The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Announced for November 2011

Bethesda took advantage of the Video Game Awards this weekend to announce the fifth installment of the Elder Scrolls series, titled Skyrim. The game is planned for November 2011, and a teaser trailer has been posted on the Elder Scrolls website. Details are sparse, though the game will apparently run on an "all-new" engine.

Let's hope they don't 'consolize' it

[Morpeth]

I really hope they focus the development with the PC in mind. So many games now are being ported to PCs as an afterthought, usually with disastrous results -- or at a minimum the game gets dumbed down for the consoles.

A lot of studios are going console crazy now, even ones that traditionally were strong PC supporters like Bioware (compare Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights to the upcoming Dragon Age II).p>

As a PC gamer it's a trend I'm very bummed about... more and more games with lots of glitz and less substance.

Re:What kind of name is Skyrim?

[SharpFang]

IIRC, the whole lore sprouted from a homebrew RPG the original authors/developers played among themselves. And it was quite tongue-in-cheek in places.

What about the forest elves, who live in such a harmony with the forest, that they are strictly carnivorous, consider eating plants a blasphemy and even brew alcohol from insects?

Re:New game systems please!

[Smegoid]

I liked that morrowind wasn't nerfed. The game created some basic rules and if you were smart to mix and match (i.e. potion quality scales with int, and int potions are additive, so boost your int like crazy and then make amazing potions) you could overpower the game. But that was the fun part. Compared to morrowind, oblivion was on rails. I still remember the sheer awesome of going into a cave way beyond my level. Realizing it and then using a cheap levitation potion to get our of harms way and rain down arrows and getting mad drops. Or using some seriously overpowered spell tricks to sneak into the underground vaults beneath vivec. And never did the game give me a "sorry this puny wooden door needs a key. Unlock 100 no workies!"

Re:And the working is expected

[Haeleth]

Daggerfall had 750000 NPCs, 15000 towns, 184000 square miles - Oblivion had 16 square miles.

No, Daggerfall had about 8 NPCs, one of which was then copied and pasted 749992 times; about 15 towns, each of which (again) was copied and pasted 1000 times; and basically no land at all, because there was absolutely no reason to set foot outside a town except to fast-travel to the entrance of another dungeon (which would also be identical to all the others, but with the same corridors and rooms arranged in a slightly different order) to do a quest (which would be one of the same three basic quests, with the same goals and the same twists, and just a few details tweaked at random).

Having lots of "content" is meaningless if it's all the same handful of places you've been before, populated by the same people you've talked to before, repeated over and over again by a pseudo-random number generator and occasionally given a slightly different texture or a palette swap.

Oblivion was too small, I will agree. But Daggerfall was even smaller in terms of actual variety.