, npc responses, timings, complexity, challenge, consequences. I think Skyrim was lacking in all the fields.

For me, Oblivion had it right. Things like having to go to a certain spot, at a certain time of day, and look on a certain stone - good fun.

I really like Skyrim too, but I don't think it's as good (I do prefer the graphics though).

I think the ES games try to provide many options of gameplay. If you like hacking and slashing, you can run around busting bandit dens and raiding camps.
If you like village life, you can buy a house and make potions to sell in the store.
If you like exploring, you can trek up a mountain, or see what's in that interesting tower.

I don't see the games as one thing. It's a role-playing game and it can be anything you want it to be. Are they perfect? Definitely not, but they've done well with it. The worlds are vast, provide an abundance of options and things to do, and again, for me, Oblivion has so much going on that it feels you could play it for an age.

Mind you I still love Skyrim to death but at the end of the day its is way more shallow than the games that game before it,and I think that needs to stop and course needs to be reversed.I even liked Fallout 4 but they really should have taken a lot more from New Vegas's Book than they did.Its really good to see Oblivion getting some love because I remember for the longest time a lot people hated Oblivion but even after Skyrim's releases but years later including after Fallout 4 its seems opinions on Oblivion are shifting into the positive as people look back it really fondly.

Its really nice to see because I firmly believe that Oblivion didn't deserve all the hate it got.I am of the mind the Oblivion took Daggerfall as inspiration and refined many of its best points while also integrating ideas and lessons learned while making Morrowind and made a damn fine ES Game and game overall.

Oblivion is still not without its faults however,but its still a game that with some tweaking and a few different design decisions could have been the best game in the Series.I view Fallout 3 similarly since it was their attempt to make a Fallout Game their way and it wasn't bad by any means,but when Obsidian made New Vegas they perfected what the series should be from now on and ES should borrow some its ideas and how it handled things. Skyrim while still fun and even great is in my opinion the weakest game in the ES Series from Morrowind on. Morrowind is still at the top for me but Oblivion is really close with the leveled enemies being its biggest flaw.

Kinda unsure what the topic is here. Which TES game, specifically, is bad, and can you cite a game that you would say is superior in terms of game design, choice/consequence layout, and exploration over combat?

Ok, maybe my purpose isn't getting through...

Imbalance, my gripe is against the design of all TES games, as they completely miss the point. Or at least all games since Morrowind, since they certainly have exploration as the core engagement. If you look at it in a broader context, all TES games have a fairly similar design.

Now, I'm not suggesting anything realistic here. I'm not suggesting any ideas that any observing dev would be likely to put into the next TES game. I'm thinking about ideal game design, as if we had total free reign over what TES could be. Yes, TES as it is is more than just one game, and the design suffers for it. Ideally, if three different people wanted to a) play a potion-making game in a village, b) clear bandit camps and c) explore towers, since they are wanting three different games, they should be using three different pieces of software.

So, Aarah, maybe a game with killing tends to sell better, but that's not our concern. I'm interested by the discussion of survival, however. Perhaps the game could be centred on overcoming survival challenges, like hunger, or avoiding wild animals or bandits, or coping with the weather as in the Frostfall mod for Skyrim. What's needed first of all is a good purpose to these actions - why would the PC be putting himself in the face of these dangers? What kind of purpose could a person have for traversing the land, which also involves NPCs, and would necessitate going to different places on each occasion? Use your lore knowledge, I have none. Maybe you can think of one that works really well in the lore of one province.

P.S.

When I say choices, I mean meaningful choice, and when I say meaningful choices, I mean choices with consequences. When I mean choices with no consequences, I will explicitly say 'false choice'.

Then, as a TES fan, I don't think I will be much use to you as I fundamentally disagree with your central gripe. I find the overall design of the series very appealing, lest I'd have stopped playing at Daggerfall. I'm fascinated with the myriad of games within games as presented, and while perhaps each entry has had its strengths and weaknesses pertaining to side activities, the franchise would not be what it is without them. If the sheer variety of possible things to do hampers the gameplay in some way, I haven't noticed because I've been busy doing all of those things while simultaneously enjoying the overarching story that I am encouraged to experience in any way I see fit. I'll grant that most quest lines are more about following a set path than choosing a branch or offshoot of events based on selectable actions, but it's fair to point out that the player always has a choice of whether or not to even accept a quest, with the consequence being fairly obvious. I don't think I understand why you would not want a role-playing game that incorporates various sub-games such as alchemy, enemy cleansing, and exploration for the sake of exploration all in one package. It sounds like your complaint is that you don't want options, or that you'd prefer to play a more streamlined game. Personally, I would not.

So you think TES design, at least since Morrowind, is sound. Well, if that topic interests you, please let's debate that!

What you love about TES is that it gives you lots of options, in the form of a plethora of extremely shallow 'minigames'. (Can we use that word from now on? I know it's not quite the typical usage, but it's great for our purposes.) You don't mind that they're shallow, because the main thing is that you can do what you like - it's a sandbox design.

I think that argument really boils down what, if anything, attracts people to the design of TES, so it's a great one to argue over. I'd like you to imagine any one TES 'minigame' in isolation. Imagine that was the entire player dynamic. You'd get bored of it pretty quickly, right? That's because it's a shallow system, or in other words, you don't get many meaningful choices about how the gamestate unfolds. If you picked combat, for example, you'll notice that almost every strategically viable option equates to dealing x damage in t seconds - there are next to no (and in Skyrim, precisely no) meaningful choices to be made.

So far we agree. But you believe that because you can muck about and try all the minigames at once, you don't get bored. Well, if you think about it, it's only a matter of time. You got bored of your imaginary minigame-isolate as soon as you had explored all the possibilities, which, as it turns out, were quite limited. Now with all those systems in place together, it's simply a question of how long it takes you to explore all the possibilities of all the systems.

This is one reason why CRPGs have in every case failed to stand the test of time. Dragon Age: Origins is 10 years old, and is considered ancient history. Compare games which have lasted thousands of years, and yet people are still playing them at the professional level, still exploring the possibilities after all that time. That point is closely related to the second.

Though me and you may love Morrowind, it's just impossible for the Skyrim generation to get into. Why? Because, in short, the novelty has worn off. In long, that means not only have all the possibilities been explored, but later games have gone over many of the same possibilities again. Skyrim fans don't enjoy Morrowind because they've already played the alchemy minigame, except with better graphics and smoother controls. And so on for most of the other minigames.

These games live, in large part, through their novelty, and so when the next instalment comes along, they slowly, but surely, die off. This also explains why I never got into Oblivion. After playing Skyrim thoroughly, and then playing Morrowind thoroughly, I had basically already played Oblivion. What of Oblivion wasn't a new introduction carried into Skyrim was a remnant left over from Morrowind. Its unique elements were so few it only took me 10 hours to get bored.

In contrast, imagine that TES only had one minigame, but this minigame was packed with depth, or in other words, was full of meaningful choices. Some people are amazed that you can play Skyrim for 100 hours and still not have seen all there is to see! Let's put that in context. If you and your friend had been playing chess at a rate of one move every 15 seconds since the moment of the Big Bang, you would barely have gotten started on exploring chess (there are estimated to be 10^40 sensible games). If TES featured one strongly designed deep minigame, nobody would get bored and the novelty would never wear off. If it's really options you want, you want to reduce the number of minigames to one.

P.S. Though it may not sound like it, I am also a TES fan. I just think it has so much untouched potential... ;)

What I think would be fun, going with the 'one minigame' (or 'big-game' in this context) concept, is something akin to, say, Skyrim's Main Quest, but a lot more in-depth.
For me, most of the quests in ES aren't long enough; I want to do more to complete them.
Quests that I really enjoyed were the Knights of the Nine expansion for Oblivion, and Dragonborn for Skyrim.

Going back to the Main Quest in Skyrim: say that was the one and only quest in the whole game, it could contain the things already in the game (escaping Helgen, Greybeards, Shouts, dragons, etc) but then between all those things, there could be the more in-depth things that I think, BiggJobag, are the things that would interest you.
For example, after seeing the Greybeards, we would then have to set out to find shouts, but in doing so, we'd need to travel, build fires, rest, learn to make tools to hunt for food and eat/drink. We could barter with people we meet, they could be generous and share their food, etc, or they could try and rob you of whatever you've got.
You'd need to make enough money to buy things (perhaps working for someone harvesting crops), craft yourself armour, etc. (I know these are already a thing).
These are starting to sound a bit like minigames again, but really you can't have no 'minigames' at all; real life is full of them (the shower minigame, the making dinner minigame, the drive to work minigame').

Basically, you'd really need to work at just surviving and providing for yourself, before you can even run off to a tomb and fight a draugr and get a shout.
You'd perhaps need to seek out a trainer, who can teach you fighting skills that you actually have to train in (no just paying money to level up a skill, and more complex than 'the more you hit something with an arrow, the more your archery skill goes up).

This is as far as my imagination will go atm, without starting to move into things that are already available in the games.

Tbh, I don't think the game I've described would be my cup of tea. Although I think Oblivion's quests and characters feel much more important and real, I actually prefer Skyrim to play because it's more easy going, and I like to game to relax and not get enraged that another flippin' scamp has killed me for the umpteenth time. (I actually stopped playing Oblivion after about 90hours because the caves and such were the same dark, plain tunnels with some more open areas, and I got fed up with the Oblivion gates (samey).
I've done a bit of a second playthrough, where I've lowered the difficulty setting, and bypassed the main quest so as not to initiate the gates, and thus far it's been much more enjoyable.)
So, yeah, if the game had too many decisions and consequences based on those decisions, I would feel too much pressure. Life has enough of those things - I don't want to game them too (again, that's just my personal preference for gaming).


You've hinted at a few elements so far, but I'd like to know what your ideal ES game would have in it. What are the things that would it perfect for you if you were the developer?

I quite like where you're going with that idea. The Skyrim main quest could work well as whole game. In that case, I can see the game going two main ways - firstly, some kind of survival-exploration game that you played in order to find the shout, perhaps somehow getting a better shout for 'surviving better' (idk, I'm just speculating). You'd then have to work this into the overall goal. I'm not fond of Alduin, because once you've killed Alduin, that's it, he's dead, congratulations, the game is finished. I'd rather the goal was to send as many dragons as possible back into the ground, using your shouts somehow. Maybe your shouts aren't special powers, but are an expendable resource, and when you use your Voice to defeat dragons, you use 1 shout. This all sounds like it could be a fun way to play the land of Skyrim in the time of the dragon crisis, and would be an idea worth exploring further if I was a Bethesda dev.

The other direction you could go is to make the shouts themselves the core mechanism. I'm not so confident this would end well. You would have to limit the number of different shouts to only as many can be truly distinct choices. You could in theory develop a set of shouts that interacted with each other and other supporting mechanisms in ways that posed interesting decisions, but in practice, I feel you would probably end up with something like BioShock, where any one player got their favourite two- or three-Plasmid strategy and spammed it for 95% of the game, or worse, like The Witcher, where there is a clear-cut, hamfistedly obvious answer in every situation as to which Sign is the best.

If you play Skyrim to relax, that's fair enough. We all need a break sometimes. But yes, when I like to think about design, I'm not thinking about relaxing. Having fun, yes, but not relaxing...

But then again, that's a different thing entirely to difficulty level. A difficulty setting is a sign that the designer has failed, because it implies that the game does not naturally, by design, unfold in response to the player's ability. If you play a game of Tetris as a novice, you will get few points. That's not the same as a game with a difficulty setting, where if you play on a setting too high, you will get nothing, progress nowhere and have to reload a save. I'd love to see a game where saves were handled automatically to be more of a pause-and-progress functionality, like in Mount and Blade: Warband. The game would have to respond naturally to the player's ability in line with the game's goals: for example, if we went with the first game idea at the top, a novice would not be able to get many dragons back in their burial mounds. Then, in theory, you could still play it to relax. (You would just be playing badly.)

P. S. From this afternoon, I'll be going away for a couple of days and will be inactive. I'll be back on Monday.

Look to be honest, I want Bethesda to make the kind of TES game Obsidian would make. And to even more honest, I want Obsidian to make the kind of TES game Obsidian would make.


I really like that element of The Witcher and having a similar bestiary you unlock by reading books or killing creatures could work wonderfully in TES. The five signs are pretty distinct and which you should use depends on the kind of creature you're fighting. I don't think it's immediately obvious, instead you study the creature learn their weakness and then exploit them, like a Witcher would. You'll have preferences sure, but all fives signs are useful. Although that's only really the case in The Witcher 2 and 3, in The Witcher 1 it's Aard and Igni all day, every day.

Hell, they already made the skills one handed and two handed, there's no longer as strong of a blade/blunt divide. Why not have creatures with different resistances for piercing/bludgeoning/slashing and which weapon is ideal to use depends on the creature? You find out their weaknesses and resistances by killing them or reading books and carry a number of weapons around. It's not like it would be a new concept, D&D and games based on D&D (so Infinity Engine) have been doing that for ages.

But that would not make the game provide more choices, just as it does not in The Witcher, or any other game which does something similar. For any one monster, the player can be in one of information-states: either they know the monster's weaknesses, or they don't. If they don't know, there is no choice to be made. They can only throw whatever they have at the thing and hope it dies before the player does. If the player does know the monster's weaknesses, then there is also no choice to be made: it is spelled out to them that they should use a certain tactic, e.g. "use Aard". This mechanic does nothing other than artificially obstruct a player's progress.

By the way, I would agree to say Obsidian did more or less the best that could be done with the TES-style design in FO:NV. Which is to say, they made the world convincing and interesting enough to distract from how awful the design was for as long as possible. (Except for the VATS. The awfulness of VATS is impossible to ignore.)

If you know how to fight an enemy and are able to use efficient tactics and exploit their weaknesses you'll have an easier time. Yes, that's a good thing. That's what you should want in your combat design. Like no, pyromancy and cyromancy aren't equally valid choices when fighting a flame atronach and they shouldn't be. I'm not sure what you want here, do you want every possible tactic and ability to equally valid in every scenario? What's even the point of having kinds of weapons and spells if they aren't functionally different? I'd rather my magic be functionally different and useful in different scenarios than mechanically identical.

Also there's a difference in scale between marco/micro decisions for character builds. So yes, for a skeleton using a warhammer is objectively better than using spear because they're weak against bashing and strong against piercing. But for the build as a whole, warhammer, spears or a mixture of the two is going to be a harder decision with no clear answer. Warhammers are better in some scenarios, spears are better in others. Which you should level up and upgrade is a choice you then make with both being viable ways to make the character with their own pros and cons.

Ok, I'm going to set aside levelling up for the moment, because I'm making the (hopefully quite reasonable) assumption that something about combat is the core of the system. Levelling minigames are a whole other kettle of fish.



What makes sense is that using different tactics will yield different results. Without options, there are no choices. But there are also no choices if you have either all the information you need to make the best choice or none of the information you need.

In The Witcher, you either know the monster you're facing is weak against Igni - in which case there is no choice, you simply use Igni - or you don't know what the monster is weak against, in which case there is also no choice to be made because you have no valid reason for selecting one tactic over another.

Imagine in a game of chess, you have an assault on the other king set up and ready to go - but, unexpectedly, the other rook moves up to take your pawn in H2. Now, you could plot ahead with your plan anyway, hoping that keeping the pressure on their king will disable their rook, and hoping that nothing in your plan goes awry, or you could deal with the enemy rook before they get a chance to take your rook and plot through your back line. What is the best option? You can only tell by looking at the situation in detail, and using your analytical skills and experience to make a best judgement. It's because the answer is unclear that the question is interesting.

So, when we design interesting decisions, those decisions need to be ambiguous. That's why the rock-paper-scissors design you favour breaks down.

I'm adding to this topic things I would add or change.
My engagement in this game (skyrim) depends entirely on my perception of how it should go. I do not like to even start a main quest until I have gone places and done things randomly. This game allows that.
I would add or change this:
If an NPC says they give up. That needs to happen. They walk away and that's it for now.
I want to design my character and my spouse.
Oh I am sure there are more things to add, but Skyrim was a good start and it has many short and a few long stories to follow.
So many gamers have such short attention spans they follow the main story then it's over for them.
Skyrim was built for me, so many games are not geared toward both genders as players.
If it has a gun that's too obvious. Give me a follower or 3 let me organize how this is going to go and let's make over a million gold. Crafting, yes please!!

Ok... in future, could you read through the topic and try and either contribute meaningfully or say nothing? Not to try and push you away, but that was a bit random and off-topic.

EDIT: This topic appears to be dead. Well, it was good fun, thank you everyone for indulging me in this discussion!