1. Maybe it's just me but that seems nothing like the impression I got of Coldharbour in the descriptions.

2. Nothing about that says MMO to me. Im not saying I hate it or anything but if I didn't know what that was ahead of time I'd swear it was a Skyrim expansion. They might have made a very big mistake having the plot be so specific to individual player. "Soulless One" is a cool title and all but it kinda sucks the fun/mystique out when you realize there are at least thirty more "Soulless Ones" within eye shot.

 

What is it with MMO's these days that they have to have a story that makes you a super special person? It makes no sense in the context of the game. I just want to be a person in the world, not the Chosen One!

 

That Loremaster has such a sexy voice.

Pretty standard plot, imo - the Big Bad steal something precious from you, and you quest to get it back. Still, I was intrigued, so not bad. And you get a generic title. Weeee.

Coldharbour? "The ground is nothing more than sludge, the sky constantly burns, but yet the air is beyond freezing". But it looks like they went with a generic icy and mildly dark place. Slightly disappointed. I would like to see some truly dark stuff happening, especially since Molag Bal is the King of Rape, but I doubt the game is going to be K-18.

Considering the plot, I've already firmly decided on a mage character. I just hope that Magicka regens fast enough, and Destruction magic is balanced for the first time in TES.

 

"I doubt the game is going to be K-18" is hardly an excuse to gut the lore to such an extent. We should never have officially seen Coldharbour at all, because there's no way they could have put what it is into a freaking game.

I would much rather never see it and have the plot be about something else than watch a few hack loremasters butcher all of the cool offscreen shit to death. The sky is supposed to be on fire. Literally on fire. You can barely draw breath because the air is so cold. There is no real solid ground to speak of; it's all black sludge and blacker water. The world is filled with charnel halls, slave pens, and butchery houses where people are constantly tormented, tortured, burned, raped, hacked to pieces, and then put back together again. And when I say filled, I mean sprawling megatropolises that go on for hundreds, if not thousands of miles. Infinite halls of torture and pain and violation and blood.

Coldharbour is about as close to literal Hell as it's possible to get in the Elder Scrolls cosmology, this side of Dagon deciding to up his torture regime. We should have never seen it to begin with, but if we had, it should have looked like the first half of the Dante's Inferno game, not this shitpile WoW version of a cold Mordor.

Yeah, I'm done. I might have actually picked this up if it looked like it was solid in spite of the crappy ripoff graphics, but this is just a horrible rehash of the Oblivion plot, they expect you to feel special when there are five million other Chosen Ones running around, and they're beating the lore to death with a giant purple dildo bat. If this had just been politics and different factions fighting each other like a proper war, I would have been completely down with that, but this just sounds like someone took a rejected scrawl on a napkin from the Dawnguard meeting room and decided to make an MMO out of it.

Starting now, I'm viewing this entire affair as non-canon. There is no "Bal did it first" for the Oblivion Crisis, there is no Soulless One, and Coldharbour does not look like some Tumblr jackass tinted a picture of Mordor blue and copypasted black Spriggans in there.

 

I couldn't agree more.

Today, against my better judgement, I tried to play The Old Republic. I'd avoided it until now, because A) I'm a massive KotOR fan and TOR has butchered the character of Revan, and B) I despise MMOs. After 1.5 hours of playing TOR, I've absolutely reaffirmed my contempt for MMOs, and decided not to even bother with the Elder Scrolls Online.

I like my games to be story-driven, with particular emphasis on character development and world immersion. That's just not really possible in any MMO I've played. The other players running around are a constant reminder that you're not special. Even the way they move around the game world (or stand still for prolonged periods) jars me out of immersion constantly.

This game, like TOR, is going to suck. Companies should stick to producing high quality single player experiences until they can figure out how to do multiplayer in a way that doesn't suck donkey dick.

 

They need to stop trying to give you that single player experience in a massively multiplayer environment. It just doesn't work.

 

With the games they've tried it with I couldn't agree more but personally I think it could work in theory. As an example I genuinely liked the story lines for your characters in KOTOR, I thought they were fun and it made quest grinding and the like a metric fuckload more engaging. It was killed though by two gaping flaws that they were idiots to not consider.

First was the period between story quests. No matter how engaging the story was, after you played through a character on either faction absolutely nothing but the story quests changed. You just did the exact same thing over and over just to get to one break for entertainment and it was just so damned monotonous it made even the idea of playing a different class on the same faction coma inducing. If they really wanted to make the experience unique then while every class might have a hand in an event they should never be doing the same jobs at any time. Why would you send a Bounty Hunter to do the same job as a Imperial Agent a.k.a. a spy? You need someone to hit a convoy of enemy soldiers then by all means send a Bounty Hunter but if you need someone to go in and quietly retrieve documents from an enemy base why the hell would you send someone whose only option for getting to what he needs is blowing the shit out of everything?

Second, they completely flopped on end game content. If you expect people to wait around while you pop out new character arcs then that's fine but you need something for them to do in the meantime and if it isn't fun no one is going to stick around.

 

What they need to do is embrace the strengths inherent to the idea of a bunch of people playing together in the same space.

You want an Elder Scrolls MMO? I can give you one. I can pull one clean out of my ass.

Know what we saw once but didn't really have justice done to it? Peryite's realm, The Pits. We saw it (very) briefly in Oblivion, but it was just a copypaste of Dagon's realm, The Deadlands, presumably because somebody was lazy and didn't want to make a whole new, unique looking environment for the sake of a single quest.

The Pits are canonically a dark and winding place, with the air of being underground. It is an unpleasant, highly dangerous place.

Well, that's generic, you say. So what? Why should we care?

Because of who Peryite is. He is the Taskmaster. His domain is the concept of wounding or hurting with the intent of making something stronger or better than it was before. He blesses his devout with disease and pestilence so that they might be tested by it. If they survive, their bodies and minds are stronger from the experience. If they die, then they were not worthy. Peryite is not evil in the conventional sense, but he wholly personifies his domain. He wouldn't break your arm because he wants you to suffer, but he'd break your arm so that it might heal back tougher and harder to break than before, and write off any pain and inconvenience as an inevitable and unavoidable part of the process.

Peryite wants to see everything become strong, and he believes that the best way to do this is to constantly 'test' mortals and his servants, 'blessing' them with the opportunity to grow stronger and greater than they were before. He inflicts plagues and maims mortals so that they might grow and adapt, collapses cities and ruins nations so that the remains can rebuild themselves into something grander, and tortures and tests his faithful constantly so that they might become better, or die trying.

In fact, "become better or die trying" is a fairly accurate summary of Peryite in general. He held the Tournament of Ten Bloods in Oblivion specifically because he wanted to see one rise above all others. Nine champions of incredible prowess and skill will die, true, but one will emerge that is greater than they, and that one will be better themselves for having triumphed. Thus, it is worth doing. That's just how Peryite thinks. Something like Mortal Kombat isn't just right up his alley, he'd do it and tell those participating that it was for their own good.

He is, in short, the perfect patron for a video game, especially an MMO. Why? Think about it.

What happens in video games? Specifically the RPG, action adventure kind?

You fight enemies. You solve puzzles. You delve dungeons. You undertake quests. You find items and loot, enriching yourself with ever greater material wealth and resources. You build up your skills, starting small and amateurish, and eventually becoming able to do amazing, epic, legendary feats. You hunt down and slay terrible monsters. You acquire experience points to level up, increasing your stats and investing in new perks and skills.

In other words, you grow. You become stronger, mightier, more powerful. It's the natural part of how the games play. It just happens. The player wants rewards for playing; bigger and better things. They struggle to get them, solving puzzles and killing enemies, until eventually they get their reward, or get their character killed trying.

In other words, it's exactly the sort of thing Peryite would set up. It's his sort of gig, from top to bottom, inside and out.

We don't even have to range far to have our plot. We can almost use what the MMO has already.

Peryite declares that the time is ripe for a reckoning of champions. He steals the souls of hundreds of thousands of mortals, with the help of his earthly cultists, and sequesters them in the depths of The Pit.

Then he gives you an ultimatum. "You want your soul back. I'm willing to give it back. But you have to come get it yourself. It's hidden in The Pit. So you can come participate in the party that I'm throwing and try and get your soul back, or you can deal with not having a soul and facing oblivion when you die your mortal death on Mundus. Your choice."

Then Peryite opens the way to The Pit, allowing free travel between it and Mundus, so his chosen can enter it and begin.

The thing about this idea, which again, I want to clarify, I pulled completely out of my ass, is that literally everything in the game is justified as existing because it is part of Peryite's game. All of those immersion-breaking things that people are just 'used' to accepting now as part of the package? No, those exist for a reason here. Universal currency? Yeah, Peryite set it up so his chosen can barter for goods without having to worry about things like exchange rates. PvP arenas? Oh hell yes, this is Peryite. Did you think you were going to get away without having to fight each other? And yet no one dies, they just respawn back at some special respawn location. That's boring and doesn't make sense, except that it does, because that's part of Peryite's game. You die, you pay the penalty in gold or XP, and your soulless body is reconstituted back together from the Waters of Oblivion.

Why are there dungeons filled with monsters and loot everywhere? That's never made any sense in games. But it makes sense here, because it's Peryite. None of it is naturally occurring. It's not like the buildings and structures crumbled in just the right way to make it a maze, or that monsters 'just so happen' to be sitting around waiting for you to show. It's deliberate. The corridors and chambers are filled with elaborate puzzles and traps because it's there to test and threaten you. That's why they exist at all.

It's all just elaborate tests and trials, tasks set forth for you to accomplish. Succeed, and you are rewarded with wealth, knowledge, fame, and glory. Fail, and you die, and must start again from the beginning.

"Raid" and "Instance" don't have to be ugly words. Not in a game centered around Peryite and The Pit. It's not an acceptable handwave of the game mechanic to allow multiple attempts at the same dungeon for the loot. It's a deliberate act of Peryite's to allow his chosen champions to challenge themselves again and again and again. Peryite made it work that way precisely because it allows multiple attempts at the same dungeon or challenge. Those bosses that magically respawn for no apparent reason? Yeah, those are powerful beings that are in service to Peryite, willingly or not, to serve as punching bags and loot pinatas for his chosen. They're there at the end to be the final challenge of the area, they show up because that's their job, and they can't ever die for real because Peryite won't let them. Whether this makes them blissful servants of the ideals of Peryite or screaming captives that must suffer a thousandfold thousand deaths at the hands of those seeking wealth and glory is something to be determined on an individual basis.

Loot bank? Peryite. PvP arena? Peryite. Universal currency? Peryite. The XP system? Peryite. Skills and perks? Peryite. Why are enemies just standing around waiting for you to show up and punch the loot out of them? Peryite. Dungeon "instances" that respawn and reset everything inside of them when you leave and come back? Peryite. Raid encounters? Peryite. Prestige option for your skills so you can loop and keep on going? Peryite. No level cap, go as high as you want? Motherfucking Peryite.

It's ten thousand players trapped in an ultraviolent Purgatory where all gaming cliches and 'unrealistic' features are totally justified and you have no choice but to grow stronger and prove yourself, because the alternative is permanent death and no afterlife, and the ultimate prize is your own soul that was stolen from you by a cackling dark god that cheerfully informs you that it's for your own good. I mean look at you! When you first came here, you had nothing but the rags on your back and your curled fists! How soft and unscarred and disgusting they were. But look at you now! Clad in metals you tore from my lands, shaped and hammered with your own hands, bought and paid for with blood and sweat and pain! Look at those beautiful scars you have now! Can you really tell me with a straight face that I haven't made you better than you were before?

Look around you, champion. What do you see? A poor farmer's son that would have shoveled mud all his life, now an Archmage and scholar of Aetherius? A lone guard, unmotivated by circumstance and unchallenged by his lot in life, now a seasoned warrior of a hundred forms of combat, a true blademaster among his peers? A foppish bard with delusions of grandeur and a knack for spinning lies to warm his bed with foolish women, now a master of the lore of a thousand worlds, keeper of secrets and protector of things long since lost and forgotten by mortalkind?

And you. Did you ever dare dream from your tiny bed that you could one day slay giants? Battle demons? Cast down dragons, and test your mettle against the brightest minds, the sharpest blades, and the most skilled muscle to ever walk the pathways of Oblivion? Did you ever believe you could possess even half the wealth in your entire life that you now cast aside with distain because carrying it is an inconvenience not worth your time? Did you know then even half the things you know now? A tenth? A third? A thousandth? Could you heft your hammer high, and beat the blood and sinew of the earth together into works more delicate than spider-spun silk, and more beautiful than broken light and shattered water? Could you swing a sword and halve the thickness of a piece of parchment thrown into the air? Could you split the eye of a sparrow with a bow?

All these merry nights, all these hard days, all of your skill and strength and power, you owe to my realms, my games. My Pit.

But thank me not. For you are one of my dear Champions, my Chosen, and I will happily give you my blessings. Again, and again, and again, and again.

The question is, Champion, when you finally find your soul, will you reclaim it? Or will you stay?


Also, the pub would have a Dremora bartender. He would speak with a posh British accent, and would be wearing a tuxedo-vest and bow tie.

 

[IMGUR]0eI4F1u[/IMGUR]

/filler due to not being a sir

 

Obviously Bethesda has been hiring the wrong people.

 

And in a single post I now dearly want to go play Skyrim again and start looking into getting Raine a job at Bethesda.

 

I only found one thing wrong with all that, Lord Raine, which is your statement that Peryite held the Tournament of Ten Bloods in Oblivion. He didn't, that was Boethiah. Otherwise, what you just described was very interesting.

 

My mistake. That was Boethiah. I have no idea why I thought that was the quest where you got Spellbreaker. That was the Goldbrand one.

 

You sir, need to get a raise. Can someone please get this good person a raise? I'm thinking a posh lifestyle, immortality, and all the resources necessary to develop this concept to its fullest. Someone get the CEO of Bethesda on the line please.

 

This is a bigass post. You should go make a bigass sandwich, and sit in a bigass chair to read it. Big ass not actually included, side effects include dry mouth, rectal badgers, scrum-diddily-umptious-ness, and wondering how much spare time Lord Raine has on it's many tentacled hands. Don't take bigass post without consulting your doctor. Not legal in some states, coming to a Canadian providence near you!

It's funny you guys think that it should be my job. It's actually what I'm trying to do for a career. I've made a lot of moves to try and get into that particular scene. The problem I ultimately had is that to get into that specific kind of niche (writing and creative control), you need to either already be a known entity, or you need to know somebody that knows somebody. It's not like the coding side, where you can get a job just through the skillset alone. I spent many a long night teaching myself computer programming, and even took classes in it, but while I definitely have a powerful affinity for Mountain Dew and insomnia, me being a programmer just wasn't in the cards. It's not my strong suit.

That's actually why I've been so absent from the fanfiction scene as it were. I haven't been dicking around doing nothing. I've been trying to get hired. Unfortunately, not only do I not know anybody, I don't know anybody who knows anybody either, so at this point, I've fallen to my last resort, which is trying to become a successful writer IRL and then step sideways into that.

I wish I was in charge of creating an Elder Scrolls MMO, though. That would be amazing. It wouldn't even feel like work. I'd be having too much fun. I know why WoW is popular, and I know why nearly every MMO that has come out since has failed to live up to it. It's because they're trying to be WoW, and you cannot out-WoW WoW.

If an MMO wants to succeed, it needs to fill a different niche than WoW does. You're not going to pull players away from World of Warcraft, that falls into the realm of trying to do it better than it itself does. Instead, you need to be something different. This current MMO they're working on? I don't think it's going to succeed. I think it will do better than most at the initial outset because it's using the Elder Scrolls name, but the story is mediocre and riddled with plot holes from what we've seen of it so far, and that's extremely bad, because we haven't seen that much. It's cribbing the cartoon style of graphics and coloration almost directly from World of Warcraft, and I have yet to see anything in either the gameplay itself or the trailers advertising it that makes it seem like it even takes place in the Elder Scrolls universe. It's too generic, too general fantasy, too bland and normal and stock. The trailer is some viking guy, a ninja (with an admittedly bitching outfit) and a Final Fantasy elf that shops at Lothlorien scaling a wall and beating up Roman Legionnaires. I don't even know what that is.

Oh, and the viking guy fought skinless quasi-bipedal wolves to get there. Because skinless werewolves are a classic mainstay of The Elder Scrolls series. You see them in every game.

No. If an MMO wants to succeed, it needs to be different from World of Warcraft. It needs to play differently, look different, have a different feel, use different mechanics and means of progression, and provide a different atmosphere and experience. It can't just sell the WoW experience repackaged and reskinned with guns or lightsabers or Atronachs or something. That will never work.

An Elder Scrolls MMO would have all of the resources necessary to do that. They just need to be used and exploited intelligently and correctly.

So what are the best traits in an Elder Scrolls game? What does the series show consistently?

Let's make a list.

> Large worlds. This isn't a truly defining feature of the Elder Scrolls series, but it's still a present feature. All of the worlds are large and diverse. Morrowind was big. Oblivion was big, especially with the Shivering Isles expansion. Skyrim is big. Disbarring games like Minecraft that have infinitely self-generating terrain, Daggerfall still holds the record for the largest game world map ever created, MMOs included. The Daggerfall gameworld is twice the size of the entire United Kingdom, and the cities and towns were of a realistic size, containing hundreds and dozens of buildings respectively, instead of a scant seven or eight apiece.

> Exploration and visuals. Derelict dungeons, old mines, cave and cavern complexes. An Elder Scrolls game is riddled with places to find and areas to explore, and when you get there, they are memorable, and in the case of the more recent games (now that graphics have advanced), beautiful. Everyone remembers the first time they walked up and saw the city of Vivec out in the bay. People remember scaling the Jerall mountains in Oblivion and looking out across two thirds of the map at once. People remember the view from the Throat of the World and the entrance to Sovengarde. People don't forget the aesthetics of Dwemer ruins or crumbling Ayelid cities. They are distinct. You cannot mistake them for anything else. You see a screenshot of a frozen shoreline dusted with ash and an erupting volcano in the near distance across the water, and you know exactly where and when you are. I don't even have to spell it out.

And everyone was amazed when they first found Blackreach.

TES hasn't always been beautiful, but it has rarely if ever been bland or boring in regards to it's environments. Everything has always been distinct and unique.

Except for Oblivion, which was supposed to be a jungle, but we won't talk about that.

>Unique enemies. The Elder Scrolls has themes that it runs on. There are many creatures and monsters that are recursive. They continuously pop up, again and again. They are distinctly unique, and quite often, they look like nothing else outside of the Elder Scrolls universe. But those distinctive things, like Dremora, Golden Saints, and Ash Spawn also stand shoulder to shoulder with things that are a classic part of fantasy, like animated skeleton warriors and vampires. The Elder Scrolls bestiary has it's fair share of atypical fantasy monsters, but a very large portion of it, arguably even the majority of it, is unique to the Elder Scrolls universe. Atronachs are omnipresent. Someone’s basement will be full of Skeevers. I saw a Mudcrab the other day. That sort of thing.

>A palpable sense of culture. Nations in the Elder Scrolls aren't just near identical castles sitting in different locations with everyone wearing the same five outfits. There are radically different attitudes, architecture, cultural values and traditions, and scenery from one locale to the next. The Ashlander tribes of Morrowind may as well have been from the moon for all the similarities they have to people living in Bravil, and a Nord warrior likely has more in common with an Orc, who is from an entirely different species, than he would a Breton knight from High Rock. We are not, in other words, simply informed of the differences that these people have from each other. We are shown it, repeatedly and in depth. They have different mannerisms, different religions and figures of worship, different buildings and architecture, different attitudes about death, warfare, and what it means to live a good life, and the equipment, gear, weapons, and armor they use all have unique cultural differences in their appearance and how they are made.

So an Elder Scrolls game has large and memorable environments, rich lore and fictional culture, iconic recurring enemies and themes, and a massive base of supporting lore.

So what should an Elder Scrolls MMO have, exactly?

It should have the best of everything. That sounds quite simple, almost absurd even, but it's quite possible. In fact, the very fact that this hypothetical project is an MMO is what helps enable that.

How so, you ask?

Well let's go down the list of what an MMO needs to be successful.

MMOs need to have an enormous arsenal of weapons and items to keep people busy. There needs to be a staggeringly vast number of options for weapons and armors to use, mix, and match together, otherwise everybody ultimate ends up looking the same, and people have little reason to keep playing the game if they can easily collect everything or all of the best things. So the larger the pool of potential armor, weapons, items, and pieces of gear and equipment, the better.

How can the Elder Scrolls setting fulfill that?

Cultural variation. Steel armor made in Skyrim looks completely different than Steel armor made in Cyrodiil. A steel longsword made in Valenwood looks nothing like one made in Solstheim. The Redguard wanderers that patrol Skyrim don't use steel longswords like we understand. They use scimitars, but that's probably a steel longsword to someone from Hammerfall. Their steel armor also probably involves sparser armor plating backed on leather and cloth, to make it lighter and help it breathe better in their native environments.

And that’s just using a few examples of two things; a steel longsword and steel armor. There are dozens more. What would Daedric or Glass weapons look like if they were forged in an Akaviri style? What kind of aesthetic would Ebony and Dwemer armors have if they were forged by a Redguard smith from Hammerfall, or an Orc in Orsimar?

No one game in the Elder Scrolls series has ever done full justice to the sheer variety of weapons and armors that should be available. Every major region and culture crafts their goods in different ways, using different techniques, and with different end goals and ultimate visions for the aesthetic and what the final product should do. Maybe High Elven smiths work Dwemer metal into golden chainmail suits of Light Armor, and add their own elven motifs to it, instead of crafting it in the image of the Dwemer statues like the Nords. Maybe the sons of Hammerfall and Elsweyr have taken advantage of the fact that correctly forged Glass and Mithral can breath as well as cloth and has nearly the same weight, and wrought their respective workings to create Heavy Armors that will not bog down or overheat their wearers, should they have to fight or march for endless hours under merciless sun and humid jungle.

And so forth, and so on it goes. Even with an entire suite of mods on a PC version of an Elder Scrolls game, it’s almost impossible to fully recreate to any satisfaction the sheer variety of weapons, armors, and tools that should, by all rights, be at your disposal and loose in the world at large.

But an MMO could.

What elegance did the Akaviri of old bring forth from the bones and hide of fallen dragons? How sharp is an Akaviri Dragonbone Katana, and what shape and form would their armor take if given such materials to craft it from? What take would a forgemaster from Summerset Isle have on the mysterious metal of the forgotten Dwemer? How would a smithy from High Rock or Valenwood work their Glass and Ebony?

And why limit ourselves to singular materials at all, for that matter? If you gave ten smiths from ten different cultures and nations access to a storeroom filled with ebony, glass, steel, moonstone, and dwarven metal, and told them to use whatever and however much they wished to craft the mightiest thing that they could, they would make you ten entirely different things.

What would those things look like? What could they do? What would they be? Would an Orc smith appreciate the heft and weight of Ebony, and work the edge of an axe in the black mineral even as they cradled the biting edge in his own native green ore? Would an Elven bladesmith forge his longsword hollow, with holes for filigree, and then baptize it still hot in liquid Mithral, to fill the gaps with glittering chrome, and stamp the burning gold and liquid silver with sharpened lines of razor glass? Would the calculating eyes and swift fingers of the Khajiit slice thin sheets from Dwemer metal and Ebony steel, to line their leathers and cloths with practical decoration? What might glass, or steel, or Stahlrim look like, if a sorcerer bound a Daedric spirit to the material as it was worked, marking it as Daedric Steel, or Daedric Glass?

What would these people, these races, these cultures do, when given such materials and resources? What would they create? What would it look like?

An Elder Scrolls MMO could answer that question. In fact, an Elder Scrolls MMO would only really run out of new weapons and armors when people got tired of putting them in. It could go where no other Elder Scrolls game has gone before, and do so boldly and with pride. Imagine, for a moment, an MMO, set in the Elder Scrolls world, that releases a new, free official weapon and armor pack every three or five months, with upwards of several dozen new items present in each. Would that not draw in players? Would it not justify something like a subscription to play the game, if such a thing was necessary to keep the game afloat? Would that not make it feel worth the price to players, to log on and every regular once in a while, see entirely new content, free with the compliments of the establishment, waiting for them to enjoy?

But what else does an MMO need to be successful? Pretty items and weapons rich in cultural meaning and purpose are all well and good, but you can’t make a game just on items alone. You need more.

MMOs thrive on progression. Players progress, and keep progressing. The manner in which the game is played is extremely important. But just as much, they also need something for the players to do once they have reached the top, something for them to shoot for and keep striving towards. The continuation and perpetuation of the Endgame is just as important as the manner in which the end is reached. How can an Elder Scrolls game serve in such a setting?

Again, being different is important. You can’t just copy or crib off of something that someone else is doing. Simply implementing something like what WoW is doing, but different enough to not be a total ripoff, is not enough. You need to be stand-alone, unique. Something that appeals to old gamers by being familiar and nostalgic while also being compelling enough to draw in new people.

Can the Elder Scrolls manage such a thing?

Why yes, actually. They can.

The last two games the Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion and Skyrim, were both two near-perfect takes on two different philosophies in regards to level progression. Oblivion had lots of numbers and crunching for players to keep track of, and had an array of core stats that should be almost second nature to recite for any serious RPG player (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Willpower, ect, ect). It allowed the player to invest in what core stats they wanted to grow directly upon leveling up, and how much you could grow them depending on what skills you leveled up, and how much you did so, to reach that level-up.

Skyrim, on the other hand, was much more organic. Skills simply ‘existed,’ and you grew by advancing them. There were no ‘stats,’ core or otherwise, only skills, and your strengths and abilities were determined half by your progression in those skills, and half by your investment of perks, which you gained upon level up, and could invest into skill ‘trees’ to gain new attacks, passive bonuses, and new ways to use your abilities.

Both of these methods of leveling up diverge radically from the system that World of Warcraft uses, where you simply choose your class from the beginning, and that hard-locks you into what you can and cannot do for the rest of the game, no further questions asked.

Now, the jury is still out, and the arguments still rage, in regards to whether Oblivion or Skyrim had the “better” system. But the question I’m asking is, can there be a compromise?

Why yes. I believe there can be. How?

Preserve the best ‘core’ traits of the two systems. Combine them into one. Set them up so they play off of each other.

“That’s all well and good, Lord Raine” you say, “but wouldn’t that be difficult to work out?”

Not at all. In fact, I’m going to do it completely by ear. Remember, not only is everything you’ve read above being pulled completely out of my ass, but everything I’m about to lay out, I also just now pulled completely out of my ass.

There are no classes. There are no ‘choices’ in the beginning for a character, beyond their name and race/gender/appearance customization. They are thrown into a short starter dungeon that shows them the ropes of how the controls work, how stealth works, and how to pick up and use the various weapon types, and then they’re left alone. You are allowed to run wild and do whatever the hell you want. Fight enemies how you want, traverse obstacles and solve puzzles using whatever skills and abilities tickle your fancy, and then ‘ding,’ level up. You gained enough experience points to level.

So you pause the game, go to your level up screen, and you see your skills. The ones you used often have progression in them. The ones that you used less, or not at all, do not. You see that your core stats have increased slightly, and you see that you have a single perk to spend, and that you can spend it on a number of different choices, as determined by what skills you used enough to unlock something new in.

So what exactly is happening, here?

You still have core stats. Those are still present, unlike in Skyrim. However, unlike in Oblivion, you cannot directly control what stats go up, and by how much. Instead, each skill you have that you can use is associated with one of your stats, and the game keeps track of what skills you use and how much you use them. Upon leveling up, the game distributes a small amount of additional points directly to your core stats, and it does so in accordance with what skills you used the most. Players who do lots of sneaking, throw knives, shoot people with arrows, and cast illusions and distractions with magic will find their Dexterity and Intelligence naturally rising faster than their other skills. Players who fight with large weapons, use heavy armors, and fight aggressively using power attacks and spending lots of stamina will find their Strength and Constitution rising higher than their other skills.

You still have control over what stats get leveled, and by how much. But that control is an indirect control. Instead of being directly controlled by the player upon level up by choosing what stats to put points into, the game invests the points for you automatically each time you level up, and how it does so is directly controlled and determined by how you used your skills. This, I think, is the best of both worlds, because it is a system that can simultaneously be appreciated by the hardcore player and the casual fan. Hardcore players would appreciate being able to control their character’s long-term stat growth by carefully choosing how often to use their skills, maximizing their gains in areas that they want to strengthen before moving on to other ones, while more casual players would appreciate the fact that the game isn’t asking them to memorize a spreadsheet of what stats matter and which ones done, and that they don’t have to worry about investing “poorly” and then screwing up their character in the long run, because their character will by definition grow stronger and better in ways that compliment the way that the character is played.

This also means that we can bring back and develop further the idea of having equipment that strengthens core stats as well as having it’s own numbers to determine damage and speed. So now that we have stats again, it would be possible to find gloves that increase dexterity or strength, or boots that make you run faster, just like in the old days. So making this change also allows even more diversification in the realm of randomly generated equipment, enchanting, and gear customization.

But I’m not done. Because while this kind of organic progression is really nice on its own, I think it can be taken one step even further. How, you ask?

Perks.

Why? Because Perks are the proverbial thumbtack you press into the wall that is your stats. It represents a special investment of attention into something. It is a silent statement, an indication that “I want more out of this than just a bigger number.”

How can Perks help take this one step further?

Skill synergy. Because it’s not enough for you to just raise up your individual skills like giant box towers. Your character’s progression just looking like a bar graph would be boring.

Instead, certain skills can ‘sync’ with others, creating overlap in how they work.

I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say you favor swords. You like longswords, katanas, rapiers, scimitars, ect. They’re your thing. And lets say you also like, I don’t know, Destruction magic. You like playing with fire. Spraying people with a hose of fire from your palm while whacking them with the sword in your other hand is fun.

So you level a bit, and level a bit, and oh hey, Level 5. Cool. Let’s go look at my perks and. . .

Wait a minute. Why is there a line drawn between my Destruction Skills and my Sword Skills? What is that?

That’s a synergy perk. You used Destruction and One-Handed/Sword/Whatever enough that they both reached a certain threshold, and now that they are both at that threshold for your character (lets say now that they’re both at level 20, for argument's sake) you can see an entirely new tree of abilities that was invisible to you before, that represents the union of those two skills.

A tree of abilities with things like “temporarily self-enchant your sword with the elemental power of a Destruction spell wielded in your off-hand,” and “launch waves of fire/shards of ice out of your sword with every swing when activated.”

This sort of tree isn’t a new skill in and of itself. Your skills remain the same; you don’t get a new one. Rather, progression in this sort of tree is dependent wholly on keeping up with the skills that make that tree up. Normal trees might need 25 in a skill before you can get to the next tier of perks to invest in, but a hybrid tree like this one would need 25 in both of the skills to get the next tier. If you keep both your Destruction and your, let’s for the sake of convenience call it Swords, you can get to the next tier of the Destruction Sword tree. If you slack off in one or the other, your progression in it stops there. You need both at or above the threshold to continue in it.

But Destruction and Swords are just the beginning. The can of potential I’ve just used Perks to open is much, much deeper than that. How about Conjuration Swords or Conjuration Armor? Overlay your existing weapons and outfit with a Bound “shadow,” making it stronger, allowing it to provide more protection, and stacking any bound weapon/armor abilities and skills you might have onto your current gear. Destruction Archery, pull shafts of fire and lightning out of the air with a flick of your fingers, and knock arrows of pure elemental destruction to fire at your foes. Destruction Restoration, because Holy isn’t just for Final Fantasy anymore, and we’ll finish what Dawnguard started with Sun Fire and Vampire’s Bane. Alteration Illusion, because those illusionary copies of yourself would be a lot more useful if they could punch somebody in the face or stab them with a sword. Conjuration Illusion, I’ll bet you wish you knew which of my Atronachs were fake and which was real, don’t you? Ha, just kidding, they were all fake. The real one was invisible. Destruction Alteration, because the ninjas can’t grab you if you’re on fire.

“But Lord Raine!” you say. “That’s all magic! What about things that have nothing to do with magic? What if I don’t like using it?”

Oh, we’re just getting started. I could continue on, sure, with things like Sneak Illusion that gives you Chameleon automatically when sneaking, but why even go there? We don’t need magic to keep this train rolling.

Hey, you. You’re wearing Heavy Armor. That’s a lot of mass. Shouldn’t you be hitting harder with your Claymore? Well now you can, with some of the Heavy Armor Two Handed perks.

What’s that, you say? Your One-Handed is high, and so is your Two-Handed? You’d think you might eventually figure out how to use a big weapon with just one hand. You’re a pretty beefy guy, after all. Guess what? Get them both high enough, maybe pass a core stat gate as well about Strength, and spend a perk, and you can use a Two-Handed weapon like a One-Handed one at the cost of spending additional stamina for attacking and using special abilities with it. Because it’s not officially an amazing game unless you can build and play as Guts or Dante. This can even be used for basic and simple interactions. Sneaking requires being quiet. Heavy Armor isn’t quiet. You can’t sneak very well, if at all, while wearing heavy armor, but there could very well be Hybrid Sneak/Heavy Armor perks that change that, allowing you to sneak perfectly fine while in Heavy Armor, or even treat Sneak perks like you were wearing light or no armor when wearing Heavy Armor. What started out as being something between nigh impossible and extremely difficult, you made possible, and then tipped to the opposite direction of being a sheer advantage, purely through your own effort and dedication in leveling up those relevant skills.

Here’s the ideal here. You pop in the game, and start playing, and the game maximizes your experience from there. This process of mixing Oblivion and Skyrim leveling, with the addition of Perks and syncing skills to get access to more advanced and specialized perks, allows for a completely organic leveling experience. You play the game, and how you play the game determines not only which of your core stats get stronger, but also governs what advanced hybrid perks you gain access to. Hardcore players get control over every aspect of their character by changing up their playstyle to suit how they want their core stats to level and what hybrid perks they want access to, while someone who is less interested in that sort of thing can just jump right into playing the game, and their own natural preferences and tactics for approaching problems will provide them with the core stat increases and perk access they need to get better at whatever is that they’re doing.

It’s a totally organic process. You can control every level of it, but even if you don’t, the game still molds your progression and perks around whatever it is that you’re doing, allowing you to spread out across the complex snarl of the perk tree in whatever shapes and progressions you feel like.

Combine that with the ability to prestige skills after they reach 100 and no cap on level, and you’ll see people playing to level 500 and beyond. Not only will people keep playing because each time they prestige a skill they start playing a different (and thus refreshing) way using their slightly developed skills to pick up on the slack of their now-beginning skills (which in turn provides even more of a new experience for the player, as it unlocks more combinations of skills and abilities), but they’ll also keep playing just to get more perks to invest into their favorite trees, expanding and filling out more and more of the core and hybrid trees with their favorite perks.

The system has hundreds, possibly even thousands, of hours of playtime built into it by default. Then factor in the possibility of an official expansion pack that adds in even more Hybrid Trees, or maybe Prestige trees, both normal and hybrid, that are gated to requiring one or more ranks of prestige in a skill for you to be able to invest in them, and you’re looking at a game that the playerbase could play for years, maybe even decades, without it ever going truly stale. Bored? Tired of playing the way you do? Get your favored skills to level 100, and put your Destruction-enhanced weapons behind you for the path of stealth and shadow, or rampaging angry steel. Curious as to what could possibly await you in the realms of Illusion One-Handed or Heavy Armor Archery? Want to know what happens if you start running around punching everyone and combining it with Destruction magics? Step up to the plate and find out. You may just find a new favorite build.

Even the basic Perk trees have more potential left in them to be exploited, completely separate from anything to do with Hybrid trees. Archery perks to fire multiple arrows at once, or rapid fire arrow barrages that let you machine-gun down enemies at the cost of massive, constant stamina drain. Spells and abilities that can be activated and left on indefinitely, but that ‘tie up’ portions of your magicka or stamina to maintain their usage, such as damaging elemental auras, a constant cloud of swirling illusionary lights and decoys, a simple magical light source to see in the darkness, summons that never disappear but cost or advanced forms of Bound Weapons and Armor that loses the timer entirely but costs a set portion of your magicka to sustain. There could even be spells and abilities that behave like ‘auras’ or massive AoEs centered on yourself, like battle shouts that draw aggro and allow you to tank, combat stances that tie up a fraction of your stamina to improve stats and provide certain benefits to yourself and any allies around you, a Necromancy spell that ties up a small mountain of magicka to sustain but which automatically animates any corpses below a certain threshold of power to fight for you when you draw near them, or the opposite in the form of some kind of Restoration Destruction hybrid spell that automatically attempts to Turn any undead that enter your aura of effect, and sets them ablaze with holy fire whether they resist the turning or not.

So we have our weapons and armor. We have our item pools and our gear. We have our system of skills and leveling up, a way to advance that bows to the will of player whim and allows them to construct their own classes and builds, instead of forcing them to play a predetermined role chosen by the designers and programmers.

And you know what?

It all means squat if you don’t have the third element to the game, possibly the most important element of all.

How does she play? What do you go with for the game itself? What do I find myself looking at? How am I peering through the looking glass?

You can have the best system for player advancement in the world and the biggest selection of weapons and armor imaginable, and it all amounts to nothing if you can’t put it together in a way that is engaging and fun to the player. So how?

In my mind, third person is the way to go, here. In the beginning, first person was the name of the game, and a lot of people really like playing games that way. I’m one of those people, actually. But I’m not going to lie; I spent a whole lot of time in Skyrim in third person. Why? Because Skyrim was beautiful. Even without any graphics mods or packs, even on vanilla console, Skyrim was a beautiful place. Why would you wander down a mountain trail in first person, when you can do it in third, and see so much more of the sky and your surroundings? The world you moved in was interesting enough, and the armor and outfits you wore finally decent looking enough, that you actually stopped caring, at least in part, whether you were looking at the world in first or third person perspective. And I suspect that when the next Elder Scrolls game comes out, almost certainly on the next gen consoles, I will likely spend even more time in third person. Possibly even as often as I can get away with it.

Any MMO that began development now would be released for the PC, probably not for the consoles, and would have ample time to have it’s graphics specs improved immensely from the standard of even where Skyrim is at. Skyrim was released years ago. Start development of an MMO now, and the detail and depth of the graphics it could have is almost staggering, even if you take into account dumbing some of it down to improve connection quality and speed.

What’s more, MMO are bigger than regular games by sheer nature. They must be. It literally is required. Bigger environments, bigger enemies, more things to see and take in.

A third person perspective, switching to over-the-shoulder for archery and ranged attacks, and using enemy and area highlighting for casting most ranged spells, would be the order of the day. It would give the game a larger, grander, and more epic feel, and would lend itself better to fighting large groups of enemies, engaging massive bosses, navigating complex environments, and other activities endemic to the Elder Scrolls MMO.

How many people would normally be playing at a time? What is the standard party size we’re looking at, here?

I’d say four. You may raise an eyebrow at me, and rightly so, but the four-man party is a long-standing tradition of RPG circles, harkening back to halcyon days of pen-and-pencil TRPGs and 8-bit Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games. It is the classic, the staple, the iconic team design.

It’s also practical. Some people, a lot of people, are perfectly fine playing MMOs with strangers, but by the same token, nearly everyone is willing to agree that playing with friends is better.

How many friends do you have in the circles you move in for games? How many of them do you play with regularly? How many of your friends will be on at any given time?

Four is a solid number to build off of. You design the game with the idea that four people playing is average, and then expand from there. You want to make a sixteen man raid dungeon with armies of undead monsters, and the final boss is a Necromancer Dragon? Take the standard dungeon, multiply it by four. Four times the size, four times the enemies, four times the rewards. You want a massive 32 man event? That’s the standard times eight. You want a weekend event superdungeon that requires dozens of teams working in tandem across a labyrinth of traps and objectives, converging on a massive war party of boss-rush proportions, only the bosses aren’t going to be waiting politely for you to kill them one at a time, and are going to roll out all at once with no brakes on their rape train? 128-man hyper raid. That’s the standard, but times 32.

Four isn’t just the classic adventuring party. It’s the quintessential bro-op, the Friday night you spend at home. It’s a small enough number that a determined adventurer could potentially go it alone in the smaller dungeons for the challenge if they wanted, but it’s also a large enough number to get serious teamwork mechanics going for most fights, and it’s a flexible number that can be easily multiplied out mathematically to create larger and larger challenges. A 128 hyper raid may sound like a lot, but that’s 32 teams of 4 people, and 32 teams isn’t as big a number as you might think.

So you put in this game, and you can count on at least being able to roll with three other people that you know personally, either in person or as part of a game guild or internet forum. That’s the standard.

“This is all well and good,” you say, “but I’m seeing a problem in the long term with this kind of setup.”

”What’s that?” I ask.

“Well, doesn’t this make endgame characters obscenely powerful? I mean, an endgame character can potentially do everything, right? Isn’t that unfair? Doesn’t that break the game?”

Good question. And yes, it might. There’s two things stopping that from happening, though. The first is that, while someone might be able to eventually do every individual thing that a full man party can, they cannot do it all at once. A four man party can have one guy tanking, one guy healing and distracting, one guy shooting arrows and throwing alchemical bombs, and another guy casting magic. Even if one character can eventually become ‘as good’ as each of those characters are at their specialty, they cannot do all of those things at once. So that’s a limitation right there.

The other limitation, though, is inherent to how my system would work. You have two slots you can fill with your loadout. Each loadout takes into account that you have two hands free to fill, and can fit something else onto your back or on your belt. So you could carry a sword and shield in one slot (two one handed weapons) and a bow in the other (one two handed weapon), and that works just fine. Or you could carry basic non-two-handed magic in one hand and a sword in the other (two one handers again) and have both of your hands devoted to magic in the second slot (which lets you cast two handed magic, and thus bring out the really big magical guns), and that works. Or you could go sword and board for one hand, and claymore for the other, or claymore in one slot and two handed magic in the other. But you’re always limited to those two slots, and what you can fit into your two hands.

But here’s the thing. While you’re in a dungeon, level, or instance? You can’t change your setup. If you go into a dungeon as a pure stealth rogue with a dagger in each hand for one slot, a bow in the other slot, and Real Rogues Do It From Behind tattooed across your heart, and you find this amazing claymore that you want to use? You can use it, but just not until you leave the level and go change your equipment around. You could replace the bow with it, or the daggers with it (since the claymore is a two-handed weapon, it takes up both hands for a slot (unless you have a special perk from a Hybrid tree to fix that, maybe)), but you can’t do that in the middle of the dungeon when you find the thing. You have to wait.

Limiting players to two slots of two hands worth of weapons gives them ample flexibility to design their character while also putting a firm cap on exactly how much they can bring to the table at any given time, and preventing people from equipping weapons while in dungeons and instances prevents someone from just bringing a dagger, a longsword, a shield, ect, and just swapping things around whenever they want. It’s flexibility, but also fairness.

So even if someone has filled out tons of skill trees, invested over a hundred and fifty perks in those trees, and has access to a ton of abilities and skills? They’re still limited to a pair of two-handed slots for their gear. They can’t carry more in just so they can switch out mid-dungeon, and they can’t switch what they have around once they’re inside, unless and only if what they find is the same type of weapon that they’re already using, in which case they can choose to replace what they’re using what what they find, and vice-versa. And you can only use, say, dagger abilities, if you’re actually carrying a dagger. You can’t use the One-Handed parry and riposte defensive abilities if you’re carrying a claymore or a bow. Only if you have a One-Handed weapon. So most of the abilities that such a player would have, they wouldn’t even have access to at any given time. Being a really high level doesn’t make you that much more powerful than everyone else, so much as it allows you to become much more versatile and flexible in what roles you can play for your group or party. Need a tank? I got that covered, I invested in a ton of stealth perks but I’ve also got loads of sword-and-board abilities and some points in Heavy Armor. Need an Archer? I’m pretty good, let the archer guy level his magic, I can cover for him. That sort of thing.

How about loot, then? How does that work?

In terms of taking loot, finding things in chests, ect, all loot is multiplied by the number of people in the party at the time, and then distributed evenly. So a four man group opens a boss chest in a dungeon. One nice enchanted weapon, one decent unenchanted weapon, five hundred gold, and two soul gems are in the chest. All four players get the (same) nice enchanted weapon, decent unenchanted weapon, five hundred gold, and two soul gems. So everything drops evenly. Everything is perfectly fair, everyone involved gets what everyone else in their specific party or group does.

That seems extremely generous, you say. In fact, that seems so generous, that I’d actually be concerned that people would be getting too much loot. Doesn’t that make the game a bit too rich?

I can say a lot of bad things about Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, but one thing that I did enjoy was the ability to break down weapons, armor, and items that you find but have no use for into (some) of their constituent components, which are then used in the crafting process. In Oblivion or Skyrim, you find a steel sword, you either don’t even bother to bring it with you because look at it, it’s a goddamn steel sword, or you bring it with you purely with the intent to sell it at the next merchant you see, and potentially to drop it to make room for something better or more valuable later in the dungeon.

But in Reckoning, you find a steel sword, you’re like “I don’t need that,” but instead of just leaving it behind, you disassemble it, and maybe get a steel blade, a leather strap, and a bolt or rivet out of it. And if you take apart enough crappy swords, and also have points into crafting, then you can take all of bits and pieces that aren’t doing anything, and make yourself a bitching magic sword that’s also on fire.

Disassembly allows loot to be recycled, instead of just being abandoned. It can be reused by pumping it into the crafting system, selling it or its parts to a vendor, or by rendering those parts down even further into metal ingots and other basic ingredients, which can then be reforged and crafted into other parts and regents, which can be crafted into other, completely different things. There could even be overlap into other crafting disciplines: Ground Soul Gem dust and elemental salts garnered from disassembling enchanted weapons and armor can be used in alchemy as well as enchanting and forging, certain enchanted tools can improve your crafting, and some smithing recipes might require alchemical reagents and enchanting individual parts of the unassembled item before they can be forged together to make the whole.

There will be other uses for loot as well. How so? Only the most basic spells can be bought from a vender with gold or favors. And this game has non-magical abilities and ‘moves’ as well, not just magical ones, like leaping attacks, iai-blow sword draws, defensive shield maneuvers, and chained dagger combos that can be activated just like using a spell. Not all of those can be learned from a trainer or a book either.

So how do you learn them?

Rituals. You need to research something, you spend resources to do so, and create the ritual necessary to learn that spell, maneuver, or technique. If you want to learn the Destruction fire spell that rolls out a carpet of fire in a designated AoE that staggers and sets on fire anyone that gets caught in it, you’re going to need to spend 15 Fire Salts, a fire enchanted magic weapon, and whatever else the ritual requires you to have on hand. You research the ritual (which costs gold), that gets you the recipe, and then you use the recipe to create the Ritual. Once you have everything you need, you use the Ritual, which costs you all of the listed components, and boom, new spell, attack, ability, or whatever.

You want to learn Akaviri Swordsmanship? That’s going to cost you fifteen Akaviri-style blades of any quality or tier to open up the initial abilities, and the rituals get more complex from there on out. Want to build yourself up to the kinds of feats and sorceries that you only hear of in Elder Scrolls legend. With enough levels, skill experience, and materials, it’s certainly possible.

Recipes are also my answer to crafting as well. You don’t just get to spend a perk and know everything about forging Glass or Ebony. If you want to make an Ebony Longsword, you need to either disassemble enough of them to learn how they’re put together, or you need to acquire the recipe to craft them.

And of course, recipes, both crafting and ritual, can occasionally be found in loot in dungeons, which allows you to skip the research/disassembly learning process entirely. If you’re lucky enough to find one, that is.

Rumor even has it that someone somewhere sells recipes, and that their stock includes a number of extremely rare ones that the seller might part with, for the right price. It’s probably just a rumor, though.

So you are going to need a lot of loot. This is deliberate. Most people who play an Elder Scrolls game seriously for some time wind up amassing gigantic piles of pretty much everything in the game, gold included, and they have nothing to do with it but keep it around in a barrel under the stairs. But in this MMO, suddenly your giant pile of loot isn’t just a vanity that causes game lag whenever you open the container. It’s a necessary and highly functional part of your personal wealth that you are constantly molding, refining, rarifying, and spending by adding newer and better things to the pile while rendering obsolete or less useful things down into the component parts to fuel your crafting, spending them outright in the form of recipe research and Ritual creation, or simply liquifying the runoff into currency by selling it.

“That’s a lot of loot, Raine,” you say. “But if I’m keeping almost everything I find, wouldn’t it be a pain in the ass to manage all of it?”

Yes, it would, if the game didn’t have conveniences that allowed easier item management. But what I’m thinking of goes above and beyond simple inventory sorting, or even marking items with different colored tabs when you collect them so they can sort themselves into designated places when you get back to your base.

I’m thinking of a literal Loot cloud.

A loot cloud, you ask?

Yes. A loot cloud. If you’ve ever played Dragon’s Dogma, you know what I’m talking about. A loot cloud basically means that wherever you go, your collection of loot follows you, and you can access it like a cloud at certain designated places and locations. You go to a merchant to sell things, and the sell screen has a tab for what’s currently in your inventory at the time, and another tab that shows the things you have stored back at home. You go to an inventory dealer to deposit and withdraw items, and they too allow you to drop off items directly back into your universal loot pile, and withdraw items from that pile as well.

This even makes sense in the context of the game itself. Remember, in my setting, we’re in the Pits. The guy you’re talking to is likely a bored Daedra who works for Peryite. He’s just going to stick his hand through a glowing purple portal the size of a dinner plate and hand you whatever it is you’re asking him for.

This even plays out in the limitations of the cloud. You can pull the same purple portal trick, but only when you’re in your own home, because according to Peryite, it wouldn’t be as fun or interesting if you could just throw everything you find that isn’t nailed down through a portal and keep it. You have to pick and choose what you want to carry with you into a dungeon, and deal with your normal limitations of what you can carry out, but if you’re not in an instance or dungeon area, you have fairly free access to all of your stuff. So as long as you’re in your home base, you can go to craft something, do some research, or activate a ritual you’ve uncovered, and the stuff you need is just there, pulled from the pile just like magic.

Because it is magic. Daedric magic, specifically.

And speaking of Daedric magic, if we’re already agreed that Peryite stole our souls, marked us as his chosen, and when we die we respawn from the Waters of Oblivion (assuming someone doesn’t spend resources to get us back up when we go down in a fight, because again, bro-op team work mechanics the game is handing you mountains of loot but also things to spend loads of loot on), then the whole “change your character customization choices” thing is also built into the game. We reform from the Waters of Oblivion every time we ‘die’ in the Pits. It’s a small step sideways from that to using the Waters of Oblivion to reshape ourselves. You pay the same price, or maybe a portion of the same price, that you would pay for a respawn, and you change your appearance, gender, and even race around to whatever suits your fancy at the time. Feel like being an Orc today? Play through the game enough to earn the right to Mastery of Oblivion’s Waters, and you can change your appearance to whatever suits your vanity at the time.

And speaking of Oblivion’s Waters, I’d also probably cast Crystallized Oblivion Water as being the ‘Elite’ currency of the game. It’s not something you can buy with real money (probably), but it is a thing that boss enemies and other ‘elite’ enemies can drop, and the main reason I want to use it is not only is it an exotic substance, but using it for it’s most common and intended purpose (reviving yourself and other people in your party who die) makes perfect sense. Instead of respawning from the nearest designated outflow of the Waters of Oblivion, you can do it anywhere in the Pits on the spot by spending enough Crystallized Oblivion Water to bring someone back. It might serve as currency at some elite endgame shops, and you would probably need to pay it for perk respecs and probably appearance changes as well (which again, makes perfect sense, because again, Waters of Oblivion), but beyond that and possibly a few ritual recipes, bringing people back to life would be it’s most common use by far.

Also, magic doesn’t have to be boring. Spells don’t have to be just different flavors of the same special effect. Roll out carpets of fire that staggers enemies and sets them on fire. Throw a lightning bolt that damages an enemy and then keeps jumping from enemy to enemy, losing damage as it goes until it peters out. Use ice to form stepping stones and root enemies to the floor, which prevents them from moving but doesn’t stop their attacks. Combine Mysticism and Alteration with other branches of magic to open up Hybrid paths of more esoteric spell types, like conjuring water and poisonous miasma, forcing magma or entangling shadows to erupt from the ground, or creating exploding illusionary decoys. Don’t let telekinesis be boring. Make it so you cast it at someone, and the nearest objects that are subject to the physics of the game, like explosive barrels, loose rocks, or the bodies of his dead friends, all immediately fly towards the target at damaging velocities.

“How could you possibly upgrade that then, Lord Raine?” you ask. “Because I suppose you could make the area of affected objects around the target bigger, but beyond that, where do you even go?”

True. You could make the area of affected objects around the target bigger, thus drawing more improvised projectiles in from further away.

Or you could combine it with Destruction magic, and make it so that they get pelted with dozens of loose objects from the environment that are also on fire.


So yeah. This is kind of what I want to do for my career. I just can’t seem to get the attention of anyone that would actually hire me.

And again, I want to emphasize this; I pulled pretty much everything in these last two posts clear out my ass. Grant you, it took me like two and a half days write this last one, because once I started I kind of couldn’t stop, but still, it was all completely off the cuff. I literally made this shit up, by myself, in a cave, with a box of scraps.

Did you finish your sandwich? Because God help you if you didn't. What did you even fucking make, you sick bastard. Did you just grease up an entire pony, glue two pieces of bread to it's flanks, and start shoving it down your throat hole? Goddamn but you are a fat bastard.

 

Holy Fucking Shit. Just god damn, this is brilliant.

 

Gotta admit, I would play that game until I died of starvation. Pony sandwich or not.

 

Just out of curiosity Raine, have you ever played The Secret World? Since there's more than a few of the mechanics in there that you're describing.

 

I'm sitting here crying cuz this isn't a real game now.

 

Holy shitballs. I've pretty much stopped playing MMOs altogether, but I would still play the everliving fuck out of that game. Seriously, find the email address for someone at Bethseda and send them these posts NOW.