Elder Scrolls V Officially Announced

[Linflas]

I hope they make the world map bigger. It took longer to walk from L to R in the world map of THE LEGEND OF ZELDA than it does in Oblivion.

If the Oblivion world was a real place, it'd be about the size of a wal mart parking lot.

Compare to Daggerfall which was HUGE! Granted the graphics were generic and not all 3d rendered, but I'd settle for more generic graphics in some areas for a bigger, less confining world.

Also, the monsters leveling with you and always staying level 1 thing is stupid too.

That being said I had a lot of fun questing in Oblivion, esp the Assassin's Guild quests. It definitely wasn't as deep of a game as Morrowind though.

Daggerfall is still my hands down favorite of them all. The world was so huge the game was almost endless. I don't think I ever finished the main quest line as I was busy exploring all the side stuff there was to do.

 

[motsm]

Compare to Daggerfall which was HUGE! Granted the graphics were generic and not all 3d rendered, but I'd settle for more generic graphics in some areas for a bigger, less confining world.

Wow, I would never in any way trade in quality for quantity. I absolutely despise Oblivion for doing exactly that, and you want it to be even bigger, and more generic? I really can't believe that mentality.

Oblivion was already just copy paste the same wee square footage over and over, and it bored me to hateful levels after finding out the entire world they created was absolutely redundant.

 

[skace]

Wow, I would never in any way trade in quality for quantity. I absolutely despise Oblivion for doing exactly that, and you want it to be even bigger, and more generic? I really can't believe that mentality.

Oblivion was already just copy paste the same wee square footage over and over, and it bored me to hateful levels after finding out the entire world they created was absolutely redundant.

Yea but, daggerfall did it better... that is part of the problem actually.

 

[motsm]

Yea but, daggerfall did it better... that is part of the problem actually.

I don't agree. I played plenty of Daggerfall, and exploration was just endless uninteresting wastelands, and pasted dungeons and towns. I could have explored literally thousands of locations, but why would I ever want to? I would just end up finding the same exact things I found in dungeon number 1, and town number 1.

In my opinion, Morrowind was the gem of the series, and I don't expect Bethesda to come close to it any time soon. It found a good medium of variation and size, and it actually rewarded exploration by placing unique items and quests in hard to find locations. Locations that weren't handed to you by NPC's.

 

[skace]

In my opinion, Morrowind was the gem of the series, and I don't expect Bethesda to come close to it any time soon. It found a good medium of variation and size, and it actually rewarded exploration by placing unique items and quests in hard to find locations. Locations that weren't handed to you by NPC's.

I remember the game-breaking regen shirt I found in like the 3rd dungeon I explored.

 

[motsm]

I remember the game-breaking regen shirt I found in like the 3rd dungeon I explored.

I never said the game was perfect, but I also played the game for hundreds of hours, and never found anything game breaking, or even remotely close to it. Of course for the sake of argument, with Oblivion's level scaling, the game was broken before the player even did anything.

Developers never know when to stop with open world games, when they are being spread too thin. They just drudge on, copying locations, characters, and quests until they have a huge world, that's entire interesting or unique content could be consolidated to a single dungeon. I find it most intolerable.

 

[Linflas]

After seeing this thread and a couple of posts about Daggerfall for some reason I did a search last night for Daggerfall and found out that Bethsoft has made the full version available for free download. So I downloaded it and DOSBOX and took a leap back to 1996.

 

[Bateluer]

Back on topic, Elder Scrolls V. I hope they pull more from the Morrowind game rather than Oblivion, and definitely scrap the level scaling system from Oblivion. Definitely made the game pointless.

 

[JellyBaby]

A new engine would be great but I don't think it can be id's. When Zenimax bought id I thought they said they wouldn't license idtech5 out to anyone else.

Agree with previous posts: new game needs better voice work, better looking and behaving creatures and definitely drop the stupid scaling.

I'd add a revamped UI and control system to the list. Having only a handful of shortcuts to use items and spells (without mods) was unforgivable.

 

[Arkaign]

A new engine would be great but I don't think it can be id's. When Zenimax bought id I thought they said they wouldn't license idtech5 out to anyone else.

Agree with previous posts: new game needs better voice work, better looking and behaving creatures and definitely drop the stupid scaling.

I'd add a revamped UI and control system to the list. Having only a handful of shortcuts to use items and spells (without mods) was unforgivable.

I have good news for you :

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/12/id-tech-5-exclusive-to-bethesda-published-titles/

"In an interview with Eurogamer, id's Todd Hollenshead said that Rage's id Tech 5 is a "competitive advantage and we want to keep within games we publish." Certainly, the awards the game picked up at E3 -- including "Special Commendation for Graphics" -- provide testament to that claim. From Bethesda's perspective, the engine is simply too good for anyone else to use. "We're not going to license it to external parties," Hollenshead explained. "If you're going to make a game with id Tech 5 then it needs to be published by Bethesda, which I think is a fair thing."

This almost certainly means ES-5 is ID Tech 5 powered, as they've confirmed it's not a Gamebryo release. An engine that can handle large contiguous outdoor areas (Rage certainly falls into this given the info on it) with great detail and with seamless streaming of landscape is not an easy thing to come by, so it would be senseless to pay tens of millions of dollars as well as critical development time making an entirely different engine with the same capabilities, whilst having legal access to a top-tier engine already available.

From a technical standpoint, this is overwhelmingly great news. However, it comes with the problem that it may take a while to get into the modding community. This means that if Bethesda does something incredibly stupid like the Oblivion global leveling system that we're stuck with it for a while. Hopefully the overwhelmingly negative reception to that aspect of ES-4 they will make some major tweaks in that area.

 

[Arkaign]

Bleh, actually according to this :

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/El...g-Skyrim-Todd-Howard,11791.html#xtor=RSS-1813

It might not be ID Tech 5. I would think it would at least be a variant, considering the absolutely gargantuan resource drain making a new competitive engine is.

 

[Jadow]

After seeing this thread and a couple of posts about Daggerfall for some reason I did a search last night for Daggerfall and found out that Bethsoft has made the full version available for free download. So I downloaded it and DOSBOX and took a leap back to 1996.

And what do you think?

 

[Jadow]

I saw this on WikiPedia, I thought this was funny:

Daggerfall: World Size 487,000 square Km, 750,000 NPCs
Morrowind: 25.9 square km, 1000 NPCs
Oblivion: 41.4 Square KM, 1000 NPCs

Ok, maybe there's some middle ground there, IMO Morrowind and Oblivion were way too small, however yeah Daggerfall was way to big. I don't think France even had that many people in the middle ages.

I'd like to see the world be at least 4x the size of Oblivion, like 2x as wide and 2x as tall, the bigger the better, I like to really walk around and explore.

 

[coldmeat]

I'm looking forward to it. I enjoyed Oblivion, even without any mods, except for the actual Oblivion part, I cheated through the gates.

 

[motsm]

I'd like to see the world be at least 4x the size of Oblivion, like 2x as wide and 2x as tall, the bigger the better, I like to really walk around and explore.

What would you find in such a world though? Unless the game had a 12 year development cycle, it would be nearly empty, and the stuff that was in it would be the same generated tiles over and over and over.

 

[Jadow]

What would you find in such a world though? Unless the game had a 12 year development cycle, it would be nearly empty, and the stuff that was in it would be the same generated tiles over and over and over.

Lotsa stuff, and it wouldn't take 12 years to develop. Once they get the foundation in place, they can add content pretty quickly.

 

[motsm]

Lotsa stuff, and it wouldn't take 12 years to develop. Once they get the foundation in place, they can add content pretty quickly.

Why has no game in history ever done it then? The games that have tried end up empty and repetitive, and I think Oblivion serves as a perfect example of that, and it's not even very big. The closest world to what your after is Gothic 3, as it is quite large but doesn't use any generated content. Of course it's still barely bigger than Oblivion I'd say, so it doesn't really come all that close.

In my opinion, it simply can't be done without an unheard of budget, the largest development team ever thought of, and a development time longer than DNF.

 

[MustangSVT]

are there any game footage or screenshot? I would like to see how it looks.

 

[sactoking]

After seeing this thread and a couple of posts about Daggerfall for some reason I did a search last night for Daggerfall and found out that Bethsoft has made the full version available for free download. So I downloaded it and DOSBOX and took a leap back to 1996.

I've still got my original Daggerfall disk. I found that game to be horrible. On release it was the buggiest game I had ever played. Even after installing every patch I could find it was unplayable. If I tried to play the main storyline it would bug out almost immediately after the note was delivered. If I just played around I would inevitably get sent to a randomly generated dungeon that was impossible to finish.

 

[StinkyPinky]

I saw this on WikiPedia, I thought this was funny:

Daggerfall: World Size 487,000 square Km, 750,000 NPCs
Morrowind: 25.9 square km, 1000 NPCs
Oblivion: 41.4 Square KM, 1000 NPCs

Ok, maybe there's some middle ground there, IMO Morrowind and Oblivion were way too small, however yeah Daggerfall was way to big. I don't think France even had that many people in the middle ages.

I'd like to see the world be at least 4x the size of Oblivion, like 2x as wide and 2x as tall, the bigger the better, I like to really walk around and explore.

Umm....I think that's about the size of France or California. There's no way a modern game can do something that big without cut and pasting 99% of the map with generic crap that the reviewers will hate.

I think 100 sq km is big enough to take a long time to explore. That's 2.5 times the size of Oblivion.

 

[Sureshot324]

I have good news for you :

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/12/id-tech-5-exclusive-to-bethesda-published-titles/

"In an interview with Eurogamer, id's Todd Hollenshead said that Rage's id Tech 5 is a "competitive advantage and we want to keep within games we publish." Certainly, the awards the game picked up at E3 -- including "Special Commendation for Graphics" -- provide testament to that claim. From Bethesda's perspective, the engine is simply too good for anyone else to use. "We're not going to license it to external parties," Hollenshead explained. "If you're going to make a game with id Tech 5 then it needs to be published by Bethesda, which I think is a fair thing."

That's BS. They're not licensing it to external parties because no one wants to license id engines these days.

 

[motsm]

That's BS. They're not licensing it to external parties because no one wants to license id engines these days.

They haven't released a new engine since 2004, do you really expect it to still be the hottest thing going? The fact that it still gets used at all is a testament to just how solid Id's engines are. Saying that because their engine from 7 years ago is now dated, that their new engine is automatically bottom of the barrel and undesired is just plain ignorant.

For the record, Brink, coming out in 2011 is using Tech 4, Wolfenstein used Tech 4 last year, and essentially the entire Call of Duty franchise is based off of Id's tech 3 engine.

 

[Arkaign]

They haven't released a new engine since 2004, do you really expect it to still be the hottest thing going? The fact that it still gets used at all is a testament to just how solid Id's engines are. Saying that because their engine from 7 years ago is now dated, that their new engine is automatically bottom of the barrel and undesired is just plain ignorant.

For the record, Brink, coming out in 2011 is using Tech 4, Wolfenstein used Tech 4 last year, and essentially the entire Call of Duty franchise is based off of Id's tech 3 engine.

^^ And great truth was spoken.

ID's engines were always very high quality in the past, though typically not that well suited for large outdoor areas until variants of ID4.

Given what we've seen from the tech demos and descriptions of ID tech 5, it's pretty impressive, particularly the megatexturing which apparently allows for much easier creative implementations rather than cut/paste texture technique that we've been stuck with forever.

AFAIK, the only other top-tier 3d engine maker of ID's caliber is the team that does the Unreal engines. There are a lot of other 3rd party engines out there, but they typically have major flaws in things like performance stability, AA/AF, modeling, etc, even if most of it works pretty well. Gamebryo was a good example of this, it was good at a lot of things honestly, and for 2006 Oblivion looked pretty nice, but there were definitely some problems with it that you never see in ID or Unreal engines.

ID, like Blizzard, works until it's pretty well done, they sure don't seem to rush things.