Skills and leveling
Between the two, i much prefer Oblivion's skill and stat system over Skyrim's, as it's more in-depth, feels more realistic, and allows more variety. However, there were some things from Skyrim i liked, so preferably i would want a sort of combination.
In Oblivion, you had attributes such as strength, endurance, intelligence, agility, and so on. Each one determined your level up speed of skills like swords, axes, bows, magic, movement, sneaking, and so on. When you used a skill enough, you leveled it up, and at certain levels you would unlock new abilities such as shield bashing. I would keep this general system, however, i would instead make leveling up a certain skill, such as one-handed, give you a one-handed skill point, which you could spend on perks. There would be no boring perks such as in Skyrim, that just do things like increase damage. Just new abilities or effects.
I would also like to see more attributes be more useful. Here's an example:
Strength: Determines melee ability and carry weight.
Intelligence: Determines magic ability.
Agility: Determines movement speed, attack speed, stamina, and parkour.
Stealth: Determines sneaking ability.
Dexterity: Determines lockpicking, pickpocketing, and critical hit chance.
Endurance: Determines max health.
Vitality: Determines health regen speed.
This is just an example to get the idea across, not an exact suggestion. Additionally, there would still be the different skills determined by these attributes, such as one-handed swords, two-handed axes, destruction, mysticism(which i would re-add as a magic school), and so on. However, there's something specific i wanted to mention. You might notice that the agility skill determines parkour.
Parkour would be a new skill that would act similarly to speed from previous games, but more precise. Rather than determining just speed, it would determine how fast you could run(within reason), how much stamina you use and how quickly you regenerated it, how high you could jump(to a point, so you couldn't mimic a giant's blow), and how well you could climb. Climbing would be a new ability you could use to grab onto ledges and climb trees and mountains(mountain climbing would require ice picks).
With this, players would be able to climb onto people's roofs, attack enemies by landing on them, climb trees, jump over obstructions, crawl through narrow passages, and do other cool parkour moves. This would be especially great for ninja-type players, as it would allow them to do more than just sneak up behind people and stab them in the back.
Additionally, parkour would make traveling more fun, as simply running could be interactive. Something that could be seen as either a downside or a bonus, however, would be the loss of jump spamming to climb up hills.
When you level up in Skyrim and Oblivion, your enemies level up as well, which, while providing consistent challenge for the player, kind of defeated the purpose of leveling up in the first place. What's the point of getting more health when you level up if all your enemies also get more health? How i would fix this would be to make leveling up strengthen both you and the enemies you face, but you would have a slightly higher increase than them.
As for leveled loot, i would mostly remove it. Instead of bandits getting better armor, shops selling better weapons, and dungeons having stronger loot as you level up, i would make it so shops would sell the strong stuff right off the bat, but you wouldn't be able to afford it early on, some bandits would have good gear right off the bat but be too strong to defeat early on, and dungeons with powerful gear would either be guarded by much stronger enemies, or be accessible early on but with the best loot inaccessible without gear or abilities you would get later on, such as being at the top of a cliff you need a high parkour skill to climb, or a door with a strong lock.
Combat
In Skyrim, melee combat was pretty unsatisfying. You swung your weapons too slowly, often attacking repeatedly in an exact horizontal line, And the animation made it look like you weren't angling your weapon towards the enemy, but just moving it around in front of you. Combined with the contact animation of blood splattering or dust puffing being a small dot by the cursor instead of a line where you actually would have struck with a slash or swing, it barely even felt like you were fighting. In Oblivion, you swung your weapons quickly(although perhaps a bit too quickly), aimed them forward at the enemy, and didn't swing in perfectly horizontal lines. This made the combat much more enjoyable, and should definitely be emulated in ES6. There would also need to be better sounds for combat, to make it feel like you were actually hitting enemies, rather than a dull "thunk" or "splut".
I would also like to see more attack options. For example, you could choose whether you slashed with your sword or stabbed, and you could do different attacks in different situations, such as being behind an enemy, landing on an enemy(ground pounds would be awesome), pushing an enemy over when they're staggered, and so on.
Archery was done pretty well in skyrim, and i feel like there's little need of improvement, save to make it so enemies can't dodge arrows with a superhumanly fast movement. Magic is much more complicated, and so i'll touch on that later.
Kill cameras, or cutscene kills, were a very fun addition, and the only thing i would change is to make them be able to be activated manually. For example, you could have a toggleable option that always performed cutscene kills when the conditions were met, and perhaps you could even choose which one you did.
Dual Wielding
Dual wielding was touted as a big improvement over Oblivion, but it was poorly implemented, such that your actions were actually more limited rather than less. For example, spells took up one hand each, whereas in Oblivion, you could cast spells even if your hands were full. Additionally, your shield can only be equipped in your left hand and your sword defaults to your right hand, which is unnecessary.
When dual wielding weapons, such as swords, there wasn't really any reason to attack with your left hand. Clicking the left mouse button attacked with your right hand, and clicking the right mouse button attacked with your left hand, but it only had one animation, which was slow and weird. The only time you actually get a benefit(other than having two weapons to enchant rather than just one) is when you click both mouse buttons at the same time, which deals a bit more damage. I would change it so left clicking alternates with each hand, attacking faster than just holding one sword, right clicking would cross your weapons and block, and clicking both buttons at once would be roughly the same. This would keep the dual wielding, but still allow you to block at the same time.
Sneaking
Sneaking in Skyrim was pretty ridiculous, as once someone found you they could sense your location through walls, yet if you were sneaking directly in front of them they wouldn't notice you if your sneak skill was high enough.
In ES6, i would make sight a more important feature. If someone can see you, sneaking would not work. However, i would also bring back the chameleon enchantment, which would camouflage you while sneaking by making you somewhat transparent. Higher levels would allow you to be closer to an enemy or in higher light levels before they see you. Additionally, invisibility potions would be more useful, as they would force enemies to follow you by sound.
If you were behind an enemy and not making noise, they wouldn't be able to detect you even if you aren't sneaking, and if you ran behind a wall NPCs would have to regain line of sight before following you again, allowing you to start sneaking again once discovered.
Once your presence is discovered, all nearby enemies would be on alert, wandering around and looking for you. If you stay undetected for a certain amount of time after that, they would assume you had left and relax again. Attacking or killing one of them, however, would cause them to stay on alert until you actually left the area(although this might be too frustrating).
In Skyrim, if you shot an enemy while sneaking, they would wander around for a while, and, if they couldn't find you, they would sit back down with an arrow in their skull and say "Must be my imagination". I would change it so attacking an enemy would immediately cause them to look for you, as usual, but they would go to another room if they couldn't find you. Also, if they found the corpse of one of their comrades, they wouldn't say "I'll find whoever did this" and promptly forget about it. They would instead cry out in alarm, causing all their allies to start searching for you. If they still couldn't find you after that, they'd go back to normal, but be more alert, making sneaking more difficult. This would require you to dispose of the bodies after killing them, perhaps by using a disintegration spell or enchantment.
Werewolves and Vampires
I would include both werewolves and vampires in ES6, but with some changes.
First, werewolves would look different. In Skyrim they looked more like hairy humans with vaguely wolfish heads. I would change them to be quadrapedal and more wolfish, with slightly glowing eyes and thicker fur. Additionally, your race would change your look in wolf form, as well as having a minor impact on your stats. For example, kahjiit werewolves would have longer, thinner tails and shorter faces, orc werewolves would be more muscular and have protruding bottom teeth, high elf werewolves would be slimmer and paler in color, dark elf werewolves would be slightly smaller, black, and have red eyes, etc.
Contracting and curing lycanthropy would also be different. Instead of doing a quest, you would have a chance to become a werewolf when attacked by werewolves, which would naturally spawn at night occasionally. Also, you would be able to cure yourself with a potion or other renewable item, allowing you to be infected and cured as much as you want.
Transformations would also be changed. Instead of being able to transform only once per day, you would be able to transform whenever you like, and transforming back would automatically reequip your gear. You would be able to transform and retransform whenever you like, even in the middle of battle, but you wouldn't be able to move during the transformation until the animation had finished.
Leveling up as a werewolf would be done by gaining a very small amount of xp while in wolf form, gaining more when attacking things, and gaining even more by devouring things. Skills might include nearby wolves aiding you in battle while in wolf form and not attacking you(and potentially being able to be tamed) during the day, gaining a small amount of health when doing a bite attack in combat, regenerating health faster, and so on.
Additionally, parkour skills would be greatly increased when in wolf form.
Vampires would also be changed a bit. To start, there would be no vampire lord form, and perks would be able to be gained simply by feeding off people, as well as gaining a small amount of XP when using life drain spells and abilities.
All your stats would be decreased by 30% in sunlight, unchanged when indoors or underground, and increased by 30% in moonlight. Upon becoming a vampire by being attacked by another vampire(after the traditional cure period), you would gain a 20% increase in agility and dexterity stats, which would result in being able to attack and move faster, as well as have more stamina. Sneaking ability would also be improved.
Fast Travel
First off, i think ES6's world should be about the same size as Skyrim, as making it any bigger would just add more empty space. In Skyrim, the world was huge, but most of it was just barren. A bandit fort, a cave, maybe a small shack, and then nothing until you reach the next town. Very little of Skyrim was spent traveling, as fast travel was not only convenient, but necessary most of the time. The world was just too huge to traverse normally, but fast traveling just made it seem smaller, and the whole thing just felt like teleportation. So in ES6, i think fast traveling should be removed.
In it's place, there would be a few fast travel points, similar to the carriages. However, each on would only connect to one other fast travel point(FTP) and could only be used once both points were discovered. So for example, in the picture below, point A and point B are connected, and point C and point D are also connected, allowing fast travel between the two.
Say the player wants to get to point D. Normally, they would walk there, but they're closer to point C than D, so they walk to C and fast travel to D. That way, you could connect different parts of the world together and have players commonly traversing between those points, rather than just teleporting to whiterun every time they want to buy or sell stuff. Additionally, i would make fast travel be something like entering fast travel point A, which takes you to a long(but not too long), winding cave tunnel, possibly with some enemies in it, and exiting the cave would take you to point B. This would make it seem more like you're actually traveling instead of just teleporting everywhere. In addition, the parkour skill would make traveling in and of itself fun.
A similar approach is used to great effect in Hollow Knight. In Hollow Knight, there's several stag stations you can use to travel to any other stag stations you've discovered, similarly to the carriage system in Skyrim. However, they weren't everywhere, so when you wanted to get somewhere, you would go to the nearest stag station, travel to the station closest to your destination, and walk from there. The overall effect was that you still had to travel, but you didn't need to go quite as far. That said, Hollow Knight is a metroidvania, not an open world RPG, but i still think this approach would work, and that ES6 would benefit from a somewhat metroidvania travel style.
There were also some quests in Skyrim where you had to travel a lot, such as going to kynesgrove to fight a dragon, or going all the way across the map to castle volkihar to fight the vampires in the dawnguard DLC. However, if you actually tried to run the whole way, it would take hours, the NPC's would likely get stuck, and nothing interesting would happen. I would change it so traveling would become part of the quests themselves, so for example, on your way to fight an evil mage, you might get ambushed by some of his minions, or you might meet a story NPC, or something else. This would make the quests with traveling much more fun.
World
Skyrim was large, but as previously mentioned before, most of it was just empty space, and what features there were were small and generic. Every bandit fort looked like every other bandit fort, every cave was the same as every other cave, and so on, like bethesda made one version of every kind of place and just copied and pasted them over and over, which, come to think of it, might be what they did. In ES6, i would like to see more interesting locations and landscapes, even if it means a smaller world. For example, you might find a forest where the trees are so dense little light can penetrate the canopy, or a cave with luminous crystal growths, or a swamp with trees growing in the water, or something else cool. Ideally, each location would be different, so you might have rocky badlands in one area, lush meadows in another, forest in another, swamps in another, and so on. Each place could also have it's own enemies and resources, so some alchemy ingredients would only grow in swamps, some enemies would only appear in forests, etc. An example of this idea done well is in the Minecraft server mineZ, where each location is interesting and unique. Every city had it's own architectureal style, every dungeon was differently themed, and there were unique landscape features such as a huge ravine, a dark forest, a rocky plateau, a swamp, a hilly area, even a meteor crater and a huge underground cavern system with several cities inside. Each place was interesting and unique, and seeing that in ES6 would be a huge benefit.
Additionally, buildings and towns shouldn't require loading screens to enter or exit. This would not only increase immersion, but also allow for things like climbing through windows, windows being transparent, and not having the entire outside world freeze just because you're indoors. Enemies would also be able to follow you through doors, which would increase immersion as well.
Enemies
For the most part, enemies in Skyrim were boring and generic. Every enemy that used weapons or spells, like draugr, bandits, forsworn, assassins, falmer, thalmor, or anything else were exactly the same and had all the same attacks, every dragon was the same, most of the animals were the same, etc. In ES6, i would change this so each enemy would have a unique attack style, AI, and strategy. For example, bandits might all rush you at once with one staying behind to attack from a distance, undead might be tough but slow and swarm you, goblins might surround you and take turns attacking, then retreating, and so on. This, along with making each enemy have different damage resistances and attack styles, would make fighting interesting rather than just repeating the same thing over and over again.
That ends part 1, part 2 will follow soon. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it, and as always, comments of any kind are greatly appreciated!
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