What should Skyrim bring from Oblivion?

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What should Skyrim bring from MORROWWIND

which is, pretty much everything :p
 
The problem with fast travel is that once it's included in the game, the quests are designed for it to be used. Rather than having quests be strictly regional in nature, you tend to see more requests made of you to travel to other towns that are on the opposite side of the map. With a map that's supposed to represent an area much larger than a few miles across, any trivial request of you to traverse large stretches of it (fast travel or not) robs the game world of its implied scale.
 
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What should Skyrim bring from MORROWWIND

which is, pretty much everything :p

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The problem with fast travel is that once it's included in the game, the quests are designed for it to be used. Rather than having quests be strictly regional in nature, you tend to see more requests made of you to travel to other towns that are on the opposite side of the map. With a map that's supposed to represent an area much larger than a few miles across, any trivial request of you to traverse large stretches of it (fast travel or not) robs the game world of its implied scale.

But it does have the advantage you mention in that it can open up quest design without having to worry about practical travel limitations for the player. It is a feature that can positively impact flavor and immersion as well as take away.

Personally I like fast travel and don't find it takes away from exploring. I still explored everywhere in Oblivion, and actually more so I found than Morrowind (until I modded it). The reason is that fast travel made me more likely to go back and revisit areas and explore the surroundings or what I've missed, and I still needed to find the locations before they were marked. With Morrowind after awhile I simply did not want to spend the time back tracking until I modded in options or just started to COC.
 
Any devs actually read these forum posts?

Not including fast travel would "upset" too many people and since they are going for a more player friendly deal this time, then it's probably in.

A nice texture pack (for those that can handle it) would be nice. A lot of people would appreciate it.
 
Guys, for the 570720274126879375329th time

Fast travel is OPTIONAL, you do NOT have to use it, so why should anybody give a shit if it's included?

I seriously have not heard this much bitching about an optional feature in 73 years, and this isn't limited to just this thread, but in several Oblivion threads.
 
Any devs actually read these forum posts?

Not including fast travel would "upset" too many people and since they are going for a more player friendly deal this time, then it's probably in.

A nice texture pack (for those that can handle it) would be nice. A lot of people would appreciate it.

Leave the texture pack to the community in my opinion. The community has less restrictions and they can do a capable job of it if not better (due to less restrictions), previous examples show this. I'd rather the development resources be spent elsewhere, mostly in sound (mainly voices), since this is an area that is the hardest (if not impossibly impractical) for the community to improve.
 
Voices were my major complaint with Oblivion (never played Morrowind). I really hope they improve on the voice acting, because it got really old having to listen to the same 3 voices for hundreds of different characters. Anyone know if Bethesda has said anything about this in regards to Skyrim?
 
Voices were my major complaint with Oblivion (never played Morrowind). I really hope they improve on the voice acting, because it got really old having to listen to the same 3 voices for hundreds of different characters. Anyone know if Bethesda has said anything about this in regards to Skyrim?

I don't remember where I read it but I read that Bethesda has hired over 80 voice actors to do the voices in Skyrim so that should easily be way more then Oblivion had.
 
Guys, for the 570720274126879375329th time

Fast travel is OPTIONAL, you do NOT have to use it, so why should anybody give a shit if it's included?

I seriously have not heard this much bitching about an optional feature in 73 years, and this isn't limited to just this thread, but in several Oblivion threads.

I like fast travel and hope it's included but it definitely has an effect on game design like hughJ mentioned just above. I don't know what's so hard to understand about that point because most people just pretend it doesn't exist and it's been mentioned plenty of times.

I personally hope they include fast travel in Skyrim, but make the world worth exploring. Hell, I explored a ton of Oblivion even though I made plenty of use of fast travel, and I'm sure they will do better than Oblivion.

I think the biggest benefit to having fast travel is that it increases replayability (for me). Regardless of how interesting the landscape is, sometimes I just don't want to run down that path for the 100th time.

The obvious ideal would be for them to have fast travel, but still make the quests relatively regional so that they can be done without fast travel. THEN nobody would have anything to complain about, but I'm sure still would. :p
 
Patrick Stewart. Yes.

Everything else "the whirling shitstorm that is Oblivion" can stay behind
 
I don't think that Oblivion was a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, it was certainly a great game for it's time, but the faults in it are so blatantly obvious and easy to pick on, and that's the real problem.

I almost wonder if it was a limitation of the game engine (at the time, remember, it's a 2006 game) or Bethseda's imagination?

Cause we all know Morrowind had better environments and more interesting locales than Oblivion did. Much better story to boot, especially when you do the whole House (of your choice) storylines.
 
The problem with fast travel is that once it's included in the game, the quests are designed for it to be used. Rather than having quests be strictly regional in nature, you tend to see more requests made of you to travel to other towns that are on the opposite side of the map. With a map that's supposed to represent an area much larger than a few miles across, any trivial request of you to traverse large stretches of it (fast travel or not) robs the game world of its implied scale.

Not really. Sure, the more important quests were all over the map,but the small quests that you get from NPCs usually don't require much traveling at all.

Anyways, when you get a quest, it's usually to an area that you haven't explored yet. You wouldn't have the waypoint to fast travel to unless you had done a bunch of exploring before doing any quests.
 
I don't think that Oblivion was a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, it was certainly a great game for it's time, but the faults in it are so blatantly obvious and easy to pick on, and that's the real problem.

I almost wonder if it was a limitation of the game engine (at the time, remember, it's a 2006 game) or Bethseda's imagination?

Cause we all know Morrowind had better environments and more interesting locales than Oblivion did. Much better story to boot, especially when you do the whole House (of your choice) storylines.

I think some of the problems was that they were trying to do to much. Like Oblivion they were designing the places around the A.I. which made them a bit more simple then Morrowinds levels since the Morrowind characters never moved or only wandered around aimlessly in the same cell.

I would say most of the Oblivion problems were technical but some were definitely because they didn't have much time to develop the landscape for example when they were finished working on their game tools.

Honestly though I think Fallout 3 had a much better landscape design when it boils down to it and also performed much better then Oblivion due to more efficient threading so I'm sure Skyrim will most likely peform much better then modded Oblivion on the same exact hardware. I'm sure this will easily be apparent when people are playing the 360 version.

For PC players I imagine the system requirements will be fairly low. I'm not the designer but I would doubt it will be all that much more intensive then Oblivion or Fallout 3. (In reality I think default Skyrim will heavily outperform modded Oblivion and Fallout 3)
 
Not really. Sure, the more important quests were all over the map,but the small quests that you get from NPCs usually don't require much traveling at all.

Anyways, when you get a quest, it's usually to an area that you haven't explored yet. You wouldn't have the waypoint to fast travel to unless you had done a bunch of exploring before doing any quests.

*shrug* Then you simply end up choosing the nearest city or existing waypoint as a launching point to where ever the undiscovered place is. For me the feeling of size in a game world has little to do with content or physical size, and everything to do with the time it takes to get places. You take away fast travel and horses, and suddenly Oblivion feels 5x bigger. The deepest wilderness can never feel like deep wilderness when you're 5 seconds from any point on the map.

Thinking back to MMOs, I remember how I felt in SWG before they launched mounts and speeders, where in some corners of the maps you could be 45 minutes away from the nearest populated area. Monotonous - sure, but it made even the most vacant, empty areas of the game feel special. Being able to bounce around all corners of the map at a whim is extremely convenient, but there's something pretty substantial that's lost by doing so. (And fewer and fewer games contain this as everything is made more and more accessible.)

With fast travel you also completely change how you manage your inventory, you tend to carry less survival items, your plan your inventory less, etc as you can simply teleport back to your storage whenever you want to. Going on what should amount to a hundred mile journey, and you don't even need to pack a lunch. It also removes the value in owning more than one house/storage facility.

And to intentionally not use a game mechanic for the sake of adding difficulty or immersion, I probably don't have that will power. If the game had a built in instant-kill-badguy button for when you're lazy and not wanting to fight some high hitpoint NPC, most people would probably end up using that too. A bit of a strawman, but we're pretty much there in a lot of games now.

But all of this is really wasted breath, as there's no way they'd remove something like fast travel, especially when it's clear they're taking the game in the opposite direction (making it easier and more accessible.) Games are few and far between these days where developers actually have a net increase in game complexity or difficulty over their previous iterations.
 
Sorry dude, but not everyone has the time or patience to spend traveling 45 minutes just to do nothing but reach the next location they need to be at.

Play Far Cry 2 if you like that kind of gameplay, then report back on what a great game it was.

That game has exactly what you are looking for.
 
Sorry dude, but not everyone has the time or patience to spend traveling 45 minutes just to do nothing but reach the next location they need to be at.

Play Far Cry 2 if you like that kind of gameplay, then report back on what a great game it was.

That game has exactly what you are looking for.

No shit, nobody wants to play a game to feel like a fucking delivery boy and these "hardcore" gamers that try and shove that on everyone and force them into that playstyle can fuck right off.

It was optional in oblivion. You dont like it, dont use it.
 
I completely understand that fast travel is optional. I mainly just wish that Bethesda would introduce a few more optional traveling options, akin to the Silt Striders from Morrowind.

That's it. Something that speeds up travel between cities, but still promotes exploring in the wilderness.

Oh, and for the record, when you break down Oblivion's storyline, you really are nothing more than an errand boy. :p
 
Just fast travel only between major cities than and use your imagination? Adding in other fast travel options should be relatively simple as well, but I don't believe those exist, likely due to lack of demand and interest.

When I first started Oblivion I gradually worked my way up to using Fast travel. At first I ran/rode around everywhere, such as to the first story mission (even though it had a marker). Than I did it between major cities, than included more settlement type areas, and than everywhere. I mean it is fun to explore, but after a certain point it just becomes repetitive going through the same areas. Oblivion is actually better than Morrowind in these sense that the world is more dynamic as well.
 
And to intentionally not use a game mechanic for the sake of adding difficulty or immersion, I probably don't have that will power. If the game had a built in instant-kill-badguy button for when you're lazy and not wanting to fight some high hitpoint NPC, most people would probably end up using that too. A bit of a strawman, but we're pretty much there in a lot of games now.

I supported your earlier statement that fast travel can change how a game is made and that should be included in any discussion about it. I can't agree with you on this though. That kind of kills any reasonable compromise just because you don't have the willpower to not use an optional feature. If you think you'd have a better experience by not using something optional, make a point of it not to use it. In fact, because this is the Elder Scrolls, you even have the option to use a mod that will help you by completely removing it.

Oh, and were you aware that you could open up the developer console and type "kill" and it would instantly kill anything you targeted while in the developer console?
 
who cares about fast travel. If it's in, mod it out. If it's out, mod it in. Personally, I think Bethseda should just have these as setting. It shouldn't cost them much development time. Hardcore mode is one way to do this.
 
who cares about fast travel. If it's in, mod it out. If it's out, mod it in. Personally, I think Bethseda should just have these as setting. It shouldn't cost them much development time. Hardcore mode is one way to do this.

Why would they need to set it as an option?

It already IS optional, you either use it or you don't.

Talk about redundancy :p
 
Yes, I could use fast travel and then just use my imagination to fill in the gap, but I just wish that I didn't have to do the imagining, that's all.

And yes, I would prefer they had some in-game options that allowed you to enable/disable the quest marker and fast travel. Surely it can't be that hard to include as a feature, instead of relying on the modders. To an extent, it feels like Bethesda uses modding as a crutch, I'm sure there are a whole slough of features that never made it into Oblivion, simply because they assumed modders would go ahead and do it anyway. Saves them development costs and time, so why not? Crutches are great, just not when they're completely dependended upon.
 
Guys, for the 570720274126879375329th time

Fast travel is OPTIONAL, you do NOT have to use it, so why should anybody give a shit if it's included?

I seriously have not heard this much bitching about an optional feature in 73 years, and this isn't limited to just this thread, but in several Oblivion threads.

It is a problem when the damned game is designed around using fast travel.

Keep fast travel out of skyrim, instead add silt striders to major towns, boats to coastal towns, and have a mark and recall spell to fill in the gaps. There you go: ease of travelling long distances without breaking immersion like, "lulz I'm gonna teleport there!".

You even had the mages guild teleportation devices too.
 
It is a problem when the damned game is designed around using fast travel.

Keep fast travel out of skyrim, instead add silt striders to major towns, boats to coastal towns, and have a mark and recall spell to fill in the gaps. There you go: ease of travelling long distances without breaking immersion like, "lulz I'm gonna teleport there!".

You even had the mages guild teleportation devices too.

No, I support them keeping fast travel, because it is OPTIONAL, if you dislike it, don't use it.

However, I do agree with the silt strider suggestion.
 
I think Bethesda could take a few lessons from Blizzard regarding RPG quests and travelling.

Blizzard has done a great job in WoW to create quests that introduce you to different regions, ask you to explore certain dungeons, and once a region has been more or less explored send you on to another area. (Obviously the redundant and repetitive nature of these quests, almost necessary to keep MMO gamers playing the same content for years on end, is not one the qualities that should be carried over.) I believe the term used in gaming is 'breadcrumbs.' Morrowind and Oblivion often had you on quests all over the place, and this could certainly be improved upon.

Of course in Oblivion Fast Travel makes virtually any quest trivial, outside of combat (and at a certain point, assuming your character isn't gimped by poor choices, combat becomes trivial as well.)

I'm actually finishing up Oblivion (for the first time) and at the moment my character is essentially so tough that combat is mostly optional. Oblivion Gates? I don't even attack anyone. I just run up and do the deed, usually in less than a minute or two.

In Wow, the scope of the environment is preserved by only allowing flight from point to point after you have travelled via conventional means, and even then this 'fast travel' still has you travelling through the terrain (although, of course, faster.) Throw in a few alternative means for quickly crossing certain regions even without conventionally travelling there first (Boats, zeppelins) in order to make getting to certain points easier.

Certainly bringing back the spells from Morrowind make sense as well, especially if they require a certain level of master (or master allows you more magical travel options) in order to give players goals for their characters and a real reward for improving certain magical skills.

One improvement I'd like to see in Skyrim is some sort of sensical progression of quest importance. In previous Elder Scrolls games I could be the Knights Crusader, the Grey Fox, and the head of the Dark Brotherhood, and yet still be asked to spy on some gimp's paranoid fantasies. It would be interesting if your fame/infamy scores were somehow tied to certain quests, and that if you 'outfame' a quest it would be dropped from your quest log if no progress has been made after a period of time, and you would stop receiving quests to do certain trivial acts.

Separate fame scores for particular regions, with certain acts influencing all or most regions, would also be an interesting improvement.
 
Guys, for the 570720274126879375329th time

And for the 570720274126879375330th time....

The problem with fast travel is that once it's included in the game, the quests are designed for it to be used. Rather than having quests be strictly regional in nature, you tend to see more requests made of you to travel to other towns that are on the opposite side of the map. With a map that's supposed to represent an area much larger than a few miles across, any trivial request of you to traverse large stretches of it (fast travel or not) robs the game world of its implied scale.

I like fast travel and hope it's included but it definitely has an effect on game design like hughJ mentioned just above. I don't know what's so hard to understand about that point because most people just pretend it doesn't exist and it's been mentioned plenty of times.

Yeah I agree. As much as people say fast travel shouldn't affect people who dont want it... it does. It takes a lot of the joy out of wandering across the world when you know in the back of your head you could just open the menu and fast travel. A hardcore mode where you select at the start of the game that you dont want to be able to fast travel would solve a lot of the problems.

lol

I'd prefer if the game was designed without fast travel in mind (without little fetch quests that require you to travel across the whole world, and leaving some sense of exploration in the game) then just when you start the game have an option for "I'm a pussy" mode, where fast travel is enabled :p
 
You have to consider it can have a positive effect as well though if the developer is not constrained by logistical issues a player might experience. For instance some examples -

Quests being more regional makes sense logistically, but at the same time limits the scope of quests.

A regional focused design also makes the game world seem smaller and more "level" based. Essentially you are semi locked into an area for a duration, despite being an open world game.

Likewise arranging a map layout designed around preset lines of travel would not be as natural compared to doing one without such concerns.
 
They should add caravans. Random traders like in Fallout. Some caravans could ask a small fee for transport. That could be "fast travel". Or like in STALKER, where you have guides.
 
They should add caravans. Random traders like in Fallout. Some caravans could ask a small fee for transport. That could be "fast travel". Or like in STALKER, where you have guides.

Interesting, I still like the silt strider suggestion. I think they should leave fast travel in, I used it quite a bit, I sure as hell am not going to spend an hour lugging myself from one location to another and doing nothing in between that time.
 
Interesting, I still like the silt strider suggestion. I think they should leave fast travel in, I used it quite a bit, I sure as hell am not going to spend an hour lugging myself from one location to another and doing nothing in between that time.

I think there should be enough random occurrences that spending an hour lugging yourself from one location to the next should be entertaining. That said I also think it will add a bit more of an epic feel to a quest rather than the I'm going to teleport to here kill this dude and teleport back shit I dealt with in oblivion.
 
I think there should be enough random occurrences that spending an hour lugging yourself from one location to the next should be entertaining. That said I also think it will add a bit more of an epic feel to a quest rather than the I'm going to teleport to here kill this dude and teleport back shit I dealt with in oblivion.

Again, that was OPTIONAL
 
Likewise arranging a map layout designed around preset lines of travel would not be as natural compared to doing one without such concerns.

I would expect that any sort of fast travelling options between points would be placed after the general environment had been designed. The West came before the Railroad.

Considering that the 'real world' has 'fast travel', I'm don't see why a game environment couldn't also be natural and realistic and still have different travel options.
 
I would expect that any sort of fast travelling options between points would be placed after the general environment had been designed. The West came before the Railroad.

Considering that the 'real world' has 'fast travel', I'm don't see why a game environment couldn't also be natural and realistic and still have different travel options.

I suppose you could say the real world has "fast travel", but it's more akin to the Silt Striders in Morrowind rather than the "fast travel" in Oblivion, FO3, and FO:NV. It's not just simple teleporting, and IMO, it adds to the experience and the depth of the world.

I mean, how do the regular people get around? Surely, not everyone has the ability to teleport across the entire world in 2 seconds? Surely not everyone can afford a horse? And surely not everyone has the physical stamina and strength required to go hiking across a vast mountain range akin to the American Rockies (I would know, I live in Utah, there's a reason they demoed Skyrim in Park City).

The plain and simple fact is that it's a massive immersion breaker. I really just wish they would take the above things into account, develop a sort of "fast travel" that the everyday citizens in Skyrim employ to travel, and then allow the player to utilize it as well.

Just give those of us who want a more immersive gameplay experience an alternative. If they did that, then I would be able to ignore fast travel.
 
Why would they need to set it as an option?

It already IS optional, you either use it or you don't.

Talk about redundancy :p

Yeah, when you break it down it is redundant. But it would keep most people happy nevertheless. Especially when such a mode is tagged as hardcore mode. The smart thing for devs to do is to make as many people as possible happy when the feature to implement doesn't cost a lot of work and doesn't have negative side effects for other groups of people.
 
Interesting, I still like the silt strider suggestion. I think they should leave fast travel in, I used it quite a bit, I sure as hell am not going to spend an hour lugging myself from one location to another and doing nothing in between that time.

Silt striders would be good too. I was thinking something similar to in RDR where you could hop on or jack a stage coach in addition to, not as a replacement really.

Nobody would want to fast travel if the world was more interesting and dynamic.
 
Yeah, when you break it down it is redundant. But it would keep most people happy nevertheless. Especially when such a mode is tagged as hardcore mode. The smart thing for devs to do is to make as many people as possible happy when the feature to implement doesn't cost a lot of work and doesn't have negative side effects for other groups of people.

This.

Call me picky or what-have-you, but it would still make me happy in the end.
 
Nobody would want to fast travel if the world was more interesting and dynamic.

I think sheer size of the world prevents this from happening. Too much area to cover, not enough time and money, so compromises have to be made.

And yes, thank god you mentioned RDR, I loved the stage coach thing, and I immediately drew comparisons to Morrowind's Silt Striders the first time I used it.
 
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