Rowan

Combined with my other suggestions, gameplay should be a lot funner and more rewarding. With much fewer enemies, the combat experience with the enemies you do fight will be much more meaningful. You'll be excited at the chance to improve your skills and test your character rather than just getting through and accomplishing some objective. You'll also have to be a lot more careful - with my system, even the strongest warriors and mages could fall to lowly creatures if they make mistakes. I'd like to see a lot more emphasis put on training - with real time training scenarios and mock battles. That way you'd have a chance to improve your skills without risking your character. You might even be able to pay for certain perks - like being able to slow down time with a trance like state so as to dodge and parry easier. And, that's why I love modding

Well, that's why you'd have to be fairly conservative with enemy placement. I don't like how every 10 ft you have to fight something in vanilla OB. With this combat system, enemies would be farther apart and have a purpose for being there. Wildlife would be much more passive.

My dream is to apprentice with Rob at castle keep someday. I've always believed that something as personal as a sword should be made by my own hands and sweat. Plus, I really want to spend a year or so in Scotland backpacking anyway. I wonder if he would even accept an apprentice? I think I asked him about it a while back and he just said that I should begin developing the skills and knowledge on my own before coming to him, which makes a lot of sense.

Freyja ( still need to think of a good last name) is the character I'd like to recreate in Skyrim. She's a typical paladin type character specializing in blade and archery. I'd love her to be skilled with the Thu'um as well.

If all that stuff is true, Skyrim promises to be a much better vanilla game than Oblivion was. Now just imagine what it will be like modded! Any news on the recommended system specs?? What about character generation? Will we see a return of the sliders? All told, I enjoyed that level of customization in OB, but I hope it will be easier to create attractive looking characters. I think you should have to eat their tongues instead. I'd like to see this dragon shout thing be a little closer to the lore, like I had planned for my children of the sky mod.

Yeah, that's kind of what I'd like to see too. Except why not be able to track the "skill" as an actual skill. Instead of Blade being a single umbrella skill covering everything that is sharp, you'd have skills for daggers, rapiers, one handed swords, two handed swords, and exotic weapons. Each of these blade types would have unique attack animations and also tangible advantages and disadvantages in combat. Perhaps these could be sub skills which fall under the major skill of Blade (sort of like skills are to attributes). Leveling the sub skills (minor skills) would directly level your major skill of Blade - but it would force the character to specialize in a particular weapon sub skill - realistically. Not to say that you couldn't eventually become a weapon master after enough training. Perhaps you could also gain skills as you go through the game. Perhaps the first time you dual wield, a duel wielding skill is added to your menu. After all, how many skills exist in real life? Hundreds of thousands. I'd like to see new skills like: horsemanship, juggling, mountain climbing, reading!, etc... however, I think emphasis should always be balanced between player skill and character skill - I tend to lean more toward player skill because it keeps the game interesting. Mainly, leveling skills would give you perks: new attacks, dodges, spell types, etc... OR, instead of defining your character in the beginning, they can evolve as you play. You can even switch out which skills you want to influence your level gain during play. The trick would be to prevent characters from becoming too homogenized - maybe the higher the skill is, the more it influences your level gain, forcing the player to stick with a particular set of skills until they are mastered. Perhaps the improvement of all skills would not be determined simply by how many times you use it, but by WHAT you do with it. If you kill an enemy faster and more efficiently than you have before you get a bonus in skill. For example, with a bow - if you are able to hit them from a very far distance you get a bonus in skill. If you kill them very quickly by hitting a vital organ you get a bonus in skill. This forces the player to try new things and actually improve in real gaming skill. Not sure if this is even possible though. IDK, there are a lot of possibilities here, and also a lot of personal preferences - hopefully they will allow this to be open ended for modders to mess with. One thing I would ABSOLUTELY LOVE TO SEE is LOW static player health. I know it's not a traditional element of an RPG, more of a FPS thing, but I've always preferred it. Instead of your enemies being able to hack and hack away you, it would only take ONE well placed hit to disable or kill you. This would make having player and character skills much more necessary. The emphasis would be put on avoiding and parrying attacks rather than having the most health. Combat could be centered around this concept of avoiding hits - through dodging, parrying, and magic shields. In turn, your objective would be to get through your enemies defenses and hit vital spots. Obviously, combat between two humans would be different than between a human and monster. Consequently, there would be LESS importance placed on the stats of your equipment. I mean a sword is a sword! However, durability would be a major factor. It'll be much easier for your armor and weapons to break or become dull, but higher quality equipment will last longer. I could go on and on with this... that's why I am thankful for modding

oh, haha... <.< nvm... I guess I just need to fork over for a copy of that magazine

Hmmm.... when it comes to customization in an RPG I don't think that less means more. I mean, if anything they should be adding new skills and magic schools, not trimming them out. It just seems like a step down from previous titles. I was bummed enough to see so many skills and spells get cut in Oblivion. Hopefully they at least allow modders to add new spells and skills. As for the other things, most sound great - I'll just have to get a good system to run it. EDIT: it might be helpful to put citations at the bottom

thanks for the reply, I appreciate it.

Update: Because I do not yet have a working laptop and I also do not have any actual CS work done yet, I think that I build the Dark Spire for Skyrim. But it might be another year by the time I'm actually able to work on it due to modding restrictions (people figuring out how to mod the game and making tools, etc) there are several important benefits of waiting: - I'll likely have a larger audience - I'll be able to make use of better graphics and physics capabilities - I never really liked OB that much anyway - the NPCs really bugged me. I'm hoping that Skyrim will be a better game overall. - I don't currently have the means to start the CS work in OB anyway In the meantime, I will continue to PLAN and WRITE - two very necessary aspects of modding. I already have all the journal entries written, and some of the books as well, which tell the backstory. I believe that having a very very solid plan will help the mod be successful and minimize wasted work. After the writing is done, I'll set to listing anddescribing all of the objects needed from the airship to the weaponry to the creatures - perhaps even drawing some of my own concept art. The only thing I may end up losing by moving this to Skyrim will be the already finished Sheogorad assets and worldbuilding that Phitt has done, but I suppose it doesn't HAVE to begin there, we'll see, we'll see... Oh, and the 200 years after OB thing will change the plot somewhat, but not drastically.

I'm assuming nobody knows what I'm talking about...

Well, I loved Bloodmoon. I just hope they implement the Thu'um in Skyrim.

So I've run into an interesting problem with the Dark Spire. I don't want to reveal too much, but basically I'm wondering what the best way to implement a complex plot using quest stages and journal entries actually is. I started out with just a single quest, but then after writing most of it, I realized that there were smaller quests contained within that I could actually extract out and make into their own little quests, and I found that I like it better that way, because I think it will help the player focus on the event that is happening right then, rather than just trying to get to the end. I'm also hoping that it will make the actual quest-building easier, but I don't know since I haven't done any. For example (since everyone already knows about it), I've made finding and operating the Dwemer Airship it's own little quest, beginning when you first read about it in one of the Dwemer's journals, and ending when you finally fly the airship back through the portal to Nirn, the plane in which it was crafted. Now, it's going to be pretty necessary to the main quest that you have found and are using the airship, but not absolutely essential since you could also use a dragon mount or some other means of flight. Currently I've split the plot into about 10 different separate quests - one for each chapter or element of the story simply because I don't think it would work to have all of those events in a single quest. These different quests often run parallel to each other and sometimes even have the same triggering events - also, in some cases one quest cannot be continued without first continuing or completing another but not necessarily. But what I don't want to happen is to have too many journal entries popping up all the time since there would be times when they would get several simultaneously... (it would help if they turned those pop up windows off) or the player getting confused about what they are supposed to do. The reason I'm trying to figure this out now is so that I can get an idea of what is and isn't possible with the CS in regards to plot, quest stages and such. That way I can get an even more solid blueprint for what I need to do later. If I make mistakes now in the plot, it could end up costing me a lot of time later. I realize there will always be some changes, but I'm just trying to minimize those to make the process go more smoothly. I need the clearest picture in my mind that I can get.

I agree with Khett! If your girl doesn't like knives too she's probably not the girl for you!