I have some points to make myself:
Immersion
- The map, which is a satellite/god view, rips you out of character. Paper maps keep more mystery.
- The quest icons that it relies on should be changed for better quest directions.
- Seeing enemies’ exact health (and name) is also not great for immersion. More visual/audible damaged states is better.
RP
- Very few choices are made in the quests, instead one has to be in character by choosing what quests one embark on. It would be great to have some conversational options with consequences. Relations are important in RP.
- Few people acknowledge you, to the degree you don’t actually feel that you are saving anyone unlike in Oblivion. IDK if it’s the voice actors or characters or that I haven’t got to actively save anyone, except DLC Serana. There’s that guy in the web that dies. In Oblivion there are monks fleeing towards you for help and more noticeably the knight in the Oblivion gate. I miss such moments.
Without mods, combat sucks. It largely boils down to spamming heal and the attack button.
To add to this, the vampire lord and werewolf add some much needed extra depth to the combat, however I do wish they fleshed them out a bit more. Their respective skill trees are very shallow. The werewolf besides being able to transform into one, has little effect on the gameplay beyond just that, while the vampire lord, comes with so many negative effects that it’s almost not even worth it.
The quests also suck for the most part. Besides what you have already mentioned in regards to RP, characters have boring and shallow personalities and you’re often expected to care about people who you barely interact with (Skjor from the companions is a great example of this). The quests are also often exceedingly predictable. It’s such a huge step down from Oblivion.
The random encounters are great and all, but when you keep running into the same ones over and over, it’s a bit immersion breaking. I would have preferred a system similar to RDR2 where each encounter doesn’t repeat itself and they are all unique.
Magic (more specifically, destruction magic) has so much wasted potential in Skyrim. It scales absolutely horrendously, making it nigh impossible to make a good magic focused build.
Difficulty curve needs to be adjusted. The difficulty settings increase linearly with HP and damage while your character’s power level increase exponentially due to weapon/armor material/quality/enchantment strength all stacking multiplicatively (This is also the reason playing a mage in vanilla Skyrim feels bad, because of the lack of exponential scaling as spells are mostly flat damage)
Bigger towns with more verticality would also be nice, Whiterun was like 12 buildings in total, but that’s more of a technical issue.
Bigger towns with more verticality would also be nice, Whiterun was like 12 buildings in total, but that’s more of a technical issue.
Markarth is pretty darn vertical.
I don’t know about the verticality.
I have an architecture book that covers early colonial era stuff in the US, and while two-story houses did appear to be common (this was apparently useful from a heat standpoint, let upstairs bedrooms stay warmer), I know that a significant factor up until the invention of steel-framed buildings was that it was expensive to add height to a building. Basically, if you wanted a taller building, you added a lot of weight to it, so you had to increase the mass of the structural elements below it, which just exacerbated the problem for anything beneath that. Also, up until the elevator came along, buildings rarely exceeded about four or five stories – because people didn’t want to do all that climbing on a regular basis. The upper floors in a block of apartments were the less-expensive, undesirable ones, the ones that required the climbing.
Yeah, but we are talking about a fantasy world where elevators do (somewhat) exist.
I think larger settlements would be nice, and most of the guild questlines could definitely be improved. I think the option to toggle quest directions/icons would be nice, so both types of players could have what they prefer
Ability to pick up quests or map markers just by hanging around taverns and inns and passively listening to conversations around you.
