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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."
Hopefully they'll use more than 4 voice actors this time.
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.
14 years. Plenty of older series going round.
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.
it's 3 feet tall on a small number of stalks that outlines your feet.
oblivionwithgunswithswords tag?
not as old are your mother
...wait, what?
oOoOoOoOoO
And they give back Fallout to Brian Fargo and crew.
Stop right there, subprime scum!
PAY $200
GO TO JAIL
RESIST ARREST
Even though I'm a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series, the voice actors weren't the only bone I had to pick. The team had a large dynamic engine that they could have taken more advantage of and didn't. Although the fighting was improved, it didn't feel very interactive (nor expansive). The way that could be improved is to integrate the classes a bit more. They gave you the feature to fight as a mage/fighter/rouge, but the system didn't demand nor support integration very much. Alchemy was the only skill that was really useful throughout all the classes, but a warrior never really had a great need to cast a fireball when his fighting was so much more effective. A wizard never really needed to sneak when invisibility was much more convenient. They should have made monsters that are more immune to certain tactics. For instance, a mage comes upon a vampire that has extraordinary hearing. Rather than casting a spell, you'll have to depend on your sneaking abilities to approach him. You cast a freezing spell that is useless on him and must throw a (potions should have been throwable) exploding potion to knock him back since fire is also useless, then you pull out your sword with copious amounts of poison on it to subdue him (your skill with a sword does not matter since the poison is so effective). Also, the physics engine could have more juice squeezed out of it. There should have been gravity gun telekinesis and the ability to pick things up and throw them. Imagine being ambushed by some nut in a bar and throwing a chair at him to knock him back for a stronger attack. Man that would have improved the game a lot.
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I'm currently playing Super Mario Galaxy. That's an amazingly good game from a series that dates back almost 25 years. I don't care if companies keep making games from awesome series, as long as new series come out as well from time to time.
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.
I assume you played Morrowind? If you wanted to beat the game, you were a heavily-armored, melee battlemage with thief skills; pure anything was tough to do. They went way out of their way with Oblivion to make a much broader range of archetypes not only possible (as they certainly were in Morrowind) but playable in the main campaign.
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)
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.
Well my biggest hope is that they finally hire some writers to do the story instead of having one programmer writing it down on a single piece of toilet paper!
...will we see the return of Raminus Polus?
There are lots of combat options! When you're running along and something like a wolf gets in the way, why waste time drawing your sword and meleeing the creature when you could just kill it with a single zap of a health-drain spell and keep on going? My level 11 character uses several combat tactics depending on enemy:
Also I really like the use of 4 voice actors, though I agree that alchemy is over-powered
Reduce, reuse, cycle
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.
I hated the Auto Level Balance. It meant that the staple of Elder Scrolls games through the ages - "Ok this area's too hard for me, better go away and level a bit" was gone. It also meant that when you reached level 30-odd pretty much every bandit was carrying 10,000 odd gold in rare or magical equipment. If these guys had such treasures, why didn't they retire and live well off the proceeds of selling them? A better idea would have been that mobs had a base level and then advanced slower than you - say 1/4th of your extra levels. Or, let players set the advancement rate at the start - 1 in 10 being easy, 1 to 1 being insanely hard (as that means mobs will always be their starting level above you...)
At least I only got stuck on the scenery a half-a-dozen times all told - earlier games it was so frequent that a basic levitate spell was a downright necessity as soon as you could afford it.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
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.
Apparently we have differing definitions of 'amazingly good'. I've repeatedly been attempting to play through Galaxy, but keep getting stymied by the poor controls and bizarre camera angles, which are both a result of running around on those little spheroids. Of course, the awful camera was also in Super Mario Sunshine, too, so it's probably to be expected at this point.
No, the last 'amazingly good' Mario game was Super Mario 64.
http://crummysocks.com
Your example makes it sound like you think that every character should *have* to be all three to viable. That's just absurd. The game was designed as it should be - all of the above are viable options and you don't have to go all routes to be able to subdue the big bad enemy. A pure melee class *should* be viable in the game, as should a pure mage or rogue.
"Little is much when little you need."
I beat it fairly easily with a pure Melee character and a pure rogue (that was sickeningly hard compared to the other) I found the caster to be the most variable of the lot - I had big issues sometimes and others it was extremely easy.
"Little is much when little you need."
That's pretty unusual. I, reviewers and also most people I know who've played it think that the controls are tight and that the camera has its moments but is generally OK. Even my eight year old nephew found the controls very intuitive! I think its because Mario's shadow always falls on the point directly beneath him, that makes perfecting jumps pretty easy.
Nick
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
Agreed.
...Though I was impressed (read: quite nearly drooling) over Patrick Stewart as Emperor Uriel Septim VII. *That* was a well voiced intro. Sean Bean (Boromir in LotR) did an excellent Martin Septim, and Terence Stamp (various bad guys in Superman, Get Smart, Smalville, Phantom Menace) as Mankar Camoran was a great match, as well.
But yeah... having ~4 voice actors for the 500 generic characters in the game did hurt the immersion, especially when, say, two members of the same gender/race (therefore the same voice) would start up a conversation...
Or worse, when a Nord and an Orc (also the same voice) began fighting to the death out of my line of sight--it sounded rather schizophrenic.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
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.
Actually, when I played Morrowind I completely beet the game with alchemy and enchanting. The enchanting skill was so useful because if you killed a skeleton and put it into a cheap soul gem, you could make 10 damage fireballs rain like crazy, and the potions essentially kept you immortal. By the time I had high level enchanting, I could kill just about anything. All you had to do was keep a massive supply of rings on you. It was way too easy.
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Galaxy is one of the best platformers ever made. It would take a dramatic amount of incompetence to have your progress stunted by the controls, which are fluid and tactile. My wife, who never played video games until this year, is able to play through the game. You seem to be less skilled at games than a woman who has approximately 2 months of total video game experience to her name. Apparently you can only deal with reality if the camera is peering over the top of your head from behind. One of the most fun aspects of Galaxy is dealing with the shifting geometry in 3D space, dodging obstacles and enemies at the same time.
Even though I'm a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series, the voice actors weren't the only bone I had to pick. The team had a large dynamic engine that they could have taken more advantage of and didn't.
[...stuff about combat...]
Man that would have improved the game a lot.
You couldn't be more wrong. I actually have a hard time believing that you would have enjoyed the game more if they did those things, and they're your ideas.
These games are (in this order):
- Role Playing Games
- Adventure Games
- Cutting edge graphical demos
- Fighting games
The problem with Oblivion wasn't combat related, and was only a little bit graphical... The problem was that they focused on the graphics and combat at the expense of the role playing and adventure.
Nobody would be upset if a game like Oblivion was a crappy tactical fighter if they nailed the RPG and Adventure aspects of it. (See Morrowind, Sands of Time, Ico, etc... For examples of this)
Any game that tries to make up for deficiencies in its core genre by improving the combat is going to come up lacking. The people who say that "the combat should be improved" (re: you) aren't going to be satisfied no matter what changes they make to the combat system. They need to get back to working on the core. Want to improve Oblivion a lot? Get rid of the dynamic difficulty. Put back the rich item crafting system. Reduce the utilization of dynamically generated content. Add additional branches to the story line. Don't punish players for straying from the linear plot. Stop rewarding players for gameplay skill in combat. (It's an RPG. You should win mostly because the character in the role you're playing is good enough. Not because you can time the button press/mouse drag correctly. You should lose if you take on opponents that exceed your character's abilities, no matter how good the player is. Oblivion failed both of those tests.)
Galaxy is one of the best platformers ever made. It would take a dramatic amount of incompetence to have your progress stunted by the controls, which are fluid and tactile. My wife, who never played video games until this year, is able to play through the game. You seem to be less skilled at games than a woman who has approximately 2 months of total video game experience to her name. Apparently you can only deal with reality if the camera is peering over the top of your head from behind. One of the most fun aspects of Galaxy is dealing with the shifting geometry in 3D space, dodging obstacles and enemies at the same time.
Wow, that's quite the leap. I found the camera disorienting when it's obviously flawless so I'm must be massively incompetent?
The camera can move around all it wants, that doesn't really bother me, but I expect that Up is always Up, i.e., when I press Up, my character goes toward the top of the screen. In Galaxy, Up is Up until the camera changes angles, and then suddenly Up is Keep Moving Forward Even Though That Direction Might Not Be Up In Relation To Your Screen... Until you stop moving, then Up is Up again. I keep trying to correct what direction I'm pressing in relation to whichever direction the camera's pointing, and that doesn't work. For example, I'm running on a planetoid, pressing Up, and the view shifts so that the direction I was heading is now Right, so I shift the stick to point Right, which is now Down since I haven't stopped moving. Then I run smack into a wall, a pit, or the gaping maw of some enemy I was trying to avoid.
If 'the camera doesn't behave the way I want it to' is synonymous with 'dramatic incompetence' then you're absolutely correct and it's obviously my fault for having preferences that aren't in line with the game's prescribed controls.
http://crummysocks.com
You don't understand 3D space well enough. Pushing the control stick forward does not mean "Up". It means "Forward". Mario always moves forward in the direction he's facing when you push the control stick forward.
Like I said, my wife gets it, and she doesn't even play games. You need practice. Galaxy is a fabulous game, designed for people that can figure out how directions work without throwing a fit and declaring the game "flawed".
I think I have a pretty good grasp of 3D space, I've managed to navigate through at least a dozen rooms today and haven't collided with any walls.
It sounds like you're trying to tell me that I can't dislike the game because I don't like the controls because the controls are absolutely perfect, which is completely asinine. Just like you get to like the game all you want, I get to dislike it all I want for whatever reasons I choose. For this game, it's the controls. I don't like them, and I've completed over half the game, so I'm pretty sure I've gotten as good at the controls that I'm going to get.
If you and your wife love it, then great. But I get to think that the controls are broken for my playstyle, too.
http://crummysocks.com
Well, I apologize for my tone. I was annoyed at a homework assignment I'm working on, so I decided to bark at someone on the internet.
However, you did indicate an inability to understand what direction Mario would move when you pushed "up", and I wanted to point out that his behavior is consistent if you learn to divorce yourself of the notion that "up" on your TV screen is related to "up" in the game world's 3D space.
And hopefully they'll return to the creativity of Morrowind, and not succumb to the mediocrity of tudor houses, butterflies, stereotypical european looking knights, uninteresting vegetation, and dialogue full of "thee's" "thou's" and "milady's".
Morrowind was a shot of brilliant originality and amazing art-direction into what had become a tired genre. Oblivion was full of stock concepts and unoriginal ideas -- yeah, yeah, I know "but that's Cyrodil"... whatever...
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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.