Slashdot Mirror
New Elder Scrolls Game In 2010?
Paul Oughton, publishing executive for Bethesda, spoke to GamesIndustry about the company's plans for the future, and his comments include some information about the next Elder Scrolls game. Quoting:
"'At the moment we've got Fallout 3 for this year and potentially there's a new Elder Scrolls title in 2010,' said Oughton. 'At the moment we're not that interested in the Wii. We're going to stick to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. We'll continue to pursue three or four titles a year and go for big titles,' he said of the company's publishing plans for the future."
nt
How old is that series now?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
give us fallout 4!
1. The chicks don't look like dudes.
2. They get more than 4 voice actors.
3. It doesn't take an Oscuro's Overhaul to make it play the way it should.
Id be happy whacking mud crabs with a stick.
I LOVE YOU TOO AC!!!!!
The trailer and the NAME have been out for a few months, I've seen some screenshots before but I can't find them now, but the best I could find was this
MERRY CHRISTMAS.
Oh, and apparently the voice acting is still melodramatic and kinky. Some more information
i know this is fake because the grass isn't 3 feet tall.
It's just going to be Fallout 3 with swords...
The trailer and the NAME have been out for a few months, I've seen some screenshots before but I can't find them now, but the best I could find was this MERRY CHRISTMAS.
Looks like that trailer got leaked pretty early. A whole year before the official trailer was released? Nice work pirates!
Nice picture, too. I'm somewhat surprised that the only screenshot Bethesda has is of a mountain. Not to mention that it's hosted on imageshack. I guess they're really getting overloaded on the server.
Merry Christmas and TYCLO
My preferred name is frazz, but someone keeps taking it. If you see him, tell him I said hi.
What's good for the goose...
it's 3 feet tall on a small number of stalks that outlines your feet.
oblivionwithgunswithswords tag?
And they give back Fallout to Brian Fargo and crew.
In case anyone believes this it's actually Warhammer 40000.
Stop right there, subprime scum!
PAY $200
GO TO JAIL
RESIST ARREST
I would have it be about a son that Barenziah had who nobody knew about, which has been theorized before based on her past storyline. He should come back trying to claim the throne now that the Emperor is dead. Barenziah was always my favorite character from the lore, and it would be cool to have various factions trying to take over now that the Empire's in shambles, with Barenziah's son being the primary one. Given the history of the Empire and its leader, he would have a right to be pissed.
I don't know how that would set things up for play in Somerset Isles, which most people presume is the next setting. But maybe they could work it out somehow.
Oblivion was amazingly ground-breaking and playable and consumed many of my hours. Be delightful to have a followup that can lean on 4 yrs of tech progress since then.
It's not so much a matter of making the game harder, it's a matter of making it more consistent.
Oblivion was designed to be a console game and to be played by console gamers. It was essentially a fighting game trying to pretend it was a RPG, with a completely inconsistent, illogical world. What OOO and other mods did (BTW, Oscuro is the name of the guy, not the mod) was make the game more consistent, get rid of (or at least greatly reduce) the nonsensical auto-levelling enemies and rewards, and try to intertwine some of the quests with each other (it was pretty obvious that Oblivion's quests had been designed by different people and just stuck together with spit right before release).
Extrapolating the "evolution" from Morrowind to Oblivion, there's a very good chance that TES:V will play like a cross between Serious Sam and Super Mario Kart.
hope i am not the only one that will ask for a less steep learning curve and complete change of interface. then again, i am a morrowind fan... so i was kinda hoping that it'd be more like it. oh well. keep up teh good work TES!
aww...
Elder Scrolls: Brought to you by Hatsune Miku? *grin*
I wondered why there weren't any comments - it's because it's a fake video. I was a bit suspicious as soon as the map showed an area named "Empire", which isn't overly Elder Scrolls-like, but then the first character appeared and he's a Warhammer Warrior Priest! Here is the original Warhammer video.
Someone needs to mod the parent down as "-1 fake"
(Yes, I know it might be obvious to others, but not everyone will have seen the Warhammer video)
1. Autolevelling. Wouldn't be so much of a problem except
a) Monsters got harder quicker than you. Mage monsters got 15HP/level. PC's max out at 10HP/Level.
b) Weapons you "won" wore out and became useless too quickly because they didn't autolevel
c) Most spells work on monsters lower than your level, so you have to use just the big guns
d) You can't level up mage skills without losing their effectiveness faster because of autolevelling
e) Because the monsters get bigger faster, you must min/max to stay on the curve. You can't afford +2 stats per level, you NEED +5/+4 on each
2. Useless skills. Acrobatics: worthless. Athletics: worthless. Useful in the game, but worthless as something to level up with. There were a lot of them.
3. Skillup requires either losing the idea of the character or levelling too quick. Take the mage, it's the most extreme. You start at best with 40 skill. Six mage skills and one other in your major list for that. To level takes 10 and gives you ONE +5 and the rest get +1, but you still take 6 levels to get them to master. 37th Level to get to master in all your skills. And you've got 100 INT/WIL and +34 to all your other stats. EVERYONE is better than you.
4. When you're up against guards, they're always higher level than you, but when you need the guards to help in the quest, they don't level up and so get creamed by the leveled monsters.
5. Useless spells. How useful is "burden"? Not. That's how useful. Drain fatigue? Same. Worst is the conjured arms/armour: they cost FAR too much, don't last and, because they are based on non-mage skills, don't protect you much or do much damage except at low level. When you can't afford to cast them.
6. Merchants. 600 GP to spend and at high level, all you get are elven bows worth 4000GP. Why up mercantile, you'll never get anywhere near the value, no matter if you can't sell for toffees.
A strange one is that in Morrowind "restore magica" potion ingredients were very rare and you didn't regenerate magca (making Atronach more worthwhile). Oblivion, the potion ingredients are common if your alchemy is high enough, you regenerate magica and you have welkynd stones and ayleid ruins to restore magica.
Weird shit.
That's a Warhammer trailer :D
Have you played it yet? It's quite good.
There are some changes. But if you examine it in an unbiased fashion, they have actually improved several game mechanics from the first two games.
1) You have to get power armor training to wear power armor. This prevents people from making a 1st level character with a high outdoorsman skill and walking to Navarro to get Adv. Power Armor, completely breaking the game. And knowing that it was there, and that you could, made any replay of the game feel totally contrived at that point.
2) Medicine. Changing the mechanic of medicine skills was a Good Thing. In Fallout 2, First Aid/Doctor were much faster in terms of game time. But in terms of player time spent clicking, just slapping "rest until party healed" was faster, so people didn't use those skills much. Now, since Medicine impacts stimpack effectiveness, people will both use the skill AND value it more, regardless of their build.
3)Healing mechanics. Not being able to rest in the wasteland without a bed means finding food, water, or stimpacks to regenerate HP. In Fallout 1/2, you could just use the pipboy to rest a lot, in almost any location, and therefore avoid the need to use stimpacks at all. Ample use of resting in the game often lead to me having huge stockpiles of 200-300 stimpacks simply because I didn't have to use them. They became less of a commodity.
3)Weapon skills. Weapon skill ratings affect both your accuracy in VATS, as well as your damage in real-time and outside of VATS. This means a couple of things; it means that a level 1 character can't use a laser rifle to much effect, in or out of VATS, without a high energy skill. This means that, as with the power armor, you can't break the game by finding a plasma rifle early on. It also means that you can use VATS to get out of playing an FPS, but you can't avoid using VATS to get out of playing an RPG. Somebody with low weapons skills still does poor damage, even if they're a crack shot with the mouse.
4) Weapon conditions. First, repairing weapons gives a lot more use to out of the repair skill. It also seems more realistic than having weapons and armor that never degrade, despite years of use (Fallout 1/2). Secondly, this makes weapons more of a commodity than they were in the first games -- since you have to constantly acquire weapons to repair your own, it creates more financial expenses for your character (which is good because it makes bottlecaps more of a commodity).
5) Stealing mechanics. In Fallout 3, you can't rob a vendor of their shop inventory without killing that vendor first (as in Oblivion). This may seem unrealistic, and it is, but it is important to maintaining game balance (and thereby fun/replayability). In Fallout 1/2, you could often eliminate scarcity for your character simply by buying something at a store (say San Francisco), then stealing all of your bottlecaps back from the shopkeep, and then repeating over and over until you had more armor, weapons, medical supplies, and ammo than you could possibly carry. Combined with the possibility of scoring free Adv. Power Armor in the early stages of Fallout 2, this made the game unenjoyable rather quickly once you knew about these locations and how you could exploit them.
Fallout 3 may be different, but I think it's better. I bought my copy to support Bethesda, and I sincerely hope they release expansions and/or Fallout 4.
...will we see the return of Raminus Polus?
Please please PLEASE don't implement level scaling.
It was the downfall of Oblivion, to me. It was a lovely game, and honestly even the repetitive voice acting I could live through, but having to get a 3rd party mod just so the game seemed worth playing? I leveled up once, and suddenly all the wolves in the forrest turned into sabretooth tigers and I was unable to leave the town without a horse.
Sad.
That's the intro cinematic for Warhammer Mark of Chaos, and apparently there are also a lot of rickrolls out there entitled Elder Scroll V trailer.
It would seem Bestheda has a bad case of diarrhea.
The trouble I had with Morrowind/Oblivion is that they simply weren't immersive, its as if they couldnt be bothered to write a story or develop the characters. The writers/developers should sit down and play the gothic series (admittedly the gothic series are buggy as hell and g3 is just plain broken) but you feel like you are a part of the world.
We're going to stick to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.
Damn. Everything that sucked about Oblivion was a compromise they had to make due to the console versions.
Please make a real PC version this time, not something that feels like a cheap console port.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Well, then let me be the one who says it. Deus Ex was a mix of FPS, RPG, Stealth, etc, elements, and it was quite easy to be disappointed, if you liked one and hated the others. Sorta like chocolate filled with cherry liqueur doesn't necessarily appeal to everyone who likes chocolate, fruit or booze, but rather to an intersection. There'll be plenty of people who still won't find it a substitute for fresh fruit, for example.
And yes, it had multiple ways of solving everything, but not all ways of solving any particular situation. Regardless of which of the genres they mixed you liked (again, unless you like them all), there's always be some places where your favourite just didn't work at all. And regardless of which you hated, there'd be several places where that was the best or indeed only option that worked.
E.g., their emphasis on stealth was about as much fun as root canal for _me_. I don't buy an RPG to end up playing Solid Snake instead. (Not saying there's anything wrong with you if you like stealth games, btw, just that tastes are subjective and _I_ don't.)
The mistake _some_ people make is to assume that everyone likes the same things they do, hence if you disliked it, you either didn't actually play it or here's a list with what's wrong with you. In reality tastes are subjective, and what you like someone else might hate. And making a hash of half a dozen genres... well, someone who liked them all, will no doubt be in Nirvana. (And I don't mean the band;) I can see how they'd think it's the best thing since sliced bread. But it's really catering to the intersection of the fans of those individual genres, not to the union. Someone like me who likes RPG but hates sneaking, will dislike having that adition shoved down his throat under the "but it's really an RPG" excuse. Someone who likes FPS but hates talking to people or managing skills, will feel cheated by those RPG additions. Etc.
That said, the same applies to some of us who really really liked Fallout 1 and 2 as they were. I really liked having a small army with me, and I really liked the turn based system. It was more like playing chess than like a twitch game. And mashing the pause key (ok, VATS key) doesn't even come close to being the same thing.
Now I _can_ live with it, but mostly because I'm resigned to the idea that thinking games are a dying breed, and the mass of the market is made of various other categories who want to play to relax their brain. Not saying it with contempt or anything, but that's genuinely the impression I'm getting. The same goes for most other genres. There are more people who played, say, the Mech Warrior games because they're cool 3D ego-shooters with big robots, than people who play MegaMek because it's an accurate implementation of BattleTech and needs doing maths with dice and modifiers.
And in the end, what you illustrate there is largely how useless a term "RPG" has become. _Almost_ anything, including far greater deviations than Deus Ex can still be called RPG with a straight face. Did you know that Daikatana claimed to have RPG elements? (And yes, I played that too. To the end. I still have the disk and the manual, come to think of it.) There are people who've claimed that fighting games are RPGs because they have a health bar which is sorta like HP in D&D. There are people who've claimed that the Gran Turismo series, excellent racing simulators as they really are, are RPGs at heart because you can use money to buy upgrades and that's sorta like having xp and levelling up. I'm not making it up.
So saying that Deux Ex or anything else is still an RPG, really doesn't say much at this point. It's only marginally more speciffic than saying that it's a video game.
It's certainly too large a category by now to even say that someone is a fan of the whole sprawling genre, because it really includes stuff ranging from turn-based tactics to RTS to FPS with a little story to God knows what else. It's become so sprawled that it's in the meantime possible to love a subgenre of it, and hate another, although they're both RPGs.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
After a full weekend of Fallout 3 where I completed the main quest line, I have to say that Fallout 3 is a universe prime for an MMO. The game struck me as an MMO that was changed almost at last minute to a single-player game; the size of the map was pretty much a full MMO zone and the scope of the game was truly epic when you incorporated the side-quests and exploration. This deserves to be shared with everyone!
I have fallout 3, and it is really good. I hope the new elder scrolls game takes what they learnt making Fallout 3 and puts it towards the new game in 2010.