I have played an embarrassing amount of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. And I mean that literally: I’m so embarrassed at the amount of time that I’ve spent playing this game, time that would probably have been better put towards improving myself in some way, that I’m not actually going to tell you what that amount is. And even having said that, I’m still finding tiny bits of story, little unexplored bits of the massive Skyrim game map, little twists in technique and strategy, that keep the game fresh… and that’s even without touching the massive and game-changing world of player-created mods for the PC version.
A lot of gamers like me are going to be spending this week engrossed in Fallout 4, and they’ll enjoy it for a lot of the same reasons. However, I’ve never been all that interested in Bethesda’s other sprawling RPG series, because I find the post-apocalyptic world off-putting. The setting just sucks all of the life out of me. I know I’m in the minority here, and that’s OK. Similarly, the MMO structure of Elder Scrolls Online turns me off – aside from the significant amount of money needed to actually play the game when it first launched, the go-anywhere, do-anything, conquer the world feeling I get from the single-player games doesn’t interest me if I need to share it with others, and indeed, rely on them for my own success. I’ve not tried ESO, it may be brilliant, but based on my experiences with MMOs in the past, I’m just not interested.
So here I sit, patiently waiting for the next true entry in the Elder Scrolls series. Since Bethesda is just wrapping up production on the core of Fallout 4 and will likely spend the next year or so on support and DLC, I think it’s the perfect time to throw my wishes for the next fantasy RPG out into the ether. Of course no one at Bethesda is obligated to grant them; hell, they’re rather long-winded and specific, so I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t even read them. But I’ll vainly hope that my requests, gently critical as they may be, could win over some hearts and minds.
A new combat system
As excellent as the Elder Scrolls series is, the combat has been the weakest part of its core experience for some time. If you play as a standard warrior you get basic slash and block techniques and not much else, with the ranged combat of bows thrown in for good measure. If you play as a thief or rogue you get to sneak about and inflict massive damage while hoping to Noctural that no one sees you. Mages get the greatest variety of the three primary systems thanks to expanded options from the various schools of magic, but it still basically boils down to shooting stuff out of your hands in either first- or third-person.
Of course the best way to play is to roll your own class, to mix skills and classes to suit your own style. Skyrim‘s leveling system did a good job of enabling that. But when I put the game down and slipped into games with more elaborate combat systems, it really makes the Elder Scrolls series seem dated. The omni-directional melee combat of Arkham Asylum and its many imitators, the tactical third-person slashing and parrying of Dark Souls, and the new and exciting movement systems of shooters like Titanfall make me yearn to see something more fluid and interesting in Elder Scrolls. The Witcher series, while working with a similar fantasy setting and weapons, manages to have much more engaging and entertaining combat. Even a return to the spell mixing system that was, for some reason, abandoned after Oblivion would be an improvement.
Changing up the entire combat system would be a huge shift in the series, of course. It would make the quick switching between first and third person more difficult for a start, and creating enemies that are dangerous and challenging would be a tall order – the aforementioned Batman-style games tend to simply throw dozens of enemies at you at once if they need a challenging boss fight. Nevertheless, I think it’s the single most effective change the developers could make to create a more engaging experience.
Speaking of challenge…
An overhauled AI
The enemies in Skyrim are linear. And by that I mean that the degree of challenge in beating them is dependent solely on their level and their quality of equipment. There’s little difference in fighting a standard bandit, a bear, a giant, or even a dragon once it’s landed. Mages and archers are a little different, but not by much. Only when an enemy mixed things up by using dragon shouts, some of the same ones I’d been using all the time, did things get really interesting and force me to change my tactics.
Where are the enemies that dodge my magic and arrows? Where are the ones that use cover to shield themselves, like I do? Why are they content to let me wail on them for minutes at a time, even when they’re supposed to be elite units or bosses? Raising the difficulty helps a bit, but even at Legendary the game is only shifting the numbers, making my damage count less and the bad guy’s count more. After you’ve killed a Dragon Priest, a Dwarven Centurion, and a Hagraven or two, you’ve pretty much seen it all.
Please give us enemies that fight like they want to live, not just like they want to kill. Give us creatures to fight with unique attacks and movement, like even the least ambitious shooter includes. Give us variety, give us challenge, make us think instead of simply making us swing swords or shoot bows with more and more power.
A wider voice cast
This is a bit of a nit-pick, and I know quality voice acting is expensive and time consuming. But Elder Scrolls games seem to use about a dozen cast members for hundreds or even thousands of voice roles, with perhaps a single celebrity like Patrick Stewart or Michael Hogan thrown in for one major character. It means that the entire game boils down to just a few voices that conform to only a few archetypes – the smarmy man, the gruff man, the sneaky man, the good-natured woman, the gruff woman, and the whining woman cover about 90% of the human characters. Other races get a little variety, if only because the voice actors are straining themselves, but even there each race seems to have only one mood or tone.
At multiple points in my playthroughs of Skyrim the same voice actor was used two or even three times during the same quest. I’m not saying that the performances are bad – quite the opposite, Elder Scrolls games tend to be on the high end of the spectrum in that regard – but meeting the same people again and again with different faces is distracting and breaks immersion.
I’m no producer, but here’s how I’d go about this: cast an entire town, the equivalent of Whiterun or Riften in whatever setting the next game has, making sure never to use an actor for more than one character. Then move on to the next town. The realities of production mean you’ll need to repeat the actors themselves, but cast them in different roles – don’t use the same gruff, beefy-sounding guy for the blacksmith, don’t use the same nasal-voiced actor for the richest character in town. Use a system that keeps the same actors from playing similar characters all throughout the world. It will make for a more interesting experience with more memorable characters all around.
More player agency
It may sound like a strange criticism of Skyrim, but the player doesn’t have a whole lot of choice in terms of whether he or she wants to be good or bad. Oh, sure, you can go around murdering everyone you see, but actually playing through the game’s main story beats became kind of repetitive: there was always a malevolent outside force that you were rallying against as the ostensible “good guy.” Even in the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild, even when you chose to play as a literal blood-sucking vampire, you eventually had to kill the bad guy and make everything right again.
In a world that enables freedom by design, this seems like a real sore point. Why can’t I join the villain and help him in his or her nefarious deeds, then have the choice to stab them in the back? Why am I fighting a thousand bandits or draugr when I’m such a powerful adventurer that I could form my own army of fur-clad warriors or undead minions? Why choose between helping the Empire or the Stormcloaks – why not take over one of the many castles scattered across the landscape and start an evil empire of my own?
And lest you confuse my intent, I don’t want a simple moral choice system. That’s far too prevalent in gaming already, and it tends to turn the entire game into an all-or-nothing choice between good and bad, often with a disappointing payoff (if there is a payoff at all). What I’d like is the ability to make an indelible mark on the wide world of an Elder Scrolls game, create an army or a following, take over a town, and be as benevolent or as bad as I want to be. All of the major plot characters seem to do that – why not the most important one of all?
A compelling setting
Tamriel is kind of… dull. Don’t get me wrong, the Elder Scrolls games are wide and deep and so chock full of story and characters that you can’t help but find things to do. However, with the notable exception of Oblivion, they’ve all had fairly bog standard western fantasy settings. That’s understandable – they’re based almost entirely on Dungeons and Dragons archetypes, after all – but after five games, we need to shake things up a bit.
There’s an easy way to do this: add time. While the settings of the previous Elder Scrolls games have been separated by a few decades, or even hundreds of years in the case of Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online, they’re all high fantasy with little to differentiate the mechanics of the present storyline. In each game you’re going to encounter a roughly medieval setting, with the variety offered by the local landscape, races, and a few curveballs in creatures or races thrown in.
So why not send Tamriel into the future – and I mean far enough into the future that it would make a huge difference. The world already has Industrial Revolution-era technology thanks to Dwemer ruins and dungeons scattered through several games. Let’s say that the various wizards and alchemists managed to harness that tech, managed to understand some of the scientific principles behind it, perhaps a few decades before the start of the next game. Let’s see the crazy intersection between growing technology and magic that’s still potent and powerful. Let’s see rudimentary muskets and steam engines and dirigibles, and the weird and dangerous ways that these changes affect the people and power structures of the Elder Scrolls world. And then if the mysterious disaster that banished the Dwemer in the first place were to be reversed, if they came back and found their mighty works harnessed by a new civilization… well, there’s your central conflict for a new entry in the series.
If Bethesda can muster even half of the creativity so amazingly displayed in games like Bioshock Infinite and Dishonored, and marry it to the sprawling open-ended gameplay of the Elder Scrolls, it could elevate the series beyond the best in the RPG space to become something that’s truly timeless. Here’s hoping we can get it.
